German Artist Gregor Schneider Would Kill To Have You Be His Masterpiece

Because fictionally creative baby blood is already kind of over, German artist Gregor Schneider is focused instead on making a terminally ill person the object of your gaze. Death is kind of “his thing,” actually. He’s currently looking for someone set to die soon so that gallery-goers can observe the way light and shadow dance across the skin of someone gasping for their last breath. Like Norman Rockwell, kind of:

Politicians and curators are in a state of uproar about Mr Schneider’s plans. The 39-year-old artist has been concerned with death for much of his career. He gained critical acclaim for a sculpture, Hannelore Reuen, of a dead woman. He has been hatching his current idea since 1996, and now has a sympathetic pathologist and art collector to help to find a candidate who wants to become a work of art in the final days of his or her life.

“The dying person would determine everything in advance, he would be the absolute centre of attention,” said Mr Schneider. “Everything will be done in consultation with the relatives, and the public will watch the death in an appropriately private atmosphere.”

Why not focus on the gasping of a petit mort instead? We’d watch. We’d gaze.

The Schneider project, however, seems to have gone too far. It is being compared with watching executions in the United States. The influential gallery owner Beatrix Kalwa spoke for many German curators who rule out the idea of giving space to Mr Schneider’s artistic endeavour. “Existential matters like death, birth or the act of reproduction do not belong in a museum,” she said. “There is a fundamental difference between portraying these acts in an art form, and showing them in actuality.”

The head of the German hospice foundation that provides care for the terminally ill, Eugen Brysch, said: “This is pure voyeurism and makes a mockery of those who are dying.” But Mr Schneider, who feigned his own death as part of an exhibition in Germany in 2000, argues that death is already undignified and that his aim is to restore its grace.

We’re not sure it makes a mockery of death. It just seems… a bit uninteresting and a little confusing. We’re not sure how light and shadow play differently on a dying person than one being born or taking a nap or eating spaghetti or getting their hair cut. The difference would be the knowledge that we’re watching a person die. Which, to us, lose poignancy when watching it on a screen, as opposed to holding the hand of a loved one as they go. And that transition of feeling from bedsheet to projection screen or gallery space is, frankly, not one we’re interested in making.

Dying to see Gregor Schneider’s latest work? Don’t worry - you could be in it [Times Online]