Artes Moriendi
Carlo Cesta
Lisa Neighbour
FASTWÜRMS
October 21, 1992 – April 30, 1993
FASTWÜRMS, sepulchre, 1992; greenhouse with plexiglass, birch tree, limestone rocks, paint, copper bell, wire, metal, wool; 6'7" W x 8' H x 12'8" L
Carlo Cesta, mausoleum, 1992; wrought iron, plexiglass, bird feeders and birdseed, concrete; 6’ W x 7’ L x 9’ H
Lisa Neighbour, memorial, 1992; brass/steel, nylon, wood, paint, Christmas lights; 11’diameter
Artes Moriendi is an installation about death, the formal language of death as it is socially constructed and displayed in the sculpture and architecture of sepulchre, mausoleum and memorial.
The installation features three discrete sculptures displayed within the conventions of art history and the traditional sculpture garden. However, by imagination and in proximity to St. James' Cathedral, the site has a double reading: the garden as a graveyard.
FASTWÜRMS' sepulchre is a tableau, a Gothic burial narrative in a small Victorian style greenhouse. At one end is a burial mound of red and white limestones; at the other a weeping birch with a root ball carefully sewn into a red wool shroud. At the top of the tree a brass bell hangs connected by a cord running into the centre of the cairn. The work references Edgar Allan Poe and the Gothic literature of The Premature Burial is conflated with the language of contemporary ecology and social anxiety over the demise of the environment.
Carlo Cesta's mausoleum is a compendium of the ideals of high modernist form buried under elaborate vernacular patterns of baroque folk ant and local working class wrought iron. The abstraction of the International Style, the red, blue and white plexiglass rectangles, are a faithful and ironic quotation from The Better Living Centre at the C.N.E. Coded in the subtle humanism of this mausoleum is the dream of the timeless family home: I have room for you, a relative group of you, together forever.
Lisa Neighbour's memorial, in contrast to the solid accounting of a conventional headstone, is a construction of light, electricity and air. Two hoops of steel, a wheel-within-a-wheel, are braced and interlaced with concentric patterns of aircraft wire. Sprouting for the bands of the sphere are flourishes of pressed metal flowers. This memorial is a metaphor of spirit and flight, a construction about the yearning to escape from gravity and the burdens of the body and to move freely within the music of the heavenly spheres.
Artes Moriendi is about death, but also play in the face of the final site: the play of imagination and social discourse, ideas and history; the play of creativity in forming a dialogue between death and life, the dead and the living.
Text by Dai Skuse
