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Conceptual Rigor Mortis To the university degrees already available in Hairdressing (Derby), Greenkeeping (Bournemouth) and Air-conditioning (Grimsby College), a new one is about to be added: a Foundation Degree in Funeral Services at the University of Bath. Our changing way of life, says Alan Slater, chief executive of the National Association of Funeral Directors, has affected our ways of death. "In an increasingly secular society… all aspects of the service are changing, from the music to the transport. We now have motorcycle hearses, for example, and sometimes we are asked to send off people’s remains in fireworks." Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, gunpowder to gunpowder: going quietly may soon be a thing of the past. For a society notorious for sweeping death under the carpet we do seem to have become strangely obsessed with it, like murderers forced to revisit the scene of a crime. At Bath University, which already offers a multidisciplinary degree in the subject - choose your weapons/poison - ‘death studies’ is now recognised as a discipline in its own right. "In society at large, too, there is an increasing interest in death, dying and bereavement and a lot of media coverage," enthuses university spokeswoman Una McConville. "There is a greater understanding that death is more than a physical event, it’s a social experience". Dead right it is. Death is the coming thing, not just for coffin-dodgers - for the younger knife-carrying noose-wielding generation it’s become hip to dig the graveyard, not only in Bridgend. And the art world, with its finger on the pulse, has been quick to join the cultural funeral cortege. There’s no need for me to list the myriad multidisciplinary guises in which the new morbidity has manifested itself in art, as Paul Wilks did the job comprehensively in his excellent letter A tunnel at the end of the light in December’s Jackdaw. Wilks fears there’s a predictive element in all this death art that may be trying to tell us - like Private Hudson in Aliens, though in a more roundabout way - "We’re fucked! We’re doomed!" While I hope he’s wrong about the future, I’m more concerned with the present. Predictive or not, all this artistic overkill must say something about the society we live in. What? Damien Hirst, the contemporary art world’s undertaker-in-chief (who could still benefit from a spot of in-job training on the practical embalming module at Bath) has a blanket explanation for the phenomenon. The man who made his name on the back of a dead shark titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living maintains, paradoxically, that all art has always been about death. Explaining the unifying principle behind his Murderme collection exhibited at the Serpentine in 2006, he philosophised: "I think there’s only ever been that one idea in art: you’re trying to make sense of life then death looms big on the horizon." Big, yes, but how big? Surely not big enough to blot out the light on every other subject. What happened to art’s other big themes - love, for instance? Where did that go? When the other arts - music, literature, drama - seem as preoccupied with it as ever, why must visual art be the only exception? Because, for reasons too complex to go into here, the other arts don’t have to be post-modern. Exempt from this painful obligation, they’re free to give in to sentiment, whereas visual art, constrained by conceptual rigour, is condemned to emotional rigor mortis. Porn is still just permissible - if sufficiently tongue-in–cheek - and much in demand at art fairs like Frieze where it flies off the walls into the sweating palms of young thrusting fat cats who screw people for a living and want their art, like their personalised number plates, to reflect their identities. But porn is unacceptable in the PC world of public galleries, where the usual double standards apply. For while death goes down a bomb with a Muslim minority who have given the world a new genre of snuff movie, images of nude women – even by Cranach – are liable to drive them into the sort of god-given frenzy that the security services fear will lead to a doubling in the output of headless corpse horror vids. With love defeated, death has triumphed. What passed with Martin Luther half a millennium ago won’t wash with the modern Mullah, so we must resign ourselves to yet another case of no sex please we’re multicultural British. But to get back to art’s strange fixation with death, I suspect that it is, ironically, the result of estrangement. A major paradox of modern life in the west is that despite having death rammed down our throats 24/7 in the media, we’re shielded from it as never before in reality. How effectively shielded becomes suddenly clear when we lose someone close to us, as I did this year. To pass through the swing doors of a cancer ward is to enter a valley of death from which the perspective on life is shockingly different. The experience has dramatic side effects. After a few hours spent on the wrong side of the swing doors, even the journey home on the tube becomes an intense experience. And this, you realise, is the natural level of intensity of a human life lived in close proximity to death - an intensity that produced not just the great poetry of the First World War but also the bright celebratory comfortable-armchair art of Matisse and Derain, as Paul Wilks observed in his letter. Modern life is seriously lacking in chiaroscuro, and without shadow we don’t appreciate light. Merchants of death art such as the Chapmans like to snicker at little old ladies who paint flowers and kittens, smugly assuming the old dears are in denial when actually it’s the Chapmans themselves who are. Artistic ability aside, the little old ladies are close enough to the roller and curtains to have noticed - unlike the Chapmans - that life is beautiful. It is that perception, not death, that is the lifeblood of art, and no great art has ever been made without it. We’ve had the death of the author, the death of painting; the time has come to pronounce the exequies over death art. Death to the art of death! Long live the art of life! The writing is on the mausoleum wall for Damien Murderme Hirst and his cortege of cronies. While the current law, at least until the adoption of Sharia, prevents us from taking him up on his murder invitation, we feel entitled – bored to death as we are by it all – to beg him to break the habit of a lifetime and do it himself. Instead of whimpering on interminably about mortality, it would be more dramatic, not to say noble, to go out with a bang. Besides, as every artist learns at his tutor’s knee, you can only make good art about what you know. So to anyone planning to add to the dead weight of works about mortality already littering the planet, we tactfully suggest that he or she first gain some personal experience, preferably with a rocket positioned where the sun don’t shine and a qualified expert - BA (Hons) Funeral Services, University of Bath - in attendance. Laura Gascoigne | ||||
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Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
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