Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying 144384926X, 978-1443849265

Table of contents :
TABLE OF CONTENTS......Page 6
ACKNOWLEDGMENTSI......Page 8
LIST OF IMAGES......Page 9
INTRODUCTION......Page 12
PART I......Page 20
CHAPTER ONE......Page 21
CHAPTER TWO......Page 37
CHAPTER THREE......Page 61
CHAPTER FOUR......Page 78
PART II......Page 94
CHAPTER FIVE......Page 95
CHAPTER SIX......Page 114
CHAPTER SEVEN......Page 131
CHAPTER EIGHT......Page 151
PART III......Page 168
CHAPTER NINE......Page 169
CHAPTER TEN......Page 185
CHAPTER ELEVEN......Page 201
CHAPTER TWELVE......Page 216
CHAPTER THIRTEEN......Page 235
CONTRIBUTORS......Page 254

Citation preview

Envisaging Death

Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying

Edited by

Michele Aaron

Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying, Edited by Michele Aaron This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Michele Aaron and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4926-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4926-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii List of Images ........................................................................................... viii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Michele Aaron Part One: Memorial and Material Culture Chapter One ............................................................................................... 10 The Disappearing Gravestone: Changes in the Modern German Sepulchral Landscape Felix Robin Schulz Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 26 Maintaining the Dead in the Lives of the Living: Material Culture and Photography in the Cemeteries of Mexico City Marcel Reyes-Cortez Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 50 Wearing your Meat on your Sleeve: Mortality and Deathliness in Pinar Yolaçan’s Perishables Rosemary Deller Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 67 Gazing at AIDS Monica B. Pearl Part Two: Mortality and Media Event Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 84 Nowhere Man: John Lennon and Spectral Liminality Cath Davies

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Table of Contents

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 103 ‘Studied in his Death’: Representations of the Assassination of Malcolm X Graeme Abernethy Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 120 Visualisation of Death in Japan: The Case of the Flight JL123 Crash Christopher P. Hood Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 140 Shooting the Dead: Images of Death, Inclusion and Exclusion in the Israeli Press Tal Morse Part Three: Mediating Life and Death: Theory and Practice Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 158 Photography: Intimating Mortality, a Heideggerian Account of Photographic Authenticity Katrin Joost Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 174 Photo-graphing the Subject: Death, Cinema and the Gaze Paul Fung Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 190 Rosetta Life: Using Film to Create “Bearable Fictions” of People’s Experiences of Life-Limiting Illness Naomi Richards Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 205 Life, Death and Beauty: Art as a Way of Accessing Grief Tracey Mackenna Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 224 Unsettling Structures of Otherness: Visualising the Dying Individual and End of Life Care Reform John Horne Contributors ............................................................................................. 243

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Pauline Smith, then End of Life Care Lead for the then Strategic Health Authority of the NHS West Midlands, for inviting me to consult on her community initiative and exhibition “Saying the Unsayable: Opening a Dialogue about Living, Dying and Death” in 2009, and for funding the conference from which this collection of essays grew.

LIST OF IMAGES

2-1. Family mausoleum of Maria Navarro Magallon. 2-2. Panteón San Rafael, Álvaro Obregón. 2-3. Panteón San Rafael, Álvaro Obregón. 2-4. Francisco R Fernandez visits his wife Matilde R. Carrillo Silva. Family mausoleum, Panteón Rafael. 2-5. Gravedigger Isabel Ramo Mora exhuming a family grave in Panteón San Rafael. 2-6. Family altar for the Day of the Dead, Mexico City. 2-7. Jesús Rodríguez Petlacalco’s erects an altar at home dedicated to his grandmother Alberta Petlacalco Herrera (Mina), Mexico City. 2-8. Photographs used in a family wall niche in Panteón San Rafael. 2-9. Manuel’s grandmother with her grandson’s images and ashes. 2-10. Members of the Cruz family visiting their grandmother Felix Perez in Panteón San Rafael. 2-11. Altar dedicated to the late cemetery manager of Panteón San Rafael, José Yañez V., Panteón San Rafael. 2-12. Altar dedicated to the Mexican Revolution. Pancho Villa (José Doroteo Arango Arámbula) a Mexican revolutionary general at rest with his female and male soldiers. Panteón San Rafael. 2-13. Altar dedicated to the ‘Cry of Independence’ in Panteón San Rafael. 2-14. Altar dedicated to the ‘Cry of Independence’ in Panteón San Rafael. 2-15. Altar dedicated to the ‘Cry of Independence’ in Panteón San Rafael. 2-16. Altar erected at the entrance of the national palace. The Zocalo, Mexico City. 2-17. “I decorate my mother’s and grandmother’s grave every month.” Panteón San Rafael. 2-18. “I decorate my mother’s and grandmother’s grave every month.” Panteón San Rafael. 2-19. Various generations depicted through their portraits. Family mausoleum, Panteón San Rafael. 3-1. Pinar Yolaçan. Untitled from Perishables series. 3-2. Pinar Yolaçan. Untitled from Perishables series. 6-1. Malcolm X on Stretcher After Shooting. 6-2. Sue Coe, The Assassins. 7-1. Map of Japan showing Route of JL123.

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7-2. A Survivor Being Taken from the Wreckage. 7-3. An SDF Soldier Recovers One of the Victims. 7-4. The Wreckage of JL123. 7-5. The Ace of Spades – “The Death Card.” 8-1. “In daddy’s hands for the last time.” 8-2. The unpublished, unattributed, photograph of Shalhevet Pass from the morgue. 8-3. “Urgent warnings for revenge terror attacks.” 9-1. Elsa and Lotti, 1938. 9-2. Elsa and Lotti, 1992. 10-1. Hans Holbein the Younger, “The Ambassadors.”

INTRODUCTION MICHELE AARON

Reverence or repulsion but always taboo shroud death in modern times. Where once our neighbours and our loved ones died amongst us, the “triumphs” of industry, urbanisation and, of course, medical science have carried them ever further from the home, the community and even from the regular workings of life itself. For Philippe Ariès, the principal historian of death and mourning practices in Western Europe, death was “tamed” by these advances: “so omnipresent in the past…[it has instead] become shameful and forbidden.”1 It has also, therefore, become increasingly invisible or distorted in its visibility. This book attempts to return some shape and context to the treatment of death in contemporary visual culture. The dramatic historical and socio-cultural shifts characterising the practices and proximity of death and dying in the late nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century are readily illustrated (not least via the burgeoning academic interest in them since the 1990s.)2 For the Victorians, for example, the private rituals surrounding death were often enacted in heavily stylised ways that rendered it romanticised. Funeral and mourning practices reflected this with the fashion for black mourning attire and the “weeping veil”—both made popular by Queen Victoria herself—and for increasingly grand funerals and graves…for those who could afford them.3 Suburban or garden cemeteries built in the mid to late 1800s in Britain, when city churchyards could take no more, provided a new stage for these heightened expressions of grief—and wealth—and one that moved death even further away from the centres of public life. However, the sheer 1

Ariès, Western, 85. In 1993, Goodwin and Bronfen declared that “interest in death has mushroomed in virtually all academic disciplines during the past two or three decades” (Death, 5.) An even greater and wider growth has happened since then, with an explosion of interest in the twenty-first century. As Bradbury put it “[d]eath hidden and denied has become death discussed and analysed” (Representations, 1.) For a list of works from this period, see my bibliography in Aaron, Moving. 3 See Stamper and Condra, Clothing, 306, and for a discussion of ostentatious funeral practices, and their reform, see Jalland, Victorian Family, 194-202. 2

2

Introduction

scale, indeed the incommensurability, of loss in the First World War and of atrocity in the Second, would put the lid on such accessorised performances of mourning. In their place, came sombre if not dumbfounded mass sentiment. These horrors made death somehow “unspeakable,” according to certain philosophers at least: it was not just hard to talk about, or to give words to, to comprehend and articulate but potentially “barbaric” to do so through art.4 Death or atrocity as a topic of representation and debate was mired in difficulty. At the same time, death as an event was once more relocated elsewhere. In the second half of the last century, and since then, breakthroughs in the treatment of illness along with the increasing medicalisation of dying meant that the majority of deaths took place not at home or in some distant battlefield but in hospital. Dying, in the Global North at least, came to be thought of as something treatable and deferrable and perhaps even survivable: the domain of doctors or “service providers” rather than intimates.5 Professionalised and, in various ways, sanitised, death had retreated not only from conversation, or public discourse, but increasingly from “nature,” from the very mud of everyday life. Though this “progressive spatial and cultural marginalisation of death” is readily illustrated, there are by now familiar grooves to this illustration with social, economic, national and even geo-political aspects being the lesser noted.6 Broad strokes paint the prevailing picture of death as Western experience framed by its denial on one side and its sensationalism or “pornography” on the other, or by what John Tercier has called a “paucity of experience but surplus of representation.”7 But what of the specifics of death’s marginalisation; what of its experience as local rather than 4

Lang, Holocaust, 16; Adorno, Prisms, 34. For the various debates about Adorno’s so-called “dictum” against art in his own work and in Holocaust Studies and western philosophy, see, for example Adorno, Can One and Foster, Abstraction. 5 Football player Fabrice Muamba was dead for 78 minutes following a cardiac arrest on the pitch in 2012, but through the intervention of a consultant cardiologist in the crowd, and specialist equipment at the London Chest hospital where he redirected the ambulance, Muamba made a full recovery. See, for example, Mark Ogden, “Bolton Wanderers to offer Fabrice Muamba chance to work at the club folllowing retirement announcement,” The Telegraph, 15 August 2012: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/boltonwanderers/9477161/Bolton-Wanderers-to-offer-Fabrice-Muamba-chance-to-workat-the-club-folllowing-retirement-announcement.html. Accessed online: 20 January 2013. 6 Townsend, Art, 8. 7 See Becker, Denial, Gorer, “Pornography” and Tercier, Contemporary, 22.

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universal; what of the precise relationship between the context and the cultural mediation of death? For many in the world, of course, death is rife within the everyday rather than removed from it: death’s taboo status is relative in other words, and its denial is revealed as a luxury, one of many similar symptoms of both late-capitalism and global disparity. Though this book does not address such inequities directly, the political and transcultural dimensions to the literal and figurative marginalisation of death are paramount nevertheless. In 1997, David Field, Jenny Hockey and Neil Small emphasised how “[w]orldly inequalities are in no way levelled at the time of death but persist, permeating every aspect of death and dying.”8 In other words, who and where you are has a great deal of influence on how and where you die and are mourned or remembered. What is more, and what is key to this collection of essays, who and where you are has a great deal of influence on how your death is marked, imaged and imagined, within contemporary culture. The media or mediation of death and dying is, thus, socio-culturally and geo-politically wrought as well. This book, then, addresses the “worldly” factors permeating and styling the visual and inevitably material treatment of death and dying. Visual culture has provided an ever more dominating forum for society’s depiction of and dealings with death but its various takes on mortality or memory or loss offer little stable meaning for “death,” even as they confirm its enduring socio-political, aesthetic and philosophical resonance. “Visual culture” is rendered similarly unfixed here. As the essays that follow will attest, it refers to a vast swathe of texts, to those that “are” images—like photographs and paintings and film—and to those that incorporate them or other types of visual symbolism—like art practices and advertising and memorials—and to those that confound or expand the meaning of “visual culture” not least through the interaction of the two terms comprising it. Film is image, sound and temporality; art is made but also experienced; screen media sculpt the urban landscape and script our days, cemeteries convene both memories and sociality; still or moving images can be considered haptic, and fiction bound to the gaze. Envisaging Death enters the broadening field of Death Studies and connects some of its key interpretive frameworks—such as issues of funerary or internment practice, personal or national trauma, and palliative care—to visual culture, and more than that to visual culture’s sociopolitical, geographic and aesthetic specificities. Charting important new interdisciplinary terrain, scholars and practitioners from a range of fields 8

Field et al. Gender and Ethnicity, 1.

4

Introduction

address an array of cultural mediations of real, fictional or fictionalised death. Divided into three sections essays have been grouped according to theme rather than approach: historians brush shoulders with queer theorists, media criticism with area studies, and philosophy with art. What is being prioritised here is the productivity of cross-disciplinary exchange amidst an urgent need to rethink the dynamic between Western understandings of death and dying—be they socio-cultural, therapeutic or governmental—and various crises of current times connected to them. These crises are economic and logistical: associated with aging populations and the increase in dementia, and Health or End of Life Care reforms. They are political and ethical: from the controversies surrounding gene therapy or pensions or war or even the hyper-mediation of suffering as entertainment. And they are social, even psychosocial: they foment in the silence, be it from awe or shame, trauma or distaste, which surrounds the taboo of death. Such crises provide the backdrop to this book and its emerging picture of the socio-political, national and creative coordinates of the visual treatment of death and dying. Part I, “Memorial and Material Culture,” addresses the processing of death and dying in a range of contexts to scrutinise the relationship between “art” form, “political” context and remembrance. These terms have an assortment of implications here, as they will in later chapters. Felix Schulz examines the visual culture of death in East Germany after 1945. Tracing historical transformations in the cemetery landscape, he comes to focus on the quintessential socialist element of sepulchral culture, the Urnengemeinschaftsanlage: the anonymous communal area for the internment of urns. Physically apart from the traditional family and individual grave plots, and characterised by its own culture of visualising death and commemoration, these areas represent the strong currents of secularisation and modernisation, and a clear ideological thanatology. Marcel Reyes-Cortez also explores the cultural specifics of the cemetery landscape, but this time in Mexico City. Focusing on the complex levels of sociability found there, he argues that the embrace of material objects and especially of the photograph within the cemetery extends individuals’ relationships and communication with ancestors, whilst at the same time cemetery officials and workers have used the dead to extend and expand political boundaries. Where the first two chapters of Part I bring questions of socio-politics and iconography to cemeteries’ representations of the dead, the second two bring questions of mortality and memorialisation to the politically loaded creative treatment of dying. The photographic series, Perishables (2002-2004), by Turkish-born artist Pinar Yolaçan provides the subject of

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Rosemary Deller’s chapter. Yolaçan’s images, which present older white women clad in Victorian-esque dresses of offal, are provocative comments on mortality and fleshly decay. At the same time they invoke enduring taboos surrounding ageing femininity and the abject, intertwined with questions of colonial history and our relationship to animals. In chapter four, Monica Pearl emphasises how AIDS, from its inception as a health crisis, has been caught up in the demands, and politics, of representation and especially in the dynamics of looking at dying. Interrogating these dynamics within art’s but also fiction’s constructions of bodily decline, she argues that these AIDS texts’ visual economies afford a profound negotiation of both distance and intimacy with the dying other. In Part II, “Mortality and Media Event,” the life and death of the individual takes on sensational proportions as mass and popular culture come under scrutiny. Exploring recent history’s public deaths—media representations of assassination or national disaster—the cultural, and entertainment, value of killings are framed by the individual’s social, national and racialised worth. In chapter five, Cath Davies examines the posthumous representation of John Lennon. Where the majority of deceased celebrities are embalmed within comforting discourses that sustain their alive-ness, Lennon, Davies suggests, is different. Analysing the recurring motifs of fragmented identity, disembodiment and liminal spaces in images of Lennon, especially posthumously, Davies argues that there is an ongoing aesthetic confrontation with Lennon’s dead body. For Graeme Abernethy, Malcolm X is another famous person for whom we are exposed to an ongoing confrontation with, rather than displacement of, his dead body. This, however, is not the product of the exceptional status of the celebrity but speaks instead to the unexceptional history of racial violence in the U.S. Where the visual treatment of Lennon could evade visual convention, Malcolm X’s could only reinforce it. As Abernethy argues in chapter six, the fate of Malcolm X, like that of Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers and others, is inseparable from North American racial politics. In the final two chapters of this section, the conventions of the photographs under discussion, and of the more “random” deaths they represent, are absolutely culturally specific. Christopher Hood looks at the visual treatment of the crash of Japan Airlines flight JL123 on 12th August 1985. Through images published at the time, and documentaries, books and films from subsequent years, he explores their resonance for understandings of Japanese society and its religious practices. Where Hood builds a picture of a specifically Japanese relationship to grief and death through the visualisation of the disaster, Tal Morse, in chapter eight,

Introduction

6

reveals the national, religious and racial politics behind the images of the dead in Israeli Media. Analysing Israeli newspapers’ reporting of death events, Morse finds that the visual representation of the deaths of nonIsraelis is significantly different from the coverage of Israelis’ deaths. The former are more explicit, the latter mostly restrained and respectful and sometimes even aestheticised. The cultural and visual conventions governing the representation of dead bodies serve as a means of defining and confirming the boundaries of Israeli society. In Part III, “Mediating Life and Death: Theory and Practice,” we move beyond questions of representation or identity geo-politics. The foregrounding of context relaxes and attention turns instead to the encounter with dying through art or visual culture, and its philosophical, therapeutic or even ethico-political significance. For Katrin Joost photography intimates our experience of the world beyond the visible. Not only can it represent dead objects but also it disrupts the temporal structure of perceptual experience and therefore brings into consciousness the finality of being. Photography can express the belonging of death to life and show that living being is, with Heidegger, “being towards death.”9 Film rather than photography is centralised within Paul Fung’s similar interest in death as always already haunting the field of vision. For Fung, and via a Lacanian reading of visuality, death tames cinematic vision and constructs subjectivity. The systematic exclusion of the dead body detraumatises, and ensures the stability of, the seeing subject. Where Joost and Fung explore the psychic promises of mortality in the still and moving image, Naomi Richards and Tracy Mackenna take art’s rupture of the logic of death as a potential source of therapy. Rosetta Life, a charity that supports individual artists to run creative projects in hospices around the U.K., is the subject of chapter eleven. Focusing on one filmmaker’s attempts to represent people’s “biographies-in-illness,” Richards asks what difference it makes, and personal or socio-political purpose it serves, to record or witness dying in this way. Mackenna’s chapter also explores the relationship between art practice or medium and questions of life and death. Here, however, it is the author’s, and her partner’s, own art practice and its interaction with their personal experience of assisted suicide that come under scrutiny. Their 2009 exhibition project, “Life is Over! if you want it,” focussed on how artists have interpreted death throughout history, how objects and images impact on people’s ideas around death and the role that art can play in mediating

9

Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 235.

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issues of morality. Mackenna recreates and critically responds to the exhibition. In the final chapter of the book, John Horne critically analyses an art exhibition as well, and the community initiative, run by NHS West Midlands, that gave rise to it. At the same time, he re-complicates the “stability” offered by the absence of the dead or dying body from the visual field that Fung noted: the silence and distance surrounding death are imbued here with ethical and even governmental import. The community initiative, “Saying the unsayable: opening a dialogue about living, dying and death,” responded to Health Service strategy, which sought to deinstitutionalise death, and end of life care reforms, which aimed to counter taboos surrounding it. Exploring both the intent and the content of this initiative, and revealing the dying individual as the “structuring absence” of the exhibition, Horne considers the potential, and potential pitfalls, of employing visual material to produce attitudinal shifts. The three sections of Envisaging Death are not discrete, far from it, for various themes recur, in particular the relationship between art and death—or between artefacts and memory, or representation and politics— which threads through the entire book. This is not, however, a book about aesthetics or remembrance or responsibility. Rather, it is about how artefacts and images in their conjuring or recording of death reflect and determine contemporary attitudes towards it, and how context is compulsory for interpreting these attitudes. At the same time, this is also inevitably a book about extending our understandings of these attitudes and potentially shifting them. The need for such a shift arises in response to those largescale economic, ethico-political and (psycho)social crises surrounding death and dying, noted above. The need also arises to ease the personal and inter-personal, or human, cost of cordoning off death and dying from the mud of everyday life in order that “we” may live more fully and fairly. All the essays in this collection navigate in different ways the fraught, policed, and always relative, distance between the living and the dead. They all negotiate the structuring absence or necessary distortion of death in contemporary life, an absence or distortion (or marginalisation) that works to reassure and re-secure those supposedly untouched by death and dying and to bolster the socio- or geo-politics which affords them that position. Finally, while visual culture provides an ever more dominating arena to reinforce this state of affairs, countless examples of, and increasing possibilities for, its disruption instead are also to be found, as the essays in this collection will now make manifest.

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Introduction

Works Cited Aaron, M. Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Adorno, T. W. Prisms, translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber. London: Neville Spearman, 1967. —. Can One Live After Auschwitz: A Philosophical Reader, edited by R. Tiedemann. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Ariès, P. Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974. Becker, E. The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press, 1973. Bradbury, M. Representations of Death: A Social Psychological Perspective. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Bronfen, E., and S. Webster Goodwin, eds. Death and Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1993. Heidegger, M. Sein und Zeit. 17th unaltered edition. Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen, 1993. Field, D., J. Hockey and N. Small, eds. Death, Gender and Ethnicity. London: Routledge, 1997. Godfrey, M. Abstraction and the Holocaust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Gorer, G. “The Pornography of Death.” In Death: Current Perspectives, edited by J. B. Williamson and E. S. Shneidman, 71-76. London: Mayfield Publishing, [1955] 1995. Jalland, P. Death in the Victorian Family. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Lang, B. Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Ogden, M. “Bolton Wanderers to offer Fabrice Muamba chance to work at the club following retirement announcement.” The Telegraph, 15 August 2012: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/boltonwanderers/9477161/Bolton-Wanderers-to-offer-Fabrice-Muambachance-to-work-at-the-club-folllowing-retirement-announcement.html. Accessed online: 20th January 2103. Stamper, A. and J. Condra, Clothing Through American History: The Civil War Through the Gilded Age, 1861-1899. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2011. Tercier, J. A. The Contemporary Deathbed: The Ultimate Rush. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Townsend, C. Art and Death. London: IB Taurus, 2008.

PART I MEMORIAL AND MATERIAL CULTURE

CHAPTER ONE THE DISAPPEARING GRAVESTONE: CHANGES IN THE MODERN GERMAN SEPULCHRAL LANDSCAPE FELIX ROBIN SCHULZ

There is a revolution taking place in Germany’s cemeteries; fewer people are being buried in sites marked by gravestones. In some places, like the East, Protestant parts of the country and some urban areas, it is happening more swiftly, in others, like the South, Catholic regions and some rural areas, it is happening at a lesser pace. Nonetheless, one can speak of a very strong and sustained trend, namely that the traditional norm of the clearly delineated plot of land within the specific confines of a cemetery and rounded off by a marker remembering the identity of the buried is providing less appeal. This means that alternative forms of disposal and burial have gained in interest considerably since re-unification. Most of the initial impetus came from two geographical directions, the East and the North of Europe, where we find established cultures of communal burial.1 However, the trend is increasingly altering the fabric of the German cemetery and subsequently to some the anonymity of many communal burials is actually a spectre that is haunting them. In 2006, a poster campaign was started by the Verein zur Förderung der deutschen Friedhofskultur (Society for the Advancement of German Cemetery Culture)—an outfit largely representing the interest of those professionally tending graves—encapsulating the rather sceptical view.2 The first release of the poster uses the stark image of a man looking at an empty grassy area in a cemetery, holding limply a bunch of flowers under the headline of “Mother where are you?” and the statement: “Anonymous Burial is no solution: family members need a space for mourning.” The view expressed in these captions sees the lack of an explicit and personal spatial focus to 1 2

For some comparison, see Worpole, Landscapes and Yolan, Resting. All translations from the German are those of the author.

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commemorate the bereaved as an anathema. This campaign stressing the importance of the locality to remembrance and the importance of continuing the tradition of the gravestone as a maker of the sacred space was further underlined when the same wording was used in a second poster campaign. However, this time there were three different versions: one using flames to denote cremation, another depicting a patch of grass without a gravestone to represent anonymous burial, and the picture of the sea to allude to the burial at sea. In short, these posters provide telling comment on what some clearly consider disruptive challenges to the sepulchral status quo.3 This chapter explores the phenomenon of the disappearing gravestone in Germany and shows that it has its roots in three entangled historical developments: a) changing attitudes to death, dying and disposal; b) the changing role of cemeteries and graves; c) the introduction and propagation of modern cremation. In the unified Germany, these ultimately combined to produce change that has accelerated over the last two decades resulting in something that indeed should be called revolutionary—a less regulated and pluralist sepulchral culture of Germany.4 Despite death being a societal constant, much of modern sepulchral culture was born when the city became the centre of economic growth and the motor of innovation. The expansion of the urban population and its density highlighted problems in sanitation and hygiene and led directly to a fundamental change in the sepulchral culture through regulation and the setting out of rules. The first step and basis for much of the coming changes in the burial culture in Germany can be seen from the middle of the sixteenth century when the traditional burial side of the churchyard declined in favour of the new cemeteries found outside the city wall: for instance, in Freiburg (1511); Nürnberg (1519); and Leipzig (1534).5 It was the city governments that continued to drive this process. The change of location away from the churches in the city centre as well as the urban wealth made new designs possible—leading to the development of the different aesthetics of cemeteries. The eighteenth century saw a further wave of moving cemeteries away from the living, ultimately moving them outside everyday life in the process that Andrea Gerhardt has called making cemeteries “ex-clusive places”—places that are removed from 3

A selection of the posters used for the campaign can be found at: http://www.vffk.de/aktuelles.html. 4 A current research project at Leipzig University is in the process of untangling the individual motivation for the trend towards the anonymous burial, see Sachmerda-Schulz, “Der Trend zur Grünen Wiese.” 5 Sörries, Ruhe sanft, 101-29.

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Chapter One

everyday life and represent their own world apart.6 Moreover, not only did this further the remoteness of the burial ground but it also meant that cemeteries swiftly became the realm of bureaucrats. In 1715, the Elector Joseph Clemens had ordered that burials should be moved out of the city of Bonn and a new cemetery should be built nearby. In Münster in Westphalia, there were similar plans in 1729, when the ruling Bishop Clemens Augustus of Bavaria complained that corpses were often buried less than a foot deep, which, he noted, caused a terrible smell and led to contagious diseases.7 This resulted in an order that bodies should be buried no less than six feet deep, and led to the planning of two new cemeteries outside the city walls. However, in both cases these plans were not realised because of heavy resistance from local citizens against the resting places being moved away from churches. But this kind of resistance only delayed regulation. Further impetus came from Joseph II of Austria’s partially successful burial reform in 1785, which tried to remove the control of the Catholic Church over secular matters. It prohibited internment in town centre cemeteries and tried to establish a civic authority to oversee cemeteries.8 The Austrian reforms were seen as the model of enlightened thought in regard to death and disposal and were adopted in many European countries. In Munich in 1789, they were successfully implemented because of prior consultations and agreeing compromises. The opening of the new central cemetery outside the city on 26 June 1789 had a marked effect on German sepulchral culture. The idea of a new central cemetery was made possible by the compromise which retained the old differences between the rich and the poor. The graves were classified with family crypts at the top of the hierarchy and simple holes in the ground marked with a wooden cross at the bottom. Prices were fixed accordingly, thereby retaining the hierarchy, exclusivity, and status with regard to each grave category and location.9 The door had been opened for the municipal government to increase legal and administrative control over burials. With the desire to improve public hygiene and levels of sanitation, the involvement of the government or state in the organisation of disposal grew. The 1789 edict stated three rules for any burial: a grave had to be 6 feet deep, a burial space could not be reused for at least 12 years, and the 6

Gerhardt, “Ex-klusive” Orte und normale Räume, 31-40. Dethlefs, Zur Geschichte, 45. 8 Boehlke, Wie die Alten, 232-33. 9 Mortuaries improved hygiene and were based upon increased scientific knowledge of disease. Laying-out at home had become a thing of the past and removal to the mortuary became compulsory in most cities. See, for example, Rädlinger, Der verwaltete Tod, 63-86. 7

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body should be dead for at least 36 hours, ideally 48 hours, before burial.10 The state took increasing responsibility for and control of appropriate forms of disposal, and this included the organisation of all its technical details by specialists. Munich was able to reconcile religion and modernisation once more, for it had also pioneered another development: the building of one of the first mortuaries in Germany.11 This meant that from the second half of the nineteenth century, death in urban areas became a professional domain increasingly removed from its association with the churches and religion. While most mortuaries had an annex for the celebration of burials, they were municipal buildings. This provided essentially non-denominational space for the removal of the body as well as a space for the funeral ceremonies in most urban areas. The growing concern for hygiene, the emphasis on public health and general tendencies of regulation, legislation and centralisation (at least in the urban environment) led to an overall sanitation of death as a social occurrence in the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century. A key component in this process was the emergence of professionals who dealt with the logistics of a death. Administrators were needed to oversee the system for the disposal of the dead for the local government; the local cemetery needed management as well as staff. In short, a whole ecosystem emerged. Chief amongst all of those concerned with the system of disposal were the modern funeral directors. As dispassionate professional organisers they began to provide a service. Practical neighbourly assistance, such as washing the corpse, became more rare through the incremental processes of professionalising death. Although professional undertakers at first complemented customary neighbourly assistance, in due course the help, expertise, services and products provided by professionals and a whole industry became the norm. Consequently, the practical aspects of dealing with the dead body were removed; they took place behind the closed doors or in the funeral parlour or the mortuary. If one adds to this the profound shift in the locality of death from the home to the hospital, the perception and reality of death became more remote.12 In turn, municipalities added to this by regulating to an ever-growing degree the professional funeral industry. For example, in the GDR it became the explicit rule that the last farewell to the deceased be conducted from behind a glass wall and not in person.13 The key effect of this development 10

Ibid., 69. Fischer, Wie wir unter die Erde kommen, 80-93. 12 Hänel, Bestatter im 20. Jahrhundert. 13 Institut für Kommunalwirtschaft, Katalog der Bestattungsdienstleistungen, 1314. 11

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is what Philippe Ariès described as the “forbidden death,” or what Tony Walter better described as the hiding of death.14 By the middle of the twentieth century death had become something that was increasingly dealt with as an organisational, technical and administrative challenge. Moreover societal change, such as secularisation, meant that the individual had become increasingly alone in facing death or coping with loss and mourning, but well catered for in terms of a complex system of disposing of the dead.15 Death had become a peripheral phenomenon until this view was challenged initially by the post-material counterculture of the 1980s and then by the ending of the Cold War in the 1990s.16 Industrialisation and ever expanding cities in the nineteenth century necessitated further cemetery space, and what emerged was the cemetery landscape that we see today. Civic-minded local governments had established grand landscaped park cemeteries with even stricter regulations. These were built even further away from the city centre, on the city’s outskirts. To make the new cemeteries accessible to the public, tramlines were laid in such cities as Munich, Bielefeld, Leipzig and Magdeburg. Nevertheless, the new location meant that cemeteries assumed an altogether different and slightly unexpected role of being used and seen as recreational spaces, offering greenery and space to saunter. The park cemetery, characterised by broad, tree-lined, axial avenues, was born. The cemetery had become a domesticated cultural space (domestizierter Kulturraum). This meant that the construction of dedicated cemeteries has to be construed as a space displaying an ever-changing societal understanding of death.17 Central to this development in Germany were two cemeteries that would set the tone and become the models for large urban cemeteries in Germany and beyond.18 Wilhelm Cordes planned and supervised the construction of HamburgOhlsdorf between 1879-1914. Ohlsdorf is a vast park cemetery incorporating natural features such as hills as well as constructions such as artificial lakes. Cordes created an enthralling symbiosis of architecture, sculpture, and landscape design that also addressed a need for order—a term that would gain great significance.19 The idea was that the individual grave needed to be part of the overall appearance. This meant that the idea of combating the excesses of bourgeois expression within the space of 14

Ariès, Attitudes, 85-108; Walter, “Taboo,” 293-310. Elias, Civilizing, 229. 16 Inglehart, Revolution; Feldmann, Tod und Gesellschaft. 17 Francaviglia, “The cemetery,” 501-09; Koch, “Geschichte und Bedeutung,” 131. 18 See, for example, Felicori and Zanotti, Cemeteries of Europe. 19 Schoenfeld, Der Friedhof Ohlsdorf. 15

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cemeteries took root. The advocates of reform believed that many cemeteries suffered from either aesthetic eclecticism often in combination with an overabundance of kitsch, or the cold characterless efficiency in form of chessboard layouts and mass-produced cheap gravestones. Cordes was successful in outlawing both oversized marble sculptures of angels as well as mass-produced polished marble gravestones with gold leaf inscription. Ohlsdorf was important, but an even strong counter model became Hans Grässels’ Waldfriedhof (1905-07) in Munich, designed around the maxim: order is already beauty.20 In addition, Munich served as the basis for the Wilhelmine ideal of the “Waldfriedhof”—the woodland cemetery encompassed a semiotic order: German trees, German nature, Germanic traditions, and later the German oak became symbols of heroism in the World Wars.21 So the natural backdrop of woodland was combined with clear rules. The reform movement’s main aspiration was to achieve the idea of an aesthetic integrity achieved through order and homogeneity. The new regulations increased insistence on order, imposed manifold regulations and introduced processes of supervision and prior approval of the design of any grave plot. Most of Grässels’ rules formed the very basis of what the central organisations of cemetery directors (founded in 1921) advocated and in turn these ideas became formally codified in 1944. This strong normative force was further aided by the fact that most German cities to the present day operate the cemeteries that were built and opened between 1870 and 1930.22 After 1945 and due to the damage sustained in the war, the first challenge was to return the burial services and the cemeteries to normality. However, swiftly after this was achieved the new organisations set up in East and West to coordinate matters in regard to the burial services returned to the promotion of the reformist ideas set in law in 1944. Therefore, we saw in both German states the continued propagation of homogeneity and uniformity until the 1960s, if not the 1980s.23 The prominence and persistence of the cemetery reform deals meant that disposing and burying the dead in Germany became an ever more complicated matter. To this day, most aspects of the modern German sepulchral culture are highly regulated and regimented. This is especially true when comparing them with the more liberal practices in the United Kingdom or the United States. The legal frameworks that the states, the local councils, the owners of the cemeteries, that is, the municipalities and 20

See Krieg, “Schon Ordnung ist Schönheit.” Lehmann, Von Menschen und Bäumen. 22 Sörries, Ruhe sanft, 184. 23 Schulz, Death in East Germany. 21

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Chapter One

the churches, have drawn up are very complicated. This means that for example six German states have laws explicitly prohibiting open caskets at the funeral ceremony; only one state allows for cemeteries to be owned by anybody except a municipality or a religious entity; three states allow the private ownership of woodland cemeteries and two states still outlaw its citizens to choose a burial at sea.24 Moreover, all states operate the legal requirement of the inhumation of the corpse or the cremains. In practical terms, this means it is illegal to keep an urn with the ashes on the mantelpiece. Everywhere, bar one specific plot of the central cemetery of the city of Rostock and in Berlin, it is legal to scatter the ashes. The remnants of German particularism and the decentralised nature of Germany are one explanation for the persistence of these inconsistent rules. The second explanation is that legislation got regularly added to but hardly ever reviewed, thus most cemeteries are simultaneously regulated under state, regional, ecclesiastical and local by-law. It took until the mid-1990s for this to be even publically discussed.25 However, these debates have regularly become caught up in party interests, in the views of the churches and the technocratic specialist that administer and regulate much of the burial system. The interests of those who administer the cemeteries have been the third reason for the state of cemetery regulation. In 1963, an East German handbook for the care of cemeteries made this clear by stressing that “[w]ell designed cemeteries and sections demonstrate clearly to everybody the right order of plants and gravestones.26 It has been the duty of those in charge to determine what is “right,” therefore, most cemeteries to this day require gravestones to follow specific requirements as to minimum and maximum dimensions as well as many very specific rules.27 The following is an example taken from the twenty pages that govern the cemetery of a small town in Thuringia:

Materials, Form and Workmanship 1. Grave markers are only allowed to be made from natural stone, wood, forged or cast metal [iron or bronze]. 2. The form of the grave marker must take into account the material, and it has to be simple and balanced. 3. Grave markers must be made as one object.

24

Deinert and Jegust, Todesfall- und Bestattungsrecht. For example, Adolph, “Gitarre aus Stein,” 179. 26 Institut für Kommunalwirtschaft , Gestaltung unserer Friedhöfe, 69. 27 Spranger, Die Beschränkungen des kommunalen Satzungsgebers. 25

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17

4. Grave markers must be finished to the same standard on all sides as well as necessitated by the material. 5. Polishing and a reflective finish is only allowable as a design feature for inscriptions, symbols and ornaments, and these are only allowed to make up an area that is appropriate in regard to the overall size of the grave marker. (…) 7. All materials, additions, designs, and methods not mentioned above are not allowed, but especially the use of concrete, glass, plastics, photography, engraving of images, plaster, porcelain, and aluminium, etc.28

The following paragraph covers the exact remits of the inscription, and the next section covers what is the allowable choice of design and selection of plants—explicitly outlawing gravel, plastic flowers, ornaments, or any plant over one and a half metres. Due to the persistence of the reformist agenda and a pronounced technocratic paternalism in regard to nearly all matters sepulchral, the modern German cemetery has become a highly regulated space. The resistance to change, even if it is only the change in the burial preferences of the population, as is the case with the spread of anonymous burials, is seen thus by some involved in the running of the burial system as disruptive.29 Yet, the German sepulchral culture is far from homogenous. Due to the multitude of regulation and the decentralised nature of government there was always space for plurality and, thus, change. Historically, the foremost reason for the pluralisation of German sepulchral culture lies in the introduction of modern cremation. Germany is the motherland of modern cremation; while the first crematorium in Europe was built in Milano, the first cremation of a body occurred in the new crematorium of Gotha in Thuringia on 10 December 1878. This historical event signalled the dawn of a new era and was entirely the result of the liberal and tolerant views held by the ruler of Saxony-CoburgGotha, one little state of the Thuringian Union. The Gotha crematorium, like others in the late nineteenth century, had been proposed by a private cremation society which advocated a far more pragmatic approach to the problem of disposal. This dynamic idea stemmed from an initially bourgeois, deeply secular and reformist agenda that based its reasoning on the principles of the Enlightenment and rationalism. The first German cremation societies were formed in the early 1870s in the predominately protestant cities of Gotha, Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt/Main. 28

Friedhofsordnung für den Friedhof der Ev.-Luth. Kirchgemeinde Falkenstein/ Vogtland, 1 July 1994. 29 For a discussion of the impact and the factors, see Happe, “Zwischen Anonymität,” 747-54; Sörries, Alternative Bestattungen.

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Chapter One

These societies used their influence and their publications to promote cremation. They had little initial success. The second crematorium was only built in Heidelberg in 1891, a further one in Hamburg in 1892. In reaction to the largely secular nature of the cremationist movement, the Catholic Church decided to ban cremation for Catholics in 1886 by the use of Canon Law.30 The Catholic Church argued that cremation as a practice was contrary to Christian funeral tradition. Priests were, therefore, not allowed to administer the last rites nor take part in the burial of the ashes. This ban was not lifted until 1963. The Protestant Churches took a more plural and more liberal view. The Protestant Church due to its decentralised organisation soon discarded an initial scepticism, this meant that well into the 1930s cremation was a viable alternative to traditional inhumation only in cities in predominately protestant regions.31 However, the success of cremation in Germany was due to the dual nature of the propagation of cremation. A second social class saw the systematic propagation of the idea of cremation—the working class. A number of labour leaders and the Social Democrats (SPD) supported the idea of cremation because it represented a new secular form of dealing with death. This political party emphasised the pragmatic rather than the dogmatic aspect of cremation. Despite being well structured, the SPD was initially slow to propagate the idea of cremation. In conjunction with the unions, the SPD and the Freethinkers (who promoted logical and secular thought), which all viewed cremation as atheistic and egalitarian, the VolksFeuerbestattungsverein von Groß-Berlin (People’s Cremation Society of Greater Berlin) was founded in 1913. When the party leader August Bebel died in August 1913, his body was cremated in Zürich. His precedent was to have strong reverberations for many decades to come. By the end of 1917 the Volks-Feuerbestattungsverein had 3,600 members, and by 1925 it had a staggering 600,000 members. The percentage of workers amongst the cremated rose from roughly 12.5 per cent in 1920 to 45 per cent in 1926.32 Burning the body opened new aesthetic avenues. Some cemeteries opened columbaria, more augmented the traditional burial plots by downsizing them, some explored new ideas such as overground urn cemeteries, but the real change came from the ability to bury many cremains in communal plots. In December 1925, the local chapter of the Freethinkers in the city of Magdeburg succeeded in convincing the local 30

Davies and Mates, Encyclopaedia, 107. Stadtarchiv Bielefeld, FW 152. 32 Fischer, Vom Gottesacker zum Krematorium, 116-7. 31

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cemetery to create the first mass urn burial site (Urnenhain) in Germany.33 This site comprises a central memorial encompassing a large grey stone torch, a bench made from red brick, but there are deliberately no markers where the individual urns are buried, nor are the names of the individuals recorded. How radical a step this was becomes clear when one sees the inscription on the central memorial. It boldly states “Neue Deutsche Bestattungsklasse” (New German burial class). This new form of burial challenged the conservative and conventional ideas so inherent in the timelimited lease of a normal burial plot. Thus, the anonymous burial, with its egalitarian and atheistic overtones, was created. In Magdeburg it proved so successful that the designated field did not last the intended thirteen years; the space was filled in less than five, and a second site was created. For the whole of Germany the idea needed the formation of the GDR, because it was there that the idea really took hold and saw widespread usage. While West Germany saw a moderate annual growth in the cremation rate, East Germany saw the active propagation of cremation. By the early 1970s cremation had become the predominant form of disposal and with it came the steady rise of the anonymous communal area for the internment of urns (Urnengemeinschaftsanlage or UGA). By 1985 around 140 UGAs had been opened in cemeteries throughout East Germany.34 Moreover, UGAs were established in urban cemeteries, and thus served large communities with cremation rates of well over 50% and thus the number of burials was considerable. For example, by 1989 around 40,000 urns had been buried in one of the largest UGAs on the Heidefriedhof in Dresden.35 Moreover, by 1993 the full capacity of 50,000 urns had been reached (despite the initial post-unification slump in the cremation rate). The site was closed and a new UGA opened. Dresden, in many ways, was an exception as not all UGAs were that large, but most sites were designed for more than 10,000 urns and for long periods over which burials could take place (generally more than twenty years).36 By the 1980s most experts considered the ideal but ultimately achievable figure to be for any UGA to absorb about 50% of all cremations (thus catering for about 30-35% of all deaths).37 In Plauen, for example, 71% of all burials took place in an UGA, 33

Krenzke, Magdeburger Friedhöfe, 101. Kramer, Planung, 7. 35 Happe, “Die sozialistische Reform,” 203. 36 The first large UGA in Leipzig had been planned for 20,000 urns. Stadtarchiv Dresden, Rep. 9.1.14, Nr. 825: Umgestaltung Städtischer Friedhöfe – Am Beispiel Leipzig, 50. 37 Stadtarchiv Dresden, Rep. 9.1.14, Nr. 137: Rednerweiterbildung, 1 November 1989. 34

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Chapter One

while it was 61% in Weida, and 55% in Erfurt and Altenburg but for the north of the GDR, rates did not exceed 30%.38 The UGAs’ main attraction to the state was that it was by far the cheapest option to dispose of the dead: between 16 to 25 urns could be buried per square metre of the burial area of an UGA with minimal costs. Moreover, the idea of a communal grave fitted the ideals of socialism. For East Germany the UGA was one part in the administrative revaluation of the role of the cemetery, a process that increasingly made cemeteries sites of collective commemoration as well as recreation.39 These two aims in themselves might sound contradictory, especially given that anonymity might amplify the remoteness of the modern cemetery. In a study of Denmark, however, Tim Flohr Sørensen combined the ideas of material culture (and the absence of the body) with an in-depth study of the changes in the rise of cremation and urn burials in Denmark (in many ways a comparable development to that in the GDR) and joined them to the theoretical framework of what Marc Augé has called “nonplaces”—the rise of places that are merely the location for transience, not having enough character to be a place outright.40 Sørensen’s argument is that the combination of cremation and the anonymous burials of urns and their spread beyond the urban have made it “possible for the relatives of the deceased to be spatially distanced from the grave yet still close to the loved one.”41 Augé’s idea of the non-place is inverted and ultimately it is the lack of a specific place that allows the bereaved to commemorate independently of a specific “sacrosanct” locality. With this argument Sørensen challenges the notion that the rise and spread of anonymous burial above all is a sign of disruptive individualism. Furthermore, this argument begins to explain why in the re-unified Germany the concept of communal burial has continued to be attractive not only in the East. Like cremation it has migrated westward. In 1999, the last reliable study financed by the confederation of German cities found that the cremation rate for the whole of the country was 40.3% (with the former East having risen to 75% and former West to 31.8%).42 Following this trend cremation is or soon will be the most popular form of disposal in Germany. Estimates for the popularity of anonymous burials for 2006/7 38 Barbara Happe does not offer any dates for these rates, but they must be around 1985, see Happe, “Die Nachkriegsentwicklung,” 223. 39 Bundesarchiv Berlin, DO 1 34.0, Nr. 48678: Analyse des Friedhofs- und Bestattungswesens der DDR (1975), 3. 40 Augé, Non-Places. 41 Sørensen, “The presence,” 110–135. 42 Deutsche Städtetag, Presseinformation, 17 May 2001.

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stood at around 15% and those for burials at sea at around 2.5%.43 The most precise figures for 2009/10 show a further growth as well as a clear split between the West with 17.2% and the East with 46.3% of deaths leading to burial in an anonymous grave.44 The published figures for two of the largest cities tell an even more interesting story. In 2003, Berlin saw 13,434 anonymous burials of urns, 40.8% of all burials, compared with 7,973 inhumation, meaning not only a dominance of cremation but that anonymous burials had become the single most popular choice of burial. In Hamburg in 2004, however 4,729 internments in UGAs were carried out (26.8%) compared to 5,709 inhumations (32.4%)—indicating that the urban West is catching up swiftly.45 Moreover, as in Denmark, UGAs are now spreading beyond the city, meaning that new forms of burial are appearing also in the cemeteries of smaller communities.46 In the two decades after the re-unification a wider revaluation of death, dying, and disposal has taken place.47 On one hand, the hidden death became more debated and public, especially in the media.48 On the other, there has been manifold resistance to the status quo and the regulatory landscape. There was, for example, little accounting for the sepulchral requirements of Muslims and other minorities, such as speedy burials without the legal requirement of a coffin.49 Other groups also pressed for change, the desire to adopt the idea of woodland burials in Germany resonated with specific sections of German society but it necessitated legal rules for burials. The first state to enact these was Hesse in 2001—over the next ten years all states bar Thuringia legalised this form of burial and today more than two dozen sites exist. The option of the cremains to be buried at the foot of a tree has added to the variety of choice on offer. This has had a visible impact on the average and especially on the large cemeteries: there is more diversity. The most visible aspect of this is the spread of the UGAs. The average large cemetery has seen some change then: some have continued the tradition of anonymous urn burials, but others have rejected some elements of anonymity, such as allowing relatives to see the location of the burial. Others inscribe the names of all those buried on the site on the central memorial. Sepulchral culture is 43

Ritzer, “Der namenlose Tod,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 30 October 2007. Sachmerda-Schulz, “Der Trend zur Grünen Wiese,” 54. 45 Data from Statistisches Landesamt Berlin and Mitteilung der Hamburger Friedhöfe. 46 Krebs, “Shrinking,” 44-50. 47 Fischer, Inszenierte Gedächnislandschaften. 48 Fichtner, “Das Friedhofssterben,” Der Spiegel, 2009 , No. 53, 50-56. 49 Höpp & Jonker, In fremder Erde. 44

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always changing, for cultural, economic, and even simple demographic reasons, but too often there has been an alarmist response, as exemplified by the poster campaign of the interest group of those employed by the cemetery sector. A more measured assessment could be found in an insightful position paper released by the central body of the protestant Churches of Germany in 2004, which, while noting the tectonic shift in the sepulchral culture of Germany, also stressed that: The liberalization of burial culture has led to considerable change, even to offer of completely new forms, such as woodland cemeteries. The expectations in regard to a funeral and to the liturgical form this can take are changing; they are to become more individualistic, more personal, and more freely determined. […] For the Church the individualization of the culture of bereavement, and related to it, the pluralization of sepulchral culture are not purely negative developments, but enormous challenges that indicated the longing for personal forms of bidding the last farewell. The wish to be involved in the process, framework and determination of the funeral is not only the expression of hyper-individualization or of egocentricity, but the expression of a resistance against the anonymization of dying and burial.50

Plurality in choice and in the design of the modern German cemetery should not be seen as a negative and threatening development. It, as much as the disappearing of gravestones in German cemeteries, is merely one element of change over time. One reason might be that when compared to the UK the German regulatory landscape looks overbearing. The real importance is, however, that we make the clear distinction between the anonymity of dying and the anonymity of the burial. This seems lost in some of the debate. Death, dying and disposal is no longer hidden, there is considerable public discourse on the matter, thus the choice to be buried anonymously does not reflect the loneliness of the dying, but a deliberate choice.

50 Evangelische Kirche in Deutschlands, Herausforderungen evangelischer Bestattungskultur, 2-3.

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Works Cited Adolph, N. “Gitarre aus Stein.” Der Spiegel 40 (1999): 179. Ariès, P. Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974. Augé, M. Non-Places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso, 1995. Boehlke, H., ed. Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet – Wandlungen der Sepulkralkultur 1750 – 1850, Kasseler Studien zur Sepulkralkultur Vol. 1. Mainz: Böhlau, 1979. Bundesarchiv Berlin, DO 1 34.0, Nr. 48678: Analyse des Friedhofs- und Bestattungswesens der DDR (1975). Davies, D. and L. Mates, eds. Encyclopaedia of Cremation. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Deinert, H. and W. Jegust, Todesfall- und Bestattungsrecht – Sammlung bundes- und landesrechtlicher Bestimmungen, 3rd Edition. Düsseldorf: Fachverlag des Bestattungsgewerbes, 2008. Dethlefs, S. Zur Geschichte der Friedhöfe und des Bestattungswesens in Münster. Münster: Regensberg, 1991. Deutsche Städtetag. Presseinformation, 17 May 2001. Elias, N. The Civilizing Process Vol. 2. Oxford: University Press, 1982. Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland. Herausforderungen evangelischer Bestattungskultur: Ein Diskussionspapier. 2004. Feldmann, K. Tod und Gesellschaft - Sozialwissenschaftliche Thanatologie im Überblick. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2004. Felicori, M. and A. Zanotti, Cemeteries of Europe – A Historical Heritage to Appreciate and Restore. Bologna: Commune di Bologna, 2004. Fichtner, U. “Das Friedhofssterben.” Der Spiegel 53 (2009): 50-56. Fischer, N. Inszenierte Gedächnislandschaften: Perspektiven neuer Bestattungs- und Erinnerungskultur im 21. Jahrhundert. Königsborn: Aertnitas e.V., 2011. —. Vom Gottesacker zum Krematorium: Eine Sozialgeschichte der Friedhöfe in Deutschland. Mainz: Böhlau, 1996. —. Wie wir unter die Erde kommen – Sterben und Tod zwischen Trauer und Technik. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1997. Francaviglia, R. “The cemetery as an Evolving Cultural Landscape.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 61, no. 3 (1979): 501-509. Friedhofsordnung für den Friedhof der Ev.-Luth. Kirchgemeinde Falkenstein/Vogtland, 1 July 1994.

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Gerhardt, A. “Ex-klusive” Orte und normale Räume – Versuch einer soziotopologischen Studie am Beispiel des öffentlichen Friedhofs. Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2007. Hänel, D. Bestatter im 20. Jahrhundert: Zur kulturellen Bedeutung eines tabuisierten Berufs. Münster: Waxmann, 2003. Happe, B. “Die Nachkriegsentwicklung der Friedhöfe in beiden deutschen Staaten.” In Raum für Tode – Die Geschichte der Friedhöfe von den Gräberstraßen der Römerzeit bis zur anonymen Bestattung, edited by AFD, 195-224. Braunschweig: Thalacker, 2003. —. “Die sozialistische Reform der Friedhofs- und Bestattungskultur in der DDR.” In Vom Reichsausschuss zur Arbeitsgemeinschaft Friedhof und Denkmal, edited by R. Sörries, 185-212. Kassel: AFD, 2002. —. “Zwischen Anonymität und Individualismus.” Stadt und Grün 11 (2000): 747-54. Höpp, G. and G. Jonker, eds. In fremder Erde. Zur Geschichte und Gegenwart der islamischen Bestattung in Deutschland. Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1996. Inglehart, R. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Institut für Kommunalwirtschaft, Gestaltung unserer Friedhöfe. Berlin: Staatsverlag der DDR, 1963. —. Katalog der Bestattungsdienstleistungen. Dresden: IfK, 1975. Koch, S. “Geschichte und Bedeutung des Friedhofes im Abendland.” Zeitschrift für Semiotik 11, nos. 2-3 (1989): 125-33. Kramer, M., ed. Planung, Gestaltung und Pflege von Urnengemeinschaftsanlagen. Dresden: IfK, 1985. Krebs, S. “Shrinking Cemeteries: Neue Strategien der Friedhofsentwicklung.” Stadt und Grün 11 (2003): 44-50. Krenzke, H.-J. Magdeburger Friedhöfe und Begräbnisstätten. Stadtplanungsamt: Magdeburg, 1998. Krieg, N. “Schon Ordnung ist Schönheit:” Hans Grässels Münchner Friedhofsarchitektur (1894-1929), ein deutsches Modell? München: Herbert Utz, 1990. Lehmann, A. Von Menschen und Bäumen: die Deutschen und ihr Wald. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1999. Rädlinger, C. Der verwaltete Tod – Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte des Münchner Bestattungswesen. München: Buchendorfer, 1996. Ritzer, U. “Der namenlose Tod.” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 30 October 2007. Sachmerda-Schulz, N. “Der Trend zur Grünen Wiese: Zur Entwicklung der anonymen Bestattung in Deutschland aus religionssoziologischer Sicht.” Religion-Staat-Gesellschaft 11, no. 1 (2010): 53-70.

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Schoenfeld, H. Der Friedhof Ohlsdorf: Gräber – Geschichte – Gedenkstätten. Hamburg: Christians, 2000. Schulz, F. Death in East Germany, 1945-90. Oxford: Berghahn, 2013. Sørensen, T. “The presence of the dead: Cemeteries, cremation and the staging of non-place.” Journal of Social Archaeology 9, no. 1 (2009): 110–35. Sörries, R. Alternative Bestattungen: Formen und Folgen - Ein Wegweiser. Frankfurt a.M: Fachhochschulverlag, 2008. —. Ruhe sanft – Kulturgeschichte des Friedhofs. Kevaeler: Butzon & Bercker, 2009. Spranger, T. Die Beschränkungen des kommunalen Satzungsgebers beim Erlaß von Vorschriften zur Grabgestaltung. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999. Stadtarchiv Bielefeld, FW 152: Sennefriedhof. Stadtarchiv Dresden, Rep. 9.1.14, Nr. 137: Rednerweiterbildung, 1 November 1989. —. Rep. 9.1.14, Nr. 825: Umgestaltung Städtischer Friedhöfe – Am Beispiel Leipzig, 50. Walter, T. “Death: Taboo or Not Taboo.” Sociology 25, no. 2 (1991): 293310. Worpole, K. Last Landscapes. London: Reaktion, 2003. Yolan, M. The American Resting Place: 400 Years of History Through Our Cemeteries And Burial Grounds. New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 2008.

CHAPTER TWO MAINTAINING THE DEAD IN THE LIVES OF THE LIVING: MATERIAL CULTURE AND PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE CEMETERIES OF MEXICO CITY MARCEL REYES-CORTEZ

In this chapter I consider how material objects such as photographs assist mourners in Mexico City to maintain the dead as active participants in the lives of the living. The chapter discusses how current funerary practices extend the agency of the dead person to the body of objects and particularly to the portraits of people found in cemeteries and on public and domestic altars. In the cemeteries of Mexico City, material objects are valuable conduits and tools that mourners use dynamically in order to create channels to express relationships with the dead, while also speaking to and expressing the particular characteristics of a person: the self. Material culture dedicated to the dead sustains the sociability and connectivity that Seale and Hockey suggest assist in symbolically maintaining the dead as social participants in the lives of the living (fig. 2.1).1 Fieldwork and research carried out in the cemeteries of Mexico City between 2002 and 2007 revealed how material culture supports continuity between the living and the dead in a variety of ways such as through sustaining a physical presence of those buried. The assemblages of objects dedicated to the dead create the conditions for new experiences that are inevitably linked to the process of remembering the dead but also to maintaining them as active participants in the world of the living, enabling mourners to export the dead from the privacy of the domestic to a public and visual expression of their grief and love for their dead.2 This chapter will also explore the sustained efforts and the activities made by mourners, 1 2

Seale, Constructing and Hockey, Memory. See Reyes-Cortez, “Communicating.”

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visitors and cemetery workers to maintain the cemetery as a living space and place of memory.3 Gravediggers, for example, have been found to use the dead as channels for expressing their social and political convictions and beliefs.4 In what follows I expand on the above findings to show how material culture plays a crucial role in current Mexican funerary practices and mourners’ daily activities, but also how important cemeteries and material culture can be in keeping the dead active in the social, cultural and political lives of the living.

Fig. 2-1. “Every month I come to talk to my mother, she awaits my visits. . .she is happy when I bring her flowers.” Family mausoleum of Maria Navarro Magallon. Panteón San Rafael, Álvaro Obregón, October 2007.

The Cemetery as a Space of Living Memory In the cemetery of Panteón San Rafael located in the borough of Álvaro Obregón, we find a combination of religious, secular and visually eclectic use of material culture.5 A diverse variety of manufactured, manmade and organic objects, in diverse sizes and shapes, accompany the dead on graves, mausoleums and wall niches. Material objects have become fixed onto the landscape of the cemetery as much as memory has been transferred onto them as well as onto the activities, the daily practices, experiences and sentiments, of the people who visit and work in 3

See Bell, Ghost. See Verdery, Political. 5 The use of material objects was found in the majority of cemeteries of Mexico City. 4

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the cemetery.6 In many instances Christian religious artefacts such as angels, saints and crosses have been overwhelmed, covered and replaced by secular objects such as the head of a fibreglass horse placed over the cross above a family grave (fig. 2-3). In most cases such objects had not been designed, manufactured or intended to be part of funerary traditions and practices. Many graves are turned into miniature gardens and enclosures for mourners to sit next to their dead so they can spend time talking to and reminiscing about a life lived with their loved ones.7 Mourners treat the cemetery space not as a reversal but as an extension of the intimacy of the domestic. This creates a social space that at first glance operates as a space of memory but digging deeper at the daily practices of a cemetery and the performances of its visitors and labour of its workers, we can see that it is also a space where memory is made and enacted or “performed.” Memory, as Connerton suggests, is manifested in rituals, bodies and spaces.8 The cemetery as a place of living memory is a special home both for the dead and for the living. Mausoleums turn into communal living spaces, familial rooms, a bedroom or a lounge; a special place for the dead, for family and for friends to gather together and commune (fig. 2-4). Memory is not only transcribed into documents, and knowledge is not only accessible through text. Memory can also take place on the body’s surface and in bodily practices and performances.9 Memory and knowledge are also transcribed and embedded onto the bodies of objects. Connerton suggests that memory happens on the lived body including the “buildings around us and other features of our habitat.”10 This chapter will expand this idea and will show that culture and life do not end when the lived body ceases to exist (fig. 2-5). Culture can also happen on the body of the dead and on the body of objects such as the photograph. The body also projects and transfers itself onto the spaces people inhabit, work and socialise in such as the cemetery. The cemetery is a special space, which it can be argued has, due to its dead inhabitants, limited sociality. Through my research however it was found that the cemetery is a highly complex and dynamic space, a lieux de mémoir, a place of collective memory and of history reflecting the social, spiritual and political complexity of the spaces and places of the living.11 6

See Connerton, Societies and Spirit. Francis, Secret. 8 Connerton, Spirit. 9 See Connerton, Societies and Spirit; Berger Another Way; Grafton New. 10 Connerton, Spirit, 147. 11 See Nora, Between; Halbwachs, Collective. 7

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Figs. 2-2 and 2-3. “As a child my father would take me to the Panteón to upgrade, clean and look after our family grave. I have returned ever since.” Panteón San Rafael, Álvaro Obregón, October 2007.

Fig. 2-4. “I bring my wife fresh flowers and light a candle every Saturday. During the week I often visit the cemetery to talk to her.” Francisco R Fernandez visits his wife Matilde R. Carrillo Silva. Family mausoleum, Panteón Rafael, October 2007.

Many mourners I met through fieldwork reach the cemetery grappling with their mortality, grief and preconceived conceptualisations of life and death. Some visit the cemetery because they are motivated by shared experiences they recall on their visits there, which are driven by

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responsibility, duty and love for their dead (fig. 2-6). Extending the practices mourners had with the dead person when they were alive, is for many mourners of critical importance and crucial to their activities. Some mourners also attend driven by guilt, while others by despair and anguish. Some mourners did not have the opportunity to converse with their loved ones when they were alive, due to family disputes or distance and feel that now they are able to commune in silence with their dead and their ánima (spirit). Many mourners have expressed that ánimas are not ephemeral as they find their way back to the world of the living to visit their families and friends, while others are in transition or in transit unable to cross over to the next world and walk the cemetery and other spaces of the living. This approach to the dead and to the world of the ánima is reflected by many Mexican mourners. It is also expressed in Mexican literature, for example in the classic novel of 1955, Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, which epitomises the suggestion that the dead and their essence are manifested in the narratives and practices of the living. The essence of the living is transferred and left behind engraved and fused to the material world and to places inhabited and now shared with the living.12

Fig. 2-5. “I don’t wish to remember my father as a pile of bones.” Gravedigger Isabel Ramo Mora exhuming a family grave in Panteón San Rafael, Álvaro Obregón, 2007.

12

See Bell, Ghost; Hood Supersense; Samuel Theatres.

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Fig. 2-6. “I have not told my children but I dream of their mother calling me to visit her at the cemetery.” Family altar for the Day of the Dead, Mexico City 2007

I met many bereaved persons, mourners and funerary professionals who believe that ánimas reciprocate with the living. Material objects act as conduits for the ánima and the relationship between the living and the dead, finding links, bridges and tools to communicate back to the living and, as suggested by Bell, ánimas give “a sense of social aliveness to a place” animating places such as the cemetery and its objects.13 LomnitzAdler reminds us that the above relationships and beliefs are intrinsic historically to a Mexican understanding of death and the dead.14 In addition we have to take into consideration Mexico’s historic complexity in light of its numerous changes and challenges driven by a rise in migration and by urbanisation. Conceptualising contemporary urban spaces such as the cemetery with reference to multiple landscapes of diverse people’s cultures, memories and interests helps to inform the dynamics of the social phenomena of the dead in Mexico. Current research and literature that attempts to illustrate funerary practices in Mexico portray it as a homogeneous death practice connected to the annual festivity of the Day of the Dead. Little is known in relation to mourners’ daily practices, bereavement or mourners’ experiences with 13

Bell, Ghost, 815. See also Reyes-Cortez, “Communicating;” Haley, Day; Firth, Cross-cultural. 14 See Lomnitz-Adler, Idea.

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grief. Not all Mexicans in a megalopolis such as Mexico City feel that continuing bonds with the dead is a positive approach to deal with their pain or a method to overcome their grief. I met mourners that are driven by their religious faith and practices, such as Buddhists, Muslims or people from the Jewish community, who visit cemeteries infrequently and do not feel the need to use material objects on graves and mausoleums. There are also mourners who are unable to visit their dead with regularity as they are buried in cemeteries scattered across the country. Through my research I also met younger members of Mexico City’s middle and upper class society who do not follow elaborate and public funerary practices as a positive way forward in dealing with their grief. However, it was found that the majority of rural and urban Mexicans I came across do attend to the needs of their dead and that extending their mourning practices has been part of their daily activity since childhood. Many mourners construct a world in which the dead and their ánima reciprocate and appreciate mourners’ efforts through commemorative activities, gifts and visits. It is also believed by many that the dead will express their dissatisfaction to their bereaved family too. The national annual festivity and commemoration of the Day of the Dead is an important time for many Mexicans, but not the reason why mourners visit the cemetery or construct a world with their dead and through material culture. The bonds have already developed through the daily social relations of the living extended to the commemorative practices for the dead and the spaces that host them. Children are taken to the cemetery from birth by their mothers and grandparents to visit family. The activities that bond the living with their dead are manifested across the year at every opportunity that mourners find to socialise with their dead family members, events that are important to the living or to the dead that they are visiting. Mr Louis, a regular visitor to Panteón Civil de Dólores, explains that his extended family has three graves there and each grave has on average four family members buried that he remembers and makes an effort to visit. Mr Louis explains: “I visit my dead on their birthdays, the anniversaries of their deaths, Mothers’ and Fathers’ days, my wife for our wedding anniversary, for Valentine’s, religious festive days such as Easter, and days dedicated to the saints plus all the other special dates in our Mexican yearly calendar.” Mr Louis is busy in his numerous visits to the cemetery across the year but most importantly he expresses a sentiment conveyed by the majority of the regular mourners I met in the cemeteries of Mexico City by adding that “there are times I just visit because I just need to talk to them.” Regular mourners such as Mr Louis explain that talking with their dead might seem unimaginable, after all the dead do not

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talk back, but that they feel committed to the wellbeing of their dead. Another regular mourner, Mrs Rosario, explains, “My dead might not talk to me, but they are listening and they are looking. . . they smell the flowers I bring them and taste the food I offer them.” For mourners the body of their loved ones might die and disintegrate with time, nonetheless their ánima remains alive. Mrs Maria Olmedo explains that “my dead relatives await for the altar dedicated to them in the cemetery to have fresh flowers, candles and regular visits. They can see and hear us talk, so we have to be careful in what we say about them.” Mrs Oldemo is considerate to the feelings of her dead since they would be disappointed if not visited and would be sad or angry if not remembered with love and delight. The sensorial experience entrusted to the relationship between living persons is retained in the relationship between mourners and their dead. The responsibility between friends and family does not stop when someone dies but is carried over after death. The dead person’s family is responsible for their care, and forgetting the dead could bring unthinkable consequences for the dead and the living. The dead person’s destiny and the salvation of its ánima are closely tied to the actions inherited by their family.15 The dead would not be so forgiving if they are forgotten, explains Mrs Olmedo: “I will not sleep well at night, my father will walk endlessly lost in the world of the ánimas. He will not forgive me if I don’t look after him.” Mrs Olmedo’s restless ánimas would haunt her heart and mind. Stability and balance in life are only possible for Mrs Olmedo if her dead are looked after and loved. Many mourners in Mexico City place importance on the visibility of their mourning. For some grief still takes place behind the closed doors of a domestic space and for them it is a personal experience. However some, including those mourners that started to grieve privately, still have a preference to make public their grief and to visualise their memorialising practices (figs. 2-7 and 2-8). With regard to the relationship that the living have with their dead, the above decisions are the ones that affect the living, nonetheless mourners such as Mrs Olmedo imagine that their choices also affect their dead and their ánima. The choices visualised and performed are directly connected to the welfare and tranquility of the dead. The dead will lie restless till their loved ones return to the cemetery to visit. Woodthorpe reminds us that focal points of tensions are believed to be located in spaces where the bereaved and mourners express their intimate personal and private emotions and practices, such as the graveside 15

Brandes, Cremated.

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or mausoleum.16 It is also important to note that moments of tension and intense emotions are expressed in all aspects and stages of funerary and mortuary practices, processes of memorialisation and in the various spaces where they are located and performed, such as spaces where a traumatic death might have taken place, for example through an accident or assault. Roadside memorials are also points of tension and intense emotion that connect mourners in Mexico City in common grief.17 Negotiating the processes of grief and commemorating the dead can take place in a variety of spaces such as the domestic space. Choices are constantly being negotiated as decisions have to be made such as which objects would be used to decorate the altar, which photograph would be most representative of the dead person, what objects and personal belongings would be kept or disposed of, and which ones would reach the cemetery to accompany the dead (fig. 2-9).18

Fig. 2-7. “Mina: You never left home and since my magical childhood you carry on being the smile that illuminates the first minutes of everyday.” Jesús Rodríguez Petlacalco’s erects an altar at home dedicated to his grandmother Alberta Petlacalco Herrera (Mina), Mexico City, 2007.

16

Woodthorpe, My Life. See Everett, Roadside. 18 See Gibson, Objects. 17

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Fig. 2-8. “I look for you in your eyes. I see the love we shared. I am thirsty for your love. Soon we will be together my love.” Photographs used in a family wall niche in Panteón San Rafael, Álvaro Obregón, 2007.

Fig. 2-9. “Grandma, this teddy is for you to remember me by, every time you hug the teddy it’s me who you will feel by your side.” Manuel’s grandmother with her grandson’s images and ashes.

The body of the dead is crucial to many Mexican mourners. Not only can emotions become more acute in spaces where the dead are located, but communication between the living and the dead is intensified there. Social, cultural, religious and political activity is found in the spaces that host the

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Fig. 2-10. “My mother smiles when I bring her fresh flowers. . . when I visit her I also get the opportunity to visit my uncles and other family members.” Members of the Cruz family visiting their grandmother Felix Perez in Panteón San Rafael, 2007.

dead, such as the cemetery. A cemetery becomes a space where friends and family come together to remember not only the death and sadness that this brings, but also the joy and happiness that the person brought to their lives through a lived experience. For many mourners the cemetery is a place to consolidate their feelings, sad or joyful. This is helped as mourners enter into communication with their dead via the sensorial worlds of material and visual culture. For mourners in Mexico City the cemetery is not a solitary space. Mourners visit their dead in large groups, accompanied by friends and extended family (fig. 2-10). If they find themselves alone then the cemetery professionals such as the gravediggers serve as friends with whom they can exchange emotions and the narratives of the dead. Mr Ángel Pérez Rafael, manager of Panteón San Rafael, explains that gravediggers create intense relationships with mourners that visit the cemetery. Mrs Emelia Contreras Morales, gravedigger of Panteón San Rafael, explains: “We discuss ideas for decorating their grave, choice of objects or advice on the maintenance of the grave . . . discussions are normally if not always followed by talking about the dead.” Many mourners stay behind and exchange a drink, food and a song with the gravediggers in Panteón San Rafael. The gravediggers become friends; for some mourners, extended family. To develop and maintain good relations with gravediggers means better care of their dead, and in some way reassurance that mourners themselves would be looked after when they

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die. Gravediggers are also mourners, they bury and grieve their own dead buried in the same cemetery with the dead of mourners they are employed to look after. Mourners and workers create a special relationship that goes beyond the expectations of labour responsibilities thus strengthening a network of social relations between the living and the dead.

Fig. 2-11. “My father José knew every grave and mourner in this cemetery like the back of his hand. Everyone loves him and mourns him like they would their own father.” Altar dedicated to the late cemetery manager of Panteón San Rafael, José Yañez V., who died on the 17 November 1998. Panteón San Rafael, Álvaro Obregón, November 2007

Using Images of the Dead in Memorials and Altars What was evident from my research is that material objects are constantly being negotiated and used as tools by communities to explore the social manifestations of commemorative funerary rituals but also people’s social and political perspectives. During extended visits to the cemeteries of Mexico City and public altars displayed on political rallies I noticed that material objects were used to express people’s political views which otherwise would have been too compromising to convey. The gravediggers of Panteón San Rafael start to erect a Day of the Dead altar three to four weeks before 1 November. The altar always follows a

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different theme that is kept a secret until it is made public on 31 October ready to receive mourners for the Day of the Dead on 1 and 2 November. Mr Ángel explains that the altar is an important attraction in the cemetery.

Fig. 2-12. “Our revolution lives on till all men and women are equal. . . Long live Pancho Villa.” Altar dedicated to the Mexican Revolution. Pancho Villa (José Doroteo Arango Arámbula) a Mexican revolutionary general at rest with his female and male soldiers. Panteón San Rafael, Álvaro Obregón, 2 November 2005.

Thousands of mourners who visit the cemetery on 1 and 2 November have to walk past it to reach their graves and mausoleums. The altar has come to represent the cemetery workers’ social and political sentiments expressed via the material and visual satirical representations of the dead. Papier-mâché skeletons are dressed and displayed to represent particular personalities in Mexico’s history, politics and current affairs. The women gravediggers organise the display while the men erect the platform and build the structure of the altar. Mourners bring flowers, drinks, food and a variety of objects to decorate the altar. Figure 2-12 shows a theme in 2005 dedicated to the Mexican revolution which started in 1910, while figures 2-13, 2-14 and 2-15 show a theme in 2007 dedicated to El Grito de la Independencia that takes place annually on 16 September (The Cry of Independence),19 with the two political parties, PAN, Partido Acción 19

El Grito de la Independencia (Cry of Independence) is the event that marks the beginning of the Mexican War of Independence which started on 16 September 1810 and went until 1821, and is an important national holiday observed in Mexico.

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Nacional (The National Action Party) and PRD, Partido de la Revolución Democrática (The Party of the Democratic Revolution) together on the same day. The altar shows the followers of PRD arguing for PAN’s legitimacy to the Mexican presidency. This double play of political satire upset many mourners who are followers of PAN and who found the altar a joke taken one step too far, somewhat disrespectful and considered “matter out of place” in a cemetery.20 Not much could be done by mourners who would prefer the Day of the Dead not to be as flamboyant and commercialised as it has become since the 1970s, and the attention and respect paid to the dead to be more solemn.21 Mr Ángel explained that a mourner criticised his altar and told him that it was not tasteful to mock the president in this way. Mr Ángel explained that “some mourners particularly the richer snobbish ones did not like the theme of the altar but other mourners praised me for my courage to display the sentiments of many working class Mexicans . . . politics in Mexico is rotten to the core, the rich get richer and we get poorer, but here in this cemetery we will all end up together buried at the same level, here, rich or poor, no one escapes death.” Through the altar being displayed via the satire of the Day of the Dead, the gravediggers found a voice to express their personal opinions that, in different circumstances and prior to the 1970s and the mass commercialisation of the festivity, might have got them into trouble with their employers, and complaints from mourners might have even lost them their employment.22 Over the course of visits to the field from 2002 to 2007, I was struck by the expansion in the use of material culture into alternative spaces commemorating the dead. Marchi argues that the current survival of the celebration of the Day of the Dead was orchestrated by cultural, political and commercial initiatives and media attention given to the event.23 Outside Mexico City, however, I came across villages that were not as dictated to by the commercialised pressures of urban practices of the festivity. However, mourners were still found dynamically and imaginatively using images and material objects to decorate their graves, altars and to commemorate their dead. Cemeteries such as Panteón San Rafael and Panteón Civil de Dólores have remnants of rural commemorative practices. For mourners in Mexico City the celebrations devoted to their dead and the use of images on graves did not represent a survival of 20

Douglas, Purity, 35 See Marchi, Day of the Dead. 22 The gravediggers are local government employees and have to follow local government guidelines. 23 Marchi, Day of the Dead. 21

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unfamiliar ritualised practices, but are rather a continuation of daily activities manifested yearly in the commemoration of their love for their dead. Many mourners have families residing in rural Mexico and combine practices. The form that this takes is as varied and diversified as the multicultural societies and peoples that now reside in Mexico City.

Fig 2-13, 2-14, 2-15. “To the men and women whose lives have been lost in the struggle for justice, democracy and liberty.” Altar dedicated to the “Cry of Independence” in Panteón San Rafael, November 2007.

Many Mexico City based mourners who I interviewed used the dead and their material and visual representations also as vehicles for political rhetoric and public expressions of discontent with their social or political conditions. Communicated otherwise such expressions might commit people more personally. Thus many people in Mexico City turn to the visualisation and socialisation of the dead not only to express their grief but also as a channel to voice social, cultural, religious and political beliefs that might otherwise be reprimanded.24 Death in art practices can assist people to traverse boundaries in society that otherwise could not be crossed without causing offence. This technique has a historic trajectory in 24

See Verdery, Political.

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Mexico’s cultural development of the contemporary phenomenon of death and the dead, as we see in the use of engravings and etchings made by the artist José Guadalupe Posada during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century.25 His engravings became vehicles for political satire, manifestations and visual expressions of disgruntlement with the political and social systems that existed at the time. Political activism through contemporary art practices and, here, in relation to death in art, still actively form part of contemporary Mexican political and social movements. Fig. 2-16 shows an altar erected on 2 November 2007 at the entrance of the national palace by supporters of Andrés Manuel López Obrador expressing their unhappiness with the electoral crisis that followed Felipe Calderón’s election as President in 2006. In any other instance it would not have been possible to erect this altar by the footsteps of the presidential palace. Social and political satire via the rhetoric of the dead opens a space for political activism and social intervention. Material and visual culture are tools regularly used by mourners both in their private and public funerary practices, processes of grief, commemorative activities and displays of love. None is more fitting than the photograph as a valuable and expedient agent for mourners to sustain and at times preserve relationships with their departed. Photographs can be attributed indefinite qualities, some of which are particularly important to the processes of bereavement and commemoration.26 The photograph can aid the living to recall, interact, maintain and extend lived experiences, and to imagine a present and a future. It can assist mourners to humanise the dead and support a reconciliation with grief. The photograph can support mourners to retain and to prolong the social life of the dead self once the supposed decomposition of flesh has eroded the visibility of visible humanness.27 Halbwachs suggests that memory is fragile.28 We need aids to sustain us in ensuring the preservation of our memory but also in “making memory happen as we never know whose memories we are living, remembering or inheriting.”29 Material culture, particularly the photograph, is a crucial memory-making site but also a practice that many mourners have embraced in order to forge extended relationships with their dead.30 Cadava suggests that “what survives in a photograph is also

25

See Lomnitz-Adler, Idea. See Ruby, Secure. 27 See Reyes-Cortez, “Extending.” 28 Halbwachs, Collective. 29 Reyes-Cortez, “Communicating,” 37. 30 See Hallam, Beyond; Hockey, Memory and Grief. 26

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the survival of the dead.”31 In relation to my research it was found that this survival is also the survival of the living; the survival of the self.

Fig. 2-16. “Calderon killed Democracy.” Altar erected at the entrance of the national palace by supporters of Andrés Manuel López Obrador showing their unhappiness with the electoral crisis that followed when Felipe Calderón won the presidency. The Zocalo, Mexico City, 2 Nov 2007.

Mourners’ sensorial experiences are also encouraged by their dynamic and diverse use of material objects. Material objects become social agents and are treated as people in the imagination of mourners. When it comes to rituals of memorialisation and funerary practices the photograph has a special role to play in the family of material and organic objects that find a home in the cemeteries of Mexico City. Photographs often become the only visual evidence of a person’s existence prior to death. The photograph is often embraced by mourners as a witness to what has existed, of our experiences and of what we see, imagine and feel in the present and the passage into an unknown or imagined future.32 It provides the dead with a social forum, a space of sociality and a presence in the future. Material objects such as photographs plus religious ornaments and secular objects such as toys “are regarded as imbued with spiritually ethereal meaning and treated more than just a material representation of the dead person.”33 The 31

Cadava, Words, 10. See Barthes, Lucida; Burke, Eyewitnessing; Reyes-Cortez, “Communicating.” 33 Reyes-Cortez, “Extending,” 35. 32

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self is transferred onto the body of the photograph making the invisible decomposing body visible, assisting the social self to transcend the mortality of the living as it is transcribed in the invisibility of the visible photograph. Mourners do not relate to the portrait of their dead as a fixed form that confines the persona within its materiality or the borders of its frame. Photographs and objects take on the essence and the sense of the self and they assist the living and the dead to remain connected over time.

Figs. 2-17, 2-18. “I decorate my mother’s and grandmother’s grave every month.” Panteón San Rafael, Mexico City, October 2007.

The unlimited processes and practices of grief and bereavement extend and negotiate the commitments and moral obligations mourners had with their loved ones into their new home, the cemetery. The material embodies the complex issues concerning the immortality of the social person and the mortality of its flesh. The use of material culture in funerary practices prevents dead persons from being forgotten as social agents. Social visibility and social recognition are therefore central to the memorymaking processes and practices mourners adopt to negotiate their grief and bridge the gap between the visible and invisible worlds of the dead:

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“Portraits of remembrance protect the invisibility of the dead as social persons, making the dead visible through the relationships and the value entrusted to the material/spiritual image by its mourners and visitors.”34 Photographs found on graves are not images of death but images of moments of life. In this way, mourners remember and communicate with their dead as social members in this world and beyond and not as visualised forms of decomposing flesh or as “corpses.” Mourners are motivated to bond with material objects, the cemetery and their dead via sensory experiences.35 The touchability of the dead is possible through material objects and spaces of memory. Our ability to feel, to sense, to imagine the smell of our loved ones brings objects to life but it also heightens the emotional bonding between the dead and the object.36 Material culture and in particular the photograph acts as a sensorial stimulus to our cognitive and somatic sensations. During Mr Alvarez’s monthly visits to his family mausoleum he brings flowers and talks to the photographs of his mother and grandmother as if he were talking to his dead as living persons. Time and care is placed in choosing the flowers he purchases, their display and in cleaning the mausoleum. Mr Alvarez’s extended visits to the cemetery are directed towards the photographs of his relatives, and even though other secular or religious objects are placed in the mausoleum he directs his conversation to the photograph of his mother and grandmother. The materiality of the object no longer plays a role in these moments of communication. The photograph is then no longer temporal or a symbol that represents a self, or an object that reflects an image of a dead person. The photograph unlike other objects turns into the self as the conversation expands and extends to the exchange of food, drinks and, at times, music. The photograph of Mr Alvarez’s family embodies a relationship between them. The image looks back and in the imagination of the mourner a conversation takes place, the gaze of the photograph looks back, eye contact is made between them and pauses are made as if the living awaits a response from their dead. At these moments of communication the photograph transcends the materiality of an object. The photograph does not replace the living but it overcomes the absence of the visible self. The graveside becomes an extension of a domestic space. A relationship is extended from the domestic to the cemetery. Expressing such intense emotions in Mexico City is regarded as a positive way to deal with grief. Grief is not only a personalised experience 34

Reyes-Cortez, “Communicating,” 48-49. See Brighenti, Visibility. See Seremetakis, Senses. 36 See Classen Aroma; Gell Art. 35

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or emotion but a public, shared and communal social phenomenon, shared between family, friends, work colleagues, funerary professionals, and at times even the general public is encouraged to participate. Funerary workers such as gravediggers also play a crucial role in assisting mourners’ display of their sentiments and performative activities. The greater the intensity of mourning and the more public and visual it becomes, the greater the love for the dead. Mr Manuel, mourner at Panteón San Rafael explains, “Our dead are watching, they also feel our pain, they miss us as much as we miss them.” Mourners who go to the cemeteries of Mexico City do not visit corpses, they visit and communicate with their loved ones as living social agents. Many mourners indicated that the person and its flesh might die but the social person or its social ánima does not. The social person and social ánima are also not immortal in the world of the living, they also need continuity or they too, just as memory, would cease to exist in the world of the living. The traces that are left and the material-visual aids created to prolong and preserve memory are embraced by mourners. Mr Alvarez’s relationship with his mother and grandmother are reconstructed, reinterpreted and constantly mediated; shifting like memory. In Mr Alvarez’s imagination the photograph’s persona, the social ánima awaits his monthly visits. To Mr Alvarez the body of the living just like the photograph’s materiality might be temporal, yet the photograph’s magical aura, its energy, is atemporal like the love he has for his mother and grandmother and the relationship he has with their social ánimas. Mourners in Mexico City do not imagine their relationships with their dead; these are already there but become extended, prolonged, and negotiated in a new form. Mrs Contreras adds, “Who knows what awaits us in the next world, I just want them to be happy.” Mourners are not only aware of their grief but also of the welfare of their dead. Mr Alvarez and many other mourners argue that their inherited commitments and continuing bonds, elaborate use of material objects and regular visits to their dead family, ensure the dead have a smooth passage to the next world and back. Salvation for the ánimas is not fully guaranteed, but through their continuity it is given the best possible chance, as it is for mourners when they die. Mr Alvarez’s grief is eased and the sadness and fear that the dead might also feel in finding themselves no longer alive is alleviated. Mourners are able to retain and maintain the multi-layers of humanness that assist the living through grief. Through photographs and material culture the dead person can maintain humanity and a place in a unknown future. A person’s identity and life trajectory can be time-based narratives of the traces left by the living, and they could come to an end at the

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Fig. 2-19. “We have been married for over fifty years and even now I still visit my wife and commemorate our anniversary, only that now we come together in her new home.” Various generations depicted through their portraits. Family mausoleum, Panteón San Rafael, Mexico City, October 2007.

moment of death. For mourners “narrative-memory. . . can be an endless process until there are ruptures in people’s ability to recall.”37 Thus the life narrative can be applied to the dead person, as it triggers a continuity of the identity of the living. Narrative-memory survives in the material world that represents them and, as Davies suggests, in moments of recall such as in biographical narratives.38 I suggest that a photograph and commemorative portraits act as biographical narratives of the identity of the self comprised of all that constitutes a societal human being (fig. 2-19).39 The materiality and persona of the photograph is transformed when it reaches the cemetery as it embodies the social ánima, multiple layers of memory and history transferred by its mourner’s relentless love. The photograph transcends its temporality and materiality; an atemporal self. While material culture assists the social visibility and social recognition of the dead person, personal or collective continuity was found to be a critical factor in resolving the issues concerning how and what mourners remember.

37

Reyes-Cortez, “Extending,” 129. Davies, “Geographies.” 39 See Reyes-Cortez, “Extending.” 38

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Conclusion Mourners in Mexico City treat the cemetery with its graves and mausoleums as an extension of their family home. Mexican funerary practices export the dead from the private and domestic towards the public, social, cultural and political spaces of the living. Material objects dedicated to the dead are used for recalling memories and function as a reflexive mourning practice in contemporary Mexican culture. Mourners in Mexico City have appropriated the dead and exported them to rituals that challenge the invisibility and privacy of the spaces dedicated to them. They also assist mourners to challenge current social, religious and political ideologies which otherwise would have had less of a voice or reach. Objects and commemorative photographs activate responses and emotions from the living. Many participants interviewed felt that they have a moral and ethical obligation to their dead in terms of contributing to their “social visibility,” assisting the dead person to continue in their role as a social participant. The photograph in particular is used as a device that prolongs and aids the social life of the dead and the relationships they had when they were alive. People go to cemeteries not to commune with corpses or bones but with the social ánimas of their dead. Mourners’ relationships with the dead are not recreated or invented but are extensions of previous relationships. Without the activities of the living, the dead are invisible and are not part of “memory” or the extended “human community.” Memories become thinned and precarious. Material culture and in particular the photograph has become for many of my research participants a memory-making tool and as such can be seen as a reciprocal aid that assists the processes and activities that society uses to recollect and preserve memory. Photographs © Marcel Reyes-Cortez

Works Cited Barthes, R. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Vintage Classics, 1993. Bell, M. M. “Ghost of Place.” Theory and Society 26, no. 6 (2004): 81336. Berger, J. and J. Mohr. Another Way of Telling. Cambridge: Granta Books, 1982.

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Brandes, S. “The Cremated Catholic: The Ends of a Deceased Guatemalan.” Sage 7, nos. 2-3 (2001): 111-20. Brighenti, A. “Visibility: A Category for the Social Sciences.” Current Sociology 55 (2007): 323-42. Burke, P. Eyewitnessing. The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence. London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2007. Cadava, E. Words of Light, Theses on the Photography of History. Princeton, N.J.; Princeton University Press, 1997. Classen, C., D. Howes and A. Synnott, eds. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Connerton, P. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. —. The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Davies, D. J. “Geographies of the Spirit World.” In The Matter of Death, Space, Place and Materiality, edited by J. Hockey, C. Komaromy and K. Woodthorpe, 208-22. New York: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2010. Douglas, M. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Boston: Ark Paperback, 1985. Everett, H. Roadside Crosses in Contemporary Memorial Culture. Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2002. Firth, S. “Cross-cultural Perspectives on Bereavement.” In Death, Dying and Bereavement, edited by M. Johnson, D. Dickenson and J. S. Katz, 338-46. London: Sage, 2000. Francis, D., L. Kellaher and G. Neophytu. The Secret Cemetery. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Gell, A. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford Clarendon Press, 1998. Gibson, M. Objects of the Dead. Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2008. Grafton, A. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge, MA and London: Havard University Press, 1992. Halbwachs, M. On Collective Memory, translated by L. A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Haley, S., and C. Fukuda. The Day of the Dead, When Two Worlds meet in Oaxaca. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004. Hallam, E., J. Hockey and G. Howarth. Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity. London: Reutledge, 1999. Hallam, E., and J Hockey. Death, Memory and Material Culture. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001.

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Hockey, J., J. Katz and N. Small, eds. Grief Mourning and Death Rituals. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001. Hood, B. Supersense: From Superstition to Religion - The Brain Science of Belief. London: Constable & Robinson, 2009. Lomnitz-Adler, C. Death and the Idea of Mexico. New York: Zone Books, 2005. Marchi, R. Day of the Dead in the USA: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Nora, P. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (1984): 7-25. Reyes-Cortez, M. “Communicating with the Dead: Social Visibility in the Cemeteries of Mexico City.” In Die Realität des Todes: Zum gegenwärtigen Wandel von Totenbildern und Erinnerungskulturen, edited by M. Alterna et al., 33-62. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag GmbH, 2010. Reyes-Cortez, M. “Extending Current Boundaries between the Private, Domestic and Public Display of Mourning, Love and Visual culture in Mexico City.” Social History 37, no. 2 (2012): 171-141. Ruby, J. Secure the Shadow. Death and Photography in America. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995. Rulfo, J. Pedro Páramo. México: Plaza Janés, 1955. Samuel, R. Theatres of Memory. London: Verso, 1994. Seale, C. Constructing Death: The Sociology of Dying and Bereavement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Seremetakis, N. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Verdery, K. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Woodthorpe, K. “My Life after Death: Connecting the Field, the Findings and the Feelings.” Anthropology Matters Journal 9, no. 1 (2007): 1-11.

CHAPTER THREE WEARING YOUR MEAT ON YOUR SLEEVE: MORTALITY AND DEATHLINESS IN PINAR YOLACAN’S PERISHABLES ROSEMARY DELLER

“Do age and rot smell the same?”1 —Carole Korsmeyer

Wrinkles, sagging skin, crumbling bones, thinning hair: aesthetic depictions of ageing have typically focused on these as signs of a supposedly excessive, undesirable, “failing” embodiment. The conflation of ageing with troublesome bodies has proven particularly potent for the figure of the older woman. Seen to transgress ideals of feminine beauty and life-giving fertility, older women are positioned in symbolic proximity to illness, death and decay. As ageing femininity is consequently left oscillating between abjection and outright invisibility in visual culture, the need to confront the stigma around old age seems paramount. Yet, what if this challenge were staged through a collision of ageing femininity and raw meat? Such a question is posed by the quietly provocative photographic series, Perishables (2002-2004), by the Turkish-born artist Pinar Yolaçan. Although the series uses older white women as models, Yolaçan complicates the pursuit of visibility by cladding her subjects in delicate Victorian-style clothing made of offal. Meat not only connotes degradation and violence, but it also signals death and decay in its imminent perishability. This chapter thus considers how Perishables utilises the anticipated ephemerality and viscerality of meat to address enduring taboos surrounding ageing femininity. Since the series also draws upon motifs of Victorian portraiture implicated in histories of racialised othering, this chapter furthermore reflects upon how meat could redress 1

Korsmeyer, Gender, 122.

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the troubling modes of representation displayed in nineteenth-century portrait traditions. Utilising an aesthetic that gestures towards the longstanding inscription of deathliness upon ageing women, colonial subjects and animals, Perishables’ intimate intertwining of raw meat and aged feminine flesh prompts us to ask who ultimately bears—and indeed, who wears—the burden of mortality?

Surfacing Whiteness

Fig. 3-1. Pinar Yolaçan. Untitled from Perishables series 40" x 32 3/8"C-Print 2003. Courtesy of the artist. Copyright: Pinar Yolaçan

Taken from Pinar Yolaçan’s photographic series Perishables (20022004), figure 3-1 shows a pale-skinned older woman dressed in a delicate white dress formed of interwoven translucent mesh and solid, satiny cloth. The subject’s slightly tilted face meets the gaze of the camera with unwavering solemn poise. Radiating light, the portrait emanates an elegance that is bolstered by the woman’s upright posture and refined clothing. Reflecting on the measured dignity of her subjects, Yolaçan identifies daylight as being crucial to the seamless display of clothing, skin, hair and background shown throughout Perishables.2 The very 2

Yolaçan in Haydaro÷lu, “Interview.”

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radiance of the lighting illuminates the white background in such a way that even the face of the subject—typically seen as the orientating marker of human individuality—becomes flattened as an instrument in the overarching production of an almost supra-human whiteness. As white hair, white skin, white clothing and white background all “line up” in this portrait, Mine Haydaro÷lu’s reference to the “harmony” of the series implicitly alludes to the production of a uniform aesthetic in which these constitutive elements cohere to surface whiteness.3 This understanding of “surfacing” is drawn from the anthropological research of Janelle S. Taylor who defines it, in part, as the materialisation of surfaces.4 Yolaçan’s portraits resonate with this process as the specific interplay of light, skin, cloth and hair all work to render whiteness visible as an aesthetically coherent photographic image. Taylor’s suggestion that surfacing also involves bringing something previously submerged into view similarly links with Perishables. The construction of whiteness as visual harmony within the portraits is accompanied by the parallel exteriorising of certain values as though drawn from within the subject, evoking the moralising and racialised discourse of physiognomy.5 As the use of daylight as a naturalised illuminating tool gives the model an ethereal air, this suggests ideals of purity, beauty and spirituality that a number of critical whiteness theorists identify as enduring virtues within Western cultural traditions.6 While allusion to spiritual transcendence thus appears an intrinsic surface quality, the particular choice of clothing nonetheless signals the portrait’s historical lineage. Evidencing Yolaçan’s professed interest in the “Queen of England-type imperial icon and the Victorian body,”7 the long satiny dress with its high neckline and the model’s pinned-up hair display sartorial motifs of the nineteenth-century “cult of true womanhood.”8 This “cult” inspired a trend for portraits 3

Haydaro÷lu, “Interview.” Taylor, “Surfacing.” 5 Physiognomy claims that one can read the moral qualities of a person from the surface of the body, including the face and clothing. It experienced a popular resurgence in Europe and North America in the Victorian period, where it helped construct certain people as “degenerate,” such as working-class and colonial subjects. See Lalvai, Photography and Twine, “Physiognomy.” 6 Despite fears that it may re-entrench privilege, critical whiteness studies is a body of theory that seeks to challenge the way whiteness gains ascendency through being “unmarked” by examining the mechanisms of its construction. See Dyer, White, Frankenburg, Displacing and Yancy, Whiteness Question. 7 McGarry, “Greater.” 8 The “cult of true womanhood” was culturally dominant in the UK and the USA between 1820 and 1860. Although its key body of virtues, including piety, purity, 4

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featuring middle- and upper-class women “as white as the paper,”9 intertwining whiteness and femininity in reified images of bourgeois sanctity and gentility. Victorian dress and the luminescent qualities of daylight thus serve to confer virtuousness on Perishables’ ageing subject through visual tropes of the physiognomic principles that informed nineteenth-century portraiture. Lighting and dress are crucial to the production of a seamless surface of whiteness in Perishables, evoking a sense of inner virtue. However, in keeping with Taylor’s observation that surfaces rarely achieve permanence,10 the interplay of these two constitutive elements concurrently serves as a disruptive force. Discussing the relationship between whiteness, skin and light, Steven Connor suggests that whiteness has been associated with “pure luminosity…a skin so refined that it is itself vanishing from view, and letting through a light coming from within.”11 The radiance of refined skin is certainly apparent in figure 3-1, however, the delicacy implied by this translucence also inflects whiteness with a fragile penetrability. The investment in an aesthetic ideal of “thin or minimal skin’” to secure white luminescence consequently leaves the portrait open to breach.12 Such perviousness is heightened by the use of ageing women as subjects. In her analysis of the changing representation of ageing in the visual arts and photography since the late 1980s, Anca Cristofovici observes that artistic renderings of age have often used marble or alabaster skin that “‘brings the surface of the skin closer to the eye. In their transparency, we also read the frailty.”13 As the aestheticised fragility of ageing skin compounds the delicacy of white radiance, potential cracks emerge in the harmonious surface of Perishables. Somewhat ironically, it is the very bourgeois clothing shown in Perishables that serves to compound this crack in the ornamental beauty of the portraits through the revelation that their fabrics are formed of socalled “low” meat, such as offal, intestines and chicken heads. This use of meat certainly fuelled a number of sensationalist headlines that accompanied the exhibition’s debut in New York in 2004, leading to

submissiveness and domesticity, was presented as a universal feminine aspiration, only white middle-class women were seen as able to successfully embody these values. See Patton, Chains. 9 Dyer, White, 113. 10 Taylor, “Surfacing.” 11 Connor, Skin, 161. 12 Ibid. 13 Cristofovici, “Touching,” 276.

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Figure 3-2. Pinar Yolaçan. Untitled from Perishables series 32x40" C-Print 2002. Courtesy of the artist. Copyright: Pinar Yolaçan

Yolaçan being branded as “the tripe artist.”14 In contrast to publicity and online conjecture that focused heavily on Perishables’ controversial materials, the presence of meat appears tonally obscured within the frames of the portraits as its paleness blends into the photographic surface. Instead, meat becomes perceptible through the peculiarly textured qualities of the clothing. Folds, ripples and tumbling cloth are all associated with the decadence of drapery, yet in figure 3-2, they give the portrait a disruptive energy. Journalist Cathy Horyn offers a rather neutral description of the model’s neckpiece as a “prim blouse splashed with ruffles.”15 However, the sudden movement implied by the notion of being “splashed” 14

Upon the premiere of Yolaçan’s show at New York’s Rivington Arms art gallery in 2004, this moniker appeared online, seemingly originating from the post, “Pinar Yolaçan is “The Tripe Artist”” on the blog Book of Joe. It has subsequently been re-posted by a number of other websites, including We Make Money Not Art and Big Shiny Thing. 15 Horyn, “Shelf Life.”

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with this texture alludes to the way that energy is carried outwards from the portrait as the neckpiece overflows onto the otherwise smooth surface of whiteness. Functioning like an excessive excrescence that cannot be contained within the bleached surfaces of Perishables, the meat clothing breaches the thin membrane of whiteness using the expansive force of texture, thus disrupting the flattened harmony of the series.

Exposing the Seams The textured clothing of Perishables does not merely unsettle the flattened harmony of the photographic surface. The depth suggested by these folds of cloth and crevices of fabric furthermore evokes something alarmingly visceral: the sense that the inside of the body has spilled out onto the surface of the image. This intrusion of interior upon exterior converges with a broader “deconstruction fashion” trend that has emerged at the crossroads of art and fashion since the late 1980s. Emphasising change and “risky transformation,”16 deconstruction fashion places particular emphasis on bringing the inside to the outside, exposing the “secret” structures that hold garments together with “x-ray like capability.”17 Since offal is “where meat becomes unapologetically anatomical,”18 Perishables takes deconstruction fashion to its extreme as the meat of the clothing harkens to the very “meat” that holds the body together, its own fleshy seams. The series draws upon the aesthetics of a period enamoured of the physiognomic principle that the nature of the self can be read off the surface of the body. Accordingly, the visceral texture of tripe invites us to read the white subject of Perishables precisely as meat. The revelation of the white subject as meat alludes to an alternative current in nineteenth-century portraiture, tied less to the surfacing of purity and gentility than to histories of othering intimately bound up with imperialist domination. As something intensely corporeal floods the image, the radiance of the lighting appears less as a flattering tool of illumination than as a violent mechanism of exposure. This is shown in the contrast between the composed, demure poise of figure 3-1 and the “blunt frontality” of figure 3-2, historically found in face-on portraits of the insane, the criminal, the poor and colonial subjects of ethnographic research.19 Nineteenth- century photography constructed subjects as 16

Gill, “Deconstruction,” 26. Ibid., 28. 18 Strong, “Offal,” 30. 19 Lalvai, Photography, 66. 17

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degenerate by merging the discourses of morality, biology and anthropology, helping to naturalise working-class and colonial subjects as biologically “primitive.” Accordingly, William A. Ewing argues that the seriality of Perishables presents its subjects as specimens organised into taxonomic categories.20 The allusion to the troubling histories of ethnographic representation is heightened by the link that Yolaçan makes between the folds of meaty cloth and female genitalia in an interview with Richard Speer.21 Her observation recalls, whether deliberately or not, the museal display of black women’s genitals as part of the nineteenth-century construction of a “Western racial-sexual science,”22 most notoriously demonstrated by the case of Sarah Baartman.23 The insinuation that the clothing is vaginal in appearance not only serves as a further reminder of the exploitative histories of ethnographic display. It also suggests that these deeply racist modes of portraiture are being refracted retrospectively onto the white subject; as Ewing observes of the white models in Perishables, “now it is they who submit to the scrutiny of the lens.”24 Since white subjectivity has often distinguished itself from its supposed others as a “who” rather than a “what” mode of being,25 Perishables challenges these ontological pretensions. As the use of meat layers an alternative history of nineteenth-century portraiture onto the images, the series suggests a fractious tension between the reification and exposure of white subjectivity. The suggested presence of visceral innards also inserts a sense of deathliness into these portraits; after all, as Elizabeth Hallam et al note, the corpse is often seen as “dead meat.”26 The pursuit of absence has been an enduring part of the paradox of white representation. Richard Dyer describes whiteness as an aesthetic predicated on the deliberate lack of “any thing, in other words, material reality.”27 Paradoxically, this very pursuit of spiritual transcendence situates whiteness close to blankness, on 20

Ewing, “Pinar Yolaçan.” See Speer, “Couture.” 22 Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Venus, 17. 23 A former slave who was displayed in exhibitions and freak shows in London and Paris in the early 1800s, Sarah Baartman’s skeleton, brain and preserved genitals remained on view at the Musée de L’Homme in Paris until the mid-1970s. Also known as the “Hottentot Venus,” Baartman’s body was used to frame the study of black women’s sexuality by European scientists. See Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Venus and Nelson, Female. 24 Ewing, “Pinar Yolaçan.” 25 Bint, “Bad Faith,” 59. 26 Hallam et al, Beyond, 65. 27 Dyer in Redmond, “Whiteness,” 97. 21

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the very abyss of non-being. Sean Redmond elaborates that “when one reaches the highest ideals of whiteness, one literally disappears into the ether.”28 Bypassing this fraught balancing act between etherealised absence and absolute negation, Perishables instead confronts whiteness with something resolutely material through the use of raw meat. Having been described as the “zero point of being,”29 meat here instead highlights the irreducible corporeality of whiteness, thus undermining its selfconstruction as material absence. While Dyer suggests that in the logic of whiteness, death is “a blank that may be immateriality (pure spirit) or else just nothing at all,”30 Perishables intertwines intimations of mortality with an emphatic, meaty materiality. These portraits thus expose the seams of whiteness by puncturing the virtuous image of bourgeois white femininity with meat as a powerful reminder of death. The deathly overtones of Perishables are heightened by the implicit ephemerality of its material: the latent entropy enfolded within the erupting seams of meat that further alludes to the impermanence of mortal existence. Admittedly, the physical decay of the cloth is not apparent in these portraits in the palpable manner of Jana Sterbak’s rotting meat dress sculpture, Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (1987). Nevertheless, even the name of Yolaçan’s series—Perishables—signals the “passage of time, the inevitability of physical transformation […] a powerful reminder that the self is subject to change.”31 The particular triadic link forged between meat, femininity and ageing is, however, a troubling mechanism of exposure. The parallels made between meat and the ageing body not only converge with the wider tendency to consign the ageing subject to a form of “social death”: “a stigmatising view of older people as fast approaching a kind of crunch point at which positively perceived life is utterly transformed into negatively perceived death.”32 The burden of this stigma is furthermore borne by ageing women. While white middle-class and upper-class women were utilised as iconic figures of British imperialism in the nineteenth century, the ageing woman continues to be exiled from canonised models of beauty; indeed, she has even been seen as the paradigm of the grotesque itself.33 Perishables could consequently be seen 28

Ibid., 92. Hatry, “Meat.” 30 Dyer, White, 207. 31 Hallam et al, Beyond, 5. 32 Ibid., 56. 33 In The Female Grotesque, Russo identifies the figure of the aging woman or “crone” as one of the key grotesque figures in the work of Bakhtin. However, since Bakhtin situates the crone as a paradigm of grotesque realism within his broader 29

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to perpetuate this stigma by using ageing femininity as the abject site of weakness in white representation: the point of its rupture made palpable as a spectacle of anticipated decay. As the intrusion of meat into the otherwise regal imagery of Perishables signals a crack in the white imaginary, the series places the onus of this fracture on the figure of the ageing woman.

Tactile Vulnerability In centring ageing femininity as the site of disruption in these portraits, Perishables provocatively gestures towards the tendency to conflate older women with death, decay and disgust. This corresponds with the work of other photographers, such as Jacqueline Hayden and Jenny Saville, who have also played with so-called abject images of ageing. However, their immersion in processes of “self-monstering”34 contrasts with Perishables, whose arguable “monstering” of another seems a more compromised mode of portraiture. Where Perishables does converge with these photographers is in the tactility of its textural qualities. Mark Durden, Rachel Greer and Cristofovici have all focused attention upon those such as Hayden and Saville for using their photography to explore ageing femininity as a “process of growth.”35 Rather than posit ageing as an essentialised, static mode of being, the work of these photographers is instead rooted in the embodied changes experienced by ageing women. In particular, these commentators suggest the importance of haptic visuality, whereby the resistive excessive dynamism of ageing flesh mobilises an imagined sense of contact for the viewer. The rippling contours of cloth shown in Perishables similarly invite such tactile engagement. As the meat clothing threatens to overwhelm the otherwise flattened surface of whiteness, this overflowing texture breaks free of the “objectifying visuality” of physiognomy with its investment in the readability of the still life.36 Instead, it gestures outwards towards the viewing body, enlivening a haptic vision that renders the viewing eyes akin to “organs of touch.”37 Grounded in this process of embodied seeing, Perishables offers its portraits as encounters that provoke a sense of tactile intimacy, breaking through the ostensible dividing line between viewer and photograph. account of the transgressive and oppositional model of the carnivalesque, this is not necessarily a conventionally stigmatising move. See Bakhtin, Rabelais. 34 See Greer, “Frame,” and Meagher, “Saville.” 35 Cristofovici, Touching, 6. See also Durden, “Negotiating” and Greer, “Frame.” 36 Twine, “Physiognomy,” 17. 37 Ahmed and Stacey, “Dermographies,” 9; see also Marks, Skin.

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The generation of a tactile intimacy through texture allows for a reengagement with the faciality of the portraits. The paralleled contours of aged skin and meaty fabric displayed in the series bring both the cloth and face to the forefront of the image. This challenges the ostensible seriality of Perishables by allowing for some resurgence of individuality, as demonstrated in a 2012 interview between journalist Jefferson Hack and Yolaçan. Hack’s attempt to summarise Perishables as an entire series of “buttoned-up matrons” emanating “angst” and “bitterness” is undercut by his own subsequent use of divergent adjectives—“sweet,” “beautiful,” “enigmatic”—as he responds to the photographs projected behind him.38 The viewer is thereby encouraged to engage with the portraits individually; while we may read a certain imperiousness in figure 3-1 that corresponds with the haughtily regal airs of nineteenth-century bourgeois portraiture, in figure 3-2 there appears a tightness to the face, a sense of discomfort. Ironically then, if whiteness has been frequently presented as synonymous with individualised subjectivity and meat with undifferentiated flesh, here the textural gesture of meat allows the portraits to avoid some of the homogeneity of serialisation. However, the intimate engagement fostered between viewer and image does more than simply encourage us to scrutinise these photographs as individualised portraits. By drawing us into the very folds of meat, the textured tactility of Perishables invites us to inhabit these portraits as embodied viewers. As our eyes follow the imagined feel of the tumbling ripples of meaty cloth, these portraits prompt reflection on the sensation of this fabric against the skin: what would it feel like to be inside such clothing? Considering the intimate touch of meat against the surface of our own body thus brings us into close proximity with flesh as a fragile, perishable, finite and sensuous material. Correspondingly, the viewer comes closer to mortality as an embodied reality not easily displaced onto a distanced other. Perishables undoubtedly acknowledges the broader aversion to ageing feminine bodies by using raw meat as clothing. Yet, the series concurrently mobilises the push-pull, attraction-repulsion mechanism of disgust, so that the unnerving texture of meat brings us to the surface of the image, provoking an embodied seeing whereby we imagine the sensation of meat against the skin. The viewer thus becomes implicated in an encounter that articulates the vulnerability of ageing. Hack has made repeated reference to the broader “vulnerability” of being dressed in raw meat, even going so far as to ask Yolaçan if the models were scared of her. The term vulnerability recurs too in the discussion of Perishables offered by 38

Hack in Hack and Yolaçan, “Interview.”

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Horyn.39 While on the surface vulnerability insinuates the long-standing linkage between ageing and weakness, it has emerged as a key concept in recent feminist theory. Ann V. Murphy explores the particular work of Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler to show how these theorists have defined vulnerability as the openness of the subject to suffering and violence and the term has moreover been accompanied by other related notions such as exposure, dispossession and precariousness.40 These tropes of fragile openness have led to a particular emphasis upon corporeal vulnerability as a general condition of subjecthood, stressing “an incarnate subject who is vulnerable to others as a body.”41 Although vulnerability is bound up in the acknowledgement of the self as susceptible to injury and violence, Murphy suggests that it has become the potential ground for a relational ethics “attuned to the non-violent realization of mutual dependence and exposure…a dimension of availability to the other that is not necessarily violent.”42 Murphy thus summarises the work of Butler and Cavarero as vital to an emerging corporeal humanism. In contradistinction to the humanist thrust Murphy attributes to those such as Butler and Cavarero, Anat Pick has sought to weave an ethics of vulnerability across the apparent species divide. Pick draws upon the work of those such as Simone Weil to posit a beautiful fragility to all embodied being. Her resulting “creaturely poetics” thus shares in the bodily focus of other explorations of vulnerability as she calls for a recognition of the “corporeal reality of living bodies” across the boundary still drawn between the human and the non-human.43 Pick’s discussion of a “creaturely” vulnerability certainly resonates with Perishables in which whiteness, ageing femininity and meat are brought together in a conjoined nexus to stress the material and finite aspects of embodied existence. However, the exposure of such ontological fragility is not borne equally within this triad. In her work, Nicole Shukin argues that animals are typically seen to possess an “ostensibly transparent literality” and, accordingly, meat is seen as one of the most “ostensibly literal currencies of animal life.”44 The notion that Perishables expresses a fundamental corporeal vulnerability at the heart of existence is similarly grounded in the reification of a “thereness” or material facticity to meat that highlights 39

See Ibid., and Horyn, “Shelf Life.” She discusses Caverero, Relating and Butler, Precarious and Account, see Murphy, “Corporeal.” 41 Ibid., 576, emphasis in original. 42 Ibid., 577. 43 Pick, Creaturely, 3. 44 Shukin, Animal, 27. 40

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an essential or profound truth—in this instance, the ultimate ephemerality of life. The impression that the animal bears the “hard truth” of existence is further heightened by the particular harnessing of offal and intestines within the series, whose consumption has become increasingly viewed within some quarters of popular culture as a brave confrontation with material frankness that similarly conflates animal body with sheer viscera.45 In an interview with Annie Potts, Carol Adams specifically castigates Yolaçan not only for using older women as “vehicles for rotting flesh.”46 Moreover, she argues that “Yolaçan actually creates, facilitates, and necessitates the impermanence of beings.”47 To see women as solely bearing the weight of putrefaction in Perishables thus leaves unexamined the implicit literal materiality concurrently attributed to the animal. This obscures the way that the series also seizes upon animal body as the supposedly transparent vehicle of putrefaction, finitude and death. Such an understanding of meat solely as a vessel of raw presence obscures the symbolic slippages that also run throughout Perishables. The use of animal body to convey the property of vulnerability—property in the sense of an inextricable ontological fact of embodiment—masks the transformation of animal body into property—or possession—of the white subject, as meat becomes woven into an elegant costume of mortality, able to be shed or worn at will. Appropriation thus becomes incorporation: the continued violent seizure of the animal is thus displaced by an understanding of the animal body as “literal” or self-evident materiality. Such easy slippage between these two interrelated understandings of property invites one to examine the potential valence in “owning” vulnerability. Rather than see vulnerability as a painful exposure for whiteness, perhaps the wearing of one’s meat on one’s sleeve—a metaphor for openness figured here through meat clothing—serves to reconsolidate the white subject as the paradigmatic site of a corporeal humanism rooted in responsivity, empathy, even ethicality? This would correspond to Dyer’s claim that the extremes of white representation are, in fact, rare. As he elaborates, “it is the combination of translucence and substance—not translucence alone—which really defines white representation.”48 To this degree, the revelation of mortality through the seized figure of the animal does not really serve to trouble the logics of whiteness; rather, it acts to solidify its privilege. Warning against the temptation to uncritically view bodies as “the aspect of physicality which 45

See Strong, “Offal.” Adams in Adams and Potts, “Politics,” 17. 47 Ibid. 48 Dyer, White, 116. 46

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is real and true,” Johanna Drucker suggests that the “return to flesh” found in contemporary art should be understood less as a claim to “greater truth” than as a more “productive story.”49 In Perishables, this productive story offers us the vulnerability of fleshliness, yet this is garnered through the fragilisation of animal life. Displacing death onto animal body as a costume of vulnerability, this is, as Lewis Johnson suggests of Sterbak’s Flesh Dress, “meat put on as garment, never to be undressed as meat.”50 Perishables thus leaves us with an overarching impression that whiteness has in some sense escaped, that it is never quite fully implicated in a fully material—that is, a fully mortal—ontology.

Wearing Death, Bearing Death The unruly texture of meat, layered over its implied aesthetic double, ageing skin, not only unsettles the harmonious surface of Perishables. It also disrupts the internal logic of white representational strategies as Yolaçan’s photographs surface an uncomfortable “truth” about (white) embodiment; this is its “meatiness,” its mortality. Grafting the racist aesthetics of nineteenth-century ethnographic imagery onto portraits that simultaneously evoke the reification of white bourgeois subjects in Victorian photography, Perishables refracts these historical processes of othering onto its subjects. The revelation of mortality signalled by meat thus undermines the tendency of whiteness to be depicted as an etherealised ideal that transcends the limitations of the earthly realm. That such exposure is borne by older women is troubling. As a gesture to the enduring tendency to figure ageing femininity as a troublesome, undesirable, unproductive and overall deathly body, the dressing of these subjects in meat serves to position older women as the potent crack in the white imaginary. However, the shared textural qualities of raw meat and aged skin pull us into the image, encouraging a haptic vision that invites us to enter into a tactile encounter with these photographs. This embodied seeing allows the portraits to intimate a corporeal vulnerability that cannot be easily displaced onto a distanced other. In so doing, Perishables confronts whiteness with a tactile recognition of the fragility and finitude of embodied being through, rather than at the expense of, ageing femininity. At the same time, the corporeal vulnerability seemingly articulated by Perishables is dependent upon the seizure and use of animals as meat. Taken to register as a kind of pre-discursive body, meat becomes the 49 50

Drucker, Sweet Dreams, 17. Johnson, “More and Less,” 176.

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means of expressing such vulnerability as an intrinsic facet of embodiment. Yet, interpreting meat solely as pure materiality obscures its concurrent transformation into a property or possession of whiteness within the portraits. Perishables thus presents us with a costume of mortality dependent upon the fragilisation of non-human others. Suggesting that there may be power in “owning” vulnerability, this process allows the white subject to slip through the net of mortality in an aesthetics that ultimately engages in disavowal. Perishables consequently leaves the animal both glaringly there and exposed in its supposed raw facticity, and yet somehow still absent, dissolved into a sign of human vulnerability. As the white ageing feminine subject wears death in Perishables, the animal ultimately bears it.

Acknowledgements I would like to offer many thanks to Michele Aaron for her invaluable feedback and support throughout the publication process. I am furthermore indebted to Jackie Stacey; her generous comments on numerous drafts of this chapter have proven vital in the development of this piece, as have our thought-provoking discussions of the Perishables series over the past year. I am very grateful to Monica Pearl for recommending me for the volume; I also thank Monica and Daniella Caselli for their careful readings of an earlier draft of this chapter. I would lastly like to acknowledge my gratitude to Pinar Yolaçan for kindly allowing me to utilise two images from her photographic series Perishables, which continues to fascinate and provoke me in equal measure.

Works Cited Primary Sources Yolaçan, Pinar. 2002. Untitled, Photographic Image. C-print, 40" x 32 3/8". —. 2003. Untitled, Photographic Image. C-print, 40" x 32 3/8".

Secondary Sources Adams, C. J. and A. Potts. “The Politics of Carol J Adams.” Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 14 (2009): 12-24. Ahmed, S. and J. Stacey. “Introduction: Dermographies.” In Thinking Through the Skin, edited by Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, 1-18. London: Routledge, 2001.

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Bakhtin, M. Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswolsky. Indiana: Bloomington University Press, 1984. Big Shiny Thing (http://www.bigshinything.com/2005/02/pinar-yolcacan/). Bint, R. E. “The Bad Faith of Whiteness.” In What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, edited by George Yancy, 107-42. New York: Routledge, 2004. Book of Joe (http://www.bookofjoe.com/2004/11/pinar_yolacan_i.html). Butler, J. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004. —. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Cavarero, A. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, translated by Paul Kottmann. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. —. Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, translated by William McCuaig. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Connor, S. The Book of Skin, London: Reaction Books, 2004. Cristofovaci, A. “Touching Surfaces: Photography, Aging and Aesthetics of Change.” In Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, edited by Katherine M. Woodward, 268-96. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. —. Touching Surfaces: Photographic Aesthetics, Temporality, Aging, New York: Rodopi, 2009. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, T. Black Venus: Sexualised Savages, Primal Fears and Primitive Narratives in French. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1990. Drucker, J. Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity. London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Durden, M. “Negotiating Difference: The Transactions of Portraiture.” In Masquerade: Women’s Contemporary Portrait Photography, Vol. 2, edited by Kate Newton and Christine Rolph, 7-9. Cardiff: Ffotogallery, 2003. Dyer, R. White, London: Routledge, 1997. Ewing, W. A. “Pinar Yolaçan: Selected Work by Pinar Yolaçan.” Saatchi Gallery Website. 2012. http://www.saatchigallery.co.uk/artists/pinar_yolacan.htm?section_name=photography. Accessed online 30 June 2012. Frankenberg, R. Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

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Gill, A. “Deconstruction Fashion: The Making of Unfinished, Decomposing and Reassembled Clothes.” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 2, no. 1 (1998): 25-49. Greer, R. “Beyond the Frame: Narratives of Otherness.” In Masquerade: Women’s Contemporary Portrait Photography, Vol. 2, edited by Kate Newton and Christine Rolph, 106-11. Cardiff: Ffotogallery, 2003. Hack, J., and Pinar Yolaçan. “Interview: Day II, 26 May 2012 – Jefferson Hack. Pinar Yolaçan, Part I.” 2012. http://vimeo.com/44512424. Accessed online 2 July 2012. Haydaroƣlu, M. “Interview with Pinar Yolaçan.” Art Slant. http://www.artslant.com/ny/artists/rackroom/9439. Accessed online 17 October 2012. Hallam, E., et al. Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity. Padstow: Routledge, 1999. Hatry, H. “Meat after Meat Joy.” 2008. http://daneyalmahmood.com/meataftermeatjoy_pr.html. Accessed online 4 June 2009. Horyn, C. “A Shelf Life So Short It Takes Your Breath Away.” New York Times (Nov 16 2004). http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940CE6DD153FF935 A25752C1A9629C8B63&pagewanted=all). Accessed online 5 December 2011. Johnson, L. “More and Less Than Objects: Inapproachable Alterity and the work of Jana Sterbak and Rosemarie Trochal.” In Other than Identity: The Subject, Politics and Art, edited by Juliet Steyn, 169-84. Glasgow: Manchester University Press, 1997. Korsmeyer, C. Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2004. Lalvai, S. Photography, Vision and the Production of Modern Bodies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Marks, L. U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Trauma, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. McGarry, K. “Greater New Yorkers: Pinar Yolaçan.” New York Times (May 20 2010). http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/greater-new-yorkerspinar-yolacan/. Accessed online 5 December 2011. Meagher, M. “Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust.” Hypatia 18, no. 4 (2003): 23-42. Murphy, A. V. “Corporeal Vulnerability and the New Humanism.” Hypatia 26, no. 3 (2011): 576-90.

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Nelson, C. A. Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art. New York: Routledge, 2010. Patton, V. K. Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: SUNY Press, 2000. Pick, A. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Redmond, S. “The Whiteness of The Rings.” In The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, edited by Daniel Benardi, 91-101. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008. Russo, M. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 1994. Shukin, N. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Strong, J. “The Modern Offal Eater.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 6, no. 2 (2006): 30-9. Speer, R. “Couture von Carne.” Willamette Week (2 March 2005). http://www.wweek.com/portland/print-article-4148-print.html. Accessed online 5 December 2011. Sterbak, J. Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic. T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1987. Taylor, J. S. “Surfacing the Body Interior.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (2005): 741-56. Twine, R. “Physiognomy, Phrenology and the Temporality of the Body.” Body and Society 8 (2002): 67-88. We Make Money Not Art (http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives /2004/11/pinar-yolacan-i.php) Yancy, G., ed. What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. New York: Routledge, 2004.

CHAPTER FOUR GAZING AT AIDS MONICA B. PEARL

From its inception as a health crisis, AIDS has been caught up in the demands of representation. The first AIDS novel, Facing It by Paul Reed, came out in 1984, three years after the first symptoms of what would come to be known as AIDS were reported in The New York Times on July 3, 1981.1 This was followed by a proliferation of AIDS literature, which appeared in earnest by 1988. As Is, the AIDS play by William M. Hoffman, was first presented at New York’s Circle Repertory Company on March 10, 1985, and opened on Broadway on May 1 of that year. Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart was first produced in 1985, though he started writing it as early as 1983. A poem by Alfred Corn appears in 1984; poems by Marilyn Hacker, Michael Lassell, and Paul Mariah in 1985. Almost immediately, the experience of AIDS and its losses were rendered into stories and descriptions, given representation in words. But the art of AIDS, the visual representation of AIDS—particularly representations of individuals with AIDS—emerged more slowly and slightly later, and has been controversial. It has been controversial partially in regard to whom is represented, and more profoundly in how their representation affects, benefits, or constrains people living with AIDS— their bodies or other aspects of their lives—and also, importantly, how their representation affects those for whom AIDS is nothing but representation. Films, for example, both independent and mainstream films about AIDS, emerged only years after written and even staged representation emerged. There was a scattering of films that came relatively early: Buddies (Arthur J. Bressan Jr.) and An Early Frost (John Erman) in 1985, Parting Glances (Bill Sherwood) in 1986, Longtime Companion (Norman René) in 1989. But it was not until 1993 that the first mainstream AIDS 1

Altman, “Rare Cancer.”

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film was made, Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993), and this seemed to be the watershed for filmic representation of HIV and AIDS in mainstream culture. There is another significant realm of visual AIDS representation, which has incurred much more controversy than the filmic representations. The controversy surrounding films was mainly about frustrated demand to force it to happen: until Philadelphia there were no mainstream filmic depictions of a person with AIDS, sympathetic or otherwise. Photographs—that is, still visual images—of people with AIDS, although seen by relatively few viewers in contrast to feature films, have been the most incendiary of representations—perhaps because they have no narrative to explain them; they seem to speak for themselves. Susan Sontag, in her book Regarding the Pain of Others, makes this very point: “Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.”2 There is a lot of pressure on the still visual image to be legible without obvious or overt narrative.

Looking at Photographs In 1988 the photographs of Nicholas Nixon, on exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, fomented heated controversy. Nixon’s exhibition People with AIDS portrayed individuals with AIDS in the final stages of illness: emaciated, covered in Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, unable to stand or hold themselves upright or otherwise care for themselves.3 The show was widely criticized for how it displayed people with AIDS as only ill, only dying, with no social or political context. The AIDS activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) protested this exhibition with flyers that demanded “No More Pictures Without Context.” The flyer explained that in “portraying PWAs as people to be pitied or feared, as people alone and lonely, we believe that this show perpetuates general misconceptions about AIDS without addressing the realities of those of us living every day with this crisis…” The flyer ends with this mandate: “We demand the visibility of PWAs who are vibrant, angry, loving, sexy, beautiful, acting up and fighting back. Stop Looking 2

Sontag, Regarding, 89. See, for example, “Donald Perham, Milford, New Hampshire”: http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3 A4315%7CA%3AAR%3AE%3A1&page_number=72&template_id=1&sort_order =1

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At Us; Start Listening To Us.”4 Roger Hallas has commented that “the recurrent images of emaciated gay men in hospital beds that circulated in the press during the first decade of AIDS often did more to sustain stigmatizing ideological narratives about homosexuality’s ‘innate pathology’ than they did to persuade readers to demand a greater political and medical response to the AIDS crisis.”5 Photographs were seen to hold a power of immediacy that made it matter very much how accurate—and more importantly, perhaps: how authentic—they were. Douglas Crimp comments that: For those of us who have paid careful attention to media representations of AIDS…what we see first and foremost in Nixon’s photographs is their reiteration of what we have already been told or shown about people with AIDS: that they are ravaged, disfigured, and debilitated by the syndrome; they are generally alone, desperate, but resigned to their ‘inevitable’ deaths. 6

The photographs might have been technically proficient and even appealing but the “story” they were telling was one that rehearsed the worn and perilous narrative of the “AIDS victim,” with no agency or anger. While I have suggested that still images do not have the power to convey narrative in the way that words might, nevertheless even narrative itself can construct and reproduce the still and agentless AIDS victim, in a very similar dynamic to what we see in Nixon’s photographs. In AIDS fiction where the person with AIDS is being “narrated” by a heterosexual man, there is a similar sculptural or photographic effect. In this way, these written AIDS narratives illuminate and expand our understanding of what is at stake in visualising AIDS; we see how AIDS illness and death are constructed by the gaze.

Looking in Fiction In the 1994 novel, As Max Saw It, Max watches Toby get ill as though he is watching a piece of art take shape.7 He immobilises Toby’s body in his sculptural description: “Death is the greatest of sculptors. His modeling knife had removed all but the most indispensable matter from Toby’s face, indenting the cheeks and lengthening and refining the nose, until it had 4 Text of flyer reproduced in Crimp, Cultural, reprinted in Crimp, “Portraits,” 87; in Grover, “Lesions,” 39-40; and Sturken, Tangled, 154-55. 5 Hallas, Reframing, 12. 6 Crimp, “Portraits,” 86. 7 Begley, Max.

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taken the form of a coin made of yellow and gray alabaster.”8 Max’s role is that of observer, unimplicated in illness, in sexuality, and in death. By establishing firm boundaries in his description of Toby’s waning body, Max protects himself against identification and infection. If part of the fear of illness is the body made permeable, then Max makes the ill body he is confronting solid. Similarly, in Dennis McFarland’s short story, “Nothing to Ask For,” two ill characters—Mack and Mr. Mears (“The two men look very much alike, though Mr. Mears is not nearly as emaciated as Mack. And of course Mr. Mears is eighty-seven”)—are snapped still in a photograph, from which Dan just manages to avoid being captured: “I stand up and step aside just in time for Mrs. Mears to snap the picture.”9 The attempt to solidify and immobilise the body of the ill other exposes an anxiety on the part of the heterosexual narrator, a combined effort to intervene, seen in the behavior of caretaking, and to maintain distance, by using such descriptive terms as to maintain a separation. In fiction, looking at and interacting with a person with AIDS is highly determined and circumscribed by who is looking or narrating. The relationship between a heterosexual male narrator and a gay man whose experiences and illnesses he chronicles is often one of voyeurism. The narrators maintain a voyeuristic perspective in order to establish distance between themselves and the gay male characters they watch. This distance is established by descriptively immobilising the bodies of the ill and gay other. Immobilising serves a dual purpose: to maintain distance and also to keep the watched other’s ill body intact, so that infection or homosexuality will not “leak” out onto the narrator. Fluids and illness must be contained, barriers always reinforced. A psychoanalytic term, voyeurism is traditionally considered to be a sexual mechanism. It is the counterpart to exhibitionism. In traditional psychoanalysis, voyeurism is a psychic mechanism intended to maintain the fantasy of separation between male and female: “In the case of scopophilia, the active and passive positions become coded as masculine and feminine respectively (following the oedipal correlation of activity with masculinity and passivity with femininity and castration).”10 Here, however, I suggest that the mechanism of voyeurism is employed to maintain the fantasy of separation between heterosexuality and homosexuality.

8

Ibid., 129. McFarland, “Nothing,” 50. The story was first published in The New Yorker, September 25, 1989. 10 Grosz, “Voyeurism,” 448. 9

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What this does of course is render the ill into objects. Voyeurism must have an object, and the witnesses conceive of no other way, without becoming implicated themselves in illness and homosexuality, of attending to their dying friends. Max asks in a rare moment of introspection that leads to no resolution or change in behavior, “But did I have the right to observe in silence; had I not assumed some sort of responsibility for how he was cared for?”11 The ill must be rendered to some degree passive objects. The traditional paradigm of voyeurism is men watching, women being watched (deliberately showing themselves off). In “the case of scopophilia”—of which “voyeurism and exhibitionism are the active and passive forms”—“the active and passive positions become coded as masculine and feminine respectively.”12 The well male heterosexual witnesses in rendering their ill friends objects, are also needing to preserve their masculinity by rendering their ill friends feminine, thus preserving stereotypes of gay as feminine and participating in some of the clichés of AIDS discourse, that by preserving their masculinity and protecting against any violation or penetration, for example, they will protect themselves from becoming or being gay and therefore from becoming or being ill and then ultimately from dying. In these narratives the heterosexual male figure struggles against being made, for a mainstream text, uncharacteristically marginal, not the centre of attention. Max is privileged as the narrator, but his gaze is always on Charlie and Toby, the gay men in the book. However, the gay men determine the course of narration; they run the narrative. In McFarland’s story there is a loaded scene when Dan confesses survivor’s guilt (over his best friend, Mack, who is dying), and Lester, Mack’s HIV-positive lover, in a moment of pernicious egalitarianism, offers Dan the opportunity to erase the guilt, to become infected himself (and therefore “gay,” in some measure, since the method of infection Lester is suggesting requires maleto-male physical contact). Lester says to him, “Danny boy, if you feel guilty about surviving...that’s not irreversible, you know. I could fix that.”13 The narrator then explains, “We were both stunned.” It is as though to be a heterosexual male is to disallow and disavow any penetration whatsoever, whether sexual or viral: the more one can reinforce one’s heterosexuality the more one has closed up all ports of entry; one is whole and therefore impenetrable and therefore not susceptible to (this) illness and death. This is why Lester’s suggestion that 11

McFarland, “Nothing,” 125. Grosz, “Voyeurism,” 447 and 448. 13 McFarland, “Nothing,” 53. 12

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they “could fix that” is so shocking, because he is threatening not only the sanctity of Dan’s health but his girded heterosexuality, his impenetrability. All his safety here is threatened. In Louis Begley’s novel, As Max Saw It, it is not so shocking to want to be implicated in disease if you are already implicated in being gay. A gay man might not be so “stunned” by such an implication. Max hears Charlie’s “confession” of his deeds when his lover Toby is already quite ill. Charlie “unfolds his tale” of a recent night with Toby, in the present tense: I have always been proud of my teeth. If you haven’t noticed before, look: they are white and perfect, as though I had had them capped, but they are, in fact, entirely my own. The only time my gums bled is when I have been hit on the mouth in the boxing ring. I take a metal fingernail file in the bathroom and cut my gums savagely. Crisscross. Also the insides of my cheeks. Then I go in to him....I kneel down at the side of the bed....I caress him....He thinks I want him, turns toward me....I rise from my knees, grab his waist, stoop, and take him. His stomach, his buttocks, heave against my hands. A moment later, it has been done, sealed!14

Charlie is implicated and engaged with Toby in a way Max cannot imagine and in his safety as a witness, does not need to. Charlie exchanges fluids with Toby, does not need to render Toby’s body solid in description or act. The AIDS crisis created a scenario where heterosexual men could look at gay men’s bodies—often in various stages of disintegration—in a disinterested way. But in fact disinterest cannot be the primary mode of looking when the object of the gaze is dying or when homosexuality is such an important signifier. That there might be unexpected interest, or desire, in the gaze, even under extremely infelicitous circumstances, generates an urgency for the narrator to immobilise and solidify the body of the other in order to sustain the illusion of a disinterested gaze but also must maintain the weakness and penetrability of the other. Like Nicholas Nixon and his wife Bebe Nixon, the narrators in the fiction are looking at a distance. The controversy over the photographic portraits was exacerbated when, with artistic colleague Bebe Nixon, Nicholas Nixon wrote, “We never knew them when they were well. We only knew them when they were sick, terribly sick, and we knew them only because they were sick.” Similarly, the narrators in the fiction become unwilling but still fascinated voyeurs, turning their friends into exhibitionists to fulfill their ambivalent desire to look, and also their 14

Begley, Max, 144.

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ambivalent sexual desire. By establishing voyeurism—watching—as the primary interaction between themselves and the ill they minimise the possibility of any other connection—that is, a physical one. The gaze allows distance and also establishes the gaze as the only permissible or possible relationship between them. This is especially so when the gaze is such that it immobilises the other. Voyeurism is the desire to look along with the desire that an Other will show (exhibit) themselves to you, or make themselves an object. This is accomplished by rendering them an object, descriptively immobilising them, or casting them as feminine (therefore penetrable). The look itself is invested with desire, can be said to be “penetrating,” establishing the narrator as the penetrator, the active figure in their coupled alliance of friendship. Max wants to look but also disavows the object of his desire. The disavowal is evident in the immobilisation of the ill other. The looking (and the care in describing) signals the desire. The voyeur both desires and is acutely threatened by the object of desire/repudiation. In one scene, after Max has ascertained that it was Toby with whom his wife Camilla had had an affair, he saves himself from shame or anger by dismissing Toby as “a little fruit.”15 I have suggested that cinema came relatively late to the scene of AIDS representation, and that photographs seemed to struggle to do what the moving image can capture. Simon Watney suggests this very reason for artists relying on video rather than the still image to document or make art out of the AIDS calamity: “This is precisely why so many artists have turned to video.”16 Nevertheless, the early wonderful film Parting Glances from 1986 anticipates and addresses this very difficulty. There is no villain in the film—it is after all a portrait of love and life and attempts to make art in New York during the crisis’s early years—but the most odious character is a heterosexual performance artist who at a party in a loft in Manhattan, surrounded by gays, is suddenly inspired to construct a ghoulish tableau of people dying of AIDS: “I’d like to stage a piece in which all of the performers are people who are terminally ill. Can you imagine the intensity, the concentration of purpose? Inspired by the sight of Nick (Steve Buscemi) whom he learns has AIDS, he tries to enjoin him to be “all gnarled and terminally ill” in his performance. . It is conveyed clearly in the film that this kind of voyeuristic artistic interest in “AIDS victims” is contemptible. 15 16

Ibid., 101. Watney, Imagine Hope, 101.

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As in the fiction, as we have just seen, the images in the Nixon exhibition were criticised for lack of context, as I have elaborated, but also for the way the objects of the gaze are immobilised. Bethany Ogdon explains how the particular photographic procedure employed by Nixon meant that no one was looking at the photograph’s subject at the moment the photograph was taken. “To trigger the shutter” of the 8 x 10 view camera, Ogdon explains, “the photographer must emerge from under the drape and stand or sit apart from the camera.”17 The “uncanny” or “invasive” experience of viewing these photographs, argues Ogdon, derives from this “lengthy, cumbersome procedure” that “basically requires immobile subjects.”18 The photographer is doing to his subject precisely what I will suggest heterosexual male narrators do to their subjects of narration in fiction: immobilising them, and therefore recapitulating that same dynamic between spectator and object of the gaze in viewing Nixon’s photographs. “Because the photographic subject’s gaze doesn’t meet the viewer’s, the viewer may feel placed in the uncomfortable position of voyeur,”19 Ogdon observes. This is not the only way to understand the representation of people living with, dying from, or—indeed—already dead from AIDS. The looking that happens in the fictional examples is repeated in certain photographs, as we have seen: the ones that are so heavily criticised for making objects out of the ill individuals. While it might be thought that there is no escape from this paradigm: after all, a photograph is precisely a still image, it is not the case that stillness means objectification. Indeed, even in death—the most still one imagines one can or be made to be—the photograph can nevertheless still animate or subjugate.

Felix Let us consider a photograph by the artist AA Bronson called Felix, June 5, 1994 with such analyses and reproaches in mind: “No More Pictures Without Context.” The photograph, as it is encountered in the gallery, is huge: h: 84 x w: 168 in / h: 213.4 x w: 426.7 cm. The very large photograph shows a man, gaunt and wide eyed, wearing and lying amidst bright solid colours—yellow, red, blue, purple—and wildly contrasting patterns. He is reclining against brightly coloured cushions

17

Ogdon, “Through the Image, 80. Ibid., 80. 19 Ibid., 81. 18

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with blankets and quilts around and under and next to him: “a Klimt-like collision of patterns and bright colours.”20 The image is very beautiful. And also shocking. It is shocking and beautiful and upsetting when perhaps we initially do not know the context or story of the photograph, but even more so when we do, when we are led to understand that the figure in the photograph is not ill, is not suffering, is not wasting away, but dead, already dead. Bronson wrote: “I made the photograph of Felix…a few hours after his death. He is arranged to receive visitors, and his favorite objects are gathered around him: his television remote control, his tape-recorder, and his cigarettes.”21 The photograph is not a close-up; we immediately have the context of the man’s surroundings. And, most crucially, it is not without a wider context; it is not anonymous. Felix, June 5, 1994. It is a photograph of someone very particular, with a name, Felix—Felix Partz—with relationships: with a relationship to—a long standing friendship and art partnership with—the photographer, AA Bronson. Felix’s friend, AA Bronson, on the day of Felix’s death, June 5, 1994, had known Felix and made art with Felix, along with the third member of the art collective General Idea, Jorge Zontal, since 1969. Felix’s friend, through his camera, looks at Felix; through this photograph, he is forever looking at Felix; and through whom, therefore, we look at Felix. We are asked to look. Asked? Consider the size of the photograph. Look at the brilliant textures and colours. We must look. And what happens when we look? Are we repelled, are we warned, cautioned, terrified? Perhaps. Of his experience of taking the photograph, Bronson says that he had “the feeling of a sort of terror mixed with intimacy and love, a sort of tenderness coated in crushed glass.”22 The mix of beauty and terror makes an unsettling elixir. If there is controversy or peril in this work, what makes it dangerous— dangerous to look at—is not uncanniness or invasiveness—it is not controversy, but it is beauty: that we might find beautiful—that we are compelled to find astonishing—the figure of, the surroundings of, the temporal aftermath of—a man who is dead. Always just dead. There is perhaps a problem of beauty in the art of AIDS: the dilemma of finding beautiful what is very harrowing. Except in high art—fine literature and 20

Watkins, “Foreword,” unpaginated. See http://whitney.org/Collection/AABronson/2003268 and http://artlystlondon.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/aa-bronson-resolves-nationalportrait.html 21 Bronson, * unpaginated. 22 Bronson, interviewed by Matthias Hermann, unpaginated.

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allegorical art—when we are invited to ponder loftily our own mortality— except then—we are not supposed to find death beautiful. It controverts all the correct responses to death: mourning, grief, horror, dread, pity. This photograph (unlike, incidentally, the AIDS quilt, which this photograph also can’t help but call to mind) is anti-elegiac. It is not a lament. It is not sentimental. It is not a metaphor. It is replete with context and connection. In Bill Arning’s reading of Felix, June 5, 1994 he writes that the photograph is “complex in its graphic depiction.…Yet this is also a depiction of love. Felix is surrounded by evidence that he was cared for by those who loved him.” “That this photograph was taken at all,” Arning continues, “testifies that there was a friend present at the end who wanted to remember his face—even when disease had made his visage strange and awful to those who did not know him.”23 Indeed, Bronson suggests that he was not the artist who made this work, but only the recorder of the tableau: “Felix controlled the creation of his own image, in the conscious act of dying. My idea was simply to record what he had created, to look over his shoulder, as it were, and see how he saw himself, how he intended others should see him. He was not a victim being depicted; he was the artist himself.”24 In the immediate aftermath of the death of his lover Hubert Sorin, Edmund White scratched out the Introduction to the book of written and drawn sketches that they had been collaborating on: “Hubert Sorin, my lover, who died just two hours ago in the Polyclinique du Sud Marrakesh, was an architect who turned himself into an illustrator with a remarkable patience and diligence and above all with a flair for capitalizing on his talents and pictorial discoveries.”25 In “The Photo,” White describes a photograph taken by the photographer Rollie McKenna of Hubert Sorin, in the last sixty days before his death. “Now that he is dead,” White writes, “I often look at this picture.”26 He also notes that “Hubert hated any new photograph [of himself], sure evidence of his rapid and disastrous decline….Rollie’s picture changed all that. Suddenly he could see a new beauty in his face.”27 Although Hubert was extremely handsome when Edmund White first met him five years before, White writes, “Maybe I’m crazy but I think Hubert was more beautiful at the end than he was when I first met him. Five years ago of course he made heads turn, he was the elegant young Parisian, he was manly and graceful and wonderfully 23

Arning, “Foreword,” unpaginated. Bronson, interviewed by Matthias Hermann, unpaginated. 25 White and Sorin, Sketches from Memory, 1. 26 White, “The Photo,” 446. 27 Ibid., 447. 24

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polite—that uniquely French combination of virility and elegance. But he earned that face that Rollie found. Before, he looked like dozens of cute guys, but there, at the end, he had an etched, lined, starved beauty that he’d achieved and I’m proud of it and of him.”28 These passages from White suggest that beauty itself comes from context: that even when there is horror and fear, intimacy and knowledge create beauty. These “portraits”—of Felix Partz and Hubert Sorin, for example—show that context does not have to mean healthy or unblemished or unravaged, necessarily, but that the individual is shown in his or her particularity, that even if the ill other is very ill, or dying, or even dead, that he or she will be rendered with some vibrancy and animation. At the very moment of the death of his erstwhile lover and artistic mentor Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz recorded his friend in every way he could think of. When everyone left the room I closed the door and pulled the super-8 camera out of my bag and did a sweep of his bed: his open eye, his open mouth, that beautiful hand with the hint of gauze at the wrist that held the i.v. needle, the color of his hand like marble, the full sense of the flesh of it. Then the still camera: portraits of his amazing feet, his head, that open eye again.29

He also recorded the death in another way—writing: “this body of my friend on the bed this body of my brother my father my emotional link to the world this body.”30 The black and white image of Hujar’s face that is most circulated from Wojnarowicz’s intense gaze—his eyes not fully closed, his mouth open— is intimate. It is taken close up, but the context here is not only the other photographs and body parts but, as with Bronson and Partz, the extant intimacy of their relationship, the intimacy that survives the death. Sontag comments that, “[t]ransforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems ‘aesthetic’; that is, too much like art.”31 And the picture of Felix, dead, amid his possessions, does look very beautiful, very much like art. But it does not offend. Because it is intimate and bespeaks of intimacy. 28

Ibid., 448. Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, 102. See http://www.artlog.com/2012/478fire-in-the-belly-art-aids-and-politics-in-the-life-of-david-wojnarowicz#.UUbmRwqx8E 30 Ibid., 103. 31 Sontag, Regarding, 76. 29

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Looking and Entering It is hard to measure engagement and intimacy—animation and immobilisation—especially in static photographs. In leading up to his distinction between the studium and the punctum in photographs, Roland Barthes tries to grapple with this very measure: how to describe and account for that feeling of fascination and motion—being moved—by a photograph. He writes: I decided then to take as a guide for my new analysis the attraction I felt for certain photographs. For this attraction, at least, I was certain. What to call it? Fascination? No, this photograph which I pick out and which I love has nothing in common with the shiny point which sways before our eyes and makes your head swim; what it produces in me is the very opposite of hebetude; something more like an internal agitation, an excitement, a certain labor too, the pressure of the unspeakable which wants to be spoken. Well, then? Interest?32

If studium is “a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment...but without special acuity,”33 the punctum is a wound: a “photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me.)”34 When he describes that in “this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it,”35 Barthes renders the motility—the animation—of the still photograph, if hard to describe or identify, nevertheless the defining feature of how and whether we are engaged by art, indeed entered. Both Wojnarowicz and Bronson speak in this way, of the porous intimacy between body and photograph. After filming and photographing his dear friend Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz claims that his friend is now inscribed on his eyeballs: “And his death is now as if it’s printed on celluloid on the backs of my eyes.”36 In a reverse process, but nevertheless describing the ways that some art is so engaged as to figuratively penetrate the artist’s body, AA Bronson describes the process by which he detaches himself from Felix through the act of displaying this photograph: Since Jorge and Felix died, I have been struggling to find the limits of my body as an independent organism, as a being outside of General Idea. Over 32

Barthes, Lucida, 18-19. Ibid., 26. 34 Ibid., 27. 35 Ibid., 20. 36 Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, 102. 33

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the last five years I have found myself much like a stroke victim, learning again the limits of my nervous system, how to function without my extended body…37

He describes that it is “like escaping from my own skin”; for Bronson the photograph is the connection and therefore the possibility of release, of separation: “Dear Felix, by the act of exhibiting this image in this exhibition I declare that we are no longer of one mind, one body. I return you to General Idea’s world of mass media, there to function without me.”

Conclusion In this essay I have suggested something perhaps paradoxical: that photographic images of the dead can be the most animate and the most intimate. For those immersed in the AIDS crisis, implicated, not gazing at it from a “safe” distance, death was normal—human. Sarah Schulman conveys this sensibility when in her novel Rat Bohemia the protagonist explains (in response to a friend’s worry of his own death from AIDS): “People we know die all the time and there is no way to react....I can see how appalled he is at how little any of us react to AIDS deaths.”38 That people became accustomed to AIDS deaths did not render the deaths less horrible. When Roland Barthes is accused of talking “about Death very flatly,” his response is: “As if the horror of Death were not precisely its platitude!”39 Perhaps the difference then is whether the visualising of the person with AIDS dramatises illness and death or treats death and infirmity intimately, familiarly, whether one is gazing with horror or tenderness. The photograph of the dead can certify, Barthes tells us, “that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing.”40 These animate intimate photographs offer no metaphors: they are not auguries of universal experience, but singular: this person, this moment, this feeling: ill, alive, dying, or dead—right now.

37

Bronson, Vienna Secession catalogue, unpaginated. Schulman, Rat Bohemia , 44. 39 Barthes, Lucida, 92. 40 Ibid., emphasis in original. 38

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Works Cited Altman, L. K. “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” The New York Times. July 3, 1981. Arning, B. “Foreword,” AA Bronson, Mirror Mirror, exhibition catalogue, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA, 2002. Bronson, A. A. interviewed by Matthias Hermann, Felix. June 5th. 1994, Ikon Gallery catalogue, Birmingham, 2003. —. Mirror Mirror, exhibition catalogue. MIT List Visual Arts Center. Cambridge, MA, 2002. —. Exhibition catalogue. Secession, Vienna, 2000. Barthes, R. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by R. Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Begley, L. As Max Saw It. New York: Knopf, 1994. Crimp, D. “Portraits of People with AIDS,” Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. —. “Portraits of People with AIDS.” In Cultural Studies, edited by L. Goldberg, C. Nelson and P. A. Treichler. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Hallas, R. Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009. Grosz, E. “Voyeurism/exhibitionism/the Gaze.” In Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, edited by E. Wright. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992. Grover, J. Z. “Visible Lesions: Images of the PWA in America.” In Fluid Exchanges: Artists and Critics in the AIDS Crisis, edited by J. Miller. London and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. McFarland, D. “Nothing to Ask For.” In The Way We Live Now: Short Stories from the AIDS Crisis, edited by S. O. Warner. 1989. New York: Citadel Press, 1995. Ogdon, B. “Through the Image: Nicholas Nixon’s ‘People with AIDS’.” Discourse 23, no. 3 (2001): 75-105. Schulman, S. Rat Bohemia. New York: Plume, 1995. Sontag, S. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003. Sturken, M. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. London and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Watkins, J. “Foreword,” A. A. Bronson, Felix. June 5th. 1994, Ikon Gallery catalogue, Birmingham, 2003.

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Watney, S. Imagine Hope: AIDS and Gay Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. White, E. “The Photo.” In Acting on AIDS: Sex, Drugs and Politics, edited by J. Oppenheimer and H. Reckitt. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997. —., and H. Sorin. Sketches from Memory: People and Places in the Heart of Our Paris. London: Chatto and Windus and Picador, 1994. Wojnarowicz, D. Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. New York: Vintage, 1991.

PART II MORTALITY AND MEDIA EVENT

CHAPTER FIVE NOWHERE MAN: JOHN LENNON AND SPECTRAL LIMINALITY CATH DAVIES

When the famous die, the media adopts an embalming process that allows stars and celebrities to remain present within visual culture. Through the repetition of familiar photographs, recordings and footage, stars are resurrected in a media afterlife, often preserved within familiar associations and identities. The star phenomenon is dependent on recognisability and star personas are constructed through a series of associations and characteristics that have been repeated throughout their career.1 This process is perpetuated after their demise and the circulation of their image at its most recognisable guarantees that the deceased remain visible. In a procedure that recalls that of the taxidermist, the dead are restored within media examples, maintaining a “living” presence despite ontological absence.2 Deceased stars therefore retain a posthumous visibility within visual culture, mummified within images of their living incarnation and it is possible to argue that their deaths are essentially erased in the media. Elliott’s study of John Lennon notes a displacement in the aftermath of his murder, where the media’s replaying of archive recordings and footage preoccupied with his living entity suggests a denial of his death.3 I have identified elsewhere this process at work in media coverage of dead stars including George Best, Princess Diana and Michael Jackson.4 Whilst not denying a traditional recycling of Lennon’s image that continues to occur in media representations since his demise, this chapter will specifically investigate an alternative perspective on Lennon’s image and, in the 1

Dyer, Stars. Davies, “Taxidermy.” 3 Elliott, Mourning. 4 See Davies, “Taxidermy” and “Re-Materialising.” 2

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process, highlight the notion that posthumous images of dead stars can encapsulate tensions concerning the recognition of death within visual culture. When star images are circulated posthumously, recognisable images that were frequently recycled during their lifetime form the foundation of their persona in the wake of their death. This reinforces particular associations that are synonymous with an embalming procedure. The embalming process is an integral component of socio-cultural rituals of death in the West,5 generating an acceptable manner of visualising the dead in its reconstruction of a lifelike appearance.6 Embalming guarantees that the dead remain recognisable when viewed, preserving the integrity of the cadaver and “humanising” the corpse.7 This exercise regulates the abject qualities of the corpse in its propensity to disintegrate and decompose, providing a disavowal of the reality that “the corpse is no longer a secure, bounded body.”8 Davis suggests that the face is used to “conceal the presence of death” in image cultures.9 Death is conspicuous in the threat to individual identity manifested in the loss of somatic form—a reminder of the instability of material embodiment.10 Embalming therefore is symptomatic of the need to acknowledge death only within restricted parameters, synonymous with the erasing of any suggestion of corporeal disintegration. The process of embalming in order to maintain a recognisable identity that is threatened in death is consistent with fetishism, a condition that seeks to disavow traumatic perceptions of abject embodiment.11 There is a compulsion to sanction death through the reiteration of a living entity, substituting absence with presence and thereby restoring the unruly soma that threatens to disintegrate with an illusion of stable embodiment. Drawing upon the paradox of presence and absence within media examples when the famous die, this chapter argues for a lack of displacement and concealment of death in examples of Lennon’s posthumous persona. Unlike many posthumous images of Lennon that recycle existing photographs and footage of him alive, a process that suggests that “the dark void generated by Lennon’s absence is for many of us, too threatening,” this study draws attention to examples that have 5

Ariès, Attitudes. See Schilling, Body. 7 Howarth, Death, 187. 8 Hallam in Howarth, Death, 186. 9 Davis, The Face, 107. 10 See Kristeva, Powers. 11 See Freud, Fetishism. 6

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creatively prevented a preservation of his image.12 These examples provide an alternative representation of the deceased star, one that encourages a visual foregrounding of death through a denial of traditional embalming signifiers. This chapter will reflect on John Lennon’s posthumous media persona and will identify recurring tropes that emerge in a range of visual culture examples appearing since his death. These case studies have been selected primarily because they draw upon existing photographs and footage of Lennon alive, in keeping with traditional media constructions of the dead, but remodel this footage thereby reconfiguring Lennon’s familiar identity in the process. It is the creative process of selecting, editing and doctoring Lennon’s image that is of interest here and this chapter outlines the implications of these reinterpretations. Questions also arise about the relationship between representations of dead stars and socio-cultural traditions of aesthetically documenting the deceased. In the process of tracing the visibility of death in the following examples, this investigation will also suggest that it is possible to preserve a recognisable star persona whilst enhancing a media identity that incorporates the aesthetics of death. In order to argue that discourses signifying death are prominent within Lennon’s persona after his murder, it is essential to ascertain how death’s presence is manifested visually within portraiture, photography and the moving image. If Lennon is reconstructed to incorporate allegorical motifs that represent death, in what form do these appear? Motifs signifying the presence of death within visual culture can be investigated by drawing upon Freud’s 1919 essay on the Uncanny, which examines the trope of liminality in relation to the dead. Freud equates the “uncanny” with uneasiness, which he attributes to a psychological positioning of the dead: “our unconscious has as little use now as it ever had for the idea of its own mortality.”13 A disavowal of death’s reality manifested in a fetishised embalming of images of the deceased results in the return of the repressed.14 Corporeal disintegration that is perpetuated within psychological and socio-cultural death rituals gradually resurfaces and can destabilise the fetish in the process. Motifs that characterise the uncanny therefore emerge as a consequence of the desire to suppress the realities of death and cultural artefacts are embedded with tropes that encourage uncanny responses.15 Liminal identities and the questioning of binaries—between life and death, animate and inanimate, presence and 12

Elliott, Mourning, 153. Freud, Uncanny, 148 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 13

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absence and the familiar and unfamiliar—characterise the uncanny.16 Bronfen and Goodwin note that “the cadaverous presence is such that it simultaneously occupies two places, the here and nowhere” and this is a reminder that the foregrounding of death within visual culture centres upon “an experience of liminality.”17 The notion of Lennon as “here and nowhere” can be investigated within discourses of disembodiment—Lennon can be viewed as inhabiting an intermediary space in relation to motifs of somatic disintegration.18 The abject dimensions of the corpse are aesthetically evoked through motifs of Lennon’s “incompleteness.” Portraits, photographs and moving images routinely position Lennon’s face within an ontological liminality, suggesting an incomplete somatic form and a face that is struggling to remain “whole” within the frame. This can be interpreted as an allegory for the deteriorating cadaver and this investigation argues therefore that death is present visually within the construction of Lennon as a partial subject (and object) in his posthumous media existence. Visual motifs that evoke intermediary spaces and somatic disintegration highlight a spectral identity for Lennon, thereby nurturing an uncanny presence within these images.

“It’s Getting Hard to be Someone”: Liminal Faces and Spaces in the Still Image Barthes maintained that at the heart of the still image is a confrontation with mortality suggesting that all photographs resonate with death.19 The process of reducing an animate figure to a frozen image evokes an aesthetic embalming of the subject. The photographic process captures the essence of mortality by reminding us of the transition from animate to inanimate being, “the living image of a dead thing.”20 The paradox of the photographic process is highlighted by its providing a document of a life that once existed, but at the same time, removing the essence of life and mortifying the subject. The correlation between the photographic medium and death is also acknowledged in Bazin’s study where he introduces visual culture’s preoccupation with “embalming the dead.”21 He maintains that there is a 16

Ibid. Bronfen, Death, 12 and Royle, Uncanny, 2. 18 Bronfen, Death, 12. 19 Barthes, Lucida. 20 Ibid., 79. 21 Bazin, Cinema, 9 17

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“mummy complex” evident within photography, illustrated by the “disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration.”22 The embalming process synonymous with photography is especially apparent in media coverage of the famous when they die, a process that I have identified previously as “technological taxidermy.”23 Whilst Barthes attests to the presence of death within the photographic image and the subsequent confrontation with mortality, Bazin considers the comforting qualities of the mummification of the living within this process. The preservation of the subject “enshrouded as it were in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact out of the distant past, in amber” disavows the reality of death by nurturing an image of the ontological form rendered intact, one that “preserves artificially his bodily appearance.”24 This is achieved through the repetition of photographs of the living that reinforces their presence within media formats, akin to the function of the taxidermist who “uses artifice and reconstruction in order to make the dead look alive.”25 The psychological effect of this process serves as a reminder of the relationship between a supposed acceptance of death and the concept of fetishism. The presence of the deceased manifested in the circulation of images of them in their lifelike incarnations, therefore offers a comforting restoration of embodiment that disavows absence. However, when original photographs of subjects provide the source material for artists, there is an inevitable modification of the preserved image within the creative process. This modification has implications not only for the embalming nature of the photograph but also for the notion of cultural taxidermy and the fetishistic recovery of a lifelike incarnation. Adapting existing photographs of Lennon is commonplace in artists’ portraits of the musician since his death. The decision to remodel familiar stills of Lennon’s face guarantees that the spectator will recognise the star by recalling the “original” photograph. Despite creating a familiar impression of Lennon whilst alive, many artists choose to reconfigure Lennon’s face thereby “doctoring” the original image. It is in the concept of re-interpretation, in the “added bits” so to speak, that uncanny motifs emerge. The following examples will be deconstructed as evidence of recurring images of Lennon that offer alternative representations within posthumous imagery.

22

Ibid., 9, 14. Davies, “Taxidermy.” 24 Bazin, Cinema, 14, 9. 25 Tobing-Rony, Third Eye, 14. 23

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Jay Russell has revisited The Beatles album’s inner sleeve photograph of Lennon from 1968 in his work.26 It is immediately noticeable that the singer’s face is highlighted as partially absent within the frame. The original photograph’s shadow cast across Lennon’s left cheek, has assumed another identity in Russell’s painting, as the artist suggests the gradual diminishment of Lennon’s features. The flesh of the face lacks any distinguishable form and deteriorates into darkness. The left side of his face is absent of flesh entirely and the lens of his glasses is hovering precariously over “nothingness.” It appears as though Lennon’s face is disintegrating into the surrounding abyss. This recall’s Van Alphen’s concept of the “bodyscape” that he attributed to Francis Bacon’s recurring representations of the body.27 The “bodyscape” trope refers to a lack of a distinguishable division between the physical body and its surrounding landscape, a lack of a decipherable space “in which the body can be framed or embedded.”28 In Russell’s painting, Lennon lacks a clearly defined “framing” that separates the physical from its backdrop. His flesh is integrated into the darkness, recalling Van Alphen’s discussion of how “space surrounding the body comes to hold bodily qualities into which the body decomposes. Lack of self is represented by a lack of shape.”29 It is the “lack of self” illustrated in the interweaving of the face and the space that operates here as a visual motif of death. The bodyscape trope in Russell’s painting therefore, can be seen as a signifier of Lennon’s somatic deterioration in death. The recognisable self is diminishing. It would seem that the death of the star is preventing a return to a whole somatic form as Lennon’s identity is positioned as partly present and partly absent. The trope of liminal embodiment has evoked a tension between presence and absence that represents a challenge to the traditional embalming processes of the photograph. The reconfiguration of Lennon’s recognisable face nurtures an uncanny presence that positions his identity as both instantly recognisable from existing photographs, but modified to establish a new identity emerging from this familiar form. The motifs that emerge in Russell’s portrait are exacerbated in the creative decision to reinterpret and reconfigure existing photographs of Lennon. These original documents of Lennon alive, embalmed through the technologies of photography, establish a familiarity within the spectator and evoke a response from recognising the image in a previous context. Freud identified tensions between the familiar and unfamiliar as a mark of 26

Russell, Lennon. Van Alphan, Francis Bacon. 28 Ibid., 147. 29 Ibid., 162. 27

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the uncanny and Russell’s modifications to recognisable images of Lennon’s face succeed in rendering the familiar face less comforting by reinterpreting the original image and evoking a sense of the unfamiliar in the process.30 Russell reinterprets Lennon’s image as art rather than photograph and the transition into portrait offers a space to reconfigure Lennon beyond the traditional repetition of the original picture. The use of recognisable photographs of Lennon that have been revised to evoke a spectral significance achieved through the familiar rendered unfamiliar, is also a technique adopted by Ralph Ueltzhoeffer. His Textportrait, a monochrome still of Lennon, is partially obscured by biographical details written in German. Nevertheless, Lennon’s recognisable features and iconic round spectacles infiltrate the typography.31 The black background creates the impression of the face emerging from the darkness. Shadows across his left side obscure the majority of the left eye socket, cheek and mouth and, as in Russell’s portrait, his face lacks form on this side. This creates the impression once again, that Lennon’s face has collapsed into the surrounding space. Ueltzhoeffer’s portrait offers a recognisable, but fragmented face that appears to be caught within a liminal space. The text appears to prevent Lennon from “becoming” completely into the space, evoking a spectral otherness reminiscent of the uncanny. His face assumes a spectral quality and incorporates aesthetic tropes that document his somatic absence. This seems to be the case when posthumous portraits draw upon existing photographs and painted recreations. Within these visual motifs of a disintegrating face retreating into the darkness—a spectral hovering between presence and absence—there is a consistent allegorical evocation of the uncanny. Posthumous reconfigurations of Lennon that involve creative interpretations of prior photographs therefore permit a space for emerging meanings rather than the preoccupation with repeating familiar images of the star ad infinitum. In each of the portraits identified so far, familiarity has been established through the artists’ reconfiguration of existing photographs of Lennon and thereby incorporating motifs that can be viewed as signifiers of a spectral identity and the presence of the uncanny within posthumous imagery. The trope of incomplete embodiment synonymous with the unruly somatic form of the cadaver is encapsulated in posthumous images that promote one of the most substantial characteristics of his media persona. Lennon’s most iconic identifiers are his round-rimmed spectacles 30 31

Freud, Uncanny. Ueltzhoeffer, Textportrait.

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and it is notable how often representations prioritise their presence, illustrating a familiar presence for the star whilst inscribing an uneasiness by obscuring or entirely omitting his eyes. Lennon’s glasses are an integral feature of his recognisable star persona and particularly pertinent in posthumous imagery. If the round glasses evoke a recognisable individuality for Lennon, they perform a similar function in posthumous portraiture. Lennon’s glasses permit a correlation between the familiar star persona and his material demise. They are the essential ingredient that assumes an iconic presence, retaining a familiarity from recollections of Lennon alive. In the examples provided in this chapter, regardless of the disintegrating facial features, the glasses provide a familiar identity for Lennon and function as yet another foregrounding of an uncanny presence. They convey more than an iconic signifier of his recognisability. They actually accentuate his diminishing embodiment. In each of these examples, spectacles frame the dark voids of his missing eyes. The glasses become necessary to reiterate an identifiable presence in absence for the star. Liminality is established through the motif of the glasses without eyes, thereby reinforcing an uncanny unease at Lennon being both present and absent simultaneously. This idea is furthered in posthumous examples where Lennon’s spectacles assume the core identity of the star. Yoko Ono’s 1981 Seasons of Glass album sleeve marks a crucial stage in the posthumous star’s media identity in this respect.32 Žižek notes that a feature of the uncanny is the “autonomous partial object” that can be illustrated in props, voices or bodily organs that assume an independent identity beyond the soma.33 Lennon’s ontological demise is often highlighted by reducing his identity to an inorganic object in the form of his spectacles that become a synecdoche that continues to be reiterated after his death. Released a year after the murder, Seasons of Glass is a mournful contemplation of life without her husband. Lennon’s absence is the prevailing theme and evident in the cover image of his blood-stained glasses that were worn as he died. The authenticity invoked by the blood and Ono’s decision to foreground his death so viscerally was particularly controversial. Ono violates the boundaries of what is considered palatable in documenting the dead, “People are offended by the glasses and the blood? The glasses are a tiny part of what happened…his whole body was bloody…that’s the reality.”34 There is a conscious decision on the artist’s 32

Ono, Seasons. Žižek, Pervert’s. 34 Ono in Elliott, Mourning, 151. 33

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part to not only allow the spectacles to provide an indexical presence of the dead star, thereby evoking his recognisable presence through his absent embodiment, but also to foreground his mortal form in the inclusion of the dried blood smeared across the lens of the glasses. This abject materiality of the body functions as a foregrounding of the reality of his death and disavows the comforting embalming process that is considered appropriate when the deceased are envisaged within visual culture. As Elliott suggests, “the shocking collision of glasses and blood …simply brought death too close to home.”35 If some posthumous images evoke a gradual deterioration of Lennon’s wholeness, the Seasons of Glass photograph erases his face entirely, leaving the last remnants of the recognisable persona signified by the spectacles. Ono’s image therefore consigns Lennon to the realms of the uncanny in its “commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar” and the unsettling tension provided in the dissolution of distinctions between organic embodiment and inorganic object.36 The spectacles are interwoven with a sense of liminal identity; Lennon’s face is notably absent but his recognisable form remains within the frame via an inorganic surrogate. Nevertheless, the effigy is shrouded in an organic identifier in the bloodstained lens that encapsulates violence and death. The glasses indicate Ono’s mourning process manifested in a hyper-investment in the “lost object” that “persists in the psyche.”37 The puncturing of the life/death, presence/absence and organic/inorganic binary within this image encapsulates the complexities of the act of grieving. The American film poster for the documentary, The US vs John Lennon (David Leaf and John Scheinfeld, 2006,) also reinforces this with its foregrounding of the familiar round-rimmed glasses offering a motif for Lennon’s missing face. His absence is once again accentuated by the presence of the spectacles. Žižek suggests that the “partial object” has consumed the “core of the personality” in its return as an indicator of the uncanny, and this is evident in this film poster.38 Lennon’s eyewear without eyes continues to reappear after his death: the glasses return as an indicator of his ontological absence and elicit the spectral presence of the object that has no eyes, framing only an empty space. His “incompleteness” is addressed aesthetically. The spectacles therefore confirm his absence whilst simultaneously functioning as an indicator of his well-established persona. 35

Ibid., 152. Royle, Uncanny, 1. 37 Freud, “Melancholia,” 312. 38 Žižek, Pervert’s. 36

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The paradox of Lennon’s recognisable presence despite his somatic absence, reiterates the uncanniness of these images. This is evident in the tensions evoked through Lennon’s familiar persona that has been reconfigured to assume ambiguous qualities. Lennon’s liminal faces and spaces elicit discomfort in the process acknowledging Lennon’s identity within the frame but confronting only a partial presence for the star. Of course, Lennon’s recognisable appearance, signified by the round-rimmed glasses, is only a component of the star’s familiar persona. In a study of his posthumous image, it is necessary to investigate how his identity is constructed in the media that generated his initial fame through both the aural and visual performances of his music. Whilst the still image is an integral component of the circulation of a star persona,39 Ellis has suggested that print-based images offer the “promise” of a more substantial star incarnation evident in the moving image performance.40 According to Ellis, the pleasures inherent in the star system are nurtured by promotional and publicity materials but are only consummated when the star assumes a living entity in the moving image as “the synthesis of voice, body and motion.”41 In keeping with Barthes’ concept of the photoeffect that renders a subject’s presence in absence, Ellis suggests that the moving image restores the illusion of a complete embodied presence in contrast to the fragmented identity conveyed in the still image.42

“Help me Get my Feet Back on the Ground”: Between Movement and Stasis in the Moving Image Acknowledging the connotations of embalming the dead within the still image, Bazin championed cinema’s innovative abilities to restore life to the deceased.43 Death is seemingly overcome when the deceased return in animate form on celluloid. Bazin’s claims of the mummification process, which Barthes identified as synonymous with the inanimate pose of the photograph, are eroded within the technological apparatus of film. This potentially reiterates a fetishistic disavowal of death in the reanimation of the deceased. If Barthes maintained that the photograph mortifies the living, then the moving image resurrects the dead, restoring the appearance of life. An investigation of moving image footage of 39

Dyer, Stars. Ellis, Visible, 108. 41 Ibid., 93. 42 Barthes, Lucida. 43 Bazin, Cinema. 40

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Lennon constructed posthumously would naturally therefore assume a comforting reassurance of Lennon’s living presence as fans revisit concert footage, television interviews, recordings and music videos, “just as the cinema animates its still frames, so it brings back to life, in perfect fossil form, anyone it has ever recorded.”44 It would seem that the suggestion of an uncanny liminality identified in posthumous still images is successfully counteracted when moving image technology comes into play. Lennon’s partial embodiment and uncanny signifiers are surely diminished when footage of the star captured during his lifetime is revisited after his death. Whilst the moving image might quell anxieties related to death’s presence, Mulvey asserts a correlation between this medium and an uneasiness arising from the return of the deceased. She maintains that film perpetuates a “technological uncanny”45 that can be characterised in cinema’s ability to generate a spectral presence in the tension between movement and stasis. In the following posthumous moving images of John Lennon, uncanny qualities emerge that question the restoration of the deceased in “fossil form” and “preserved intact.”46 Fischer’s suggestion of cinema’s similarity to “cryogenics; the act of freezing live (but dying) individuals in order to thaw them out later” reiterates the traditional focus (and pleasure) of posthumous regeneration of the star persona.47 However, like the previous still images identified in the previous section, this chapter considers the construction of an uncanny presence emerging visually and aurally that potentially sabotages any illusion of a thawing procedure that restores a reassuring presence to the deceased. The music video for the posthumously released Woman and The Beatles’ Free as a Bird recording and accompanying music video will illustrate that Lennon continues to be positioned in relation to partial embodiment, within an intermediary location.48 According to Mulvey, the “mechanics” of cinema, particularly techniques such as the freeze frame and slow motion, evoke the presence of death within the cinematic frame. The freezing of the image mortifies the subject, “the inanimate image is drained of movement, the commonly accepted sign of life.”49 The interweaving of stills and moving images of Lennon is evident in the video for Lennon’s song Woman, foregrounding Lennon’s uncanny presence that emerges through the trope of movement 44

Mulvey, 24, 17. Ibid., 36. 46 Bazin, Cinema, 14. 47 Fischer, Marlene, 31. 48 Lennon, Woman; The Beatles, Free as a Bird. 49 Mulvey, 24, 22. 45

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and stasis. Compiled by Yoko Ono in the immediate wake of his death, this video is constructed as a mourning ritual. Ono consciously foregrounds Lennon’s absence with footage of her and Lennon strolling around New York followed immediately by images of her sat alone in the same location after his death. The togetherness of many of the photographs and moving images of the couple is juxtaposed poignantly with the loss and loneliness of just her positioning within the frame. Like her Seasons of Glass cover, the video offers an uncomfortable confrontation with Lennon’s death. Within the montage of still images from the family album, Ono includes a newspaper front cover documenting his death with a close-up of her grieving expression at the scene. Similarly she includes the final photograph of him alive, signing his autograph at the request of his murderer. This is another example of a text constructed as an act of mourning foregrounding the need to acknowledge the reality of his death. It seems critical for Ono that photographs of Lennon alive are interwoven with reminders of his fate. She dissolves a close-up of Lennon first encountered on the inner sleeve of the Imagine album with a post-mortem photo of him lying in the same position.50 The tension between life and death is erased visually through this dissolve. This tension will recur throughout the video as Ono employs moving image technology to suggest Lennon’s posthumous liminality. The illusion of life through Lennon’s movement is halted abruptly by a freeze frame technique that fossilises Lennon within the frame, generating a symbolic motif of his death. In keeping with Mulvey’s observations, the dead are resurrected within the cinematic space when movement is restored to the image previously embalmed. After a montage of photographs, Lennon is once again viewed walking in Central Park. The restoration of movement following static stills, highlights the presence of the uncanny “aroused by the confusion between the animate and the inanimate...associated with death and the return of the dead.”51 Whilst Lennon is restored to life in the footage provided, the montages of stills that invade the moving image are a reminder of his ontological demise. When movement and stasis are integrated into posthumous materials, this aesthetic fusion places him “in-between” life and death. The tension that emerges in the juxtaposition of photographs and moving image footage highlights Ono’s melancholic reflections that paradoxically confront and deny Lennon’s ontological demise at the same time. Intermediary spaces between presence and absence are evoked through 50 51

Lennon, Imagine. Mulvey, 24, 60.

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movement and stasis in many moving image tributes to Lennon, but it is also possible to discover further developments on liminal identity in posthumous media examples of the ex-Beatle. The suggestion of Lennon’s disembodiment is evident in The Beatles’ 1995 single and accompanying video Free as a Bird.52 The aural recording and music video succeed in foregrounding Lennon-as-spectre, particularly in the symbolic “location” generated by his vocal contribution. When The Beatles reformed in 1995 with a new release, it was an opportunity to resurrect the past and create the illusion of a nostalgic “wholeness,” displacing the reality of a tragic murder by restoring a sense of the “complete” Fab Four. This was made possible by Ono’s donation of a Lennon composition recorded in its “first draft” in 1977. The remaining Beatles, with the help of Jeff Lynne in the production seat, infused the track with their own creative contributions in order to generate a newly composed venture.53 The track symbolises a unified wholeness; we hear Lennon’s voice interwoven with his former colleagues for the first time since the band’s split in 1970. It is almost as if Lennon’s absence has been restored and he has returned to perform in the 1990s. McCartney emphasises a sense of this “comforting” unity in the recording of the track, suggesting “it was like the old days. Because John’s voice is there then it’s the four of us—we can really say it is The Beatles, we’re all together.”54 Elliott maintains that the Free as a Bird project erases Lennon’s death, suggesting the musician’s return to the land of the living.55 The apparent resurrection of Lennon through the inclusion of his “living” voice would seem to reinforce a preserved, embalmed embodiment for the performer at last. However, challenging the notion that Lennon’s living presence is foregrounded aurally and aesthetically, this chapter is proposing that Free as a Bird is, in fact, infused with an uncanny presence instead, and that it is the inclusion of Lennon’s vocals that paradoxically highlight his somatic absence. Lennon’s disembodied voice presents a heightened confrontation with an uncanny presence in its rupture of the threshold between absence and presence, life and death. Partly due to technological advancements since Lennon’s death, Free as a Bird does not provide a nostalgic illusion of “completeness” in the return of the Fab Four. Aurally, it is quite evident that the fab three have recorded together and the fourth voice is most certainly not present in the corresponding location. Like the previous examples’ spectrality, Free as a 52

The Beatles, Free as a Bird; Pytka, Free as a Bird Music Video. Burns, “Refab.” 54 McCartney, Guardian. 55 Elliott, Mourning. 53

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Bird locates Lennon’s voice in yet another liminal space, one that cannot be conveniently identified in the “here and now.” Recalling the phrase “This is Not Here”—the words ingrained in the door-frame of Lennon’s Ascot home—Lennon’s voice is present (we recognise it within the song) but at the same time “not quite there” either. It is a “voice without a place.”56 The stereo studio-based technology succeeds in establishing a spatial dichotomy and division between Lennon and McCartney’s voices. Burns describes Lennon’s voice as “tinny and faraway, a function of the poor quality of the original cassette” noting the “macabre implication.”57 The differences in both singers’ voices apparent in all Beatles recordings are amplified here as Lennon’s higher-pitched “thinner” sounding timbre contrasts with McCartney’s lower-pitched vocals reiterating a spatial opposition. In other words, McCartney’s voice, assisted by advancements in recording technology, possesses more definition and seems “nearer” to the listener than Lennon’s. This recalls Chion’s work on “Materialising Sound Indices” (MSIs) relating to recording techniques, such as the singer’s distance from the microphone, that “pull the scene toward the material and concrete.”58 McCartney’s vocals are therefore sharply contrasted to Lennon’s, reiterating the deceased’s absence from the space of the recording studio. His voice appears to be floating above McCartney’s, lacking his bandmate’s grounded quality. This evokes a liminal location for Lennon whose voice assumes spectral connotations when heard in relation to his bandmate, and suggests a transient entity who cannot be contained within a definitive location. As Chion notes further, the “sparsity” of the MSIs can connote the impression of the protagonist as “ethereal, abstract and fluid.”59 Lennon’s voice therefore evokes a disembodied presence. The sense of an aural “floating,” which hovers above the location of the remaining Beatles, provides a formless quality which can be interpreted as Lennon lacking a secure somatic substance in which to confine his voice. Recalling Chion’s “acousmetre,” a voice “seeking a place to settle,” Lennon’s voice is unable to be “lodged” within a corresponding body.60 Chion’s work on the acousmetre in cinema is particularly pertinent in an analysis of the Free as a Bird video. Transferring the disembodied voice into the visual domain accentuates the spectral tropes relating to Lennon’s identity. Visual footage of The Beatles would naturally assist in 56

Chion, Voice, 27. Burns, “Refab,” 180. 58 Chion, Audio Vision, 114. 59 Ibid. 60 Chion, Voice, 23. 57

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“grounding” Lennon’s voice to a recognisable body within the frame, allowing us to relate the seemingly spectral vocals to images of Lennon on screen, therefore complying with Chion’s process of “de-acousmatization.”61 This process “says here is your body, you’ll be there and not elsewhere.”62 Whilst footage of the band is indeed prevalent throughout the video, “deacousmatization” is not permitted. Lennon’s body, like those of his colleagues, is frequently framed in a fragmented manner, with partial views of his face and body as he enters and exits the scene. He is often displayed hovering on the periphery of the frame, not “complete” enough to assume a substantial entity centre-stage. Footage of the Fab Four constantly moving in and out of the space conveys a transient fluidity that reiterates Lennon’s vocal disembodiment. Chion’s acousmetre therefore dominates. An aerial steadicam shot, sweeping like a bird, unsuccessfully attempts to land amongst the Liverpool streets, frequently seeking refuge in the skies above. Lennon’s voice accompanies these motifs of liminality, recalling Chion’s notion of the body unable to be “inscribed in a concrete identifiable space.”63 Lennon’s voice is “in exile”64 and this motif of disembodiment evokes Žižek’s “autonomous partial object,” a voice that exists independently of a somatic source, thereby confirming an uncanny identity encompassing a liminal locale.65

“Nowhere Man, Can You See me at all?”: Retaining Familiarity in Death Posthumous constructions of Lennon’s identity within visual culture often offer a reconfigured yet recognisable persona for the deceased star. This chapter has suggested that familiar tropes associated with him are combined frequently with motifs signifying his ontological absence. His presence within these examples is merely partial—he is never permitted to fully encompass the frame. Each example encourages a reading that implicates Lennon as a spectral figure, a transient being located within a liminal space. Whilst there are significant examples to support Elliott’s “displacement” of Lennon’s death onto images of him alive, this chapter has advocated an alternative representation of Lennon’s posthumous visual identity. 61

Ibid., 27. Ibid. 63 Ibid., 51. 64 Ibid., 52. 65 Žižek, Pervert’s. 62

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According to Dyer, stars “articulate aspects of living in contemporary society” and this chapter has considered how the posthumous representation of a deceased star can encapsulate socio-cultural preoccupations with death.66 A star persona perseveres within media and visual culture, assuming an independent entity beyond the biological lifespan of the individual. Characteristics that inform the posthumous reassembling of the persona have been the emphasis of this discussion. Rather than merely being reminders of the recognisable identities that were circulated prior to death—nurturing nostalgic reflections on their contribution to culture and society during their lifetime—posthumous representations of stars are embedded with tensions regarding corporeal absence. If stars encapsulate typical attitudes that emerge about being human, then their images naturally encompass prevailing attitudes about death. Questions have arisen in this chapter about the proximity of death and the aesthetics of the dead body within visual culture, highlighting palatable parameters in the visualising of the deceased. Posthumous images of dead stars have the ability to resurrect and provide a continued presence in absence for the deceased. In a fetishistic restoration of their living incarnation stars’ recognisability is preserved and the reality of their demise is obscured. It is tempting to view the lack of embalming procedures outlined in these examples as a confrontation with reality and a challenge to fetishistic disavowal. Unlike texts that provide an illusion of embodiment—a figure captured “in the hold of life”67—this discussion would appear to refute Bazin’s notion of the “mummy complex” that secures “the preservation of life by a representation of life.”68 Whilst tropes of liminality and disembodiment evoke an uncanniness within these examples that potentially foreground the reality of Lennon’s absence, each image nevertheless succeeds in retaining a recognisability illustrating a need to reiterate components of his familiar identity. Even whilst reworking Lennon to foreground his untimely demise, there is an attempt to “keep up appearances in the face of the reality of death” to an extent.69 There is a tension between the desire to confront Lennon’s absence and a longing to hold on to him by securing a recognisable presence for him within these posthumous texts. This ambiguity is manifested in the trope of liminal embodiment that paradoxically evokes an uncanny unease but also functions as a comforting antidote to the reality of his somatic absence. 66

Dyer, Heavenly, 8. Bazin, Cinema, 9. 68 Ibid., 10. 69 Ibid., 9. 67

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A desire to acknowledge the reality of his death and a need to retain a familiar identity is perhaps a consequence of the tragic injustice of Lennon’s death. His murder is far from typical of rock star deaths from hedonistic lifestyles. He was not the agent of his own destruction and the shocking circumstances of his murder have inflected his persona with a traumatic, melancholic sensibility. This could explain the prevalence of uncanny traces that are documented in the artistic reconstructions of his image in these examples. The circumstances of Lennon’s demise have certainly generated contemplations within the creative process of death’s formlessness and subsequent anxieties have emerged. Arguably, the notion of an incomplete, liminal embodiment permits an iconic identity for the dead star, encouraging Lennon-as-spectre to roam within a range of cultural spaces, ripe for reconfiguration at any given time.

Works Cited Primary Sources Russell, J. John Lennon. Date unknown. Available from : http://antonysgallery.com/media/.gallery/image369.jpg (accessed 14/1/2013) Ueltzhoeffer, R. John Lennon Textportrait. 2006. Available from: www.ueltzhoeffer.com/JOHN-LENNON-UELTZHOEFFER.html (accessed 14/1/2013) The U.S vs John Lennon. Directed by Leaf, D; Scheinfeld, J. USA. Lionsgate, 2006. Image available from: http://www.empiremovies.com/movie/the-us-vs-johnlennon/11230/poster/01 (accessed 14/1/2013) Ono, Y. Seasons of Glass. CD. New York. Geffen. 1981. Image available from: www.imaginepeace.com/archives/3615 (accessed 14/1/2013) Lennon, J. Woman. Directed by Ono Lennon, Y (03.43). 1980. Music Video [online]. Available from : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PALfDNShEnO (accessed 14/1/2013) The Beatles, Free as a Bird. CD. London. Apple Records. 1995. —. Free as a Bird. Directed by Pytka, J (04.26). 1980. Music Video [online]. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqHjXF1gUWU (accessed 14/1/2013)

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Secondary Sources Ariès, P. Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present. London: Marion Boyars Publishing, 1994. Barthes, R. Camera Lucida. 1980. London: Vintage, 2000. Bazin, A. What is Cinema? Volume 1. 1967. Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 2005. Bronfen E., and S. Goodwin, eds. Death and Representation. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1993. Burns, G. “Refab Four: The Beatles for Sale in the Age of Music Video.” In The Beatles, Popular Music and Society: A Thousand Voices, edited by I. Inglis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Chion, M. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. —. The Voice in Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Davies, C. “Technological Taxidermy: Recognising Faces in Celebrity Death.” Mortality 15, no. 2 (2010): 138-53. —. “No Mere Mortal? Re-materialising Michael Jackson in Death.” Celebrity Studies 3, no. 2 (2012): 183-96. Davis, T. The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition and Spectatorship. Bristol: Intellect, 2004. Dyer, R. Stars. London: British Film Institute, 1979. —. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: British Film Institute, 1986. Elliott, A. The Mourning of John Lennon. Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1999. Ellis, J. Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. London: Routledge, 1992. Fischer, L. “Marlene: Modernity, Mortality and the Biopic.” In Stars: The Film Reader, edited by Fischer, L., and M. Landy. London: Routledge, 2004. Freud, S. The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock. 1919. London: Penguin Books, 2003. —. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In The Penguin Freud Reader, edited by A. Phillips. 1917. London: Penguin, 2006. —. “Fetishism.” In The Penguin Freud Reader, edited by A. Phillips. 1927. London: Penguin, 2006. Howarth, G. Death and Dying: A Sociological Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Kristeva, J. Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

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McCartney, P. Interview. The Guardian, November 21st, 1995. Available from: www.guardian.co.uk/thebeatles/story/0,,606548,00.html (accessed 14/1/2013) Mulvey, L. Death 24 x A Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books , 2006. Royle, N. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Shilling, C. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage, 1993. Tobing Rony, F. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Van Alphen, E. Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self. London: Reaktion Books, 1992. Žižek, S. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, directed by Sophie Fiennes. UK. Amoeba Film, 2006.

CHAPTER SIX ‘STUDIED IN HIS DEATH’: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ASSASSINATION OF MALCOLM X GRAEME ABERNETHY

On 21 February 1965, assassins killed Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little), the radical African American leader and controversial former National Minister of the Nation of Islam, in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. His death was, like his life, much illustrated; its visual representation initiated the pattern of contestation of Malcolm X’s meaning and legacy that John Edgar Wideman has described as “the bickering over the corpse of a dead man – who gets the head, the heart, the eyes, the penis, the gold teeth.”1 Eyewitness Herman Ferguson claimed, probably apocryphally, that at the moment of the assassination he observed “lights going off and on. Yellow bright lights. And I said to myself they’re not firecrackers, they’re not gunshots, they’re flashbulbs. They are taking pictures of this thing.”2 Michael Abdul Malik, the first prominent black British figure to write at length about Malcolm X, and his follower or ally near the end of his life, told of an unexpected visit from someone claiming to be Roy Wilson of the CIA: “He handed me a photograph, a picture of Malcolm X. ‘It was taken just a couple of minutes before he was shot,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d like it.’”3 There are in fact no known photos from behind the stage or of the shooting itself. Photographic depictions of the moment of death are of course exceedingly rare and perhaps even impossible to confidently or accurately identify; as impassive effigies there is no reason they should be any more 1

Wideman, “Autobiography,” 103. Ferguson, “Price,” 101. 3 Malik, From, 176-77. 2

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enlightening than the hackneyed expirations of stage and screen, or literary descriptions of a bright light or a death rattle—the implements of the literary heirs of The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886). But, as representations they can be relatively unadorned and present the viewer with an illusion of presence. Earl Grant’s photograph of Malcolm with his wounds exposed, taken seconds after he was shot, was published in Life magazine on 5 March 1965; it would also lend a decidedly sensationalist tone to the first American and British editions of the posthumously published The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965, 1966), co-authored by Alex Haley. The United Press International image of Malcolm being carried on a gurney by white policemen to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital was printed in the first edition of The Autobiography and recreated in a documentary, black-and-white style in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992); the image captures the moment’s derangement as well as a sense of the man falling into shadow.4

Fig. 6-1. Malcolm X on Stretcher After Shooting, 21 February 1965, © Bettmann/ CORBIS

4

Variations on this image appeared on the 22 February 1965 front pages of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, among others.

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As Roland Barthes suggests, already inherent in photography is “a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.”5 Old photographs of living persons, now dead, speak both of death to come and death that has been, provoking simultaneously in the viewer a refusal and acknowledgment of the reality of death. Photographs of a dead person, on the other hand, attempt a sort of resurrection, if only of the most ephemeral sort. They hold a death and its circumstances up to a scrutiny that delicacy, distaste, or fear typically obviates. Consistent with the civil rights era’s disruption of “one of photojournalism’s strongest conventions, which is to present a clean image of death,” Malcolm’s would be another in a series of photographed corpses presented to the American public “as an image of its own systematic dehumanization.”6 Most shockingly, the images of a bloated and beaten Emmett Till appeared, at his mother Mamie Till Mobley’s insistence, on the cover of the 15 September 1955 issue of Jet. Malcolm himself was familiar with the use of lynching photography as a political and pedagogical tool. Benjamin Karim indicated that, at a Nation of Islam meeting in 1957, Malcolm displayed a photograph of “a black man hanging from a tree by a rope around his neck”; Gordon Parks photographed Malcolm in 1963 displaying for reporters pictures of the dead body of murdered Nation member Ronald Stokes.7 Challenging the mainstream journalistic perception of Malcolm’s death, Thulani Davis likened Malcolm’s death to a lynching. For Davis, the fates of Malcolm, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers and others are inseparable from the American racial violence they confronted: in death, “they don’t become Gandhis; they join a long line of lynching victims.”8 As substantiations of existing narratives, iconic images necessarily have their scriptural analogues. This chapter considers just some of the images and attendant narratives of the death of Malcolm X, a man who has been described as “a hologram of social forces.”9 Despite The Autobiography’s pre-eminent influence, it is no unproblematical document of Malcolm X’s life and death, for reasons that will be discussed. I will address a selection of the images and adaptations that have accompanied and emerged from The Autobiography, including photographs, screenplays, Lee’s film, and paintings by British-born artist Sue Coe. That images have

5

Barthes, Lucida, 32. Hariman, No, 149; Frady, “Children,” 64. 7 Karim et al, Remembering, 52. 8 Davis, “Image,” 13. 9 Reed Jr., “Allure,” 231. 6

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appeared across so many genres is attributable to the death’s status as a historical event well suited to the proportions of myth. Mainstream publications deemed the assassination worthy of prominent headlines and feature articles for several weeks, typically presenting it as a fitting end to a uniquely “lurid” life marked by drug addiction, crime, imprisonment, and nominal reformation, or as the realisation of a particularly virulent strain of blackness—“black supremacy”—opposed to racial reconciliation.10 The story, in such publications as the New York Post, Life, and Time, was of a potentially escalating blood feud between the respective followers of Malcolm X and Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm’s death, like his life, was interpreted as an incitement to indiscriminate violence. In Life, an article titled “The Violent End of the Man Called Malcolm X” (and illustrated by Earl Grant’s photograph) insinuated that “Malcolm X” had been merely the false identity of an imposter—a kind of stage name.11 It also implied that Malcolm’s audience at the Audubon Ballroom bayed for blood, waiting “expectantly” for a speech “flaying the hated white man” before “a scuffle broke out,” Malcolm was murdered, and his killer “very likely would have been stomped to death if the police hadn’t saved him.”12 The forecast in Life was for “fratricidal war” amongst African Americans.13 Malcolm’s end itself was depicted in kinetic, almost cinematic, terms: his bodyguards “had been faked out”; two gunmen “rose from the audience and pumped bullets into the speaker”; another “cut loose at close range with both barrels of a sawed-off shotgun.”14 For some, it seemed poetic justice that Malcolm died violently. Martin Luther King, typically cast by the press as Malcolm X’s political and spiritual inverse, reflected that “Malcolm was forced to die as an outsider, a victim of the violence that spawned him, and which he courted through his brief but promising life.”15 In thus mirroring the mainstream journalistic perception of Malcolm, it is perhaps only surprising that King stopped just short of the language of Malcolm’s obituary in the New York Times, which labelled him “an extraordinary and twisted man, turning many true gifts to evil purpose.”16 10

Poston, “Muslims,” 15; Parks, “Violent,” 26-27. Parks, “Violent,” 26-27. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 27. 14 Ibid., 26. 15 Carson, Autobiography, 268. 16 “Obituary,” 20. It can be seen, however, that King moved closer to sympathy with Malcolm’s politics following the latter’s assassination. King’s participation in 11

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What such interpretations or simplifications overlooked was that the man shot dead in 1965 was not precisely Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam minister notorious for his references to “white devils,” but someone struggling to cast himself in the mould of newfound Islamic legitimacy as the Sunni convert, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. He announced this new persona with a letter to the New York Times and in an early version of The Autobiography, “I’m Talking to You, White Man,” published in the Saturday Evening Post on 12 September 1964. He also announced it with his newly grown goatee. Attached to the Post article was a photograph by John Launois of Malcolm performing the salat in a Cairo mosque; the image declared that Malcolm’s political and religious visions were internationalised and that the racially insular esotericism of the Nation of Islam was abandoned.17 Among the most widely circulated and least remarked upon images of Malcolm X are the cover illustrations of various editions of The Autobiography. Through them can be traced a partial history of the editorial and commercial positioning of Malcolm X’s evolving meaning. Leroy McLucas’s photograph on the dust jacket of the Grove Press first edition is uniquely unflattering, casting Malcolm as a sweat-browed orator distracted to the point of hypnosis. The sense here is of Malcolm as a fascinating, if possibly dangerous, aberration of an African American preacher. In depicting him behind a microphone, the picture also reminds us that images of Malcolm’s oratory always contain the implication of his death, given that Malcolm was killed in the act of initiating his final speech. By 1966, the cover of Grove Press’s first paperback edition spoke not to Malcolm’s inscrutability but to the commercial value of the conventional perception of his militancy; it featured in the blurb above the book’s title and a photograph of Malcolm X gesturing from behind a microphone: “He rose from hoodlum, thief, dope peddler, pimp…to become the most dynamic leader of the Black Revolution. He said he would be murdered before this book appeared.”18 His death was to be exploited in the interest of book sales. Despite its popularity, The Autobiography remains in many respects a problematical text—indeed, it may not be an autobiography at all. Our inability to identify the seams of the collaborative authorship, beyond the the Chicago Freedom Movement in the summer of 1966 introduced him to many of the Northern, urban conditions that moulded the lives of Malcolm and his constituency. 17 Eldridge Cleaver wrote in Soul on Ice (1968) of consecrating the John Launois photograph as a religious icon on the wall of his prison cell. 18 X and Haley, Autobiography, front cover.

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revelations of Haley’s commentary, potentially casts the book into a purgatorial haze somewhere between fiction, biography, and memoir. Although Malcolm told Haley in 1963 that “A writer is what I want, not an interpreter,” Haley, a political conservative and “a recently retired veteran from the Coast Guard and a feature stories writer” for Reader’s Digest, inevitably interpreted as well as recorded.19 Carol Tulloch has asserted that “the storyteller, Malcolm X,” is “always in control” of his representation, whereas Haley is merely “the guide.”20 But, whatever Haley’s intentions as an honest chronicler, his authorial and editorial contributions to the book are significant and undeniable. He is more Boswell to Malcolm’s Dr. Johnson than Virgil to his Dante. This tension regarding the book’s authorship is exacerbated by that attending the several personae narrated by Malcolm X. Begun in 1963, before the upheaval of Malcolm’s separation from the Nation of Islam, The Autobiography contains, in the form of its unseen early drafts and revisions, much scar tissue. Although it does set out to satisfy many of the conventions of a genre driven by narratives of personal redemption and autodidacticism, it has been described as “three distinctly different books”: that of the prison convert and eventual Nation of Islam minister, that of the 1964 Sunni convert, and that of Haley’s commentary on Malcolm X’s death.21 The book is thus a kind of fascinating multiple exposure, concerned as much with the exemplary death as with the exemplary life of its subject, a rare thing for something purporting to be an autobiography. The Autobiography frequently insisted that Malcolm’s death was imminent. His anticipation of violent death can be attributed to the fact of his father’s apparent murder by white supremacists in Michigan in 1931. The Autobiography also equated the nihilism of Malcolm’s youth as Detroit Red, the hustler and jazz enthusiast framed as a kind of sacrificial figure within the book, with his later Islamic providentialism: “Deep down, I actually believed that after living as fully as humanly possible, one should then die violently. I expected then, as I still expect today, to die at any time.”22 Increasingly, he came to regard his death as instructive, even

19

Ibid., 463. All references hereafter are to this edition. Tulloch, “‘My Man,” 300-301. 21 Marable, Living, 159. Marable refers to Malcolm’s two Islamic conversions and to Haley’s epilogue. 22 X and Haley, Autobiography, 141. In the terms of the Nation of Islam, as Detroit Red, Malcolm was already dead; so-called Black Muslim ministers actually described the physical world inhabited by the unsaved as “the grave” (Jamal, From The Dead Level, 1). Malcolm X came to see his “two careers as a black man in 20

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redemptive. Two days prior to his death, he told a reporter that “It’s a time for martyrs now. And if I’m to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country.”23 As conscious as he was of death, it is unlikely that he could have foreseen that even his dead body would be absorbed into the narrative of evolving self introduced by The Autobiography. Haley recounted his farewell to Malcolm’s corpse in Harlem’s Unity Funeral Home: Under the glass lid, I glimpsed the delicate white shrouding over the chest and up like a hood about the face on which I tried to concentrate for as long as I could. All that I could think was that it was he, all right – Malcolm X. “Move on” – the policeman’s voice was soft. Malcolm looked to me – just waxy and dead. The policeman’s hand was gesturing at his waist level. I thought, “Well – good-bye.” I moved on.24

This is not the agonised, felled figure of the Earl Grant photo but a processed body encountered in the restrained but implacable presence of state authority (in the person of the policeman). The image of the only partially lifelike corpse emblematises our physical and temporal distance from the dead; the account also reveals the absolute quality of Haley’s authorial separation from his subject. It is the self-consciously external mechanism of Haley’s commentary, addressing the collaboration in the light of Malcolm’s assassination, which guarantees our awareness of his authorial presence elsewhere in the text. Haley composed the majority of the book in 1963-4 based on interviews conducted mostly in 1963. Malcolm X apparently last read through and approved the completed manuscript in a three-day stint at the New York Hilton shortly before his death. The draft was then sent, according to Haley, to the publisher. But, necessarily, Malcolm did not read Haley’s commentary, which, though written after his death, comprised nearly fourteen percent of the published book’s length. Haley wrote that he had pre-approval from Malcolm for just such a self-narrated commentary to appear alongside the conventional nineteen chapters of the book: “I asked for – and he gave – his permission that at the end of the book I could write comments of my own about him which would not be subject to his

America”—as the criminal and the Muslim minister—as concerned with dying and exhumation, respectively (X and Haley, Autobiography, 339). 23 X and Haley, Autobiography, 436. 24 Ibid., 459.

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review.”25 It bears mentioning, however, that the letter of agreement for the book’s authorship (dated 1 June 1963) contained no such provision.26 Positioned as an epilogue in all American editions, Haley’s commentary aspires to preserve the illusion of a linear narrative progressing from birth to death. Haley’s account of the death imposes a kind of narrative resolution on the text, and his discussion of their collaboration provides what the evolving and ultimately unresolved narrative perspective of the rest of the book cannot: a unifying retrospection, however ostensibly external to the narrative proper. The Autobiography as we have it, then, is not quite Malcolm X’s. Following his death, it “would be left to Haley to close the book; autobiography [gave] way to biography”; Haley became “Malcolm’s biographer, or rather…his thanatographer.”27 Other prominent African American writers of the period would address the death of Malcolm X. Amiri Baraka was one of the key theorists of a Black Arts Movement for whom Malcolm X was a talismanic, often Christ-like, figure emblematic of a new and revolutionary blackness rooted in African American vernacular culture.28 Given their peculiar relationship to image making, as narratives filled with visual cues but no visuals, it is worth examining two notable, unproduced screenplays about Malcolm X. The most distinctive of these is Baraka’s The Death of Malcolm X (1969). Written in late 1965 and early 1966, it dealt in racist clichés and explored the layers of mediation enshrouding Malcolm X.29 The screenplay bore the marks of recent trauma. Baraka’s Malcolm, cool and inscrutable behind a pair of sunglasses, first appears surrounded by cameras, lecturing to a television panel on the nature of evil. The scene then shifts to a hotel room, where a monstrous Ku Klux Klansman, implicated by Malcolm’s words, observes Malcolm on a television screen. The Klansman laughs as he watches but does not really see Malcolm, emboldened by his conspiratorial plan, code-named “Operation Sambo,” to have him murdered.30 His fellow conspirators include a set of undifferentiated Uncle 25

Ibid., 394. X and Haley, “Author/Collaborator Letter of Agreement, 1 June 1963.” 27 El-Beshti, “Semiotics,” 361. Dudley, Shadow, 186. 28 Black Arts poetry was particularly enamoured of Malcolm X as an oracular political hero. Dozens of the era’s panegyrics were collected in Broadside Press’s anthology, For Malcolm. 29 Baraka wrote: “I even did a script for a film I figured might not ever be shot. The Death of Malcolm X. But what this did was get me interested in making films. I bought a camera, a 16mm Bolex, some editing equipment, including a Moviola for viewing what I shot” (Baraka, LeRoi Jones, 231). 30 Baraka, “The Death,” 95. 26

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Sam-costumed white patriarchs, the “Hippy President,” a “Banker,” and, by implication, a misguided, grey-haired integrationist who collaborates with the plot in exchange for a gilded watermelon.31 The latter figure, who gradually overtakes Malcolm X on the screenplay’s pervasive television screen, was clearly intended as a cruel parody of Martin Luther King—an iteration of the Black Arts Movement’s preference for Malcolm X as a figure of exemplary defiance, with King reduced to a champion of Southern stereotype. Historical accuracy was evidently not Baraka’s concern with the screenplay, an exercise in grotesque satire in which ancient Greeks, Vikings, and George Washington all make appearances. The screenplay does communicate Baraka’s deep pessimism about the adaptability of American government and media to the needs and demands of African Americans. The murder of Malcolm X at the screenplay’s end is an entertainment, a public execution carried live on television and radio for his many enemies to gape at in gleeful anticipation. With the screenplay, Baraka was responding to the perception that Malcolm X had somehow invited his own death as well as to The Autobiography’s implication of the involvement of the American government in the killing. (After being barred from France in February 1965, Malcolm indicated that he believed he was being harassed and pursued by federal agents, not just the Nation of Islam.) James Baldwin’s One Day, When I Was Lost (1972) is another anomalous screenplay concerned with Malcolm X; it was written after the violent images of the assassination had somewhat receded from view. Baldwin was of an earlier generation, politically and artistically, than Baraka, although he had explored the youthful radicalism in his play Blues for Mister Charlie (1964). Drawn to Hollywood in 1968 to adapt The Autobiography “over the vehement protests of [his] family and [his] friends,” Baldwin wrote of his ambition to bring a credible African American history and hero to the screen.32 He shared with Malcolm X a sense that the cinema presented false images of African Americans. The project was ultimately discarded as a box office risk. However unlikely a pairing—Baldwin represented a far more liberal intellectual strand than Malcolm X; Malcolm was very likely homophobic—Baldwin also shared with Malcolm X a sense of the depth of America’s racial animus and its role in shaping African American psychology.33 He wrote that “black men do not have the same reason to 31

Ibid., 83, 93. Baldwin, The Devil, 50. 33 Malcolm X apparently asked reporter Elombe Brath during a lecture by Baldwin at Hunter College: “Is that guy a faggot?” (Brath, “I Remember,” 18). Bruce 32

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hate white men as white men to hate blacks. The root of the white man’s hatred is terror….But the root of the black man’s hatred is rage.”34 As the most articulate and divisive instrument of this rage, Malcolm X, especially upon his death, appealed to Baldwin as a representative figure and fellow Harlemite. Malcolm X was also representative for Baldwin in his ontological indeterminacy; a complex, unrealised figure revealing of America’s unresolved racial destiny, his meaning was “as yet undetermined and, ultimately, undeterminable.”35 The screenplay underlined Malcolm’s claim that “I have had so many names,” introducing to the story a trope of temporal simultaneity that dismantles The Autobiography’s linear narrative of transformation and its artificial separation of the several personae of Malcolm X.36 Even the title of the screenplay spoke to this instability of Malcolm’s “narrative location.” Baldwin was the first and has been one of the only writers to experiment with disrupting the linear narrative of The Autobiography. The screenplay begins not with images from Malcolm’s childhood or youth, but with him driving from the New York Hilton to the Audubon Ballroom—and to his death. In largely dispensing with a totalising narrator, Baldwin can be seen to have attempted a kind of psychological realism, placing the viewer “inside Malcolm’s head bombarded by images or tropes from multiple times.”37 The screenplay’s recurrent images and figures also provided a symbolic texture to the narrative. Baldwin’s sense that America was haunted by historical crimes is evident in flashbacks to the image of Malcolm’s burning childhood home, vandalised by Klansmen. Baldwin’s Malcolm was not without his own past crimes; the ghostly figure of Laura, the addict and prostitute from The Autobiography’s Detroit Red narrative representative of Malcolm’s failing of women—especially African American women—haunts him in Baldwin’s version, even appearing at Malcolm’s graveside in the closing scene as a kind of Mary Magdalene figure. The most controversial portrayal of Malcolm X has been that of director Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, not least for a promotional campaign perceived by many to have married a rhetoric of black nationalism to unabashed capitalist practice, with the ubiquitous X functioning as a kind Perry’s iconoclastic biography Malcolm in 1991 alleged that, in his youth, Malcolm X had a number of homosexual experiences and was intermittently a prostitute. 34 Baldwin, The Devil, 66-67. 35 Norman, “Closet,” 104. 36 Baldwin, One Day, 3. 37 Norman, “Closet,” 103, 105.

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of dollar sign on posters, t-shirts, keychains, and baseball caps. Lee’s early films in fact represent a triumph of the African American cultural politics of the period, pairing black entrepreneurship and artistic endeavour, and uniting nationalist rhetoric and an escalating interest in the significance of Malcolm X with critical and popular appeal. Lee has remarked that his preference for hiring African American crew members had earned him a reputation in the industry as “a baby Malcolm X.”38 Apart from The Autobiography, the film’s major source, Malcolm X has also been the most influential in shaping perceptions of the man. (Lee’s screenplay was also adapted in part from Baldwin’s.) Having owned the rights to the project since the 1960s, Warner Bros. finally released Malcolm X on 18 November 1992, a generation after Malcolm’s death and in the wake of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and the Los Angeles riots of 1992. The film’s climax is the assassination scene. Lee described the assassination shoot as the film’s “most difficult, technically and emotionally,” adding that “choreographing chaos is difficult.”39 The complexity of accurately and convincingly re-enacting an event of mythic stature in modern African American history is evident in Lee’s account of its visual and narrative requirements: There are a lot of angles, maybe twelve set-ups. Re-cut, re-cut, re-cut. Some of the elements that have to come across are the cold-bloodedness of Malcolm’s killers; you’ve got to see the devastation of his family – know that they are there; you have to see his awareness of what is happening; you have to see all this clearly in the middle of the chaos.40

The film adopts the five-assassin theory set out in Peter Goldman’s second edition of The Death and Life of Malcolm X (1979), depicting the Nation of Islam assassins cleaning and loading weapons in a basement hideout. The sequence presents Malcolm X as resigned to his fate. In a gesture either misguided or self-sacrificial, Malcolm refuses armed protection at his final appearance, stating, “we don’t want black people killing each other.”41 The film implicates the FBI in the shooting. As Malcolm tells his wife Betty over the phone that the Nation is not working alone in pursuing 38 Lee and Jones, Do the Right Thing, 91. The film’s star, Denzel Washington, first played the role of Malcolm X in Laurence Holder’s one-act play When the Chickens Come Home to Roost at New York’s Henry Street Settlement Arts Center in 1981. 39 Lee and Wiley, Necessary, 101. 40 Ibid., 142. 41 Lee, Malcolm X.

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him, FBI agents listen in, one joking that, “compared to King, this guy’s a monk.”42 Most memorably, a tracking shot depicts Malcolm as if gliding mechanically and irrevocably along the sidewalk towards the Audubon. Prior to his speech, Malcolm sits before a dressing-room vanity in a scene suggestive of the distinctly performative context of his life and death. The setting is faintly tawdry, with burnt-out bulbs visible around him as he declares: “It’s a time for martyrs now.”43 A hint of a smile crosses his lips as he observes his assassins approaching the stage. The Earl Grant and stretcher photographs of Malcolm’s corpse evidently influenced the framing of the sequence. Following the assassination scene, the film includes an extended montage of documentary footage and photographs with Ossie Davis reciting his eulogy for Malcolm X in voice-over. The sequence is amongst the film’s finest, acknowledging as it does the performances consigned to history by Malcolm X himself and revealing a complex tradition of narrative interaction with his iconography. Sue Coe’s 1986 series of paintings of the assassination, intended “as a visual complement to the Autobiography,” paired the noir aesthetics of the graphic novel with a vision of hell, or perhaps the medieval dungeon.44 The paintings are characteristic of her polemical, expressionistic style illuminated by Goya-like “vignettes of horror.”45 In these images, the figure of the orator is framed by the blood-red proscenium arch and an aura suggestive of ascension. The Assassins, the most evocative of these paintings, emphasises the widow’s grief and, in its portrayal of Malcolm X, clearly echoes Earl Grant’s photograph. Malcolm X may have resisted a Christian interpretation, but his was a culture steeped in Christian iconography; as Wilson Jeremiah Moses indicates, “suffering-servanthood and the image of the man of sorrows are, of course, essential ingredients of the Christian messianic myth” appearing so commonly in the African American cultural tradition.46 Coe’s painting, like the oratorical genre of images in general, functions in Malcolm’s iconography like representations of the Passion relative to the death of Christ; with the Passion, “the moment before [Christ’s] death is positioned as the preferred way of depicting death itself, death’s opposite being used as its stand-in,”

42 Ibid. The statement refers, of course, to the FBI wiretap revelation of Martin Luther King’s infidelities. 43 Ibid. 44 Heller, “Sue Coe: Eyewitness.” 45 Ibid. See Goya’s The Third of May, 1808, which memorialised the Spanish resistance to Napoleon’s invasion of 1808. 46 Moses, Black Messiahs, 48.

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suggesting visual culture’s interest in resurrection—mythic, religious, or otherwise.47

Fig. 6-2. Sue Coe, The Assassins. © 1986 Sue Coe. Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York.

The backstage perspective reveals a shadowed group of hooded, horned figures resembling executioners. Their clasped hands feign innocence, while a rifle is visible behind the rearmost figure’s back. Coe has since distanced herself from the work, claiming, “I made Malcolm into an icon when I should have dealt with him as an individual.”48 Engaging 47 48

Zelizer, “The Voice,” 166. Heller, “Sue Coe: Eyewitness.”

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with Malcolm X beyond the terms of his iconicity is, of course, increasingly difficult. Although Coe’s assassination paintings are on some level derivative of the photographs and narratives that have illustrated and evoked Malcolm’s killing, they can also be seen to comment on (while contributing to) the objectification of his martyrdom. The assassination has been repeatedly, elaborately, and often harrowingly visualised, demonstrating Malcolm X’s status as a site of memory in which popular, radical, and religious discourses interact. Laurence Henry has written that: One might say of Malcolm what a character named Malcolm said of the assassinated Thane of Cawdor in MacBeth: Nothing in his life Became him like the leaving it; He died As one who had been studied in his death.49

Many have questioned whether absorption by mass culture necessitates the depletion or distortion of meaning. For Theodor Adorno, “all mass culture is fundamentally adaptation,” a largely vacant but relentlessly selfreferential hall of mirrors.50 Others doubt that the formats of commodity and spectacle can be reconciled with practical or, indeed, revolutionary politics. I suggest that depictions of Malcolm X’s death demonstrate the timeless cultural practice of the production and retrieval of meaning through images: “The old process continues: history becomes mythology, mythology begets ritual, ritual demands icons.”51 The many images of Malcolm X have served to contain, distort, and allude to the many narratives that have been produced by and about him. Despite the frequent use of Malcolm X to identify and, at times, exploit the perceived fissures in human society—whether in terms of ideology, nationality, race, or religion—he is not reducible to the “convenient symbol of ‘hatred’” that The Autobiography foretold.52 The X persists in signifying variously.

49

Henry, “Malcolm X Lives,” 92-93. Adorno, Industry, 58. 51 Fishwick, “Icons of America,” 4. 52 X and Haley, Autobiography,” 389. 50

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Works Cited Adorno, T. The Culture Industry. London: Routledge, 1991. Baldwin, J. One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” New York: Laurel, 1992. —. The Devil Finds Work. London: Corgi Books, 1976. Baraka, A. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. New York: Freundlich Books, 1984. —. “The Death of Malcolm X.” In Malcolm X: Justice Seeker, edited by J. B. Gwynne, 81-97. New York: Steppingstones Press, 1993. Barthes, R. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by R. Howard. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982. Brath, E. “I Remember Malcolm (a narrative).” In The Harlem Cultural/ Political Movements 1960-1970: From Malcolm X to “Black is Beautiful,” edited by A. Sinclair, 13-18. New York: Gumbs & Thomas Publishers, Inc., 1995. Carson, C, ed. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. London: Abacus, 2000 Cleaver, E. Soul on Ice. London: Panther Modern Society, 1970. Coe, S. X. New York: New Press, 1992. Davis, T. “Malcolm X: Image, Myth, Ideas.” In Malcolm X: The Great Photographs, 7-27. Stewart, Tabori, & Chang, 1993. Dudley, D. L. My Father’s Shadow: Intergenerational Conflict in African American Men’s Autobiography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. El-Beshti, B. M. “The Semiotics of Salvation: Malcolm X and the Autobiographical Self.” The Journal of Negro History, 82, no. 4 (1997): 359-67. Ferguson, H. “The Price of Freedom.” Souls 7, no. 1 (2005): 84-106. Fishwick, M. “Icons of America.” In Icons of America, edited by R. B. Browne and M. Fishwick, 3-11. Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1978. Frady, M. “The Children of Malcolm.” The New Yorker, 12 October 1992: 64-81. Hariman, R., and J. L. Lucaites. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Heller, Steven. “Sue Coe: Eyewitness.” Eye Magazine, Summer 1996

30 April 2012. Henry, L. “Malcolm X Lives.” Cavalier, June 1966: 36-37, 91-95.

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Jamal, H. A. From The Dead Level: Malcolm X and Me. New York: Random House, 1972. Karim, B. with P. Skutches and D. Gallen. Remembering Malcolm. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1992. Lee, S. dir. Malcolm X. Los Angeles: Warner Bros., 1992. Lee, S,. and L. Jones. Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint. New York: Fireside, 1989. Lee, S., and R. Wiley. By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X. New York: Hyperion, 1992. Malik, M. A. From Michael de Freitas to Michael X. London: Andre Deutsch, 1968. Marable, M. Living Black History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2006. Moses, W. J. Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth. London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982. Norman, B. “‘Reading a Closet Screenplay’: Hollywood, James Baldwin’s Malcolms and the Threat of Historical Irrelevance.” African American Review 39, nos. 1-2 (2005): 103-115. “Obituary: Malcolm X.” New York Times, 22 February 1965: 20. Parks, G. “The Violent End of the Man Called Malcolm X.” Life, 5 March 1965: 26-7. Perry, B. Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America. Barrytown, New York: Station Hill, 1991. Poston, T. “Malcolm and the Muslims.” New York Post, 22 February 1965: 15. “Races: Death and Transfiguration.” Time, 5 March 1965: 23-25. Randall, D., and M. G. Burroughs, eds. For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and the Death of Malcolm X. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1969. Reed, Jr., A. “The Allure of Malcolm X and the Changing Character of Black Politics.” In Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, edited by Joe Wood, 203-32. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Tulloch, C. “‘My Man, Let Me Pull Your Coat to Something’: Malcolm X.” In Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, edited by S. Bruzzi and P. Church Gibson, 298-313. London: Routledge, 2000. Wideman, J. E. “Malcolm X: The Art of Autobiography.” In Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, edited by J. Wood, 101-16. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

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X, Malcolm and A. Haley. “Author/Collaborator Letter of Agreement, 1 June 1963.” The Malcolm X Collection: Papers, 1948-1965, Sc Micro R-6270, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. —. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1966. —. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Ballantine Books, 1999. Zelizer, B. “The Voice of the Visual in Memory.” In Framing Public Memory, edited by Kendall R. Phillips, 157-80. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2004.

CHAPTER SEVEN VISUALISATION OF DEATH IN JAPAN: THE CASE OF THE FLIGHT JL123 CRASH CHRISTOPHER P. HOOD

We are surrounded by death. But most of the time death is out of sight. For many it is a source of fear. Even though most, at least in technologically and medically advanced nations, will die relatively peacefully, the questions over death and what happens after death cause uneasiness. The possibility of dying in a more traumatic event only heightens the fear of death. The possibility of perishing in an aviation accident is a common fear of many in the modern world. Such deaths are rare, but when they happen, the story is often the focus of much public attention, with this fascination and voyeurism into the abyss of tragedy being fuelled by the media. But the way in which such events are covered by the media initially, as well as by books, documentaries and films and such like can vary greatly from culture to culture. The degree to which death itself will actually be visualised can similarly vary significantly. This chapter will consider the way in which deaths in the world’s single largest plane crash were portrayed in the country where the disaster happened; Japan. The crash of Japan Air Lines flight JL123 on 12 August 1985 shook both the Japanese nation and the whole world. 524 crew and passengers were on board the Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet. When rescue teams finally reached the crash site, all but four people were dead. It remains the world’s largest single plane crash in terms of human fatalities. Amongst the first on the scene were the media. For several weeks after the crash the media covered the aftermath in detail, including information about how many bodies had been identified and how they had been identified. There were also many images to go with these stories.1 A number of them have 1

Due to copyright reasons, it is not possible to include some of the images under discussion. However, several are available on the internet and web addresses will be provided for these. In many cases there are a variety sites which have the same,

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become iconic and well known images in Japan, as will be discussed below. In many respects, I believe that this disaster is Japan’s and the aviation world’s equivalent to the Titanic. This chapter discusses how the deaths were visualised both in 1985 in the media and in subsequent years in various narratives and dramatisations about the crash. It includes a study of various outputs in relation to the visualisation of deaths from the crash, including two novels that have also been turned into films. The chapter also considers the numerous other books connected to JL123. Although the majority of these books do not contain pictures, a reader often creates their own visuals in their head as they read, as if directing their own film. Narrative descriptions can further enhance our understanding of the visualisation of the original event, and so it is appropriate to consider them in this chapter also.

Japan: The Land of Death Although Japan is a country which many associate with beauty and technology, it is also one which we, perhaps unknowingly, associate with death. For example, it is the country of seppuku (also known as harakiri) and tokubetsu kǀgeki tai,2 better known as kamikaze. In recent years, Japan has become known internationally for Aokigahara, the forest at the foot of Mount Fuji where each year up to 100 bodies of those who have committed suicide may be found.3 Similarly suicides on the railways and through internet suicide groups have been reported in the international news.4 Japan was also the scene of religious terrorism when 12 people were killed and over 1,000 injured following a sarin gas attack on the Tǀkyǀ underground in 1995. On top of this there are many deaths due to or similar, images. Some of these do not remain live for great lengths of time. Where pictures become unavailable, search using the tool: www.archive.org. Other pictures can also be found in my book, Dealing With Disaster in Japan: Responses to the Flight JL123 Crash. 2 Macrons are used as appropriate on all Japanese words. Macrons are used to denote long vowel sounds, which are twice the length of a short vowel in pronunciation. Macrons are not included on words where the brand name does not include them, such as “Tokyo Disneyland.” An apostrophe is used between combinations ‘n’ and ‘yo’, for example, to distinguish between the sounds “n’yo” and “nyo.” Japanese nouns do not have plural forms, and so no pluralising “s” is used. Although often written as Gumma, which follows the traditional Hepburn Romanisation system, I use the spelling Gunma as used by the prefectural government (and the revised Hepburn system). 3 See Gilhooly ‘Inside.’ 4 For example, see BBC 2004a, BBC 2004b.

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natural phenomenon such as earthquakes, tsunami, landslides, typhoons, flooding, and heavy snow. Even the famous sakura, cherry blossom, derives much of its symbolic appeal for the Japanese from its reflection of the transience of things, mono no aware.5 For some its ultimate beauty comes at the moment of its demise as it falls from the tree, and the Japanese military exploited this idea during the Second World War by promulgating the dictum “Thou shall die like beautiful falling cherry petals for the Emperor.”6 Death features heavily in many novels, television dramas, manga and films. Japan’s most internationally renowned films this century both feature death; Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001), better known as Spirited Away, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Film in 2002 and Okuribito (Yǀjirǀ Takita, 2008), otherwise known as Departures, which won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2009. If we consider death and religion in Japan, there is a paradox. First it should be noted that religion in Japan is centred upon practices as much as it is about beliefs. But while the main religions in Japan coexist, and the majority of Japanese practice elements of Shintǀ and Buddhism throughout their lives, it is in relation to death where the two seem very different. For Shintǀ, death is dirty and should be avoided. Those connected with death should also be avoided. This led to the creation of a class of untouchables, eta, during the Tokugawa Period (1603-1868) as their lives were connected with death, whether human or animal. Buddhism, on the other hand, is the religion Japanese often turn to at times of death. Although Shintǀ is also concerned with ancestral worship, funerals, acts of remembrance, memorialisation, and ancestral worship are often centred on Buddhist practices. However, I would suggest that many of these acts happen at a superficial level rather than being founded on an understanding of, or a belief in, what is being done. So Shintǀ tries to push death away, whilst Buddhism accepts death as an inevitability and the rituals relating to it as being something which the living should be involved in. These conflicts are perhaps part of the reason why it seems that many Japanese are yet to find a position on death with which they are comfortable.7 In terms of the visualisation of death, one may assume that Shintǀ influence would lead to a reluctance to show death. However, in fact, Japan is often very open about not only the discussion of death, but, as this chapter demonstrates, the visualisation of death too. The visualisation of death in Japan is a clear demonstration of the paradox of 5

Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, 27. Ibid., 28. 7 See Hood, Dealing and “Disaster.” 6

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the attitude to death; whereas at times it is something which is considered “dirty” and to be avoided, there is also an openness and acceptance of death and this allows images of it to be used more widely than may be seen in some other societies.

Flight to Disaster Let us now consider the key points relating to the crash of JL123. It was a domestic flight going between Haneda Airport in Tǀkyǀ and Itami Airport in ƿsaka.8 Although Tǀkyǀ and ƿsaka are only about 400km apart, the demand for fast transportation links supports both high-speed railway connections via the shinkansen (“bullet-train”) and a significant number of flights. Indeed, in recent years the route has consistently been the third busiest sector in the world, behind two other domestic Japanese routes, taking over 7 million passengers per year.9 With this level of demand, it should be of no surprise that the planes used on these routes have been Boeing 747s (“Jumbo Jets”) rather than smaller Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s, or even Bombardiers, which would be found on routes of a similar distance in Europe (e.g. London – Newcastle) and the USA (Chicago – Detroit). 12th August is a significant date in the calendar for many Japanese. It is not a national holiday as such, but it is a time when many are on holiday due to school holidays. Furthermore in many areas of Japan it marks the start of the period of Obon when many return to their ancestral homes so that they can visit and clean the ancestral grave. With the migration to the large cities on the Kantǀ and Kansai plains since the 1950s, many have found themselves living far from their family graves and their relations. Consequently, the demand on the transportation system is stretched to its limits as they return to hold family reunions during Obon. The demand on the railways, roads and planes is further exacerbated by the general acceptance to take time off work at this time, leading to many travelling for holidays.10 8

Officially Haneda Airport is Tǀkyǀ International Airport (HND) and Itami Airport is ƿsaka International Airport (ITM), but throughout the text I use the terms by which the airports are better known to avoid confusion with the Narita Airport (NRT) (formerly known as New Tǀkyǀ International Airport) and Kansai International Airport (KIX)). 9 Japan Airlines, “World.” 10 Although the situation is changing now, in the 1980s many Japanese workers did not take much of their annual leave. That the Japanese travel when there are religious or quasi-religious reasons to do so has parallels with the situation during

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Flight JL123 was due to depart at 18:00. There was a wide range of passengers on board. There were those travelling due to Obon, businessmen, and families returning from Tokyo Disneyland. There were also some famous people on board—for example, the singer Kynj Sakamoto and the President of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team.11 The plane took off at 18:12. Twelve minutes into its flight, there was an explosion. Unknown to those on board, a large part of the vertical stabiliser (“tail fin”) had broken off. Soon all hydraulics were lost. The pilot declared the plane as being “uncontrollable” to Air Traffic Control. The plane entered both a “phugoid motion,” whereby it pitches up and down like a roller-coaster, and a “Dutch roll,” whereby it moves forward in a snaking-pattern.12 With oxygen masks having dropped, the situation in the cabin must have been desperate. Having passed over the Izu Peninsula and Suruga Bay, the plane turned northwards over Yaizu and then progressed eastwards, north of Mount Fuji (fig. 7-1). The plane then completed a 360-degree turn before turning towards the mountains of the Japan Alps. Finally, at 18:56, 32 minutes after the initial explosion, and after slicing through one mountain ridge, the plane crashed into another ridge. Today the crash site is referred to as Osutaka-no-One, “the ridge of Osutaka.” This name reflects the fact that the mountain on which the plane crashed is generally referred to as Osutaka-yama (Mount Osutaka), as was suggested by some media reports. However, the ridge is actually on another mountain, Mount Takamagahara. Although the first media helicopters were flying over the scene of devastation just a few hours after the crash, it was not until after dawn on the 13th that the location in the village of Ueno, Gunma prefecture, was officially confirmed. There were then further delays as it took time for rescue teams to negotiate the narrow roads and tracks to the crash site. It took about 15 hours for the rescue teams to reach the site.

Tokugawa Period when travel outside a domain was generally restricted to pilgrimages. In reality, as with the situation during Obon, much of the reason for travel may have been leisure as much as religion, see Reader, “Pilgrims,” 123. 11 All personal names are written in the order given name-family name. 12 AAIC, “Report.”

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Fig. 7-1 Map of Japan showing Route of JL123.13

13

Ibid. Diagram by author based on information in official accident report.

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Crash Visuals The visualisation of death in relation to JL123 starts prior to the crash although these images only became available some time subsequent to it. By chance a plane-enthusiast videoed the take-off of JL123 (see BBC 2005a). Later, only a few minutes before the plane crashed, an amateur photographer, Keiichi Yamazaki, took a picture of the plane.14 Whilst both of these were images of the outside of the plane, there was also a photograph taken by one of the passengers of the scene inside the plane during the final 32 minutes.15 Each of these images brings the viewer that bit closer to the torment of being on the uncontrollable plane. It brings the viewer closer to death. Within hours of the crash, the names of passengers were put on the television news without the next-of-kin being informed first. Newspapers agreed with each other to a later-than-normal print run so that they could try to collate and print details of the passengers, such as their age, home address and why they were on the flight, and so that the first picture of the crash site could be included.16 Indeed, one of the first helicopters to reach the crash site, just over two hours after the crash, was for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. A photograph taken from this helicopter was on its front cover the next morning.17 The way in which the photographs of passengers and their personal details were listed in subsequent days was reminiscent of the way in which details of kamikaze pilots were presented in newspapers during the war,18 and this would suggest that this is the appropriate way for the dead to be remembered in the media in Japan. This suggestion is further supported by a storyline within the novel KuraimƗzu Hai, discussed further below, where the chief reporter demands that a junior reporter goes to obtain a picture of a traffic accident for an article about the accident in the paper. By the time the crash site had been pinpointed, it was dawn on the 13th and ten and half hours had passed since the crash and the live television visuals were the most powerful. The fire was out, and the most significant visual was the lack of the aircraft other than part of one wing.19 The 14

See Hood, Disaster, 71: figure 4.5; AAIC, “Report,” 257: image 124 See Ibid., 50: figure 3.5 or http://f.hatena.ne.jp/images/fotolife/e/eternal7786/20060304/20060304143848.jpg. 16 Asahi Shimbun Shakaibu, Nikkǀ, 98. 17 See Hood, Disaster, 150: Figure 7.1 or http://www.asahi.com/information/db/anotoki/2008_0517.html. 18 See Earhart, Victory, 434. 19 See for example, Hood, Disaster, 63: Figure 4.3 or 15

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cameras on the helicopters were far enough away that no bodies or body parts could be seen. One of the most iconic pictures of that morning was when the first survivor was found and winched off the crash site a few hours later,20 whilst other images of survivors being taken away from the wreckage also featured in newspapers and magazines (fig. 7-2).

Fig. 7-2. A Survivor Being Taken from the Wreckage. Photograph by and courtesy of Naonori Kohira

That there were four survivors out of 524 passengers and crew provided the title for a book, 4/524, published in 1991. This is a tall, thin, and, by Japanese standards, expensive book. There is limited text and what there is, is mostly in English which makes the book accessible to a wider audience. The author, Naonori Kohira, was a photographer for the magazine Focus at the time of the crash. Such magazines are comparable to British tabloids. Although the title reflects the number of survivors, only 16 of the 51 pictures in the book are of the four survivors. 10 pictures are focussed on the dead, presented in a section called “520/524.” All are of fully intact bodies as Kohira wanted the book to be about “the importance of life” so more graphic images were not necessary.21 The section shows the care that was being taken by the Self Defence Force (SDF) soldiers in http://www.goennet.ne.jp/~hohri/n-ziko-1.jpg 20 See Ibid., 68: figure 4.4 or http://www.goennet.ne.jp/~hohri/n-ziko-4.jpg. 21 Personal interview with Naonori Kohira, 7 July 2011.

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recovering the bodies (fig. 7-3). 39 of the images show rescuers and 35 show a significant amount of plane wreckage (fig. 7-4). There are hardly any pictures focussing on personal effects, although one of these—of an Ace of Spades card (fig. 7-5)—touched Masato Harada, the director of KuraimƗzu Hai (Climber’s High) (2008), who included it in the film although it was not mentioned in the original novel.22 This card was one of the first signs of the crash that Kohira discovered as he approached the site and clearly the symbolism of it being the “death card” was not lost on him or Harada. 23

Fig. 7-3. An SDF Soldier Recovers One of the Victims. Photograph by and courtesy of Naonori Kohira.

22 23

Personal interview with Makoto Harada, 11 July 2011. Personal interview with Naonori Kohira, 7 July 2011.

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Fig. 7-4. The Wreckage of JL123. Photograph by and courtesy of Naonori Kohira.

Fig. 7-5. The Ace of Spades—“The Death Card.” Photograph by and courtesy of Naonori Kohira.

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Whilst 4/524 could be classified as being tastefully presented, magazines such as Emma, Focus and Friday printed pictures which show the grim reality of the crash site. These weekly magazines regularly had combined sales of over half-a-million and unlike newspapers, where most of the sales are by subscription, most are bought at shops and so sales are likely to be a good indication of readership level.24 So although sales are small when compared to newspaper circulation, or even compared to television programme viewing figures, they are not insignificant. The pictures found in these magazines include SDF soldiers trying to fish limbs down from trees and other shots of limbs hanging from trees, corpses lying with blankets on them, burnt and mangled limbs and bodies, the crash site and bodies wrapped up in blankets waiting to be transported off the mountain to the temporary mortuaries and photographs of bodies inside coffins in the mortuary itself.25 These images raise a variety of questions. Why would people want to publish them? Why do some people want to see them? And why do some people—whether they be the bereaved or not—find the publication of these images so repulsive? But it should be noted that even these publications have limits. One picture shows a child in a coffin but the face has been distorted so that it is not recognisable. Is this because the person would otherwise be identifiable, because she is in a coffin, or because she is a child? Although I have come across many Japanese who have mentioned how repulsive they find the various images in these magazines, it is not a view shared by all. After all, many thousands of copies were sold at least in part due to inclusion of the images. During one visit to the crash site I was approached by a Japanese 24

Gamble and Watanabe, Betrayed, 81. These images can be viewed at: http://sk.fox.ac/jal123/emma1.jpg; http://sk.fox.ac/jal123/focus2.jpg; http://sk.fox.ac/jal123/emma2.jpg; http://sk.fox.ac/jal123/emma3.jpg; http://sk.fox.ac/jal123/emma7.jpg; http://sk.fox.ac/jal123/focus1.jpg; http://sk.fox.ac/jal123/focus3.jpg; http://sk.fox.ac/jal123/focus4.jpg; http://sk.fox.ac/jal123/friday1.jpg; http://sk.fox.ac/jal123/friday3.jpg; http://sk.fox.ac/jal123/friday4.jpg; http://sk.fox.ac/jal123/jal13.jpg; http://sk.fox.ac/jal123/emma4.jpg; http://sk.fox.ac/jal123/emma5.jpg; http://sk.fox.ac/jal123/friday2.jpg and http://sk.fox.ac/jal123/emma8.jpg. 25

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man who was not a relation of a victim and who, upon learning of my research about the crash but not specifically about the visualisation of death in relation to the crash, at once began discussing the potential importance of these images and how it was a good thing that they had been published. Given the number of sites and YouTube videos that also feature the images, one has to conclude that he is not alone in this respect. We have become accustomed to seeing similar images of the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.26 We have also become accustomed to similar images in documentaries and films made about the bombing of Hiroshima in particular. The link between JL123 and Hiroshima was even made by one of the tabloid magazines when it used the caption “no more JAL 123” on one of the pictures in a nod to the “no more Hiroshimas” slogan. Let us not forget that the crash came just three days after the 40th anniversary of bombing of Nagasaki, itself three days after the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The memory of these events would have been very much in the minds of the Japanese at this time, just as the anniversary of the crash even today ties in with what Satǀ refers to as Japan’s “August journalism” with its emphasis on memorialisation.27 Whilst some of the pictures of victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were of the living, viewers would probably realise that many would not live for much longer. Films or docu-dramas, such as the one made by the BBC in 2005 look incredibly realistic, but we console ourselves with the assumption that the dead are not real. But why do we find it easier to accept the images of victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in comparison to those of JL123? Is it because in the case of JL123, most victims, even if not in the images discussed above, were ultimately identifiable or had living relatives? Is it because permission had not been given for the images to be used? Is it because there is a feeling that these magazines are merely exploiting the JL123 victims rather than being educational? Is it because for many Japanese these victims are not considered “dead” at this stage?

26

For example see http://media.photobucket.com/image/Hiroshima%20burnt/geoffrey_summers/Hiro shi.aBodyBurnt78_3000m.jpg, https://crfntserver1.crfusa.org/crf/crfdata/hdww2007/2702/Hiroshi_1BadBurnNotSurvived.jpg, http://www.deathmasters.com/HiroshimaNagasaki%20Memorial%20Page_arquivos/ngsk01.jpg, http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Japan/Victim1.jpg 27 Satǀ, Hachi, 129.

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Before moving on to further images, there is another category of image that appeared in the media which is worth discussing here. During the final 32 minutes a number of passengers and one of the crew wrote isho— farewell notes or “will/testament.” In the case of the stewardess, it was notes about what announcements to make, in Japanese and English, after an emergency landing. The six passengers’ notes were to their family members. Photographs of the isho appeared in newspapers and magazines.28 As with the pictures of the plane first discussed in this section, these photographs of the isho show no dead bodies, but help to bring the viewer a little closer to understanding the torment of those on the flight and of developing an image in our own head of what it must have been like on the plane.

Identifying and Remembering the Dead Remains were transported from the crash site to a city about 60km away called Fujioka. Generally all the public saw of this process were images of helicopters and folded up bundles of blankets. Medical books, produced by doctors’ associations and which are not widely available, provide details of the identification process.29 Copies of these books were given to all of the Japanese bereaved (izoku). These books appear to be careful not to include images of any identifiable body or body part although the text itself is graphic in other ways (though not as graphic as what some bereaved saw for themselves). Once remains had been detailed, the bereaved were able to enter the temporary mortuary to look at the coffins and to attempt to identify their loved one.30 There were over 2,000 coffins for all the various bodies and body parts recovered from the crash site.31 A few images of the mortuary, when empty, were shown in the media. However, as the focus, in this instance, was on the coffins or the families, the visualisation of death was focussed upon the bereavement and mourning process rather than visuals of the dead themselves. In subsequent years many more non-fiction books and documentaries relating to the crash have been made. What is noticeable about these Japanese books and documentaries in comparison to English-language ones, both related to this crash and other crashes, is that the Japanese ones 28

See Hood, Disaster, Figure 5.1 or http://sk.fox.ac/jal123/emma9.jpg and http://www.goennet.ne.jp/~hohri/n-isyo.htm. 29 These books have no ISBN, for example, making it harder for them to be searched for or purchased. 30 Hood, Disaster, 97-8. 31 Iizuka, Tsuiraku Itai, 174.

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tend to focus more on the story of the bereaved rather than the survivors and that they include much more detail about body parts of the victims. Based on my readings of English language books on aviation accidents and my viewing of numerous English language documentaries about aviation accidents, such as those shown on channels such as National Geographic and Discovery, they tend to disassociate the human element from the crash after the initial news reporting, and it is rare to hear any mention of incomplete bodies. It is almost as though the victims are reduced to a mere statistic. Most English books focus on the cause of the crash. Even movies, whilst possibly showing bodies being burnt, will seemingly resist showing anything that reveals the grim reality of what can happen to some bodies. Although the Japanese books may not contain images of dead bodies, documentaries do. For example, in one the wife of the captain shows off the only remains found of her husband—his jaw.32 There may be a variety of reasons for this. Documentaries on television, by their very nature, are primed for visual impact. That, in this case, they have the victim’s wife as a willing participant in the programme ensures that there are no concerns with upsetting that particular family. For books, on the other hand, their power tends to come more from words than from images. Obtaining the necessary images may lead to costs so that permission can be granted from the image holder rights to use the picture. But even with their permission, there may remain concerns about the feelings of the family of the victim, even if the victim is not immediately identifiable from the image. That Japan has significantly strengthened its laws in relation to privacy and personal information protection may also have an impact upon the imagery and information included in books about the crash published since 2003.33 In 1985, newspapers continued to follow the developments in Fujioka for several weeks and printed updates on the numbers of bodies which had been identified. The evening edition of the best-selling newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun on 24 August even produced a seating-plan providing detailed information about how each body had been identified up to that point. But as the media continued to surround the morgues in Fujioka, one of the most well-known events took place at the crash site. Several days after the crash Mr and Mrs Miyajima travelled to the site looking for their nine year old son, Ken, who had been travelling by himself for the first time. They travelled to the site as a result of their own belief that Ken could still be alive and lost, wandering in the hills around the crash site. Although a 32 33

TBS, BoisurekǀdƗ. See Hood, Disaster, 156.

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reporter friend gave them advice as to how to access the site, their trip was done without any help or support from others. Whilst the image of Mr and Mrs Miyajima at the crash site did not show death it provided a visual reminder of the enormity of the event and made this more understandable for the average individual.34 In many respects I believe that Ken Miyajima became the means by which many can comprehend the consequences of the crash. This is perhaps comparable to how Anne Frank’s diary can allow us “to grasp the awful reality” of the holocaust.35 Following identification, most victims were cremated and ceremonies were held. There were also some special memorial services. In terms of the visualisation of death in Japan, perhaps the most striking part of this process was the use of black and white pictures for dead people. The choice to use black and white pictures appears to be an attempt to provide a further confirmation of the person’s passing from the colourful world of the living. This delineation can even be seen in the custom of generally not displaying photographs in the home which contain both people who are still living and those who have died.36 However, what constitutes “death” is something which appears to be different in Japan to many other societies. After the physical death, there is a limbo stage when individuals are neither considered to be alive nor fully dead. This continues until the 49th day after the physical death and the person is considered to have become “a Buddha.” Japan is noted as a country where ancestor worship is of great importance. However, the deceased does not become an ancestor at the time of death or even on the 49th day after death. Indeed it is not until either the 33rd or 50th anniversary after the individual’s death that they are considered to have become an ancestor.37 That the physically dead are not considered fully dead for some days after the physical death may be one of the reasons why some are so appalled to see photographs of the dead in the shnjkanshi discussed above.

Narratives About the Crash Let us now consider the novels and films about the crash. The first of these is the novel KuraimƗzu Hai (Climber’s High), written by Hideo 34

Ibid., 158: see Figure 7.6. Walter, “War,” 73. 36 Suzuki, “Beyond,” 145. 37 It is important to note that the year of death is counted as being the first year. Consequently, the ‘third anniversary’ of an individual’s death for someone who died in 1985 would be 1987 not 1988, see Hood, Disaster, 115 and Hood, “Dealing,” 204-6. 35

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Yokoyama. It is the story of a reporter in a local newspaper who has to decide what stories to run in relation to the crash, whilst also covering his attempts to climb Tanigawa-dake (fig. 7-1), which he had been due to climb until the news of the crash came in, some years later. Yokoyama was a reporter at a local newspaper at the time of the crash, and so the book is considered to be a fact-based fiction novel (moderu shǀsetsu), which is a popular style of writing in Japan. In reality, whilst many parts of the book are based on truth, it is overly simplistic to think of it being based upon Yokoyama’s experiences.38 NHK did a two-part dramatisation in 2005 (directed by Gǀ Inoue) and a feature-film version was released in 2008 (directed by Makoto Harada). The three stories have subtle differences but here I will only discuss the way in which the NHK and film versions visualised death. In both versions, as the story is focused on the decision making process about what articles to include, there is little need for graphic portrayal of the crash site. The main imagery in relation to the death of a passenger is when a dead girl is seen being carried by an SDF soldier. However the film version also shows a severed arm dangling from a tree in the same scene, paralleling one of the magazine images mentioned earlier. Other than that no dead passengers are seen directly—but there are references to them and there are also other deaths. In the film version one reporter questions whether the people have also been pulverised like the plane when the first TV news images of the crash site are shown. The film version also shows a reporter, apparently unable to overcome the trauma brought on by going to the crash site and seeing dead bodies for the first time, being run over. Both versions contain references to what was seen by reporters at the crash site, images of the make-shift mortuaries in Fujioka and one of the isho, with the NHK version showing a copy of the note itself. With regard to the mortuaries in Fujioka both versions use still photos of the mortuaries in relation to what story to run one day in the newspaper and the NHK version also includes images showing coffins being carried to the morgue from actual TV news footage from 1985. The NHK version also includes a few black and white still images near the start in a brief overview of the crash which helps tie the programme to the historical realities of what happened in 1985. The use of black and white images may further emphasise that this is dealing with a past event, whilst also providing a degree of distance and difference from the colourful images of the drama itself. Here, and in the images of the crash site in the film, the 38

Personal interview with Hideo Yokoyama, 10 August 2009.

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dead bodies at the crash site are wrapped in blankets. I believe that by not being overly graphic, the scene showing the dead girl helps to focus the mind on the scale of the tragedy without detracting from the main story or its themes. The other novel relating to JL123 is Shizumanu Taiyǀ (The Sun Which Doesn’t Set) written by Toyoko Yamasaki, which was published in 2001 after being serialised between 1995 and 1999. The novel is in three parts and a total of five volumes. The third volume deals with the crash. It is another moderu shǀsetsu. Most—but not all—names are changed. Significantly Ken Miyajima’s name remains unchanged. The book contains text from the actual Cockpit Voice Recorder, details about the Search and Rescue efforts, the original “Ochiai Statement” allegedly made by one of the survivors and later shown to probably have been fictitious, details about the body identification process, discussion about possible SDF missile remnants at the crash site, one of the isho, and detailed accounts of the compensation process. After many false starts in December 2008 it was announced that a film, directed by Setsurǀ Wakamatsu, would be made with Ken Watanabe in the lead role (with the international title of The Unbroken). The film was expected to cost in excess of ¥2bn (£15m) making it one of the most expensive Japanese films ever.39 It runs for over 3 hours, and has a 10-minute interval during the film. The picture company was keen to stress that this is a film of Shizumanu Taiyǀ and that it is not about JL123 (as explained in the credits at the end of the film and in my personal correspondence with the company) and all of the names—including Ken Miyajima’s—are fictitious. Whilst the picture company may have tried to distance the film from JL123, I suspect that people’s perceptions are likely to bring the two closer together and the documentaries about the making of the film which are available on a bonus DVD with the film itself show that Watanabe and the film crew were clearly aware of the basis for the story. As well as recreating the crash site, as the film version of Climber’s High did, Shizumanu Taiyǀ also recreates the plane (using computer graphics) and has a mock-up of some of the inside of the plane. However, the actual moment of impact is not shown. Although it is possible to see a body at the crash site, it is not overly graphic and there is no highlighting of there being any body parts as was seen with the scene in the film version of Climber’s High. Most of the visualisation of the dead revolves around the handling of corpses in blankets and the coffins. Although when viewing inside the mortuary one can briefly see some bodies, the angle is 39

Tokyograph, “Watanabe.”

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so wide that there is little detail. Further shots of the coffins when the lids are removed are done in such a way so that the contents cannot be seen. The only significant view inside a coffin comes later in the film when we see the main character’s dead mother and so is unrelated to the crash. The only other death that we see is when, near the beginning of the film, the main character shoots an elephant dead. This event takes place at a different time in the main character’s life, but the crash is entwined with this episode with crosscutting between the two scenes. As the elephant collapses the sound of the plane crashing can be heard. The two jumbos die together. The relative proximity to the crash in terms of time is probably what makes directors reluctant to be too graphic. At one level it seems surprising that films relating to JL123 are being made at all. Let us not forget many relatives of victims, as well as the four survivors, are still alive. The association for the bereaved is generally informed when something is to be made, but not consulted during the production process.40 Would an audience have been prepared to accept a recreation of the graphic images of the JL123 crash site, depicting mangled bodies and body parts, similar to those shown in the tabloid magazines? Such graphic images may actually detract from the story or put many people off from going once they have read reviews mentioning such scenes. The impact of the film consequently may be reduced. If this is the case, perhaps the question is not why such images are not more wide-spread in the visualisation of JL123, but why are there so many such images used for Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Japan has changed in the years since the JL123 crash. Whether the reporting of a crash today would be done in the same way is debatable. There are many different views on death and the visualisation of death in Japan, just as in most societies, but I believe that there are some areas where a significant proportion of Japanese society is, or was, different to many other societies, and that the coverage of the JL123 crash demonstrates this.

Works Cited AAIC (Aircraft Accident Investigation Commission, Ministry of Transport), “Aircraft Accident Investigation Report: JA8119,” (Japanese and English versions), 1987. Also available at

40

Personal interview with Kuniko Miyajima, 16 January 2009.

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http://www.mlit.go.jp/jtsb/eng-air_report/JA8119.pdf. Accessed 1 February 2007. Asahi Shimbun Shakaibu, Nikkǀ Janboki Tsuiraku: Asahi Shimbun no 24ji, (17th edition, first published 1990) Tǀkyǀ: Asahi Shimbun, 2006. BBC, “Nine die in Japan ‘suicide pacts’.” 2004a. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3735372.stm. Accessed 12 October 2004. BBC, “Japan’s internet ‘suicide clubs’.” 2004b. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4071805.stm. Accessed 7 December 2004. BBC, “1985: Hundreds dead in Boeing crash.” 2005a. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/12/newsid_252 9000/2529031.stm. Accessed 1 February 2007. BBC, Hiroshima, directed by Paul Wilmshurst, 2005b. Earhart, D.C. Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2008. Gamble, A., and T. Watanabe. A Public Betrayed: Japanese Media Atrocities, What the World Needs to Know, Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2004. Gilhooly, R. “Inside Japan’s ‘Suicide Forest’.” The Japan Times, 26 June 2011. Also available from http://info.japantimes.co.jp/text/fl20110626x1.html. Accessed 27 June 2011. Hood, C. P. Dealing with Disaster in Japan: Japanese and Global Responses to the Flight JL123 Crash, London: Routledge, 2011. —. “Disaster and Death in Japan: Responses to the Flight JL123 Crash.” In Death, Dying and Disposal in Contemporary Japan, edited by H. Suzuki, 202-225. London: Routledge, 2012. Iizuka, S. Tsuiraku Itai – Osutaka-yama no Nikkǀki 123bin, Tǀkyǀ: Kǀdansha, 2001. Japan Airlines, “World Top 11 City-Pairs.” SORA Data File, 2004. Kohira, N. 4/524, Tǀkyǀ: Shinchǀsha, 1991. Lennon, J. and M. Foley. Dark Tourism, London: Thomson Learning, 2004. Ohnuki-Tierney, E. Kamikaze Diaries, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Reader, I. “Dead to the World: Pilgrims in Shikoku.” In Pilgrimage in Popular Culture, edited by I. Reader and T. Walter, 107-136. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993. Satǀ, T. Hachi Gatsu Jnjgo Nichi no Shinwa, Tǀkyǀ: Chikuma Shinsho, 2005.

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Suzuki, I. “Beyond Ancestor Worship: Continued Relationship with Significant Others.” In Death, Dying and Disposal in Contemporary Japan, edited by H. Suzuki, 141-56. London: Routledge, 2012. TBS, BoisurekǀdƗ: Nokosareta Koe no Kiroku – Jambo-ki Tsuiraku 20nenme no Shinjitsu, directed by Takahiro Matsuda, Mariko Arai and Hideki Nakahara. Television documentary first shown on 12 August 2005. Tokyograph, “Ken Watanabe stars in “Shizumanu Taiyo’.” 2008. http://www.tokyograph.com/news/id-4154. Accessed 9 December 2008. Walter, T. “War Grave Pilgrimage.” In Pilgrimage in Popular Culture, edited by I. Reader and T. Walter, 63-91. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993.

CHAPTER EIGHT SHOOTING THE DEAD: IMAGES OF DEATH, INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION IN THE ISRAELI PRESS TAL MORSE

Introduction 2001 was another year of bloodshed in Israel-Palestine. The endless conflict between Israel and the Palestinians yielded a large number of stories about killings on both sides. Images of death and destruction were a common item on the news. Yet, the coverage of the different death-related stories in the Israeli media was not homogenous, and the visual language that was used varied significantly in relation to the different events. What are the different modes of representing death in the Israeli media? Why did the coverage of events that were similar in nature, result in different coverage? What purpose did this variance serve? This chapter addresses these questions. The use of images presenting dead bodies in news reports is infrequent, despite the conventional wisdom that “what bleeds leads.”1 This is due to the journalist self-regulations that were established in western countries in relation to mortal images and the sensitivity they bear.2 And yet, such images do appear in the media from time to time. The discussions about the presentation of death images and the journalistic practice that was developed in relation to this issue teaches us that death images are perceived differently from other news images and that they are subject to a fierce debate between different social agents—journalists, administrations, 1

See Hanusch, Representing; Griffin, “Picturing”; Fahmy, “Iraq War”; Zelizer, About to Die. 2 Campbell, “Horrific Blindness”; Zelizer, About to Die; Hanusch, Representing; see also “Rules of Journalistic Ethics.”

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publishers and the public.3 The coverage of death events can facilitate social cohesion, yet it can evoke social tensions and expose the fragility of society. In this sense, the ways death images are utilised when reporting death events is significant in the construction of the meaning of the reported event. Accordingly, by studying the representation of death in news reports, we can have a better understanding of the power relations in society and its dominant values. This chapter studies the news coverage of the death of two infants who were murdered in 2001, within four months of each other, and analyses the different ways their deaths were covered by the Israeli media both in images and language. Whereas the death of an Israeli Jewish infant was covered in accordance with the prevalent perceptions among Israeli journalists regarding respect towards the dead and shared norms of good taste and decency, the death of a Palestinian infant was covered in a way that stands in stark opposition and was framed in such a way that feelings of empathy and mourning were utterly absent. The juxtaposition of the two cases demonstrates the different social regulations of death imagery in the Israeli press and the different “regimes of pity” they carry.4 The operation of different regimes of pity, I argue, demarcates the boundaries of care and action and associates them with the boundaries of the community.

Managing the Visibility of Death Death events—and violent death events in particular—are destructive moments that destabilise society.5 As such, these events meet a number of news criteria and “often make the front pages of our newspapers or are the leading items in news bulletins.”6 In addition, the images that emerge from death scenes offer the viewers a glimpse of an exciting and voyeuristic “theatre of violence.”7 Yet not all death events are reported by the media. For a death event to be newsworthy, it has to meet some criteria such as public interest, like the death of a public figure, or to be unexpected and within clear time and space premises.8 According to Seaton, “by far the most important [death event as candidate for news coverage] is the public violent death – the one that no one would want, the ‘bad’ death that is

3

Griffin, “Media Images”; Zelizer, About to Die. Chouliaraki, Suffering. 5 Hertz, Hand; Pantti and Sumiala, “Till Death.” 6 Hanusch, Representing, 2. 7 Griffin, “Media Images,” 8. 8 Walter et al, “Private Emotion”; Harcup, “What Is News?” 4

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unexpected and shocking, that is worthy of making news.”9 In addition, Seaton stresses that “showing pain is almost never neutral—it always has a purpose, and is part of arguments and strategies.”10 Hence, public representation of violent death is meaningful and purposeful. Different social institutions are involved in managing the visibility of death—i.e., controlling the means of production, circulation and framing of death imagery—in order to make a claim in a broader social and cultural context that extends beyond the mere display of the image. This chapter argues that the representation of death serves to draw the boundaries of care and pity in a way that fits the national affiliation and thus functions as a mechanism of social inclusion and exclusion. Despite the newsworthiness of violent death events, the perception of death as a taboo, that is, as something that is prohibited, forbidden or denied,11 shapes the ways in which death events are covered and introduced to the public. In fact, the occasions in which non-fictional violent death is explicitly displayed are fairly scarce.12 Unlike other images of pain and suffering that can be regarded as entertaining,13 images of non-fictional death are almost always controversial and they evoke strong emotions and fierce debates. The production, circulation and presentation of death images raise issues of justice, pity, patriotism, dignity, privacy, freedom, religious belief and even political economy. In this sense, managing the visibility of death is a manifestation of symbolic power that works as a vehicle to establish social order. In other words, managing the visibility of death serves as a means to negotiate power and control by different social groups. The visibility of death might offer the spectators ways to construe reality or to act upon it, and therefore its management is significant. Managing the visibility of death might encourage the spectators’ engagement with the events and with distant suffering or it might discourage it.14 The ways in which mortal reality is relayed to us by words and images facilitates our engagement with the sufferers. In this regard, we need to examine not only what the image depicts but also the way the image is framed and contextualised.15 After all, “what we make emotionally and intellectually of the portrayal of death 9

Seaton, Carnage, 192. Ibid., 84. 11 Walter, “Modern.” 12 Hanusch, Representing. 13 Foltyn, “Dead Famous”; Foltyn, “Corpse.” 14 The discussion here does not address the question of media impact. Rather, it examines the proposition the media make regarding the reported events. 15 Seaton, Carnage; Zelizer, About to Die; Chouliaraki, Suffering. 10

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depends not on the horror of the imagery itself, but on how the death is shown and identified.”16 As will be shown later, images and words operate differently—they can elicit different emotions and inform in different ways; they can work in accordance with one another or one against the other.

The Economies of Regulation The representation of death in the news bears an inherent tension between the public’s right to know and the respect towards the dead. On the one hand, the public needs to be informed of atrocities in various places; on the other hand, explicit death images can dishonour the depicted dead and hurt the public’s feelings, especially the family of the dead.17 This tension is not limited to the issue of whether it is right or wrong to present the images of dead people but moves on to questions of the selection of deaths to present and the method of doing so. Campbell describes the journalistic practices around representation of death in terms of “the economies of regulations.”18 These are prevalent practices in Western journalism that govern the presentation of death images either by self-censoring the images (the economy of “taste and decency”) or by framing and contextualisation the images in a way that filters out their horribleness (the economy of display). The economy of “taste and decency” refers to the self-regulation of the Western media through which horrific images tend to disappear from the media. In such cases, the media hold horrific images but they are kept away from the public eye due to industry standards.19 Formal codes of conduct and informal norms were formulated to shield the public from images of violence. This regulation is often referred to as the “breakfast cereal test.”20 This test is a useful tool to balance decency and sensationalism by appropriating images that will suit the (Western) morning routine of newspaper reading during breakfast. According to this test, the images should tell the horror story, but they should not evoke gruesome or repulsive feelings for the readers or viewers. In so doing, the public is kept both informed and undisturbed. One of the reasons often mentioned to justify this test, is the need to protect children from the 16

Seaton, Carnage, 193; see also Campbell, “Horrific Blindness.” See also Wischmann, “Front Page”; Morse, “Shooting the Dead” and Fishman, “News Norms.” 18 Campbell, “Horrific Blindness.” 19 Ibid. 20 Zelizer, About to Die. 17

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horrible reality but questions of political economy, political bias and patriotism are also in play.21 However, the norms of “taste and decency” are not always maintained, and images of dead bodies do make it to the news from time to time. This is, according to Campbell, the economy of display.22 When death images do appear in the media, they are regulated by framing and contextualisation. The horror of the image is filtered by the use of titles and captions that shape the meaning to the image. The media can enhance or mitigate the horror of the image, and of the story it represents, by a particular use of language and by framing the image in a given context. Since “the same pictures can mean different things at different times because of different concerns,” the media can guide the readers’ relation to the reported event.23 The power of the image is synthesised within a broader context in a way that sometimes gives new meaning to the image. In this regard, it is important to note that the death images in Western media are usually images of dead foreigners,24 a pattern that maintains power relations between Western spectators and non-Western dead.25 In other words, the economy of display is subordinated to questions of nationality, ethnicity and geography, which are questions of power relations. This is an important point if we consider the link between death images and questions of human dignity; the respect towards the dead, voyeurism and the sensationalism of death, that are embedded in the representation of death.

Representation of Death in News Reports in Israel: Two Case Studies, Three Images Thus far, we have seen how the imagery of death is utilised as part of a power struggle. We have also touched upon the controversy that death imagery evokes, and seen the economies of regulation that shape the Western encounter with death imagery via the media. This lays the

21

The circulation of images of the dead Muammar Gaddafi in the news around the world, as well as the successful efforts to keep the images of the dead Osama Bin Laden, indicate that the adherence with this regulation is political and not homogeneous. 22 Campbell, “Horrific Blindness.” 23 Ibid., 71. 24 Taylor, Body Horror; Zelizer, About to Die; Hanusch, Representing; Fishman, “Documenting death” and Fishman and Marvin, “Portrayals of Violence.” 25 Campbell, “Horrific Blindness.”

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foundation for the analysis of the following case studies that shed light on how the economies of regulation operate within the Israeli media. Before delving into the two case studies, it should be noted that in addition to the balancing of the public’s right to know and fear of hurting the public’s feelings, the proper coverage of death events in Israel is affected, to a certain extent, by the dominance of Jewish culture. According to Jewish tradition, it is customary to cover a dead body and not openly display it in public.26 Accordingly, the discussion on how to present death in the media is affected not only by journalistic practice, political economy and manifestation of power, but is also grounded in religious practice that considers such an exhibition as scorning human dignity. On 26th March 2001, a Palestinian sniper shot and killed a Jewish infant, Shalhevet Pass, in the Jewish settlement in the city of Hebron in the West Bank. The Israeli press never printed the explicit photograph of the bleeding dead Jewish infant, although her family urged the Israeli media to disseminate that photograph in order to show how brutal the Palestinians were.27 Instead, the photograph that accompanied the report on the baby’s death showed the father carrying her covered body to the grave. The explicit photograph of Pass is available on a rather esoteric internet website.28 Four months later, on 20 July 2001 Diya Tamaizi, a Palestinian infant, was shot by a Jewish sniper, apparently as a revenge for the death of Shalhevet Pass. By contrast, the photograph of the bleeding Palestinian infant was printed on the front page of Israel’s most popular newspaper, Yediot Achronot. Thus, the events and their representation almost demand their juxtaposition, to which I now turn.

Report on Shalhevet Pass’s Funeral The photograph from the funeral of Shalhevet Pass (fig. 8-1) was printed on the front page of Yediot Achronot. The photograph shows Yitzhak Pass, the infant’s father, holding his dead daughter covered in a blue cloth with golden embroidery of the Star of David. The father’s shirt is torn at its collar, according to the custom at Jewish funerals and throughout the week of mourning, as a sign of grief. In the background,

26

Lamm, The Jewish Way. Barnea, “Bell Tolls”; Mann, “Terror.” 28 See http://www.tip.co.il/news.asp?which=israel&id=651. Tip.co.il describes itself as an “International Internet Newspaper,” however this website is not associated with any of the news organisations in Israel. The website provides its readers with soft news and consumer tips. 27

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there is a hand laid on Yitzhak’s shoulder and behind him stand other mourners. The father looks ahead, though his gaze is not focused. Yet, his facial expression is not one of gloom and he looks calmly restrained. The photograph is taken at eye level, in an empathetic manner. The Star of David on the blue cloth together with the bearded face of Yitzhak signifies his Jewishness. The photograph is surrounded with a black frame, a typical manner of conveying reports of death in Jewish culture and other western cultures, symbolising grief and mourning, assisting the viewer in contextualising the story as a sad story of death. The title of the story is “In daddy’s hands for the last time.” The title describes the photograph. It is not an informative title however, as readers that are as yet unfamiliar with the story cannot fully understand what it is about and who its protagonists are. And yet, it is clear that this is a story of a father that buries his child. However, the use of the term “daddy” (“Aba,” in Hebrew) is common use for children referring to their own father. Using that term without a possessive pronoun (like “her father”) in the title turns the story into a personal one. Yitzhak is not the father of Shalhevet; he is “daddy,” a familiar archetypical figure that the readers can relate to. The description “in daddy’s hands” renders a warm and protective feeling. The phrase “for the last time” gives a dramatic tone and establishes the story as a fatal story. In fact, in using this phrase, the newspaper signifies that this is a story about death. Thus, the report’s title tells in a few words, a story of a strong bond between a father and his daughter that has tragically come to an end because of the daughter’s death. To the left of the photograph there is a short summary of the event which informs the readers of the names of the protagonists, and a short description of the events that led up to the infant’s death is provided. The informative subtitles complete the information that was missing in the main title and identify “daddy” and his daughter: “10 month-old Shalhevet Pass was buried yesterday in Hebron a week after her murder. Thousands escorted her for the last time. Her father, Yitzhak who was wounded in his leg by the same bullet that killed his daughter, carried her in his arms to her grave as he was sitting in a wheel chair.” All in all, this is a respectful coverage. The readers cannot witness the dead body of the infant, but there are other means of representation to signify that this is a story of death and bereavement. The story is framed as one about a dead infant that is carried in her father’s arms in a last gesture of love. The title adds a personal dimension and reinforces the reader’s sense of identification with the father’s grief. That was the photograph that was printed in the newspaper.

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There was another photograph of the dead infant that captures the body of Shalhevet Pass. That photograph was never printed in any Israeli newspaper, nor was it shown in any news report on Israeli TV despite her family’s insistence to spread the photograph.29 The photograph is available only via one website: Tip.co.il.

Fig. 8-1. The title reads: “In daddy’s hands for the last time.” The subtitle reads: “10 months old Shalhevet Pass was buried yesterday in Hebron a week after her murder. Thousands escorted her for the last time. Her father, Yitzhak, who was wounded in his leg by the same bullet that killed his daughter, carried her in his arms to her grave as he was sitting in a wheel chair.” Source: Yediot Achronot. Photograph: AFP

Shalhevet Pass—The Photograph from the Morgue The readers of the newspaper can only see the photographs that the editors thought fit to print, but they cannot see the unprinted photographs that were left outside the edition. The story of the unpublished photograph of the dead Shalhevet Pass provides a unique opportunity to observe the backstage of the newspapers and the photograph that it had in hand, but was turned down and never published. Contemplating this photograph can provide us with an idea as to which images do not comply with the “taste 29

Barnea, “Bell Tolls.”

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and decency” regulation. By analysing Shalhevet Pass’s photograph from the morgue (fig. 8-2), we can learn what kind of images the editors of the newspaper find so horrible and from which they choose to protect their readers.

Fig. 8-2. The unpublished, unattributed, photograph of Shalhevet Pass from the morgue.

At the centre of the photograph there is an infant’s head, shown from the shoulders up. The photograph is taken from a high angle, similar to the angle adults usually look at babies. The infant’s head faces the camera and fills most of the frame. The infant’s eyes are shut, its cheeks are flushed and the head is bleeding. At first glance the infant seems calm, but the dark red stain under her head leaves no doubt that the baby is dead. The blood that drips from the head breaks the innocence of the shut eyes of the infant, and makes it a horrific image. The blood stain signifies the violent death of the infant and dramatises the image. The life of the innocent infant in the photograph has ended prematurely in a violent manner. In fact, that explicit photograph of the dead Shalhevet Pass posted on the website was not part of a report on her death, but was part of a public discussion and campaign that the website wished to initiate on whether or not the photograph should be disseminated by the media. The website editors, like the parents, advocated publicity of the photograph, arguing that the photograph should be part of a campaign aimed at global public opinion, demonstrating how brutal the Palestinians were.

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Report of Diya Tamaizi’s Funeral The photograph from Diya Tamaizi’s funeral was printed on the front page of Yediot Achronot on 22 July 2001 (fig. 8-3). The photograph shows a woman dressed in black, facing the camera with her eyes shut. She holds an infant in her hands, shrouded in a white cloth. A red stain spreads under the infant’s head along with some other blood stains on the white cloth. The woman is surrounded by other women hugging her and caressing her. The photograph is taken from the front. The camera is at the woman’s eye level. Those elements result in empathy with the woman in the photograph. The woman seems to be in deep agony. Her shut eyes, her head tilted backwards, her suffering face and the supportive touch—all render the feeling that the photographed woman is in terrible pain. The reason for the woman’s deep anguish is her dead son that she holds in her arms. The infant’s eyes are shut and he is wrapped in a white sheet. Although the infant seems peaceful and calm, the blood stains leave no doubt that he is dead. The photograph is presented in a black frame that emphasises the death in the photograph.

Fig. 8-3. The title reads: “Urgent warnings for revenge terror attacks.” The subtitle read: “Suspicion: Settlers from the West Bank murdered the Palestinian infant. A high-ranking security source says: Palestinian organisations plan an unprecedented series of terror attacks. Jordan captured missile supply to the (Palestinian) territories.” Source: Yediot Achronot. Photograph: Reuters

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The title of the report, however, is in a complete contrast to the photograph: “Urgent warnings for revenge terror attacks.” At first glance, one cannot find any connection between the photograph and the title. The photograph shows a mother weeping over the body of her dead son, but the title deals with warnings of terror attacks. The title does not inform the readers regarding the protagonists of the photograph and does not assist the readers in decoding the photograph or understanding what the reported event is about. The title is an informative one, which deals with what seems to be a different story. Moreover, the title warns the (Israeli-Jewish) readers of likely terror attacks saying that they are in danger and that their well-being and security is threatened due to forthcoming terror attacks. The victim, the dead Palestinian infant in the photograph, is not even mentioned in the title that expresses no compassion for the loss of life. This framing of the image suggests a role reversal: The victim becomes the victimiser of its victimiser. The casualty of an Israeli aggression becomes a threat for the Israelis. There are three subtitles that purport to add more information to the story. The first subtitle gives the reader some information that can assist in decoding the photograph: “Suspicion: Settlers from the West Bank murdered the Palestinian infant.” The next subtitle deals with the subject in the main title—the fear of future terror attacks: “A high-ranking security source says: Palestinian organisations plan an unprecedented series of terror attacks.” The last subtitle deals with a story that is not integral to the main story but enhances the vulnerability of the Israeli readers: “Jordan captured missile supply to the (Palestinian) territories.” After reading the subtitles, the readers receive first clues with regard to the identity of the photographed mother and infant and to the circumstances of the death and how the things are connected—a fear of retaliation after a Palestinian infant was allegedly murdered by Jewish settlers. Yet, the infant remains nameless and the woman in the photograph is still anonymous even after reading the main title and subtitles. The full information of the photographed woman and infant can be found in the caption below the photograph: “Rima Tamaizi holds the corpse of her three month old son, Diya Tamaizi who was killed in a shooting attack last Thursday. In the funeral two days ago, two other relatives that were killed in the same attack were buried.” The caption reveals some of the missing information on the people in the photograph and the circumstances of the events that led to the photographed moment. The contrast between the informative title and its militaristic language and the mother weeping over her murdered son reduces the impact of the photograph. The horrible murder of Diya Tamaizi is not significant

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enough to be reported as an independent story and was woven into a larger report that, in the eyes of the editors, was of more significance or interest to the Israeli-Jewish readers of the newspaper. The newspaper left no room for the pain of the Tamaizi family. Instead, the death of their son was turned into a threat over the wellbeing of the Israeli-Jewish readers. Diya Tamaizi was not a victim in himself, but a mere detail that might generate another tragic event that could turn the readers into victims. Instead of focusing on the death of Diya and the pain of his family, the readers were confronted with their own threat, with their very own potential victimisation. This is an inversion that changes the meaning of the image from an image that elicits compassion into an image that imposes a sense of self-defence. In doing so, the newspaper made the death of Diya an ungrievable death, a point to which I shall return later.

Discussion After introducing the three photographs, we can compare the two photographs of Shalhevet to the photograph of Diya. The title of the photograph of Yitzhak carrying his dead daughter to her grave dealt with Shalhevet’s funeral. That title is a personal and dramatic title that reflected the personal aspect of a father that buried his baby daughter. In contrast, the title that accompanied the photograph of Rima holding her son, did not deal with the death of Diya at all. That was an informative, emotionless title that dealt with the prospective implication of Diya’s murder, but not with the murder itself. The title lacked the link between the murder of Diya and the warning of terror attacks. In other words, whereas the report on Shalhevet’s murder focused on the personal tragedy of the Pass family, the story of Diya’s murder was left untold. His death was another link in a chain of a long lasting conflict—his murder came as revenge and might end up in yet another death. The report on the murder of Shalhevet focused on her family’s pain and did not deal with a warning of a revenge attack, though the revenge attack did take place with the murder of Diya (as stated in the report). The differences in the coverage of the two stories provide an example of the differences between a witnessing text and a non-witnessing text.30 Frosh defines a “witnessing text” as a text that “creates presence at the event, which produces experience out of discourse” and one that “invite[s] us to engage with it [with the text] in producing imagined worlds.”31 30 31

Frosh, “Telling Presences.” Ibid., 274.

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Witnessing texts also bear moral responsibility. The witnessing texts “make us care about the lives of others,”32 but in order to achieve this solidarity, there is a need for intimacy and personal engagement. This means that we need to try to see “others” as equal to us. Media witnessing allows us, as spectators, to see the world in the eyes of the other. The coverage of Shalhevet’s funeral enables the readers to feel as if they were present at the event. The photograph, the title and the caption turn Yitzhak into a character that is easy to identify with. Although the readers are not familiar with Yitzhak, they do sympathise and may feel close to him. He is not a stranger to them; he is “daddy,” “Shalhevet’s daddy.” In contrast, the report on Diya’s funeral does not bring the readers closer to the event and does not turn them into imagined participants. The report on Diya’s murder is framed within a larger story. The miscorrelation between the title and the photograph, render Rima, Diya’s mother, as a stranger. A comparison of the unpublished photograph of Shalhevet and the published photograph of Diya indicates a striking resemblance between the two photographs. In both photographs, infants are wrapped with sheets stained by blood, making the horrible death inescapable. The difference between the two photographs is, of course, the fact that one of them was published on the front page of the newspaper, whereas the other was never printed in any Israeli newspaper. The refusal of the Israeli newspapers to publish Shalhevet’s explicit photograph since it might harm the readers’ feelings disappeared when it came to the similar photograph of Diya. The newspaper’s editors felt as if they needed to protect their readers from the photograph of Shalhevet’s bleeding body and printed the photograph of her father carrying her to her grave. Yet, the photograph of Diya’s bleeding body was presented with no concealment and was neutralised by framing it in a broader narrative, according to which Israel is a victim threatened by the Palestinians. The different coverage of the two similar stories demonstrates the different regimes of pity in operation, and the way they establish a hierarchy of death and bereavement in Israel. As Lilie Chouliaraki puts it: “The concept of regimes of pity suggests, then, that spectators do not possess ‘pure’ emotions vis-à-vis the sufferers, but their emotions are, in fact, shaped by the values embedded in news narratives about who the ‘others’ are and how we should relate to them.”33 These case studies show that there is grievable death and ungrievable death. I draw here on the 32 33

Ibid., 278. Chouliaraki, Suffering, 11.

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work of Judith Butler in which she discusses how the representation of suffering reflects the way in which different groups are humanised or dehumanised.34 The main question Butler poses is “what counts as a livable life and a grievable death?”35 The representation and misrepresentation of suffering—especially of death—constructs a hierarchy of life and death which either deprives the sufferer of humanity or bestows it upon him or her. In order to grieve for a person’s death, one should recognise the value of that person’s life: “If we are not haunted [by the photograph], there is no loss, there has been no life that was lost.”36 The framing of Diya’s death does not allow the image to haunt us. The power of the image is played down by a title that takes the focus away from it. We do not engage with the people behind the story and therefore Diya’s death is not grievable. “Grievability,” then, refers to the extent to which the lost life is portrayed as significant and meaningful; the way in which the spectator was provided with information that makes room for his or her grief over the death of others. The different framing of the two stories, of the two photographs, enables the readers to grieve only for the lost life of Shalhevet and not for the lost life of Diya. If we consider these case studies in relation to the economies of regulation, we can see the different modes of operation. The coverage of the murder of the two infants—the Palestinian and the Israeli-Jewish— shows that the question of taste and decency is applicable in Israeli media only to images depicting dead Israeli Jews.37 The need to protect the readers from the horror photographs arises only when it comes to these Israeli victims. When non-Israeli victims are reported, the economy of taste and decency is put aside in favour of an economy of display, according to which images of dead bodies are presented, but they are framed by words that mitigate them.38 The newspaper’s editors did not 34

Butler, Precarious and Frames. Butler, Precarious, xv. 36 Butler, Frames, 97. 37 A quantitative content analysis of images from death events in Israeli press supports this argument. For more details, see Morse, “Shooting the Dead.” 38 Two other case studies that demonstrate the different framings and presentations of Israeli dead compared with non-Israeli dead are the killing of five members of the Fogel family in Itamar in the West Bank (March 2011) and the killing of Muammar Gaddafi (October 2011). In the case of the Israeli family, this was a leading story but all the Israeli news organisations refused to display the images of the slaughtered victims; the images of Gaddafi were displayed with no concealment and they were framed as the end of a tyranny. These cases demonstrate the significance of the identity of the dead in determining the journalistic treatment the story gets. 35

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find it necessary to protect the readers from horrible photographs of Diya. The image was displayed, but it was framed in such a way that did not encourage the readers to engage with the victim and his family.

Conclusions This chapter studied the visual representation of death and analyses the different modes of operation that are in use in the Israeli media. The chapter demonstrated how the management of the visibility of death operates as a mechanism that cultivates different regimes of pity and works to delineate boundaries of care that construct the Israeli community. The chapter argues that the visual representation of death events establishes different regimes of pity and by employing different modes of visual representation, the Israeli media delineate the boundaries of care and sympathy to the distant other in a way that includes some and excludes others. News images are central to our engagement with the reality “out there,” especially with the kind of events that are not part of our lot, that is, events that bear some element of thrill, excitement, fear or horror. In such cases, images can engage us with the event in a telling way. Violent death events fit this category and the way we make sense of these events is based, to a large extent, on our ability to witness the event as it takes place on the ground. And yet, the meaning we give to the images we see is not bound only to what the images show, but also to the way they are framed. Therefore, the management of the visibility of death incorporates the use of language and images in a given context. The management of the visibility of death is a manifestation of symbolic power. As such, it is designed to facilitate the construction of the community and to reaffirm the bond between its members. This chapter has shown how images of death are utilised within this framework. By using different means of representation and by putting words and images into play, the media position the spectators vis-à-vis the distant sufferers. The different economies of regulation in use by the Israeli media operate as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion. In relation to Israeli dead, the economy of taste and decency is in use. On the one hand, it maintains a proper distance of the spectators from the horror and keeps the norms of respect towards the dead. On the other hand, the use of language in framing the story brings the spectators in close proximity to the sufferers. As for the “others,” the Palestinians in this case, the economy of display is in use. The explicit images of the dead are shown without concealment and regardless of their horror, yet the images are framed in a way that

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blocks the spectators’ engagement with the sufferers. The images provide close proximity to the dead body—it is shown without concealment—yet the framing of the story keeps the spectators away from the human in the image.

Works Cited Barnea, N. “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The 7th Eye, January 5, 2002. Butler, J. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London; New York: Verso, 2004. —. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2009. Campbell, D., “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media.” Journal for Cultural Research 8, no. 1 (2004): 55-74. Chouliaraki, L. The Spectatorship of Suffering. London and Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage, 2006. Fahmy, S, and D. Kim. “Picturing the Iraq War Constructing the Image of War in the British and US Press.” International Communication Gazette 70, no. 6 (2008): 443-62 Fishman, J. Documenting Death: Photojournalism and Spectacles of the Morbid in the Tabloid and Elite Newspaper. Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylnania, 2001. —. “News Norms and Emotions: Pictures of Pain and Metaphors of Distress.” In Image Ethics in the Digital Age, edited by L. P. Gross, J. S. Katz and J. Ruby. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Fishman, J, and C. Marvin. “Portrayals of Violence and Group Difference in Newspaper Photographs: Nationalism and Media.” Journal of Communication 53, no. 1 (2003): 32-44. Foltyn, J. L. “The Corpse in Contemporary Culture: Identifying, Transacting, and Recoding the Dead Body in the Twenty-first Century.” Mortality 13, no. 2 (2008): 99-104 —. “Dead Famous and Dead Sexy: Popular Culture, Forensics, and the Rise of the Corpse.” Mortality 13, no. 2 (2008): 153-73. Frosh, P. “Telling Presences: Witnessing, Mass Media, and the Imagined Lives of Strangers.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, no. 4 (2006): 265-84. Griffin, M. “Media Images of War.” Media, War & Conflict 3, no. 1 (2010): 7-14.

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—. “Picturing America’s ‘War on Terrorism’ in Afghanistan and Iraq: Photographic Motifs as News Frames.” Journalism 5, no. 4 (2004): 381-402. Hanusch, F. Representing Death in the News: Journalism, Media and Mortality. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Harcup, T., and D. O’Neill. “What is News? Galtung and Ruge Revisited.” Journalism Studies 2, no. 2 (2001): 261-80. Hertz, R. Death and the Right Hand. Aberdeen: Cohen & West, 1960. Lamm, M. The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning. New York: J. David, 1969. Mann, R. “The Pornography of Terror.” The 7th Eye, March 24, 2008 Morse, T. Shooting the Dead: Photos of Dead Bodies in Israeli Media, PhD Thesis. Department of Communications, University of Haifa, Haifa, 2009. Pantti, M. and J. Sumiala. “Till Death Do Us Join: Media, Mourning Rituals and the Sacred Centre of the Society,” Media, Culture & Society 31, no. 1 (2009): 119-35. Rules of Professional Ethics of Journalism. 2012, Israel Press Counsil 2008. Available from http://www.moaza.co.il/BRPortal/br/P102.jsp?arc=27521. Seaton, J. Carnage and the Media : the Making and Breaking of News about Violence. London; New York: Allen Lane, 2005. Taylor, J. Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe, and War. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Walter, T. “Modern Death: Taboo or Not taboo?” Sociology 25, no. 2 (1991): 293-310. Walter, T., J. Littlewood and M. Pickering. “Death in the News: The Public Invigilation of Private Emotion.” Sociology 29, no. 4 (1995): 579-96. Wischmann, L. “Dying on the Front Page: Kent State and the Pulitzer Prize.” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 2, no. 2 (1987): 67-74. Zelizer, B. About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

PART III MEDIATING LIFE AND DEATH: THEORY AND PRACTICE

CHAPTER NINE PHOTOGRAPHY: INTIMATING MORTALITY, A HEIDEGGERIAN ACCOUNT OF PHOTOGRAPHIC AUTHENTICITY KATRIN JOOST

“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability....All photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”1 —Susan Sontag “Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein.”2 —Martin Heidegger

We all know that we will die one day. This is a fundamental aspect of our lives. Not only is death inescapable but the finitude of our lives structures what it means to be a human being, a person. We are born; we live; we die. The time of our lives, in all senses, makes us who we are. Yet, as much as this is clear it also constitutes a blind spot. It is one of the least understood aspects of human existence. We spend our lives living. This may seem an obvious statement but it is impossible to comprehend and think our own death. And this impossibility seems to be essential to death.3 In other words death is fundamentally inexperiencable and therefore unthinkable. We live and when we stop living, we are no more; there is no identity that remains. To be dead is not to be. To be is to live, to experience

1

Sontag, On Photography, 11. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 250. 3 There are many aspects that make thinking about death difficult. We don’t want to think about pain, grief, mourning and loss. These connotations are linked to the death of others. However, in this chapter I wish to focus on the idea of our own death. 2

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the world, continuously. How can we even begin to understand our death, which is outside of our lives, and so beyond ourselves?

Fig. 9-1. Elsa and Lotti, 1938.

Fig. 9-2. Elsa and Lotti, 1992.

I shall argue that photography as a specific form of visual expression not only represents the world but also shows what being in the world means. Photography intimates our experience of the world beyond the visible. Photography’s power to refer directly to the particular leads to its ability to show the particular moment. Therefore, it can illustrate death. This means that photography can not only can represent dead objects but disrupt the temporal structure of perceptual experience and it therefore brings into consciousness the finality of our being. This happens through the immediacy of seeing and not intellectual understanding. Our own death is disturbing and frightening because it is essentially unimaginable, which renders an analysis of it as a phenomenon or event futile. Photography, though, is a medium that can express the belonging of death

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to life and show that living being is, with Heidegger, “being towards death.”4 This chapter will fall into three parts. Firstly, I refer to some decisive aspects of the nature of photography. The distinctiveness of photography resides in its particular relationship to its content. As Barthes points out, photography is always of the particular.5 This critical characteristic of the photographic medium leads to a fundamentally direct understanding of the content of a photograph. Moreover, we understand a photograph not only as an image of the particular object, person or landscape, but of a particular moment. This results in a perception of photography as “an arrest of time.”6 I will argue that this freezing of time, this understanding of photography of the actual “has been,” is fundamentally different to our lived experience as temporal flow. The stillness of photography, particularly when contemplating images of ourselves or people we know, disrupts the continuous stream of our lived experience and, in doing so, emphasises not only our temporality but also our finiteness. It therefore evokes the passage of time and eventually death. Many thinkers have elaborated on photography as inextricably linked to temporality, so much so that it arguably functions as a memento mori.7 Throughout this chapter I will refer to two photographs of my grandmother and her sister (figs. 9-1 and 9-2). I encourage the reader to look at these images and reflect on the experience of looking at photographs. I use personal pictures to emphasise the particularity of the scene presented. Also, I will refer to two pictures taken at different points of time of the same people to highlight the disruption of time that photography engenders. This leads to the second part of the chapter in which I will argue that this recognised characteristic of photography, as pointing out the temporality and finitude of experience, can be analysed in Heideggerian terms. In other words, the generally acknowledged affinity of photography with the theme of death can be clarified philosophically. By referring to Heidegger’s work as emerging from the phenomenological tradition, I will explain how his thought is shaped by the importance of experience. 4

It is important to note that I am not arguing that photography is morbid, i.e. that with every photograph we look at we linger on our mortality. However, the contemplation of photography allows for an authentic way of being towards death, see Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 235 (Heidegger devotes several sections to the existential analysis of death, starting from this page). 5 Barthes, Lucida, 4. 6 Van Gelder & Westgeest, Photography, 64. 7 See, for example, Barthes, Lucida; Batchen, Photography Zero; Kracauer and Levin, “Photography”; Sontag, On Photography; Elkins, The Object.

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Moreover, experience immediately leads us to the recognition of temporality, structuring not only perception in particular but, crucially, human existence—which Heidegger calls Dasein—in general.8 As soon as temporality is acknowledged, the finitude of Dasein comes to the fore. I will then comment on the impossibility of imagining one’s own death as the end of Dasein’s being. The paradox of experience as continuously ongoing, as opposed to the essential finitude of our Dasein, renders death as essentially incomprehensible. Yet, the finitude of being is the ground for meaning of and for Dasein. Our temporal finitude not only anchors us within the world but also discloses the world’s significance for us. Heidegger further argues that the incomprehensibility of our own death leads to a mostly inauthentic regard of death and therefore of our lives. This is to say that we fear our death and so much so that we either refuse to face the thought of it altogether or focus morbidly on it. Rather, we need to embrace the finitude of our lives as being towards death to understand the meaning of our lives. Finally, I will conclude by arguing that photography can provide a realm of discourse that allows for the reflection on death in an authentic manner. The disruption of time of the photographic medium as well as its essential visuality enables a different way of thinking about death. The attempt to intellectually delineate the phenomenon of our own death remains paradoxical, which leads to the inherent difficulty of relating to it. Photography may show dead subjects or symbolise death but its ability to intimate mortality resides in its nature of disrupting time. Sometimes, photography can precisely allow us to face death as part of life, as being towards death. Moreover, through seeing our finitude the possibility of significance in principle is disclosed. This is one of the most fundamental aspects of the nature of photography, it shows living mortality. Let us now turn to some aspects of the nature of photography. Photography has dominated visual expression for over a century, so much so that we see the world as a set of potential photographs, as Sontag indicates in On Photography.9 In other words, photography plays a crucial role across the contemporary media landscape, from family pictures on the mantelpiece, via images in newspapers, magazines or book covers to picture messaging, photos within social media and all across the internet. Moreover, the ubiquity of photography is such that it shapes our way of 8

Dasein is Heidegger’s term for the human subject. He uses a different word to signify the importance of human experience and existence rather than giving a traditional account of human beings as substances, that is as beings with a set of essential characteristics. 9 Sontag, On Photography, 23

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seeing and imagining the world. When, for example, thinking, about places where I have not been before, such as Paris or the Amazon, I imagine these locations as directly informed by photographs. In these cases I will invariably think of photographs of the Eiffel Tower and the rainforest. The, for me unknown, unseen places are shaped in my imagination by photographic visions. The informative aspect of photography in the automated element of the photographic process and what is more structurally underpins photography’s affinity to nostalgia and death. We trust photography, because we understand it as a mechanical or, indeed, digital process recording the light reflecting from the object, person or scene to be photographed directly onto the film or sensor.10 Importantly, this procedure is directed not created by the photographer. Taking a photograph includes a moment of surrender to the photographic process (mechanical or digital), no matter how carefully the to-be-photographed scene is staged. This is to say, photographing involves an element of passivity, which allows the photograph to take place. When the photographer presses the shutter, s/he lets the photograph happen. Arguably, other visual arts, such as painting, require continuous active creation. Of course, there are possibilities to incorporate into the process of painting serendipity, coincidence and hesitation, such as Jackson Pollock letting the paint drip on the canvas. Yet, unlike painting, photography as a medium is essentially grounded in this moment of surrender. Now, the important point is that this moment of letting the mechanical process take place precisely leads to our belief in photography as showing us its subjects directly. The light is recorded as a shadow of the object, person or scene itself. Therefore, a photograph has a direct connection to its subject unlike a painting which is only ever a representation of the subject. This is not to say that photography shows its subject objectively. The photograph very much displays the view of the photographer. When we look at a photograph, for example the photograph of my grandmother and her sister, we see the two women, Elsa and Lotti (fig. 9-1).11 10

Increasingly we understand photography as a digital process. There has been much debate about how our understanding of the truthfulness of photography is undermined by the digital possibilities of manipulation, see for example Richin, After Photography or Mitchell, Reconfigured. However, whether the image is actually truthful, that is, not manipulated, or not is not the issue here. I want to emphasise that the photographic process is initially essentially based on the mechanistic rather than creative. 11 For the purposes of this chapter, I would like to suspend the discussion of the truthfulness of either the momentary photograph capturing the true essence of a

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Photography too can idealise or distort its subject, but photography’s views are based on the selection of a view rather than the creation of a representation. The important issue here is that in a photograph there is no difference between the referent and the reference. As Barthes puts it: “It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself.”12 This congruity of the referent and the reference in photography allows us to see in the photograph the particular. Referring back to figure 9-1, we see two particular women, my grandmother and her sister. It is not an image of women in general or women of a certain generation, even if the picture may be used to represent those. In the first instance this is a picture of these particular two women, Elsa and Lotti. Again, Barthes points this aspect out emphatically in Camera Lucida: ...the photograph always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see; it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This (this photograph, and not Photography)...13

Moreover, this leads to photographs being understood as pictures of moments; as snapshots. Other visual media may be about representations of a point in time,14 but photographs are showing the particular moment that the image is of, that is, the particular summer afternoon in 1938 when the picture of Elsa and Lotti was taken (fig. 9-1). We may not know the moment, or recognise the particular persons or scene, but we understand what we see in the image as having taken place. This essential characteristic is fundamental to the argument of this chapter, that photography can visualise death more directly than other visual media. The notion of photography as always of the particular necessarily entails that images are of particular moments. Further, photography disrupts temporality, since the particular moments are separated from their occurrence. This is why “discussions of photography are dominated by time,”15 explaining how it is considered as “freezing,”16 “embalming,”17 or “clipping out,”18 or capturing the “decisive moment.”19 The peculiarity of photographic person as opposed to the idealised representation of a person through the process of, for example, painting. 12 Barthes, Lucida, 5. 13 Ibid., 4. 14 Film may be understood as a lens-based medium and similar to photography in this respect, but is structured differently temporally. 15 Wollen, “Fire,” 76. 16 Sontag, On Photography, 87; Drucker, “Temporal,” 25. 17 Friday, “Bazin’s Ontology,” 340. 18 Elkins, The Object, 28

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time is clearly pertinent to how we see photographs. Moreover, photographs in their stillness are very much different to how we perceive the world around us. This is to say photographs are paradoxical in depicting the particular directly and at the same time presenting that particular moment essentially different to our experience of moments in general. The photographic instance is not only ripped out of its original temporal context but it is stretched: we can continue looking at it, dwell in it or go back to it time and time again. Unlike film, photographs do not imitate the temporal structure of the flow of experience.20 In its stillness the photograph reminds us of how our life is a continuous temporal stream of experiences, precisely because it is motionless. This paradox is conceptually complex but at the same time very intuitive. Looking at figures 9-1 and 9-2 we see Elsa and Lotti in 1938 and 1992. As pointed out before, we see those particular two women. Moreover, we see them in particular moments of time. Yet, in seeing them then, we are immediately aware of them being different now. This example emphasises the transitoriness of our lives. We see Elsa and Lotti as young women and then as elderly ladies. The question arises how much longer will they be?21 They don’t look fragile in figure 9-2 but, particularly in view of figure 9-1, we see time has gone by and, of course, 1992 is also in the past. Similarly, when we look at pictures of ourselves we become acutely aware of time going by. The person I see in the picture is not me as I am, but me as I was, which poses the question of what I will look like and how will I be in the future. What is more, at some point I will be no more. How can I think my own death? This leads to the second part of this chapter: the philosophical clarification of the concept of death. Death is a theme discussed throughout the history of philosophy, from Plato’s Phaedo to Nagel’s What Does It All Mean? As I mentioned in the introduction, we all know that we will die. So, clearly, it pertains to what it means to be a human being. Philosophy, therefore, must be concerned with this issue if it is to reflect meaningfully on the human condition. One of the most influential reflections on death is by Martin Heidegger. He continues “the ancient maxim that ‘to philosophise is to learn how to die’” in his seminal work Being and Time by proposing, simply put, that “being is time and time is finite.”22 Now, 19

Cartier-Bresson, Decisive. Van Gelder and Westgeest map out this comparison from Bazin’s, Metz’s and Friday’s work on film and photography, see their Photography Theory. 21 When I gave this paper at the Symposium: Envisaging Death: Visual Culture & Dying in 2009, Elsa, my grandmother, was still alive and Lotti had just died. 22 Critchley, 20

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this appears to be a rather simplified account of human existence but, when we look at it closely, it becomes clear that Heidegger’s project is unquestioningly complex but at the same time surprisingly intuitive. To grasp not only Heidegger’s account of death but, moreover, why death is so fundamental to his philosophy, we need to understand his thought as stemming from the phenomenological tradition. Here, a few concepts need to be explained. Modern phenomenology situates experience at the heart of philosophical inquiry. Importantly, experience needs to be seen as intentional structure, that is to say, in terms of the relationship between consciousness and world. It cannot be stressed enough that the relationship is at the heart of the matter, not consciousness in itself nor the world in itself. Only when we understand those two poles of intentionality in relation to each other, can we conceive the nature of ourselves and the world in a philosophically rigorous manner and not as essentialist abstractions. Phenomenology is philosophising by explicating phenomena. This is to say that we are to understand the world as it appears to us. This is why Heidegger shapes language as he develops his philosophy. He refers to “life-world” in order to emphasise our experience of it. The world as lived, as experienced, is the issue not the world in itself. Likewise he coins the notion “Dasein,” which is not merely another word for consciousness or mind but emphasises human life as embedded or, as Heidegger puts it, as thrown into the world (“Geworfenheit”).23 Both of these crucial terms are, as it were, the matrix of Heideggerian thought. Now, bearing these points in mind, what does Heidegger say about the notion of death? Firstly, let us think how death appears to us. Here a paradox immediately becomes apparent. Clearly, we cannot analyse death in this manner. Death is not a phenomenon to be encountered. As Wittgenstein puts it “Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.”24 As I mentioned in the introduction, when we are dead, we are no more. Consequently, when Dasein is gone a phenomenological analysis is meaningless since intentionality collapsed. If there is no phenomenon in the sense of Dasein experiencing it, living through it, we cannot address it. Yet, we still know we will die one day. How then can we think about it? We can think about our lives as being defined as a duration between birth and death. Yet, Heidegger immediately criticises this view of Dasein http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/13/heidegger-being-time 23 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 179. Husserl already uses the term “life-world” in his later text Die Krisis to emphasise intentionality but Heidegger takes the priority of the intentional relationship even further. 24 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 84.

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as a duration with a beginning and an end. If we were to see ourselves like this, our identity would only be accomplished once we have died. Our lives would only make sense once they are completed. We can only view the lives of others in that way. Even that, I would argue, is a distortion of the other person. We may have historical accounts of people and look at their lives retrospectively, like stories. Yet, this is only the case when we think about them in specific historical or social contexts and not how we relate to people. Our everyday encounter with people is different. For example, I knew my grandmother, Elsa, as a person whilst being with her when she was alive. Once she died, the unity of her life as a completed story did not add to it or make her life accessible to me as a whole. Rather, the opposite is the case, of course. Once she was dead, I lost her: she was gone. Heidegger emphasises that the death of others is an essentially different phenomenon. Our death is inherently our own; nobody can die for us.25 This ownership of our death is an important point. The burden of our own death cannot be taken on by anybody else and so reinforces the certainty of death as pertaining to our being. Moreover, it pertains to our being as we are living our lives. This is to say that we have to understand our death from within our lives as we are experiencing it and not from an abstracted outside perspective. If we liken the duration of life to a journey, we would have to try and understand the end of the journey from the viewpoint of “on the path,” that is, from within the journey, and not visualise it as a line on a map from a bird’s-eye perspective. Wittgenstein concludes, after recognising the impossibility of experiencing our own death, that we live eternally if we are to understand this eternity not as infinite duration but as timelessness in the present.26 Freud takes a similar line in stating that this incomprehensibility of one’s own death leads to the repression of understanding our own death as a reality: even if we admit that we know we will die someday, “deep down, behind the one-way mirror of the unconscious, the archival repository of the repressed, none of us believes it.”27 However, rather than capitulating and declaring death as something beyond philosophical discourse, Heidegger rigorously pursues the question of death for Dasein, not as a phenomenon among others but as a structural component of the way of Dasein’s being. Consequently, death is not only philosophically graspable, albeit with difficulty, but is central to a meaningful understanding of Dasein. What is more, in photography a similar outlook on death can be intimated. 25

Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 240. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 84. 27 Thomson, “Can I Die?” 29. 26

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Heidegger’s insistence on understanding Dasein from “within,” through its experiences, emphasises the being of Dasein as temporal. Again, we have to be mindful of remaining within a phenomenological discourse here. Dasein is not a substance with the added characteristic of temporality. Rather, Dasein’s experiences are essentially temporal, which also means that Dasein is temporal. Our experiences drive forward into the future; we are always in the process of becoming.28 To be human means that one is not a static entity just ‘there’ among other things. Rather, being human is always a process of becoming oneself, living possibilities, into one’s future. For Heidegger such becoming is not optional but necessary.…The essence of being human ‘is to be possible’— not just being able, but above all needing to become oneself.29

This is what Heidegger means by declaring that being is time. Moreover, being is also finite. As much as we are continuously becoming, there is the certainty that this becoming will stop. Unlike Wittgenstein, who argues that time appears to us as ever ongoing, Heidegger claims, that we must be aware of our finiteness. Death as the ultimate possibility towards which we are living is then the “possibility to end all possibilities.”30 This ultimate possibility is not only ever present, as we are never too young to die,31 but renders all other possibilities limited insofar as their number is finite. Death, in this light, constitutes a horizon of the “not-yet” of “not-being.” To call it a horizon is to emphasise that this possibility is not one amongst others that may or may not come to pass. Death is certain; we are finite; and that means our experiences are limited. This is then not thinking the end of being which, as we outlined above, is absurd, but thinking our being towards the end. Now, most importantly, Heidegger argues that to not acknowledge this horizon is living inauthentically. As Zorn puts it, “death reveals authentic

28

This essential temporality as becoming has fundamental implications for the understanding of presence. The realisation that the present moment is never fully given but is laced with absence is already a crucial insight in Husserl’s work (see particularly his Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness) and is further developed by Derrida when he points to the traditional misconception of a metaphysics of presence, see Of Grammatology. The presence of absence within the present moment is a fundamental area of interest for the philosophy of photography but will have to be discussed elsewhere. 29 Sheehan, “Heidegger,” 314. 30 Ibid., 29. 31 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 245.

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Being.”32 The limitedness of our being precisely gives it meaning. We have to face our mortality in so far that we have to confront the realisation that our time is precisely not endless. This is not to say that we should face death as “having an anxiety attack,”33 as constantly anticipating our demise. Rather, our finitude anchors Dasein within the world. If Dasein were unconditionally endlessly becoming, the world would be a vague sum of all possible experiences and so cease to be intelligible. To be in the here and now relies on the fact that we are precisely not everywhere and forever. Every specificity of our experienced life depends on the structural limit of our Dasein. Without limit we would eventually experience everything, rendering the world meaningless. A light-hearted metaphor for the disassociation from the world through immortality can be seen in some vampire stories.34 It is imagined what it would be like to be immortal and rather than the joyful absence of death the horror of an endless and meaningless world is the tragedy of the Dasein of vampires. Experiences lack definition because they have been already had or will eventually come to be. As Sheehan points out, Heidegger’s “phenomenological analysis of Dasein as being-in-the-world…opens up the arena of significance by anticipating its own death.”35 Yet, we are so absorbed in the everydayness of our lives that we tend to not acknowledge our mortality authentically. Photographs, however, are very much part of our everyday life. Rather than facing mortality by rational analysis, a visual and possibly more emotional acknowledgment of our mortality may be opened up through the contemplation of photographic images. We are now turning to the concluding part of this chapter, thinking about how photography may facilitate a Heideggerian view of our mortality. I argued in the first part that photography is always of the particular moment and that the stillness of photographs brings to the fore the temporality of our everyday experiences. Looking at photographs implies the looking at past moments and this disruption of time precisely highlights our way of being. Taking into consideration Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein as being towards death, it becomes apparent how photographs can be considered to show the horizon of our mortality. 32

Zorn, “Philosophy,” 10. Dreyfus points out this misunderstanding of authentic being towards death in his preface to White’s Time and Death, xx. 34 This is a very limited metaphor because, of course, vampires become immortal and so have at least a beginning and are therefore at least initially situated within history. Also, they can still die. There is still the possibility of not being, so death is still a possibility if not the certain horizon of mortals. 35 Sheehan, “Heidegger,” 308. 33

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Moreover, in looking at photographs we can contemplate this horizon of our mortality authentically. It is vital to understand this “showing” in opposition to depicting or representing. Photography can be of and about any number of subjects, including death. There are a multitude of images of dead bodies, corpses or the dying.36 These images, of course, evoke the contemplation of death, dying and mortality. However, I would argue that these pictures primarily bring to the mind thoughts of our demise and all the related fears with that. These considerations, though, remain within the realm of perplexity towards death as a phenomenon that cannot be experienced. The imagining and fearing of the moment of our own death or the process of dying is still short of facing existential death in the sense of embracing our finitude. Elkins elaborates on the paradox of not being able to comprehend death in this manner when he explicates the problem of looking at death. By referring to a horrific sequence of images of an execution, he illustrates that we cannot see death. It is invisible because it is unbearable to see as well as impossible to identify in either the images of the living body or the dead corpse.37 In this sense it is impossible to see death. Rather photography reveals death other than by merely depicting dead bodies. Death is not visible as an identifiable subject in a photograph. When Barthes refers to a portrait of Lewis Payne, whose picture was taken just before he was hanged, he precisely outlines how it is the disruption of time that makes this image poignant: “the photograph tells me death in the future.”38 Crucially, this is in principle true for every photograph. Any photograph shows the “has been.” Photography’s affinity with death resides in the ability to bring to the present a vision of that which is no more.39 Yet, we may choose not to see this existential truth in all photographs. Heidegger argues at length that Dasein is absorbed in everydayness. It has the fundamental capacity to contemplate its way of being but mostly Dasein is self-forgetful (selbstvergessen).40 Mostly, we look at images in this manner. We see photographs in newspapers, on Facebook, advertisements, catalogues, the internet, which picture all sorts of things, scenes and 36

See, for example, works by Witkin or Serrano and the abundance of journalistic and documentary photography from conflict and disaster reportages etc. such as the iconic images by Capra or Ut. 37 Elkins, The Object, 103. 38 Barthes, Lucida, 96. 39 This vision is to be distinguished from a representation of the past. 40 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 322. This absorption in the world Heidegger calls “fallenness” and is discussed in part 2 chapter 4 of Being and Time.

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people. Still, we directly connect with the content of the images, seeing particular people or things at particular times. Nonetheless, this too is inauthentic since it is disregarding the horizon of finitude that is the basis of the significance of our life world. In this attitude we ignore our mortality and are absorbed in the experience of the flow of time. However, this is not only ignoring our mortality but also constitutes, as it were, overlooking the nature of photography. Some photographers are acutely aware of the crucial temporality of the photographic medium and thematise death and mortality by evoking temporality and finitude.41 This is to say that these photographic explorations of death, based on the particularity of the photographic medium, open up a discourse on death in an authentic manner. Sally Mann’s body of work can be understood in Heideggerian terms. Many of her projects, from her early work on her children (Family Color, 19901994) via her depictions of decay (What Remains, 2004, and Matter Lent 2000-2001) to the visceral self portraits (Untitled 2006-2007), evoke the temporality of our being as situated clearly in our life world.42 Ravenal refers to images of Mann’s children in What Remains: But now the balance has shifted from naturalistic and seemingly candid views to portraits that symbolize the impossibility of fixing an image of any living being. They also have a spectral quality that acknowledges photography’s inherent relationship to mortality—in isolating a moment from the larger flow, it memorializes an instant from which time moves relentlessly forward.43

Mann’s work is an example of how photography can deliberately address mortality, not merely by depicting or symbolising death but by utilising its essential temporal disruption. However, this is only possible on the basis of understanding photography as much more than a particular technique to depict a subject. Every now and then, without explicitly philosophising, we look at a more or less mundane picture, that leads us to contemplate our mortality. We look at a photograph of ourselves or a person we know, or knew, or a poignant scene in the past. Suddenly, we see how much we are children of our time and that our being is wholly circumscribed by the fact that we are 41

See Coplans, A Body; Scheel and Lakotta, noch mal leben. Sally Mann’s work entails a number of rich projects which evoke numerous areas of discussion such as the nature of family, youth, the body, physicality, age, and so on. Her photography can by no means be reduced to the discourse on death. 43 Ravenal, Sally Mann, 6. 42

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anchored in our world in our time and essentially finite. For me, this can be seen by looking at the photographs of Elsa and Lotti (figs. 9-1 and 9-2). Particularly the juxtaposition of the two pictures of 1938 and 1992 brings to the fore the passage of time. In figure 9-1 I see two women I did not know. I did not exist at the time the picture was taken. This is how my grandmother and her sister were as young women, before my time. Figure 9-2 shows my grandmother as I knew her years ago. Now, neither she nor her sister is alive. Death is not depicted, not identified, but intimated. We gain a sense of our way of being, of our limited time going by. We see that we were different, we are still becoming, into our particularity, because we are not infinite. This power of photography to intimate death in a direct but not depicting manner, I would argue, is one of the most fundamental characteristics of photography as a medium. It not only sets it apart but is the basis for the continuing fascination with still photography in a contemporary media landscape. Photography shows living mortality.

Works Cited Primary Sources The images used in this article are private photographs and have been taken by members of the author’s family. Fig. 9-1, Helmut Joost, 1938. Fig. 9-2, Hartmut Joost, 1992.

Secondary Sources Barthes, R. Camera Lucida. 1980. London: Vintage Classics, 2000 Batchen, G. Photography Zero. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Bazin, A., and H. Gray. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Film Quarterly 3, no.4 (1960). Cartier-Bresson, H. The Decisive Moment. London: Simon and Schuster, 1952. Coplans, J. A Body. New York: PowerHouse Books, 2002. Critchley, Simon, “Being and Time part 6: Death,” available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/13/heidegge r-being-time Derrida, J. Of Grammatology. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Dreyfus, H. L. “Forward.” In C. J. White, Time and Death: Heidegger’s

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Analysis of Finitude, ix-xxxvi. Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing, 2005. Elkins, J. The Object Stares Back. Orlando, FL: Harvest, 1996. Friday, J. “André Bazin’s Ontology of Photography and Film Imagery.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63, no. 4 (2005): 339-50. Heidegger, M. Sein und Zeit. 17th unaltered edition. Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen, 1993. Hurn, D. On Looking at Photographs. Anacortes, WA: Lenswork Publishing, 2000. Husserl, E. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, Springer, 1993. —. Texte zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (1893 – 1917), nach Husserliana Bd. X, Felix Meiner Verlag Hamburg, 1985. Kracauer, S. and T. Y. Levin. “Photography.” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (1993): 421-36. Mitchell, W. J. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the PostPhotographic Era. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Ravenal, J. B. Sally Mann: The Flesh and The Spirit. Aperture/Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2010. Richin, F. After Photography. London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. Scheel, W. and B. Beate Lakotta. noch mal leben 2003 available at http://www.lensculture.com/webloglc/mt_files/archives/2008/05/portra its-of-the-dying-before.html Serrano, A. The Morgue, Exhibition Catalogue with an Essay by R. Hobbs, Malmö Konsthall, Sweden, 1996. Sheehan, T. “Heidegger, Martin (1889-1976).” In Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy IV, edited by E. Craig, 307-23. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Sontag, S. On Photography. New York: The Noonday Press, 1989. Trachtenberg, A., ed. Classic Essays on Photography. New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books Ltd., 1980. Thomson, I. “Can I Die? Derrida on Heidegger on Death.” Philosophy Today 43, no. 1 (1999): 29-42. Van Gelder, H. and H. W. Westgeest. Photography Theory in Historical Perspective. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Watts, M. The Philosophy of Heidegger. Dublin: Acumen, 2011. Whelan, R. Robert Capa: The Definitive Collection. New York: Phaidon Press Ltd, 2004. White, C.J. Time and Death. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.

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Wike, L. “Photographs and Signatures: Absence, Presence, and Temporality in Barthes and Derrida.” Invisible Culture: an Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 3, (2000): http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/ Witkin, J-P. And G. Celant. Joel-Peter Witkin: A Retrospective. New York: Scalo, 1996. Wittgenstein, L. Tractatus-Logic-Philosophicus, Werkausgabe Band I. Surkamp, 1997. Wollen, P. “Fire and Ice.” In The Photography Reader, edited by L. Wells, 76-81. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.

CHAPTER TEN PHOTO-GRAPHING THE SUBJECT: DEATH, CINEMA AND THE GAZE PAUL FUNG

I once heard a story which I believe, that Leontius the son of Aglaïon, on his way up from the Peiraeus under the outer side of the northern wall, becoming aware of dead bodies that lay at the place of public execution at the same time felt a desire to see them and a repugnance and aversion, and that for a time he resisted and veiled his head, but overpowered in despite of all by his desire, with wide staring eyes he rushed up to the corpses and cried, “There, ye wretches, take your fill of the fine spectacle!”1

Envisaging death is a tantalising topic. The word “envisage,” unlike “see” or “look,” suggests having a kind of abstract vision. To envisage death, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can mean to look in the face of death, to obtain a mental view of death, or to contemplate death.2 Instead of the materiality of death—that is, the dead body itself—these definitions suggest looking at the idealistic side of death, or death as an abstract vision which feeds the subject’s fantasy. Death as mundane, undramatic, unbeautiful, on the other hand, is always absent in the discourse of popular culture. As Roland Barthes puts it, “flat death”— which is simple, banal and depthless—is appropriated into art, and subjected itself to the “rhetoric of painting and its sublimated mode of exhibition.”3 Envisaging death in this sense involves a visual detour of the dead body, going round about it without directly confronting the mere deadliness of death. This chapter asks how and why the dead body is excluded in the field of vision by discussing three cases: public execution, Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). 1

Plato, Republic, 439e-440a. OED Online, definition 1, 2a. 3 Barthes, Lucida, 117. 2

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Dickens describes how the sight of death in public executions produces in him a “horrible fascination,” suggesting that the experience of seeing the dead body involves ambivalence.4 Similarly, when Leontius stares at the dead bodies piling up outside the northern wall, his enjoyment is a mixture of pleasure and anger (thumos).5 Envisaging death evokes the desire to look and at the same time the forbiddance of looking; the vision of death evokes in Leontius a kind of painful pleasure. Such “horrible fascination” of witnessing the corpse is tamed in the work of the 19th century writer, Ivan Turgenev. In the essay “The Execution of Tropmann” (1870), he observes and describes the entire process of execution, following the convict’s conversations with notables attending the affair, the setting up of the guillotine, and the rehearsal of the event in the square.6 In the final moment before the blade slides down, the writer turns away from the beheading. Turgenev loves envisaging death but he cannot tolerate the sight of the headless body. He later says that he has no right to be present at the execution. This statement reflects not so much sympathy for human suffering as the instinct of self-preservation of the bourgeois subject. The sight of death has to be made invisible in exchange for a sense of decency, which is essential for retaining bourgeois pleasure. Dostoevsky, who has a long and complicated friendship with Turgenev, comments on 11 June 1870 on the latter’s refusal to see death: Man on the surface of the earth does not have the right to turn away and ignore what is taking place on earth.…Moreover he gives himself away: the chief impression one gets from the article is a frightful concern – fussy to the nth degree – about himself, his integrity, his composure – and all this over a decapitated head!7

While Dostoevsky is concerned with humanity at the cost of terror, Turgenev ignores the dead body in order to maintain a stable subject or, as

4

Dickens, Complete, 4: 340. On witnessing public execution, see Cooper, Lesson and Janes, “Beheadings.” 5 Plato, Republic, 440a. 6 Turgenev, “Execution.” Jean Baptiste Tropmann was guillotined before a crowd of 25,000 Parisians. He is executed for killing a family of six. For a comparison between Turgenev and Dostoevsky on the execution, see Jackson, Dialogues, 2954. 7 Quoted in Jackson, Dialogues, 39. Dostoevsky himself survived an execution by firing squad in 1849. The death sentence was commuted to hard labour in Siberia and conscription to the army at the very last moment, see Frank, Dostoevsky, 4968.

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Robert Jackson describes, a vision of equilibrium.8 Turgenev’s compulsion of looking away from the dead body will help us to understand the refusal to represent the dead body in Hollywood cinema. In both cases, the dismissal of death is key to the formation of a stable, and perhaps bourgeois, viewing subject. In his essay “Two Versions of the Imaginary,” Maurice Blanchot writes that the “the strangeness of a cadaver is also the strangeness of the image,” suggesting that the study of the cadaver can illuminate our understanding of vision, which he discusses from two perspectives.9 First, the image pacifies as it feeds the desire to look and confirms a stable viewing subject. The image veils a certain “nothingness” and appropriates it into art. The cleaning up of that “nothingness” keeps the viewer satisfied, powerful and active. But on the other hand, the image can also make the viewer powerless, strangely mute and passive.10 Blanchot uses the examples of the image of a face or a corner of a room. But the ultimate example is that of the dead body, which unreservedly exposes its nothingness to the field of vision: The cadaver is its own image. He no longer has any relation with this world, in which he still appears, except those of an image, an obscure possibility, a shadow which is constantly present behind the living form and which now, far from separating itself from that form, completely 11 transforms itself into a shadow.

There is a temptation to envisage the dead body as the person who lived. But an unbridgeable gap emerges between the living form and the dead body, which resembles nothing but itself. Normally, a shadow is an index of an object. Here, the dead body is the shadow which completely cuts itself off from the object. What remains in the dead body is the “elemental strangeness” and the “shapeless heaviness of the being that is present in absence.”12 In her essay “Cinematic Visions of Dying,” Fran McInerney demonstrates the way in which Hollywood relentlessly narrates mortality but at the same time distances the viewer from engaging his or her own death.13 “Cinematic dying,” she writes, “enacting the narrative imperative 8

See Jackson, Dialogues. Blanchot, “Two Versions,” 83. 10 Ibid., 80. 11 Ibid., 83. 12 Ibid., 83. 13 McInerney, “Cinematic.” 9

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for a ‘happily ever after,’ promulgates passivity, linearity, beauty, resolution and salvation in the face of mortality.”14 In the “women’s film” genre for instance, death is often inseparable from the pursuit of true love.15 A mother’s death affects other members of the family, empowering the motherhood ethic and therefore making death functional in film narrative.16 The dying of elderly characters, generally perceived as less beautiful and energetic, is unpopular in Hollywood’s aestheticisation of death.17 Another example is dying on death row, which is often infused with moral implication at the last moment of death.18 In Dead Man Walking (Tim Robbins, 1995), Matthew, a convicted rapist and murderer, is counselled by his “spiritual advisor” Helen. When the death sentence is imminent, Matthew confesses his guilt, to which Helen rejoices, “You have dignity now.” He replies, “It figures I’d have to die to find love.” Apart from the “death-row” genre, McInerney points out that dying itself is almost never witnessed.19 If we do see it, death is often placed in the final or penultimate scene as the film’s dramatic conclusion.20 The frequent idealistic depiction of death and dying is described by bell hooks as “the sensational heat of relentless dying…with no time to mourn.”21 Death often takes place off-screen and the dead body is rarely presented on-screen for long. Viewers are allowed to think about death with respect to various ends (e.g. beauty, resolution and salvation), but they rarely see on the screen the mundane dead body which resembles nothing but itself. McInerney concludes thus: While ostensibly encouraging us to reflect on mortality, films of th[ese] genre[s] paradoxically serve to distance us from an engagement with the inevitability of dying, so divorced are they from reality in general and the chronic illnesses and dependence in old age that are the likely end of life’s journey for most.22

McInerney seems to suggest a possibility of depicting death more realistically in cinema. In fact, we can find examples other than Hollywood blockbusters, where someone’s death is shown as a banal image rather 14

Ibid., 213. Ibid., 213. 16 Ibid., 216. 17 Ibid., 220. 18 Ibid., 223. 19 Ibid., 227. 20 Ibid., 227. 21 Hooks, “Sorrowful,” 10. 22 McInerney, “Cinematic,” 229, emphasis in the original. 15

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than told as a dramatic event. A film that portrays mundane death caused by chronic illness or old age is The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005), which shows an old man repeatedly sent from one medical department to another before dying ambiguously when waiting for an operation. The film finishes with a still twenty-second shot of the old man dying on the operating bed, a parody of the Lazarus raised from the dead by Christ in St. John 11. Another example of the vivid depiction of death is Hunger (Steve McQueen 2008), in which the viewer witnesses the prisoner Bobby Sands, leader of the 1981 Irish hunger strike, becoming thinner and thinner and eventually dying. In Caché/Hidden (Michael Haneke, 2005), the suicide of the Algerian, Majid, is recorded by a hidden camera through which the viewer witnesses the entire scene. The film’s ambiguity about whether the hidden camera is set up by the characters inside the story or “someone” from the outside suggests that the desire to photograph death exists in the characters as well the viewer themselves. At the end of Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman 2008), the viewer is confronted with documentary footages of piles of dead bodies recorded in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre. The protagonist is initially haunted by some fragmented memories of the Lebanon War in which he fought. He then speaks to his ex-colleagues and interviews specialists, hoping to fill up the gaps in his memory. The end shows that the primal scene he has repressed is his witnessing of the corpses from the massacre. And it is at this point the film switches from animation to documentary. The whole film is animated except for these images of the dead bodies at the end. The entire journey of memory searching is motivated by the more realistic depiction of massacred bodies. The vision of the dead was repressed and yet it is the repression that propels the narrative. Whether there is a better way to depict mass death in cinema is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, I want to explore why Hollywood cinema ceaselessly reflects on mortality in its narratives but rarely depicts the dead body. The relentless portrayal of idealistic dying and the disavowal of the dead body in the mainstream genres McInerney has surveyed are two sides of the same coin. Both, I argue, are fundamental to the institution of a stable viewing subject and I will examine this argument in relation to the concept of the gaze as formulated by Jacques Lacan. The Lacanian gaze should be distinguished from the male gaze popularised in film studies by Laura Mulvey. While the male gaze assumes an allpowerful position of the voyeur, the Lacanian gaze shows that our vision no longer shows mastery of the image. “In our relation to things,” says Lacan, “in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something slips, passes, is

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transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it – that is what we call the gaze.”23 The Lacanian gaze refers to a blind spot in the field of vision which is outside the signifying system.24 As Joan Copjec writes, the gaze “marks the absence of a signified; it is an unoccupiable point, the point at which the subject disappears.”25 I would like to compare the Lacanian gaze which eludes vision to the dead body which is always absent in cinema: “What I look at is never what I wish to see.”26 What marks the formation of the viewing subject is not the visible things in the field of vision but rather those we cannot see, or what Lacan called the gaze. The dead body serves a similar function: its absence on the cinematic screen is crucial to the insistence of a stable viewing subject. Lacan discusses the gaze with reference to Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, which depicts two life-size French ambassadors gazing at the viewer, accompanied by a range of objects of knowledge (two globes, books, a sundial, a decagon, a square, a pair of compasses, a lute).

Fig. 10-1. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors.

A distorted object stretches across the foreground and can be seen clearly only by looking from the far right of the frame. From that angle, the anamorphic object reveals itself to be an image of a skull, which was a popular theme in 16th-17th century Northern European painting, indicating 23

Lacan, Fundamental, 73. See Foster, “Obscene;” Iversen, “Photographs;” Jay, Downcast, 357-67; Payne, Reading, 214-17; Silverman, Threshold, 126-93. 25 Copjec, “Orthopsychic,” 69. 26 Lacan, Fundamental, 103. 24

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that all earthly deeds are vain illusion, hence vanitas, meaning emptiness. The anamorphosis of the skull recalls Holbein’s earlier painting, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521-2), which depicts a horizontal view of the dead Christ sealed in a claustrophobic sepulcher. Ippolit, a young Russian nihilist, in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1869), says that the deadliness of Christ is so vivid that the viewer would lose faith in his resurrection: In the picture this face is horribly hurt by blows, swollen, with horrible, swollen, and bloody bruises, the eyelids are open, the eyes crossed; the large, open whites have a sort of deathly, glassy shine….[I]f all his disciples, his chief future apostles, if the women who followed him and stood by the cross, if all those who believed in him and worshipped him had seen a corpse like that (and it was bound to be exactly like that), how could they believe, looking at such a corpse, that this sufferer would resurrect?…Can something that has no image come as an image?27

Dostoevsky, when writing The Idiot, said he wanted to depict a perfectly beautiful individual, i.e., Christ.28 Ippolit’s question can therefore be understood as: can that which is ugly, broken, degenerated be depicted as aesthetically attractive?29 Ippolit’s question to modern aesthetics anticipates Blanchot’s reflection on the uncanny solidity of nothingness. The dead body in the painting, as “something that has no image,” resists idealisation of death. And yet, the dead body is an image in the canvas. The dead Christ is “nothing” but comes as “something,” as the “shapeless heaviness of the being that is present in absence.”30 Similarly, the death’s head in The Ambassadors signifies “nothing” from the front but “something” when looked from far right. The image of the death’s head is only decipherable when the viewer moves away from the front view, which is the painting’s geometrical point. When the skull is deciphered from the perspective of the far right, the rest of the painting is distorted. In geometrical optics, light travels in straight lines from the object to the eyes, forming a clear and balanced image. But the anamorphic skull shows that something slips away under the law of geometrical optics. In other words, light does not always travel in straight lines; it can also be “refracted, diffused, it floods, it fills – the eye is a sort of bowl – it flows over, too, it necessitates, around the ocular bowl, a whole series of organs, mechanisms, defences.”31 The skull 27

Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 408. Frank and Goldstein, Selected Letters, 260-72. 29 Jackson, Dialogues, 68. 30 Blanchot, “Two Versions,” 83. 31 Lacan, Fundamental, 94. 28

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represents what is missed out in the traditional representation of geometrical optics. Lacan, through the analysis of the skull, illuminates the heterogeneity in the experience of seeing. A process of “othering” takes place when looking at The Ambassadors. The viewer is normally understood as the subject and the skull the object. But in front of the death’s head something eludes my vision, something grasps and solicits me.32 A reversal takes place: the gaze becomes the subject and the viewer the object. As Lacan explains: In the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture. This is the function that is found at the heart of the institution of the subject in the visible. What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which…I am photo-graphed.33

What constructs me as a subject are not the objects visible in the painting. Rather, it is the gaze outside the field of vision which institutes the subject inside. In other words, the stasis of the viewing subject depends on not what it sees, but what it does not see. Besides, the idea that the subject is “photo-graphed” suggests that I am painted as a picture, or that I am literally inscribed to become a subject by light, as I am always looked at by the gaze. The gaze here is not the power of surveillance as developed by Michel Foucault, where identity is constructed by the institution and subsequently maintained by the self.34 Rather, the gaze refers to the unoccupiable point which marks the non-knowledge in representation.35 The light which photographs me is that which is refracted, diffused, is that which is outside the knowledge of geometrical optics. In other words, the impossibility in seeing the gaze—to see outside representation, or as Lacan would say, to see myself seeing myself—founds the viewing subject.36 This is not to say that the gaze is founded upon some metaphysical presence beyond representation. The death’s head represents nothing; beyond the field of vision there is nothing at all. To further illuminate the Lacanian gaze, I would like to discuss Peeping Tom (Le Voyeur). The film demonstrates how the gaze structures our way of seeing, just as the always misrecognised Holbein’s skull is 32

Ibid., 96. Ibid., 106, emphasis in the original. 34 Foucault, Discipline. 35 Copjec, “Orthopsychic,” 56. 36 Ibid., 69. 33

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fundamental to our understanding of the experience of looking. The film evoked unprecedented criticism from British film critics for its explicit depiction of sadism and morbidity.37 The repulsion felt is not only to do with the “perverted” content of the film but also the implication that the audience becomes no less perverted than the voyeur in the film when they are gazing at the cinema screen. In 1980, Peeping Tom was redistributed in the U.S., presented by Martin Scorsese and received much critical attention.38 Originally, the writer of the film, Leo Marks, hoped to make a film about Sigmund Freud. But hearing the news of Freud: The Secret Passion (John Huston 1962), he changed his mind and suggested a story about a young man with a camera who kills the women he photographs, which retains the psychoanalytical content and also became the plot of Peeping Tom.39 Mark (Carl Boehm) is a cameraman and freelance photographer with an obsessive drive to look at distorted faces, murder, and dead bodies. This obsession with looking is materialised in his attempts to record these alluring objects with his handheld camera. He even resorts to killing three women with a blade installed at the end of his camera tripod. During the filming/killing, the women witness their “face of death” through a concave mirror attached to the camera. The women who are photographed and killed, including a prostitute, a stand-in and a porn model, all earn a living by exposing their bodies to other people’s look. After the murders Mark returns to his private studio to study his freshly made snuff films. Mark’s obsession with looking is related to his desire to preserve, to film, to study and to find truth in images. Voyeurism has been discussed in connection to scientific empiricism and, what is more, it is not coincidental that the invention of the film camera was inspired by machine guns.40 The women are objectified, recorded and subjected to replay and scrutiny, suggesting that film-making is a murderous as well as fetishistic activity.41 Mark says to Helen, who is in love with him, that he will never photograph her, which implies she is not his object of inspection: he will not kill her. Mark’s deceased father was a biologist who investigated the emotion of fear. He used to scare Mark and have the entire process recorded by his camera. One of the footages in the film shows Mark as a young boy looking at his mother’s death. The father not only aims to capture Mark’s 37

Christie, Arrows, 85. See for example Ibid., and Mulvey, “Light.” 39 Powell, Million, 393. 40 See Denzin, Cinematic; Kittler, Gramaphone. 41 See Metz, Imaginary, 59-77. 38

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fear but also his entire life. As Mark says, his father wants to record every single detail of his son’s life. When Mark wakes up at night in another footage, his father is sitting next to him, taking notes and making observations. While the father is interested in scopophilia as a research topic, Mark himself is scopophilic, seeking sexual pleasure from intensive looking through the camera.42 In the opening scenes, Mark hides his camera in his bag, approaches a prostitute, follows her to her room, then films and kills her. The whole process is presented to the viewer from the perspective of Mark’s handheld camera. More than a simple point-of-view shot his camera overlaps with the director’s camera, suggesting that not only Mark but also the viewer is a voyeur. Scopophilia, as the psychiatrist character in the film says, is the “morbid urge to gaze.” For Freud, that morbid urge is a drive which, unlike hunger, cannot be satisfied and is disconnected from biological needs.43 The drive is a perpetual and excessive force which Freud compares to the image of successive eruptions of lava. This lava flows in multiple directions, just as the scopophilic drive, when it fails to find pleasure actively, turns upon the subject’s own self.44 The active desire to look becomes a passive desire to be looked at, i.e., exhibitionism. The aim of the instinct—pleasure—has not changed. What changes is the object of the instinct. At the end of the film, Mark photographs himself committing suicide. “I am glad, Helen, I am afraid” are Mark’s last words before he stabs himself with the camera tripod. In this way, Mark again fantasises being his father’s child and completes his father’s unfinished documentary by inducing and capturing his own fear. His voyeurism has turned upon himself. This is not to say that the scopophilic drive is “satisfied” when Mark films his own death. Filming his own death only redirects the drive from active to passive. Elaborating on Freud’s discussion of the drive, Lacan says the purpose of the drive is not to reach a goal but to follows its aim, which is to circle around the object of desire.45 The ultimate source of enjoyment is the drive’s repetitive movement, not the possession of the object of desire. Mark’s serial shooting/killing suggests that the scopophilic drive is not satiated by preserving the image of the woman. The drive is never satisfied and is re-directed to the urge for the next shooting/killing. 42

“Scoptophilia” is referred to in the film. The misspelling dates from a mistake made by Freud’s first translators. 43 Evans, Dictionary. 44 Freud, “Instincts,” 124. 45 Lacan, Fundamental, 179.

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Can the drive ever be fully satisfied? Lacan says that the drive works on the basis of detouring a lost object. What could that object be in Peeping Tom? The process of death cannot be visually captured insofar as the transition from the living state to the corpse is infinitely minimal. Capturing the whole process of murder on the camera would seem to necessarily include that minimal instant. This is the same with capturing the physiological change of fear in a minimal period of time. Mark’s camera can capture and materialise neither death nor fear. The moment of death is always missed (recalling the end of Mr Lazarescu), but that missed encounter with death seduces Mark to seek another death. In this way, the failure to record death itself points to the limit of Mark’s camera and cinema itself. The scopophilic drive seems unable to coincide with the object of desire, to capture death. The missed encounter with death recalls Lacan’s description of the gaze as that which slips, passes, and is transmitted from stage to stage in the field of vision. The gaze, which is always missing on the screen, structures the scopophilic drive: What occurs in voyeurism?…Up to that point what is the subject trying to see? What he is trying to see, make no mistake, is the object as absence. What the voyeur is looking for and finds is merely a shadow, a shadow behind the curtain. There he will phantasize any magic of presence, the most graceful of girls, for example, even if on the other side there is only a hairy athlete. What he is looking for is not, as one says, the phallus – but precisely its absence, hence the pre-eminence of certain forms as objects of his search.46

What the voyeur is trying to see is a lost object. Lacan compares it to the shadow behind a curtain, meaning that the voyeur imagines an attractive woman behind the curtain when in fact there is nothing behind it. His visual fantasy is fed on the lack of something rather than its presence. Figuratively, what the voyeur looks at is not the phallus but precisely its absence. Lacan suggests that the curtain is not so much a substitutive penis as a plain curtain which covers nothing behind. In other words, the fetish does not satisfy the voyeur because it presents to him the phallus. Rather the fetish conceals the very idea that nothing lies behind itself. The voyeur’s visual enjoyment is sustained by the absence which Lacan refers to as the gaze or, I suggest, the death which is always already missing in cinematic experience.

46

Ibid., 182.

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We can therefore say that the subject is always split because it is founded upon an unanalysable lack which the eyes as well as the camera cannot visualise but continually desire: The phantasy is the support of desire; it is not the object that is the support of desire. The subject sustains himself as desiring in relation to an ever more complex signifying ensemble. This is apparent enough in the form of the scenario it assumes, in which the subject...is somewhere, splits, divided, generally double, in his relation to the object, which usually does not show its true face either.47

The voyeur’s fantasy—that he can successfully capture and scrutinise death—is a kind of mistaken knowledge about death. And it is precisely this misrecognition that fuels the voyeur’s desire. Similarly, what sustains the father’s desire to make his “documentary” of fear is not the son but the phantasy that the truth of emotion can be attained through intensive looking/recording. Lastly, I would like to focus on a scene in which the voyeuristic look encounters the Lacanian gaze. The blind mother of Helen, I argue, represents the unoccupiable spot under the voyeuristic look. Although she is blind, she spots problems in Mark which she describes as “unhealthy.” One night she steals into Mark’s private studio and asks him to show her his films. Mark wants to photograph/kill the mother, but the fact that she cannot directly respond to the camera/weapon stops him from murdering her. The voyeur finds little pleasure in looking at someone who cannot return their look. Since she cannot look back and fear cannot be evoked effectively, she is eliminated from being investigated/killed; she is outside the camera’s field of vision. In the same scene, Mark is playing the snuff film of a stand-in (Vivian) he has murdered. While Mark scrutinises her image on the screen, the mother asks, “What am I seeing, Mark?” as she walks closer to the screen. The next shot shows Mark, the mother, and the stand-in in the frame. The viewer sees the back of Mark and the mother, who are facing the screen, while Vivian on the screen is facing the viewer. On one hand, Mark is studying his film, in which we see the fearful face of the stand-in. The voyeur projects his sadistic gaze over her image, feeding his desire. But on the other hand, as the three figures overlap each other, Mark’s body blocks Vivian’s image from fully being projected onto the wall, causing half of her face to fall on his back instead. Mark cannot fully enjoy Vivian as half of her is absent from his vision. The viewer, looking from behind, has the 47

Ibid., 185.

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advantage of seeing the other half of her face which resembles the image of a skull. Mark is looking at her but he is also being looked at by the skull projected on his back. The disturbance of the gaze is accentuated by the blind mother asking: “What am I seeing, Mark?” She and Vivian’s projection threaten his mastery of voyeuristic vision. When Vivian is just about to be stabbed to death by the sharpened tripod, the snuff film goes blank as there was not enough light when she was filmed. The camera fails to capture Vivian’s death. “It’s no good.” Mark says to himself, “I was afraid it wouldn’t be! The lights faded too soon. [I have spoiled] an opportunity. Now I have to find another one…” Mark fails to capture death and he has to photograph and kill another woman. Technically, the fading of light stops the camera from functioning properly, which also means that when light fades, the voyeur cannot capture death with the camera. That is why Mark has to find another opportunity. But in this scene Mark does not manage to see the stand-in’s face fully, suggesting that he is gazed at from the back by Vivian’s “face” of death. Mark’s vision is split and doubled. He is looking at the face of death but he is also being looked at by the gaze which is outside his vision. Mark looks at the picture of the stand-in. But he himself is already a picture: “In the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture.”48 Moreover, we can say that Mark is literally photographed. The image of death—half of it is projected on his body and the other half on the screen. Light here is intersected into two anchor points— one arrives on Mark’s body, another on the screen. The image of death which is outside vision is inseparable from the images which are inside. And it is in this split where we find the chasm between the voyeuristic look and the Lacanian gaze. This chapter has attempted to show how the Lacanian gaze can help to understand the experience of envisaging death in cinema. I have suggested that the dead body which is most often absent from the screen is the unoccupiable spot in representation. The systematic exclusion of death in Hollywood can be understood as a way to secure an undisturbed viewing experience and hence a stable subject. As Bauman says, the viewer uses “magic and irrationality” to escape the threat that death represents.49 This is another way to describe how the voyeur “phantasize[s] any magic of presence, the most graceful of girls, for example, even if on the other side there is only a hairy athlete.”50 On the other hand, I have also demonstrated that it is the Lacanian gaze, compared to the dead body in cinematic 48

Ibid., 106. Bauman, Mortality, 16. 50 Lacan, Fundamental, 182. 49

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experience, which determines the viewer as a split subject, always already punctuated by the gaze. This chapter has attempted to open up the space that challenges the institution of a stable viewing subject. To envisage death in cinema has meant to enliven the fantasy that circumvents an absence which determines and threatens the subject with annihilation. The position from which we envisage death has to be reconsidered in terms of absence rather than presence.

Works Cited Primary Sources Peeping Tom. 1999. The Criterion Collection. DVD. Directed by Michael Powell. Screenplay by Leo Marks. Originally released by Anglo Amalgamated in 1960. Chicago, Il.. Home Vision. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, The National Portrait Gallery, London.

Secondary Sources Barthes, R. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by R. Howard. London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1984. Bauman, Z. Mortality, Immortality and other Life Strategies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Blanchot, M. “Two Versions of the Imaginary.” In The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction & Literary Essays. Translated by L. Davis, P. Auster and R. Lamberton, 417-28. New York: Station Hill Press, 1999. Christie, I. Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. London: Faber, 1994. Cooper, D. D. The Lesson of the Scaffold: The Public Execution Controversy in Victorian England. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974. Copjec, J. “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan.” October 49 (1989): 53-91. Denzin, N. K. The Cinematic Society: The Voyeur’s Gaze. London: SAGE, 1995. Dickens, C. The Letters of Charles Dickens. 12 volumes, edited by. M. House et al. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-2002. Dostoevsky, F. The Idiot. Tranlated by R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky. 1869. London: Vintage, 2003.

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Evans, D. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Hover, New York: Brunner-Routledge, 1996. Foister, S. “Death and Distortion: The Skull and the Crucifix.” Holbein’s Ambassadors: Making & Meaning. London: National Gallery Publications, 1997. Frank, J. Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal 1850-1859. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Frank, J. and D. I. Goldstein, eds. Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew. New Brunswick, NJ; London: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Freud, S. “Instincts and their Vicissitudes.” In Penguin Freud 11: On Metapsychology. Translated by J. Strachey. Edited by A. Richards. 1915. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. Foster, H. “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic.” October 78 (1996):106-24. Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1977. hooks, b. “Sorrowful Black Death Is Not a Hot Ticket.” Sight and Sound 4, no. 8 (1994):10-14. Iversen, M. “What is a photograph?” Art History 17 (1994): 450-64. Jackson, R. Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Overwhelming Questions. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Janes, R. “Beheadings.” In Death and Representation, edited by. S.W. Goodwin and E. Bronfen, 242-62. Baltimore; London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993. Jay, M. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. London: University of California Press, 1994. Kittler, F. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Lacan, J. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. McGowan, T. “Looking for the Gaze: Lacanian Film Theory and Its Vicissitudes.” Cinema Journal 42, no. 3 (2003): 27-47. McInerney, F. “Cinematic Visions of Dying.” In The Study of Dying: From Autonomy to Transformation, edited by A. Kellehear, 211-31. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009. Metz, C. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Mulvey, L. “The Light that Fails: A Commentary on Peeing Tom.” In The Cinema of Michael Powell: International Perspectives on an English Film-maker, edited by I. Christie and A. Moor, 143-55. London: BFI, 2005.

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Payne, M. Reading Theory: An Introduction to Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva. London: Blackwell, 1993. Plato. Republic. Vol. 1. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Massachusetts; Harvard University Press, 1969. Powell, M. Million Dollar Movie. London: Heinemann, 1992. Silverman, K. The Threshold of the Visible World. London: Routledge, 1996.

CHAPTER ELEVEN ROSSETTA LIFE: USING FILM TO CREATE “BEARABLE FICTIONS” OF PEOPLE’S EXPERIENCES OF LIFE-LIMITING ILLNESS NAOMI RICHARDS

This chapter is based on an ethnographic study of the charity Rosetta Life and discusses some of the ways in which film can be used to open up public discussions about illness and dying. Rosetta Life acts as an umbrella organisation for a number of individual artists who run creative projects in hospices around the U.K.1 A registered charity, its mission is to enable hospice users to tell their stories through creative collaborations with artists. It also has the broader aim to “change the representation of the dying.”2 This aim neatly tallies with current UK policy objectives to find ways of stimulating public discussion of, and raise awareness about, issues associated with death and dying.3 In this chapter, I focus specifically on the work of one Rosetta Life artist who uses film to tell stories about people’s biographies-in-illness. In trying to offset the dominant images commonly associated with dying—images of loss and of suffering—artists seek out alternative themes and narratives with which to represent the full spectrum of end of life experiences. It is argued here that the filmmaker hopes to prompt both self-reflection on the part of the hospice user who 1

This chapter is based upon research conducted in 2007-8 as part of a PhD in Social Anthropology, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number PTA-031-2005-00228]. Ethnography involves prolonged immersion in the lives of research participants so that a holistic account can be given of their lives. Research data is collected by way of direct observation, as opposed to relying solely on secondary accounts in the form of interviews or focus groups. 2 Jarrett, Creative Engagement, xi. 3 Department of Health, End of Life Care Strategy, 39.

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features in the film, as well as recognition from others who view the film. Film as a medium possesses certain attributes which help this process along. Above all, showing aspects of a person’s life on film can prompt different forms of reflection and recognition than simply telling people about it. Appearing in films gives hospice users a way of reaching audiences outside of their immediate circle and this offers possibilities for catharsis both for themselves and for other viewers of the films. Rosetta Life films can also become a vehicle for hospice users to participate in their own memorialisation in advance of their death and to contribute to their own legacy. However, in order to secure receptive audiences and recognition from others, certain conventional filmic devices are often applied to the films which inevitably have the effect of simplifying the subject’s life and complex subjectivity. This chapter explores these tensions by analysing two attempts, through the medium of film, to secure witnesses to people’s dying while at the same time helping the individuals featured to envision their own dying.

Rosetta Life gives Form to People’s Biographies-in-illness Rosetta Life artists work on creative projects in hospices around the U.K. Artists-in-residence can specialise in film, photography, poetry, dance or drama. Rosetta Life, and the hospice movement which supports their activities, believes that through creative collaborations with people who are at the end of their lives there will be a transformation of the individual in terms of how they view and value their lives and their relationships. Rosetta Life (inasmuch as artists working under that umbrella hold a collective view) operates from the premise that when a person is diagnosed with a life-limiting or terminal illness, new possibilities for personal discovery, creativity, and self-knowledge surface. The rationale which guides the charity’s endeavours is that, while people living with life-limiting illnesses often have low energy and low confidence, Rosetta Life artists have the wherewithal to step in and inject the required energy for a joint creative endeavour. They can guide the individual towards a creative expression of his or her own life story or biography-in-illness. The idea is that the artist provides the medium while the hospice user provides the message.

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During the course of my research, I shadowed one artist-in-residence, Chris, at a hospice day centre in South London.4 Chris came to work for Rosetta Life after a long career in television. He told me that through trying to engage hospice users in artistic collaborations, he wants to “reawaken” their imagination and encourage them to feel a sense of transcendence over their illness. People diagnosed with life-limiting illnesses (assuming they are told of their prognosis) have more time in which to anticipate their death, giving artists like Chris an “artistic window” in which to work towards recording their testimony. As Clive Seale notes, one of the features of death from cancer, in particular, is that it has a medically predictable trajectory and this has fundamentally influenced the late modern ability to anticipate our own death.5 In the early part of the twentieth century, the onset of disability and life-threatening illness often marked the beginning of the dying phase, yet now, a century later, these markers can signal a new phase of life. As Joanne Lynn points out, our language has not quite got to grips with this new reality and people are either categorised as “temporarily immortal” or “dying,” with no space in between.6 The worlds of many hospice users in the day centre had grown very small as they struggled with fatigue and pain resulting from their disease. Most were simply coping with day-to-day realities; trying to manage their prescriptions, their emotions, and their diminished capacity to order their world. But palliative care, according to the World Health Organization’s definition, is not just about relieving pain.7 It also encompasses helping patients to optimise their quality of life in its final stages. Chris’s role in the hospice is to offer patients an artistic outlet to help them reflect on the value of the life they have lived and to improve the quality of their life in that uncertain and ambiguous space which living with a life-limiting illness represents.

The Hospice Day Centre The modern hospice movement grew out of a discontentment with the general “effacement” of the dying in British society.8 There was a sense that the dying had been abandoned to an isolated and lonely existence in 4

I visited the hospice day centre over a period of nine months. I also spent time shadowing a number of different Rosetta Life artists at various hospices around the UK, and observing public events organised by the charity. 5 Seale, Constructing Death, 37. 6 Lynn, “Living Long,” S14. 7 www.who.int/cancer/palliative/definition/en. Accessed 30/03/2008. 8 Ariès, “Reversal,” 85.

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institutions because society itself had lost the ritual capacity to make sense of death.9 The founding ethos of the modern hospice movement was to enable people to “live until they die.” As originally conceived, hospices were to act as a counterpoint to impersonal medical bureaucracies which denied patients the kind of person-centred care which would prevent them from feeling abandoned in the face of death. Cicely Saunders’s founding vision for hospices was that they should become microcosms of the community around them, with a smooth transition of care from the home to the hospice community.10 Saunders was persuaded that what the medical profession could not or should not seek to provide, the “community” and Christianity would take care of. As the hospice movement has evolved throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, it has provided a new paradigm for the care of the dying, one in which death is a familiar and manageable phenomenon. The local hospice is intended to provide an enclave within a community where death can escape the drama and the histrionics of its media representations. The hospice day centre in which artist-in-residence Chris worked, for example, existed as a social hub where people came to discuss the week’s events with friends and volunteers and to see the clinical staff, chaplain, or complementary therapist. Day centre patients engaged in a form of bio-sociality, that is, a form of sociality that rests on the shared experiences of personhood attenuated by the effects of disease.11 Hospice users’ biological subjectivity, which stigmatised them or marked them out as different in wider society, became the point of reference in social interaction. Illness acted as a leveller in the hospice day centre and in this environment there was a tacit understanding of what it meant to be living with a life-limiting illness. One day a week Chris sat with the day patients at the hospice and talked to them about their experiences. Some days he encountered a vibrant “buzz” of activity among the twenty or so patients which he said “charges him up for the week” and inspires him. Other times he said he can walk in and the atmosphere feels flat, usually when certain colourful characters have stayed away. The waning energy of patients is something that Rosetta Life artists must negotiate if they are to produce the creative collaborations they are commissioned to make. Rosetta Life was invited to take up residence in this hospice at least in part to fit the day centre’s diversionary mandate: to provide activities which could stimulate patients and prevent boredom. Chris saw his role slightly differently. He wanted to 9

See Elias, Loneliness; Gorer, Death. Du Boulay, Cicely Saunders, 136-8; Clark et al, Heaven. 11 Rabinow, “Artificiality.” 10

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offer alternative, artistic modes of stimulation for patients wanting to “dig a little deeper” and side-step the usual games of Bingo and Dominoes. He said that putting people in front of the camera acted as a stimulant to discussion and interesting things could be revealed. He tried to induce energy by coming up with ideas for films which would inspire and motivate individual hospice users to want to share their life stories on screen.

Bob and his Asclepiads During my research, Chris made a short film about a 55-year-old man called Bob.12 Chris worked with Bob on and off for over a year. Bob had been living with Motor Neurone Disease (MND) since 2003 and came to the hospice for respite care. Bob was paralysed from the neck down and had minimal movement in his arms. Prior to the onset of MND, he was one of the country’s biggest collectors of Asclepiads: tiny succulent cactitype plants that are particularly difficult to grow north of the equator. Through conversations in the hospice, Chris discovered that Bob was going to have to give up the collection in which he had invested so much passion and so many painstaking hours because he was no longer able to venture into the garden to tend to his plants. Knowing this, Bob had arranged for them to be adopted by a fellow member of The Asclepiads Society. This struck Chris as a poignant story of loss and of the process of adapting to chronic life-limiting illness. He sensed the filmic potential in a story about an avid collector having to give up his life’s work in order for it to survive beyond his death. Chris saw an equivalence between this process of adaptation due to necessity and Bob’s ability to survive and adapt to each loss of bodily function until the only thing that remained to be adapted to was the inevitability of death itself. It was this thematic parallel which drew Chris to Bob’s story and which was to be the catalyst to their creative collaboration. Chris sought Bob’s permission to make a film about him and his Asclepiads and Bob agreed. Evident in the construction of this short film are the themes which preoccupied Chris in his work with people at the hospice. He tried to find moments in people’s lives which offered, in his words, a “gold nugget” of insight about the human condition. The theme which interested Chris the most was that of human resilience and the ability to adapt even in the face of life-impeding change. However, this was undoubtedly Chris’s theme and the impetus to tease out these “gold 12

This is a pseudonym.

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nuggets” came from him. It was not clear what Bob’s objective was or what theme he expected the film to convey, although I did observe that he enjoyed his interactions with Chris and enjoyed being made the centre of attention through the filmmaking process. In creating films for an audience, whether that audience comprises the hospice user’s friends and family, other users of the day centre, or an unknown audience accessing the film via the internet, the Rosetta Life filmmaker hopes that the story depicted will have a wider resonance. The aim is to find a balance between the personal, specific elements of a person’s life story and a meta-narrative envisaged and drawn out by the filmmaker. In The Revival of Death, Tony Walter identifies this same tension between the two competing discourses in hospice care: one which emphasises the uniqueness of each individual’s story (in the words of Cicely Saunders: “you matter because you are you,”) and the other which tries to create a meta-story around universal processes and stages of adapting to life-limiting illness (Elizabeth KüblerRoss’s five-stage model for coming to terms with a terminal diagnosis, for example).13 It is clear that this disjuncture between the unique and the meta-story is a point of tension both for the hospice movement, as identified by Walter, and for Rosetta Life artists, who must try to make their films reflect both the specificity of the individual’s story and the more universal themes which are deemed likely to resonate with audiences. The film about Bob and his Asclepiads has an optimistic tone. The Asclepiads go on to a new home in Yorkshire and Bob, as he talks to camera, seems stoical and accepting of this outcome. The soundtrack is upbeat and the voice-over, written and read by Chris, explains to the viewer the story as it unfolds. However, a postscript to the day’s filming with Bob revealed that a very different narrative could well have emerged. What was not caught on camera that day was that, after the plants were driven away, Bob was overcome with emotion, something he admitted to Chris and I at the hospice the following week. Had this been caught on camera and incorporated into the film it would have significantly changed the tone from one of positive adaptation and survival to one of sadness at the loss accompanying irreversible bodily decline. This raises an important point in terms of our understanding of how films are used as part of a process of memorialisation. The conventional narrative arcs which can be used to structure a film and give it aesthetic coherence also make the film appear as if it is telling the whole story. In this way, films fix in time a certain representation of a character or an event. The use of voice-over, for instance, often critiqued for giving the impression of a “voice of God,” 13

Walter, Revival, 69.

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directs the viewers’ attention and appears to be in control of what is happening in the film.14 Similarly, the film’s narrative is constructed so as to present or set up a problem which is then resolved or the individual redeemed in some way during the course of the film. This kind of redemptive narrative arc was not specific to Bob’s film but rather was evident in many of the Rosetta Life films I viewed, the purpose of which was to offer viewers a form of catharsis. This again highlights the tension between attempts to appeal to universal themes in order to secure the interest of a wider audience, and remaining true to the individual’s story, which is likely to be more complex, convoluted, and entailing conflicting emotions not so amenable to resolution. I want now to explore two further themes: 1) the theme of using film to fix time in order to preserve an image for posterity; and 2) that of using film to try to change the representation of the dying.

Freezing Time on Film Film footage creates a never-ending present tense which gives viewers the impression that everything they see is happening now.15 By fixing time in this way, capturing a person’s image on film can be a means of maintaining that person in suspended animation and thereby freezing their physical decline. This is the process of immortalisation which is an important role played by the art work in the Rosetta Life canon. As the film theorist Edgar Morin wrote: “In man, the struggle against the erosion of time, fixes itself in a privileged manner upon the image.”16 Hospice users’ participation in Rosetta Life films could be interpreted as a desire to be immortalised in order to make certain they will not be forgotten: a “prophylactic” against death.17 A film will last long after the person featured in it has died and has the potential to be re-watched many times by loved ones. Films made by Rosetta Life enter a private family archive but are also publicly archived online. This digital archive will not deteriorate, as flowers at a graveside will. Researchers have noted a growing role for cyberspace in celebrating the dead. Virtual cemeteries store visual memories of the dead with the promise of continuity and preservation in perpetuity.18 Both the public and private Rosetta Life archives are places where specific moments captured on film are isolated 14

Loizos, “Authority,” 54. MacDougall, Transcultural, 34. 16 Morin, Cinema, 32. 17 Doane, Emergence, 22. 18 Green, Good Death, 179. 15

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and preserved as moments of particular significance. They serve a future desire to remember. So while films can be said to occupy a never-ending present tense, they are not without a connection to the future. For one, viewers of the film, as well as its author and subject, exist outside of the film’s artificial timespace logic. As the anthropologist and filmmaker David MacDougall writes: “Even as a film is being shot, its subjects are in transition, moving towards a future that the film cannot contain.”19 The gap which exists between the medium’s evocation of the subjects’ presence through the film footage and knowledge of their real life presence, which may well be much changed due to the progression of the disease, or indeed their absence, due to death, can in fact draw attention to the passage of time rather than effectively freezing it. Roland Barthes identified the effect of this temporal gap in what he termed the noeme of photography: the conjuring of a past moment “that-has-been” in the present.20 So while the medium of film, and its ability to be digitally archived and made available for future viewers, serves the desire to memorialise ourselves and our loved ones, its inability to contain the future means that, by its very nature, it can also work to emphasise people’s mortality and “time’s relentless melt.”21

Re-presenting Images of Illness and Dying While attempts to freeze time through committing a person’s image to film are problematic, so too are attempts to fix a certain interpretation or representation of that person in pursuit of some broader ambition. Rosetta Life’s stated aim to “change the representation of the dying” implies that the charity wants people to see dying in a new way.22 But what is the dominant representation to which they seek an alternative? The charity’s founder told me that she and other Rosetta Life artists are committed to offsetting an image of dying as one associated only with suffering. She said that Rosetta Life is focused on “empowering” the dying person, helping them to think positively about their experiences and to “awaken” them to the new facets of the self that can be discovered by way of those experiences. In light of this broad aim, the selection of film topics and the construction of each film’s narrative arc are important. The optimistic tone 19

MacDougall, Transcultural, 33. Barthes, Lucida, 115. 21 Sontag, On Photography, 15. 22 Jarrett, Creative Engagement, xi. 20

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established by artist-in-residence Chris in the film about Bob and his Asclepiads, for example, both supports and reflects the broader aims of the charity not to focus solely on the negative aspects of living with lifelimiting illness. This is reminiscent of the work that Malcolm Johnson has been conducting over the last decade about how to re-present the life stories of older care home residents in a way that eases their “biographical pain.”23 He has explored ways of training care home workers to listen to the testimonies of the residents without falling prey to Hippocratic pressures to patientise or pathologise people and their experiences. Johnson believes that in simply saying to older care home residents “I want to hear your story” and then “positively reframing” it, workers in the care home can improve the chance of residents having a good death.24 In resisting the term “suffering,” the Rosetta Life founder and her coartists are not denying that people with life-limiting illness can and do suffer but rather that the organisation does not want to cast people as passive victims in their illness narratives. Through their creative collaborations with hospice users, the artists want to construct an alternative narrative to one of suffering; a narrative which focuses on the positive contribution the dying can make to society rather than, say, trying to elicit sympathy or pity. Indeed, evoking pity, it is argued, could have the unwanted effect of distancing the audience from the narrative being presented to them. According to Susan Sontag, the evocation of pity and sentimentality can effectively negate a genuinely empathetic response because it helps viewers to proclaim their innocence as opposed to emphasising their complicity in a shared world.25 The reluctance of Rosetta Life’s artists to use the term “suffering” could be deemed by some to be a part of the “palliating” or “cloaking” (from the Latin pallium, meaning “to cloak”) of people’s more painful experiences of dying. This charge of “cloaking” the more unpalatable aspects of the dying process has been levelled at the hospice movement more generally. The anthropologist Julia Lawton, for instance, drew attention to the “unbounded, leaky bodies” which populate hospices and to the disintegration of the self which can occur prior to biological death.26 Such experiences present a challenge to the hospice rhetoric that you can “live until you die.”27 However, Rosetta Life’s mandate in hospices is entirely premised on enabling hospice users to live until they die: the 23

Johnson, “Spirituality.” Ibid. 25 Sontag, Regarding, 91. 26 Lawton, The Dying Process. 27 Ibid. 24

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optimising of their quality of life in the ambiguous space which living with/dying of life-limiting illness represents. Artists are not making a pure record of the reality of people’s dying days. They are concerned instead with helping patients to maintain a sense of continuity of self in the face of life-limiting illness, and offering them the opportunity to leave a durable and archiveable testimony for future generations. In order to consider further Rosetta Life’s artistic engagement with and representation of expressions of suffering, I want to describe another creative collaboration, this time between Chris and a hospice user called Clare.28 This collaboration represented an attempt to work sensitively with a patient’s despair at her bodily deterioration and approaching death. While there was still a diversionary element to Chris’s engagement with Clare, as well as a clear attempt to instil a redemptive arc in the telling of her story, the attempt to use film as an outlet for suffering at the end of life, rather than as a means to explore universal themes, is shown to have considerable power.

Cathartic Filmmaking Clare was thirty-six years old and had a very aggressive form of Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Her disabilities had progressed significantly over the time she had been working with Rosetta Life and at the time of my research she was in a wheelchair permanently, had little movement from the neck down, and very slurred speech which made it hard for her to communicate. Clare’s most commonly expressed sentiment was “I’m so frustrated.” The hospice nurses and volunteers often found themselves at a loss as to how to console her and commonly fell into the trap of supplying platitudinous responses. Chris’s response to Clare’s expressions of despair took a different tack. His aim was to try to channel her frustrations into artistic ventures. Chris and Clare’s main way of working together was through writing poems. Clare used to read the poems out loud to camera and then Chris would edit and juxtapose these short clips with other short vignettes of life in the hospice. However, Clare’s speech had deteriorated to the extent that is was now Chris’s voice (as it was with the voice-over narrating Bob’s film) which spoke her words. One day we visited Clare at home and I watched them write a poem together. Chris would ask Clare questions and out of her responses he would create verses. He was subtly shaping what she was saying, teasing out the salient points, and sculpting her words to 28

This is a pseudonym.

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fit a metre. He told me later that he wanted to preserve the “deceptive simplicity” of her words. When the poem was finished, he read it back to her in full, and Clare was visibly moved. She said that it expressed “exactly how she felt.” It was particularly poignant given the problems Clare now had in speaking and in making herself understood. In addition to writing poems, Clare also took part in a film. This was a film of a musical called “The Mariners,” written by Chris and Rosetta Life’s Lucinda Jarrett and composed by Orlando Gough. The musical intertwined the stories of four women, including Clare, who were all service users at different London hospices. Two of the women had since died. The charity’s description of the musical read as follows: “Beginning with diagnosis, the story takes the audience on the roller coaster ride of life-threatening illness - the fears and the pain, but also the laughter, exhilaration, and understanding.”29 The film intercuts some of the performance of the musical with testimony from the four women. Clare says things like: “I never had to think before about a simple thing like drinking” and “I hate the word can’t – it’s just not a part of my vocabulary.” Clare had very fond memories of making the “The Mariners” and while I was at her house we watched the film. Her husband told me that she watches it all the time, and when I looked over at Clare during the viewing, she was crying. When talking about how the “The Mariners” project was conceived, Chris recalled a time when he found Clare sitting on her bed crying. When he reached out to comfort her, she said she couldn’t stop her “silent tears…like a quiet Niagara.” Chris thought this phrase captured something “quite profound,” and it became a key refrain in the musical. So while the musical score was uplifting, the words expressed sadness. Again, Chris used Clare’s words, but it was his moulding of them which created the art. As with the film about Bob and his Asclepiads, Chris provides the form/structure for the art, while the content comes from the individual’s stories and insights. When I saw Clare a few months later at the hospice, she had brought the films with her and was asking the nurse there: “have you seen my films?” They seemed to express something which she felt unable to verbalise herself. They acted as her testimony, her personal archive, something of which she was very proud. It was clear that Chris had managed to find a way through platitudinous or “jollifying” impulses30 frequently evident in interactions in the hospice day centre, by being 29 30

See www.RosettaLife.org. Richards, Promoting the Self.

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prepared to say “yes, things are bad for you” but then finding a way of doing something with those negative feelings; making something positive through invoking poetry and film’s ability to communicate. The anthropologist Arthur Kleinman wrote about a formative experience during his medical training when he was trying to comfort a seven-year-old child who was very badly burnt. It was only when he asked the girl directly about her unrelenting pain, as opposed to trying to divert her attention with questions about her school or her friends, that she grew calm. He writes that the experience taught him “that it is possible to talk with patients, even those who are most distressed, about the actual experience of illness, and that witnessing and helping to order that experience can be of therapeutic value.”31 The anthropologist Veena Das has argued that expressions of suffering are made in a cultural register because they do not only point to an inner object but rather try to invoke the experience of another’s pain inside the body of the witness.32 The direct, intimate effect of films on an audience, along with the projection-identification which occurs when the viewer relates him or herself to the subject depicted, makes film a very affective medium for engaging an audience and for invoking the experience of pain in another’s body, something which I suggest Clare is trying to do when she shows people her films.33

Securing Witnesses As Clare’s expressed desire to have others view her films illustrates, artistic communication, whatever the medium, holds the power to express another’s pain in ways that people living with life-limiting illness may be unable to do themselves, due to failing capacities, voice, or energies. Both Clare and Bob were flattered at becoming the focus of the filmmaker’s attention, and the process of making the films enabled them to take centre stage in their own lives. However, all art forms require an audience. “Giving voice” requires being heard and testimonies require witnesses. In her ethnography of mourning practices in Inner Mani, Greece, Constantina-Nadia Seremetakis revealed how witnessing was done with dramatic effect by women actively performing their role as witness through improvised poetic discourse and mournful screaming.34 Her 31

Kleinman, Illness Narratives, xii. Das, “Language.” 33 See Tarkovski, Sculpting; Morin, Cinema, 85. 34 Serematakis, Last, 7. 32

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analysis of these mourning practices suggests that a death which is not witnessed is a “bad death”; associated with nakedness, poverty and abandonment.35 In this way, securing witnesses is instilled as a vital component of the “good death” experience. In order to try to secure witnesses to people’s filmed testimonies, whether they be family members, hospice staff and volunteers, or even strangers visiting the “virtual cemetery” online, Rosetta Life artists must make the films watchable by employing certain filmic devices. The most significant of these is the redemptive format. As noted earlier, the potential problem with employing a redemptive narrative arc is that it involves fitting a person’s story to a pre-determined theme or to a generalisable meta-narrative. As Arthur Frank notes, there is always a risk of creating yet another general unifying view into which individuals’ stories are fitted.36 This can occur at the expense of recognising the particularity of that individual’s experience. Many of the Rosetta Life films I observed being made employed a redemptive formula in order to promote healing and catharsis for the audience, and for the person featured. This classic formula also made the films watchable, even entertaining, and was an attempt to avoid potential witnesses switching off. It is fear of a silent death, or a death without a witness, which motivates the work of Rosetta Life, as it motivates the work of the modern hospice movement. Rosetta Life artists such as Chris can find themselves turning the unshareable truth of suffering into “bearable fictions” in order that audiences do not turn their back on their role as witness.37 In conclusion, Rosetta Life, in its engagement with Bob and Clare and other hospice users around the UK, demonstrates a refusal to accept that we can never find the words to respond to someone who is dying. Its artists engage in creative collaborations with people who are approaching the end of their life, constructing filmic narratives which offer certain representations of the individuals featured; representations which will ultimately contribute to their memorialisation after their death. Anthropologist James Green’s comment about North American death practices could equally refer to the grand narratives and redemptive tone found in many Rosetta Life films: that they continue to be informed by an “ancient, persistent and religiously inspired redemptive ethos which shapes how we understand the value of life and solemnize its ending.”38

35

Ibid., 76. Frank, Wounded. 37 Schweizer, Suffering, 3. 38 Green, Good Death, 30. 36

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Film is a durable and shareable artefact which, through the “projectionidentification” of viewers with the person on screen, offers an intimate window on people’s worlds at the end of their lives.39 Film also has the potential to enable its subject to envision their own legacy in advance of their death and even to enter a mode of anticipatory grieving for their own future loss of self.

Works Cited Ariès, P. “The Reversal of Death: Changes in Attitudes Toward Death in Western Societies.” American Quarterly 26, no. 5 (1974): 536-560. Barthes, R. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981. Clark, D. N. Small, M. Wright, M. Winslow and N. Hughes. A Bit of Heaven for the Few? An Oral History of the Modern Hospice Movement in the United Kingdom. Lancaster: Observatory Publications, 2005. Das, V. “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain.” In Social Suffering, edited by A. Kleinman, V. Das and M. Lock, 7691. London: University of California Press, 1997. Department of Health. End of Life Care Strategy for England. London: DoH, 2008. Doane, M.A. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press, 2002. Du Boulay, S. Cicely Saunders: Founder of the Modern Hospice Movement. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1984. Elias, N. The Loneliness of Dying. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Frank, A. W. The Wounded Storyteller: The Body, Illness and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Gorer, G. Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain. London: Cresset Press, 1965. Green, J. Beyond the Good Death: the Anthropology of Modern Dying. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Jarrett, L. “Preface.” In Creative Engagement in Palliative Care: New Perspectives on User Involvement, edited by L. Jarrett, x-xiv. Oxon: Radcliffe Publishing Ltd, 2007. Johnson, M. “Spirituality and Biographical Pain.” Paper presented at The Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal, 8th International Conference, The University of Bath, 2007.

39

Morin, Cinema, 32.

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Kleinman, A. The Illness Narratives: Suffering and the Human Condition. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1988. Kubler-Ross, E. On Death and Dying. London: Tavistock Publications, 1970. Lawton, J. The Dying Process: Patients’ Experiences of Palliative Care. London: Routledge, 2000. Loizos, P. “Authority, Representation and Anthropological Knowledge.” In Film as Ethnography, edited by I. Crawford and D. Turton, 3-85. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. Lynn, J. “Living Long in Fragile Health: The New Demographics Shape End of Life Care.” In Improving End of Life Care: Why has it been so Difficult? Hastings Centre Report Special Report 35, no. 6 (2005): S14-S18. MacDougall, D. Transcultural Cinema. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1998. Morin, E. The Cinema or The Imaginary Man, An Essay in Sociological Anthropology. 1956. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Rabinow, P. “Artificiality and Enlightenment: from Sociobiology to Biosociality.” In Essays on the Anthropology of Reason, edited by P. Rabinow. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996. Richards, N. “Promoting the Self through the Arts: the Transformation of Private Testimony into Public Witnessing.” In Governing Death and Loss: Empowerment, Involvement and Participation, edited by S. Conway, 45-53. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Schweizer, H. Suffering and the Remedy of Art. New York: State University of New York Press, 1997. Seale, C. Constructing Death: The Sociology of Dying and Bereavement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Serematakis, C. The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Sontag, S. On Photography. 1971. London: Penguin Books, 2002. —. Regarding the Pain of Others. Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 2003. Tarkovsky, A. Sculpting in Time: The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses his Art. 1986. Austin, TX: University of Texas, 2003. Walter, T. The Revival of Death, London: Routledge, 1994.

CHAPTER TWELVE LIFE, DEATH AND BEAUTY: ART AS A WAY OF ACCESSING GRIEF TRACY MACKENNA

Art as Mourning Practice, and as Discursive Tool Life is Over! if you want it 1 is the exhibition project that arose from a prolonged period during which attempts were made to give place, name and form to death, through an exploration from the position of within, of the slow and seeping immersion in grieving and mourning in which I was engaged, as an individual and at the same time with my collaborative and life partner, Edwin Janssen. The project considered, enveloped and re-presented issues within a cycle framed by art: art-illness-end of life-death-loss-grief-mourningexperience-private-public-participation-identity-memory-history-material culture-meaning-religion-art. While artists throughout history have made work that questions mortality, we wished to establish a way to do so that invited people in, without presenting confrontation or stimulating moral outrage, to encourage meaningful discussion. The central narrative built on a personal story, the death by assisted suicide of Edwin’s father, situated within the broader context of issues around contemporary death, how objects and images impact on people’s ideas about death and the role that art can play in mediating issues of life and death while framing through historical artworks how artists have interpreted death throughout history. As artists who share a collaborative practice Edwin and I were struggling with the question of whether the very existence of the arts is related to the human drive to mourn, and testing, through a discursive art practice, 1

Mackenna and Janssen, LIFE IS OVER! if you want it. The exhibition was supported by a Wellcome Trust scheme that through art aimed “to inform and inspire the public about biomedical science and its social contexts.” http://www.mackenna-and-janssen.net

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whether public exposition could facilitate a place for private mourning processes; whether, in practice, as Darian Leader has stated: The arts exist to allow us to access grief, and they do this by showing publicly how creation can emerge from the turbulence of a human life. In our unconscious use of the arts we have to go outside ourselves to get back inside.2

Devised to open up spaces for shared creativity, collaboration and engagement, the project raised specific ethical questions regarding collaborative participatory practice, the artist’s authorial identity and the foregrounding of curatorial intent as an artistic strategy in socially engaged art practice that can also impact upon institutional responsibilities. Framed within the discourse of participation, these questions highlighted issues about the ethics of performance and about community identity and legitimacy. Hampered by the experience of loss, initial ideas were literal and illustrative, focusing on the representation of the final moment of death in an age that exemplifies Walter Benjamin’s observation that: Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most exemplary one; think of the medieval pictures in which the deathbed has turned into a throne toward which the people press through the wide-open doors of the death house. In the course of modern times dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living. There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died….Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death.3

The translation of our experiences of the moment of death, seared upon our individual memories, was repeatedly transformed through the corruption of shared re-interpretation. All effort was channeled into possible visualisations of what has become, also in our public minds, frightening and unimaginable, removed from everyday life and experience; the public process of dying sited within the domestic. Stimulated to develop artwork that could only be given life through public presentation and engagement, we strove to bring together personal experiences of loss with their public placement, as an environment where a variety of narratives could co-exist and develop through partnership between the artists, the institution and various publics.

2 3

Leader, New Black, 87. Benjamin, “Storyteller,” 93.

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Death and Life as Decentred Experience In the winter of 2002, the displacement of my family from the heart of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, to rural Fife on the east coast of Scotland triggered a process of art-making that facilitated the process of mourning. The exhibition project is the result of two individuals’ attempts to come to terms with their unexpected involvement in the arranged death of another; Wim Janssen, born 1924, profession supervisor in Scania truck manufacturer’s production department, husband and father of four. Wim’s death took place in his home in the Netherlands through the act of assisted suicide, experienced and witnessed and enabled by his wife, his children, their partners, one doctor and the Dutch legal system. Drawn into Wim’s death whilst living in the Netherlands catapulted Edwin and me into the realm of a mode of dying that was openly debated, positioned nationally and on the whole, understood and accepted within Dutch multi-cultural and multi-religious society. This form of dying whose name in translation is still that of “pleasant death” is highly regulated. The act is deemed to be not punishable provided conditions set by law are met; the doctor in attendance must consider due care, the nature of the patient’s request, the degree of suffering, possible alternatives, consultation of a second physician, the method of life-ending and the requirement to report the act to a review committee. Leaving the Netherlands soon after with one young son, and a girl in the womb, our pace of living decelerated, and from a new position across the North Sea we turned to face the place and people from which we had disengaged. In direct contrast to the place that assisted suicide occupied in Dutch society, our attention turned to the slumbering debate in Scotland and the UK. In particular, the work of Sheila McLean in the area of law and ethics that addressed the position the state should occupy in relation to individuals’ choice to choose their own death, revealed to us the gravity of the decision Wim had made when situated next to the freedoms available to neighbours close in geographical distance, yet separated by significant ideological and cultural philosophies.4 Voices raised loud in the UK media pitted personal freedom against religious primitivism, and declared national tendency to be mired in illiberalism.5 In the absence of balanced, enlightened debate in the national interest, the raw desperation of individual acts read as sensationalism 4

McLean, Assisted Dying. A series of articles in the national press at the time of developing the exhibition project included Jenkins, “Denial” and Warnock, “Legalise.”

5

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while the public learned of trips to Swiss “suicide clinics” and witnessed through television a man’s death by euthanasia,6 amidst philosophers’ calls to heed moral obligations to ourselves and others in the exploration of a new understanding of life as a state of being that is embedded in death.7 Falteringly, we unpicked the occasion of death; the triggers, decision, sequence of events and the impact upon ourselves and on others. Out of dependence on each other, complacent presumption suggested that the impact was shared and equal but eventual immersion in a creative process brought to the surface the previously silenced knowledge that what each of us had experienced together bore little resemblance to the traces left upon us separately. Displaced, out of the social and political context of the country where the deed had taken shape, and relocated to an unfamiliar environment, the social spaces normally filled by the living that give structure to complex interpersonal relations and intercourse slowly opened up: natural fissures forced wider apart by death.

A Demonstration of an Art Practice Trial and error in the space of art-making would allow us to consider the roles that we had played in the process of Wim’s death; from the moment that he decided, alone, we had tumbled as a kitten falls downstairs, complicit. Illness, fear, decision; effect on you, effect on her, effect on us. You chose your way, without discussion, found the doctor, named the date8

But how to understand individually, and between the two of us, and to communicate to others if the socio-cultural significance of death in our Western societies has faded to a shadow seldom glimpsed, replaced by media regulated images of the horror, tyranny and violence of impersonal death? In highlighting questions of the utmost importance to artist Ian Breakwell whose work accepted death “in all its guises,” anatomist Bernard Moxham said, “life should be understood as much in terms of death as in terms of life….Yet, in an age of carpe diem, how is it possible for the individual to be other than selfish and how is it possible for a

6

See Zaritsky, Right to Die. See Sayal, Call. 8 Excerpt from texts written daily by Tracy Mackenna during discussion with participants and added daily to Life, Death and Beauty: The Invisible Talk Back Fear, No Fear. 7

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society to progress?”9 Could Edwin and I create an alternative that would offer a space to ourselves and to others within which to consider anew this most likely of confrontations, the personal death? The collaborative practice that Edwin and I have shared since 1997 is a discursive association, a method perhaps that brings into close proximity doing with thinking, craft with idea. This work is set positively against conservatism to tease out the actuality of the everyday world in all its latent messiness, considering Nigel Llewellyn’s observation that: “Today very little attention is paid to the visual culture of mourning, and extended private grief is by and large discouraged as psychologically unhealthy.”10 Edwin and I are each other’s sounding board and sparring partner, required to provoke and refine each other’s ideas. Our art practice is sited somewhere between two definitions of participatory art practice: relational art—“an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space”11—and significantly different, littoral art, in whose definition art historian and critic Grant Kester emphasised “a discursive aesthetic based on the possibility of a dialogical relationship that breaks down the conventional distinction between artist, art work and audience - a relationship that allows the viewer to ‘speak back’ to the artist in certain ways, and in which this reply becomes in effect a part of the ‘work’ itself.”12 A continuous honing of the collaboration that takes place between us persists, at times both drawing from and hidden from public intervention and affect, typified by Claire Doherty as “artists for whom a critique of authorship and the democratisation of art are implicit; for whom the role of the participant predominates through dialogical process; and for whom human relations or ‘the relational’ aspect of social context is a primary point of departure.”13

Art as Social, Human or Humane Education Everyday objects and familiar procedures are deployed in a spectrum that unites art production with multi-sensory spatial exploration and an 9

Moxham in Breakwell, Dance Floor, 39. Llewellyn, Art, 93. 11 Bourriaud, Relational, 14, emphasis in the original. 12 See Kester, “Dialogical,” presented originally at the conference Critical Sites: Issues in Critical Art Practice and Pedagogy, The Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dun Laoghaire, County Dublin, September 1998. 13 Doherty, Naming, 29. 10

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ethics of encounter to encourage interaction (relational), whilst incorporating participants’ voices (littoral). People see and, through repeated points of engagement, can critique what they contribute. While we, as the artists, retain the roles of editors and directors of a range of concurrent processes, a site is offered to participants, validated through their incorporation into the end results. Tackling actual social-political issues occurs in this “expanded concept of art” that stimulates connectivity to unite practical, social and political concerns and demands.14 Sensory environments bring together fine art and practical art, providing a context for the shared exploration of a subject while actual experiences promote and produce dialogue and living critique to expose and open emergent social attitudes. This practice generates meaning and knowledge through creativity, stemming from the proposition that the activities of art naturally contain the activity of research, understood as “that function that expands each field’s potential and relevance.”15 The cycle of action engendered in the exhibition environment colocates intentionality and reflection through action. Spending time together cohabiting a question is the very reason for being together, value emerging from public durational art-making that is open to participation, sociality, and hospitality. Against the notion of art as spectacle, the embedded place of time and change enables conversely, counter spectacle, with temporary transitory publics. It is public time, more importantly than public space, that promotes unexpected outcomes and values open-ended, incomplete proceedings: a positive norm of practice.16 The nature of these environments derives from our observations that sites of trust are needed by many of us, where contentious and highly personal issues can be discussed collectively and shared publicly and where, in the place of making and talking, emotions ranging from sadness to melancholia can be expressed and played out.

14

Brenner, “Political Activism.” The artist Joseph Beuys asserted that art should assume an active role in fostering societal change. While reflecting the institutional critique of the 1970s, recently it exemplifies a critical stance towards contemporary politics, society and economics, focusing on whether artists can transform criticism into artistic practice. 15 See “current research” of Scrivener, and for discussion on what distinguishes visual arts research from contemporary visual arts practice see his Visual, 228-40.* 16 For a theory on art as a form of instrumental action within social contexts, see Gell, Agency.

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An Art Project as Discursive Tool A visual narrative was established through the conjunction of largescale slide projections, historical artworks from the 17th to the 20th centuries that depicted dying and death, and wall drawings.17 These drawings belong to a series that addresses each new project’s subject matter, drawing on John and Yoko’s 1970’s peace campaign poster “WAR IS OVER! if you want it, Love and Peace from John & Yoko.” The texts offer a range of social, political and cultural queries playing on and simultaneously subverting the language of public advertisements through slogan, scale and visual identity. Hovering over the project’s proposition, they breathed life into research’s visual, oral and written manifestations, choreographing release and reflection on experiences, emotions and interpretations of events that impact on us variably through the subliminal (private) and the social (public). The discursive was facilitated by locating within the gallery a public studio where we worked each day and hosted a series of public participatory events. Production, presentation, exchange, research, teaching and reflection were co-located through the equal foregrounding of on-site collaboration, interaction, curatorial practice, (personal) histories and interpretation. All of these operated in response to the specific conditions in which we place ourselves as artists: cultural, socio-political and art-institutional. Two works central to the project were large-scale still-image projections encapsulating core issues that acted as “frames,” as physical presences which demarcated time and place within the gallery. Comprising two distinct elements in a pairing of screens was the single work Life, Death and Beauty: The Invisible Looks Back – Fear, No Fear.18 One complete at the start of the project, a still life was apparently inert, except for the continual change in one component, that of a picture frame. The entire 17

Historical works were loaned from nearby collections; The Doctor’s Visit, Jan Steen, oil on canvas on panel, c1660, University of Edinburgh Fine Art Collection, and from Perth Museum & Art Gallery, Perth & Kinross Council Still Life with a Violin, Franciscus Gysbrechts, oil on panel, c1680; Still Life with a Lobster, Jan Davidsz. de Heem, oil on canvas, 1606-1684; War Baby, 1918, Robert Henderson Blyth, oil on board, 1945; The Burial of the MacDonalds of Glencoe, Colin Hunter, oil on canvas, 1892; Flower Study, Abraham Breughel, oil on canvas, 1671; Death of a Pierrot, William Strang, drawing, undated; A Human Sacrifice in a Morai in Otaheite, the Body of Tee, a Chief, as Preserved after Death in Otaheite, from a series of engravings from Banks’ New System of Geography, published by Royal Authority. 18 See http://www.mackenna-and-janssen.net.

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projected image, being larger than average height and wider than an arm span, contained a vase with purple tulips, Edwin’s father’s watch, an unlit candle in a candlestick, a half-full bottle and glass of water, a lemon on a porcelain plate and, within a photographic frame, a series of photographs that changed at a regular pace. As each photograph appeared a visual document was assembled, simultaneously building and communicating a narrative told through pictures, of Edwin’s view of his parents’ house, made in the days after both parents had died, when the house was still, devoid of human presence, and in the resting period between one set of decisions made, and the formulation of the next. By fixing and framing these artefacts within their natural settings during a liminal period of un-occupation and un-ownership, a heightened state of being was activated enabling Edwin’s capacity to “listen abstractly.”19 Through the act of capturing possessions collected by his parents, he eased himself into the process of mourning, an act consciously “designed to release a palliative emotional response.”20 The nestling of the photographs within a still life projection ignited the exhibition project and consequently enabled the creation of a reflective space that would slowly, over the project’s duration, be filled within the partner projection. On the project’s public opening the partner screen was in essence empty, lit only by a projected blank slide, physical presence marking out and holding open the space in which a work would develop out of the artists’ occupancy of the gallery; it would be complete on the last day.

Points of Multiple Access and Re-access Whilst the project appeared at first glance to follow the accepted notion that an artwork is made prior to public presentation, an essential component was the artists’ presence in the public studio. This fundamentally shifted the balance of the project towards that of an artwork with in-built obsolescence. The artists generated and curated new material to foreground the temporal aspect of art production, activating the site of the exhibition simultaneously with the site of production, giving equal room to the visitor participant and the author artist. A series of informal encounters with visitors was triggered by my daily 19 The visual conditions in the house focused attention on the apparent absence of sound, invoking Martin Heidegger’s proposal that “in order to hear a bare sound we have to listen away from things, divert our ear from them, i.e., listen abstractly,” Heidegger, “Origin,” 156. 20 Llewellyn, Art, 85.

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presence when the psychological, philosophical and ideological qualities and the implications and impact of the representation of death, mourning and loss were discussed. Conversation released stories and countered how death is usually portrayed as abject, seeking out alternative concepts and views on the subject matter in a site where questions could be posed in safety, within a space for reflection. Students, colleagues and external participants, in proximity to my own reflections on the omnipresence yet simultaneous absence of death in our societies, released thought and opinion on how our society’s severance of the relationship between living and dead disallows the continuity of social interaction and forms of social life, when death is not regarded as an extension of life, actively not incorporated into the daily rituals of the living. The locative nature of the project gave physical home to conversation, housed within many forms of story where the performative act of telling was regarded as an essential aspect of the human condition, crucial to our ability to describe our knowledge of the self and make visible the place of imagination in our formation of our own identities. The accuracy of these stories was irrelevant, their purpose to liberate through transmission the experiences described in the present of the moment. As the collection grew, all parties engaged journeyed into expanded times, continually reawakening the space of the otherwise intentionally silent gallery, now resounding with voices. Ties and roots, belong and trust, differences in between Holding on and coming close, straining to unite Common sense fights gut reaction, stomach saying all A glow, a gap, a chink of light – no, nothing there at all 21

The texts garnered through exchange were written at the end of each day into the second still image slide projection. Consisting at times of perhaps only three or four words, composed to acknowledge the projection’s physical presence in the gallery and the time required to see, scan and read across the expanse, a growing series revealing the interrelationship of the spoken word and written text emerged, exposing the culturally laden use of words and phrases. In combining a related collection of excerpts through editing and mixing, the act of reading became a process of re-reading, enabling the negotiation of temporality.

21

Excerpt from texts written daily by Mackenna during discussion with participants and added daily to Life, Death and Beauty: The Invisible Talk Back Fear, No Fear.

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scraps and notes and rips and tears lead here today, and every day that you are part of, away 22

The series of changing slides presented word transformed in to image, introducing internalised sound through movement and rhythm as the viewer read silently to herself engulfed by the light of the projection, adjusting to new meanings and attuning her presence through the tone and tempo offered by the pace at which the slides changed. Within the project’s environment, the sequential arrival of the slides proposed a particular reading of the material through photographic framing while, “[t]o the extent that we are fixated on what we see when the light is on (and are lost in the afterimage that lingers in the dark interval), time expands and contracts; forgetfulness and suspenseful expectancies of various kinds compete.”23 In – between Back and forth Gap site Place Always travelling, moving, never arriving, looping 24

Art as Ethics Working against dominant culture to subvert the establishment of prevalent ideologies by the foregrounding of experimentation, dissatisfaction with definitions was regarded as positive material to be moulded live, in the happening space and place of real-time, proposing possibilities that reveal the inseparability of life, art, politics. Consider Life is Over! if you want it as a tableaux in flux, where form and subject are constructed and repeatedly deconstructed on site, an

22

Ibid. Storr, Next, 55. 24 Excerpt from texts written daily by Tracy Mackenna during discussion with participants and added daily to Life, Death and Beauty: The Invisible Talk Back Fear, No Fear. 23

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adventure through event.25 The entirety of everything that is presented evolves through the action of making and dialogue in the site of the presentation itself. This differs from standard gallery and museum practice by seeking to provide a collective, active point of departure for all who encounter the work. Both the project and art practice, if considered as an ethics of public art practice, give central position to what the Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk has termed “temporary fields of intervention.”26 As artists, curators, performers, facilitators and editors active in the exhibition space and literally sculpting in time the project’s material, we were ever alert to Jacques Rancière’s caution that participatory art in particular can unwittingly contribute to the emergence of what he terms consensus, where the actual political terrain which relates to the project may remain unchanged or undisturbed by the project.27 The ethic of participation through encounter that we sought to engender was closer perhaps to constructive dissensus than to a tolerant but non-revisionist consensus. What we hoped to create was a trusting space where dissensus introduces a rupture that disturbs the conventions of the status quo, of the terrain of the critique, and newly defines normative positions of tolerance and intolerance. The query bubbling silently underneath was whether art needs an ethics beyond an off-the-shelf ethics, and whether this in turn begs the question of whether aesthetics is in need of re-defining. Within the care of the institution, an ethics of intent and responsibility was central to the project, mediated by the artists-as-curators’ roles in the representation of their and of their project’s position. In this case, the institution accepted a situated ethic, arising from the exhibition project’s nature and demands, which in turn affected an individual’s ethics, from within an engagement with art, itself a space to question ethics. If art enjoys a status of exception, at what point is the ethics itself identified as an artwork, particularly in socially-engaged, participatory work? The artistic proposition implicit in the timeframe of this project was that an ontological shift could be felt to occur, away from the representational towards the real, serving only to strengthen its efficacy, the “real” acted out daily with a range of participants-as-actors, critiquing through contribution and sharing. 25 For discussion on issues of what constitutes an event with relevance to practices of time, art and photography, see Lomax, Sounding. 26 Van Heeswijk, Mapping. These symposia and events were a collaboration between Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, Public Art Scotland (PAR+RS), Creative Scotland (formerly The Scottish Arts Council), and resulted in Neil, “Correspondent’s Report.” 27 Rancière, Dissensus.

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The University as Institution The immediate local critical context for Life is Over! if you want it within the art college’s broader environment of the university was focused three months earlier by the public debate “This house believes that Physician Assisted Suicide should not be legalised in Scotland,” organised by a Christian medical student who questioned “how people’s belief frameworks give rise to their stance on a given issue.” The backdrop for debate was the 2005 Private Members’ Bill introduced by MSP Jeremy Purvis into the Scottish Parliament, calling for a change in the law to allow Physician Assisted Suicide for those with a terminal illness. Politicians, physicians, ethicists/lawyers and theologians debated in front of an audience in excess of three hundred and fifty, on a Saturday evening.28 The decision to site the project in our own institution was crucial, driven to connect participants who could bring a broad and compelling range of expertise to the subject matter of a project whose structure enabled open-endedness and dialogue and that centralised discourse and a critical dimension through an “intensive temporality.”29 Also highlighted was a recurrent dilemma for those individuals like us who, within the art institution, expose through making a philosophical and ethical focus that places centrally an art practice that is curation in process and in transition. Our practice sited art education as an open work within its structure, locally situated and socially engaged. A key motivation underpinning our belief in art education as an investment in social agency is the conviction that making art is about building social and intellectual capital through the exposure and sharing of process, thereby opening up new sites of inquiry. Embedded within the project was a desire to better understand how our identities as artist educators are formed. Community, activism, education, exchange: the considerations at the heart of many of our projects are those of authority and the construction of knowledge. In the studio, we re-work images and text to reveal agendas hidden in their original context; as artisteducators, our work questions hierarchies and power relationships within institutions. Revealing all our roles concurrently, we aimed to discover themes that characterise the artist-educator as a mode of practice as critique, considering the urgency of pedagogy’s current position as raised by the artists’ platform 16 Beaver Group’s “response to a letter:” [T]he question of pedagogy cannot be separated from the most urgent 28

See http://theplexus.wordpress.com/tag/physician-assisted-suicide/ Accessed 30 January 2013. 29 Tallant, Experiments.

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ecological, social, cultural, political and economic questions we confront today. Any interrogation of these issues remains tied to the question of pedagogy. Indeed, pedagogy is at the heart of these questions.30

The artist educator is a position undergoing definition and professionalisation. It is critical to ensure that the artist’s actions and point of view directly influence the way the role is practiced and theorised. This project enabled the examination of how this is understood within educational, museum and gallery contexts and by artist-educators themselves. By co-locating differing practitioner and institutional understandings and practices it explored how relationships are negotiated in practice.31 By re-thinking the role as a form of arts practice, with specific art-historical lineage and contemporary relevance not least in the current challenges to higher arts education, the activity through public projects contributes to current debates about the nature and value of socially-engaged practice. The polarising position established through the university debate’s motion served to foreground the gap that exists between those academic disciplines that study the human condition and the arts, brought into sharp focus where an art college is sited within a university. There is vast potential for the development of essential, new connections between disciplines—art, medicine, humanities, religious studies—as tools for greater understanding about the human condition and therefore the self, and one’s role in society. New models that recognise equally the intrinsic values of each discipline could lead to new understandings about the essence of human values and the human condition mediated through new approaches to ethics, articulated through a focus on personal, social and cultural contexts that determine each and every life.

30

16 Beaver Group, To Whom, 238. A recent proliferation of international exhibitions, symposia, events and publications on the subject of the changing role of the academy and the museum include Academy (Academy. Learning from Art and Academy. Learning from the Museum), initiated by Siemens Arts Program and realised in cooperation with the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College in London, the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Described as a “continuous project that wishes to prompt reflection on the potential of the academy within society” it asked the question “How do we expand our notions of teaching and learning beyond the frames assigned by formal education?” to interrogate possible shifts from “teaching geared to a clear output and teaching that focuses on possibilities for an enabling interaction between subjectivities and social organisms.” 31

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Art Towards Change “I became a doctor to combine my intellect and my heart in helping people.”32 This statement made by Dr David Reilly relates directly to the wondering aloud by visitors and participants in LIFE IS OVER! if you want it, about possible better ways of the medical profession and physicians approaching medicine and human caring, that could emphasise the innate healing capacity in people, the factors that modify the healing response, and their interaction in the therapeutic encounter and relationship.33 Interaction through dialogue demonstrated people’s overlapping interests, and belief in the creative process inherent in healing as a potential to move out of the constriction of the human being, towards a better sense of self; that healing, recovery, growth and creativity may share a root commonality, that of emergent change. Visitors talked of the beneficial effect of repeat visits as a symbolic ritual where the potency of the moment could be seized and transformed into a positive experience offered by art; vital to setting out new “maps,” the shifted map enabled a shift in the journey.34 Medical professionals and students questioned their training that teaches them to believe that evidence proves their method right, whilst experience teaches them otherwise, and described this as a crisis in National Health Service care. 32

David Reilly, doctor, educator and researcher, in Seminar 2 of The Museum of Loss and Renewal: Object becomes Subject, with Mackenna and Janssen, Visual Research Centre, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, 25th Nov 2011. 33 These ideas were developed in public by David Reilly in Seminar 2 of The Museum of Loss and Renewal: Object becomes Subject, with Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen, Visual Research Centre, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, 25th Nov 2011. His evaluation of aspects of complementary medicine and mind-body medicine has been adopted as the core of The Fifth Wave report that explores future health in Scotland. 34 This theme was publicly discussed in the project On Growth, & Forms of Meaning, 2011, Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen, whose starting point for informal “experimental” natural conversations that explored ideas around visual thinking both orally and visually was the work of biologist, mathematician and classicist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson. Dr Wendy Wheeler and Sara Cannizzaro’s work in biosemiotics, a new way of thinking about nature, culture, and art opened a conversation about the ways in which we are tied to earth and environment, which shape us, and also about the ways in which cultural and aesthetic life evolves—collectively, individually, and abductively—from earlier emergent forms. http://www.mackenna-and-janssen.net. Accessed 30 January 2013.

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The project’s framework established conditions from which to create, then stimulated creation, providing an environment that allowed emergent movement through changed agency in the site of subject matter and creativity. The necessarily unchallenged veracity of people’s stories demonstrated that myth is simply a false story transmitting the truth. Participants’ mindfulness of their own drives, evidenced in their verbal performances, revealed a willingness to move from the egoic to the “observer of me,” experienced as a liberating state and perhaps even as a psychological shift from psycho to social.35 This on-site experience, whilst in no way laying claim to the territory of the art therapist, is akin to the activity of that rare medical professional who works through phenomenology—learning from the patient—and not theory. In this case, the artist is present in advance of the theoretician. In the same way that the doctor can prescribe a placebo, the artists here create a state of transmitability; providing a context and situation for the transmission of positive, and positively negative knowledge, maximised through sharing. Parallel to, and in deliberate contrast to, the performative writing enacted by myself through conversation, a series of structured discursive platforms open to external audiences was devised as a complementary way of engaging visitors and participants in a process of thinking aloud, in the dynamic, associative and unregulated space of making heard unmediated thoughts about the project’s topic, amongst themselves.36 Offered to others for the presentation of questions within their own areas of interest, these cross-disciplinary events took place within the site of the exhibition project environment and brought together artists, curators, art historians, philosophers, architects, clinicians and scientists. They included a symposium that addressed the question of the role art can play in mediating issues around life and death, a seminar focusing on the relationship between place, architecture and suicide, an in-conversation gallery discussion on artists’ perspectives on mortality and a Master of 35

The understanding here of a concept as psychosocial is that it relates to one’s psychological development in, and interaction with, a social environment. First commonly used by psychologist Erik Erikson, the individual does not have to be fully aware of this relationship with their environment. Relevant to this project, the concept was discussed in a conversation between Paula MacCormack and Dr Jeremy Keen of The Highland Hospice, and Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen on 19 April 2012 in Dundee. The broader framework of the exchange concerned “terror management”; does talking about death cause damage by not allowing suppression? If life is allowed to be the subject, can this engender a healthier state?. 36 See Pethick, Resisting.

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Fine Art student collaborative performative response, “Exquisite Corpse; a Contemporary Unfolding.” Specialist knowledge came together within what Jeanne van Heeswijk has termed a “temporary field of interaction,” contributions creating “collaborations and conjunctions between experts.” Van Heeswijk asserts: “We have to talk about inclusive practice; practice that includes people…daily trivialities are important. By bringing them to the fore you see the power of life.”37 The essence of these spoken presentations, conversations, discussion and debates was captured by me, distilled and written into the slide projection, offered back to the participants with every new day.

Memory and Legacy In the public and private, internal and external, personal and shared, a topic was explored to enhance the critical potential of creative practice. Critique was visibly translated into a productive force within a crafted site. It contributed to ways the institution can respond to and reflect its specific location as well as how it maintains relevance within an international discourse, showing how an art practice that grounds living theoretical discourse can help to increase the relevance and effectiveness of art practices. Participants said it offered a new perspective on its subject matter through a non-hierarchical exposition of collaboration between artist, audience and institution. Our goal was to reframe current artistic practice and art education to take account of, and be responsive to, the complex negotiation of identity and subjectivity when performed in a temporary site enabled by contemporary art. That presentation, participation, exchange, making, reflection and teaching on the themes of art, life and death were addressed in combination—part of a “rhizomatic” structure built upon interconnectedness and decentring rather than linearity and hierarchy— offered to participants individually, collectively and together with us as the artists a terrain with multiple access points suggesting flexible pathways and a set of navigation tools that could be shaped and constructed to enable varying routes into, and levels of, self-expression.38 37 Van Heeswijk, New Perspectives: Inspirational Approaches, Symposium 1 of Mapping. 38 See Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand, 21: “The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight.”

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Whilst neither community art nor activist art what was created was a symbolic space for release and a site offered as a trigger for interaction within which to consider an ecology of care and possible new models where life and art and education—art as ethics—come together to respond to the complex socio-political challenges we currently face, by affecting the engaged in ways that impact on our lives.39 A number of deep relationships with individuals have evolved, effecting small-scale yet significant impact, whist a long-term relationship has developed that can potentially enable this art to contribute to change. Due to its participation in the exhibition project’s symposium, The Highland Hospice has emerged as a partner in the new stages of the project, The Museum of Loss and Renewal.40 Stimulated by what they recognise in our practice as critical to their own potential for addressing healthcare issues and drawing on our work that has established connections between art and communities, The Hospice has invited us in to consider with them what they identify as a crisis in healthcare—its need to create new ways of conversing with those for whom it cares—that relates to the current political agenda that encourages communities to be open to discussions about death and dying. The Hospice offers us the possibility of contributing to a real situation, where an art practice activates the imagining, creating and developing of beneficial outcomes, while demonstrating that art as a propositional format can make the step towards implementation in the real. The visual and physical forms of representation associated with art provide the new ways needed to see, communicate and debate change concepts. Art towards change offers a powerful mechanism for turning thinking into action.

39 Artist Liesbeth Bik expanded on this term when she asked “can we fit care in public space?, can artists and citizens work together to shape space?, what is the value of a life?, will you let me die if I want to?, are we as individualistic as we think we are?” in symposium Actors, Agents and Attendants, Speculations on the Cultural Organisation of Civility, SKOR (Foundation Art and Public Space), Amsterdam, 2010. 40 The Highland Hospice is the only Hospice serving adults with incurable lifelimiting disease in the Highlands of Scotland; 10,000 square miles or one sixth of the UK landmass. Its 11 charity shops sited in towns across the region and staffed by volunteers generate a quarter of the Hospice’s annual funds.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Mackenna, T., and E. Janssen LIFE IS OVER! if you want it, Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design’s public gallery, University of Dundee, 2009. Macenna, T. Life, Death and Beauty: The Invisible Talk Back - Fear, No Fear, double screen projection, 210 x 280 cm each, duration 05:00 in LIFE IS OVER! if you want it.

Secondary Sources 16 Beaver Group, To Whom the Past No Longer, and Not Yet the Future, Belongs: A Response to a Letter. In Curating and the Educational Turn, edited by P. O’Neill and M. Wilson, 230-49. London/Amsterdam: Open Editions / de Appel, 2010. Benjamin, W. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov.” In Illuminations; edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt; translated by Harry Zohn, 83-107. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968; London: Cape, 1970. Bourriaud, N. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 1998. Brenner, R. “Political Activism: Joseph Beuys.” http://www.walkerart.org/archive/F/9C4309B0B50D8AA36167.htm. Accessed 30 January 2013. Debate on physician assisted suicide, http://theplexus.wordpress.com/tag/physician-assisted-suicide/ Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. London and New York: Continuum, 1987. Doherty, C. Naming a Practice, in One Clover and a Bee. Groningen: Stichting VHDG, 2003. Gell, A. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Heidegger, M. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Basic Writings, edited by D. Farrell Krell, 143-87. London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Jenkins, S. “Denial of the Right to Die is Sheer Religious Primitivism.” The Guardian, 22 October 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment isfree/2008/oct/22/assisted-euthanasia-religion-suicide-prosecution. Leader, D. The New Black, Mourning, Melancholia, Depression. London: Penguin Books, 2008.

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Kester, G. “Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for Littoral Art.” Variant Magazine 10, Spring/summer (2000). Llewellyn, N. Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c.1500 - c.1800. London: Reaktion, 1991. Lomax, Y. Sounding the Event: Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of Art, Nature and Time. London and New York: I.B. Taurus, 2005. McLean, S. Assisted Dying: Reflections on the Need for Law Reform. London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007. Moxham, B., in Ian Breakwell, Death’s Dance Floor. Cardiff/Penarth and Glasgow: Ffotogallery in association with Street Level Photoworks, 1998. Neil, K. “Correspondent’s Report.” http://www.app.dundee.ac.uk/vrc/mapping/. Accessed 30 January 2013. Nollert, A., I. Rogoff, B. de Baere, Y. Dziewior, C. Esche, K. Niemann, D. Roelstraete, eds. Academy, Frankfurt am Main: Revolver Verlag, 2006. Pethick, E. Resisting institutionalization, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Essays http://www.ica.org.uk/17441/Essays/Resisting-institutionalisation-byEmily-Pethick.html Rancière, J. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, edited and translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2010. Sayal, R. “Call for euthanasia to be legal in UK.” The Observer, 19 October 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/oct/19/danieljames-paralysed-euthanasia. Scrivener, S. “Visual Art Practice Reconsidered: Transformational Practice and the Academy.” In The Art of Research, edited by M. Mäkelä and S. Routarinne, 228-240. Helsinki: University of Art and Design, 2006. Storr, R. “Next Slide, Please ….” In Slide Show, edited by Darsie Alexander. London: Tate, 2005. Tallant, S. Experiments in Integrated Programming. Tate Papers, 2009. http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/experimentsintegrated-programming van Heeswijk, J, T. Mackenna and E Janssen. Mapping the Future: Public Art in Scotland, symposia and events programme, October 2010. Warnock, M. “Legalise Assisted Suicide, for Pity’s Sake.” The Observer, 19 October 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/19/euthanasiadaniel-james-health-law?commentid=9a9113a6-55a7-468b-a8c22adab7ada05e. Zaritsky, J. Right to Die. Sky Real Lives channel, 10 December 2008.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN UNSETTLING STRUCTURES OF OTHERNESS: VISUALISING THE DYING INDIVIDUAL AND END OF LIFE CARE REFROM JOHN HORNE

Contemporary Western society is currently confronting a serious problem. There are not the resources—physical, financial, political or emotional—to ensure a genuine quality of life to those who are dying. Indeed, quite the reverse. People are living longer and dying longer, with the end of their life routinely occurring invisibly behind institutional walls. Citizens spend their final months, weeks and days—sometimes years— kept away from their community and even their family. Alongside these physical structures, discursive structures work to sustain the status quo. The dying individual is objectified, stigmatised and contained within a framework that keeps them at a distance—as other—from their fellow citizens. In this chapter, I will consider these issues through the lens of an NHS exhibition. The exhibition was run as part of a national strategy which seeks to fundamentally reform British citizens’ experience of dying. I argue that if end of life care reforms are to succeed in treating all citizens equally, physical and discursive structures of otherness must be identified and unsettled. Writing over seventy years ago, Walter Benjamin captured a state of affairs that has persisted in the West to the present: In the course of modern times dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living. There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died….Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end approaches they are stowed away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs.1 1

Benjamin, “Storyteller,” 93-94.

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Over the course of the last century, dying became a problem that was treated increasingly through institutional means: it moved out of the house and into the hospital, hospice or care home.2 Gradually this passage “out of the perceptual world of the living” came to be perceived as normal. Society shifted structurally in ways that complicated, if not flatly discouraged, the ability to die in one’s home, or the place of one’s choosing, or in a manner that reflected one’s wishes. Furthermore, increasing taboos around discussing death established barriers that continue to cocoon dying situations away from the community, bracketing off individual grief and suffering until an acceptable public face of bereavement is reached. Alongside this, cultural engagement with the topic typically absented away the actuality of natural death (and the idea of death as natural), tending instead towards the entertaining, or shocking, spectacle and the sentimentalised and sanititised struggle against illness.3 Put another way: the lived experience of the dying individual became framed both socially and culturally in a manner that maximised anyone’s capacity to disregard it. Recognition of the necessity for correctives has occupied multidisciplinary and professional discussion of death and dying for some years.4 On July 2-4 2009, a 3 day exhibition was held in the centre of Birmingham, entitled “Saying the Unsayable: Opening a dialogue about living, dying and death.” Organised by NHS West Midlands Strategic Health Authority, the exhibition was held as part of the Department of Health’s national End of Life Care Strategy. It displayed around one hundred photographs, selected from over eight thousand images taken by a range of community groups in and around Birmingham.5

2

See Ariès, Hour; Bauman, Mortality; Bradbury, Representations; Elias, Loneliness; Illich, Limits; Kearl, Endings; Kellehear, Social and Study; Kennedy, Unmasking, 140-66; Seale, Constructing; Walter, Revival. 3 Aaron, Moving; Gorer, “Pornography;” Horne, “Screening;” McLlwain, Pop; Mcinerney, “Cinematic;” Sobchack, Carnal, 226-57; Tercier, Contemporary. 4 For a range of historical, sociological, philosophical, medical and social policy perspectives, beyond texts already cited, see for example, Choron, Western; Conway, “Changing;” Kaufman, Time; Kellehear, Compassionate; Kübler-Ross, Dying; Mitford, American; Nuland, How We Die; Saunders, Care; Sinclair, Rethinking. 5 The community groups were: K-Kats Youth Club, Out Central LGBT Youth Project, Birmingham’s Older People’s Reference Groups, The British Oak Pub, King Edward’s School, Moseley ARC, Moseley School, Kings Heath Cricket and Sports Club, Birmingham Carers Centre, Falcon Lodge Youth Centre and St John Wall Catholic Secondary School.

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The National End of Life Care Strategy, launched in 2008, seeks to restructure the way in which British citizens encounter and experience death. It is based on the understanding that the present treatment of dying inhibits, or indeed runs counter to, people’s wishes for themselves and their loved ones. At present, nearly 60% of all deaths occur in hospitals, with a further 20% in other institutions, whereas most people, when asked, express a preference to die at home.6 When developing the strategy, a central challenge was found to be the “widespread reluctance to discuss issues of death, dying and bereavement.”7 Such a curtailment of open communication engenders the stigmatisation of the dying individual and helps sustain the status quo of institutionalisation, medicalisation and isolation. Consequently, Dying Matters, a national coalition organisation, was created “to support changing knowledge, attitudes and behaviours towards death, dying and bereavement, and through this to make ‘living and dying well’ the norm.”8 Inspired in part by Sandra Bertman’s work9 using visual culture for purposes of death education, the Birmingham exhibition sought to use locally produced photography as a means of “articulating, visualising and speaking of living, dying and death.”10 And in this it was successful. Put simply, it got people talking and often quite openly: a positive response 6

Department of Health, End of Life. The strategy document notes that recent surveys, focus groups and interviews have consistently found that “most…people would prefer not to die in a hospital.” Presently, however, “[m]ost deaths (58%) occur in NHS hospitals, with around 18% occurring at home, 17% in care homes, 4% in hospices and 3% elsewhere” (ibid., 9). By 2030, if recent trends continue, the number of deaths in institutions is projected to increase by over 20%, with home deaths falling to only 9.6%. By contrast, in around 1900, “about 85% of people died in their own homes, with workhouses accounting for most other deaths. See also Gomes & Higgson, “Where people die,” for specific analysis of historic and projected figures. In The Living End, Brown notes various contributing factors to such figures. Particularly concerning is the increasing numbers of elderly people with chronic physical and mental conditions requiring direct care. This can often only be provided institutionally because of their isolation from networks of family or communal support. He notes the stark difference between the rise in “life expectancy” as opposed to “healthy life expectancy” (the age to which one can expect to sustain good to fair health). In the UK, between 1991 and 2001, life expectancy rose by 2.2 years, but healthy life expectancy only rose by 0.6. 7 Department of Health, “End of Life Report,” 19. 8 “About Us,” Dying Matters website. http://www.dyingmatters.org/overview/about-us 9 Bertman, Facing. 10 Smith, “Saying,” 172.

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evident from written feedback made in the visitor comment book and the observations of organisers.11 The organisers were pleased with the results, noting that the use of visual imagery “provided a very useful start and method and route into the territory of articulating and sharing aspects of living, dying and death in very accessible and acceptable ways.” The photographer who oversaw the project commented that the images were “not only meaningful to each photographer, but also relevant to us all.” Following its success, the selected photographs have subsequently been trialed as a resource pack for schools and other organisations. On the last day of the exhibition, a passing group of Senegalese citizens stopped by. They had been attending a local conference and were curious about what they saw. Key to their intrigue was a central question: Why do British citizens have such difficulty supporting those who are dying, when surely this should be part and parcel of human nature? This intervention, by individuals viewing the exhibition from a perspective outside British—nay, Western—paradigms, lays the foundation for what follows. What are the structures which frame “our” encounter with the dying individual and how can end of life care reforms best work to puncture them? Moreover, how can these reforms ensure that the dying individual is not simply returned to “the perceptual world of the living,” but welcomed there as a citizen amongst equals? I couple these questions with a problematic fact: the dying individual was, fundamentally, the structuring absence of the photographs taken and shown at the exhibition. Given the way the photographs were produced and the intent of the exhibition, this is not unsurprising. But of the more than eight thousand images taken, only a tiny handful, which I’ll consider below, could be said to present such a person. Curiously, the absence of dying in the community-produced photographs was augmented by a selection of outside images, taken from news agencies, showing foreign— and violent—deaths. For many reasons, I find these photographs an odd and troubling substitute. However, they also make stark the extent to which actual death has become estranged in the West: remote, foreign, other, and something that happens to them not “us.” These images also foreground the site where we mostly encounter dying in everyday life: 11 I evaluated the project for internal use by the organisers (Horne, “Evaluation,”) using evaluation forms completed by the participants who took photographs, the exhibition comments book, formal and informal reports written by project organisers and discussion with Pauline Smith, the project lead. I also had access to the complete set of photographs (8,000+) taken by participants. See also Smith, “Saying,” and the reflective reports by members of the exhibition team at http://www.wellbeingindying.org.uk.

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visual culture. In the context of end of life care reforms, therefore, can visual culture play a role in re-framing and unsettling current structures, rather than sustaining, the status quo? Zygmunt Bauman argues that “death is the absolute other of being, an unimaginable other.”12 In this chapter, I first want to argue that dying has become falsely understood as the other of living. I suggest that this stems from a belief, or perhaps a wish, that the messiness and uncertainties of death can be safely contained within a framework, whether in the literal frame of visual culture or wider frames at play socially. As a consequence, the encounter with the dying individual is always already foreclosed. Returning to the exhibition, I want to look a little closer at how the photographs replicate this dynamic and argue that this was partly a consequence of the emphasis on creating compassion towards the dying individual from the perspective of the spectator. Instead, I advocate “solidarity” over “compassion,” achieved through a rethinking of how the dying individual’s citizenship is constructed and communicated. As such, it behoves end of life care reforms to acknowledge and unsettle the structures of otherness present in Western visual culture which seek to frame the dying individual as separate from the “living.” Precisely what is meant by “dying” is problematic. To describe somebody as “dying” is to identify complex physical, psychological, social and existential needs, yet that same labelling presently serves to stigmatise, often resulting in isolation and abandonment.13 “Dying individual,” as a descriptive term, instantly labels, categorises and objectifies. Similarly, it assumes a universality of experience without accounting for individual particularities. It is being used here to refer to a terminal situation where mortality is approaching, but this should be understood in the broadest possible terms, inclusive of all possible meanings. The danger lies in precisely the fact that efforts to renaturalise death produce a new set of normative assumptions about the dying which risk sustaining their separation from the communal fold. Whilst a looser formulation would be preferable, the term “dying individual” will be retained throughout the following for the sake of clarity and brevity.14 12

Bauman, Mortality, 2, emphasis in original. Kellehear, Social; Sinclair, Rethinking. 14 The wish to destabalise the significance of “dying” as a signifier carries the recognition that the question of devaluation and marginalisation extends well beyond mortality. Issues such as gender, class, race, sexuality and disability are inextricable from any consideration of end of life care. They are, unfortunately, beyond the scope of the current discussion, however, it is hoped that the commonality of dying (and watching) provides a perch of universal experience 13

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Allan Kellehear argues that “dying has become a form of social death” which he defines as an individual’s perceived “interpersonal irrelevancy, uninterest or even rejection by others.”15 Kellehear categorises contemporary dying as the “shameful death,” a shame sadly felt by the dying individual much more than society. For Kellehear, there has been not just “an erosion of awareness of dying” but, perhaps more significantly, “an erosion of support for dying.”16 Furthermore: Dying, as a shared social, that is, interpersonal affair is becoming endangered as a publically recognised form of conduct....Dying is now increasingly state-defined, with definitions so institutionally narrow in their scope that dying is only recognised if it is viewed as an end-of-life care experience under formal medical supervision.17

In consequence, the dying individual “might be the only one aware that he or she is dying.”18 Indeed, as Michel de Certeau suggests, family, friends and professionals can be complicit in the privatisation of dying. When somebody vocalises the statement “I am dying,” they may be greeted with fictions such as “of course not; you’re going to get better.” This lie, de Certeau argues, is “a way of assuring that communication will not occur.”19 The willingness to foreclose communication can be considered in relation to “death anxiety”: the self’s reluctance to entertain questions of its own finitude.20 For Norbert Elias, dying produces barriers of empathy because it presents physical and psychological states which people don’t simply struggle to entertain, but refuse to. The title of his 1985 book The Loneliness of the Dying refers not simply to literal isolation, whether personal or institutional, but the sense of suddenly becoming a socially worthless individual, cast out from the “living.” He sees this partly as a result of historic shifts that emphasised the role of the individual self over that of the group.21 Consequently, an understanding of the necessary which permits a wide-reaching unravelling of objectifying discourse. Here, indeed, there is much scope for reciprocal exchange and progressive pluralistic social development. 15 Kellehear, Social, 246. 16 Ibid., 210. 17 Ibid., 251-53. 18 Ibid., 251, emphasis in original. 19 de Certeau, Practice, 190. 20 See Becker, Denial; Piven, Delusion; Yallom, Existential. 21 Whilst his approach has universal overtones, Elias notes throughout that he is generally describing the situation in developed countries. Indeed, he identifies the

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dependence of people on others to instill meaning and value has increasingly escaped social consideration. Such interdependence is: particularly impeded today by the refusal to look the finitude of individual life, including one’s own, and the coming dissolution of one’s own person, directly in the face, and to include this knowledge in the way one lives one’s life – in one’s work, one’s pleasure, and above all in one’s behaviour towards others. Too often, people today see themselves as isolated individuals totally independent of others.22

For Elias, dying (and ageing) produce barriers of empathy because they present physical and psychological states which others don’t just struggle to imagine but actively reject. Accordingly, dying is often considered “a deviation from the social norm,” which encourages institutionalisation as a means of comprehension and containment.23 Equally, through reducing dying individuals to bodies in need of clinical care and isolating them from communal view, society can more easily ignore their very real need for interpersonal and physical support. As Elias observes: “[i]t is perhaps not yet quite superÀuous to say that care for people sometimes lags behind the care for their organs.”24 Reinforcing Elias’ account, Zygmunt Bauman argues that death posed a specific problem to the West: it was the one thing that modernity couldn’t master and so social structures responded by giving citizens a false sense of immortality.25 Likewise, Philip Mellor, drawing on the work of Anthony Giddens, suggest that society keeps dying private and hidden to ensure citizens are not challenged by threats to their “ontological security.”26 Dying has thus become a form of “social death” because it is understood as opposite to “living,” rather than a process within it.27 Visual culture—whether film, television or print media—potentially challenges the “sequestration thesis” of modern death. The very public dying of Jade Goody provides a particularly interesting recent example of this.28 However, as society has strived to make the dying individual modern isolation of the dying as a consequence of the Western tradition, particularly that fostered by industrialisation. 22 Elias, Loneliness, 34. 23 Ibid., 69. 24 Ibid., 91. 25 Bauman, Mortality. 26 Mellor, “Modernity.” 27 See Scarre, “Dying.” 28 See Walter, “Journalists,” and “Body”; Woodthorpe, “Public.”

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disappear, so too has visual culture, albeit in a striking, rather tautological, manner. This contradiction was expressed and addressed by the conference which gives this collection its name.29 “Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying” began its call for papers by noting: Death is everywhere yet nowhere in Western culture. Corpses litter Hollywood film; the threat of violence propels most mainstream narratives; the recently-recovered or slowly dying make bookshelves groan. But the pain of death, the banality of physical, of undignified, decline is oddly absent.30

This matters. In the United Kingdom today, it is increasingly common for citizens to reach their fifties before experiencing an actual dying situation.31 Thus, as John Tercier argues, because, for most, “the contemporary deathbed is, until we lie upon our own, a virtual one,” it is through representation, not reality, that the dying individual is mostly encountered in modern society.32 Such representations typically occur on the fictional field of television and film, ensuring that actuality is absent when the dying individual is encountered on screen. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, the dying individual is mostly screened for the benefit of the spectator, whether for the purpose of entertainment or education, or both.33 In such texts, the spectator is routinely assumed to be an individual who is “living” (that is, “not-dying”). Occasionally visual culture—such as the film Wit (Mike Nichols, 2001), the documentary Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (Kirby Dick, 1997), or the 1976 photographic volume Gramp by Mark and Dan Jury—fosters solidarity between spectator and dying individual, however mostly compassion or pity is solicited. In filmic narratives of terminal decline, for example, the spectator is typically aligned with the family and friends of the “dearly departed,” weeping and grieving with the rest of the “living.” When the spectator is aligned with the dying individual, such as in The Guitar (Amy 29

“Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying,” University of Birmingham, 26 June 2009. 30 Aaron, “Envisaging.” 31 Department of Health, End of Life. 32 Tercier, Contemporary, 210. In his discussion of Gorer’s notion of the “pornography of death,” Tercier notes that the original derivation of “obscene” is from the Latin obscaena, or “off-stage,” referring specifically to death and the absence of the actual moment of death from ancient Greek theatre. He remarks that whereas representation of death was once considered obscene, now it is death itself. Ibid., 212. 33 Horne, “Screening.”

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Redford, 2008) or Veronika Decides to Die (Emily Young, 2009), the film frequently concludes with a miraculous recovery: the “dying” become “living” once again. This is the backdrop against which end of life care reforms must work. The “perceptual world of the living” currently constructs the dying as different, which is understood to mean “not-living.” Or, put another way, “the perceptual world of the living” currently offers certain securities to those who are “not-dying.” Those securities, which are based on a pretense and trigger the “social death” of the dying, need to be identified and challenged. The dying individual presently faces social devaluation and exclusion. It is thus not enough for end of life care reforms simply to seek to relocate the dying individual to a new site where the oppression might be less if the discourse, which triggered their existing stigmatisation, remains unchallenged.34 Borrowing from Ariella Azoulay, I want to argue that the dying individual is, at present, a “flawed citizen.”35 That is, they are governed differently to their fellow citizens. The status quo of “the perceptual world of the living” is sustained through the complicity of citizens wishing to keep the lived experience and the demands of the dying individual at a distance. If end of life care reforms are to genuinely return the dying individual to “the perceptual world of the living” and not simply accommodate them there, they must be willing to challenge this complicity and make a determined case for equality. To explore the difficulties of this further, I will now turn to the exhibition referred to earlier. The exhibition was entitled: “Saying the Unsayable: Opening a Dialogue about Living, Dying and Death.” The “dialogue” the exhibition sought to open was identified by the organisers as a necessary first step towards overcoming basic interpersonal barriers of taboo, unfamiliarity and uncertainty surrounding death. The exhibition primarily displayed photographs, produced within the local community by a variety of groups (including schools, a cricket club and a carers centre).36 Participants were 34 A parallel can perhaps be seen in the problems of community integration faced following the deinstitutionalisation of long-term psychiatric patients in the 1980s (see Isaac & Armat, 1990; Johnson, 1990). 35 Azoulay, Civil. 36 The exhibition also included interactive performance art by the organisation ONCE, a locally produced documentary and ten photo-essays (where participants provided short aural accounts which were played over a series of their own photographs). All exhibition materials and commentary by the organisers can be accessed at http://www.wellbeingindying.org.uk. See also Smith, “Saying,” for a report by the project lead.

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asked to take pictures following a series of prompts specifying: “loss,” “living well,” “care,” “compassion,” “death or dying,” “what brings you to life” and “what deadens you.” Over eight thousand photographs were taken, around a hundred of which were selected for exhibition by the organisers. The dying individual, to a large extent, was the structuring absence of the photographs taken. The images I will shortly discuss are the only ones from the more than eight thousand photographs that signify the dying individual. This raises the concern that that the exhibition unintentionally (indeed, unconsciously) perpetuated the status quo. If the subjective presence of the dying individual is typically mediated and occluded from socio-cultural view, such an absence at the heart of reforms aimed at rectifying this is troubling. The broader implications of this are raised by Christian Metz, in terms which resonate with the current discussion: The character who is off-frame in a photograph, however, will never come into the frame, will never be heard - again a death, another form of death....It marks the place of an irreversible absence, a place from which the look has been averted forever.37,38

However, the community nature of the photographs’ production, the amateur status of the participants and the resulting “snapshot” or “personal” aesthetics of many of the pictures, helps us to see more clearly the socio-cultural frames which manage death. Michele Aaron, in an essay written for the exhibition guidebook, analysed a selection of two thousand photographs. Aaron notes that the “vast majority...[of the photographs] had little to do with the topic of mortality”; those that did generally approached the subject “figuratively,” finding “metaphors for ‘our’ death through displacement,” particularly in images of “disuse and dilapidation” within the community but also in winter scenes and natural decay. Photographs that directly spoke of death and dying “did so with varying degrees of explicitness.” Most common were shots of graveyards, alongside “occasional nods to death’s infrastructure or industry.” However these latter shots of medical and 37

Metz, “Photography,” 87. By “another form of death,” Metz, recalling similar comments by Barthes in Camera Lucida, is referring to the “immobility and silence” which figure both death and the photographic image; equally, he alludes to the ability of photography, through old pictures, to retain the dead in the present, as well as its act of capturing and embalming the living in a frozen moment that can never be relived or recaptured. 38

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funerary institutions “tended to be highly objective—insulated, mostly, against emotion, often people-free” standing in contrast to the many, mainly joyous, photographs taken by the participants of their families and friends.39 This becomes even more apparent when considering the complete set of images. Here, there are many, many photographs of families and friends simply hanging out or having fun. Looking through them, one gets the sense of sifting through a private family or Facebook album. The vitality and interpersonal connectedness displayed in the pictures of people, contrasts with the objects (and “often people-free” infrastructure) selected to represent death and dying. This stark contrast suggests a synthesis, whereby the dying individual re-enters the social frame surrounded by the warmth of companionship. However, such a possible synthesis sounds a very real alarm: the sustaining of a “highly objective” gaze which structures the dying individual as separate from the “living.” This alarm is crystallised in one image, taken at a hospital bedside, although not used in the exhibition itself. In it two people, sat at the end of the bed, face and greet the camera, whilst a third, the patient, can only be inferred through a visible bulge in the blanket. What makes this picture particularly resonant is that it’s the only image taken at the hospital by that participant. Accentuating this particular exclusion of an individual whose absence nevertheless defines the image, is how thoroughly personal so many of the photographs are, capturing a level of private minutiae that often seems out of place for potential public display. Or rather, an axis suggests itself. At one end are the images of “living well” and “what brings you to life,” which are the most private, in that they resemble the sort of snaps every family takes of itself and its activities. At the other, those of “death,” “loss” and “dying” are the most public, in that consciousness of composition, audience and exhibition come to the fore. In making public the private, the frame imposes itself most forcefully the more the photograph speaks of death. This echoes Geoffrey Gorer’s sense of the “pornography of death” which John Tercier elucidates as, “the explicit (the private made public) representation (mediated act) of a forbidden act (the transgression of social norms) for the purpose of arousal (the eliciting of desire).”40 The un-sightliness of the dying situation, and the dying individual, sustains, generally, an off-frame existence. The spectator need not look away for the camera already did so. However, this begs a crucial question: 39 40

Aaron, “Seeing.” Tercier, Contemporary, 213.

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for whose benefit is this? The selection of one of the photographs displayed in the exhibition, from a sequence taken at the same time, suggests the spectator is given first consideration. The series concerns an elderly woman, lying down. The woman is pictured either alone, sleeping, or joined by a young boy (perhaps her grandson). Of the two pictures with them together, one is tightly framed on their heads, with her barely awake face pressed against the child as he looks to the camera. The other, wider, encompasses their bodies as the child, forehead against cheek, looks angelically up at her. The latter was chosen for exhibition under the theme, “Compassion, attachments, love and connections.” It is the most sentimental of the four images, packed with affect. As such, it is the easiest to see. It implicates the spectator least. The photograph communicates a particular message: this woman has the love of her grandchild and, through him, life goes on. However, it says little beyond this.41 Photographs that communicate at the level of affect may well provoke a moral response—here the importance of companionship to the dying. But such a response from the spectator typically resists any deeper consideration of complicity in, say, individual and societal failures to provide the comfort of companionship to the dying. That is, complacency rather than complicity is encouraged through being moved by the companionship that this particular woman, who, at this specific moment, as captured by—and seen in—this photograph, has. The most constructed image was perhaps picked because it communicates simply and safely, reducing complexity and subjectivity by implying that everything is being said within the frame. The other image which figures dying that was chosen for the exhibition, also displayed under the theme, “Compassion, attachments, love and connections,” offers a potent example of how a frame can efface the subjective presence and agency of the dying individual. An elderly woman is in a bed, in a home environment, being looked after by another, younger, woman. The photograph selected for the exhibition frames an act of clinical care—an injection is being given—whilst maximising the privacy of the woman: her head is hidden by her hand, as if she’s turned away from the camera in shame. The spectator’s eye is guided, through the composition of the image, towards the woman’s carer. The photograph, alone, seems to be offering the most palatable—for the spectator— presentation of a difficult situation; it’s unfortunate that the woman has to 41

Such a reading was reinforced by the caption for the image (provided by the photographer): “this photo tells me that when someone dies a new baby takes their place.” The picture and caption as displayed is available online: http://www.wellbeingindying.org.uk/theme-three.htm#11

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hide her face, but at least she keeps her dignity. Only this reading, a reading which appears complete, which appears to account for everything within the frame, is utterly mistaken and exposes the spectator’s desire to allow the frame to inscribe meaning. In actuality, the photograph—of mother and daughter—portrays play. Whilst being given her medication, the mother was having fun by hiding from the camera.42 Indeed, the spectators’ act of looking at the photograph potentially situates them as an active, and necessary, participant in this game. By unsettling the frame, the spectator is drawn into a private world, untethered from the dictates of public discourse. In both examples, awareness of the broader spatial and temporal context work towards restoring the lived existence of the dying individual. However, both photographs chosen bracket the encounter within a structure of care and compassion. They displace the spectator’s gaze away from the dying women and towards the grandchild and daughter respectively. This shift works to prioritise care and compassion towards the dying individual over responsibility for ensuring their equality. Moreover, it provides the spectator with a ready solution for reform— more care, more compassion—rather than encouraging contemplation about the actual lived experience of the dying individual and the structures which render him or her as different from the “living.” The institutional approach to the problem of death—enveloping the dying individual in a framework of clinical care—has, as noted, resulted historically in the absenting of its subjective presence. Healthcare reforms in the last few decades have typically tended towards softening the medical grip.43 However, such reforms have generally sustained an objectifying discourse. The dying individual is still constructed as somebody to be clinically done to, it’s just that the doing to can be improved. The true reformation of end of life care has to step out of such a framework and rethink itself in a way that shifts the approach from doing to towards doing for or with. This refiguration, where the individual’s wishes, wellbeing and experience is primary, requires not just the simple 42

This “correct” reading of the image was supported in the exhibition by the caption provided by the daughter: “I took this of my mum. I was doing her medication. This photo shows care, friendship and support for someone in need. Also loss and change. It makes me smile as Mum was hiding as we were taking her photo and laughing and playing a game.” The picture and caption as displayed is available online: http://www.wellbeingindying.org.uk/theme-three.htm#1 43 Most significantly, perhaps, the emergence and philosophy of the hospice movement. A more recent example would be the Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient, see http://www.mcpcil.org.uk/liverpool-care-pathway/.

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de-institutionalisation of care, but a radical challenge to society’s current relationship to illness, dying and death. The need for wide-reaching societal change underpins much contemporary thought in end of life care reform. Allan Kellehear’s work in this field has been particularly influential; his ideas, for example, strongly informed the “Health Promoting End of Life Care” strategy developed by NHS West Midlands, of which the exhibition “Saying the Unsayable” was a part. Kellehear advocates a restructuring of organisational care, the development of new services and the forging of strong community networks of support, to develop what he calls “Compassionate Cities.” Compassion, for Kellehear, is “the human response, the tender response aroused by the distress and suffering of others” and should be considered an “ethical imperative for health.”44 This also builds on his work on “health-promoting palliative care,” which establishes a set of principles which insist upon “the essentially social character of health and illness.” As such, Kellehear argues that “health care should be participatory, not something we do to others but a style of health care that we do with others.”45 Kellehear sees as essential the recognition that historically “care of the dying…has been a normal and routine matter for families and communities” and we must, once again, recognise “dying, death, loss and care as normal and usual experiences for which communities can and should take some responsibility.”46 He also advocates the need for developing “resilience,” traits and resources which can be called upon and drawn from at times of adversity.47 Paul Sinclair offers a useful critique of Kellehear’s approach, cautioning that his emphasis on the universality of dying and loss fosters an “idealised understanding of death” and fails to prioritise and centrally address the question of social devaluation. Sinclair’s concern is that “compassion,” for Kellehear, is orientated more towards the benevolent relief of suffering, rather than an introspective interrogation of one’s responsibility for perpetuating that suffering. He is not suggesting that Kellehear’s model is consciously devaluing but rather seeking to expose the limitations inherent in its approach. Sinclair suggests “solidarity” rather than “compassion,” in an attempt to reorientate the “quasi-religious” nature of empathetic caregiving towards something closer to a struggle for equality.48 The tension Sinclair outlines, between care of the other and 44

Kellehear, Compassionate, 43, 44. Ibid., 25, emphasis in original. 46 Ibid., 13, 34, emphasis in original. 47 Kellehear and Young, “Resilient.” 48 Sinclair, Rethinking, 96-109, 193-96. 45

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responsibility for the other, makes the question of responsibility central to social reform. It cautions against a gaze that, however altruistic, however benevolent, is conditioned to constitute the other—the dying individual— within a particular, ultimately de-subjectifying, discourse. The re-entry of the dying individual to the “perceptual world of the living” is thus not simply a question of re-visibility. Rather, it demands the unsettling of the structures of otherness which instigated and maintained his or her institutionalised exclusion. Within this lies the specific unravelling of discursive attempts to enforce a separation between the “living” and the “dying.” Dying has become a private affair. Consequently, its public appearance frames dying individuals in a manner that denies their subjective presence. Such objectification is naturalised by the arbitrary social and cultural structures that produce it. The gap, therefore, between private and public is the gap between individual and structure. The “social death” of the dying individual is thus a product of the structure. End of life care reforms are rightly identifying the social and cultural barriers of taboo as key sites restricting dialogue and inhibiting societal change. Through foregrounding the role visual culture can play in achieving this, NHS West Midlands opened up a vital, publicly accessible, arena. However, given that the visual, as argued, currently contributes to the present devaluation of the dying individual, reforms utilising visual material should be careful not replicate this exclusion and objectification. As seen, there is a danger that prioritising imagery engendering “compassion” towards the dying individual risks perpetuating the status quo. Reforms must be willing to challenge the complicity of citizens in wishing to continue socio-cultural structures that consistently fail to grant the dying individual equal status in “the perceptual world of the living.” Accordingly, rather than compassion towards the dying individual, solidarity with the dying individual should be sought. Solidarity involves the recognition of the dying individual’s present status as a “flawed citizen” and a refusal to allow that to continue. As such, it may therefore be necessary to challenge and unsettle spectators, by way of unsettling structures of otherness. In The Civil Contract of Photography, Azoulay emphasises that the photographic encounter is one between spectator, photographer and photographed, with nobody holding a monopoly over meaning. However, it is all too easy for the photographed individual to become effaced: to exist as an object encountered through the framed gaze of spectator and photographer alike. While the photographed person may be a “flawed citizen” in wider civil society, within the civil contract of photography

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they hold equal status and agency. Through this, Azoulay seeks to turn citizenship into an active, ongoing, engaged struggle of solidarity which challenges the legitimacy of governing structures that fail to treat citizens equally. Spectatorship thus becomes a performative act of citizenship if and when it recognises the demands and the agency of the photographed person against current governing structures. Accordingly, the act of unsettling structures of otherness actually offers the spectator real civic agency, shedding shackles of selfishness by reorienting their gaze towards the other. End of life care reforms should ensure that the dying individual is accorded the same civic status as all whom the reforms address. Given that this is presently not the case, any imagery utilised should be considered for its ability to challenge the complicity of spectators in submitting to the status quo. Equally, the spectator’s wish to be freed from anxieties over mortality should be recognised for the harm it can inflict. Reforms have the potential to unsettle the perceived naturalness of artificial barriers by encouraging spectators to recognise and question the structures which permit the dying individual to be regarded as different, as other, from the living. Welcoming the dying individual back within the “perceptual world of the living” necessitates identifying and unsettling all frames which seek to contain the encounter and keep the private from upsetting the public. Through seeking solidarity with the dying individual, a future can perhaps be envisaged where all citizens are equal throughout the course of their being.

Works Cited Aaron, M. “Saying the Unsayable, Seeing the Unseeable.” 2009a. [online] http://www.wellbeingindying.org.uk/Saying-the-Unsayable-Seeingthe-Unseeable.htm [Accessed May 24th 2012] —. “Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying - Call For Papers.” 2009b [online] http://www.envisagingdeath.bham.ac.uk/Envisage%20Death%20CFP. pdf [Accessed May 24th 2012] —. Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Ariès, P. The Hour of Our Death, translated by H. Weaver. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981. Azoulay, A. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Graeme Abernethy is a writer, researcher, and educator based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Find information on his latest projects at www.graemeabernethy.com. Cath Davies is a senior lecturer in Cardiff School of Art and Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University. She teaches Contextual studies at undergraduate level with a particular emphasis on media and cultural Identity. She also delivers an MA programme on Death and Visual Culture. Her current research interests lie primarily in media representations of stardom and death. She has published previously in both Mortality and Celebrity Studies journals on this area. Rosemary Deller is a PhD student at the University of Manchester. Interested in issues surrounding embodiment, her research critically explores literary and visual texts from the late eighties to the present that offer sensual encounters with a variety of 'meaty' bodies, with a particular focus on the transformation of live flesh into dead meat. Paul Fung is Assistant Professor in English at Hang Seng Management College, Hong Kong. He is currently working on a book which examines epilepsy as a mode of existence in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels. Christopher Hood is a lecturer at Cardiff University. His publications include Dealing with Disaster in Japan: Responses to the Flight JL123 Crash (Routledge, 2011) and 'Disaster and Death in Japan' in Suzuki, H. (ed.), Death and Dying in Contemporary Japan (Routledge, 2012), Shinkansen: From Bullet Train to Symbol of Modern Japan (Routledge, 2006). John Horne is a PhD student at the University of Birmingham. His thesis is on the "Western" spectator and the "Arab Spring", with a particular focus on representations of torture. John has an MPhil in visual culture entitled "Representations of Dying in Contemporary Visual Culture and the Ethics of Spectatorship”.

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Katrin Joost teaches at the faculty of arts at the University of Cumbria. Holding a PhD in philosophy she now works as a critical theorist primarily in contemporary photography, but also other media (Games Design, Film & TV). Her research focusses on the phenomenology of photography and other media. Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen’s collaborative art practice is a creative and discursive site that integrates research, production, presentation, exchange and education. Tracy holds the Personal Chair of Contemporary Art Practice at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, and directs the MFA Art, Society & Publics. Tal Morse is a PhD candidate at The Department of Media and Communications at The London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the mediated engagement with death as a prism to understanding the power dynamics within society. Monica B. Pearl is Lecturer in Twentieth Century American Literature at the University of Manchester. Her work addresses the construction of subjectivity in cultural texts, with recent focus on AIDS and its written and visual representation. She is the author of AIDS Literature and Gay Identity: The Literature of Loss (Routledge, 2013). Marcel Reyes-Cortez is a researcher, artist and ethnographer. Marcel’s Doctoral programme developed the application and practice of photography as a methodology and a social research tool. Marcel explores the spaces, socio-cultural currents and contemporary ritual phenomenon of the dead and the social, economic and political life of its mourners and workers. Naomi Richards’s research interests include the anthropology of death and dying, older age, legal, and visual anthropology. She has completed a multi-sited study of the ‘right-to-die’ debate in the UK. She has also conducted research into the use of art in eliciting testimony from people at the end of life, visual representations of older age, and, most recently, the need for and provision of palliative care for older people in UK hospitals. She received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh in 2010 and has since worked at the University of Sheffield where she is currently undertaking an Economic and Social Research Council funded fellowship.

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Felix Robin Schulz is Lecturer in Modern European History at Newcastle University, and has specialized in the histories of the German speaking countries. His research interests include the history of sepulchral cultures, regional and national memorialization, and the link between landscape and identity. He has published on death and disposal in East Germany as well as on the history of the Alps.