#amygartrell

Pink (Two Lines Meeting in Space), Amy Gartrell, (2004), MoMA: Drawings and Prints

The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift Size: 19 x 16" (48.3 x 40.6 cm) Medium: Ink, gel-ink pen, and pencil on colored paper

In her project for issue #15, “Alive and Dead,” Amy Gartrell reveals and then disrupts the ways in which we tend to relate to the dead and the famous. Images of celebrities and rock stars lie etched in a plain white notebook, their faces flat and minimally outlined. Distinctive features shine through—a wild hairstyle here, a signature outfit there—but bodies tend to blur into the blank space surrounding them. Emblazoned on the first page are the words:

‘Why is it so much easier to admire the dead?’

The question is echoed in the following pages, now asking why it is so much easier to admire the famous, to admire strangers. Yet despite her insistent questioning, through the formal rendering of the subjects Gartrell begins to answer her own questions. Just as Gartrell’s figures have visual holes that are left to be completed by the viewer, the living are free to construct their own images of those who have died—it is easy to admire the dead because their absence can be filled with idealizations. Even figures in the project marked with the words ‘famous’ or ‘alive’ are only presented as outlines, their fame emptying them of substance and leaving their identities open for others to form.

Having subtly illustrated the flattened, somewhat unreal lives the famous and the dead lead in our imaginations, Gartrell begins to reintroduce a sense of her subjects’ humanity. In the final pages of the project Gartrell shifts from questioning to labelling, including with each figure the word “alive,” “dead,” or occasionally simply “famous. The effect of seeing these labels alongside the familiar face of a popular icon can be disorienting; reduced to a symbol, it is easy to forget that the famous are still human.

Although the images in Gartrell’s project are drawn rather than photographed, the way in which they remind the viewer of their subject’s humanity is similar to the quality Barthes identifies in photographs as punctum. In Camera Lucida Barthes describes the way in which death is always present in photographic images, writing that “there is always a defeat of Time in them: that is dead and that is going to die” (96). Yet even if death is always present, we are not always conscious of it—it takes a unique element, a punctum, to shake us into an awareness of the mortality of an image’s subject and bring out a sense of poignancy. In the case of Gartrell’s drawings, the label of ‘alive’ or ‘dead’ over each subject serves as this punctum. The tension between the familiar image and the definitive label is capable of pricking, reminding the viewer that the subject is mortal or already dead, acting as an engaging memento mori.

By illustrating our tendency to dehumanize the dead and famous only to insistently rehumanize them, Gartrell has suspended her subjects in an ambiguous space between life and death. Simultaneously harboring a flattened immortality and signs of their actual or eventual deaths, the figures in Gartrell’s images are, as the title suggests, both ‘Alive and Dead.’

To once again resurrect the somewhat-dead, visit Amy Gartrell’s project from issue #15 here.