ArticleIs she dead? Is she alive? You can’t be sure as you walk past Old Woman in Bed (2000, 2002), a mixed media sculpture by Ron Mueck currently on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It’s part of the Encounter exhibition of Mueck’s work. This Eastertime I am thinking about what it might be like to feel the approach of death, to know that I am taking my final breaths. Does the Easter story change anything?
Mueck’s sculptures are often described as “hyper-real” because of the detail he uses to portray the human body. In Old Woman in Bed the eyes of the old women look moist; the veins show through her transparent skin; her tongue sits flatly against the bottom of her mouth, which is open as if she is gasping for air. Or perhaps she has just taken her last gasp of air? The faint flush of the old woman’s skin suggests that she may still be alive but we can’t be sure.
The gallery brochure describes Old Woman in Bed as “affecting as they come”, and notes that “our hesitancy as to whether she is still (or was ever) breathing, mirrors the experience of listening out for a loved one’s ragged, possibly final breath”.
Mueck’s human figures are never to human scale. The woman in this sculpture is tiny: more baby-scale than adult scale.
The sculpture blurs the beginning-of-life with the end-of-life.
Susan Stewart is a poet and a scholar who is interested in the way humans tell themselves stories through art. Stewart notes in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1984) that miniature sculptures tend to draw their audience into a fantasy world that feels fairy-like and outside of time. We look upon the “hallucinatory details” of the tiny people and feel like we are in a trance.
Old Woman in Bed invites us into a moment that feels magical and suspended, but when we “wake up” from this moment what are we meant to make of our encounter with the artwork? There is a tender feeling, perhaps, for this life-like representation of a frail fellow human being, and a concern for our own elderly loved ones. There might also be a nagging worry as to what it will be like to draw our own final, ragged breaths.
At Eastertime we remember an event: the time that a human being, Jesus Christ, took his last breath on a Roman cross. We also remember the startling turn in this story: this was not Jesus’ final last breath. The claim of the gospels are that he came back to life three days’ later and had more real-life encounters with his friends and followers.
Luigi Giussani (1922-2005), an Italian Catholic priest and theologian reflected on the mysterious thing that Jesus Christ did for us — for all of humanity — when he resurrected from death on Easter Sunday. Jesus addressed the uneasy human sense that our lives are just fleeting and meaningless moments of time. Instead, the resurrected Jesus is with us in every passing moment, transforming each moment, “making it history, opening it, preventing things from finishing in nothingness”.
The Gospel of Mark records Jesus’ last breath. In the old-fashioned language of the King James Bible, it says that Jesus “gave up the ghost” (Mark 15:37). But the Gospel accounts are careful to let us know that Jesus returns as a human and not a ghost.
Jesus has his own version of an Encounter exhibition, except in his version there is no museum guard preventing viewers from touching the lifelike exhibit.
Jesus invites Thomas, the sceptical disciple, to touch and explore the nail wounds on his hands and the spear gash on his side (John 20:24-29). This is real-life, bodily and not ghostly Jesus.
Jesus’ resurrection is “as affecting as they come” (in the words of Ron Mueck’s curator), because a new way of being in the world is forged for us, a world in which we can look upon our fellow humans and our wrinkling, aging, injured bodies with tenderness. We can understand that each moment of human life is charged with meaning, even if it feels in many ways that our own life is marginal or it is petering out.
The Easter story tells us that even our final gasping breath can be changed from a full stop to just an important comma in our own life story. Like Jesus, our stories will end up being resurrection stories, and we will be humans on a new earth.
I am wondering when will be the moment I take my final breath? What will be my death story? I’m not haunted by my future death story, though. I believe that the death-to-life story of Jesus changes my own story, that I won’t finish in nothingness, and that I won’t stalk the world in a ghostly non-human afterlife. The Easter story turns around my own life and death story and breathes life beyond my final breath.
Danielle Terceiro is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. She is completing a PhD in the area of literature and theology at Alphacrucis University College.