Monthly archives of “October 2014”

October 5, 2014
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Remember you will die

The project’s art-historical references are object-based Memento Mori (the Latin phrase means “Remember that you are mortal”, “Remember you will die) and Vanitas genres. These works remind viewers of their own mortality, and are epitomised by “Untitled: Model Head Life one half. Death the other”, held in the Wellcome Trust’s Permanent Collection.

Such works became popular in the seventeenth century, when most believed that earthly life was preparation for Divine Judgement, Heaven, Hell and salvation of the soul. These ideas brought death to the forefront of consciousness. Artists produced self-portraits depicting themselves holding a skull, or with a skull nearby. Vanitas is Latin for “emptiness” and alludes to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of vanity.

In our project there is a reflexive spiral embodied by the objects that we will produce: vanitas works function to make viewer consider the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death. We will take such contemplation as central to the means by which we produce the work, and the final work will literally represent such contemplation.

October 5, 2014
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The embodied brain

One of the features of realised human life is ‘embodiment’ – a sense of being fully situated within one’s bodily experience. This can be contrasted with different degrees of ‘dis-embodiment’ – a psychological dissociation from the body as the site of pain, trauma and suffering, which, in an existential analysis, can be seen as being driven by the fear of death, of the body’s impermanence.

It is this ‘situatedness in the body’ or the lack of it, that radically changes in the process of dying and death. The meditations that I will undertake can be seen from the perspective of awareness practices – key to meditation training – contemplation of death both as the impermanence of the body, and as the change in the relationship of one’s awareness of one’s body.

Our research explores changes in functional connectivity patterns in the areas of the brain known to process body awareness and sense of oneself as an embodied subject, and considers how these changes affect the dynamics between the two major networks, intrinsic and extrinsic, in the brain.

For more on this and related research, please see Zoran Josipovic’s site with links his papers.

October 5, 2014
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Anatomy of desire: part 1

It is not uncommon to find anatomical wax works and vanitas depicting women that are sexualised. This is less unnerving when we look at mannequins like  this Victorian 1900 wax boudoir mannequin bust from France. It was made with real glass blown eyes and porcelain teeth. The long blond hair is human and implanted, as are the eyelashes and eyebrows. However, the “Anatomical Venuses” those life-sized wax anatomical models of idealized women made on the 1700s are both seductive and horrifying, arguably more horrifying because they are seductively posed and coloured.

The artist Zoe Leonard’s Anatomical Model of a Woman’s Head Crying, 1993 is one of a series of works made as she tries to capture the desire and horror expressed in these works.
“I first saw a picture of the anatomical wax model of a woman with pearls in a guidebook on Vienna. She struck a chord in me. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She seemed to contain all I wanted to say at that moment, about feeling gutted, displayed. Caught as an object of desire and horror at the same time. She also seemed relevant to me in terms of medical history, a gaping example of sexism in medicine. The perversity of those pearls, that long blond hair. I went on with this work even though it is gory and depressing because the images seem to reveal so much.”–Zoe Leonard, Journal of Contemporary Art”