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"The rest is silence"
Death and the skull in contemporary art
$80Limited edition 250
80 page full colour hard covered book with
skull images and stories by over 100 artists in
the exhibition
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Artist and DBK intern Dani Hakim has compiled a fabulous array of skull artworks on our blog : http://www.deathbekind.blogspot.com
as well as obtaining copyright to reproduce a number of the images in book
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essays by
Helen MacDonald, Christine Schmidt, David McInnis & Helen Hughes
ORDER BOOK
Order before December 11 and receive your book in early February 2012
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ZINE COVER
Alex Rizkalla, Catherine Clover, Ceri Hann, Claire Lambe, Dani Hakim, David Lawrey & Jaki Middleton, Deborah Kelly, Elvis Richardson, Greg Richards, Louise Paramor, Michael Needham, Nana Ohnesorge, Nat Thomas, Nikos Pantazopoulos, Nick Waddell, Nicki Wynnychuk, Raafat Ishak, Raquel Ormella, Sadie Chandler, Sarah CrowEST, Sarah Goffman, Simon Zoric, Stephen Garrett, Toby Pola, Veronica Kent and in the office space Jane Brown
At the intersection of sculpture and death we find the funerary monument - a structure that is created to commemorate a person or important event. Ancient monuments such as the Egyptian pyramids, the Chinese terracotta army or the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus in Turkey are all giant tombs. A casual walk through your local city cemetery is a journey through sculptures history as marble and concrete express religious, social/political, economic and aesthetic conditions.
The small scale works in MONUMENTAL EFFECT occupy the space on top of twenty-six grey plinth/stelae arranged in a skewed grid formation in the gallery space. Lest we forget the numerous war memorials in Australia that occupy prime public space in our cities, suburbs and towns. This exhibition looks to Germany were a voracious and ever expanding memorial culture exists. Currently there are several hundred plans in development for Holocaust monuments or memorial sites all over Germany.
The plinths in this exhibition have been modelled as a detail of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Peter Eisenman. Consisting of 2711 concrete slabs of various heights located over a city block in Berlin, Eisenman calls the minimal hard edged forms ‘stelea’ which refers to ancient vertical carved funerary monuments.Andreas Huyssen describes Germany as labouring under the reproach of forgetting or repressing their historical past in his essay Monumental Seduction. He asks “how do we read this obsession with monuments that in itself is only part of a much larger memory boom that has gripped not just Germany”.
The works in this exhibition utilize scale, materials and processes to question ideas of monumental in contemporary culture and art. Have traditional meanings of the monumental been knocked from their plinths in favour of the temporal, the assembled and the found?
The miniature reconfigures the monumental in intimate personal scale. Reduced and reproduced in a mommento, keepsake or souvenir or venerated as a relic on public display. Rememberance is the monuments central role, generational memory, national memory and personal memory.
In 1927 Robert Musil suggested that for the society for which the monument was erected, familiarity undermined the monuments purpose. In his famous essay Monuments his quotable statement “there is nothing so invisible as a monument” suggests the monument is more an object of forgetting than remembering.
Claire Lambe & Elvis Richardson
June 29-July 25 2010
For the first exhibition of DEATH BE KIND Claire Lambe and Elvis Richardson in collaboration present The Memorial an elaborate display-case housing a collection of beloved objects that once belonged to a deceased relative, friend, acquaintance or lover chosen by over 100 people from all walks of life who have kindly participated in this project and a zine catalogueing the objects.
The Memorial presentation is reminiscent of the small private museum and employs the language of display to create symbiotic dialogues through the relational placement of the works. A complex display case has been constructed so as to elevate the importance and meanings of the beloved objects and gently navigate the viewers experience of the gallery space.
The Memorial retells the stories behind the objects that we keep to evoke memory of the deceased, how these objects maintain ongoing relationship with the dead, and how these material possessions remain important in memory making. Each object has been documented and texts collected from the holder about their object to create a catalogue of texts that caption the objects personal meanings in a zine.
Zine also features writers Morgan Fayle, David Luker and Ruth Learner and artist Marina Lutz.All images are of the memorial cabinet and objects installed at DEATH BE KIND. Photo: Joseph Lambe
Opening Hours
Friday 6-8pm
Saturday + Sunday 2-6pm
or by appointment
ER: 0401346520
CL: 0448 381 651
Upstairs @
THE ALDERMAN
134 Lygon Street
Brunswick VIC 3056