5th Global Conference
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 2: The Art of Dying
Chair: Kate Coleman
The Temples at Burning Man
Lori
van Meter
California, USA
There are many descriptions of the Burning Man project, all of which seem true but incomplete: an art festival, a circus, a camp-out, a sociological experiment, a rave, a ritual, a Bacchanalia, druid puke. Amid this enigmatic occurrence stands a temple, solemn and serious, dedicated to the memory of the deceased. Every year, thousands of people at Burning Man find a way to intertwine an unusual celebration of life with an unusual commemoration of death. This paper examines the roots, traditions, and meaning behind the annual creation and destruction of the temples at Burning Man.
The Art of Dying
Helen
Ennis
ANU School of Art, Canberra, ACT, Australia
How do the dying choose to
represent themselves in the last phases of their lives? What issues are
raised by photographs produced both by the dying and those closely associated
with them?
This paper is based on my research for an exhibition currently
on view at the National Portrait Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Reveries:
Photography and Mortality is concerned with death of self, death
of other, and reflections on mortality prompted by one’s own experiences,
such as serious illness or the death of a loved one. Today I will be
considering a small number of photographs from the exhibition, identifying
their shared concerns and preoccupations. The photographs are by prominent
Australian and New Zealand photographers and date from the last two decades,
a period in which attitudes to dying and death have changed significantly.
The reasons for this are complex but include the growing influence of
the death awareness movement and the reaction against the excessive medical
and technological interventions into the dying process that have characterized ‘modern
death’. Also crucial has been the impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis
in the 1980s and the gay community’s development of new, highly
personalised forms of ritual around dying and death.
Representations of the Infamous or Anonymous Dead: Gerhard Richter’s
Photopaintings and Jeffrey Silverthorne’s Photographs
Randall
van Schepen
School of Architecture, Art, and Historic Preservation,
Roger Williams University, Bristol, USA
The relationship between death and photography is a longstanding one, reaching back to the beginnings of the technology and to 19th century funerary photographs. Photography has changed our relationship to death by both trying to overcome it and by constantly reaffirming it. As Siegfried Kracauer suggests, the sheer accumulation of photographs attempts to banish death while the ripping of a fragment out of reality in order to fix it photographically embalms the moment. The nature of the photograph’s dialectical relationship to death becomes particularly acute, however, when the subject of the photograph is itself the dead body. This paper compares two artistic approaches to the representation of the dead, the photographic-based paintings of the infamous Baader-Meinhof terrorists by Gerhard Richter, called 18.Oktober 1977 (1988), and a set of 1970s public morgue photographs of anonymous corpses by Jeffrey Silverthorne. The particularities of Richter’s subject of the Baader-Meinhof group’s very public suicide deaths and the anonymous accidental deaths of the corpses in Silverthorne’s public morgue photographs provide fascinating case studies of the set of issues that artists face when representing death. Richter’s painted images were derived from widely circulated press photographs and reveal his desire to break through their impersonality in order to empathically identify with subjects that were physically and psychologically distant from him. Silverthorne’s access to the largely hidden environment of the public morgue led him to subjects that he knew little about but which were much more physically and personally present. Thus, while Richter strives to personalize the tragedy of the Baader-Meinhof group suicide by bringing them closer to the viewer, Silverthorne’s photographs give increasingly evidence of the photographer’s personal engagement through his use of increasingly expressive and symbolic effects and through allowing his bodily presence into the photograph.
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