Who wants to live forever...

Info

Media

Concept

Info

1998

9 photographs, single-channel video, 6'25"

Media

Images

Concept

Who Wants to Live Forever is an effort to reveal the uncontrollable hunger of the contemporary media apparatus to disseminate salacious information parading as news, to manufacture human lives as media products as well as the exhibitionistic rendering of the celebrity experience even at the moment of their death. An explicit reference to the tragic 1997 death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when the celebrated member of the British Royal Family was killed in a car accident generally believed to have been caused by pursuing paparazzi, this work consists of two parts and contains both a visceral critique of the media apparatus and a personal testimony. The first part is a pastiche of a music video, in which a Princess Diana look-alike is seen posing against a completely white background for a photoshoot to the beat of the ensemble Queen (the title of the work makes allusion to a track by the band), gingerly hoisted onto a Mercedes-Benz S280 car seat, the same make and model of car in which the Princess expired. The second part consists of a series of pictures taken during the photo shoot in the video, in high contrast and high gloss veracity, as if they were meant for a fashion magazine. The visible injuries found on Diana’s corpse, such as the blood dripping from her nose and smeared across her chest, or daintily descending from her lips were faithfully reproduced according to a detailed police report garnered from the internet.

 

For AES+F, the physical death of Princess Diana did not announce the demise of her media image — beloved as she was by the people and the press during her lifetime — but rather its canonization. On a biographical note, Who Wants to Live Forever was inspired by the mass hysteria displayed by the British people on the occasion of Diana’s death, a delirium the artists witnessed directly given that they arrived in London on the day of the Princess’s tragic passing and departed on the day of her funeral. This devotional frenzy resembled the medieval revelation of a new saint, bringing with it all the attendant, morbid interest in a victim’s wounds, presented as evidence of the purity of her sacrifice. Whilst publications of Diana’s corpse were forbidden by the British government, and traditionally the portrayal of saints in the Middle Ages often emphasized the blood of the martyr as a signifier for both beauty and salvation, the project’s accurate presentation of details of the Princess’s injuries at the time of her death nonetheless did not represent an overt transgression of censure, or a hagiographic narration. Rather, Who Wants to Live Forever offers a critique of the media production of and the public desire for a glamorous death as both sacrifice and transcendent experience. As a function of a media-driven idolatry standing in for the sublime, it is an exegesis for those who must become victims to then become saints.

 

This project belongs to the same typology as Corruption. Apotheosis (1996), Family Portrait (1995), and even Défilé (2000–07) as part of the corpus of the artists’ work emerging in the 1990s, which investigated a disharmonic, wounded, and mangled body. The presence of blood — or its absence when instead one expects to see it — presents a crucial narrative for AES+F and a constant element in their visual language. The representation of pain belongs in their investigation of suffering or its denial as a common denominator or confirmation of existence: the wound is the tangible sign of the action perpetrated, the place where the limit of the flesh is broken — in a lived experience ever more simulated, cybernetic, or mediated. As will become evident in future projects, as the artists entirely sublimate the representation of blood and pain, flesh itself is no longer carnal, but always already subsumed by the virtual.

 

Who Wants to Live Forever was first shown in 1998 as part of the Academy of Frost exhibition at the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art in Odessa, Ukraine and subsequently at New York’s renowned Art in General in 1999, as part of their concurrent studio residency. It was later displayed at the group’s retrospective at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg in 2007, and most recently in 2018 at Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, Italy, as part of the exhibition Music for the Eyes.