Session One: Silence, Art and Ritual
Editor's Note

We begin our exploration of "seeing the difference" in a session entitled "Silence, Art and Ritual." Launching the institute with a specifically visual example, photographer Jim Goldberg prefaces his presentation with a moving series of images of individuals he had photographed some years earlier in a Boston nursing home. Goldberg then moves on to show and discuss his work on the death of his father, an amazing series which had been commissioned for an exhibit organized by the National Hospice Organization (Hospice) for the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (later published in the catalogue entitled Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry). His parents had agreed to the Hospice photographs, Jim explains, because they "wanted to help people." As both son and photographer Jim "saw" his father's death. In readings from diary entries he made in those final days of his father's life, as well as the images he shot, Jim explores the difficulties inherent in those dual roles. Jim Goldberg's presentation probed the kinds of knowledge that art and ritual can provide in the realm of loss and suffering. Of the moments captured in his photographs of his father, he later wrote, "I could feel something when my father died, but I couldn't see it." That dichotomy Jim identifies between feeling and seeing will be seen to come up again in subsequent discussions of the Institute.

Jim's account of being there, of witnessing the death of his father as both son and artist, is followed by "Death Opens," Sandra Gilbert's exploration of the ways in which the death of her husband "opened" into something "plausible," "urgently close" for herself and her daughters, seemingly collapsing the boundaries between the living and the dead. A literary critic and a poet, Sandra Gilbert speaks in spatial terms to the notion of boundary or border that Jim Goldberg's photograph of the watch marking the moment of his father's death ("7:41am") suggests in a temporal sense. The ways in which funerary practices either do or do not take such borders into account are explored in Gary Laderman's presentation, "The Embalming Century." A scholar of religion with a focus on American rituals around death and funerary practice, Laderman gives us an account of the pivotal role of embalming in the growth of the funeral industry; embalming, he explains, allowed the notion of the "last (beautiful) look." The embalmed body that ostensibly does not "look" dead is thus a powerful means of denying the boundaries between the living and the dead.

All of these presentations explore the regime of the visual in different ways. The panelists ask, what do we see when we look at the dead? What is the function of this seeing, for the dying and for those who survive? Does art facilitate or obfuscate our attempts to understand the experience of death? And finally, as eloquently posited by commentator Jodi Halpern, M.D., Ph.D. (philosophy), what is the function of acknowledgement--for the living and for the dead? What do we want from the dying? What do the dying themselves want? What is the relationship between acknowledgement and empathic connection? Speakers and participants grapple with these questions in the discussion introduced by Dr. Halpern, asking what cultural metaphors are open to us in the contemplation of death. If death is, as Sandra Gilbert has suggested, an "open door," what is that space that we want to peer into, that place whose image we both desire and dread? --CMG

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