How is Death Portrayed in Visual Art

Death

This research is an extension to my work looking at Barthes and the photograph as death to come. I want to try and confront death and how death is portrayed in visual art. This might not be comfortable for me but I feel instinctively that this is important to try and help me to understand my work. This doesn’t feel very joined up but is a ramble through a very broad field as a way of developing my understanding.

To begin to unpick my ideas I first have to ask some question about death.

 

The first issue when writing about death is what does it actually mean? I am a non-religious person, and think of death as an absolute. To me death is simply of end of life. The dead person is no longer living and as they are not capable of thought or action they might be thought of as no longer being a person. Many consider death as a transition to another state whether this be through rebirth or going to some kind of afterlife. To me the idea of endlessly being reborn or even worse of being in some kind of heaven forever sounds dreadful but I can see how some would take comfort from such ideas. It is immediately obvious to me that my sense of loss, mourning and grief after the death of a loved one who I believe to be gone and I will never see them again is likely to be much more severe than for people who imagine that their loved one ‘is in a better place’ or at some point in time they will be ‘reunited in an afterlife’. I suspect that for some, a fear of death and of the concept that once we die, we are gone forever, is a big reason why people seek comfort in religion. This idea of the impact on the living of different beliefs regarding death is explored in a fascinating paper on the Ontological Representation of Death. The paper concludes that “the representation of death as total annihilation is positively correlated to hopelessness and negatively correlated to resilience” (Testoni, Ancona and Ronconi, 2015, p. 60, 76)  I question the use here of the term ‘total annihilation’ as this would appear to imply a complete obliteration yet we all leave traces. histories and memories. Even the holocaust and the attempted destruction of the Jewish people and more has left many traces. Complete annihilation does not seem possible unless in a sense of Physics where in wave theory if an electron and a positron collide, they annihilate one another releasing gamma rays. From the perspective of the photograph of a person, this is proof that a person was born and lived and if I take this one stage further after Barthes, is also proof of their impending doom.

 

The third issue concerns two related points; whose death am I talking about and how did that person die? These questions have a social element.  Is the death of an ancient relative the same as the death of a child? This point touches on why the death of children might be considered more shocking than the deaths of older people. Is the death of someone perceived to be a ‘bad person’ the same as someone perceived to be an ‘innocent’? Is a sudden death through violence or a car crash the same as a peaceful death? Does a death resulting from a suicide have a different feeling than a death due to murder? Is the death of someone considered to be ‘the same’ as us different from the death of someone from another culture and perhaps with a different colour of skin? Then there are remote deaths happening to someone else. Why do deaths of characters in books or films impact us? The film or book might harness grief as a tool within the plot and audience members might have experienced similar emotions or experiences so the reader or viewer of the film can imagine themselves to feel close to that character. The reader or the viewer might experience an emotional reaction and might cry but surely nobody experiences grief through watching a film? What about the deaths of the famous? It is highly unlikely that we knew this person but when a famous person dies there are often stories about public grief. It is thought that millions watched Princess Diana’s funeral and stories to this day tells us that there was an “extraordinary outpouring of emotion”. Yet the press often portrays such events with a specific agenda. As Sandbrook tells us, “During the funeral, as the historian Thomas Dixon remarks, the television cameras unwaveringly zoomed in on faces streaked with tears or contorted with emotion. What they did not capture, though, were the faces that remained unmoved, or the millions of people who were simply doing something else.” Sandbrook calls this  “public sentimentalism”  (Sandbrook, 2017) Is the grief at a funeral of a film star or a royal fake?  I think this is important to differentiate between real grief and something which instinctively feels shallower. This view of the death of an unknown seems to me to be far removed from the death of an intimate. I touched here on the role of the press. It seems clear that how they report on a famine, a war or individual deaths might well influence public reaction. Given the story surrounding a death and how an individual might perceive this event might help explain why different deaths are thought of differently, or perhaps as different shades of the same thing. My tutor mentioned something specific about cancer deaths and how these might be viewed differently. Maybe as I been so close to this, I wasn’t aware that these deaths any different. I did think back on a work colleague, Terry, who got in touch with me as knew about my daughter. Terry wanted help as he was dying from cancer and was worried about how his wife would cope and what he could do about it and wanted to know if I could offer advice. As I was thinking about how to respond, I had news that he had died very suddenly. I have regret that I didn’t respond in time even though I suspect there would have been nothing I could have said to ease his worry. This story shows a different side to cancer and to death. Having experienced such things personally, a few people over the years have approached me for help. Each death and story seem to build upon my own story and my sense of what suffering and the potential of death might mean. As I remembered the story of Terry and wrote this down, I wondered if my experiences are ‘normal’. Do people not touched by death get asked such questions by others? How do those with little experience of death cope?

Ernst van Alphen writes of this in a book about Francis Bacon, “It is easy to represent death objectively: as somebody else’s death, as a dead body, as the fear of our future death. In those cases, death is outside or in front of us” (Alphen, 1992, p. 95) Alphen goes on to describe that the people who are dying or at the point of death cannot participate in the act of representation. “We cannot narrate death in the first person, present tense.” (Alphen, 1992, p. 95) Peggy Phelan seems to echo this thought in an essay about Francesca Woodman. Phelan argues that, “Woodman’s work exposes two philosophical and psychic relations to the temporality of death. Refusing the well-known conviction that death occurs always in the future tense. Woodman’s photographs suggest that our anticipation of death is necessarily based on images, indeed on memories, of death as an event in the past. In the age of the spectacle, one confronts thousands upon thousands of such images; in the age of performance, one attempts to insert oneself into that cultural image repertoire.” (Phelan, 2002, p 986),

Untitled photograph by Francesca Woodman, Boulder, Colorado,1972–75

This early work by Woodman might be a self portrait as she often photographed herself using techniques such as blurring to partially obscure the figure in her work. The image shows her appearing to crawl through a headstone. It would appear to be about life after death and a figure trying to crawl back into life. It questions the temporality of death.

It is also relevant when looking at Woodman’s works to remember that she took her own life at the age of 22. I wonder whether the topic of death was always in her mind? She was 3 years older than my daughter Rebecca when she died.

 

Phelan goes on to look at Woodman’s work set against the theories of Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin with Barthes perspective as a proponent of the age of the spectator and Benjamin as a proponent of the age of the spectacle. Phelan says, “photography has been a crucial art in that it both serves as a witness to life and as a rehearsal for death” (Phelan, 2002, p. 979) This is an interesting idea as many artists have created work to record their journey towards death. This disagrees with the words of van Alphen ad his idea that death and the journey to death is recorded as a second-hand experience. I think here for example of the work of Jo Spence and her book The Final Project detailing her future death through leukaemia and using her previous experiences of breast cancer as a framework around which to approach her project. In the preface to this book, Terry Dennett writes, “Louisa’s proposal and the present publication fits in very well with Jo’s wishes that after her death a contemporary generation of women be enabled to explore and comment on her unpublished work so that her ideas could continue to be kept in the public domain” (Dennett, Jacob and Tobin, 2013, p. 9). This is an important point as van Alphen and Dennett put their fingers on a basic truth. Death happens to others but the memories and representation of death can only be done by the living. This is an important point in my own experience. In my visual representation of my daughter and of the experience of death, I can only imagine her death through my own experience, sitting by her bedside, feeling her clammy skin slick with sweat, calling out and swearing, asking for more drugs and before her end telling me she loved me. This seems true of the limits of visual art not just in relation to death. If I take an image of anyone, it is impossible for me to look through their eyes and to capture their thoughts and through my visual work to express everything that makes that person. The difference with photographs of people who are dead is that I can’t go back and ask the subject what they were thinking or feeling. The photograph isn’t the same as a person or of an experience. It only alludes to such things. The photograph cannot bring back the dead but it can make some aspect of them live on. These ideas made me think of Geoffrey Batchen’s thoughts on constructing shrines to the dead or having lockets of hair and photographs kept as a memento or as a trigger to certain memories about the departed. In his book, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, Batchen asks, “What kind of memory does it [the locket] seek to stimulate?” (Batchen, 2004, p. 67) The most basic answer is that the locket is for the living to try and conjure thoughts of those no longer living.

Van Alphen goes on to talk of a particular wok of Bacon’s, a study for a portrait made using a life mask of William Blake.

Study for Portrait II (after the Life Mask of William Blake) 1955 Francis Bacon 1909-1992 Purchased 1979 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T02414

This painting is from a mask of Blake taken when he was alive yet the painting seems to blur the lines between life and death by making a life mask into a death mask. “The imprint of life is indistinct from the ghost of death.” (Alphen, 1992, pp. 104–106) There is a similarity between the frozen moment in time held in a photograph has clear similarities with that of death where that person, to those still living, might appear frozen in time. Yet for Bacon his work seems radically more than just a frozen moment.

As I said at the outset, this is a vast area of research and I am aware I have barely scratched the surface. This field is of great interest to me and there is the potential here for a dissertation or even a much larger piece of written work to explore these themes in more depth.

 

References

Alphen, E. van (1992) Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self. London: Reaktion Books.

Batchen, G. (2004) Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=2YAXe5_y3IIC&pgis=1.

Dennett, T., Jacob, C. and Tobin, A. (2013) Jo Spence: The Final Project. Ridinghouse.

Phelan, P. (2002) ‘Francesca Woodman’s Photography: Death and the Image One More Time’, University of Chicago Press Journals, 27(4), pp. 979–1004.

Sandbrook, D. (2017) The Death Of Princess Diana in 1997: When Grief Gripped A Nation, BBC History Magazine. Available at: https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/princess-diana-death-what-happened/ (Accessed: 23 June 2022).

Testoni, I., Ancona, D. and Ronconi, L. (2015) ‘The ontological representation of death: A scale to measure the idea of annihilation versus passage’, Omega (United States), 71(1), pp. 60–81. doi: 10.1177/0030222814568289.