ANNIE HECKMAN

In preparing for my residency I pulled together several books, choosing some more consciously than others. Packing the suitcase forced me to narrow my selection, and the most important titles stood out from the rest and made their way to Budapest with me.

Death: Current Perspectives is a hefty anthology edited by John B. Williamson and Edwin S. Shneidman. I was fortunate to stumble across it when Elise Goldstein and I were doing some initial digging for Hungarian research on death and found the study by Maria Nagy, “The Child’s Theories Concerning Death,” included in this collection of works on thanatology.

Nagy’s study appears in a section titled “Children and Death.” Her approach to treating children as the creators of theories about death has continued to interest me over several readings, and I keep returning to the words of the children she interviewed in 1948 Budapest. An example of words from an eight-year-old child:

“When death goes away it leaves footprints behind. When the footprints disappeared it came back and cut down more people. And when they wanted to catch it, it disappeared.”

Nagy’s study first appeared in the Volume 73 of the Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1948.

A clip from Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. The fact that this little penguin is going to die by continuing to move towards the interior of the continent, yet seems to be moving playfully along, made me particularly sad in the theatre. I don’t remember any laughter in reaction to it at the time, but this article describes a different response. The idea of an unsurvivable environment is particularly interesting to me; harm and risk are bound up in simple exposure to parts of the landscape for which a creature isn’t adapted, and places like the Antarctic highlight this because of their extremes. The penguin made a persuasive case for me to work on this project, starting with the icebergs.

As I’m preparing proposals to send out to different spaces for the Love Letters to Antarctica exhibit, I realized it’s time to start directing this blog toward answering why I’m doing a project about Antarctica at all. Lorien Jordan started this process going with her drawings, and when she mentioned the possibility of combining our work in a single exhibit I wasn’t exactly sure where an exploration of Antarctica should start for me. Then we went to see Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago in 2008. The trailer above and a particular sequence that I’ll excerpt tomorrow will start to answer the question of why Antarctica is getting my attention; it’s less about the texture of icebergs (cool as that texture is) and much more about the playing out of love and death amongst animals and humans on a particularly challenging stage, and about how that stage is imagined from the comfort of a warm home in Chicago.

Annie Heckman, Dissolution of the mouse, 2009, ink on paper, 11 x 14 inches

Yesterday I posted the first of this set of three drawings, showing a still visible mouse in an early phase of decomposition. This series is (very) roughly based in the Nine Cemetery Contemplations in the Buddhist Sutra on Mindfulness. The idea is (roughly) that you can accept mortality, and the limitations of the body, by contemplating the image of a corpse in nine stages of decomposition. I’m not there yet, as you will perhaps note by my initial choice of a mouse for this contemplation. I did the first of this set of drawings in 2007 after inadvertently coming across a mouse covered in maggots (so somewhere around a 2 in the contemplations), and then actually came across it again around a stage 6, when the bones looked like little threads on the ground.

Drawing maggots is a meditative activity, if and when you decide to draw many of them, and the list of people who act curious about your projects may dwindle when you’re on day 4 or 5 of “drawing more maggots.” The third drawing follows tomorrow.