The Daily Undertaker, The Variety and Importance of Ritual

Showing posts with label death. Show all posts

Sunday, November 3, 2013

The Beautiful Death: Photos by Izima Kaoru

3/29/2009

Izima Kaoru: Landscapes With a Corpse

From the series "Tominaga Ai wears Prada"

http://www.galerieandreasbinder.de

In my experience, death is never glamorous. The reality of our physical ends has too much to do with our earthly origins and functions to be attractive. I recall reading in Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, the story of a movie star in the 1940s, whose career had gone south on her. She desired a glamorous end, and so, dressed all in white lace, in perfect makeup, on a beautiful white bed in a beautifully appointed room, she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. However, instead of turning into Snow White for the newspapers, sickness came before death and she died in the bathroom in a decidedly un-photogenic state.

Cautionary stories aside, death is something that needs to be pondered, meditated upon and accepted. Perhaps those of us in the West can gain something from the Buddhist concept of death and life as two equally important parts of the same whole. In our culture we concentrate only on the life and deny the death. Perhaps by contemplating, since we each must one day die, what our ideal moment and place for death would be - even what we'd like to be wearing, we can gain a perspective that will enrich our experience and deal honestly and creatively with what is certain to come to us all.

To this end, I am happy to share selections from the series 'Landscapes with a Corpse" by photographer Izima Kaoru. This work has challenged me to examine my ideas about death, the effects and significance of death on the world around us, and the significance of my own death and it's consequences. The text and photos are taken from the Andreas Binder Gallery, which represents Mr. Kaoru

From the series "Kuroki Meisa wears Gucci"

http://www.galerieandreasbinder.de

Izima Kaoru encourages his female models to develop their own ideas about their transience and their death and translates these ideas into photographs. This eventually led to a series that was totally focused on the requests of his models and the scenario of death. Based on classic depictions of landscapes and interiors, each of his highly aesthetic photographs gradually zooms in on the victim who died in perfect beauty, even down to a detailed close-up of her face..

From the series "Erin O´Connor wears Vivienne Westwood"

http://www.galerieandreasbinder.de

Apart from the victim, all his scenarios are completely without humans, whether they are secluded streets, landscapes or rooms. They are devoid of any form of life, and nothing else exists. The viewer first experiences this state of desertion through a photograph taken from a distance. We are under the impression that the dead woman is looking at her own body, which is no more than a shell. Death is celebrated by Izima Kaoru in style, as a special event. In doing so he refers to three classic genres: Japanese landscape photographs with the traditional aesthetic element of transience, scene-of-crime photos with their documentary quality - an influence that cannot be denied in Kaoru's scenes - and fashion photography "with its demonstratively erotic and situational artificiality"

From the series "Koike Eiko wears Gianni Versace"

http://www.galerieandreasbinder.de

Izima Kaoru himself puts it like this: "Death is inevitable for everyone. Even the fear of death can hardly be avoided by anyone. Nevertheless, it is possible to come to terms with death or with the idea of dying, to work through it in a lengthy process and ultimately to accept it."

In Buddhism the practice of meditating on death is seen as a means of detaching oneself from the diversions of life. Izima Kaoru’s models hardly present themselves as renouncing life, yet Izima does ask us to consider that feigning death will help them towards accepting it. Whether this is correct or not, it is certainly true that death is seen differently in traditional Japanese culture than in the West.

To understand the context of these photographic series, we need to grasp the artist's method of depiction: he certainly does not see himself as a reporter or photographer who wishes to illustrate reports on unusual deaths or human relationship dramas through the presentation of shocking imagery. Rather, he wants to stage death in the context of enticement and temptation and to do so with attention to the most minute detail. He has well and truly mastered the art of depiction. Obviously, his scenes of death in these “Landscapes with a Corpse” are imaginary. Yet they refer to a long tradition of romantic themes, tragic ends and "beautiful deaths".

for more of the photos and the text, visit http://www.galerieandreasbinder.de

Saturday, February 4, 2012

The Great Majority

Life is the desert, life the solitude;
Death joins us to the great majority.

- Edward Young 1721

Long before English Poet, Edward Young wrote those words in his play The Revenge, the great majority, was a common idiom referring to the dead. There had simply been many more people who had died than were currently living. Life was a side show to the real event, and when we died, we entered the big tent. Perhaps it is easier for us in the New World to forget this home truth than it is in more continually populated places in the world, where one literally cannot take a step that was not trod by countless deceased predecessors. As bracing as this thought is, it puts our human situation into sharp focus.

Now we have another bracing thought. As our population skyrockets, will there come a day when there are more of us alive than have ever died? Is that day here?

BBC news published an article yesterday that does the math for us. Many very interesting variables are taken into account, but visit the article yourself to appreciate what goes into the equations. The numbers come out like this; currently there are approximately seven billion of us alive. A whopping big number, and more that have ever walked the earth at once, but calculations also reveal that over 107 billion have come before us. This is certainly an overwhelming majority, and one that the earth's resources could never maintain at once. Souls aside, that's a hell of a lot of dead people. In order for that many bodies to have been absorbed by the earth, some serious recycling has been going on. The building blocks of all of those bodies must be all around us and may even be a great majority of what makes up our own bodies.

Which brings us to another bracing thought, and another quote; this time from George Romero, creator of the Living Dead series, and pioneer of the zombie genre.

When there's no more room in hell,

the dead will walk the earth.

-George Romero 1978

In light of the BBC article, Romero seems to have gotten things backward, since there seems to be much more room for the dead in hell than there is on earth. But what does this staggering number mean to us metaphysically? We may accept that a higher power can make a place for a million souls, and it requires only a small additional leap of faith after that to accept that there is room for over a hundred billion in the hereafter. But what happens when the saints come marching in? How do I find grandpa when I get to heaven, hold up a sign?

There is some comfort in the idea of reincarnation. That could go a long way to explaining where everyone is coming from and going to; it would mean that there is a more fixed number of souls that keep passing through, resulting in a much smaller number of dead. If this is the case, however, how did we go from 500 million in 1500 AD up to seven billion in 2011? Unless we've got an ever increasing number of new souls, it doesn't look like our chances of breaking out of the cycle are very promising.

These are questions that are clearly beyond me, so let's come back where we started. Life may not be the desert of solitude that it once was, now that seven billion of us walk the earth, but we're still just a sideline. The great majority is still on the other side. Let's hope they stay there!

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Space Constraints in Urban Asia Prompt a Shift in Ritual and Memorialization

Lily Kong, a geographer at the National University of Singapore, describes how commemorative practices in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China have changed in response to shrinking amounts of physical space for the dead. These shifts — from earthly graves to cremation, and now to scattered ashes and even online memorials — mark a graduation from "spatial competition to spatial compression and then to spatial transcendence," -The Challenges of Burying The Dead in Urban Asia, The Atlantic Cities, Eric Jaffe

What is evident from existing studies is that death practices and deathscapes have evolved over time in a number of Asian cities. ... As a consequence, sacred space and sacred time have been reconceptualised and rituals have been (re)invented to suit conditions of modernity while addressing abiding belief systems. -Urban Studies, Lily Kong

This change in rituals, moving from the physical to the virtual through the use of memorial websites vividly demonstrates both the need for ritual and the ways that traditions adapt to new circumstances. Visit Atlantic Cities for Mr. Jaffee's full piece, and if you have access to Sage Journals, please take a look at Ms. Kong's Article.