Recently in Art of Death Category
"Vanity of Vanity, all is vanity." - Ecclesiates (1:2)
"Vanitas art", a genre emerging from the Sixteenth Century, reminded it's viewer
of the frailty of life and the often quality taxing distractions of glory and wealth.
Above, a work by Philippe de Champaigne, a master of subtlety!
Antonio Canova (1757-1822)
Canova was a sick sculptor. He could sculpt your head while you were talking to him and then use it to make you think you were talking to yourself. He was unfortunately into being catholic and lived in Rome, he is also dead.
Penitent Magdalen (1809) State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, 2001
This is the Toms Sachs foamcore skull. One of our favourite skulls!
Don't let the subject heading fool you, we're not talking about the worst movie ever. This post features designer gas masks by Dido Velema. Kind of reminds me of Tom Sachs... but whatevs, I guess.
Continue reading Apocalypto.
Cigarettes kill you, so many of you, that it beats war in casualties. Here's some art done by a Brazilian ad firm. Enjoy.
My girlfriend's mom died of cancer last year. This year she (Tyler Clark Burke) created a series of work dealing with the unfortunate event.She explains her work as follows:
I made this show for my mom Valerie who died suddenly a year ago. She actually hated her name and went by Val, not Valerie.
My aunt was on vacation in Florida and she went to a psychic in Cassadaga, a community known for its psychics. It is in the middle of Florida, not near the ocean, so if I were to claim an area for its psychic qualities, I would choose near the water. I mean, if I were making things up, I would choose near the water and maybe even a place on an island. Hopeful skeptics like me find these sorts of things confusing, but the woman who did my aunt's reading (I type the word reading with a cringe, my fingers cringe somehow) said crazy things. Crazy true things. She also asked my aunt if she had been seeing a lot of crows, which was an incredible question since my aunt lives in Vermont and was literally inundated with tonnes of crows. Maybe even a crow problem. The psychic told my aunt that my mom Val was sending these birds to Pam (my aunt), I think to make peace, and that the crows were very good. Not dark.
I've been looking for crows everywhere for almost a year, even if the idea scared me a bit.
I've been a bit obsessed with birds, which is funny also because my mom hated her name and--strangely--birds (long story, I presume). Regardless, I just made tonnes of birds, tonnes of crows, murders of crows, and I hung them all up yesterday.
This morning, hung over, weary from the week and wary of today, I saw a black shape in my window. I tried to figure out what it was, if it was on the plant or in the tree outside, and it was a bird. A crow. I think it was a crow. It was an all black bird and I've been drawing many. There were no other colours or markings. I went to get my camera and it flew away.
Installation pics after the jump.
For more information please contact Katherine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects.
Fuck death.
For more information please contact Katherine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects.
Fuck death.
Continue reading A Muder of V's or Stand By Your (Wo)man.
More on the Schneider story from a week or so ago.
The German feuilletonists were quick to react negatively to Gregor Schneider's proposal to create an artwork showing someone on their deathbead, opines Brigitte Werneburg in the Tageszeitung. Werneburg reminds readers that Schneider is not the first to attempt to capture death with art. She cites Bill Viola and Sophie Calle, who both made films about the death of a parent. For Werneburg, Schneider—who is looking for a willing volunteer—is closer to Joseph Beuys, albeit "the Big Brother Version" of Beuys's social sculpture. Werneburg notes another similarity with German history: Schneider was born in Rheydt, just like Joseph Goebbels, "a master not only of propaganda but also self-propaganda." Haus Lange Museum in Krefeld, Germany, where the artist proposed to create his work, declined to comment. According to a report in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, German politicians, the Protestant Church, and the National Association of German Undertakers are all indignant over the proposal.
Yet there may be some bright news for Schneider's morbid project. TheFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's Andreas Rossmann reports that Father Friedhelm S. J. Mennekes, who led Cologne's Artstation St. Peter from 1981 until recently, believes that it's "not taboo" to think about death. In fact, in 2006, Father Mennekes recalls having lengthly conversations with an artist about doing an exhibition "in this sphere." "The question of exhibiting a dead person was posed at that time," Father Mennekes told the FAZ. "We took distance because it was too close to the church and we believed that it belongs in the museum." He sees the museum as a parallel space to the church "for reflecting and thinking" that is predestined to debate "the existential perspectives of meaning of man."
Links to his past shows:
And here's more info on the Silence = Death slogan.
From the Encyclopedia of AIDS:
“The pink triangle was established as a pro-gay symbol by activists in the United States during the 1970s. Its precedent lay in World War II, when known homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps were forced to wear inverted pink triangle badges as identifiers, much in the same manner that Jews were forced to wear the yellow Star of David. Wearers of the pink triangle were considered at the bottom of the camp social system and subjected to particularly harsh maltreatment and degradation. Thus, the appropriation of the symbol of the pink triangle, usually turned upright rather than inverted, was a conscious attempt to transform a symbol of humiliation into one of solidarity and resistance. By the outset of the AIDS epidemic, it was well-entrenched as a symbol of gay pride and liberation.
In 1987, six gay activists in New York formed the Silence = Death Project and began plastering posters around the city featuring a pink triangle on a black background stating simply ‘SILENCE = DEATH.’ In its manifesto, the Silence = Death Project drew parallels between the Nazi period and the AIDS crisis, declaring that ‘silence about the oppression and annihilation of gay people, then and now, must be broken as a matter of our survival.’ The slogan thus protested both taboos around discussion of safer sex and the unwillingness of some to resist societal injustice and governmental indifference. The six men who created the project later joined the protest group ACT UP and offered the logo to the group, with which it remains closely identified.
Since its introduction, the ‘SILENCE = DEATH’ logo has appeared in a variety of manifestations, including in neon as part of an art display and on a widely worn button. It was also the forerunner of a range of parallel slogans such as ‘ACTION = LIFE’ and ‘IGNORANCE = FEAR’ and an entire genre of protest graphics, most notably including a bloodstained hand on a poster proclaiming that ‘the government has blood on its hands.’ Owing in part to its increasing identification with AIDS, the pink triangle was supplanted in the early 1990s by the rainbow as the dominant image of ‘gay pride.’ By force of analogy, however, the rainbow itself has, in some countries, become an image associated with AIDS.”
Figuratively and possibly literally.Artist Wayne Martin Belger has created a camera that contains blood that is HIV positive. The blood is used as a filter through which images of people diagnosed with HIV are photographed by Belger.$20 says he has at least one Danzig album in his collection.
A pretty potent and might I say high-risk effort by the photographer, and candid undertaking on the part of the subject.
Click here to read more and see images made using the camera.
(Via OMG via Greydon)
This just in, via Artforum.com:
(from Jon Knowles)
GREGOR SCHNEIDER SEEKS SOMEONE WILLING TO DIE FOR ARTNot awesome.
Never one to shy away from controversy, the artist Gregor Schneider has begun a search for someone willing to die as part of a performance. “I want to display a person dying naturally in the piece or somebody who has just died,” he told the Art Newspaper's Gareth Harris. “My aim is to show the beauty of death.” Schneider has noted his desire to stage the performance at the Haus Lange museum in Krefeld, Germany, also saying that if the museum refuses, he will stage the performance in a studio space in his hometown of Rheydt, also in Germany. The museum declined to comment.
(from Jon Knowles)
