A Rough Edit of My Ideas

Below is a somewhat lengthy summary of the ideas swarming around my current projects. The next few entries will have summaries of the recent projects.

Andre Bazin suggested that “…at the origin of painting and sculpture there lies a mummy complex. The religion of ancient Egypt, aimed against death, saw survival as dependent on the continued existence of the corporeal body” (Trachtenberg 237). Bazin explains death as something that conquers time, but preservation of the body is something that removes an individual from the persistence of time. Art is one way in which this mummy complex manifests itself, a way for artists and culture alike to have an existence beyond the life of their own body.

So many creative acts are invested in an existence beyond death, an existence largely carried out by the memory of those who remain. Art objects in particular are often designed to have an archival quality, and are maintained by galleries and museums the way a natural history museum preserves its artifacts of civilizations passed.

Art history is riddled with tombs, effigies, paintings, religious icons, and photographic relics of people that are to be remembered. It is one of the more relentless aspects of humanity, though it is constantly in transition. Artists such as Christian Boltanski actively confront the ephemeral nature of our own lives, exhuming the images and associated memories of the dead and reifying them as art objects. How people are remembered, as well as the objects that become the surrogates for their existence, are affected by a nexus of economics, social ideals, taboos, religion, legal systems, psychology, and individual experiences [among other things].

American culture has its own systems for dealing with death and passing, as any culture does. Funerals are an obvious example, allowing a sense of closure for those who live on. We write wills and trusts to make sure our possessions end up in the hands of those around us. These objects are not to be left unattended, and if they are, they become a burden to those who remain. The things we leave must be worked back into the economic and social systems that exist, the way the matter of our bodies redistributes itself into the environment around it. We often exert control over the things that we will be remembered by, including how our own bodies are dealt with after death, in a way that suggests control over our identity beyond our corporeal self.

Of all the processes we have for dealing with the inevitable passing of time, memory is certainly the most significant. Objects left behind become activators of memory, and the photographic image plays perhaps the most significant role in this mode of understanding death.

I once new a girl who became irate every time someone took her picture. She felt it was taking some part of her aura and falsely immortalizing it, an act that resonated negatively for her, so much so that she would aggressively avoid someone taking her snapshot. Taking was the key word for her, because she felt that something of her was ripped away from her control with every image of her that was created. Perhaps this sentiment is the power that the photographic image holds for us, and such notions of the aura [as Walter Benjamin and many others have described], are where images and objects start to resonate the existence of individuals.

This work is an investigation of the processes we have for remembrance and the leaving of a legacy. Typically using myself as a starting point, I engage with my own personal and familial traditions, experiences, narratives, and memories in a way that allows the viewer to determine their relationship with their own end as well as the ends of those around them. The mode of using myself as a subject is not a narcissistic one, but rather one that puts me ‘on the spot’ so to speak, in a way that the viewer might feel capable of critiquing, analyzing, and responding to the content of the work without a fear of being insensitive. It encourages an openness and honesty in the response of the viewer, since I am the subject in question, rather than the audience.

The works themselves often manifest in the realm of performance and installation, and typically have a limited timeline in their existence as well. I explain these projects to others the way one might tell the story of a passed relative – through photographic documentation and an accompanying narrative. Such time and memory based elements in the work have a direct metaphorical relationship with the temporal and ephemeral qualities of life.

These works are meant as spaces of contemplation, rather than statements or solutions with regard to the aforementioned issues. They are to provide people with as objective a space as possible to think about death and dying, without an intense emotional component that can so often create a wall around the conceptual significance of thinking about the limits of our existence.

The interest in providing such a space comes out of very personal experiences with death, and being allowed enough distance from such experiences to reflect on them in a way that allows questions to be raised and answered without feeling emotionally overwhelmed. I have found this act of reflection to be an invaluable one, and am interested in imparting such an experience on others.