Designing the Unknown: NGV Essay

This essay was originally commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria for publication in NGV Magazine, Issue #30, Sep-Oct 2021. ‘Designing the Unknown: Symbols and objects of death, remembrance and mourning in design and making’ was written by Penny Craswell.

We might not think of designers as being concerned with existential subjects such as mortality, but if we take a closer look at symbols and objects of death, remembrance and mourning throughout history, a different story emerges. Looking at design works in the NGV Collection as well as common symbols, from the Jolly Roger to the ‘spiky blob’ of COVID-19, Penny Craswell explores how designers confront the big questions of life and death, and how they can influence our perceptions and attitudes towards the unknown.

‘Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.’ — HARUKI MURAKAMI

I was about ten years old when I saw my first death mask. Ned Kelly’s face seemed almost serene – eyes closed, head smooth, propped up in a glass display case at the Old Melbourne Gaol. The memory of that moment has stayed with me all these years – standing there I had a powerful sense of fascination mixed with fear. This was not some horror movie or bogeyman – this was a real man, a real corpse. And his life was really taken, here, at these gallows.

Death has long held fascination for us – our own deaths may present something to fear, something to ponder, something to prepare for. Other people’s deaths also can be profoundly affecting – mourning is a vital part of the human experience and we memorialise loved ones in various ways. Death masks are interest- ing because they make something ephemeral – a living face – concrete and eternal, relatively speaking. Dating back to ancient Egypt, the death mask has been used to record the faces of rulers and famous figures in history, from Tutankhamun to Dante, Beethoven to Napoleon. They are not made for just anybody: someone has to be famous – or infamous – to have a death mask.

Death masks are one of a number of different artefacts and objects that are associated with mortality. The skull is another common symbol. Plenty of other objects are also traditionally associated with death, including coffins, shrouds, gravestones and plaques, urns, mourning jewellery and clothes. In recent decades, many of these objects have been reworked by contemporary designers, while other designers confront the subject through works that express grief or symbolise remembrance.

One of the most interesting contem- porary design explorations is Vespers, 2016, a series of death masks designed and created by Israeli-American designer Neri Oxman and her team the Mediated Matter Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The masks, which were displayed in the inaugural NGV Triennial exhibition of contemporary art and design in 2017-18, are a contempo- rary reinterpretation of the ancient death mask, made by 3D-printing using spatial mapping algorithms. There are three series, Vespers I, II and III, 2016, each with five masks. The first series, Vespers I, is inspired by ancient death masks that often were made with precious stones and minerals. Five colours were selected, each corresponding to a colour found in an ancient death mask, then an algorithm was used to select colours and shapes to additively build the masks. Vespers II is a development of the first series, a stepping stone from the ancient past to the future of technology.

Vespers III takes the idea of the death mask one step further – these have been brought to life through the addition of living microorganisms which can be seen coursing through the nearly colourless shell. Oxman and her team synthetically engineered a variety of different microorganisms, which were placed inside the mask in order to produce specific pigments and/or chemical substances, such as vitamins, antibodies or antimicrobial drugs. ‘Devoid of cultural expressions and initially nearly colourless, these masks are paradoxically the most “alive” of the three series’, said the MIT team. ‘They literally “re-engineer” life by guiding living microorganisms through minus- cule spatial features within the artefacts of the dead.’1 In a contemporary world where making death masks is a much less common practice, it is interesting to see how Oxman and her team have redesigned these objects, creating a set of tools and technologies to build program- mable matter, and, at the same time, given the concept of the death mask a new life.

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A trip to Melbourne, March 2018. We’d stopped for an eclair at an Italian pasticceria on the way to the National Gallery of Victoria, and arrived in the late morning to see the inaugural NGV Triennial. I had already seen many of the works on Instagram and Mass, 2016–17, by Ron Mueck, an installation of 100 oversized human skulls piled high in the gallery, was one of the things I was most eager to see in real life. I remember the excitement of glimpsing the skulls through the doorway from the gallery adjacent and then the unreality of them as I stood close – so white, so big, so perfect. I wanted to reach out and touch them but didn’t. A child was playing near one of the skulls and I worried that she would touch them: she didn’t. I tried to photograph them but someone was in the way, ruining my composition. Each visitor politely jostled for the best spot to take a photograph.

Looking back I realise that the sense of disconnectedness, that Mueck’s skulls didn’t feel real, was almost like experi- encing the sublime. In my honours thesis I had written about the sublime as theorised by philosophers Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant and Jean-François Lyotard, but had rarely experienced it firsthand. I didn’t feel terror or delight – two emotions described by Burke as part of the sublime experience. Instead I had the sense that these jawless mon- strosities were so large, so numerous and so pristine that they were beyond my comprehension. It felt unreal, like they couldn’t really exist in this space, as the fully three-dimensional objects that I knew them to be. Maybe there is just something about a skull. Mueck said of the work:

The sight of a skull grabs us at an unconscious level. Even as children we know what it is, what it means. It attracts and repels simultaneously. In archaeology, forensics or investigative journalism, the image of a group of skulls begins to suggest a story. Often an unsettling one.2

The skull has featured throughout art history, most often as a sign of death or danger. Skulls and skeletons were commonly used in Japanese art, as well as being made as netsuke (decorative clothes toggles) or okimono (ornaments) from the seventeenth century. The skull and bones were often included in images of Christ on the cross from the Middle Ages through to the Renaissance, supposedly because Adam’s bones were laid to rest below the cross. Later, the skull became a common memento mori (meaning ‘remember you will die’), featuring in portraits and still-life paintings alongside hourglasses, clocks and guttering candles that signify that our time is numbered. In Albrecht Dürer’s exquisitely detailed engraving in the NGV Collection St Jerome in his Study, 1514, the skull and the hourglass symbolise the scholar’s mortality, and are depicted among various objects, including cushions, slippers and books, while a lion and a dog slumber peace- fully at his feet.

While death is a common subject for artists, designers are not traditionally associated with such existentially profound subjects. Design’s history has generally been much more pragmatic. In the post–Second World War era, design was associated with the ‘machine age’ – a sign of modernism and progress as well as a signifier of a certain social status. Towards the end of the twentieth century, as prices went up for ‘designer’ goods, it became more often associated with luxury – design was for the elite as well as the upwardly-mobile middle classes. Throughout, design was seen as a commodity, something to be acquired. Of course, all of this is a fiction – design is and always has been much more than that. Design serves many functions and one of these is communication. And in the world of communication design, the skull has a very clear meaning – death.

The image of the skull and crossbones is commonly used on poison bottles to warn us of danger. This dates back to the 1800s, when it became law to label household products that were poison- ous.3 And, of course, the skull’s use as a symbol dates back much further. In her book Hello World, Alice Rawsthorn points out that the Jolly Roger, the skull-and- crossbones flag used by pirates to instil fear, is ‘a textbook example of modern communications design … a precursor of today’s corporate logos’.4 Even though no one knows exactly why it’s called the Jolly Roger, the first recorded sighting of the pirate flag was in 1700 by John Cranby of the British Navy ship HMS Poole. After that, its use spread rapidly, with the skull and crossbones sometimes accompanied by an hourglass or daggers.

The ‘spiky blob’ of COVID-19 is another powerful communication tool brought to us by design. Its purpose is to communicate the dangerous and viral nature of this disease. The image was designed by Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins, and is part of a sub-genre of design called medical illustration that is used in teaching, research and scientific communications. Medical illustrators need to not only be designers, often specialising in graphics and/or 3D visualisation, but also to have a science education. Eckert was a painter and scientist, while Higgins had a background in graphic design, before they became medical illustrators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

The pair designed the ‘spiky blob’ of COVID-19 together in January 2020, before the public had any knowledge of it. The image is based on how the virus actually looks – the shape of the proteins for example – but other aesthetic decisions, such as the colours, were made by the designers. Eckert said: ‘We really focused on the big red S proteins, the ones that make the coronavirus so contagious by attaching it to human cells’. The designers also had to communicate the public health emergency that was unfolding – it had to be serious but bold, something really eye-catching. Eckert is clear that the purpose of the illustration was not to create fear, but to help the public to visualise the disease and act accordingly. Eckert says ‘It gave a face to the unknown. That’s how I think of it, because it gave people something substantial that they could hold on to and comprehend.’5

It is not unusual for the images associated with a disease as dangerous as COVID-19 to become infused with some of the fear of death associated with the illness. Just look at the plague beak – a piece of medical equipment for those doctors treating the plague from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. Plague doctors wore full-length gowns with hoods, gloves and boots, finished off with a face mask in the shape of a long bird’s beak that was filled with a ‘posie’ – herbs traditionally used to ward off bad miasmas in the air, believed at the time to carry the disease. In the 2020s, the plague beak has been replaced with personal protective equipment (PPE) – the full-length suit, hood and mask worn by doctors and nurses treating COVID-19 patients. While it’s not as macabre as the plague beak, there is some fear associated with the suits, especially because they cover the face. Interestingly, the fear of a face hidden by a mask contrasts with the fear associated with the death mask, whose job is to capture a likeness – while one conceals, the other reveals. Some doctors and nurses have pinned photographs of themselves to their chest so that they bring some humanity to the interaction.

Sitting here in my home office, writing this during Sydney’s longest and most severe lockdown in winter 2021, I’m reflecting on how so much has changed in the world in the past one and a half years. Yes, there was disconnec- tion, loneliness, illness and death before the pandemic, but now the negative has multiplied – you only have to watch the news to see it. Or, on second thoughts, turn the news off.

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As well as creating works that explore the concept of death, designers can have a hand in redesigning the objects directly linked to death. There’s the urn for keeping ashes, the coffin, the gravestone. Recent redesigns of these objects include End Cycle, a gravestone and urn designed by Sydney design studio

Gibson Karlo in collaboration with Veena Sahajwalla from the UNSW Centre for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT@UNSW). The gravestone and urn are remarkable, not for their appearance, but for their material design – they are made from recycled materials, including waste fabric. The designers speculate that the deceased person’s clothes could be used to create the gravestone and urn, thereby recycling waste materials and saving the use of primary materials in the creation of these objects. Another such project using recycled materials is the cardboard coffin designed by Australian company LifeArt and made from a specifically-engineered cardboard called Enviroboard, which is made from 97 per cent recycled materials and produces up to 60 per cent fewer carbon emissions than regular coffins made from MDF or particle board.6

Architects and landscape architects can also impact our perceptions of death through the architectural and landscape designs of crematoriums and cemeteries. A plan for a new cemetery called the Acacia Remembrance Sanctuary, proposed for a bushland site on the outskirts of Sydney by architects CHROFI and landscape architects McGregor Coxall, was created in response to the firms’ belief that attitudes to death are changing. The design celebrates the natural environ- ment and responds to an increasingly secular society, with the resting place of loved ones in unmarked graves locatable through GPS. An elevated walkway draws visitors through the bushland towards a walled garden, while at the heart of the site, a semi-enclosed pavilion provides a place for burial ceremonies.

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As a way of processing his own grief, US artist Fred Wilson created a magnificent chandelier, To die upon a kiss, 2011, around the time of his father’s peaceful death. The work, which was exhibited at the NGV Triennial in 2020–21 and supported by Professor AGL Shaw AO Bequest, is part of the artist’s decades-long work with black Murano glass, as well as an exploration of the history and presence of Africans in Venice and the Shakespeare play Othello. This elaborate chandelier, created in the Venetian tradition, features black at the base, which slowly transitions through to clear glass at the top, symbolising the body’s dissolution through death. Wilson said: ‘When looking at To die upon a kiss as a completed artwork, I saw my father’s life force in the blackness of the chandelier, draining down from the body as his spirit rose out’.7

Mourning jewellery has existed since ancient Rome, when skulls and skeletons, along with butterflies and Cupid-like figures with the torch of life extin- guished, were worn as memento mori. By the mid seventeenth century, the memento mori and mourning jewellery had combined – rings in black enamel with initials, dates and a coat of arms were worn to symbolise the death of an individual.8 From the eighteenth century, jewellery containing human hair was common, as seen in the 1782 Mourning pendant from England in the NGV Collection. Hair would be given in friendship between girls and between sweethearts and, after a person’s death, a goldsmith would then place the hair, often ornately curled and tied where the hair was cut, in a brooch, a ring or a pendant.9 In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff steals into the drawing room where Cathy’s body lies in her coffin, opens the locket around her neck and replaces her husband Edgar’s hair with his own. Later, the servant Ellen takes Edgar’s discarded hair from the ground, twists it with Heathcliff’s hair and replaces it in the locket around Cathy’s neck, symbolising the fact that Cathy loved Heathcliff as much, or more, than her own husband.

Contemporary jeweller Susan Cohn has also created a pendant about death and remembrance. Last the blast, 2006, was created in response to an interview she watched on TV with a couple who lost a daughter in the Bali bombings. Cohn was deeply affected by hearing that the family of the deceased did not have a body to bury and, in fact, did not have anything left of her. In response, the necklace pendant Last the Blast carries a message and is designed to survive a bomb blast. She says: ‘[I]t just bubbled up. What if I made something that could send a message back? What if it was a piece of jewellery that someone was wearing?’10 Made of steel, ceramic and titanium, the pendant is bombproof, like the dog tags that soldiers wear to war to identify them. With this work, Cohn has not just created an object to commemorate a death, although it may do so. Instead, the work is designed to outlast death, acting as a messenger for loved ones left behind.

Little ten-year-old me who saw the death mask did not think about death often – and many of us don’t for the majority of our lives. More recently, major world events such as the pandemic have brought the subject much closer. Importantly, designers, like artists, have a role in asking the big questions, includ- ing those of life and death, and in making us consider our own and others’ deaths in new ways. Designers can also play an important role in communication design that warns of danger, in redesign- ing the objects surrounding mortality, and in memorialising the departed. Because design isn’t about progress and it isn’t about luxury – it’s about making life better, and that means making death better too.

NGV Members can also listen to Penny Craswell read her essay on the NGV website.

1. MIT team, quoted in Ali Morris, ‘Neri Oxman’s new death masks contain pigment-producing microorganisms’, 26 April 2018, Dezeen, https://www. dezeen.com/2018/04/26/neri-oxman-vespers-death-masks-pigment-producing-microorganisms/ , accessed 23 July 2021.

2. Van Badham, ‘Skull and bones: Ron Mueck’s outsized installation gets under the skin’, 25 Dec. 2017, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian. com/culture/2017/dec/25/ngv-triennial-an-arresting-exploration-of-identity-and-exile, accessed 23 July 2020. For more on the death mask, see ‘Death mask’, Britannica. com, https://www.britannica.com/topic/death-mask , accessed 23 July 2021.

3. Emily Miranker, ‘Pirates, poison, and professors: a look at the skull and crossbones symbol’, 19 Sep. 2016, New York Academy of Medicine, https://nyamcenterforhistory.org/2016/09/19/pirates-poison-and-professors-a-look-at-the-skull-and-crossbones-symbol/ , accessed 23 July 2021.

4. Alice Rawsthorn, Hello World: Where Design Meets Life, Hamish Hamilton, London, 2013, p. 30.

5. Alissa Eckert, quoted by Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Alissa Eckert on designing the “spiky blob” Covid-19 medical illustration’, 26 Sep. 2020, Wallpaper, https://www.wallpaper.com/design/design-emergency-alissa-eckert-designs-covid-19-illustration , accessed 23 July 2021.

6. ‘Cardboard coffin, 2021’, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, https://collection.maas.museum/object/398986 , accessed 23 July 2021.

7. ‘Triennial profile: Fred Wilson’, NGV, Victorian Government, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/multimedia/triennial-fred-wilson/ , accessed 23 July 2021.

8. Margriet Sopers, ‘Memento mori and mourning jewellery’, 29 Feb. 2012, Talking Jewellery, http://www.talkingjewellery.com/?p=4634 , accessed 23 July 2021.

9. Marjorie Simon, ‘Objects of remembrance: contemporary mourning jewelry’, Metalsmith, vol. 25, no. 5, 2009, https://issuu.com/ marjoriesimon/docs/objectsofremembrance_metalsmith-vol29_no5 , accessed 23 July 2021.

10. Susan Cohn, quoted by Tracey Clement, ‘Susan Cohn on the personal and political power of jewellery’, 3 Sep. 2019, Art Guide, https://artguide.com.au/ susan-cohn-on-the-personal-and-political-power-of-jewellery/ , accessed 23 July 2021.