I have heard too many preachers, too many times, make a plug for salvation altar calls with the similar shtick, “You have no guarantee, you don’t know if you’ll leave here and get hit by a car…”  It is true and can be genuine I suppose, but it certainly comes across as a scare tactic. So I find it funny that I am so drawn to an artistic and literary genre that is sort of the medieval equivalent.

Beyond the similarity to the kind of scare tactics I resist in my own life, there is often a focus on personal morality, and while I think morality is better than immorality, it isn’t really the emphasis of the Gospel as I understand it. 

The medieval church that faced the horrors of the Black plague and the 100 years war on top of the tragically high mortality rates and short life spans developed a literary and artistic movement that continued for centuries to influence European and early Colonial culture.  The text Ars moriendi (Latin for “The Art of Dying”) and its focus on how to die “rightly” and the artistic movement of Memento Mori (remember you will die) focusing on inspiring morality in the face of our mortality, where both didactic.  The Dance Macabre as a concept, art form and theatric/pageant straddled the line between inspiring to morality and celebrating life in the face of certain and often untimely death.  All of these produced compelling art forms.

But death is a universal.  All people, all cultures, at all times are faced with death.  Egypt’s pharaohs and China’s emperors had fantastic funeral preparations. Material culture and literary evidence confirm our obsession with death back through Mesopotamia.  In fact much of what we think of as the archaeological record is because of the human tendency to prepare for death and attend to the deceased.  Each individual must square with death, and in the literary and artistic traditions of medieval Europe, the truth is there, “Death comes for us all.”  It is not a truth that is found in sacred texts only, but is common to all of us, none escape death, no amount of power, influence, success, wealth or even health, can change the truth.  There is no preferential treatment.  Rich and poor alike will die.  Wise and foolish share the same fate.  Sinners and saint will both face death. 

Seems grim, I know.  But that is death. 

Acknowledging it, preparing for it, denying it, embracing it, glorifying it, celebrating it, avoiding it, accepting it and all the other ways we as humans have tried to handle death, there is still this nagging suspicion that death is something wrong.  We miss our loved ones, we fear the end coming too soon, we rage for those young who die before their time.  Death seems part of the world we live in and just a normal part of the order of the planet, but when it hits closer to home; it is an intrusion, unwelcomed, an enemy.

And so it is.

There is a different perspective offered in the New Testament regarding death.  And I am not opposed to sharing that perspective and the good news as I have come to understand and revel in it, but I feel drawn to look at and make art that accentuates “the bad news,” at least for a while, if only to better understand and appreciate the good news.  In this pursuit, little effort has been made to offer hope, and that seems counter to my own way of thinking, but as inadequate as I may be to convey any message of import through my artmaking, to try to address such a serious topic and then offer a solution strains credibility.

So rather than offer solutions I just want to explore the artistic tradition of this medieval movement, the compelling images and concepts and make some art that picks up some of the same ideas and wrestles with them.   

There are some larger assemblages I am working on and some smaller pieces of found art that are focused upon specific elements from the genre.