Duende Professors Jennifer L Buckle and Sonya Corbin Dwyer write for Psyche on the benefits of memorial tattoos: Many of these bereaved individuals talked about their memorial tattoo as an expression of their need for a sense of permanence in response to painfully clear impermanence – a reaffirmation of life amid the stark reality of death. … Read more‘A tattoo is for life’: how memorial tattoos help the bereaved
Also removed the stained glass lamp, until the days start getting shorter again.
Mortem is a two-week long, daily online artist residency arranged by Ayatana’s Biophilium: The virtual residency will involve daily live video lectures with international death care and funeral industry workers, historians, biologists and artists on a range of death related topics, one tethered international field trip in a graveyard near you and several short one … Read moreMortem: an Online Residency for Thanatocurious Artists
I have often remarked that I didn’t go into medicine to simply bear witness, but the work has a way of forcing you to do just that. Even with foresight and the most careful attention, you cannot plan on grace, or force closure; you cannot practice someone’s last words in advance. People die as they … Read more“What My Grandmother Knew About Dying”
Alter/Altar was an experiment in ephemeral public memorial art: It’s said that you’re a New Yorker when that which is gone becomes more real than that which took its place. This event is an homage to hyper-local elements of the city, including but not limited to communication, transportation, personal memory and happenstance. In the wee … Read moreAlter/Altar (Lower Manhattan, 2019)
Folk banjoist Clifton Hicks conjures the Appalachian Reaper, “Old Leatherstocking”, in these memento mori songs from his album of that title.
The next rendition of my Art of Ritual course for the Morbid Academy (the online teaching branch of the popular Morbid Anatomy enterprise) begins on April 20th: The intangible culture of death ceremony became increasingly bureaucratized throughout the Industrial Age, as hospitals, businesses, religious institutions and civic authorities overtook what had previously been intimate, participatory … Read moreThe Art of Ritual: Changing Ways of Life and Death (April/May 2022)
My Way of Life and Death draws significant inspiration from the mid-late 20th century American counterculture, which began and flowered (for most practical purposes) in Northern California. Above is a selection of joke courses “offered” by the Communiversity, an experimental San Franciscan free school. The “Deathskool” curriculum is a parody of the type of courses … Read moreDeathskool (1976)
The world is a midway; cities are its sideshows. The only difference between children and adults is that there is no one to take care of us. When we left home it meant we were lost on the midway and, unlike God, the carny boss will only let us ride as long as we pay. … Read more“Carnival Cosmology” by Gary Warne (1977)