This immediately made me think of “the pornography of death”, as understood by Geoffrey Gorer, who originated the term. Death suppressed, death as a taboo – as with sexual intercourse in Victorian times – stimulates pornographic imagination. To put it simply: death today is what sex was in the 19th century. This doesn’t mean we fear less, however – on the contrary, we’re more prone to fright than ever.
We spy on death in its weird, warped, larger-than-life form. We are voyeurs of death from home. Witnessed on-screen in a crime film, a horror flick, even in a romcom, it turns into entertainment. It produces a cultural phantasm about dying. Removed from reality. In a home we share together, our nearest and dearest may be drawing their last breath, while we, glued to pop-cultural representations of death, forget how vastly those differ from a real-life death just across the hall. Just as pornography isn’t like real sex. Death is no fiction.
Please also notice that the man in the photo only seems a streamlined, high-end version of a cadaver. This is a frightening, contrastive revision of memento mori. If, as Gorer suggests, death is like sex, then Défilé #6 is an orgasm. A paroxysm reminding us of dying. Or, put simply, a little death.
But there’s something else. Fear, immortalised on a dead face. Or maybe a mere projection of what we see ourselves, while looking at deathly facial expressions: lips parted, chin withdrawn, eyelids sunken, caved-in cheeks. Eyes remain open, but something’s missing here: eyebrows fail to shift, eyeballs that don’t bulge. Corpse no. six, part of Défilé by AES+F, doesn’t feel any fear. It’s us who are filled with dread.
