Visualizing Death

Andy Warhol, Orange Car Crash (5 Deaths 11 Times in Orange) (Orange Disaster), 1963 

 It is as a further result of his ability to travel in the supernatural worlds and to see the superhuman beings (gods, demons, spirits of the dead, etc.) that the shaman has been able to contribute decisively to the knowledge of death. In all probability many features of "funerary geography," as well as some themes of the mythology of death, are the result of the ecstatic experiences of shamans. The lands that the shaman sees and the personages that he meets during his ecstatic journeys in the beyond are minutely described by the shaman himself, during or after his trance. The unknown and terrifying world of death assumes form, is organized in accordance with particular patterns; finally it displays a structure and, in course of time, becomes familiar and acceptable. In turn, the supernatural inhabitants of the world of death become visible; they show a form, display a personality, even a biography. Little by little the world of the dead becomes knowable, and death itself is evaluated primarily as a rite of passage to a spiritual mode of being. In the last analysis, the accounts of the shamans' ecstatic journeys contribute to "spiritualizing" the world of the dead, at the same time that they enrich it with wondrous forms and figures.

—Mircea Eliade, Shamanism

With Warhol, we encounter the radical de-spiritualization of death, its banalization. The flat orange background showing through the transparent photographic reproductions arrests attention on the surface: the painting is formally and connotatively superficial. Repetition transforms the image into visual noise.

The genius of Warhol was to have intuited that the profanation of the world facilitated by photography and its mechanical reproduction is best conveyed by reproducing reproduction. To the extent that one can find elegance, if not beauty, in Warhol's work, it derives from his having discovered the perfect means to frame banality, to make modern vacuity palpable.

Initiation

usually comprises a threefold revelation of the sacred, of death, and of sexuality.” (Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane) The initiate emerges from the initiating mysteries as one who knows. 

The symbolism of death and (re)birth figures prominently in these mysteries. The initiatory ordeals impress upon initiates the full import of assuming the position of man or woman. 

In a desacralized society, the symbolism of death and birth is unavailable, as is symbolism in general, and rites of passage no longer exist. This leaves each individual to “choose” his or her own identity. Today, this has extended to each individual acquiring the “right” to choose his or her gender identity. But because these identities are self-conferred with little effort, they carry little weight and are as easily cast off as they are put on. Under these circumstances, one never attains the position of one who knows. One remains a perpetual infant, not to say an embryo, arrested in a lifelong condition of fragile identity, anxiety, and bewilderment.

Initiatory death reiterates the paradigmatic return to chaos, in order to make possible a repetition of the cosmogony—that is to prepare the new birth. Regression to chaos is sometimes literal—as, for example, in the case of the initiatory sicknesses of future shamans, which have often been regarded as real attacks of insanity There is, in fact, a total crisis, which sometimes leads to disintegration of the personality. This psychic chaos is the sign that the profane man is undergoing dissolution and that a new personality is on the verge of birth. (Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane)

Religious man conquers the fear of death by assigning death the symbolic meaning of passage: what dies is the profane man, to be reborn as consecrated man, free from the fear of death and, therefore, enabled to live a noble life. Secular man shrinks from death and is, therefore, condemned to live a cowardly, compromised, half-life.

Today, the West appears at war with itself, demolishing its own traditions and monuments. A desacralized and diminished civilization cannot tolerate the memory of its sacred origin. The legacy of the past becomes an embarrassing encumbrance putting to shame the spiritual poverty of the present.  But the willful erasure of the past does not prevent it from haunting the present. In the modern, the sacred persists as a haunting, as the always possible return of the irrational.