And yet another one

FAST-FORWARD: ICONIC PROGRAMMATICS

Prolonging the lives of plants recalls the psychology of the phantom limb that accompanies the lives of those who have lost it. Is the eternity of nature a phantom process for you?5

The sculptor Marc Quinn‘s peculiar and spectacular installation Garden (2000) is a beautifully strange floral art work. When I interviewed him a few years back, Quinn told the story of how he collected a thousand flowers in full bloom from around the world and sank them all in “twenty-five tons of liquid silicone,” maintained at “a constant temperature of -80˚ Celsius.” His garden is frozen, but not frosty. The plants look as if they’re fresh and alive and thriving, though in reality, they’re dead. If we were to allow any air to contaminate the monter in which they sit, they would instantly go black, wither, fall to pieces. The flowers are dead, but will last forever.

“Of course,” Quinn said, “the flowers, when they freeze, become pure image. They become an image of a perfect flower, because in reality their matter is dead and they are suspended in a state of transformation between pure image and pure matter.” 

Flowers trapped behind glass, reflected in mirrors, making up a garden of infinite beauty and immortality. A beauty that doesn’t decay. In an interview with Germano Celant, Quinn spoke of “a kind of romanticism in trying to stop time.” Which is different from what the supporters of cryonics are interested in. They would rather suspend the body in time, postpone the inevitability of death, freeze life so as to be able to resurrect it at a later point in time, when science has the answer to the riddle of eternal life.

Philip Johnson built himself a house in which to die. With great care he created a space that was at once both full and empty, both contained interior and open exterior, a shining case for his larval soul to leave behind. But today a house in which to die wouldn’t necessarily only be an end station.  

Instead, it might be a building that is an end and a beginning. A place in which to die and be born again. An action and a re-action. A library of frozen bodies. A laboratory of the unknown; half serious science, half Frankenstein’s monster. A building that expresses the last hopes of our generation and those to come.

What spaces would such a building contain? How would the process of dying and being resurrected in a controlled fashion fold out in space and time? The mind wanders into an interesting range of programmatic spaces that would be truly iconic – the very spaces we remember from an entire cultural history of life and death:

• a space in which to sign the papers and pay the bill

• a space in which to be physically examined

• a space in which to have a last shower or bath

• a space in which to dress for death

• a space in which to have the last supper

• a space in which to say farewell

• a space in which to read and store human minds

• a space in which to die

• a space in which the bodies are frozen

• a space in which the bodies are stored 

• a space in which electricity is safeguarded from power cuts

• a space in which friends and relatives can pay visits

• a space in which to be resurrected

• a space in which to have the first breakfast

• a space in which to have the first shower

• a space in which to greet each other again

• a space in which to do rehab training

• a space in which to learn about the history one has missed

• a space in which to read up on gossip and pop magazines

I propose a project that begins with the notion of building a house in which to die, but then immediately accepts the contemporary idea of death being a process rather than a final state – and a potentially reversible process at that. A cryonic clinic, a building of life and death, or rather death followed by life, would be programmatically iconic. The next question is: what would it look like?