The Ultimate Inarguable: Death a Self Portrait at the Wellcome Collection

Der Tod als Erwürger (1851) by Alfred Reth

Perhaps the skull symbolises the abrupt cul-de-sac at which the blithe delusion of eternity must halt: the face, gums, uvula and brain deliquesce to leave evidence of faunal existence in a near imperishable masque that traverses the centuries; to reassure us that we will become enduring, grinning remnants of the novel contraptions that we are now. When you enter the door marked Death: A Self Portrait at the Wellcome Collection, the popularity of the skull makes sense: it can be frightening, it is frequently funny, and symbolically it rivals the heart-shape and cross, while representing something more universal than love or sacrifice. It epitomizes the ultimate inarguable. 

Antikamnia Calendar 1897 ‘The Diagnosis’ Louis Crucius

As you ponder these thoughts, you traverse the danse macabre of exhibits- etchings, paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations- engulfed in a phantasmagoria of skulls and bones, and then you hear the voice. As you gawp in horror at Otto Dix’s grotesque 1920s war cartoons, you notice that the voice becomes more persistent. It isn’t, as you first thought, the long-winded punter that was droning on and on, while you were gazing with amusement at Kawanabe Kyosai’s Frolicking Skeletons. It must be some sort of installation or something. As you progress past the sinister, wooden-faced Indonesian Tau Tau– that looks as if it may come to life the minute you look away-  the voice becomes louder, until you witness its source on a flat television screen. You feel the Tau Tau’s implacable glare burning into your back as you finally  put a face to the voice, and a name to the face of collector and 21st century psychopomp Richard Harris– the source of this grisly miscellany- speaking with chirpy cheer about his collection of Death. By the time you become acquainted  with the countenance  of this improbably breezy eccentric, you are aware of the bones behind the skin and flesh of his face, and his resemblance to St Jerome, the anchorite whose image appears more than once in this his considerable  memento mori.

Dana Salvo, from the series The Day, the Night and the Dead. 1990-2004

You look about you to find that you are in a sort of mortality departure lounge: volumes on Death, armchairs upon which to read them, and a highly affecting wall chart where David McCandless’ proportionate, circular diagrams- of what killed millions of us in the twentieth century- interrupt the breathing and arrest the attention. Here you learn that lung cancer is the lord of all cancer (93 million), that the papal condom edicts account for the loss of 2 million lives and Communism’s domination of Russia and China is the biggest ideological killer (94 million). As you leave you are confronted by the gruesome enchantment of Jody Carey’s In the Eyes of Others, a vast chandelier constructed entirely of human bone.

Jody Carey ‘In the Eyes of Others’ 2009

Maybe Mr Harris seems so peaceable because he spends his life in an obsessive collector’s meditation on the end. Maybe he has discovered that if Death is kept close it can become a friend, a guardian angel, a higher power in which one can invest religious or apostatical faith. My growing feeling in the exhibition was that Death itself wouldn’t be an issue, but that the manner of dying would likely  amount to an annoyance, an inconvenience or a bore. Its inevitability, the non-existence of anywhere to run, my new awareness of the eternity in my bones- despite the ephemerality of my flesh- make it something I may as well embrace and befriend, the way it already has me. Death is no respecter of persons, it is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. Who knows? It was probably even Death that actually said, “Let there be light!” and there was Death.

Tete de Mort postcard, c1900 © The Richard Harris Collection

Death’s reach resounds in our  faceoff with John Isaacs’ merciless installation, Are You Still Mad at Me, a dissolving cadaver sat atop an enormous parcel, to which a portrait of a weeping blonde girl is affixed- it surprises me that I can’t smell its decomposition. Death is gleeful in its scope, as it serenades Cholera by playing thigh bones like a fiddle- at the scene of her outbreak at the French court in Alfred Rethel’s  Der Tod als Erwürger (1851). It is the ineluctable force behind the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as they forge a malevolent charge across Albrecht Dürer’s etched apocalyptic wasteland. It is the ubiquitous visitor to unassuming Mexican abodes in Dana Salvo’s photography from his The Day, the Night and the Dead series. It is the all American comedian patiently awaiting the last laugh in the unwitting prophecy of Louis Crucius’ Antikamnia calendar.

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, ca. 1497–98
Albrecht Dürer

I relax in this exhibition: I experience amusement at my adornment; I become newly aware of my skeleton’s resilience; I let go and I let Death; I feel every bone in my body and bid my flesh and my organs a necessary goodbye. As we complete our brush with Death through the ages, my partner sighs that he is “All deathed out.” I smile and think to myself, “Not quite yet.”

John Isaacs ‘Are You Still Mad at Me?’ 2009