Rarely does an exhibition catch my attention enough for me to visit it twice. But Death: A Self Portrait at the Wellcome Collection was so fascinating that I had to return. I don’t think I have ever been to an exhibition that manages to linger in the mind; it possesses a haunting quality befitting its subject matter. It is an exhibition where we are the subjects: in the emptiness of its many skulls and skeletons, the exhibition looks back at you – perhaps it is for this reason that I found it so fascinating.
It is a relatively small exhibition, but there is such a diverse range of objects from throughout history and across the world – artistic and otherwise – that the exhibition leads you in a variety of different directions. You are not given a sense of exactly what death is, and instead you are left confused and bewildered by the multiplicity of ways that death has been represented and understood. It disrupts your perspective, interrupting your line of thought whenever you think one begins to form in your mind. The fine lines of the portrait work against the image they are supposed to create.
Each room of the exhibition takes a different approach to death, presenting us with a different way into its subject matter. This ranged from the focus on memento mori in the first room, ‘Contemplating Death’, to images of war in ‘Violent death’, to images and artworks suggestive of the link between death and eroticism, in ‘Death and Thanatos.’ However, it was not so much the distinctiveness of each room that was so memorable, but rather the way that even within these rooms there was such a wide range of objects that individually each exhibit pulled at the seams of the neat titles designed to hold together the exhibition’s narrative or line of argument.
It is certain individual exhibits rather than the overarching movement of the exhibition that remains in my mind. I remember, for example, quite vividly two exhibits at the very beginning, in the ‘Contemplating Death’ room. The first of these was Adriaen van Utrecht’s Vanitas Still Life with a Bouquet and A Skull (according to the accompanying literature, this was the first piece in Richard Harris’ (the antique collector after whom the collection is named) collection), while the second was a photograph by the American photographer Irving Penn. There are more than three hundred years separating both pieces, but the similarities are clear. Of course, at the most obvious level both feature skulls as their centrepiece. This creates an empty stillness in both images that hollows out both the painting and the photograph, producing an effect not dissimilar to looking into an abyss. I was reminded of Nietzche’s words that if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you. What particularly fascinated me about both though was the strangeness of the respective compositions, which seemed to resist understanding. It was as though both harboured a story, but this story was impenetrable and incomprehensible. This resistance to narrative or simple conception in both Utrecht’s painting and Penn’s photograph seem to me like good metonyms for the exhibition itself.
Image taken from http://tinyurl.com/cdmpsymII
Image taken from http://heathenharvest.org/2013/01/08/the-futility-of-all-an-introduction-to-vanitas-art/
Elsewhere in the exhibition was a large plasticine skull (by the Argentinian Mondongo Collective) that was made out of lots of different images, such as buildings and books. This was striking both because of its sheer size and its intricate detail – the small plasticine books used in the skull, for example, were incredibly detailed reconstructions of famous cover designs. There was a certain joyous quality to the image/sculpture, in the way it was constructed out of a wide variety of objects. The soft pliability of its material also seemed humorous (plasticine usually associated with child’s play) and at odds with its subject matter, but it also made an interesting point – that the image of death that we experience in culture and our everyday lives is one that is being made and remade all the time. Within the humour of it, however, the piece might also be seen as a memento mori, a reminder that death and decay does not only encroach on our own individual lives, but also on entire cultures.
Image taken from http://tinyurl.com/cdavjhl
One of the most interesting ‘mini collections’ in the exhibition was a collection of random photographs, all of which related to death, all featuring skeletons or skulls in some way. As the writing accompanying the photographs pointed out, these photos were by far the least valuable items in the collection (money-wise), but they were nevertheless one of the most intriguing features of the collection. These were photographs of everyday life, of family, work or friends. I remember one of a group of about four men gathered around a table, all looking somberly into the camera, while on the table, at the very centre of the picture, was a skull looking in the same direction as the men. The image was so strange that it was darkly humorous, leaving you at a complete loss to explain it. Humour was a feature of all these photographs, and suggested the comical way we regard death in daily life (perhaps more so in daily life than in artistic or cultural life). Against this, however, the photographs were also decidedly eerie. For all the humour that each respective moment contained, the photographs themselves all referred to death in the way that they all spoke of a lost past. You looked at the photographs seeing people who were now dead, the photographic form attesting to the insistent reality of both death and loss.
As a self portrait, Death: A self Portrait was one where the subject’s face could hardly be properly made out. It was an image that is nothing more than many other images, not totally unlike the Mondongo skull. But the very difficulty of making out the image of death was the most satisfying thing about the exhibition. Moreover, if an exhibition has the power to haunt in a way that the dead do in fiction and movies, then this is evidence of how powerful and impressive it was. I will leave the last words to Richard Harris himself.
(Death: A Self-Portrait runs until 24th February 2013 at the Wellcome Collection)
Cryptic Murmurs 