Death: A self-portrait at The Wellcome Collection

What do these three images have in common?

Well, each one of them was singled out for special scrutiny by my ‘critical eye’ during the six years I spent looking at pictures (sorry, I mean studying History of Art). More importantly, and what may have popped into your head whilst looking at them just now, is that they are all concerned with humanity’s ceaseless need to explore and try to explain death. Humans do this by creating art, and carrying out rituals – sometimes these two activities are one and the same.

Warhol’s Little Electric Chair, one of Goya’s etchings from his The Disasters of War series, a 12^th century Japanese hand scroll depicting hell. Each work from different eras, and the product of very different cultures – but all three connected with a sincere attempt to address this universal concern, this fascination with the great equaliser that is death.

Death is the subject of the new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection. Following my own inquisitive interest in death, I braved ‘snowmaggedon’ on Friday to visit Death: A self-portrait.

I am very fond of The Wellcome Collection. When I ‘grew out of’ The Science Museum, which I regularly visited as a child (and, frankly, after becoming fed up of the constant presence of large numbers of tourists and schoolchildren), I turned to the Wellcome Collection to satisfy my scientific curiosity. For me, a visit to this place kills two birds with one stone, because it explores both science and art/culture.

The Wellcome Collection was founded by Henry Wellcome (1853-1936): a pharmacist, entrepreneur, philanthropist and avid collector of books and objects. He was interested in the history of medicine, including connected subjects such as alchemy, witchcraft, anthropology and ethnography, creating a diverse collection from a number of different cultures and eras. The Wellcome Collection, in its present day form on the Euston Road, opened to the public less than 10 years ago, in 2004.

Interestingly, the exhibition is comprised of objects amassed by another collector (albeit a living one): Richard Harris. Upon entering the exhibition, the variety of objects assembled here immediately confirmed my assumption that my morbid interest in death is not unique but shared by the rest of humanity. Across five rooms, the exhibition groups objects around the following themes: Contemplating Death, The Dance of Death, Violent Death, Love and Death, and Commemoration. Curated in an efficient and tasteful manner, the exhibition thankfully does not give in to the ‘temptation’ to pay tribute to any of the multitude of deathly clichés – no darkened rooms, black walls or purple velvet here.

Stand out pieces for me were:

• A selection from Goya’s The Disasters of War, which have lost none of their emotional weight since their production 200 years ago, during which time many of us have become a desensitized to violent images through their omnipresence in popular culture.
• Otto Dix's Der Krieg was another fascinating colletion of etchings and aquatints, especially given their situation in a room with the above series. It was interesting to see to what extent Goya’s series influenced this more recent one, whose subject matter is World War 1. There are certainly some similarities stylistically, but the immediacy of brutality expressed in Dix’s works really pay tribute to his experiences as a soldier.
• Mexican Day of The Dead skull. I love Day of the Dead artefacts from the perspective of design – the bold colours, the highly decorative patterning. The celebratory intention of the piece also comes as somewhat of a relief, located as it as towards the end of the exhibition, when you have spent the past hour being reminded of your own mortality by countless memento mori.
• The bone chandelier In The Eyes of Others, by Jodie Carey, 2009 (mixed media). I love the concept of creating something decorative with bones, yet the very pure white colouring of the bones places this piece firmly in the realm of artifice. No one was harmed in the production of this artwork! The piece took me back to my visit in 2008 to Sedlec Ossuary, also known as ‘the bone church’ in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic. There, the bones are all real, belonging to an estimated 40,000 – 70,000 long-deceased people.

Bone chandelier at Sedlec Ossuary

One thing I would have been interested in seeing explored here more is the way contemporary societies, cultures and individuals deal with death, perhaps considering some elements of popular culture. But, since this exhibition is based on one man’s collection, I can’t really criticise it for not extending its scope in other directions that might have been of interest to me.

The objects chosen for exhibition here are alternately beautiful, grotesque and curious. Individually they each reveal an attitude towards death; collectively they create a dialogue between these attitudes, each originating from a different place, a different time - from a different individual. I would say that this dialogue reveals more similarities than it does differences. Unsurprisingly perhaps, given that death is the one thing we all have in common – as the proverb says, there are only two things certain in life: death and taxes!

Going forwards, with the world becoming increasingly secular, it will be interesting to see how mankind’s ways of making sense of death evolve with the decline of religious beliefs. In the meantime, I highly recommend visiting this exhibition to catch up on the story so far.

Death: A self-portrait

Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE

Until 24 February 2013