Death: A Self-Portrait @ Wellcome
I'd like to write this before it becomes such a long time since I was there (February 2013, the same day I first saw the Tate's Painting after performance) that I can't remember anything useful.
From a participant's perspective I remember most being disgusted by a large sculptural piece made of a packing crate for air freight, relatively small in size, displaying a grotesque mutilated corpse laid bare. It was such a realistic sight that the disgust was genuine to the point that it induced feelings of queasiness. My companion on the day thought something similar, and his nervous laughter has to have been a way of coming to terms with it. The display reminded me of something I learnt when I was last in Egypt in 2010, where I met an international teacher who was looking for work in Cairo. She had visited Thailand while she had worked as a teacher in South Korea, and the memory she related pertained to death. A living person's relationship with death, she believed, in Thailand is different from what I presume she classed as a Western relationship with death: death is not morbid was the overall assessment I think she wanted to make. This recalled response helped me to appraise the strange sculpture in this exhibition because I began to view it and then to interact with it as a device to change my perception of and relationship with death. I don't think the display reduces any morbidity, though, so it would seem to operate differently from how the teacher's conversations with Thais changed her attitude.
Sitting squarely in the middle of the room right in front of the door leading from a series of sketches by Goya (?) and another anti-war artist, from a curatorial point of view, the sculpture should probably be seen as a renewal of the polemic those artists were engaged with, too. The realism of it and its contemporary trappings (stamps on the packing crate were recent) also help to collapse the fallacy of distance from war some visitors to an exhibition in London in 2013 might feel and which the prints in the previous room, from a time long past, could need some assistance in evoking.
From a participant's perspective I remember most being disgusted by a large sculptural piece made of a packing crate for air freight, relatively small in size, displaying a grotesque mutilated corpse laid bare. It was such a realistic sight that the disgust was genuine to the point that it induced feelings of queasiness. My companion on the day thought something similar, and his nervous laughter has to have been a way of coming to terms with it. The display reminded me of something I learnt when I was last in Egypt in 2010, where I met an international teacher who was looking for work in Cairo. She had visited Thailand while she had worked as a teacher in South Korea, and the memory she related pertained to death. A living person's relationship with death, she believed, in Thailand is different from what I presume she classed as a Western relationship with death: death is not morbid was the overall assessment I think she wanted to make. This recalled response helped me to appraise the strange sculpture in this exhibition because I began to view it and then to interact with it as a device to change my perception of and relationship with death. I don't think the display reduces any morbidity, though, so it would seem to operate differently from how the teacher's conversations with Thais changed her attitude.
Sitting squarely in the middle of the room right in front of the door leading from a series of sketches by Goya (?) and another anti-war artist, from a curatorial point of view, the sculpture should probably be seen as a renewal of the polemic those artists were engaged with, too. The realism of it and its contemporary trappings (stamps on the packing crate were recent) also help to collapse the fallacy of distance from war some visitors to an exhibition in London in 2013 might feel and which the prints in the previous room, from a time long past, could need some assistance in evoking.
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