Death: Mother of Beauty

This week I drove from one end of the country to another and wound up listening to four audio books, all of them about beauty and death. The lineup included all three of Dan Wells’ John Cleaver books plus Preston and Child’s Still Life with Crows. Maybe I seek out this darker work, but I’ve noticed it’s less difficult to stumble on than it used to be. Some critics, as I’ve noted in previous posts, have bewailed this turn toward the Gothic. I disagree. It’s good that pop culture has taken this artistic swerve toward death rather than try to cover it up with saccharine. In fact, the Rebecca Black approach to music and art depresses me precisely it does everything it can to avoid grim realities. Meanwhile, a fictional character’s inner demons, or a painting’s focus on mortality, provides a productive channel for it. Take Well’s character, John Cleaver–far from sane. In some ways, he’s not even a good kid. (He threatens his mom with a knife in one of the books, and he even reminds her of the incident at later points to get what he needs.) But these faults render works of art more beautiful. Not the kind of faults that make characters look like petty, pathetic whiners, but problems that propel plots and characters toward terrible realizations, silver-lined with some form of redemption.

Listening to Still Life with Crows in particular has brought me back to a running topic on this blog: art and murder. Odd how often the two cross paths (See my posts from recent months.) If Funaro’s killer is a highly organized Michelangelo, then Preston & Child’s is a kindergartner. It turns out that art does indeed inspire the grotesque man-child, albeit in ways far more primitive. Definitely worth a read.

I’ve also found two more artists who blend art and crime explicitly: Pepón Osorio and Melanie Pullen.While each one takes a radically different approach, they both take that Wallace Stevens line about Death and Beauty one step further. Is it ethical to think of murder as beauty? Sure, as long as you’re not killing your models. That’s the whole point of art; it’s everywhere. The job of an artist (including writers) is to find the beauty or potency in unexpected places and bring it to people’s attention–even if some find that offensive.

Pepon Osorio, "The Scene of the Crime."

On that note, a recent post on The Starving Art Historian blog also reminded me of Sally Mann’s work, especially her exhibition centered on the infamous body farm in Tennessee–which I’m pretty sure also appears first in Patricia Cornwell’s crime fiction. My favorite art always pushes the envelope, and it informs my own writing–whether it’s Bosch or Marina Abramovic scrubbing a skeleton or Mann walking about poking dead bodies (as described in The Guardian and in the documentary “What Remains.”):

Mann has a gift for provoking strong reactions (“I like pushing buttons”) and her pictures of rotting corpses certainly do that. She took them at the University of Tennessee’s anthropological facility at Knoxville, aka the “body farm”, where human decomposition is studied scientifically. The bodies are mostly left in an outdoor setting and lie there for months or even years. In Steven Cantor’s 2006 television documentary about Mann, she is observed happily wandering from cadaver to cadaver, prodding this body part and stroking that one, unfazed by the maggots and reek of decay.

Melanie Pullen, "Last Light."

“Death makes us sad, but it can also make us feel more alive,” she says. “I couldn’t wait to get there. The smell didn’t bother me. And you should see the colours – they’re really beautiful. As Wallace Stevens says, death is the mother of beauty.”

More and more, I realize this is why I write: to find the unexpected beauty in places and bring it to people’s attention, and to prod at the small gaps between opposites that we take for granted every day. I’m not very interested in looking at paintings of flowers, sunsets, lakes, or forests. But if you slip something in there that’s out of place or unusual, or give it a new frame, then you’ve made thought-provoking art (or poetry, or fiction.)

So, I’m pleased to watch Sally Mann roam the Body Farm–just like I’m pleased to roam abandon buildings and art museums and asylums. And I’m also happy to write things that are likely to piss people off, like I did with those posts about Southern Literature. It’s not that provocative people cling to provocative beliefs. They just realize that nobody else is going to say what’s necessary to generate new ideas–which are often painful to birth.