Burials

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monochrom Buried Alive, 2013
‘The people present will have an opportunity to be buried alive in a coffin for fifteen minutes. As a framework program there will be lectures about the history of the science of determining death and the medical cultural history of “buried alive”. People buried alive not only populate the horror stories of past centuries, but also countless reports in specialized medical literature. The theme of unintentional resurrection by grave robbers also runs through forensic protocols. Even in the 19th century it was said that every tenth person was buried alive. No wonder that the fear of this fate was immense and led – especially in the German-speaking region – to all kinds of precautions to avoid it. Various death test methods were developed, for instance. “Security coffins” with bell pulls and air hoses were patented; mortuaries were built, in which corpses were left for days to natural decay.’

 

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Marlene Dumas Measuring Your Own Grave, 2003
‘For years I had the same studio, in the center of Amsterdam and there were some other artists in the building too. A fellow-artist friend had this canvas which he had painted this beautiful light gray. He wanted to throw it away and I said, “Give it to me,” and so when you look at that canvas you will see that the grayish, lighter area at the bottom is done with very systematic brush strokes. And they’re actually not mine, they are his.

‘So I had this beautiful background, beautifully painted, and I wanted to have an image that fitted this canvas. So then someone else had a newspaper image of someone in this position, and because I also work in such an associative way, I thought, this image is going to stretch itself to the edges of this canvas. And after I painted it, I thought, it is like measuring your own grave — making art is actually like measuring your own grave. The canvas is almost like a coffin for the figure, because all my figures always seem to struggle with the fact that they are paintings, — they never breathe so well in the painterly space.’

 

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Jeff Wall The Flooded Grave, 1998-2000
transparency in lightbox

 

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Sophie Calle Here Lie the Secrets of the Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery, 2017
‘French conceptual artist Sophie Calle just launched a 25 year installation in a a cemetery. Here Lie the Secrets of the Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery is a participatory art project where Calle erected an white marble obelisk that bears that inscription plus artwork’s name. At the base is a small slot where participants can insert their written secrets, sealed in an envelope. Whenever the obelisk fills up, Calle will return to Brooklyn to burn the contents. They will be burnt at the same cemetery facilities that handle the deceased. It’s a project that is deeply personal, and inherently cathartic. The 25-year duration of the project is based on the practice of cemeteries in Paris, where buying a grave “for eternity” only guarantees you a 25-year occupancy. If you don’t get visitors, the plot can be turned over to someone else.’

 

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Massimo de Carlo The Grave, 1998
dirt, cement, rocks

 

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Keith Arnatt Self-Burial (Television Interference Project), 1969
‘At 8:15pm on 11 October 1969, just after the evening news, viewers of WDR3 [Westdeutsche Rundfunk Channel 3] – a German television channel – were shown a photograph of a man standing in a field. The image was on screen for two seconds. It wasn’t announced, explained or credited. This was the start of Keith Arnatt’s Self-Burial (Television Interference Project). The work was shown over a period of eight nights with images shown straight after the evening news at 8:15pm and interrupting whatever programme was on at 9:15pm. As the work progressed the man – artist Keith Arnatt – seemed to disappear into the ground.’

 

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Ruth Stanford From the Ground Up, 2018
‘This inversion of cemetery architecture brings the inside out into the open with the light and color serving to honor individuals laid to rest here.’

 

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Roger Hiorns Buried passenger aircraft (Pathways), 1990-2016, 2016
‘In the summer of 2016, Roger Hiorns buried a military passenger aircraft into a hill in the East of England. The burial marked the first occasion in which a series of buried aircraft will occur across the globe in what the artist describes to be a global network of buried passenger aircraft. Aircraft are to be, or have been, buried on all continents across the globe.

‘The artist describes the act of burying the craft, each craft with differing contextual references and uses, based on their final location, as ‘another stage in the evolution on object making against the established world of objects’. ‘That a worldly object and its intentions can somehow be readapted, or “insulted”‘. ‘That the human occupant of the newly buried plane will become influenced and more attuned to the powerful systems we pass through.’

 

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Linda Hubbard Baby Burial Socks, 2013
‘Funeral Socks. Make sure your baby is appropriately attired warm and snug for the final journey.’

 

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‘An artist has been buried alive beneath a busy Hobart road, where he will spend 72 hours as part of Tasmania’s Dark Mofo winter festival. Organisers estimate more than 3,000 onlookers watched as Mike Parr, 73, climbed into a steel container beneath Macquarie Street and the road was resealed above him. Oxygen will be pumped into the container where Parr will spend the next three days fasting, meditating, reading and drawing in his sketchbook. “He will take a copy of Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore down with him to read, and he’ll have his sketchbook, but what he does down there aside from that, nobody knows.” And what will he use for a toilet? “There’s a bucket down there,” Mr Rawlins said.’

 

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Diana Markosian School No. 1, 2004
‘School No.1 in Beslan, Russia, days after the siege. Drawings in this project are from survivors, and have been integrated into photos of the hostage location.’

 

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Maurizio Cattelan Eternity, 2018
‘‘My favorite dream has always been the one in which I get to go to my own funeral,’ says Maurizio Cattelan. For this participatory social sculpture, Cattelan has issued an open call to local artists to invoke their own favorite dream – or worst nightmare – by designing and building a tombstone or gravestone for a living person, be they an enemy, a family member, or a friend. Fictional characters are also accepted (see: Pinocchio). The artist hopes to select around 200 proposals and will ask their creators to build and install them in Palermo Park in a temporary tribute to those who have not yet passed away. ‘I have always liked cemeteries – they are so quiet and inspiring,’ the artist muses. ‘So why not build a cemetery for the living? Maybe it will make our life easier as we learn to coexist with the end.’’

 

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Eum Sung-do Untitled cat cremation urn, 2017
ceramic, paint, feline ashes

 

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Ken Unsworth Five secular settings for Sculpture as ritual and Burial, 1975
‘Ken Unsworth was entombed in a glass box (3 tons of Sand were used to fill this glass tomb). He was enclosed for over 20 mins. November 17, 1975.’

 

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Nicholas Galanin Shadow on the Land, an excavation and bush burial, 2020
‘Imagine a future where the statues of veneration that mark our public landscape today have long been forgotten, buried beneath the earth. In this speculative archaeological-style dig, Nicholas Galanin ‘uncovers’ or ‘excavates’ the shadow cast by the Captain Cook statue that currently resides in Sydney’s Hyde Park. The work rests between a possible past or future burial, a presence through absence of an object that today very much still functions as a celebration of colonial heroics. Inverting the gaze of archaeology, which has often framed Indigenous cultures as belonging to the past, this work imagines a possible future where the memories of settler colonialism have become distant and buried.’

 

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Jess Miley and Derek Sargent The Grave Project, 2021
‘The Grave Project is an ongoing performative research project by Jess Miley and Derek Sargent. We research historical individuals who have had an impact on queer and non-normative culture. This research culminates in a pilgrimage to their gravesite, which we document through performance, photography, film and text to create an alternative historical archive. We examine the way their queerness is used in the construction of their historical biographies, including how and where they lived, either by choice or not, had a profound effect on their queer story.’

 

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Roberto V. Villanueva Ego’s Grave, 1993
‘His art has been labeled as “ephemeral,” a description, which may well be consistent with his last and final performance: himself wrapped in his favorite tinggian blanket while lying on a pile of wood that was later set on fire. His friends and loved ones danced in a circle around him, playing the drums and gongs for the next six hours. Among his most memorable pieces is “Ego’s Grave”, a pit which he dug for 17 days causing him to collapse during the first Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia.’

 

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Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Alice B. Toklas’ and Gertrude Stein’s Grave, Paris), 1992

 

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Paul Thek The Tomb, 1967
‘In 1967, Thek culminated his early career by creating a life-sized effigy of himself, dressed in a pink suit and laid to rest in a pink ziggurat tomb. The sculpture, dubbed by critics the “Dead Hippie,” seemed to capture the zeitgeist of the era. The discs on Thek’s cheeks were painted with psychedelic colors, and Thek originally surrounded the figure with paraphernalia that alluded to drug use. When it was shown at the Whitney in 1968, Vietnam War protestors left flowers by the tomb, as if the wax figure were a martyred comrade.

‘Critics celebrated Thek’s Hippie as a masterwork of American sculpture, and it was exhibited at museums throughout the United States and Europe. Eventually, it became the first great work of Thek’s to be lost. Over time, the notoriety of the Hippie exasperated Thek. When a museum in Germany asked to exhibit it in 1981, more than a dozen years after its inception, he wrote to a friend: “I really don’t want to have to do THAT piece again! Oh God no! Not THAT one. Imagine having to bury yourself over and over.”

‘Thek did agree to show the work, but when it was returned from Germany, he never picked it up from the shipper, and the Hippie was destroyed, or disappeared. Why Thek allowed this to happen is unclear. By one account, he simply forgot to retrieve the work from the shipper. But it’s also possible that he abandoned the Hippie out of frustration that it had never been purchased. Whatever the reason, its destruction ensured that he would never have to show the work again.’

 

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Adolf Wamper Memorial with Miners, 1953
‘The Nazis used arts and culture as propaganda tools. Their definition of acceptable art was very narrow, and one that promoted their racist ideology. Many artists were banned from working or persecuted; a great number of them fled into exile. But on the other hand, the work of certain artists like sculptor Adolf Wamper was deemed to be of extremely high value to the regime. Even in the final phase of World War II, a select few of artists were declared to be “indispensable” to Nazi culture, exempting them from military duty and work assignments.’

 

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Winner Jumalon A Part, 2010
‘Imagine the consternation that ensued when the invitations for the show first came out describing the outdoor venue as a graveyard marked by portraits! Not exactly palatable news to the superstitious. Winner took inspiration from the grave markers of non-Christians, like the ones found in Mindanao for instance, that define burial sites with carved likenesses of the dead beneath them. Winner fabricated each piece as both a portrait and a still life, one on reverse sides of each other. He painted using automotive paint on a resin base.’

 

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Milène Guermont Causse, 2016
‘CAUSSE is an artwork commissioned by an eminent French scientist to Milène Guermont to be his ultimate tracking place on Earth. Several authorizations were necessary to install this sculpture made of ultra high performance fiber-reinforced concrete and light on the preservation area of the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

‘CAUSSE is formed by 12 facets, representing the 12 floors of the photo-electric cell with multiplied electrons invented by the scientist. Thanks to optical fibres embedded into the concrete, light goes from one facet to another, like the electrons in the photo-electric cell. When a cloud, a bird or a visitor passes in front of an optical fibre, it darkens a point of light on another facet.’

 

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Puppies Puppies Andrew D. Olivo 6.7.1989 – 6.7.2018, 2018
‘Andrew D. Olivo 6.7.89-6.7.18, an installation of new work by Puppies Puppies that refects on past trauma, the physicality of transitioning, and mourning the death of an old self. Patches of grass filled the entire flooring of the booth, in the middle which stood a tombstone bearing the name of her former self “Andrew D. Olivo” and the dates “June 7, 1989” and “June 7, 2018.” Albeit a bit morbid, the artwork is also a celebration of a turning point in the artist’s life, as she underwent surgery and embraced life as a trans woman.’

 

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Shigeko Kubota Korean Grave, 1993
‘Born in 1937 in Niigata, Japan, Shigeko Kubota became a key member of the Japanese avant-garde, a respected participant in New York Fluxus events in the 1960s, and, starting in the 1970s, a pioneering practitioner of video art. An emblematic work she created is Korean Grave (1993), a work dedicated to her husband. Kubota had been together with fellow video art pioneer Nam June Paik since the 1970s, supporting each other’s dynamic lives until Nam June’s passing in 2006. Kubota made tributes to her beloved partner through various video works and through a written memoir.’

 

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Barbara Kruger Untitled (You Can’t Drag Your Money Into The Grave With You), 1990
photographic silkscreen on vinyl

 

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‘A 90-year-old man, Lonnie Holloway, from South Carolina in USA, made a wish before his death that he wants to be buried with the car – a 1973 Pontiac Catalina. His last wish was granted. He was buried in the front seat of his car with his hands on the steering wheel along with his most prized possessions – his guns – in Saluda.’

 

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W. Eugene Smith Burial at Sea, Marshall Islands Campaign, 1944
‘Called a fanatic of his craft and, often, “troublesome” by his editors, photographer and photojournalist W. Eugene Smith demanded such perfection of his images that he destroyed most of his early work. He began taking pictures at age 14, initially of airplanes, exploring an interest in aeronautical engineering. Smith went on to study photography at Notre Dame, followed by a job at Newsweek in 1937 (which he was fired from upon refusing to use a medium-format camera.)’

 

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Olga Kroytor Untitled (Open Grave), 2013
‘The artist lies down in a grass-lined grave with a glass lid. Naked and, like Botticelli’s Venus, covered only by her hair, she allowed crowds of spectators to walk “over her” and subject her to their scrutiny. The idea of this performance came to her during a visit to the Louvre. She felt sorry for the Mona Lisa: Every day thousands of people come to stare at her and take pictures.’

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I’m glad you found some stuff that hit your heights. Given the Oscars’ blah tastes, I’m not surprised that ‘Annette’ was a miss for them, although it’s pretty criminal that not one Sparks song from the film made it into the finals. I mean, come on, really? ** David Ehrenstein, I don’t think the Woody Allen has opened here yet, but I guess it has in fact opened in your neck aka the States according to Steve. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yep, I now have two friends ready to go with me today, so odds are at least one of them won’t cancel. Cavities, here I come! I’m apparently really weird because I never, ever notice people’s shoes. I don’t know why. I just never look down there. Maybe because I’m tall? But, thanks to you, I did notice that I was looking down there when I was out yesterday. No crocs yet. You’re right, no coincidence surely. Ha ha, yes, warning to all and sundry, should you ever send me that Leo DiCaprio GIF in any context, the school of our relationship is out. There are few things in the world that irritate me more than ‘reaction gifs’, like when people post them on social media threads. They make emojis seem like ‘Ulysses’. So I’m on your love’s side. Love inventing a cigarette that also doubles as one of those tube-like blow guns that shoot poison darts so the next time I see some some smug jerk on the metro posting an emojigif to their Twitter account I can use him as my ill-fated pin cushion, G. ** David, I’m glad you’re feeling better. The only good thing about grief is that it’s absorbent. Poor bird. Nice pic. ** LC, Hi. I miss camping overnight in the woods. I was in both Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts when I was kid, and that was their go-to activity, so I used to do that all the time. When I get to the fake Lascaux cave, I’ll give you a … fake report? Happy her tune helped you. What are you working on? ** trees, Ted! Wow, you wrote on Skelton. I’ll go read that post-haste. Everyone, D.l. trees who doubles as the superb poet Ted Rees wrote about the great Richard Skelton — one of yesterday’s gig’s stars — and that’s a guaranteed treat. So, read it. Here. Very excited for your new book! Take good care, my friend. xo. ** cambria, Hi, cambria, welcome! Yes, I was excited to find that john m. bennett video/track online. He was great. I saw him read a couple of times, and it was something else. Thank you a lot for coming inside. It’s good to meet you! ** Sypha, Hi. Ben Affleck is so, so fucking snooze. Even snoozier than Robert Pattinson, and, for me, that’s saying something. My favorite Batman is Michael Keaton, hands down, no competition. I think Gaga got a bunch of awards and stuff for that role, so I think she’ll be just fine. Yes, the new Sypha Nadon! I haven’t heard it yet, but I’m about to. Everyone, Sypha who’s better known as the vaunted scribe James Champagne is also a musician/recording artist named Sypha Nadon, who makes awesome sounds, and Sypha Nadon has just released his new album called ‘Lovecraft’, and you can listen toit  and get it right here. And do that! ** Steve Erickson, I agree re: the Dark Sky Burial. Everyone, Steve has reviewed ‘the revenge drama CATCH THE FAIR ONE, about a Native American woman fighting the men who kidnapped and trafficked her sister’ here. Huh, I didn’t see Christophe H’s film in the list of that festival. It must be his pandemic documentary. I haven’t seen it, but it was very poorly received here. I was in his film ‘Homme au bain’ (Man at Bath). It was actually a small role in the film, not a cameo. ** T, Thanks, man. I’ve been meaning to investigate French drill. I’m still a virgin, I think. I’ll start with that Ziak and aya. Thanks! Oh, yeah, let’s have a coffee on Sunday. I’m free, and that sounds great. Just give me your schedule when you know it, and we’ll sort that. Terrific. I accept your Thursday warmly. Well, not too warmly, ha ha. How about a Thursday that reverses time until it’s 1968 and grows its hair sub-shoulder length and stops shaving and smiles beatifically and hands you a big fat joint. xo. ** Maria, Isabella, Camila, Malaria, Gabriela, My eyes are so, so peeled. I don’t like mermaids either, and mermen are even worse. 20 hours, ouch! ** Brian, Hey, Brian. Thanks, bud. That comparative idea is of course a very interesting idea. And, yeah, I’ve never seen anyone ever pit those two together. So, should that settle in as your choice, I think you’ve got a winner. But, obviously, take your time and nail your favorite idea. Huh, interesting about ‘Pickpocket’s’ non-impact. It’s many people’s favorite Bresson, and I completely understand why, and I think it’s insanely great, but, as a fellow lover of the later Bresson, I can understand why it might have seemed a bit cold and crisp. Have you seen ‘A Man Escaped’? It might have the same effect since it’s earlier and b&w, but it’s pretty incredible. I hope your four hour class felt like one hour but was as rich with fascinating things as a whole lifetime. Fat chance of that, I’m guessing? ** Okay. Today I’ve turned the blog into a kind of cemetery, I guess. See you tomorrow.