The prizewinning artist Gregor Schneider, enfant terrible of the
German cultural scene, is looking for a volunteer who is willing to
die for his – that is, Mr Schneider’s – art.
He wants someone whose dying hours will be spent in an art
gallery with the public admiring the way the light plays on the
flesh of a person gasping for the last breath.
Politicians and curators are in a state of uproar about Mr
Schneider’s plans. The 39-year-old artist has been concerned with
death for much of his career. He gained critical acclaim for a
sculpture, Hannelore Reuen, of a dead woman. He has been
hatching his current idea since 1996, and now has a sympathetic
pathologist and art collector to help to find a candidate who wants
to become a work of art in the final days of his or her life.
“The dying person would determine everything in advance, he
would be the absolute centre of attention,” said Mr Schneider.
“Everything will be done in consultation with the relatives, and
the public will watch the death in an appropriately private
atmosphere.”
Death is commonly seen as the last taboo, but artists have been
trying hard to demystify it. Gunther von Hagens, nicknamed Doctor
Death, has been travelling the world with an exhibition of
plastinated corpses, showing genuine human bodies in living poses,
playing chess or on horseback. The Wellcome Collection in London
has an exhibition of portraits of people pictured before and after
death by two German photographers.
The Schneider project, however, seems to have gone too far. It
is being compared with watching executions in the United States.
The influential gallery owner Beatrix Kalwa spoke for many German
curators who rule out the idea of giving space to Mr Schneider’s
artistic endeavour. “Existential matters like death, birth or the
act of reproduction do not belong in a museum,” she said. “There is
a fundamental difference between portraying these acts in an art
form, and showing them in actuality.”
The head of the German hospice foundation that provides care for
the terminally ill, Eugen Brysch, said: “This is pure voyeurism and
makes a mockery of those who are dying.” But Mr Schneider, who
feigned his own death as part of an exhibition in Germany in 2000,
argues that death is already undignified and that his aim is to
restore its grace.