Category: Thoughts about Texts

“Sex and Death: The Transitory Points In Human Existence”.

Jasmine Symonds / / Thoughts about Texts

“Victorians lingered over death but could not bring themselves to recognize the public existence of sexual relations; in the later part of the twentieth century sex gradually became a subject for open discussion, but death seems more deeply buried than ever. Sex and death: the transitory points in human existence which, in many cultures, are seen as rites of passage of equal importance. Possibly the increasingly negative connotations of sex, accumulating as a result of the AIDS epidemic, may gradually transform our attitude towards the ritual of death. A study of the visual culture of the post-Reformation death ritual shows, however, that this has yet to happen.”

(The Art of Death, Nigel Lllewellyn)

 

What interests me about this extract is how over time the social taboo has switched from being accepting of death and keeping away from the subject of sex to sex being socially accepted and death being the opposite in the twentieth century. In order to understand this we need to look at how society has changed in order for death to be looked upon with disdain in our culture.

With the development of medicine and hygiene death is left no longer prevalent in every day life. Not only this but faith in organised religion has also dropped in popularity and they no longer have as much control over the general public. Which means that the problems that caused people in victorian times to be so accepting of death have been eliminated (the daily risk of death and the holy belief that you should be aware of your mortality to keep you humble). These things are no longer an issue in our culture and so society has no need to be as accepting of death as it has been in the past and in fact denies it existence almost in the drastic way social behaviour towards death has changed. Instead of clearly speaking about the fact that someone has died we say they have “passed on”, even the word “death” or “died” is completely avoided being said.

I believe this denial stems from a fear of our own mortality, before we had the belief that we would inevitably die however this would lead to an afterlife/ heaven whereas now in a science based society we have created this distance from death in order to protect ourselves from the thought that we are inevitably going to pass away.

This extract ends on a question of wether or not death would become more accepted if sex became less acceptable in our society again and suggests that they are linked. I disagree with the concept behind this, I feel that the two natural human acts are separate in their sociological development and feel that death will never become freely accepted and embraced as a part of life again unless we rewind time and go back before science turned everyone into realists and we all had hope of an afterlife. I myself am a realist (although have some belief that there are wondrous things in this world we may never understand) and rather than give people hope of an afterlife to create acceptance of death I intend to just highlight the fact that death is a natural occurrence, nothing will ever change this and wish to point this out through memento mori or ritualistic props. Death must be accepted in this modern age as something timeless and unchangeable in order for the occurrence to have a healthy reception by the bereaved not shunned and oppressed.

Death and Masks

Jasmine Symonds / / Thoughts about Texts

“People formulate their relationship with death in different ways; always, however, masks and death appear in association. The mask is an emblem of hope, a magical instrument of continuance, and a manifestation of an otherworldly identity. There is another life hidden behind the mask images of one’s ancestors, an after-life in a mysterious and terrifying form, symbolised in the mask and invoked from the valley of the shadow for a possible temporary return and resurrection. The mask is summons and interdiction in one; it induces the dead to stay in their own realm. The mask on the face of the dead serves both to preserve their identity and to set the seal on their separation from the living.

Funerary masks also exist in Africa, although there it is hardly ever put on the dead as a face mask. The white mask of the Baule tribe of Guinea, painted in the colour of death, represents in its simple and expressive clarity the mysterious impassivity of death, which art alone can penetrate.

In Europe, Gallic and Etruscan patterns had a widespread influence on the concepts underlying the use of funerary masks. The Roman ancestor masks (imagines maiorum) date back to proto-Etruscan times; originally they were made of wax , and were therefore rarely preserved. During the time of the Roman Empire, masks were durably made of metal. In the Roman ancestral cult, these masks were brought out and worn in all funeral processions, thus involving the ancestors directly in the proceedings. This custom had a creative effect on Roman sculpture.

With the secularisation of death, the disappearance of the belief in heaven, hell and judgement, masks ceased to be a symbol of fear and hope. Death as final disintegration no longer needs a disguise.

Nothingness wears no mask.

It was not until recent times that Europeans reverted to the Roman practise of making death masks which are cast in plaster or wax direct from the face of the subject. Neither works of art nor cult objects, these masks nevertheless often have a powerful associative content.”

(Masks of the World, Oto Bihalji-Merin)

 

This rather large extract taken from my favourite book on the subject explains why I chose the medium of mask making in order to create Memento Mori pieces. What I have always loved about masks is that once you place it over your face you become an entirely different person, just by altering your facial features you can escape and be someone other than yourself. In it’s association with death it has a very different meaning, which changes depending on wether it is placed on the deceased or the bereaved. This text shows some examples of different ways the death mask has been used in different cultures, for example the ritual for them in Africa is inherently different to how they were used in the Roman ancestral cult. In one culture they could be painted representations of death and in another they can be plain, metal reminders of ancestral heritage. I think it might be an idea to look more to the Roman rituals as a reference in my work because of the Roman Empire’s links with the United Kingdom.

Another point to think about is wether or not I want to create masks for the dead or the living. Personally I don’t believe my masks are meant to be worn, they are both a reminder of mortality and an ephemeral object representing the personality of the deceased. Nothing lasts forever but the memory of a persons personality lives on through the people who were influenced by them. After the person has died, a visual representation of that persons face is born with a limited life span of it’s own. By capturing that persons facial features I feel that for a short while I am capturing their spirit. Of course in my actual pieces this is only a concept so far, the subject of death masks must be tackled with sensitivity for the general public so for the time being my masks are that of living people but the feeling is intended to be the same. By creating these pieces I wish to mimic the impression of a death mask memento mori piece having been created and the message is still the same. As the impact is not as great as if it was cast in death the possibility of being able to do this in the future will be explored. For now I have been concentrating on the processes and concept so maybe I will be able to approach this sensitive subject when I have become more experienced with the materials.

The Art of Death

Jasmine Symonds / / Thoughts about Texts

Over the past day or so I have been reading The Art of Death by Nigel Llewellyn. His work is pretty in tune with what my work is about and this morning I came across a really interesting piece of text that I am going to share:

 

“To some extent, contemporary capitalist cultures in the West still recognize that dying exists as a liminal point between life and death: we mostly agree on the good sense of preparing a will, a process which demands that we imagine the social world in our absence and which in a way foretells our own deaths. Most of us change our behaviour when someone close to us dies. Nevertheless, in the Western world death takes place at a distance, it is a pollutant which threatens hygiene; it indicates a time requiring strength, not emotions: death ignored might also be death denied. In early modern England such denial was unfamiliar if not impossible and the clerics preached the wickedness of those who disregarded their own mortality. In response, the space between life and death, the ritualized period of dying, was stretched in ways which today’s standards would be considered tasteless and unacceptable.”

(The Art of Death, Nigel Llewellyn, P.16)

 

This piece of text has me thinking about the difference between rituals today and rituals in the past, the ideals seem to be completely contrasting of each other. Before we embraced death and saw it as a humbling event and now we disregard death almost to the point of denial. When did this unhealthy attitude towards death in the West occur? As modern science has progressed and people’s day to day lives have become more sanitised, people have become more distanced from nature in general and death is just another unsanitary act that reminds us of our mortality. Which in this modern age is looked upon more as a failure to achieve immortality or a failure of medicine than a natural celebrated event that happens within every life.