Artists in Pursuit of Death

I’m reading a really interesting book at the mo called ‘Short Lives’: Portraits of Writers, Painters, Poets, Actors, Musicians and Performers in Pursuit of Death, by Katinka Matson.

Matson doesn’t attempt to theorize as to why these people appeared to be haunted and hounded by the black dog of self destructiveness and depression all their lives, she just gives a concise biography, and lets these people talk for themselves through her superb selection of quotes.

Artaud, Lenny Bruce, Chatterton, James Dean, Billie Holiday, Kerouac, Modigliani, Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath, Van Gogh, Dylan Thomas – all the most notorious iconic cadavers are there. As the book was printed in ‘81 a new edition may include Kurt Cobain, and of course, most recently Michael Jackson and many others.

All these people created beautiful artworks, poetry and music, entertained and educated the wider population to other ways of seeing the world and themselves. They made a lot of people very happy by spending most of their own lives very unhappy.

We seem to have a very weird relationship with artists in the West, we feed off their disaffection with life, their pursuit of death. They appear to be necessary human sacrifices, the acceptable casualties for the overall stability and psychic evolution of society. They appear to be condemned to articulate and universalise our suffering.

We are often suspicious of artists who haven’t paid their existential dues, who don’t appear to suffer for their art. I suppose we’re all still a bunch of Romantics at heart, or is it something deeper?

I think its interesting that Damien Hirst has been the most successful artist on the scene for a number of years now, and although he is very far from the traditional stereotype of the tortured soul, his work deals explicitly with death and decay. His greatest influence, Francis Bacon is also notorious for describing the human form as a dismembered slab of meat in a butchers shop.

Picasso lived until he was 93, pleasured a shed-load of women half his age, was the richest artist to have ever lived, but hey, at least he had his Blue period and later Guernica: women and children being annihilated by Nazi bombers – his trademark piece so to speak.

Does the most cathartic and influential art, especially in the modern era (subjective I know) have to involve some kind of personal suffering on the part of the artist, does it have to be in pursuit of death in an explicit way to resonate with something deep inside us?

Van Gogh painted nature and people in vibrant rich colours, exploding with the life force, but would we just say: ‘that’s a pretty picture’ if we didn’t know he cut his ear off (well the lobe), and remember Kirk Douglas’s hammy ravings in the movie ‘Lust for Life’?

If Prozac had been invented a few centuries earlier, would Romanticism and Modernism have happened at all?

I do wonder if a large number of these notorious sufferers were in fact driven by an interior aspect of themselves. A naughty Demon or Daemon who from childhood onwards, tossed them a few juicy carrots of universal enlightenment, from which they were enslaved until death. (Nod to Anthony Peake here.)

They knew at a conscious level, what most people only sense at the most subliminal level – death is a transition, a consolidation, a graduation to another state of experience.

Do they, and did they feel a sense of urgency? Their lives appear to be an exercise in perceptual and emotional ‘cramming’. They’re like precocious students lost in a sea of books the night before their ‘finals’. The hour is always late.

If Rolf Harris had been born with a death wish wouldn’t his work be on permanent display in Tate Modern or MoMa? Or does ‘Two little boys’ really indicate a preoccupation with the existential emptiness of even the most personal of relationships?