Deaths of the Artists
Bas Jan Ader, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Aubrey Beardsley, Chris Burden, Keith Haring, Eva Hesse, Yves Klein, Édouard Manet, Ana Mendieta, Amedeo Modigliani, Pierre Molinier, Jackson Pollock, Egon Schiele, Georges Seurat, Robert Smithson, Vincent van Gogh, Andy Warhol, and Francesca Woodman. Match the names to their epitaphs.
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22, suicide by defenestration. Said, ‘You cannot see me from where I look at myself.’
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25, tuberculosis. Dandy. Said, ‘I have one aim, the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing.’
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27, heroin overdose. His tag was a crown.
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28, Spanish flu. Said, ‘He who denies sex is a filthy person who smears in the lowest way his own parents who have begotten him.’
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31, meningitis. Said, ‘Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.’
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32, AIDS. ‘Crack is wack.’
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33, presumed lost at sea. Emo.
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34, from his third heart attack in two months. Said, ‘Blue has no dimensions.’
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34, brain tumours. Said, ‘Don’t ask what the work is. Rather, see what the work does.’
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35, plane crash. Said, ‘Abstraction is everybody’s zero but nobody’s nought.’
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35, tubercular meningitis. His widow—eight months pregnant with the couple’s second child—committed suicide by defenestration the following day.
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36, fell from her thirty-fourth-floor apartment. Her artist husband of eight months was acquitted—twice. In one of her performances, she had held a freshly decapitated chicken by its feet as its blood spattered her naked body.
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37, probable suicide, by gunshot. Said, ‘The sight of the stars makes me dream.’
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44, car crash. Said, ‘I am nature.’
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51, eleven days after his gangrenous left foot was amputated due to complications with syphilis and rheumatism. Painted a dead toreador.
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58, arrhythmia, following a routine gall-bladder operation. Said, ‘Death is the most convenient time to tax rich people.’
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69, melanoma, after near misses with gun and electrocution, and being crucified on a car. Said, ‘Nail me to my car and I’ll tell you who you are.’
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75, suicide by hanging. The note said, ‘I’m taking my life. The key is with the concierge.’
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Answers here.
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[IMAGE: Vincent Van Gogh Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette c.1885–6]
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I’ve always loved Melvin Sokolsky’s fashion-photo series The Bubble, published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1963. It seems especially resonant right now, with us all in our bubbles. Model Simone d’Aillencourt floats through Paris, encased in a Plexiglass ball. She appears to be at once inside and outside the scene, an object of the gaze yet also the embodiment of the gaze within the image—like us, a tourist.
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Franz Erhard Walther could be the poster boy for social distancing. I first saw his work in Wild, Visionary, Spectral: New German Art at Wellington’s Shed 11 in 1986. Since the 1960s, he’s been making minimalist-looking fabric objects for gallery goers to occupy and articulate. With their openings, fastenings, and straps, they are less sculptures than activities—performance scores. His body bags regiment populations into lines, shapes, patterns, tableaux, while his wall-mounted fabric works hybridise clothing and architecture. Restricting, yet benign, and often rather cosy, his social activities suggest social structures, cataloguing permutations of independence and interdependence—like snapshots of group dynamics. But Walther’s work is never an orgy. He doesn’t press bodies together, insisting on respectful distance, equal personal space. Indeed, his works are all about getting together without touching. Now, with the pandemic, much of it looks like experimental social-distancing technology. Check out his Tate Shots video.
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