The relationship between portrait photography and embalming is the morbid yet enthralling subject of ‘Deadness’, Jordan Baseman’s latest foray into what he calls ‘creative nonfiction’. What you get is a relaxed, meditative documentary combined with a vaguely professorial slideshow. The voiceover is provided by a sociologist, the son of a mortician, who muses on the cultural history of funereal display – covering subjects including the desire to preserve a lifelike image of the deceased, the development of modern embalming techniques in the nineteenth century and the consequent demise of the tradition of postmortem photography.
Meanwhile, images of corpses in coffins are projected on a screen, sometimes singly, sometimes in groups. Preservations of preservations, these range from formal Victorian examples of sunken-faced souls to modern, full-colour snapshots depicting oddly plasticised features.
The whole thing feels like going to a fantastic lecture, at once brilliantly entertaining and edifying. A second image-and-voiceover piece, ‘The Last Walk’, is harder to classify. Here, British performance artist Stuart Brisley narrates a bizarre story involving an act of self-immolation he witnessed, while a projected video shows an ambiguous, tendrilly image of what turns out to be fairy-lit trees at night.
The visuals strobe and pulse softly, and occasionally disintegrate entirely. There’s a similar sense of gaps and shortfalls as the storyteller tries to get to grips with the sheer strangeness of the event. The work addresses a subtle, abstract idea about the blurred borderline between perception and description. Yet, the way Baseman conveys it is utterly magical.
Gabriel Coxhead