Department of Decomposition: Painting
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Rotting. Decaying. Dying. Disintegrating.
Dissolving, Spoiling. Breaking. Crumbling.
Festering. Molding. Diminishing. Wasting Away.
Breaking. Deteriorating. Ruining. Purging.
Destructing. Putrefying. Disembodying.
Eroding. Dilapidating. Atomizing. Oxidizing.
Dissecting. Disassembling. Depreciating.
Disfiguring. Dismantling. Infecting.
Evaporating. Reducing. Perishing. Polluting.
Fouling. Fading. Pulverizing. Mortifying.
Shriveling. Waning. Withering. Dwindling.
Decreasing.
Declining.
Dissolving.
Decomposing.
Extinct.
The Department of Decomposition mission was to explore anything and everything that has to do with decay—whether deconstructing the painting surface or the subject matter at hand.
Often students in traditional art education classes are not taught to incorporate aspects of the abject into their artwork. In the Department of Decomposition, we pushed the barriers of what students believe art should be. What constitutes “good art” and what constitutes “bad art”? We presented a wide range of artists including Damien Hirst, Ivan Albright, Cindy Sherman, Camille Rose Garcia, Mark Bradford, Robert Rauschenberg, Marina Abramovic and Mark Dion to better understand life through the investigation of decay.
We strived to instill a sense of openness, passion, confidence, and playfulness within our students. It is of the utmost importance that young artists are given the tools to decompose received paradigms that are no longer productive and to generate new ways of making art and of viewing the world around them.
Report submitted by
Faculty of the Department of Decomposition
Kristen Meyer, Sean Blackburn, Katy Innocenti
to Director Olivia Gude
Spiral Workshop Office of Aesthetic Investigation
Aesthetic Investigation of the Department of Decomposition
School of Anxiety: Gothic Narrative
Sometimes the contemporary high school environment can feel this way—stranded in a gloomy and grotesque place with uncanny occurrences and not quite understandable implications. Startled, not the clinking of chains, but by the rattling of a teacher’s thick ring of keys—treading, not the haunted hallways of a Gothic mansion, but the seemingly never-ending corridor between Algebra and Art class… We admit this a bit over the top, but this is a Gothic-inspired project.
The Department began with tracing the disconnected history of Gothic sensibility—from the Germanic tribe, the Goths, who invaded the decomposing Roman Empire in the 4th century to Goth’s current manifestations in the music and styles of no-longer-always-so-youthful adherents to contemporary Goth culture. The Gothic revival in art, architecture and literature in 18th and 19th century Europe was a rejection of classical ideals of order, logic, harmony and stability in favor of the individual, the creative, the idiosyncratic and the sublime.
In its investigation, the Department considered compelling questions such as “What is the difference between the Mad Hatter’s tea party in the classic Tenniel illustrations, the Disney version, and the work of contemporary artist Camille Rose Garcia? Does this difference matter?” We wanted to get to the “nitty gritty,” which is all too often overlooked in Disney productions.
In the Gothic Narrative project, the youth artists explored the sometimes dark undercurrents of everyday existence. Using personal experiences of feeling like an outsider as inspiration—feelings of isolation, not fitting in, being judged, tormented, misunderstood—stories of confusing encounters or relationships gone bad—each youth artist created an outsider narrative.
Of course, classic life drawing and one-point perspective wouldn’t suffice to tell these complex tales so the project began in much different fashion. Week 1: Papers were passionately painted—stained, splashed, smeared and spattered. Week 2: Paper was crushed and crinkled, flattened and messed up again. The artists began by finding characters in the creases and lines on the battered papers. Free from the narrowing constraints of “realism” (remember what gets left out in mono-perspective is also “real”), each youth artist developed the sinister, pitiful, heroic or harassed characters needed to tell his/her story. Later torn paper created spaces in which the characters could interact. Gluing down was delayed until the last moment so that compositions could be shifted and altered intuitively for formal and narrative effect.
Viewer, beware. You’ll shudder at tales of musical teens taunted for being in a band or vulnerable adolescents forced to make paintings based on grids. Be strong. Look closely and deeply. As Anne Radcliffe, a sensational 18th century Gothic novelist wrote, terror “expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a higher degree of life.”
What gets repressed when we are asked to learn and live in a disnified world? The youth artists debated the question (with good answers on both sides) “Would you rather live in Edward Scissorhands’ gothic castle on a hill or in a color-coordinated suburban home in the suburbs below?”
Can we imagine a hybrid home with the safety and productivity of modern life and the imaginative spaces of a Gothic dwelling? Hey, it’s the 21st century—hybridity is so postmodern and hybrid monsters are so Gothic.
Aesthetic Investigation of the Department of Decomposition
Art of Bacteria
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A mere eight weeks ago, the Decomposition artists collected a variety of materials to incubate in petri dishes over the course of the semester. Each week, students examined the petri dishes, noticing changes in color, texture, and form (And later smell.) As a conclusion to our 9-week Spiral exploration of decomposition, each artist surveyed his/her petri dish and then simultaneously created a painting and conducted a scientific investigation of the outcome of this informal experiment in decomposition.
Studying art world bacterial science, the Department of Decomposition looked at contemporary artists whose work expands beyond traditional art materials, including Mark Dion’s Neukom Vivarium, a greenhouse that holds a sixty-foot long section of a hemlock tree that has been moved from the forest where it fell to continue as a “nurse log,” developing the unique ecosystem of plant and animal species that will cause it to eventually decompose.
We also were surprised to find that famed biologist Sir Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin, also produced a series of petri dish paintings by growing microbes with different natural pigments in agar, the gelatin-like substance used to host bacteria. Fleming would use a wire lab tool called a loop to inoculate sections of the agar with different species. He had to time his inoculations such that the different species all matured in their various colors at the same time.
In another improbable coming together of bacteria and art, the Decomposition artists learned about a series of cave paintings in northwest Australia, known as the Gwion Gwion or Bradshaw Paintings. After approximately 70,000 years, the colors in these cave paintings remains almost perfectly intact, despite the fact that they have never been repainted. Scientists have discovered that the original pigment has since been replaced by a biofilm of living, pigmented microorganisms. The microorganisms’ natural replenishments account for the longevity and vividness of these ancient paintings. In yet another fusion of art and bacteria, conservators in Valencia, Spain are removing grime from frescoes in the Church of Santo Juanes by covering them with bacteria, especially grown to eat the saline encrustations on the murals.
The Department of Decomposition artists began their documentation of decomposition by building up layers of tissue paper to simulate the sculptural forms in the petri dishes. On following week, the artists continued their artistic investigation, utilizing the skills that they had developed in color and brushwork to document the miniature dramas of the waning and flourishing of life.
Aesthetic Investigation of the Department of Decomposition
Bone–Still Life?
Welcome to the Spiral Charnel House.* The Department of Decomposition undertook the study of what remains when the flesh of bodies decomposes.
We began with considering the representation and meaning of bones in popular culture and art—from the somber Capuchin crypt in Rome “decorated” with over 4000 skeletal remains of Capuchin friars to UIC Professor Tony Tasset’s irreverent Capuchin Chandelier. From the intricate anatomy drawings of Vesalius to the familiar life/death contrasts of Georgia O’Keeffe’s bones and flowers paintings to Marina Abromovic’s performances reanimating a skeleton with her breath, the students surveyed how skeletal imagery structures the human imagination.
Other artworks unearthed by the Decomposition faculty included Damien Hirst’s platinum diamond-encrusted platinum skull sculpture worth $99 million, Gabriel Orozco’s intricate checkered graphite drawing on a human skull, and Pepón Osario’s large-scale blow up of an x-ray of his deceased mother’s skull.
We concluded our image research with an overview of skull-decorated clothing from its early edgy days when worn by transgressive Hell’s Angels or Punks to the current fad of skulls as a decoration found on shoes, shirts, purses, caps, etc. What’s up with that?
To further our investigation of decomposition, the Department’s youth artists carefully observed bone remains from different animals. They then documented the intricate topography of internal geography in the somber, bleached out and restrained colors of actual bones.
* A charnel house is a vault or building where human skeletal remains are stored. In countries where ground suitable for burial is scarce, corpses would be interred for approximately 5 years following death, thereby allowing decomposition to occur. After this, the remains would be exhumed and moved to an ossuary or charnel house, so that the original burial place can be re-used.
Aesthetic Investigation of the Department of Decomposition
Glimpse into the Future
We decided to turn our focus inward and investigate our own eventual decomposition. Looking at the artists Cindy Sherman and Ivan Albright for inspiration, the Spiral artists painted each other’s faces, studying the existing face for signs of what will happen with age. New lines form, others become more bold and distinct. Bags appear, cheeks wither, noses drop, ears elongate.
The artists then reflected on lifetime goals. The youth artists filled out a his/her top 25 specific goals to accomplish in his/her lifetime and then responded to this prompt:
It is your 99th birthday. You are surrounded by friends and family. You say, “I have no regrets because…
We invite visitors to the Spiral Show to reflect on your own eventual decomposition and thus on the importance of living one’s life fully. Write your statement on the “I have no regrets because...” cards and pin to one of the columns.
Department of Decomposition Aesthetic Investigation
Surrealist Gaming
Seeing Into, also known as the Paranoiac Critical Method, is an alternative way of looking at the world. A method open to all who choose to create fresh compositions by decomposing the strictures imposed on vision by the conscious mind, Seeing Into is a fusion of unconscious content and the visible world.
After viewing artworks created by Salvador Dali to see the dramatic results of Paranoiac Critical methodology, the Department’s artists were given dark-colored construction paper that had been stained with bleach spots. The bleach stains physically decomposed the pristine surface of the paper and created an ambiguous avenue for unconscious content to enter. Using charcoal and oil pastels, the Department of Decomposition issued enigmatic communiqués from the beyond the realm of controlled consciousness.
Aesthetic Investigation of the Department of Decomposition
3D Color Study
To simultaneously investigate the use of color and destroy the confining flatness of traditional painting, the Department of Decomposition created a project that blurred the lines between what constitutes a painting and what constitutes a sculpture. Looking at artists such as Jasper Johns, Lee Bontecou, Robert Rauschenberg, and Mark Bradford, students considered that often paintings are not made of “just paint.” Layered newspaper created a 3-dimensional ground recalling both the collaged surfaces of artists whose work begins with appropriating images and objects drawn from the real world and the thickness of paint of many expressionist paintings—a style rarely available to most student artists because of the cost of paint.
Beginning with a ground of two dark colors, students chose a hue and accent color to further develop the painting. They challenged themselves to create many variations of hue, value, and chroma of their base hue. While conducting this color investigation, the youth artists utilized expressionist techniques of painting such as bold physical brush strokes, flicking of paint, and fluid drippy paint application.
Having established a base on which to work, these Spiral artists were encouraged to rip, tear, and score the newspaper, using additive and subtractive (decomposition) methods of making. Spray bottles were introduced to the youth artists so that they could experiment with altering and removing paint.
After completing so many school exercises in which they are told to “make an interesting composition,” these youth artists passionately embraced the artmaking method of decomposition.