Volume 67, Issue 8

Are Chrysanthemums Perchance
More Real than Skulls?
“Snuff Films,” Suicide, and Impressionism
by Menachem Wecker

Is there life before death?
                          - Belfast Graffito

Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.
                         - Sir Francis Bacon

It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air - there's the rub, the task.
                         - Aeneid

DEAD PERSON:  I'm not dead!
CART MASTER:  'Ere.  He says he's not dead!
CUSTOMER:  Yes, he is.
DEAD PERSON:  I'm not!
CART MASTER:  He isn't?
CUSTOMER:  Well, he will be soon.  He's very ill.
                        - Monty Python

Visitors to a Berlin (only in Germany…) arts center confused a 24-year-old suicidal woman with an actress playing an artsy performance piece.  Failing to differentiate between a very disturbed bohemian who had leapt from a window to her demise and a design piece, the viewers fell to the pothole of many a modern art institution and stumbled about the hazy barrier between art and death:

“A group of visitors to the center at first thought the body lying on the ground at the art center was part of an art performance,” said police spokeswoman Christine Rother, according to a Yahoo! news article. “It took a while before anyone realized it was not an act but a suicide.”

Apparently, the woman had discussed the prospect of suicide in a videotaped interview with artists the previous evening.  Alarmed, the artists attempted to dissuade her from such a terminal endeavor and drove her home from the very same club, Tacheles, to which she subsequently returned and executed her piece-de-résistance.

Readers interested in this issue, and it is certainly a fascinating albeit deplorable one, will find instructive two articles: in the current issue of The New Criterion (accessible on the online site) “Annals of transgression: On the case of a suicide mistaken for performance art,” and the philosophical kin to be found in BBC News on October 2001 (also online at the official BBC site) entitled “Cleaner Dumps Hirst Installation.”  The New Criterion does an excellent job of tracing the question with attention to Dada, Surrealism, the counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies, Burden, Athey, Duchamp, etc., so I will try and take a new slant.

I recently visited the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) Boston, where I saw Impressions of Light: Landscape from Corot to Monet, on exhibit through April 13, for those of you who have the chance to attend (and yes, it is still on exhibit even if you cannot attend).  Although I did not enjoy the exhibit particularly, for reasons I will address in turn, it did raise some issues that I feel are noteworthy.

The museum did an excellent job of tracing the roots of Impressionism, primarily the esthetic escapades in the Forest of Fontainebleau.  With particular attention to pre-Impressionist Paul Huet and the cliché-verre prints (a primitive photographic techinique, which consisted of salt solutions, silver nitrate [AgNO3] and light sensitive paper) of Corot, the exhibit demonstrated how the most colorful of movements fit into the artistic backdrop of Symbolism, the Nabis (a movement that drew its inspiration from the Hebrew נביא) and the many other artistic cliques.  With regards to a review, do not see the exhibit if you are hoping for cute, pretty pictures by Monet; you will in fact not encounter any Impressionism until the sixth room of nine.  Furthermore, you will pay to see paintings conveniently relocated from the museums regular collection, and that is perverse and unnatural.  If you are interested in a historical daguerreotype of the precursors and theories of the Impressionists however, it does fairly well to that end.

Walking through extensive galleries of flowers and bright, pastelly colors, I was overcome by my artistic impulses for irrationality and started thinking of the snuff films of the Sixties and Seventies.  I have always been amused by the stark divergence of Nineteenth century French art from its Spanish counterpart: roses versus skulls.  If you do not follow, just consider which colors and images come to mind when I say El Greco, Goya and Velazquez.  Now think which ones come to mind when I say Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, etc.  Surely Saturn Devouring His Son would never be confused with a French painting, and similarly Luncheon at the Boathouse would never be a Spanish painting.  With trepidation lest I sound Marxist, wherever we find life overflowing in its robustness, death is sure to follow.  Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes’s Time of the Old Women and Hans Baldung Grien’s The Three Ages (both paintings are easily viewable online) are two perfect examples of this.

When I say “snuff films,” I refer to the term coined by Ed Sanders (1976), to refer to the genre of films (mostly from South America), which hoped to entertain the viewers in grand coliseum-esque style by depicting actors actually mutilated if not killed during the production.  For an educational discussion centering around reservations as to the reality of such films vis-à-vis their mythical nature, see the article by Scott Stine, accessible through the CSICOP official site (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal).

Clearly, death and art are linked.  And now, a story, which I owe to John Berger’s fantastic books on art criticism.  Painter Oskar Kokoschka was once teaching a life drawing class in which his students were struggling to capture the model.  The painter called a recess, during which he discreetly spoke with the model.  Sure enough, several minutes into the next pose, the model collapsed in a heap on the floor.  The painter ran over, felt his pulse, and announced to the students that the model was dead.  After a spell, the model arose and resumed his pose.  Kokoschka turned to his students and said, “Now draw the model like he is alive and not dead” [emphasis mine].

We have discussed the somewhat disturbingly coterminous nature of art and death.  We know of the suicides of far too many artists (Rothko and Van Gogh perhaps the foremost, but many others).  Now far be it from me to say that art and death are incongruous; many paintings of death are esthetically and technically brilliant, but there is clearly a difference between art about death and art that is death.  In a time where our life is for the most part dominated by death, it is very unfortunate that we oftentimes cannot even turn to art for the salvation that it can provide and that we so desperately need.

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