The reason behind this research project is an interest in the depiction of death in art and contemporary expressions of the theme. In light of these artists, this dissertation will look at the materiality of the dead body and its embodiment of death. This dissertation will involve finding elements of humiliation in selected works of art and approaching the theme of death as an element that one denies.
This project explores the phenomenon of death as depicted and presented to us in the artworks of the chosen artists. This provides an overview of the representation of death and how it has changed over the centuries.
The Abject
As Fletcher poetically suggests, "The symbolic requires a boundary, a threshold, to protect the subject from this precipice that haunts the subject and lures him closer to the edge" (Fletcher 1990: 89). Therefore, death is seen here as a challenge to the symbolic and a threat to society's order of meaning and management. The abject is not a definable object; it has no real „objecthood‟, but transgresses what is socially acceptable, threatening the Symbolic Order.
Death and the corpse are ever-present dangers for the symbolic subject and are therefore abject. This is the way of the abject; an endless oscillation between desire for the nothingness and desire for the differentiated, ego-based existence of the symbolic' (Herbst 1990: 147).
Historical Modes of Depicting Death
The images of the dance of death acted as a reminder of the universality and inevitability of death. This image is filled with humble elements - the corpse, the decay, the wounds of Christ and the tears of the mourners. The corporeality of the suffering and dead Christ was common to devotional practice in the late Middle Ages.
People began to accept the death of the other (friend, family member, loved ones) with greater difficulty than before, and this was feared more than the death of the self (Ariès 1974: 67). Géricault went to extraordinary lengths to delve into the experience of death and every detail of the shipwrecked's ordeal.
Contemporary Views and Representations of Death
What Davies may have been referring to is the medicalization of death in recent times. Early in the planning process, the artist began searching for objects, old clothes, photographs, and other items that would influence the outcome of a piece that would speak of death and mortality—the conceptual framework within which he was working. We become desensitized when we are exposed to images of death over and over again through various forms of media.
The photographic artists analyzed in the following chapter set out to confront taboos surrounding death and explore the visceral reality of death as well as the complexities of depicting such a subject. Photography can be seen as having a special role in documenting and communicating information about the reality of death in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The Abject Corpse
The previous chapter briefly explored the notion of the corpse as the ultimate signifier of abjection. Death, and especially photographic depictions of corpses, is generally not a comfortable subject in modern Western societies. The link between hygiene and disease was first established in the nineteenth century, which, together with the physical separation of the living from the dead, led to a growing perception of the corpse as a pollutant, both physically and symbolically.
The body of the deceased is often removed to the mortuary or chapel and requires the services of a skilled professional. Kristeva focuses especially on the boundaries of the body and the corporeal nature of the subject who must drive away what threatens him. The corpse indicates the rupture of the distinction between subject and object – a loss of the essential factor in the establishment of self-identity.
The corpse – the most morbid of all waste – is a boundary that has crossed everything. In this ontological response, Kristeva notes, "the phobic has no other object than the abject" (Kristeva 1982: 6). For others, it may be less traumatic: they may just experience a fear that is the result of the unknown.
As previously noted, abjection is linked to the mother - the abject separation of one body from another at birth. In this regard, posthumous photography of the nineteenth century drew on the conventions of earlier portrait painting (Hallam 1999: 35). The medium of photography and its relative accuracy in recording apparitions allowed representation, not of death, but of the dead, the corpse.
Postmortem Representations
The reproductive power of the medium and the simple nature of 'making' a photograph meant that the sacredness of death was somewhat reduced to a staged pictorial fiction, an illusion of reality. 33 An example of a photograph that appears to be a denial of death and at the same time a commemorative image is Dead Child (1850) (Figure 27). The image shows a child sleeping, placed on a large chair, while his/her siblings stare at the viewer.
There are several other accounts by nineteenth-century daguerreotypists that describe their approaches to photographing the dead and the necessary manipulation of the corpse to achieve the intended effect. 34 In Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America, anthropologist Jay Ruby notes the existence of memorial portraits in the home and how the photographs became "a normal part of the photo inventory for many families - displayed in wall frames and albums alongside other family photos". Elizabeth Hallam suggests; "The importance here is the way in which photographs form cultural representations which ensure that the dead remain socially active, as a continuing presence in the social and imaginative lives of families" (Hallam 1999: 36).
Post-mortem photographs allowed not only the memorialization of an individual to the family, but also the preservation of the images of those who had died prematurely, especially at a time when infant mortality was particularly high. Both the corpse and a representation are 'uncanny' in the sense that they suspend stable reference categories and positions in time and space. Contemporary artists seek to confront the reality of death and mortality within broader public spheres by displacing the corpse through photographic images within the art gallery.
For example, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in March 1991, entitled The Art of Death, was postponed because it coincided with the Gulf War in which Britain was heavily involved. The infamous Sensation exhibition, sponsored by Charles Saatchi, first took place at the Royal Academy of Art in London in 1997. The exhibition later toured to Berlin but was rejected by Australia and caused outrage in America when the exhibition opened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999 (Stallabrass 2001: 201).
Andres Serrano
The Morgue series was met with great controversy and fanfare in response to what many perceived as a violation of the privacy and sanctity of death (Ruyter 2006). This is evidence of the impersonal and multiple depictions of death that appear in the media today. He photographed 95% of the bodies that came out of the morgue door over a period of three months (Miglietti 2003: 75).
When you look at pictures of the dead, you look closely at them because of their authority. 39 looking at pictures of the dead is a simple act of confrontation, and we begin to acknowledge death. Thus the sublime is directed at something beyond the scope of the ordinary, or something that exists on the precipice between the ordinary and the other.
For Burke, the "source of the sublime" is anything that is in any way terrible, or is. Society has projected its rejected emotions around the subject of death onto the role of the artist (St. George 2005: 59). In Morgue (Fatal Meningitis II) (1992) (Figure 35), the image could be of a child sleeping soundly, except that the blanket in which it is wrapped covers the lower part of the child's face and mouth. .
The acceptance of death requires a showdown with fear – the fear of the unknown, a fear that ultimately everyone has to come to terms with in one way or another. The titles of some of the works in The Morgue series, such as Rat Poison Suicide and AIDS-related Death, invite one to see them as a sign of our collective self-destructiveness. And the hedonistic revelry in the transcendent powers of the imagination must be celebrated” (Arenas in Wallis 1995).
Joel-Peter Witkin
Due to the transgressive nature of the content of his images, his work has been labeled exploitative and has sometimes shocked public opinion (Heartney 1997: 35). The power of pollution is not an inherent one; it is proportional to the strength of the prohibition that grounds it' (Kristeva 1982: 69). What is disturbing is the presence of the dead baby, partially buried under still life objects, in the center of the image.
That is perhaps why it is destined to survive the collapse of the historical forms of religions (Kristeva 1982: 17). To the left of the image is a blackened window and a black table covered with a white cloth. In this photo, the rejected body parts that must remain indoors are explicitly depicted.
Disfigured bodies become phobic objects; their threat is linked to the fragility of the symbolic order and the impossibility of mastering death. What compels a response to the image is our realization that we are witnessing a photograph of a headless man, and it is almost too terrible to be true. Contemporary Western society wants to contain it within the limits and boundaries of the symbolic order.
To this end, Ariès outlined three attitudes towards death over the course of the Middle Ages to the present. Later, around the eighteenth century, the attitude shifted to concern about the death of the other. Serrano explores this most significantly in his Morgue series, where he reveals the veracity of the corpse.
However, the formal beauty of the image often keeps the horror of the event at bay. This juxtaposition has been used to invert expectations to provide a better understanding of changing attitudes toward death.
