Art and death

I’m delighted to host a post by Brian Jenner. Brian is a words-for-hire person (I know how that feels) who does everything from gilding the tongues of politicians to writing terrifically good books. This summer he is holding a Six Feet Under convention in Bournemouth. As soon as I heard about this I fired off emails to him. Obligingly he has come up with what he does best — some words for this blog. Not that he isn’t a dab hand at organising events, mind. He’s done quite a bit of that, too.

Those who enjoyed Six Feet Under unanimously agree that it was the best telly ever. It had the breadth of War and Peace and the psychological acuity of a louche Henry James. It is amongst the finest dramatic achievements of all time (eat your heart out, Homer).

Enough of me. Here’s Brian. Oh, before he starts — one moment, Brian — let me endorse what he says about Bournemouth. Once the only UK cemetery with traffic lights, it is now the sort of place that hip Europeans fly to for a weekend of clubbing. It is all sorts of vibrant these days.

IT’s five years since the quirky American TV series Six Feet Under came to an end and I’ve missed it terribly. Tender, intelligent, funny, mystical and beautiful, these are not epithets you often apply to TV drama, but Six Feet Under was all of those things.

I live in Bournemouth, a popular beach resort on the South Coast of England. A few years ago, I was walking through a cemetery and I remembered how the character Nate would go jogging on a path through the gravestones. It gave me two ideas. Here was a place to go jogging and wouldn’t it be fun to have a Six Feet Under convention?

I never did go jogging, but last year, having organised a couple of conferences, I put my morbid imagination to work and devised the ultimate weekend break.

It would be like a Star Trek convention, but a lot more classy. We’d host lectures about embalming, green funerals and obituaries. We’d have a Thomas Newman concert and a talk about the music we’d like to accompany our departure. We’d have an audience with one of the stars from the series, go for a picnic in our equivalent of Forest Lawn and offer the chance to sit in a real hearse.

When posted to my blog, I was sure it was all too weird. Within 24 hours someone had responded: ‘Sounds fascinating, put me down for two tickets.’

Bournemouth has a reputation for gerontocratic torpor, but we’re also keen to promote its more creative and hedonistic side. Six Feet Under embraces both. We’ve picked 12-14 August – the height of summer – with our pine trees, sandy beaches and boulevards we can give the town the best chance of being mistaken for California.

Can you have a weekend devoted to celebrating the grim reaper? Isn’t it going to be crass and insensitive? Well, here’s the paradox. Works like Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, Hal Ashby’s Harold & Maude, Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death Revisited don’t fill you with gloom, they give you a spring in your step.

Six Feet Under was great because it wrestled with religion, sexuality, family, drugs and work in raw ways. I want to hang out with sensitive and intelligent people who want to be honest about life. We need to club together. Sadness, fear, joy, uproarious laughter – the weekend will elicit all those things. And we’ll go home reminded how great it is to be alive.

The Six Feet Under Convention, Bournemouth, 12-14 August 2011. For more details go to http://www.sixfeetunderconvention.co.uk

Memoir

It has been

absolutely

fascinating

being me.

A unique

privilege.

Now my

whole life

lies ahead

of you.

No thanks

at all are

called for,

I assure you.

The pleasure

is all mine.

Dennis O’Driscoll

MANIFESTO

We, the First Committee of the International Necronautical Society, declare the following:-

1.That death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit.

2. That there is no beauty without death, its immanence. We shall sing death’s beauty – that is, beauty.

3. That we shall take it upon us, as our task, to bring death out into the world. We will chart all its forms and media: in literature and art, where it is most apparent; also in science and culture, where it lurks submerged but no less potent for the obfuscation. We shall attempt to tap into its frequencies – by radio, the internet and all sites where its processes and avatars are active. In the quotidian, to no smaller a degree, death moves: in traffic accidents both realised and narrowly avoided; in hearses and undertakers’ shops, in florists’ wreaths, in butchers’ fridges and in dustbins of decaying produce. Death moves in our appartments, through our television screens, the wires and plumbing in our walls, our dreams. Our very bodies are no more than vehicles carrying us ineluctably towards death. We are all necronauts, always, already.

4. Our ultimate aim shall be the construction of a craft¹ that will convey us into death in such a way that we may, if not live, then at least persist. With famine, war, disease and asteroid impact threatening to greatly speed up the universal passage towards oblivion, mankind’s sole chance of survival lies in its ability, as yet unsynthesised, to die in new, imaginative ways. Let us deliver ourselves over utterly to death, not in desperation but rigorously, creatively, eyes and mouths wide open so that they may be filled from the deep wells of the Unknown.

¹This term must be understood in the most versatile way possible.It could designate a set of practices, such as the usurpation of identities and personas of dead people, the development of specially adapted genetic or semantic codes based on the meticulous gathering of data pertaining to certain and specific deaths, the rehabilitation of sacrifice as an accepted social ritual, the perfection, patenting and eventual widespreaddistribution of Thanadrine^TM, or, indeed, the building of an actual craft – all of the above being projects currently before the First Committee.

Declaration on the Nature of the Future (2010) here.

Website here.

Interview with Stephen Critchley here.

I enjoyed this piece over at Obit magazine:

It’s good to be a dead leader.

Not so for Ariel Sharon, the (arguably) most influential and the (certainly) most enduring politician in Israel. Sharon has never been memorialized, has never had a funeral, and is barely mentioned anymore in Israeli political conversations. He’s also not really dead.

Into this void recently stepped an Israeli installation artist, Noam Braslavsky, 49, who held a show at Kishon Gallery in Tel Aviv this winter that enjoyed international media attention. Braslavsky created a real-life Sharon, eyes open and mechanically breathing in a hospital bed, wearing his trademark button-down blue shirt.

“People didn’t have the opportunity to mourn,” Braslavsky said. So he decided to give them that chance.

Read the entire, very well written article, here.  Good pics here.

There’s an interesting piece over in the New York Times about an artist, Tobi Kahn who, when his mother lay dying, filled her hospital room with his paintings of flowers.

Out of that private, personal display for his mother, Mr. Kahn has built a body of work that aspires to bring solace, comfort, a kind of sublimity, to the end of life. It is by no means the only or even the primary work he does — for decades, he has been a protean, prolific artist in paint, sculpture and installation — and yet it has become a distinctive specialty.

In the aftermath of Ellen Kahn’s death, Mr. Kahn began asking clergy members, hospice workers and funeral directors what kind of art dying people wanted. He received both specific advice — no sharp edges, calmness, tones of blue, no sudden tonal shifts that might set off a hallucination — and more important, he recalls, a broader recommendation for “a certain sense of dignity, nothing soporific.”

As part of his own grieving process, Mr. Kahn dedicated 11 art projects to his mother’s memory. One of them involved designing a sanctuary and meditation room and decorating 18 residential rooms for a Jewish hospice in the Bronx. Many of those paintings depicted lakes, horizons and landscapes, themes to which Mr. Kahn has often returned in his end-of-life art.

Read the whole article here