So The Obituary Project started out of a desire to bring focus back on everyday people. I must preface this and say that I think some of this has changed since the recession and the Obama administration, but for the most part we still live in a celebrity driven culture. Furthermore, we not only live in it, but we, as the the collective consumers in a capitalist society, drive the celebrity machine, and sometimes so much so to the degradation of a validation of what it means to live, to put it bluntly, a simple life. Behind the quest to be known, to be remembered and maybe even be loved, there are people whom you will never meet, whom you will never know and yet they too leave a footprint.
The Chinese hold a belief that a red string runs through every person whom you are destined to meet. How have those whom you've never met and who have gone effected those whom are on your path?
These were the questions I set out with when I first started this project. I found the stories printed below the obituaries fascinating. Each told a story. I wanted to send a bunch of the to US Weekly and have them run stories about all the dramas and scandals that were present in these people's lives. And yet, there is also a disconnect. For example, there are photos of children, whom on the outset one must think have died a sudden death - that feeling evokes emotion of lives not led, possibilities not formed and basically a waste of expectations - and yet, under the photo it says the person lived to be in their 80's. There is a play on illusion and emotion going on, not surprisingly different from that of the tabloids.
Then there are those who either chose (or had chosen for them) their 1942 high school year book picture as their final face to the world. Why? Were those the best years of your life? Is it because of beauty and vanity? What stories does that choice hold? Or there are the most unflattering pictures that one could possibly choose - those with gaping mouths caught off guard, or in big dramatic poses with floppy derby hats and feather boas. It's hard to imagine anyone would want to be remembered in that way - perhaps it's the vengeance of a disgruntled family member, or perhaps the fact that the person choosing the picture really didn't know you well enough to choose one to accurately describe you. These images, put together with the prose below are often vast emotional and grief stricken pleas for love and mercy, for empathy and sympathy. And yet they are stacked on a newspaper page daily, next to dozens of others. And that is just in this metropolitan area in one newspaper. How many other stories go unread and unheard? How many die alone to only never be recognized by anyone other than their immediate acquaintances and a few others who glance over the page?
The problems with taking and using the obituaries as a medium have proven to be a conundrum within themselves - for one, there is the legal issue: who owns a copyright of the obituary? Does the newspaper? Does the family? Technically, the family is putting the information out there in the public sphere, but does that then strip them of their right to claim the information as their own? What happens legally if someone finds them offensive? I mean, my last intention is to slander or defame someone deceased loved one, and for all intents and purposes, all I am doing is recreating the death announcement in a different form - but what rights do I have as an artist versus the rights a family might have versus the rights the publication might have? These are all sticky questions that I may not have the answer to until I start putting the obituaries more into the public.
But that raises another problem. In what form do I put them out there, and where do I go from here? The first series I did is interesting when compared to the second - the first lost a lot of information, while the second retains it - which one might think would work in the opposite way, with the aesthetic of the second series coming first instead of after. Yet there is a quality to the first series - to the decay of information about the individual in relating to the decay of a life spent on Earth. The second series does a much better job in preserving the person rather than allowing the information about them to pass on just as they have - interesting again when I think that I printed the first more decayed series on archival paper and the second more preservational series on newsprint.
But which is better to send out into the world? And in what form?
-I've talked to people who say I should leave a stack next to newspaper stands.
-I've thought about mailing the obituaries to random addresses.
-I've thought about creating walls of obituaries and linking it to walking "through the valley" so to speak.
But the question still remains as to how I want to convey this message of individual importance while still maintaining the integrity of not only the life of this person, but the form in which I found it (the obituary itself), and yet transforming it into something that I can call my own art.
All questions still to be answered.
