Death: 2 exhibitions

Death: a self-portrait

Wellcome Collection, 15 November 2012 – 24 February 2013

Doctors, dissection and resurrection men

Museum of London, 19 October 2012 – 14 April 2013



Untitled (skulls with finger and eyelash) by Ray Johnson. From here.

An exhibition on death symbolism is complemented with one on the social history of medical grave-robbing. Both encourage reflection on our feelings towards dead bodies.

"If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it."
Michel de Montaigne. 

Like taxes, death is certain; unlike taxes, it can only be delayed, not avoided. I am hopelessly muddled on the subject, but I suspect everyone is.  

Our own death may be impossible to come to terms with. The emotions around bereavement are important, but as they aren’t relevant to contemplating our own deaths, perhaps other emotions (fear? desire? of what?) are involved. Death is related to, but distinct from dying, from fear of old age or from pain. We feel there can be an unjust death, but a just death is a peculiar idea to me too. 

The exhibition at the Wellcome Collection is drawn from the modern cabinet of morbid curiosities of the collector Richard Harris. The Museum of London complements this wide-ranging exhibition with a more specific focus on the medical demand for dead bodies for dissection, and how this came to be regulated in the UK through the 1832 Anatomy Act.

Mostly focussed on visual representations of death, Harris’ collection has a lot of skulls. It seems all over the world, the skull represents death, either as something to be contemplated and commemorated or something to be feared and appeased.  

A repeating motif in the exhibition is the use of a skull or skeleton in otherwise everyday settings. A portrait of a doctor with hand on a skull; personal photos with family members, perhaps, holding a skull; printed books depicting a skeleton holding the hands of people of all ages and social situations; Tibetan death masks.  

These images address death abstractly, and create a sense of reflection rather than the horror we usually feel when thinking about death. The powerful exception is the sets of prints by Callot, Goya and Dix, all depicting – from different wars – actual or imagined horrors of war, including some extremely violent deaths, or at least corpse mutilations. 

Corpse mutilation is also the main theme at the Museum of London, and the horror this inspires. The trade in dead bodies, necessary for medical research, is still fairly shocking, though I’m not sure why. Certainly the trade had social implications – as hanged murderers were the only legal source of bodies, it was a source of great shame when the poor had their relative’s graves robbed, whether illegally or after 1832 legally.

I would have liked more of this social background, and more on the harsh implications of the Anatomy Act for the poor, as well as more links to recent controversies over the rich paying for organ donations, etc. I was surprised to learn that even today, demand for dead bodies exceeds supply. 

The two exhibitions provoke introspection on the subject of bodies, in particular. At the Collection, the skeleton, or skull, is clearly a powerful, immediate symbolic representation of death. The Museum stresses the sanctity of the dead body. I think this has something to do with the mystery of death; that one moment we are alive, the next not. Our bodies don’t seem to change so very much, though eventually we end up skeletons.  

Unsurprisingly, neither exhibition is remotely the last word on death. But seen together, they help me, at least, to reflect upon that complicated mix of reactions I feel on the issue.

Orpheus: The song of life

Ann Wroe

Published by Pimlico, 2011



Lamentation d'Orphée by Alexandre Séon (1896)

 An innovative prose poem biography that doesn't explain this hero's mysterious appeal.

 
I'm late reviewing this book, which was published in 2011, but I couldn't leave the London Olympics year without at least one review relevant to Ancient Greece...

In the future, we may feel this book is a pioneer of Wikipedia world, a product of our current Light Age, where so much information is available that organising it will be a work of art in itself. I suppose this raises the question of whether Google is a work of art, but I will leave that aside. 

Orpheus, the singer who descended to the underworld and returned, may seem a relatively simple hero of the ancient Western world, his story a convenient model for composers. But his mystery cult in ancient Greece influenced Plato and was once felt to be a harbinger of Christianity. For this if nothing else he deserves this innovative biography. 

I see nothing wrong in writing a biography of myth. While we’re certain that nobody ever heard Orpheus play his lyre, and are equally certain that many people heard Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, nobody we know has heard either, and artists and biographers are required in both cases to interpret. 

Wroe organises her facts under seven themes (or strings to Orpheus’ lyre), arranged broadly in a standard life cycle. So a section on love precedes a section on death. The material in each section is necessarily drawn from a wide range of sources, far-flung chronologically, geographically and linguistically. 

We get ancient Greek figure vases, ancient Roman poetry, early Christian philosophy, medieval romances,  renaissance paintings, modern films, and of course operas. The variety is bewildering, and the author cannot intend us to remember, for example, whether  contemporary readers of Orpheus on the Argonautica also knew of his love for Eurydice. 

Less a detached biography than a love song, the prose is breathless and poetic, as if the narrator were reciting one of Orpheus' hymns. We gain a unifying image of Orpheus out of the chaos, and he would seem to be the narrator’s wish-fulfilment, a beautiful non-sexual sensitive young man who is too wise to be truly attached to anything or anyone, though this only makes it easier to fall hopelessly in love with him. 

Sometimes, the narrator references something that wouldn’t be so easily located on wikipedia, such as a busker on the London Underground, singing to the shades that pass him, perhaps searching for his Eurydice. I wish there were more of these lateral references in this book; as it is, we are given Orpheus ‘straight’.  

Even here, though, some of his mystery has been conveyed better by other writers.  

The German poet Rilke features prominently in this book, with regular quotes from his Sonnets to Orpheus. Yet Wroe doesn’t seem aware of Erich Heller’s wonderful essay on Rilke and Nietzsche, in which Orpheus becomes for the poet something like a composite of Apollo and Dionysus for the philosopher. 

This is the biggest disappointment with the biography. It presents the facts in an entertaining manner, but doesn’t attempt to explain Orpheus’ significance, especially his significance to us, now. The affirmation of life in spite of its horror; the role of style in mediating between Dionysus’ indivisible terrifying truth and Apollo’s false yet beautiful mastery; all of this goes unmentioned.

But perhaps the book itself is an attempt to achieve that style, that balance. The last line, involving a coffee cup, cake and primroses, might suggest this.

 

On the whole, though, I feel Orpheus keeps his mysteries.