Death: A Portrait.
Koestle-Cate, Jonathan
Death: A Portrait
Wellcome Collection, London
15 November 2012-24 February 2013
Hegel once spoke of death as 'the sovereign master'. As
is clear from the latest exhibition from the Wellcome Collection, that
mastery can take many forms. In 'Death: A Portrait' it appears
in numerous guises--allegorical, symbolic, figurative--building an
aggregate portrait of death in art, artefacts, scientific documents and
ephemera. Here the viewer is invited to contemplate the inescapable fact
of mortality through memento mori, commemorative images and objects, the
danse macabre and day of the dead, anatomical science, and even sudden
death in times of war. But this is also a portrait of one man's
particular obsession with images of death, assembled as it is from the
private collection of Richard Harris, a former antique print dealer from
Chicago.
As the scope and variety of the exhibition shows, it is a diverse
collection of truly remarkable objects. To take just three examples, one
of the exhibits that drew visitors' attention was the Mondongo
Collective's Calavera (2011), an imposing 3D collage in plasticine
of a skull, which, on closer inspection, reveals itself to be a curious
amalgamation of political commentary, episodes from art and literary
history, and Pac-man! Another was a fascinating collection of
19th-century terracotta figurines depicting death as the great leveller.
This delightful series reminds us that the call of death knows no social
boundaries, dispatching every citizen and profession, no matter their
position in society, from labourer to priest to king. But it does so
with grim humour, since each and every figure is carted off, each after
their own fashion, by a skeleton whose habit and accoutrements matches
their own. One of the dominating themes of the exhibition is the
indiscriminate nature of death; whether treated as a fearful, Faustian
end, sweet release from a weary life, or dreadful, untimely annihilation
on the field of battle, it is the destiny of all to die. For some,
however, that end is tragically premature. Thus our third example is a
room dedicated to violent death in the form of three of the greatest
anti-war polemics in print: Goya's The Disasters of War (1810-20),
Otto Dix's The War (1924), and the less well-known series by
Jacques Callot, The Miseries and Misfortunes of War (1683).
Unfortunately, only a handful of Goya's images were on display, but
Dix's candid and appalling jeremiad against the abject horrors of
war was shown to full ghoulish effect.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
It is with the genre of the vanitas study that the exhibition
commences, splendidly represented by Adrian van Utrecht's Vanitas
Still Life with a Bouquet and a Skull from 1643, one of Harris'
first acquisitions. Originating in 17th-century Holland, the tradition
of vanitas painting emerged as a token of religious observance for the
wealthy. It did so by alluding to the transience of life and certainty
of death through representations of mortality and ephemerality alongside
signs of wealth and worldly possessions: the all-too-briefly-enjoyed
pleasures of this world allied with intimations of the next. These were
reminders, literally memento mori, of one's inexorable fate, for
which nature morte offered the perfect pictorial form. This genre, so
long out of fashion, has undergone a revival of sorts in recent years,
this exhibitionbeing only the latest testament to a renewed fascination
with what some have called 'a new visibility of death'. (1)
As an overt expression of that visibility, 'Death: A
Portrait' aims to raise a number of questions regarding the value
of art as a guide to communicating, even negotiating, the reality of
death. To that end, Freud is explicitly flagged up as a guiding
influence, notably his formulation of a death drive to counterbalance
the instinct for life. This duality of Eros and Thanatos is presented
here as 'the eternal conflict at the centre of human
civilisation'. To my mind, Heidegger too remained a silent but
implied voice throughout the exhibition. One of the central pillars of
his philosophy, the existential fact of being-towards-death, reminds us
that our own personal death is at once at the heart of our human
experience and paradoxically the least accessible and most remote of
experiences.
For the Christian the mastery of death is, of course, tempered by a
hope that reaches beyond the grave. Much of this exhibition flies in the
face of that hope, however, showing the futility and cruelty of war, the
cold indifference of death, or the dread of finitude. But it is not
without macabre humour too, while perhaps the note of hope in death
sounds most prominently in the sections devoted to ancestor worship,
where a sense of continuity between the living and the dead is evoked.
(1.) Thomas Macho, in Six Feet Under: Autopsy of our Relation to
the Dead, Kunstmuseum Bern, 2006, p. 26.
Jonathan Koestle-Cate is an Associate Tutor at Goldsmiths College,
London
