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Restriction Drawing Workshop
Taped two pens to the back of my hand and restricted the movement of my fingers
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What Is Death?
Some seem to say it's non-existence, similar to before we were born. I thought of Da Vinci's studies of the foetus. A potential for a life never realised, yet observed, from life, from a man who's legacy still lives on 500 years later.
Is it really an accurate comparison? Before conception we are nothing, we have no sense, no consciousness, merely a possibility. Yet, before death we are alive. We have friends, family, goals, hobbies, and things we can never return to once it's all over.
Clinically, it may be the same, but emotionally it does nothing to erase the feelings of fear, loss and regret caused by mortality.
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Asphalt and Chalk Series (Michael Brown, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin)" Titus Kaphar, 2014
Kaphar's Asphalt and Chalk series feature the faces of young, unarmed black men who lost their lives at the hands of police brutality. Using chalk on asphalt paper, Kaphar traces their faces until any sense of recognition is obscured, rendering a hazy image reminiscent of a chalk outline of a body.
"As you look at the drawings, your eyes struggle to reconcile the multiple faces into one," Kaphar told the Huffington Post, "In these pieces, I’m thinking about mistaken identities, similar life struggles, and fitting the description."
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Poupées Series, Michel Nedjar
"I identified with the corpses. I felt the violence"
Nedjar, who was born 1947, grew up amidst stories about the horrors of the Holocaust, where many members of his family had lost their lives.
He channelled these thoughts and feelings into dolls, that appear to be part cocoon, part fetus, resembling decay.
"This is not the decay of a fruit or a rose, as in the vanitas still lifes of the Dutch 17th century. This is not even the decay of an animal, like a gull found dead on the shore. The poupées reflect the dereliction that underlies human existence: the fragility of the body of that which is intelligent, thinking and self-aware, and the fact that it will decompose and rot quickly, once the spirit has fled." - Katherine Lieber
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Siluetas, Ana Mendieta
Mendieta, born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, moved to the U.S. at 12 years old to escape Castro's regime. She then began a brief yet passionate artistic career, before she committed suicide at just 36 years old. Her art tackles themes and issues of love, death and rebirth, using her body and mother nature as a vessel.
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Saturn Devouring His Son, Francisco de Goya 1819–1823
In the later years of his life, between 1819 and 1823, Goya began what are now known as the "Black Paintings." After surviving two near-fatal illnesses, one which left him mostly deaf, Goya was terrified of relapsing, incorporating his fear and impending insanity into his artworks. The most renowned of which depicts Saturn feasting on one of his children.
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Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation, Hans Memling
Memling was a 15th century German-born painter who worked in the tradition of Early Netherlandish painting, who created this triptych comparing the beautiful luxuries of earthly existence with the looming prospects of death and eternal hell. The haunting image is a prime example of a memento mori, an artwork hinting at the mortality that defines us.
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Still Life with Dead Hare and Birds, Jan Fyt 1640s
This painting by the Flemish Baroque painter Jan Fyt depicts spoils of the hunt: the lifeless body of a hare surrounded by dead birds. These elements are also conventions of memento mori still life painting. This genre, also referred to as "vanitas" (Latin for "vanity") often contained subjects such as dead animals or decaying fruit as symbols of mortality.
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Terror Management Theory
TMT is both a social and evolutionary psychology theory originally proposed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski, published in their book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (2015).
It proposes that a basic psychological conflict results from having a self-preservation instinct, while also realizing that death is inevitable and to some extent unpredictable. This conflict produces terror, which is managed through a combination of escapism and cultural beliefs that act to counter biological reality with more significant and enduring forms of meaning and value.
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Mortality Salience
The awareness of individuals that their death is inevitable.
Mortality salience engages the conflict that humans have to face both their instinct to avoid death completely, and their intellectual knowledge that avoiding death is ultimately futile.
According to terror management theory, when human beings begin to contemplate their mortality and their vulnerability to death, feelings of terror emerge because of the simple fact that humans want to avoid their inevitable death. Mortality salience comes into effect because humans contribute all of their actions to either avoiding death or distracting themselves from the contemplation of it. Terror management theory asserts that almost all human activity is driven by the fear of death.
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impermanent
/ɪmˈpəːmənəns/
noun
the state or fact of lasting for only a limited period of time.
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Thoughts on Potential Routes
For this unit, I decided to focus in on something that I feel can be a debilitating negative thought process and try to make work that corresponds to it.
For a while now I've been suffering with near-constant intrusive thoughts and anxiety over the concept of death. I've developed a form of existential anxiety. The thought of just no longer existing, the inevitability of one day being forgotten, the idea of dying before I've given my life meaning, the unknowable after I'm gone... Is all completely terrifying, and it's all I seem to be thinking of.
This kind of theme is common in many periods of art through history, from Memento Mori to Vanitas. I believe it will be beneficial to me to create work on this subject as it's usually how I work through things.
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Definition of Site
1.
A: the spatial location of an actual or planned structure or set of structures (a building, town, monument)
B: a space of ground occupied or to be occupied by a building
2.
A: the place, scene, or point of an occurrence or event (a picnic site)
B: one or more Internet addresses at which an individual or organization provides information to others
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Definition of Body
1.
A: the main part of a plant or animal body, especially as distinguished from limbs and head
B: the main, central, or principal part (architecture, a vehicle body)
2.
A: the organized physical substance of an animal or plant either living or dead.
(1) the material part or nature of a human being
(2) a dead organism, a corpse
B: a human being, a person
3.
A: a mass of matter (a body of water, celestial bodies)
B: something that embodies or gives concrete reality to something
C: aggregate, quantity (a body of evidence)
4.
A: clothing, the part of a garment covering the trunk or torso
B: the main part of a literary or journalistic work
C: the sound box or pipe of a musical instrument
5.
A: a group of persons or things (a body of cavalry, a legislative body, university student body)
6.
A: fullness and richness of flavour
B: viscosity/density (oils, grease)
C: denseness, fullness, or firmness of texture
D: music, fullness or resonance of a musical tone
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