The Art of Memento Mori – Remember you must die
A couple of years ago Damien Hirst’s “For the Love of God” was in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Tracking through a carefully curated – by Hirst himself – maze of 17th century Dutch and Flemish masters the onslaught of people would arrive in a dark room with a platinum cast of an 18th century human skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds, including a pear-shaped pink diamond on it’s forehead known as the Skull Star Diamond diamond, on display.
Damien Hirst | “For the Love of God” | platinum, diamond, human teeth | 2007 | White Cube Gallery, London, England
This work is a confrontation with death and one’s own mortality and the march towards it was along works of a similar nature, although I doubt that many of the masses noted any of this as the slowly made their way toward the center chamber. The gaze into death as the affirmation of the limit of being, to paraphrase Georges Bataille. The image of skulls is a haunting beauty, beyond the confines of mere hard-rock apparel. The hollowed orifices which one’s housed the eyes – the window to the soul – pull you deep into their darkness. The thought persists there is nothing there, it is all gone. Death is empty and we will all meet it one day, we will all become this object. You touch your own skull to conform the bones underneath the body tissue. Standing in front of an object is a dancing with death.
It is what the Mexicans do on Día de los Muertos, a feast where one transgresses the boards of existence, to release this tension and live with death in your heart and in the morning one returns to the routine. [Continue]
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