Theoretical and Historical Context of other Artists who work with Loss, Grief and Death
In the course of my studies, I have come across many people for whom loss and grief are a prominent part of their lives and a big influence in their art. Just last week in early August, when speaking to some stallholders at Fringe by the Sea, I explained my work and we chatted about common experiences of loss and shed a few tears together. In addition to these local artists, I have researched some well-known artists who are influential in this field, some historical and some more recent. In this document, I look at two historical artists and two more recent artists who inspire me and have all been impacted by loss. This encourages me that my work has value. Seeking to understand the motivations and works of others, gives me insights into how I can use artistic expression as a medium for dealing with my own loss and communicating intense feelings such as grief. I have written about some of these artists before but have revisited Sophie Calle and Jo Spence as am interested in looking at my sense of these artists and to see if my perspective has changed and if, as I near the end of my undergraduate studies, I have new insights into these people.
Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954) was a Mexican artist who worked with self-representation and whose work featured her experiences of pain and loss. She lived much of her life exposed to disability and pain. Her father had epilepsy and developed a close bond with his daughter (Dawson, no date) who was diagnosed with polio in childhood which left a lifelong disability in her right leg and foot. When she was 18, she was in an accident where she fractured her pelvis, spine, collarbone and leg. (Dawson, no date) The pelvic injury left her unable to have children. She experienced miscarriages which featured in her art. She experienced gangrene in her foot and died young at the age of 47. (Frida Kahlo biography, no date). Some creative works by Kahlo that I have thought about in relation to my own work include “Henry Ford Hospital” painted in 1932. This work features Kahlo naked and bleeding on a hospital bed and is a representation of her despair following a miscarriage. Kahlo is surrounded by medical depictions and symbolic items such as a snail and an orchid. I wondered about these items as I thought of my own use of medical scans in my work. I wondered what Kahlo thought in those cold medical discussions. There is a chance that her experiences have many touchpoints with my experiences. Interestingly in Kahlo’s painting it seems to be set outside with industrial buildings on the horizon. Does this express this coldness of which I speak? Another work 5 years after her miscarriage is “My Nurse and I”. This shows an earlier part of Kahlo’s life when she was fed as a baby by a wet nurse. The nurse wears a funeral mask and holds the baby Kahlo, with the head of the adult woman Kahlo, as if in offering for sacrifice.
Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) was a German artist who lived through both world wars and lost her son in World War I. In this small fact, I am reminded of Roland Barthes losing his father in the early days of WWI and of how death shapes the living. I instinctively feel close to Kollwitz because of the loss of a child. Her work, “evokes images of bereaved mothers, ailing, fatherless children, anguished parents, and, more generally, suffering and death”. (Käthe Kollwitz | MoMA, no date) For me, there is a brutality mixed with a tenderness in Kollwitz’s work which I find very moving but which I imagine asks a lot of the artist. Her 1903 work, “Woman with Dead Child (Frau mit totem Kind) https://www.moma.org/collection/works/273959 predates the death of her son and shows a woman cradling her dead child. This shows Kollwitz’s interest in the high childhood mortality at the time and in bringing a sense of what this meant to real people. She used herself and her son as models for this work so I can imagine how she felt after her son died years later to look back at this work. Another notable work with meaning to my practice is The Widow II (Die Witwe II) in which Kollwitz “portray[s] a mother holding her infant as if offering a sacrifice”(Käthe Kollwitz. The Widow II (Die Witwe II), state VII/VII, plate 5 from War (Krieg). 1922, published 1923 | MoMA, no date)This sense of a sacrificial offering is an idea which Kahlo used tooin her 1937 work “My Nurse and I, which I describe above.
Kollwitz’s art was anchored in very human and literal works which speak of loss, grief and suffering due to things such as disease and war which can seem bigger than us and out of our control. In making her art, she felt compelled to speak out. “I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate. It is my duty to voice the sufferings of men, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain-high.”(Kollwitz, 1988, p. January 4th, 1920, page 96)
Jo Spence (1934 – 1992)
I was first drawn to the work of Jo Spence after visiting an exhibition in Edinburgh in 2016. This was just a few months after the death of my daughter. I made a post in my blog about Spence which can be found here: https://richarddalgleish.net/jo-spence/
I have reread that post and am struck by my words at that time and my focus on Spence’s cancer and why she would have wanted to construct a project about her illness and death. Eight years have passed and I now have a very different perspective.
When I looked for Jo Spence online, I found a recent exhibition, The Cancer Project 1-31 October 2023, where her work was put on sale. I was interested in the layout of this online with words and images on a stark white page with prices below each image. I wonder what Spence might have thought of her work in this setting. This also made me wonder who might buy such photographs and in turn made me think about my own project.
https://www.richardsaltoun.com/viewing-room/49-the-cancer-project-jo-spence
Spence’s work focuses on the harsh treatment for her cancer. There is a theme here between Kahlo, Calle, Sontag which touches on their personal loss and pain. Kollwitz too interacts with the pain of loss but from her I detect a wave of anger in her work and also a political message. Spence too has this political side to her work using her own troubles and brutal depictions of her damaged body, her sense of self and her awareness of her impending death to ask the viewer to think about the social implications of disease and death. I really connect with Spence’s work and admire her as a person and as an artist. When I was revisiting her work I discovered her work on the “therapeutic uses of photography” (Takemoto, 2009) Spence called this phototherapy. Today I think it might be called art therapy. It is something I am interested in as a potential choice after my degree. To try and use my art as a way to interpret loss and to use my experiences to help others. I found a great resource on Spence’s Phototherapy on BritishPhotography.org. Interestingly this also details the exhibition, the space required and lots more.(Spence, 2020) A fascinating resource of value to be in planning an exhibition and in the future direction I might go in.
I had some difficulty choosing influential works from Spence as so much of what she does resonates with me. I chose the photograph below where she seems to float in the grass in a graveyard. It directly confronts her sense of her own mortality.
The grass in the graveyard is overgrown as with many such spaces it feels abandoned and unloved. Was this an expression of how Spence felt at the time? In her pose, which I assume in the sea or a swimming pool, she has her eyes close and looks so relaxed. Is she trying to imitate death or is she showing that she is not afraid to die? The other thing I love about Spence is her book “The Final Project” which combines photographs and words. I been wondering about whether to accompany my exhibition with some form of printed booklet or zine but would have to consider what words to use with my pictures.
Sophie Calle (b 1953)
I was first drawn to the work of Sophie Calle while researching the work of Tracy Emin and her piece, The Bed. See my blog post about the Backward Gaze https://richarddalgleish.net/the-backward-gaze/ Both Emin and Calle have a very intimate approach to their personal stories expressed through their art. Emin openly speaks of cancer and the major surgery which saved her. In this, she has a similar story to that of Susan Sontag. She has talked about the death of her mother and thoughts of her own death which interest me as I work on my major project. (Black, 2020) Calle filmed her mother’s final breaths on her deathbed and has worked around the death of her cat, has taken job in hotel so she could photograph what people kept in their rooms and has even passed a breakup note from a boyfriend to 107 female professionals to analyse. (Wiseman, 2017) Some of her works which interest me include pieces such as Room 43 which features in her project Hotel spoke to me of the bed as a repository of memory and was very similar to Emin’s work. As I researched Calle my interest grew when I learned that her father was an oncologist. I had done some research on this and had asked one of my children’s doctors how they were able to separate out the bare and brutal facts of their working lives and the deaths of children from the rest of their lives. The answer was compartmentalisation and putting things in boxes. Calle and her father existed on the other side of the wall of one of these boxes from me and my experiences so it fascinating for me to learn more about her and her work. She produced work based on people who were born blind and discovering what their idea of beauty was. ,Sophie Calle: Because –The Blind (1989) (Calle, 2023) My son is blind so this project really resonates with me. She tried to capture a sense of her mother who was dying from cancer and had been given a short time left to live in “Ne vous faites pas de souci.”. Calle writes, “She asked me to put on a Mozart piece after her last breath. But I didn’t see any breath, she had been breathing so softly. So for eleven minutes I was touching her heart and her hand to look for respiration, it took me eleven minutes before I understood to put on the Mozart. The last word she said was ‘souci’ She said, ‘Ne vous faites pas de souci.’ Don’t worry in English. But I could never see her last breath. It was impossible to capture. And those eleven minutes were for me like a no-man’s land.” (Calle, 2016) This no-man’s land, I am convinced, is the liminal space between life and death at the heart of my own work. I am reminded of my time at my daughter’s deathbed. Maybe the thoughts we have at such moments are more common than I imagine and are part of the universality of death?
Conclusion
I started this essay by thinking about artistic influences but ended on a note thinking about death. This, at first glance, might seem odd, but no, my project is about loss and memory and my daughter’s death so thinking about death and being influenced by writers and artists who speak of the same thing is entirely reasonable. Many of us suffer. Kahlo lived a life of pain and suffering and reminds me very much of Susan Sontag and her battles with cancer and the pain and horror of Spence’s photographs of herself. While Kahlo was very positive as shown for example when she speaks of the despair that she might be confined to a wheelchair and was in constant pain after 7 operations on her spine she writes, “I am not sick. I am broken. But, I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.” (Almeida, 2020), for Sontag however, she lived with a terror of death. (Rieff, 2008, p. 74) I am reminded here of Sontag’s words at the start of Illness as Metaphor, “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” (Sontag, 1991, p. 3) It is interesting to me how Kahlo through her art and Sontag through her writing tackled similar ideas. For Spence I do not get a sense of the terror of death but instead of anger. This same idea comes through from Kollwitz. Both have a strong feminist and political message in their work. Out of all of these artists, Calle stands apart. Her work while intimate and deeply moving has the sense to me of an observer. I wonder if my work has an element of this standing to one side and presenting my view, not necessarily from the experience of cancer, pain and death but as someone who has seen all of these things and has experienced these things second hand, one step removed. What my project is not about is the specifics of cancer or of any other disease which might come with a death warrant or the medical words we learn and which become commonplace. No, my interest is in the fact of a life nearing its end and of the memorial of those left behind and of visualising the space between life and death whether as real things, a mythological expression or as conceptual works asking the viewer to pause and think for a moment about their mortality.
References
Almeida, L. (2020) Quotes from Frida Kahlo | Denver Art Museum. Available at: https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en/blog/quotes-frida-kahlo (Accessed: 12 August 2024).
Black, H. (2020) Tracey Emin on Following Your Emotional Instinct and Turning Inwards, Elephant. Available at: https://elephant.art/tracey-emin-on-looking-inwards-24112020/ (Accessed: 16 August 2024).
Calle, S. (2016) Death Watch, Harper’s Magazine. Available at: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/death-watch/ (Accessed: 16 August 2024).
Calle, S. (2023) Sophie Calle: Because—The Blind, Art Institute Chicago. Available at: https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9779/sophie-calle-because-the-blind (Accessed: 16 August 2024).
Dawson, B. (no date) Frida Kahlo in her own words | Dazed, Dazed. Available at: https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/38331/1/frida-kahlo-in-her-own-words (Accessed: 12 August 2024).
Frida Kahlo biography (no date). Available at: https://www.fridakahlo.org/frida-kahlo-biography.jsp (Accessed: 8 August 2024).
Käthe Kollwitz. The Widow II (Die Witwe II), state VII/VII, plate 5 from War (Krieg). 1922, published 1923 | MoMA (no date). Available at: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/69686 (Accessed: 8 August 2024).
Käthe Kollwitz | MoMA (no date). Available at: https://www.moma.org/artists/3201 (Accessed: 8 August 2024).
Kollwitz, K. (1988) The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz. Edited by H. Kollwitz. Translated by R. Winston and C. Winston. Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
Rieff, D. (2008) Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir. Lodon: Granta Publications.
Sontag, S. (1991) Illness as Metaphor & AIDS and its Metaphors. London: Penguin Books.
Spence, J. (2020) JO SPENCE FROM FAIRY TALES TO PHOTO THERAPY: Photos from the Hyman Collection, Centre for British Photography Touring Exhibitions. Available at: moz-extension://7dbcc703-cba0-40a4-9916-0fc8d7aff0cb/enhanced-reader.html?openApp&pdf=https%3A%2F%2Fbritishphotography.org%2Fusr%2Flibrary%2Fdocuments%2Fmain%2Fjo-spence-from-fairy-tales-to-photo-therapy-2-.pdf (Accessed: 21 August 2024).
Takemoto, T. (2009) REMEMBERING JO SPENCE: A CONVERSATION WITH TERRY DENNETT, Afterimage. Available at: https://www.mutualart.com/Article/REMEMBERING-JO-SPENCE–A-CONVERSATION-WI/72E69221260E7E73 (Accessed: 21 August 2024).
Wiseman, E. (2017) Sophie Calle: ‘What attracts me is absence, missing, death…’, The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jul/02/sophie-calle-art-interview-what-attracts-me-is-absence-missing-death (Accessed: 16 August 2024).