Prospero | Exhibition: “death: the human experience”

Can good cheer and honest talk change our gloomy perspective on death?

Bristol Museum and Art Gallery takes on the world's least-favourite subject with surprising success

By L.K.

DEATH is a hard thing to sell. People shrink away from the declarations of life-insurance companies and funeral-planning services (“you’re guaranteed to be accepted for a funeral plan if you’re 50 or over”), dismissing them as unpleasant and, unsurprisingly, morbid. Attempts to bring death into the public domain have been largely unsuccessful; last year, IDEO, a leading global design firm, sought to “redesign death” in the form of a slick app to help put one’s affairs in order. It was abandoned, with few prospects for uptake. Another “Death-Positive Movement” wants to “teach our repressed society how to explore its relationship with death”; one advocate runs a website called “Ask A Mortician” so that fears, thoughts, and feelings can become part of the wider “cultural conversation”. It has found cult popularity, but the movement has not been able to break death’s commercial taboo.

A new exhibition at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery has achieved what IDEO and other death-positive programmes have not. Entitled “death: the human experience”, the show repackages death into friendly jewel-pink tones and soft lowercase letters, yet does not shy away from frank presentation of the processes that surround death. Visitors can peruse a model of the mortician’s workplace, where bodies are embalmed and dressed for funerals, complete with a real mortuary table from Bristol General Hospital. More disturbing displays about premature deaths and ritual murders are available, but sectioned off so that viewers can “opt in” to see them.

A key theme of the exhibit is the differing treatment of death in various cultures—when a person is considered dead, and what happens to the body afterwards. The Torajans of Indonesia, for example, consider their departed to be alive as they await burial, and therefore requiring food, clothing, and shelter. They “delay the process of decay by embalming their dead and placing them in special houses for many months, even years”. In Asia, Joss paper—often called “Hell Bank Notes” or “Hell Money”—is burned at funerals in order to preserve the deceased’s social status and pay off earthly debts. It is an intimate tour of death and mourning rituals from around the world, encompassing the unfamiliar, poignant, even the bizarre—a bright orange Ghanaian “fantasy coffin” in the shape of a lion, custom made to celebrate the life of the deceased, is a highlight.

The exhibition also encourages visitors to reflect upon more recent controversies. Tapping into current debates—Britain is considering laws on “the right to die”—the museum included a replica flat from Dignitas, Switzerland’s assisted-dying organisation, to the display. The installation seeks to demystify the process; the concoction of drugs that people are given when they are ready to die is laid out for visitors to comprehend—a square of chocolate is also given to cancel out the formula’s bitter taste. By highlighting the ethical and legal implications of assisted dying, as well as the perspectives of palliative-care doctors, medical-ethics professors, and Dignitas staff, the exhibition does not advocate one perspective over another. Visitors must arrive at their own conclusions.

“death: the human experience” has been a success—drawing 36,000 visitors since opening on October 26th last year. Observing the range of methods and emotions with which others have approached the end of life is a disarmingly uplifting experience. One of the final displays, a digitised version of Don Celender’s 1982 “Reincarnation Study”, punctuates a gloomy subject with humour. Celender, an artist and professor, asked dozens of celebrities “in which form would you like to return?” Julia Child, an American chef and television personality, responded with a list: “three inches shorter, feet two sizes smaller, flat stomach, capacity to eat all day and not gain a pound, otherwise Okay as is.” Georgia O’Keeffe, an American artist, wished to be reincarnated as a “blond with a high soprano voice.” The office of Edmund Muskie, then the senator for Maine, sent back a standardised letter.

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