Grieve with a View

Public housing in Singapore is scrupulously maintained so as to preserve ethnic quotas per floor, with no clear predominance of one group over another. However, the huge cemeteries (necropolises) in the far west of the island are equally scrupulously in the separation of their denizens according to faith. 

To paraphrase L. P. Hartley: death is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

In art depictions of the dead usually serve to reassure the living that they are safe, which is not difficult as audiences are rarely anything other than safe.

Slide: Picasso's Vollard Suite: Gladiators

More unusually, death is implied as a place to go to and perhaps return from.

Slide: Arnold Bocklin, Isle of the Dead

In the film Orphˇe, by that arch melancholic Jean Cocteau, death is a portrayed as a place in which it is even possible to set up a radio station and broadcast signals to the living.

Slide: Orphˇe

This idea was taken to sublime extremes by the International Necronautical Society who regard death as territory ripe for conquest. Their manifesto reads thus:

1.That death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonize and, eventually, inhabit.

2. That there is no beauty without death, its immanence. We shall sing death's beauty - that is, beauty.

Regarding their second point of credo, it has been observed that the root cause of age-death in animal cells is oxidization, the same process that turns iron into rust and willow into charcoal. It seems therefore quite reasonable to regard life as a fire whose livid incandescence pre-determines its own demise.
 
Their first point of credo is more perverse. It is compelling, but only because it is not achievable. We can go to the moon and come back with samples, photographs and perhaps one day even snow globes, but the two immutables that we all share: gender and mortality, are beyond tourism. We may photograph them but we can not go there and photograph them.

It is interesting that the International Necronautical Society frame their enquiry into death as an act of colonization. This betrays a lack of sensitivity towards the incumbent denizens, flora and fauna and promises a future where alien ways of doing things are grafted over the native. To colonize death, therefore, would be to turn it into a form of life.

I am a member of the art collective Grieve Perspective, the others being artist and curator Gual-Liang Tan, filmmaker Charles Lim and historian Adele Tan. 

In our short video loop 'The Life I Live...' a piece of text revolves around the figure of a girl. The text reads thus:
'The life I live is a special kind of life. It is black and its name is death. The quick they dance without me but that is there right (and their duty) and I would not have it any other way'

It is difficult to talk about what intensions we had when making our work as the particular terms of our collective means that they are rarely examined and an hysteric flavor imbues much of our authorship.

It is much easier to speak of our work in the manner of a post-mortem: as a corpse from which facts are culled, observations are made and larger creative vectors determined. I shall also take the cue from the International Necronautical Society and present our work as an enquiry into death as a place that requires celebration.