When asked about his approach towards death at a press conference, Woody Allen replied ‘I am completely against it’. Can a person of sound mind be against death? This statement makes absolutely no sense, death cannot be escaped. Well, both life and death make no sense – this is what the famous American director, a lover of Søren Kierkegaard and Ingmar Bergman, seems to be saying. In his films this basic truth is realised by everybody except for the few lucky ones gifted with a naive belief in sense. Ignorance is bliss, as the English say.
In the famous classicistic painting kept in the Louvre, Et in Arcadia ego (1638-1640) by the seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin, a group of shepherds comes across an ancient tomb. There is a mysterious inscription on it, entailed in the painting’s title: Et in Arcadia ego. This engraving, a quotation from Virgil, is a typical Latin ellipsis, an incomplete sentence – the predicate is missing, we don’t know who is hiding behind the speaking ‘I’ (ego). It can be translated in at least two ways: ‘I, the person lying in the grave, lived in Arcadia’, but also ‘And I, death, am present in Arcadia’. Erwin Panofsky, a famous art historian and creator of iconography, was in favour of the latter interpretation in his article on the painting. In the face of the mysterious inscription the shepherds slip into reverie. They accept the vision of inevitable death with stoic resignation. Even Arcadia, the mythical land of happiness where it’s always summer and the shepherds joyfully drink and dance, isn’t free from death…
Robert Kuśmirowski, an artist famous for creating impeccable mockups of objects using styrofoam, paint, or papier-mâché, creates an anti-image of Arcadian utopia. Viewers are confronted with the image of a forgotten cemetery. What vision does it convey?
Kuśmirowski built his cemetery in small gallery spaces – Johnen Galerie in Berlin (2004) and Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw (2004). This is what the effect of surprise stems from – the vision of an old cemetery becomes embodied in a clean modernist white cube. The viewers are separated from the necropolis by a brick fence and a rusted gate. Plaster from between the bricks has crumbled, but the fence is still standing and effectively protects the realm of the dead. It is further delimited by white walls. It’s only a fragment of a bigger vision, possible to view only from one perspective. The surroundings force us to assume that we’re dealing with a mockup. Its falseness is hidden behind the three-dimensional image.
The artist deliberately exploits contrast – the functional, clean architecture is juxtaposed with the disorder ruling the realm of the dead. The living have forgotten them long ago, just like they’ve forgotten the place of burial; nobody takes care of the tombs anymore. The statues, probably from the 18th or 19th century, are tilted and fractured – time has crumbled the stone, blurred the carved inscriptions, and broken the arms of the crosses. Together with them faded the memory of the names, surnames, dates of birth and death. Yellowed grave plaques show faintly in a few tombs. It’s a grim view, dually morbid. It’s a view of forgotten death. It seems like the cemetery underwent a catastrophe. There is no living greenery, the soil is cracked clay, as if there’s just been a flood or a great downpour.
On the one hand Kuśmirowski creates a viable mockup of reality, on the other – it seems it’s closer to film depictions of cemeteries, known from horror films or Disney cartoons, than to real necropoleis. In the world of cinema the artist may be referring to, death occurs either with such intensity that it ceases to be treated seriously, or is simply impossible – a blow on the head with the heaviest hammer is unable to kill off the characters of children’s films; they always emerge alive in the next scene. It’s as if the authors of these productions agreed with Woody Allen on that: ‘Death? I disagree. I veto’.
Kuśmirowski’s vision is an exaggerated image; it’s excessive, more of a film set than a portrayal of reality. Is this what death boils down to today? To a kitschy (even if three-dimensional) image? Is the contemporary image of death tantamount to zombies living in horror films?
It seems that Woody Allen encapsulated the escapist approach to death prevailing in postmodern contemporaneity in his laconic utterance. Despite its ubiquity – without it, the news wouldn’t exist, and the higher the number of casualties the more interesting the news is – death is growing taboo, disappearing from everyday life, isolated from public display. But it is the fact of human mortality that shapes our culture to a large degree. As Zygmunt Bauman wrote in his essay Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies:
It is because we are aware of mortality that we preserve the past and create the future. Mortality is ours without asking – but immortality is something we must build ourselves. … Without mortality, no history, no culture – no humanity.
Meanwhile, the postmodern life strategy:
…attempts to resolve (in fact, to dispose of) the haunting issue of survival by making it less haunting or not haunting at all … It does not allow the finality of time to worry the living; and it attempts to do it, mainly, by slicing time (all of it, every shred of it, without residue) into short-lived, evanescent episodes. It deprives mortality of its vile terror by taking it out of hiding, and tossing it into the realm of the familiar and the ordinary -- to be practised there day in, day out. Daily life becomes a perpetual dress rehearsal of death.
Yet the Gothic novel is the prototype of horror films, and in the field of visual arts its roots can be tracked back to Romantic paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, who used landscapes and natural scenery as a medium for religious, eschatological, or vanitas vanitatum meanings. He was familiar with the image of a Romantic cemetery – secluded, hidden in the mountains, forgotten, destroyed by time, covered with snow.
Interpreters of Robert Kuśmirowski’s work point to an intriguing aspect of his pieces – we’re dealing with something which looks like a real object, but isn’t one. At the same time the fact that we know it is crafted by hand, and not a mechanical copy, gives it an extraordinary aura, as if it were ‘more real’. As Jarosław Suchan wrote:
The great effort put into Kuśmirowski’s pieces, which in the time of quick and simple reproduction techniques may seem extravagant, is therefore securing the counterfeits in the real world – only to subsequently make its realness less obvious. If counterfeits can be incorporated into reality so perfectly, who will ensure us that this reality as such isn’t one huge counterfeit?
Creating his mockups Kuśmirowski blends the borders between what is real and what is false, but also between what is temporary and what is permanent.
As Bauman notices, ‘Of all adversities of earthly existence, death soon emerged as the most persistent and indifferent to human effort’. Poussin agrees with him: ‘Yes, death is present even in Arcadia’. Allen says ‘check’. And Kuśmirowski, as the title, a common tomb inscription, D.O.M., suggests, safely dedicates his piece to Deo Optimo Maximo – to God, most good, most great.
Author: Karol Sienkiewicz, March 2011, translated by Natalia Sajewicz, August 2016
Robert Kuśmirowski
D.O.M.
installation
2004