Brenda Goldstein’s 35mm film loop Hereafter (click image above for documentation) is a spare portrait – a woman in blue operating gown and white mask in a starkly lit environment carries out detailed preparations over an unseen body. On first consideration, this assemblage of elements—the fluorescent lighting, the sterile furniture and the medical garb—all conjure the visual atmosphere of operating room-based television dramas. Yet, unlike those forms of representation, Goldstein’s image trains our eye not on the spectacular image of death, often violently portrayed on television, but rather on the social meaning of caring over the dead. Our attention is diverted through a simple yet decisive framing device – the film’s frame line rests just above the preparation table, drawing our attention away from the corpse as the locus of death. The framing shifts our attention, allowing us to perceive the undertaker’s detailed care in her craft. The static camera concentrates on her actions and movements, as she washes and prepares the body for burial. It is evident that she is highly skilled in these preparations; her hands move with a lightness and precision that add up to a delicate and graceful choreography of actions and procedures.

Hereafter belongs to the long art historical tradition of memento mori, representations aimed at reminding the receiver of their own mortality. Notable filmic examples include Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes(1971), which records autopsies being performed in a Pittsburgh morgue and Kenji Onishi’s feature-length documentary A Burning Star (1995), a very personal record of his father’s funeral and cremation. By contrast to these other two films, Goldstein’s project shies away from the imaging of the flesh, instead making space for our own projections and assumptions to be engaged. This absence of the dead body produces its own anxiety and may symbolize our desire to retract from the sight of death. By this absence, Goldstein intends to highlight a limitation of our culture: the lack of a contemporary vocabulary and rituals around death. This loss of understanding and inability to communicate around death in everyday life is at odds with the staggering proliferation of corpses in popular forensic serials that exploit death for its gruesome theatricality. This discrepancy between representation and experience forms the subject of the installation.

Hereafter exercises an aesthetic of restraint – the image is based on limits and controls – the prohibition of viewing the dead body, the unmoving eye of the static camera and the spare composition of elements within the frame. Against this controlled aspect, the film itself unravels. Goldstein has chosen to suspend the film loop across a number of rollers, rendering it even more vulnerable to the accumulation of dust and other ambient particles that will spell its eventual obliteration. Supporting the filmic presentation, Goldstein is also exhibiting a series of text slides based on various witness accounts of death gathered both from private individuals and frontline workers. Since spoken language is missing from the film portrait, the slide projections supplement the core composition by addressing the question of how we verbalize the experience of death in common vernacular.

–Sarah Robayo Sheridan

[Link to Artist's talk audio]

home