First, inject formaldehyde; then, restore an artwork

In this vast Gloucestershire flatland dotted with abandoned airplane hangars, a former Royal Air Force Station where pilots once plotted classified missions during World War II, the artist Damien Hirst was overseeing a secret operation of his own one recent morning.

It was a delicate undertaking, one that required rubber protective jumpsuits, long tables of medical equipment and more than 224 gallons of formaldehyde. The goal: to replace the decaying tiger shark that floats in one of Hirst's best known works of conceptual art, "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living." As rap music quietly played in the background, five men and a woman wearing bright yellow suits, black rubber gloves and breathing masks huddled over the shark's hulking 4-meter-long replacement. The immediate impression was that the shark was being treated by a team of acupuncturists: about 200 large needles dotted its body.

So toxic was the air that the property could be reached only through security-coded iron gates, and no one, not even the artist, was allowed near the shark without protective gear. As Hirst, 41, looked on, he plucked a long hypodermic needle from a nearby worktable.

"Three different lengths of needles are being used to inject the shark with formaldehyde," he said, with the air of a child showing off a new toy. He flexed the syringe to demonstrate how the needles are inserted into the shark twice, each time penetrating deeper into its cavity. "The last shark was never injected, so it decayed from the inside." The original shark, also 4 meters long, was caught and killed in 1991 by a fisherman in Australia at Hirst's behest. It was unveiled to the public in its glass tank the next year at the Saatchi Gallery in London. It quickly became a symbol of the shock tactics common to the circle known as the Young British Artists.

Charles Saatchi, the advertising magnate and collector, had commissioned Hirst to make the work for l50,000, now about $95,000. At the time that sum was considered so enormous that the British tabloid The Sun heralded the transaction with the headline "50,000 for Fish Without Chips." But as a result of inadequate preservation efforts, time was not kind to the original, which slowly decomposed until its form changed, its skin grew deeply wrinkled and the solution in the tank turned murky. (It did not help that the Saatchi Gallery added bleach to the solution, hastening the decay, staff members at Hirst's studio said.) In 1993 Saatchi's curators finally had the shark skinned and stretched the skin over a fiberglass mold.

"It didn't look as frightening," Hirst said. "You could tell it wasn't real. It had no weight." Saatchi has been selling off works by the Young British Artists that he collected so voraciously in the 1990s, and two years ago "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" was purchased by Steve Cohen, a hedge fund billionaire who lives in Greenwich, Connecticut. He paid $8 million for it, one of the highest prices at the time for a work of contemporary art.

The impetus was a call from a Manhattan art dealer, Larry Gagosian, alerting him to Saatchi's intention to sell. Cohen knew the shark's history and its problems. But in a funny way, that too had its appeal. "Is it real? Isn't it real?" Cohen said. "I liked the whole fear factor."

But Hirst didn't. When he learned of Cohen's plans to buy the 22- ton work, he volunteered to replace the shark. "I frequently work on things after a collector has them," the artist said. As it turns out, Cohen is paying for the replacement project. He would not say how much it would cost, other than to call the expense "inconsequential." (The procedure to inject the formaldehyde adds up to about $100,000, including labor and materials.)

Hirst began by contacting his shark sources in Australia. A year ago he bought the second tiger shark, this one from a fisherman who caught it off the Queensland coast. It was shipped by sea freighter in a special 10-meter freezer with backup power, a journey that took about two months. Meanwhile the original tank was renovated. Purposely provocative and sometimes disturbing, Hirst is probably Britain's most controversial artist. Lines form around the block at gallery openings of his work, and fans often shout when they recognize him in the street. Some art critics praise him for acquainting a young generation with conceptual art nearly a century after Marcel Duchamp unveiled his porcelain urinal; other critics deride him as an artist of gimmicks and one-liners. In 1995, when he won Britain's Turner Prize for "Mother and Child Divided," a cow and a calf cut into sections and exhibited in a series of vitrines, Brian Sewell of The Evening Standard of London wrote that it was "no more interesting than a stuffed pike over a pub door."

Hirst has arranged rotting cows to simulate copulation and displayed sheep preserved in formaldehyde and maggots attacking a cow's head. He has filled glass-fronted shelves with hundreds of bottles and boxes of drugs, displayed dead animals and skeletons in cabinets, and produced canvases covered with real flies and butterflies. In the hangar where the work on the shark is taking place a vast space with several freezers filled with dead animals he continues to explore variations on those themes. Four crucified fiberglass cows, their skins stretched over molds, lie on the floor. Canvases hold the beginnings of what Hirst said would become a series inspired by the Beatles' "White Album," which he said he might call "Bigger Than God, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah."

Reportedly one of the richest people in Britain, Hirst can now afford to run multiple studios in London and in Gloucestershire, about two hours west of the capital, equipped with freezers filled with dead animals and emergency generators in case of a power failure.

Such is his reputation that when a two-meter shark washed up on a beach in July, and the Natural History Museum in London needed a place to store it until its staff was ready to preserve it, the first call it made was to Hirst. "They asked if I had any room in my freezer," he said with satisfaction. He was happy to oblige.

Oliver Crimmen, a scientist and fish curator at the museum, was in the formaldehyde pool with the shark, directing the operation. Hirst had enlisted his help to ensure that this specimen would last longer than its predecessor.

The shark a female about 25 to 30 years old, middle-aged in shark terms would spend about two weeks in a bath filled with a 7 percent formalin solution, made of dissolved formaldehyde gas and water.

Unlike most fish, Crimmen said, sharks do not have bony skeletons; theirs are made of cartilage, which is relatively flexible. "Even their jaws, which you might think are made of bone, are actually made of hard cartilage, which has a limited life span and can crumble over time," he said. So the shark must be kept constantly moist in the formalin solution if it is to last decades. Crimmen and his team had to drill small holes in the shark's skin, filling them with temporary pins before the formaldehyde injection. With the shark turned on its side, the process of removing the temporary pins and injecting the formaldehyde started. Once it is finished, the shark is to be taken in a special shark-shaped traveling tank to Bregenz, Austria, for an exhibition that begins in February. Next summer, the shark will then move to Cohen's house in Greenwich.

Hirst acknowledges that once the shark is replaced, art historians will argue that the piece cannot be considered the same artwork.

"It's a big dilemma," he said. "Artists and conservators have different opinions about what's important: the original artwork or the original intention. I come from a conceptual art background, so I think it should be the intention. It's the same piece. But the jury will be out for a long time to come." Echoing that argument, Cohen said the shark could not be compared with a painting. "We're dealing with a conceptual idea," he said. "The whole point is the boldness of the shark."

Rumors have circulated in the art world that Cohen has promised the work to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But Cohen said he had made no plans to donate the work to the Modern and that he is unsure where he will put it when the tank arrives in Connecticut. "Ultimately I think it's a piece that needs to be put in a major museum," he said.

As for the shark's future, Hirst isn't worried, he said. "As long as it lasts my lifetime, I'm happy," he said. After a pause, he added: "It's got a 200-year guarantee. Or your money back."

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