The death of Minnie Ha-Ha, William de Leftwich Dodge, 1892

For the Love of God, Damien Hirst, 2006

Yes, death can excite the romantic imagination. Not only do we have Minnie Ha-Ha but also Damien Hirst’s skull made of diamonds. Yes, it’s the stuff that our tragedies are made of. Yes, there are photographers who have stared death in the face such as Sally Mann and Richard Avedon. But let’s not confuse the issue, and dignify German artist Gregor Schneider’s proposal to exhibit a dying person in a museum with the name of art. Art it is not and spectacle it is.

Sally Mann, What Remains

Schneider’s aim is to build a chamber for dying, a “simple room, flooded with light with a wooden floor”. In the simple room, open on the sides, the dying person would peacefully expire before an audience of art lovers. “My aim is to show the beauty of death”, says the artist, “There is nothing perverse about a dying person in an art gallery”. Predictably, the museum that was to stage the piece and the pathologist who was to aid him in finding a victim both backed away from the project the moment it received some publicity.

I recently came across another series by a German ( No I don’t think I’ll go there!) photographer, Walter Schels. Schels received permission from dying people to photograph them in life and death and the resulting project was not that far off from Schneider’s idea.

Walter Schels

click to enlarge

But there is a significant difference between Schneider’s proposal and the diptychs presented by Walter Schels and his collaborator, journalist Beate Lakotta. For one thing, in Schel’s case, art is the mediator between us and death. Experiencing photographs of a person living and dead is a step removed from actually being present at the death. Art mediates the experience whether through symbol, metaphor, or the presence of the medium itself. Schneider’s proposal removes the veil of mediation and replaces it with spectacle that would be uncomfortably reminiscent of the glory days of public executions.

It is the theatrical aspect of this proposal that disturbs me the most. First, the experience violates the privacy of the dying person; it diminishes them by reducing their death to a ‘performance piece’. The audience would be collaborators in the performance and their distress (or pleasure) in the scene perverts the normal experience of theater in which the audience is ideally transported to a higher experience of life. They would simply be witness to a dying, an experience most of us get by our middle years anyway. What would we gain from seeing a stranger dying in front of other strangers?

And what if the volunteer didn’t cooperate and die on cue? How long would the voyeurs sit on their gilded museum chairs waiting for death’s entrance? And even worse, what if the death turned violent, a not unlikely occurrence? There is no guarantee the death would be peaceful and highly unlikely it would be “beautiful”. In fact, most deaths are neither beautiful nor peaceful, even if they occur in a drug-induced stupor which is the case of many a death in the developed world. The dead can be serene but the dying rarely are.

In 1993 Doctor Sherwin Nuland wrote “How We Die”, a book graphically describing the manner of most deaths from disease, and as I recall, none of them were peaceful. He wrote about dying in a hospital of a heart condition. It seemed a ‘performance piece’ not unlike what artist Schneider proposes:

The patient dies alone among strangers. Well-meaning, empathetic, determinedly committed to sustaining his life -but strangers nonetheless. There is no dignity here. By the time the medical Samaritans have ceased their strenuous struggles the room is strewn with the debris of the lost campaign … and in the center of the devastation lies a corpse.

I suspect there is one who would be prominent among the ghouls attending the performance: Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, author of over twenty books on the subject of death. But sadly, her front row seat would be empty as she herself died in 2004.

In researching this piece, I came across a site featuring a “death clock” You enter some personal information and the clock tells you how much longer you have to live. The clock informed me that based on the data I had given it I was already dead!