| This world was never meant for one as beautiful as me: |
| Artistic Suicide and the Blunting of the Avant-Garde |
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| Foolish man, what do you bemoan, and what do you fear? Wherever you look there is an end of evils. You see that yawning precipice? It leads to liberty. You see that flood, that river, that well? Liberty houses within them. You see that stunted, parched and sorry tree? From each branch liberty hangs. Your neck, your throat, your heart are all so many ways of escape from slavery... Do you enquire the road to freedom? You shall find it in every vein of your body. | ||||||||||||||||
| --Seneca | ||||||||||||||||
 he history of modern culture can readily be understood as a willful and progressive dismantling of personality by means of the isolation and atomization of its constituent elements. This is most tangibly perceived via metaphor in works of art, literature, theatre, music, etc., where clearly discernible waves of disintegration have regularly washed over our hapless languages to the predictable dismay of guardians of the status quo and last year's barbarians alike; but the case can certainly be made that the very structures of our being, social, psychological, spiritual, and physical, are analogously engaged in this deliberate self-pulping.The pacing of this all-dissolving tide is by necessity incremental--each disruption must be intelligible enough that it is recognized as such by a quorum of consensus purveyors, and not universally dismissed as just plain crazy talk. Nevertheless, logical extremes of certain tendencies may be glimpsed by visionaries (Kurt Schwitter's ultimate concrete text-sound poem, the entire score of which was 'W') or derived by dogged rationalization. In this latter category, it may come as something of a surprise that, at the time of my writing and to the best of my knowledge, no-one has actually committed suicide as a work of art. What got me thinking about this again most recently was Timothy Leary's posthumous book Design for Dying. Technically speaking, Dr. Tim can't quite be called an artist, at least not by prevailing community standards. But anyone who got kicked out of West Point for throwing a brick through a storefront window to steal beer and fired from a full professorship at Harvard for 'failure to attend a graduate committee meeting' (i.e. for publicly advocating the use of psychedelic drugs in non-clinical settings) can't be all bad. Furthermore, he attributes the inspiration to treat his own death as a media performance event to Dali's bathetic drawn out croak. When Dr. Leary learned he had a terminal and inoperable cancer of the prostate, he made a public statement to the effect that he would be approaching the experience with the same experimental enthusiasm he had brought to previous researches, in that he would treat his death as a cause for celebration, self-medicate until the end, decide on the circumstances and time of his death, transmit the entire proceedings, live and otherwise, over the internet, and finally order his corpse be decapitated and the head cryogenically preserved for future revival, perhaps to be reattached to Walt Disney's body. Oh Brave New World that has such creatures in it! While almost none of this happened according to plan, and Leary didn't end up needing to expedite his departure at all, his always savvy handling of the media made it moot: the public response was in essence the same. The concept of conscious self-destruction, while superficially shocking, plays to a deep psycho-spiritual craving and touches a nerve of thrilled foreboding in contemporary humanity. By this I mean to say a sense of unspeakable inevitability that surrounds acts such as those of Leary, Dr. Kevorkian and Heaven's Gate, which belies the shock and outrage with which these occurrences are greeted, and accounts for the curiously omnipresent yet unfulfilled meme of the artist-who-dies-for-Art. Leary's decision was, essentially, to extend the limits of creative will to encompass the manner of one's own death. He wasn't seeking to encircle Death in support of this or that position, only to bring to it the awareness and manipulation of set and setting (including the question of timing) that characterized his approach to the psychedelic experience. Couched thusly, his case is not entirely unprecedented. Leaving aside for the moment times and cultures in which the suicide taboo is less momentous, 20th century European and American culture has had an effective blossoming of auto-terminal activities. The social taboo against suicide had been waning for some time--from the peak of interdiction when Augustine deemed it the greatest of all sins and the suicide's body was desecrated and forbidden burial in Holy ground, through the gradual psychotherapeuticization of the issue, fraught with distancing pity and dubious treatments, to the morally unmoored speculations of the existentialists and onward, suicide increasingly became both more easily contemplatable, and more easily accommodated by society at large. Ultimately, the taboo came to have more in keeping with America's dread of 'losing' than with any more cosmic faux pas. The materialistic humanist drive to regard an individual as his or her own property to be made into (or disposed of) as one saw fit here reached something of a cul-de-sac. For just as the ersatz autonomy of laissez faire capitalism requires zero tolerance for overt social masochism, so a person's right to end their life must remain theoretical for the mass of gluttonous cogs in the pyramid scheme. Otherwise who will purchase all that merchandise? Nevertheless, increasing numbers of intrepid nonconformists have chosen to exercise their options, with greater or lesser degrees of attention paid to the aesthetics of the episode. Any suicide must decide at least when and where and how. Kurt Cobain shot up and wrote a note.
Other creative types whose leave-taking lacked a certain élan include Sylvia Plath, Arshile Gorky, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Rothko, Marilyn Monroe, Freddie Prinze, the Singing Nun and Guy Debord. All favored scenarios whose parameters were firmly embedded in their narcissistic self-objectification, acts of faith in the insurmountability of their woes, the immutability of their personalities, and the fullness of their understanding of this world. Not very Modern at all. Perhaps this compartmentalization, seeing their art as an ancillary aspect of their lifestyle, is what prevented solace from flowing from one domain to the other. Playing the field between art and life is no guarantee against the yearning for oblivion though, as Mr. Rauschenberg's lengthy association with Mr. Daniels attests. Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation, but from deliberation. --Sören Kierkegaard Jacques Vaché, a belle-époque dandy and major influence to both Breton and Duchamp, forsook any substantial writing and visual art in favor of obsessional sartorial and social manipulations. He is remembered for threatening an audience at a play by Apollinaire with a loaded revolver, for dressing up in elaborate disguises and refusing to acknowledge friends in the street, and for the manner of his death. Wounded in W.W.I, he had written: "I object to being killed in the war. I shall die when I want to die and then I shall die with somebody else. To die alone is boring; I should prefer to die with one of my best friends." He purportedly acted on this impulse in 1919, taking an overdose of opium and administering the same to two unsuspecting friends in their tea. While there have been doubts expressed as to the veracity of this account, for our purposes the strength of the rumor is enough to treat it as truth. While it may be objected that Vaché would have despised his suicide being referred to as 'art', and while the only indication of motive is more of a political impulse, his suicide was undoubtedly arranged as meticulously as any of his other 'creative' activities. The fact that he struck a pose of profound nihilism, pursuing absolute detachment from sensual or social phenomena, casts some doubt as to the aesthetic (or any) value that can be attached to Vaché's activities. Nevertheless, it's clear that his indifference was not fully realized, in that he relied greatly on being perceived as such, presumably by lesser minds. While this undermines his philosophical credibility, it adds credence to the artistic merit of his final act. In taking the lives of two others, Vaché raises a more disturbing aspect of the terminal arts. Like Vaché, sleazy hardcore singer-songwriter G.G. Allin, whose recordings include "Eat My Fuc" and "I Wanna Fuck Your Brains Out," and whose proactive stage sets generally included bloodspill, hurled feces, and real sexual assault, had long promised to kill himself onstage as a culmination of his principles, and to take as many audience members with him as he could. Although he set a date on a number of occasions, Allin's magnum opus was frustrated by a Michigan jail-term for stage-rape. Upon release, he could muster only enough gumption to OD on heroin in some east coast flop. The ethical issues raised by the non-consentual conscription of other sentient beings in the realization of one's snuff fantasies are too juicy for the scope of this article, as the logical extreme would be the field of Holocaust Esthetics, an entirely Other can of worms. As an extension of the domain of the will it is indisputable, but whether it can be said to be creative if it deprives others of the same choice is a question of some import. On the other hand, if you attend a concert where the performer has announced he'll be killing random members of the audience, it probably serves you right. Proto-dada boxer and poet Arthur Cravan also promised suicide as a finale to several of his public lectures, though he never delivered except in the sense that his ultimate disappearance (presumed dead) at sea was a neat summary of his incorrigible views. There is one recorded case in Victorian England of a man advertising his suicide as part of a public lecture, and delivering; but his motive lay between the destitute condition of his family and the generous box office resulting from his performance. Mere commerce! And yet, having raised it, we are obliged to address the question of enterprising self-annihilation in the arts. "Good career move." is the inescapable wag refrain whenever a celebrity bites it, or as Paul Anka notes in his 1976 song "The Painter": "When he dies and on that day, the sky's as high a price they'll pay; while he lives the price they give is small, while he lives the price they give is... small." Part of Van Gogh's legacy has been the embedding of pathologically self-destructive behavior in the culture's shared idea of what it means to be an artist. This notion has been codified and stylized in popular culture, particularly rock music, to a point where it bears almost no connection to its impetus, but has come to stand instead for an essentially conformist pressure valve at best, and perhaps a nice fashion decision. Unsurprisingly it is rock musicians, as well as film actors (or rather their estates), who have reaped the greatest financial rewards in instances of untimely demise. It apparently reassures people that the artist wasn't trying to 'put them on' and that s/he indeed suffered as they do. That, and the misguided concept that the product actually dries up when the artist dies. Just ask V. C. Andrews. Whatever the psychological or mercenary logic energizing it, the basic trope of the artist dying before their value can truly be appreciated has been familiar long enough to have been parodied in Norman Jewison's 1965 film "The Art of Love" starring Dick Van Dyke and James Garner, in which Van Dyke, an expatriate poseur artiste living in a garret with a prostitute with a heart of gold (Elke Sommers), receives a visit from his friend Garner, whereupon they inadvertently fake Van Dyke's suicide and his career takes off. Viennese actionist Rudolph Schwartzkogler's career soared after Robert Hughes fallaciously reported Dolph's penile self-amputation and cumulative self-mutilational demise. Schwartzkogler's scenes were, in fact, all staged using models and his defenestrative kaput was a martyrdom of the lowest order, staining the sidewalk near Kurt's end of the rainbow. Nevertheless, this erroneous journalistic mutation served to generate enough continued interest to provide the necessary inertia for a successful posthumous livelihood, even after the true facts of the matter came to light. The most telling element of the story, though, remains the public's easy, even eager, embrace of the possibility, patinated as it was with a film of proprietary scandalization. This highly charged reservoir of unquenched Thanatos has been non-fatally sampled elsewhere in the visual arts, most notably in the early body works of Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, et al.
But you've used up all your coupons Except the one that seems To be written on your wrists Along with several thousand dreams... Then Santa Claus comes forward That's a razor in his mitt Then he puts on his dark glasses and he shows you where to hit --Leonard Cohen, Dress Rehearsal Rag If we open the discussion to works that engage self-obliterating impulses, or even depict suicide, we encounter a flood of material from virtually all periods of Western art history, particularly from 1300 or so on. Paintings and sculptures portraying such celebrated self-murders as Socrates, Judas, Ophelia, Pyramis & Thisbe, and Cleopatra were a staple up to and into the Modern era, and the topic has continued to appear in traditional media at least as recently as Andy Warhol and Julian Schnabel. Artists can not in general be said to have ever been working in ignorance of the death wish, and in fact, may not be able to. Every mark conjures its erasure, and it is the turning point between them that the Action-Painters sought to hold to, not an entirely unheroic position in spite of the fallout of Corn. Tinguely's "Homage to New York," Gustav Metzger's acid splashed sheets of plastic, Lucio Fontana's pierced and violated canvases, Rauschenberg's "Erased de Kooning" and SRL's auto-destructive machines are only a few of the surrogate suicide mechanisms whose sacrifices echo a persistent heresy: if God manifested as Jesus for no other reason than to die, He was killing Himself. At the very least He was embodying Himself as completely as possible in a creation designed to be destroyed. One of Philip Dick's Gnostic obsessions was the idea that the god controlling what we take for reality is actually a psychotic demiurge, who only believes itself to be the Creator. Some Gnostics hold this life to be a test to see if we have enough faith to abandon it, that we are created solely for our redemptive self-negation. These surrogate suicide artists, or S.S.A.'s, in occupying the demiurge capacity, must also be understood to be working in a form of narrative illustration, in that it is contained within a category of activity labeled 'art.' On a more macroscopic scale, Lee Bonticou's disgusted withdrawal from the art world, Philip Guston's late shift to abject cartoonish figuration, Warhol's quixotic film-making career, and Tim Ebner's abandonment of post-painterly lamination for circus animal symbolism are all examples of sacrifice of a somewhat more courageous magnitude, risking accumulated art world merit and sustained creative continuity; potential career suicide, in other words, presumably an entirely less contained category of activity. In our spectrum, we are a little over half way toward the Ultra-Mishima. More corporeal art brushes with death have included John Duncan's last potent seed spent in a corpse in Mexico, the late Bob Flanagan's proposed live decomposition video feed, and Hannah Wilke's wrenching photo-documentation of her terminal cancerous decline. Rumor has it that Diane Arbus set up a tripod and camera to record her bathtub barbiturate 'n razor double whammy, but by the time the cops arrived no such evidence was present. Arbus was possessed by an unflinching empathy for the most bitter shoals of our human landscape, and if she indeed arranged to document her suicide, we have circumnavigated the fractal borders of our dark Kansas of the soul to reach our pot of gold: a consummate summation of a body of work in an act of bodily mutilation and finale. The fact that the slides got lost, however, insinuates a tone of the apocryphal urban folk tale to the scuttlebutt, lending support to our collective/teleological/determinist idea of art struggling to keep up with the sick unconscious fantasies of the species. As L. Ron Hubbard believed, "A culture is only as great as its dreams, and its dreams are dreamed by artists." Since at least the 70s, the species' dream of global suicide has been relentlessly intruding on the reassuring hot-tub of mainstream programming in the form of post-apocalyptic science-fantasy films. Such subversive fare as "Planet of the Apes," "The Bed-Sitting Room," "A Boy and His Dog," "Mad Max," and "Terminator" did as well as they did, or even were allowed to be made due to their seductive content. Communal offings such as Jonestown ('Revolutionary Suicide'), The Branch Davidians, The Solar Temple, and Heaven's Gate (we're still waiting on Elizabeth Clare Prophet) resemble paranoiac global village passion plays for the imminent Armageddon. The entire Reagan era was marketed as an elaborate tribal fiction. Of course, one must always leave the door open for sequels. The basic phenomenological problem with most of these forms of self-destruction is that they presuppose some form of continuity, whether it's merely a dreamless sleep, or a hardcore band of cut-throat survivalists eking it out in the desert, or just a world containing an audience to appreciate the absent artist's wasted genius, the ego is projecting itself into the so-called future: "They'll be sorry when I'm DEAD!" In contrast, many non-modern or non-western cultures have had collectively sanctioned and dissipated ritualized expressions of the Death instinct: Roman sword-plunging was virtually a national sport, the Mayan goddess IXTAB welcomed the strung up into frappucino heaven, and the Japanese, as usual, developed a more elegant and perverted recipe than anyone else. Yukio Mishima was already the most famous 20th century Japanese author before his spectacular 1970 seppuku, climaxing his patently theatrical attempted coup of the Japanese government with a private army of soft mercenaries, as well as his own bifurcated artistic schema, by following the ancient warrior code of Bunburyodo, which mandates correspondent Action to literary creation. Mishima had rehearsed his own death to the point of filming and starring in a movie version of his story, "Patriotism," as a renegade army lieutenant who commits hara kiri four years earlier. In addition to the careful long-term planning that obviously went into Mishima's final statement, the artist has the rare distinction of making work that is most deeply intertwined with racial and sexual issues that are today too often cash-cows for non-profits. Mishima's actions imply that he considered History to be his medium--including sexual, political, and spiritual forces--only to be harnessed to his vision. As a sheer refusal to participate in what he perceived as a degraded form of humanity, Mishima's suicide, however compromised, remains the clearest espousal of the use of one's own death as a means to reconstitute reality according to one's aesthetic criteria, a capping statement to a progression of aesthetic positions, and perhaps the closest case to the suicide-as-art ideal possible. 'Closest possible' because it's difficult to imagine a more detailed premeditation. The gap between map and territory remains unbridged, and the deed itself an act of faith in the pathetic fallacy, in the identification of one's personality, no matter how grandiose, with the Knowable, and so a mere depiction. The 'Edge' becomes a slide down the Snakes & Ladders into self-aggrandizing mediocrity. Maybe the rest is silence. But my mind keeps coming around to Timothy Leary, whose approach to suicide was not so much in imitation of his own personality, as a willingness to surrender personality in the process of orchestrating public attention towards the aesthetic possibilities of death, including self-administered. "We're here to express our autonomy and our pleasure in participating in the life process." wrote Leary. "In death the object of objectivity is extinguished." As an art form, death is unique in the implausibility of vicarious critical interpretations and Leary's open-ended post-Gödel positivism is so far the only model that doesn't seem to oblige us to remain behind to bear witness.  |
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