Dana Schutz, The Autopsy of Michael Jackson, 2005. Oil on canvas, 152.5 x 274.5 cm
Death seems an alien experience now: when we see Dana Schutz's painting of Michael Jackson's autopsy, we are struck by its oddness, its humour, rather than its gravitas. 'It was weird', she remarks (speaking some ears before his death), 'painting him dead, or painting him at all, as if I felt complicit in the whole spectacle craze. [He] is the ultimate self-created man, a site of projection, and a construct of American culture.' We may ask how real is death when happens behind closed doors and we see it now only when re-enacted in crime movies and serials. Death is equally unreal but perhaps less scary in Barnaby Furnas's Vietnam re-creation. [...]
(Tony Godfrey, Painting Today, Death and Life, p. 270, Ed. PHAIDON 2009)
More about this item here or on Hrag Vartanian's site.
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