David Jhave Johnston’s Interstitial work deals with the fundamentals of existence: life and death. Poets of all ages have played with the polemics of life and death and the afterlife, ever attempting to blur or redefine the fine line between what we little know of this life and the massive unknown that is death beyond. Mercilessly perused by love-crazed Phoebus, Daphne escapes capture by eclipsing into nature:
The girl saw waves of a familiar river,
Her father’s home, and in a trembling voice
Called, “Father, if your waters still hold charms
To save your daughter, cover with green earth
This body I wear too well…
Ovid, The Metamorphoses 8 A.D.
Jhave does not attempt to sentimentalize nor deconstruct these issues:
Death is death; life is life.
If a dead cat floating in shallow shore water conventionally evokes repulsion, rejection, withdrawal and disgust, this work attempts to circumvent normal cognitive responses, and see the decomposing cat as a fluid undulant field of phenomena distinct from its actual existence or its death or the ongoing process of its decay.
The observing gaze refrains from intervening: it is silent and gestureless. Observation leaves things as they are; there is nothing hidden…
Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic 1963
Physical decomposition is inevitable for all physical forms; death simply is. What arises decays. All times have known death, most of us have thought of it, yet most of us have rarely examined the actual changes that bodies undergo after death. Putrefying corpses are not considered compost for high culture; our unease with the actual impermanence of existence exiles physical rot to folk legends of ghouls and comic book zombies dripping flesh. The reality is much more mundane and sensual; it us who rots: sheaths of our form slowly dissipating into other forms.
Taboos against death are widespread; the first autopsies were considered heretical and obscene desecrations; corpses are hidden beneath mounds of earth or consumed in flames. At the same time cultures are territorial, burial spaces are considered sacred land. Since long before Freud delineated the conjunction of eros and thanatos as central prohibitive tendencies in the psyche, humans have avoided decaying flesh of humans; it physiologically evokes repugnance.
The fear of death is already upon us, and everyone is straining to hold fast the last link with life.
Lucretius, The Nature of the Universe55 B.C.
Yet in the Dzog Chen literature spiritual practice of Tibet, spiritual practitioners are advised to spend time in the charnel grounds, among corpses, in order to arrive at a still clear equanimity in the face of death. Bodies are envisioned being chopped to bits or cooked and roasted; sutras recited to corpses. In this sense the work is a spiritual purative work, seemingly in contrast yet somewhat in harmony with Plastination.*
the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying
Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia (Urne-Burial) 1658
*Plastination is a technique used in anatomy to preserve bodies or body parts. The water and fat are replaced by certain plastics, yielding specimens that can be touched, do not smell or decay, and even retain most microscopic properties of the original sample.
David Jhave Johnston / Interstitial
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