A Survey of Contemporary Death Art
MORTALITY A SURVEY OF CONTEMPORARY DEATH ART MORTALITY A SURVEY OF CONTEMPORARY DEATH ART Curated by Donald Kuspit Assisted by Robert Curcio 2 Death Mon Amour Donald Kuspit, Curator The skull is a symbol of death, not any old Thus, the ambivalence about the skull, the was once part of has decayed, disappeared death, but the death “within oneself,” the hatred of death that makes it at home in hell, into oblivion, leaving it stranded in abstraction, death that is not only “the farthest extreme of the love of death that lifts it to heaven, like a strangely unnatural however natural, numi- destructiveness that we can conceive of,” but sort of mysterious man in the radiant moon— nous however down to earth—oddly sublime my very own death, the death that owns me for death is radiant with strange life in the por- even as it symbolizes our alienation from our the way I own my skull, the one and only gen- traits of it in the exhibition, especially in those self, for that is what the fear of death is. uine memento mori.1 But, strangely enough, of Lynn Stern. all skulls look more or less the same, seem Abstraction is peculiarly obscene, for it is hid- impersonally identical—can I find my own The skull, however much it is a symbol of den behind the scenic representation it sup- skull in a pile of skulls, say in the catacombs death, and however much it is nameless—any ports. It is the aesthetic underpinning, often of my unconscious? Freud said we can’t imag- skull could be anybody else’s skull—is in an unconsciously experienced, of the consciously ine our own death—it’s too great a narcissis- aesthetic class of its own, a sort of aesthetic known pictured scene, inseparable from and tic insult, a wound to self-esteem, impossible thing in itself, for it epitomizes the aesthetic immanent in it, the subliminal truth in the fic- to heal—and, anyway, there’s no time in the issue: reconciling opposites while conveying tional fact.
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