Images on
Flickr and video
here.
¡Viva la muerte! When I had to choose my subject for this project, death almost immediately popped up in my head. Only in London, I have 5 papier mache skeletons, one sugar skull and a cactus clay pot decorated with little skulls, all from Mexico. I love José Guadalupe Posada and everything around the Mexican Day of the Dead. Why am I so attracted to the the skulls and the dancing, singing, quarreling and tequila guzzling skeletons? I can not claim to know what it all means. I have no context to understand it and I feel no emotional connection. My weary and agnostic eyes do not see what is transcendental about it but I appreciate the quirkiness. For me, the Mexican art of the deadFor it is quirky, outlandish and colourful. It puts a smile on my face. It makes me laugh. And I also suspect there is an existential message in it.
It is this existential dimension of death that intrigues me. There is one kind of meditation from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition that invites you to imagine your last moments and reflect on what you have achieved in your lifetime. Thinking of our own death reminds us of two things:
Life is finite
It is all about the choices that you make
Another significant moment was a movie I saw on the telly. I do not remember the name of it or what it was about, but Meryl Streep was in it. Someone dies in the family and an inquisitive child asks Streep about this death business she says something along the lines of ‘we all die, what matters is what you do with your life before that happens’. Death is inevitable, but what do you do with your life before the inevitable happens? In the same line of thinking, last year I read Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych’, a wonderful little book about a man who discovers that he’s going to die imminently and realises that he has not had a good life but merely has lived out somebody else’s script, a false life.
These were some seminal thoughts but I had no idea what to do with them. The first thing I did was to go to the library and start looking at books about the Day of the Dead, death in medieval art, horror films from the 50s, and anything that had the word ‘death’ in the title. I discovered the art of the Linares family in Mexico, who create vibrant and funny scenes with papier mache skeletons. Another thing I did, without any sort of agenda, was to go to Highgate cemetery and record some cheeky footage with my video camera. When I saw the clips, I did not know what to do with it. It did not inspire me. However, a lot of the tombs were covered in vegetation and this made think about the connection between death and growth.
Up to this point, I collected stuff, images made by others. It was all about me putting photocopies, sketches and clippings in a folder... so to speak, as I never really use folders. I have images of demons carrying off damned souls, images of hell full of sinners, images of mortal decay, images of people being punished and suffering horribly.... all dreadful images. One that stands out is the temptation of Saint Anthony, by Jacques Callot. I do not know what the temptation entailed, and will resist the temptation to google it, but it must have been pretty intense, judging from the impressive legion of demons and evil forces surrounding the saint, an old man with a robe and a long beard. At this point I did not know what I was supposed to do with this project, was it about gathering research or was it more than that?
Soon I learned that the research was meant to be a catalyst to your own image making. I then started drawing things that came to my mind: a dismembered body travelling in a suitcase on a night train (I read this in the newspaper), a stick man walking in a valley, between the peaks of birth and death, a man writing a marketing report in his dying bed, death holding a scythe by the side of a moribund patient, an skeleton playing maracas, a ladder going to heaven, an onion-shaped ghost wondering if she was dead... What was the glue and what could I do with it, I wondered while scratching my head.
I chose to go down a route of finding cultural meanings of death and read a number of books. I particularly liked Hans Holbein’s ‘Dance of Death’, which shows people from all walks of life, bishops and farmers, warriors and monks... being united by the inevitable experience of death.
I had a tutorial with Robin. He asked me what my personal view was. We talked about the hole that a person leaves in you when they die, having regrets, death as the only certainty of our existence, death as a good thing to put things into perspective, euphemisms about death, an analysis of grief, a modern interpretation of ‘death’ as a profession... We discussed how dead can be a positive thing also, if there were no death, there wouldn’t be room for new beings to be born. I realised that to this point, what I had seen was fairly negative. But in my mind, the idea of death is life affirming but all the imagery was grim.
So I drew a one-page story about the cycle of life and death. A man dies and is buried, is eaten up by worms, then eaten by a bird, the bird is killed by a hunter and eaten up, the hunter makes love to a woman, a baby is born, lives and dies, is buried and eaten up by worms. Repeat. Death needs to happen for life to happen.
At one of the tutorials, Jake talked about the hell of your mother in law, the hell of smelly trains, preserving memories, and terrible ways of dying. We also discussed symbolism and I looked into metaphors for life, like chasing a butterfly but it stopped there for me, so I got lazy and rented a DVD. In ‘Before sunset’, Ethan Hawke recites a poem by WH Auden:
In headaches and in worry
vaguely life leaks away,
and time will have his fancy
tomorrow or today
This seemed to capture my sentiments well.
At this stage, my head was like a cocktail shaker. I did a first attempt at making a book that tried to capture my thoughts and ideas about death, a way of not ruling out, keep everything in, put all the scattered thoughts and indecisions into a semblance of a linear narrative.
Jake said it was boring. He suggested that I think about adding tension, think structurally, less tame, try out different things, cruelty, etc. This is when it dawned on me that I was trying an intellectual approach rather than experimenting with actual image making. I made the determination to have fun, enjoy the process of image-making and be inventive.
In relation to timing, I drew a man in a prison, surrounded by a swarm of rats. I thought this was interesting, playing with showing something and leaving the reader of the image to imagine what happens next. I drew a few more in this vein, like a woman in a bathtub, before a fat fly is about to tip the hair-dryer into the water or a couple getting ready to make love before an airplane crashes into their window.
This was interesting but I was still doing what I always do, which is to draw with an HB pencil in a A4 sketchbook. I tried out different things: I printed a t-shirt, did lots of skeletons on the computer, I used water colours, markers and drew on photographs. I found the collages with one colour cut-out silhouettes particularly appealing, for the boldness of their simplicity, for their honesty. One of the collages, using photography tells the story of a little bird, tweeting away, while unaware of an airplane on fire that is coming towards him.
I kept exploring. I did some drawings around innocence, the inexorable trains and one way journeys. I had this idea of modernising Holbein’s the Dance of Death. Death taps you on the shoulder while writing an e-mail. Death grabs you while buying a kebab. Hey, it’s time to go! says Death. I had lots of fun drawing skeletons chasing cyclists, grabbing business-people and cruising around in convertible cars.
At one of the tutorials, Jake suggested that I explore innocence and what’s coming after, or a ladder climbing up to death, trains that are inexorable, one way journeys. I did explore all of these things but I wasn’t too excited about them and this is because I took these suggestions perhaps too literally and you have to do something and pursue what really interestests you. I created images of the inexorability of death, lurking death, death tapping you on the shoulder, what grows from what’s dead.
Then this ideas of modernising the Dance of Death occurred to me. Bringing the Dance of Death to the world of today, you’re sending an e-mail and then death grabs you from the arm. It’s time to go! I had lots of fun drawing lots of skeletons chasing cyclists, grabbing business persons, cruiising around in convertible cars...
Because I did not have a clear image of what I wanted to say, Jake suggested that I stop looking at everything and focus my efforts on innocence and death, inexorability and the unexpected. Also, it was brought to my attention that my image-making was very quiet, very timid.
I forced myself to do something outside of a piece of paper. I looked around and found a bottle of wine, and painted on it. At the tutorials, it came up that it was an interesting approach but there was no substance, no story attached to it.
If I had more hair I would pull it. I sat down, rolled up my sleeves and reflected on how to move forward with this project. So I decided that:
I have to enjoy it
I have to understand what story I am telling.
What does death mean for me? Death is inevitable, be aware of this and make the most of life while you can. That was what I wanted to say, it was not about innocence or one way journeys. That was it.
The drama of birth and death is repeated over and over. Every man has to solve the riddle of life and then die. It is a cycle. This made think of a ferris wheel, something in constant circular movement.
When I was a kid, I used to love making things, making things and drawing. I decided to rekindle this love for making things. I built a Meccano ferris wheel.
I wanted to make our everyday routine life ride the ferris wheel. The wheel of existence is made up of ordinary everyday moments. I went out and took photographs around London but when I put them into the seats of the wheel, they amounted to nothing, they were meaningless. I decided to replace these with skeletons. I made a walking cycle of an skeleton, to create the ilusion of movement, but the wheel was too slow and did not create this effect, ‘alive’ skeletons, because death is coiled into life.
Jake suggested that a monkey could be operating the ferris wheel. I liked this idea very much. Here is the wheel of life and death, and if you try to find a transcendental meaning, there is just a blasé monkey. You want meaning and he does not give a damn. Which is the same as saying, there is nothing. There is only this life and the rest is nothingness. Try to find the meaning and you will bump into a nonchalant monkey.
The wheel also reflects the mechanical qualities of life for some of us (not me by the way). One of the things that I enjoyed the most was to draw skeletons free-form. I took some of the sketches and turned into silkscreen prints. Jake suggested that I played with words and was quite playful at that. The main messages are ‘life is short and you are hot’ and ‘sorry mate’.
Because I had done some work on animating the skeleton, I decided to use the work and created an animation on the computer. It plays in a loop and reminds me that death is inexorable. The music comes out of a music box, plays ‘who’s afraid of the big bad wolf’, which is like saying ‘we’re not scared of death’.
I am not sure how succesful this project is but I know that it is telling a story.
What have I learned?
Enjoy image making and experiment, and try to have fun
Have a very clear idea about what the story is
Balance between concept and experimentation
Believe in the story
Perfectionism limits creativity
Jorge
(written on thursday, 21 February 2008)
