[worried-dolphin]

With Dead Head was Hirst’s first Memento Mori

Brian Dillon (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/9177026/Damien-Hirst-He-laughs-in-the-face-of-death.html)

[worried-dolphin]

Damien Hirst: With Dead Head (1991)

“With Dead Head is a black and white photograph of the artist when he was a teenager, posing with the head of a corpse. In 1992 he recounted the making of the image: It’s me and a dead head. Severed head. In the morgue. Human. I’m sixteen ... If you look at my face, I’m actually going: ‘Quick. Quick. Take the photo.’ It’s worry. I wanted to show my friends, but I couldn’t take all my friends there, to the morgue in Leeds. I’m absolutely terrified. I’m grinning, but I’m expecting the eyes to open and for it to go: ‘Grrrrraaaaagh!’.I was doing anatomy drawing. I took some photos when I shouldn’t have done. It was ten years ago. But I just suddenly thought ... to me, the smile and everything seemed to sum up this problem between life and death. It was such a ridiculous way of ... being at the point of trying to come to terms with it, especially being sixteen and everything: this is life and this is death. And I’m trying to work it out.”

Source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hirst-with-dead-head-ar00617

[worried-dolphin]

Greif & Art Case Study: “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” by Damien Hirst (1991)

“‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ comprises of a 14-foot tiger shark suspended and preserved in formaldehyde, in a vitrine. The piece was created in 1991 by Hirst, commissioned by Charles Saatchi who then sold it for approximately $12 million dollars. It has since been exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and more recently the Tate Modern but currently is not on display to the public. The work solidified Hirst’s reputation as a forerunner in the Young British Artist’s movement and also prompted a wave of controversy about the value and originality of his work.

Since its initial installation the shark has been replaced with younger models due to inevitable decomposition. This is highly significant; the shark can be seen to be representative of death, and whilst Hirst may have wished to present a moment frozen in time, his shark is still subject to the wearing away and degradation that comes with the passing of time, and its replacements remind us that this is something we are all subject to. The replacement of the shark also highlights how much of Hirst’s work comprises of copying, and mass reproducing. As opposed to more classical notions of what constitutes an ‘artist’, Hirst seems to place little value on originality and authenticity, with the majority of his works being produced by his team of helpers, and not the man himself.

The shark in the tank is completely isolated from its natural setting, instead of being in motion, in the water, we see it completely frozen and preserved. For most, it may be the first time we have come so close to a shark, with many of us only seeing them on television or perhaps at an aquarium. Here we have a direct experience of the shark, not mediated through any media. Thus we are forced to consider the shark in a new and different context and re-evaluate how we perceive the animal. This recontextualisation of the shark is interesting, partly, it is reminiscent of the appropriation of popular culture images by artists such as Warhol, taking banal images and exploring them in a new light. I mean this in relation to the dominant portrayal of the shark in popular culture; that of Jaws. This image of the open jaws of a shark is something most of us are at least familiar with even if we have not seen the film; it evokes unease and fear. In Hirst’s piece, we come face to face with the reality and physicality of this familiar image and are forced to consider it in a new setting.

The shark possesses an uncanny simultaneity; it seems to be both dead and alive at the same time. Obviously it is dead, but its commanding and unnerving presence, and power over the viewer makes it feel as though it could be alive. Its complete stillness gives it an eerie and unsettling quality. This stillness could also be interpreted as a sense of peacefulness; however, the facial expression of the shark pertains to a more troublesome feeling and prevents the viewer from feeling at ease. Its wide open mouth gives it a sense of menace and danger. This plays upon what the audience knows about sharks from popular culture, that they can kill people, and that they are dangerous and threatening. It is clearly a conscious decision on Hirst’s part to use a shark as the embodiment of death, instead of an animal that we would perceive as gentle, or beautiful.

The eyes of the shark exaggerate its unnerving presence – where eyes are usually expressive and convey feeling, the eyes of the shark are lidless and stare interrogatively at the audience. This lack of expression in the eyes prevents the viewer from feeling sympathetic towards the animal, instead, we feel threatened by its blank gaze. The mouth of the shark, wide open, shows us an action paused and frozen in time. This is the pervading feeling upon viewing the shark; the viewer feels as though they are looking at a moment in time which has been stopped and suspended, and then displayed. In this sense, the presentation of the shark is similar to what happens when we take a photograph; capturing and immortalising a moment in time. Eventually photographs fade and it is impossible to truly immortalise a moment. Similarly, the various sharks have decomposed and needed replacement. The display of the shark also explores the tradition of taxidermy and the displaying of animals for public view. We are perhaps used to seeing animals stuffed in cases in museums but the preservation of a huge fish is slightly unusual and so it seems that Hirst is slightly upsetting this tradition.

The presence of the shark is visceral, direct and impossible to ignore. This is primarily due to its size; the shark measures a total of 4.3 metres, which makes it incredibly hard to miss or bypass in a gallery setting. In this sense, its existence is similar to the theme of mortality. The theme of death is something that people may often try to avoid or ignore, but it is such a necessary part of human experience and so inextricably linked to life that it is impossible not to acknowledge it and question it at some point. So, the preserved shark deals explicitly with the ‘impossible’ nature of mortality. It is a theme that we are forced to consider, but such a problematic and difficult thing to fully grasp or understand, however, most importantly, it is inescapable, much like the shark.”

Source: https://www.clc.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/?p=391

[worried-dolphin]

Grief & Photography (Research Continued)

“Photographs of loved ones taken after they died may seem morbid to modern sensibilities. But in Victorian England, they became a way of commemorating the dead and blunting the sharpness of grief.

In images that are both unsettling and strangely poignant, families pose with the dead, infants appear asleep, and consumptive young ladies elegantly recline, the disease not only taking their life but increasing their beauty.

Victorian life was suffused with death. Epidemics such as diphtheria, typhus and cholera scarred the country, and from 1861 the bereaved Queen made mourning fashionable.

Trinkets of memento mori - literally meaning "remember you must die" - took several forms, and existed long before Victorian times.

Locks of hair cut from the dead were arranged and worn in lockets and rings, death masks were created in wax, and the images and symbols of death appeared in paintings and sculptures.

But in the mid-1800s photography was becoming increasingly popular and affordable - leading to memento mori photographic portraiture.

The first successful form of photography, the daguerreotype - a small, highly detailed picture on polished silver - was an expensive luxury, but not nearly as costly as having a portrait painted, which previously had been the only way of permanently preserving someone's image.

As the number of photographers increased, the cost of daguerreotypes fell. Less costly procedures were introduced in the 1850s, such as using thin metal, glass or paper rather than silver.

Death portraiture became increasingly popular. Victorian nurseries were plagued by measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, rubella - all of which could be fatal. 

It was often the first time families thought of having a photograph taken - it was the last chance to have a permanent likeness of a beloved child.

But as healthcare improved the life expectancy of children, the demand for death photography diminished. The advent of snapshots sounded the death knell for the art - as most families would have photographs taken in life.

Now, these images of men, women and children stoically containing their grief in order to preserve the likeness of a taken-too-soon loved one, continue to live up to their name.

Memento mori: remember, you must die.” 

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-36389581

[worried-dolphin]

Life is a movie. Death is a photograph.

Susan Sontag (https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/07/22/susan-sontag-peter-hujar-portraits-in-life-and-death/)

[worried-dolphin]

Photographers exploring similar themes to that of my final project:

Peter Watkins. “In 1993, when he was nine years old, Peter Watkins’s mother took her own life by walking into the North Sea at Zandvoort, in the Netherlands. Twenty years later, he began making the still-ongoing work of memory and loss he’s called ‘The Unforgetting’. This week, it is exhibited in a room in Pickford’s House in Derby as part of the Format photography festival.” The theme of the festival is evidence, and the series is, among other things, a gathering of proof: remnants, belongings and fragments from an interrupted life. At its core are Watkins’s photographs of the things his mother left behind – among them her lace baptismal dress, which seems to float suspended in the air behind yellow Perspex like a hallucination. Nearby, inside a dark cube on a plinth resembling a museum artefact, sits the rucksack his mother was carrying on the day she died. The bag is both mundane and charged with mystery: it is closed, its personal contents intact but hidden. Both the dress and the rucksack are loaded with sadness, but they are predictable or sentimental. This is the nature of such a complex project: Watkin’s must evoke his mother’s absence and her continuing presence honestly, but also acknowledge the impossibility of ever fully articulating that absence – that profound, unalterable sense of loss.” Source: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/13/peter-watkins-photography-ghostly-reflection-on-grief-and-loss

[worried-dolphin]

Final Project Investigations, Reflective Overview (Part 2):

The eventual theme of my project unfortunately fell in front of me much more naturally than I would have liked. 

I was beginning to hear more and more that “people react to grief in strange ways” again. 

 No rhyme or reason. 

Lots of emotion. 

 Personal. 

 The gift (and sometimes the curse) of hindsight. 

 It all lined up rather perfectly, right down to the aesthetic I had been exploring - right down to the symbolic props used in some of my inspiration images.

Initially, after deciding that I wanted to focus my project on grief and the grieving process I thought about taking a global approach. 

I am from the West, and so am accustomed to the Western grieving rituals and mentalities. Particularly those characteristic of the Christian faith. Funerals, black clothing, tears, far too much conversation about the suspiciously white Jesus Christ, etc. 

I have not always lived in the West, and understand that grief translates very differently across different cultures. However, upon further investigation, I decided that I simply did not have enough time to explore these rituals properly, allowing myself to understand or interpret them accurately. 

I feel that my work would not be sufficient enough in any sort of depth to surpass appropriation. I wanted to avoid that, just as much as I wanted to avoid communicating the same type of tasteless ignorance as I saw in Meisel’s series.

What followed next in my research journey contradicts a lot of what I said previously. 

 I knew that I wanted to evoke, or at the very least convey feelings that I could not, and didn’t want to articulate. However, I found myself looking for inspiration in literary works, googling “death poetry” and sifting through a plethora of works from Shakespeare, to WordPress’ least spelling-conscious contributors.

After thinking initially that I wanted to have a collection of these poems within my work alongside my images, I came across a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson that would become the only poem contained in my publication. In Memoriam (1850) was an impressive 90 A5 pages long in the book that I purchased from Waterstones. I read about 30 of these. I selected the first 27 sections as being the most relevant to what I wanted to say (with 27 being an obvious place to end for me, given the last line being a popular and somewhat optimistic saying). This took some further trimming, and I was left with a 8 sections of the poem that I was inspired by.

[worried-dolphin]

Final Project Investigations, Reflective Overview (Part 1):

Venturing into the initial stages of research for my final project this year threw up many alternative paths of exploration which I found tricky to navigate. My initial concept for my project was built upon an aesthetic, discovered when my eye was drawn to various images on Pinterest.  A collection of these images is stored in a link in a previous post. While relatively easily to translate into my own work, I realised that it would be difficult to build and entire project, and publication, on such superficial foundations. I began to think about what it was that I wanted to create, and in turn, what I wanted that to say. Eventually I decided that like many people in the class, I wanted to try and capture something that was relevant to me. While further exploring the aesthetic that I had been first drawn to, I came across an image by Steven Meisel for Vogue (2007) named “Models Enter Rehab”. The problematic nature of Steven Meisel’s “Supermodels Enter Rehab” for Vogue 2007 is immediately obvious, particularly in the context of fashion photography. The romanticism of themes including rehab, addiction and mental illness for me, make the tastelessness of the series is undeniable. The conclusions I drew from the series are nevertheless very difficult for me to explain. 

 Regardless of all of the obvious flaws with the very nature of the series, (the more alarming of which being the heinous inaccuracy of it all. Had Meisel ever seen a rehab facility or a psych ward outside of a 90s Hollywood film?) I was not angry. In fact, I was surprised. I was surprised by something familiar, and something which I thought could no longer surprise me. I realised that the shoot had actually, in some way, made me feel introspective. It made me very aware of my gift of hindsight regarding my own experiences relating to such themes. All of the feelings that I had about the images were entirely personal, in a way that I think only painful things are, and so very difficult to articulate. 

 I understand that perhaps this is an unusual reaction to such imagery, especially having embarked on an investigation into the critical reviews of the series. Nevertheless, these feelings were important to me. 

 I should perhaps note that this reaction was undoubtedly entirely supported, and even created, by experiences that statistically most people do not share. I realised that I could not simply copy this concept to create the same feelings in others, and nor did I want to. The appeal of these images was how they touched me personally. I should also note that I did not feel, nor want to create pain of any sort looking at my work, but I did want to try and capture the complexity of my reactions, and so began to think about how. 

 I concluded that I wanted my project to be entirely personal, but certainly not drawing on the same concepts as Meisel. I knew instantly that I did not want to explore themes of mental illness. I wanted to explore, or even provoke, the complexity of emotional reactions, rather than simply emotions by themselves, as mental illness is so often interpreted. 

I came to the first class discussing the final project with no solid ideas. When hearing about the developments of other people’s projects I was extremely doubtful of any notions I had regarding my own. I was having a god-awful day, and it was dark outside. I hate that. I was struggling to sit still in my chair, and focusing on anything felt impossible. I became very aware of myself and suddenly began to realise how fidgety I was. I laughed inwardly at the realisation of this. I’d been spending so much time thinking about emotional reaction, and realised that I was being physically moved by emotions connected to... What exactly? 

 I hadn’t taken any photos yet, but suddenly that didn’t seem like as big an issue. I had been stressing over the impact of my project while ignoring the only 2 things that I did know: - I wanted my project to be personal - I wanted my project to evoke an emotional reaction. So, with the deadline drawing ever closer, my next conclusion? People were going to feel however they were going to feel. Even reactions have much less rhyme or reason than I’d considered. It was so obvious. But not to me. Not until now.

(Continued in next post)

Please note: Due to the nature of Meisel’s work, Tumblr has forbidden me from attaching the images, flagging and hiding all of my previous attempts. The “Supermodels Enter Rehab” series can be found here: https://trendland.com/supermods-enter-rehab-by-steven-miesel-for-vogue-italia-july-2007/

[worried-dolphin]

Investigation into aesthetic: “In Memoriam” project Inspiration Board:

https://pin.it/4dojr45ukqfbjn

[worried-dolphin]

Harper’s Bazaar image showing one of Paco Rabanne’s pieces from his debut couture collection “Twelve Unwearable Dresses” (1967). 

‘Paco Rabanne spoke and wrote extensively about his past lives, and his claims, including the one in which he “traveled to Earth from the planet Altair, to organize civilization on this planet 78,000 years ago,” and this earned him the nickname Wacko Paco.’

[unchildhood]

FRANZ KAFKA x DAMIEN HIRST

The Metamorphosis (1915);

Pill Cabinets series diptychs:

In Search of Oblivion (2007)

Standing Alone on the Precipice and Overlooking the Arctic Wastelands of Pure Terror (1999 - 2000)

Lost Memories and Dreams Forgotten (2008 - 2009)

[worried-dolphin]

Experimenting with concepts & context (see also: pissing about)

[worried-dolphin]

Piotrek. 

A GIF in progress. 

[worried-dolphin]

Faces of Edinburgh (03/10/19) - a first attempt at sartorial typology. 

[typologicalphotography-blog]

Stephen Gill #1

I yesterday bought Stephen Gill’s book “Field Studies” which is full of typological photography.

A field study is a term used by naturalists for the scientific study of free-living wild animals in which the subjects are observed in their natural habitat, without changing, harming, or materially altering the setting or behavior of the animals under study. Field study is an indispensable part of biological science. It helps to reveal the habits and habitats of various organisms present in their natural surroundings.

Stephen Gill does the same, but then projecting this method of looking on people. He also adds historical importance to his subjects cuz he’s very aware of why he photographs it now. 

Listening to music in public for example changed the public space. When you see this body of work hundred years later you’re looking at a document who shows the beginning this change. Gill is especially interested in the “invisibible everyday”, the things we see but never pay attention too. 

[typologicalphotography-blog]

Nicolas Nixon

I love the way Nicholas Nixon uses typology in his sisters project. We are all accustomed to seeing images of children as they grow up. There is usually a record of our parent’s love, starting with our baby book and on to our college graduation photos. But it is rare to see that method used to record the love a husband has for his wife, which includes her family. I imagine being married to a women who has three sisters can be perilous, female politics are complicated. But what I love about those images, is the closeness visible in the sisters relationships – they have such a strong presence. Nixon’s photographs seem almost jealous. One of the expectations of a marriage is that husband & wife become closer to each other than anyone else. The ‘us versus them’ phenomenon, but Nixon has to compete with his wife’s three sisters. The yearly photograph becomes a testament not only to Nixon’s love for his wife, but also of the many ways in which families form and interact with each other.

[typologicalphotography-blog]

Hilla and Bernd Becher

The Becher’s typology is arguably one of the most important developments in the history of photography. The photograph was and is so often used to classify and record information. In medicine, criminology and astronomy, the photographic image is proof that something happened or it is used as a means of comparison. Their grain silos and exploration of the post-industrial revolution world created an entirely new conceptual framework for the fine-art photograph. No longer was is it about recording a moment of beauty, or a emotional human experience, but to document a world, where the cold, ugly and mammoth blight of human technology had taken over the landscape. The typology form became an almost ubiquitous conceptual tool. Certainly the artists of Dusseldorf school have led the way in co-opting, transforming and re-imagining the typology.