Unbelievable part 28: Andromeda and the Sea Monster

You know the hit is coming and there is nothing you can do to stop it. Your body braces automatically even though logic dictates it won’t make any difference. The torrent is coming at you hard and fast. You are vulnerable. Helpless. Perhaps your slight cower is an attempt at self-comfort and assurance. You did all you could. Broader events were beyond your control. It’s not your fault. You’re collateral damage, and it means nothing about you. It is natural to curl into yourself because who else can you rely on? A saviour, a hero, surely couldn’t make it in time.  

Andromeda and the Sea Monster, Damien Hirst, 2011, image June 2017

Andromeda and the Sea Monster is a monumental sculpture in blue bronze depicting a young naked woman chained to a rock face, her head angled off to her right and her mouth open in a horrific silent scream, mirroring the wide, toothy mouths of hungry sea creatures frozen in time and space as they surge at her. You could only see the woman’s scream if you passed around the work clockwise from the back of its rock-face covered in different crabs, lobsters and other shellfish snap-shotted in mid-scuttle. In fact it looks as if creatures of all types and sizes are heading for this chained woman, presumably with consumption in mind, to pick over the wreckage from the immanent carnage. There’s not much of her, though. She has the slight figure of perceived contemporary beauty in women. It feels impolite to look, but she does have visible labia while so many naked women throughout all of art do not. Otherwise, her body type has that supposed healthy look we’re expected to aspire to or hate ourselves for not being able to attain. And while she has skinny and coded-white privilege, she is clearly in anguish, but, as I pointed out, this was only perceived from the side of the sculpture that was visible if you moved all the way around it, such was its positioning in room 7 of Palazzo Grassi. 

Upon coming in from room 6, visitors were met with those not-scuttling shelled creatures on the rocks seemingly headed for the young naked shining body bared full frontally with her face turned away and her left leg daintily angled backward from the knee with her thighs modestly held together. Her wrists were bound in shackles and her right arm hooked around her back with hand clasping her left wrist. Her hair also swept off to her right shoulder. Everything else was fully visible from this side-view of the scene facing into the room. This young woman – Andromeda – didn’t command my gaze for too long as it was mainly drawn to not one but three sea monsters hurtling at her with sharp teeth in large, powerful jaws ready to pierce and rip flesh and bone. Catching the light were long scratches around the mouth of the great white shark leaning towards her but in an almost upright position.

I have never been to the Universal theme park, but I have seen footage of their animatronic shark pertaining to the Jaws film franchise initiated by the Steven Spielberg-directed film of that title first released in 1975. This blue bronze incarnation looks as if it is about to pop back down into the water in wait for the next tour boat to thrill. Plenty of reviewers reporting on Damien Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable in 2017 pointed out the sculpture’s evocation of the publicity posters for Jaws (themselves adaptations of the original book cover illustrated by Paul Bacon) which bare a direct relationship with the shark’s first kill in the film. The poster shows the shark at a perpendicular angle with a blissfully unaware young woman swimming above, moments before imagined immanent carnage. Flipped on its side, this is the arrangement in the sculpture, and seeing it as it was installed in Palazzo Grassi, as you came into the room you wouldn’t know Andromeda was in any distress. Given her stance and apparent nonchalance with her face turned away, she could easily have been posing for a glamorous photo shoot. 

The first fatal encounter in Jaws is with a young woman who has gone skinny dipping alone and is violently attacked after exhibiting agency and enjoying pleasure in being her naked self in the world. When you view the sculpture actively by moving around it, that is when the perception of Andromeda can shift as you are met with the horror, fear, anxiety and hopelessness in her pained expression and her face contorted in a scream. The body is no longer communicating that of sexual availability or an invitation to be looked at, but is an image of vulnerability, of a body in danger. Her trauma and the predicament in which she has found herself are laid bare. The attack is coming full throttle, and the shark flanked by writhing sea serpents is too close to be stopped. Like Chrissie in Jaws (played by Susan Backlinie who around the time also performed naked modelling), this Andromeda only has herself with no sign of Theseus on the way, and is suffering for it. A common saying, and one familiar if you grew up, as I did, in Northern Ireland in the late twentieth century, is ‘there’s no smoke without fire’. Young, naked and chained to a rock – surely she only has herself to blame. Fits well with ‘what was she wearing?’ and ‘did she encourage him in any way?’ lines of questioning regarding rape victims that bypass the rapist as being responsible for the rape.

In the mythologies, Andromeda’s father is Kepheus, king in the land of the Ethiopians. Andromeda’s mother, Kassiepeia boasts that their daughter is more beautiful than the Nereids, sea nymphs. The Nereids report their indignation to the Olympian god Poseidon who sends a flood and a sea monster to terrorise their coast. At their wits’ end, Kepheus and Kasseipeia consult an oracle which determines that the only way this situation can be allayed is if Andromeda is sacrificed to the monster, Cetus. Kepheus relents to the people’s demand to give her up.

Meanwhile, on his way home from murdering Medusa, and after, by some accounts, turning the Titan Atlas to stone with Medusa’s severed head for not putting him up on his travels, Perseus, flying by with his winged sandals, happens upon the chained princess, falls for her, and rescues her on the condition that he can marry her. She ends up doing quite well out of the arrangement, but has no say in it. In the Hirst depiction, unless we’re seeing the tableau as an instant of time Perseus has managed to freeze (or turn to stone) in order to complete negotiations with Kepheus, I can’t see him blowing up the shark or scything Cetus in time to save Andromeda. What I keep becoming fixed on is how Andromeda comes to be put in this position at all, so consuming are my current issues concerning a demanding parent.

The novel from which Jaws was adapted written by Peter Benchley and published in 1974 includes complex interpersonal relationships that were stripped out for the film, particularly Ellen Brody momentarily doubting her life with Police Chief Martin Brody and having a sexual tryst with Matt Hooper, whose own hubris leads to grisly demise-by-shark during the central trio’s hunt for the creature. The novel was inspired by a spate of shark attacks off the New York state coast, and the film adaptation – which initiated the term ‘blockbuster’ with its long queues to see the movie (Treasures could be considered a blockbuster exhibition) – harkened back to the ‘red scare’ creature feature of the 1950s (think Creature from the Black Lagoon, for example). Land dwellers terrorised by sea monsters. Women, children and immoral men beware.

What was Kassiepeia’s motivation? What could she gain from her claims that someone – something – she made was comparatively more beautiful than something else? Would the sense of smugness really have been worth it? What was the rest of Andromeda’s life shaped like? Was she otherwise considered useless and simply became a thing to be looked at, her only value in her (to borrow from Laura Mulvey) to-be-looked-at-ness? What happens when we view her in the Hirst sculpture from her right? That frozen, desperate, pleading, frightened scream. The bodily contortion of her brace with her hands shackled behind her. Facing towards and away at the same time. What must the psychology be of this character in that moment?  

How could you do this to me, mum? How could you talk about how beautiful I am only to have me be ripped apart by rows of sharp, merciless teeth? To leave me unprotected? To not give me a choice? I was minding my own business; how could you expose me so horrifically? Why didn’t I matter enough not to do that? What could you possibly have gained? What is this really about? Do you resent me that much? Do you regret my existence that much? Is my only value something that might give you more prestige? More beauty by extension? Why couldn’t you be content with simply being beautiful as you are and not put us in competition with each other or anyone else?

It’s the emotional horror of this moment in the sculpture that strikes me. A daughter with time to think before a terrible end pained by a mother’s unthinking actions. While this doesn’t excuse Poseidon for being a great big nasty overdramatic bully, I don’t think Kassiepeia should get off the hook from having to look at her own behaviour. The gods sort her out later by making her into a constellation that spends half its time suspended upside down to give her some humility. Not much of a punishment after a long, illustrious life. I think of her tipped up as if a god is dangling her by a foot, taunting her. My own mum keeps saying she must have done something really bad to deserve the suffering she’s experiencing due to sensory overload at a care home while recovering from injury. Early-twenties me wouldn’t hesitate to have told her that these are the consequences of decisions she’s made over the years that I had warned against (like Cassandra, doomed by Apollo to possess foresight but never be believed and had to witness the fall of Troy). Older, more anxious me hasn’t the energy for the fallout. So perhaps that’s why Andromeda and the Sea Monster from Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable has been one of the works I can’t stop thinking about: it’s my very own Munch’s Scream. I feel every ounce of that girl’s anguish. I’m shackle-bound and braced before every conversation. Every demand. Every solution I suggest to address complaints knocked down. I see Andromeda’s silent scream and I feel her anger, hurt, upset and the fear for her own painful destruction from parental collateral damage.

If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe and visit buymeacoffee.com/peablair to support my work - thank you!