Brissett, D. and Edgley, C. (2005). Life as theater. Transaction Publishers. 

- Funeral directors and their teams are seen as 'actors' and 'crew' who ensure that they stage a performance to show dignity and respect for the family at loss.
- Backstage preparation (embalming) to ensure the body looks nice for it's 'final performance'.

Ceri Watkins (2005) Representations of Space, Spatial Practices and Spaces
of Representation: An Application of Lefebvre’s Spatial Triad, Culture and Organization, 11:3,
209-220
- Representation of space- dominant space in society
- Spacial practices- production and reproduction of locations and spacial sets
- Spaces of Representations - spaces of lived experiences lived through images and symbols

Durkin, K., 2003. Death, dying and the dead in popular culture. Handbook of death and dying, 2, pp.43-49.
- Popular Culture
    - Obsessive fascination with death and death-related phenomena.
    - According to the National Institute of Mental Health, by the time the average American reaches age 16, he or she has seen 18,000 murders on television.
    - Dramatise death through the whole the process.

Karoline Gritzner (2010)  Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance   

- Catharsis in theatre harnesses dangerous emotions, tragedy has always gives a glimpse of the unknowable and unrepresentable world of human desire, passion, love, violence, pain and death.

- Kantor (1976) = Theatre of death= theatre of impossible presence in which space and time are haunted by ghosts and memories and the human figure often modelled on, replaced by wax figures- suspended in-between life and death 

- It is possible to express life in art only through the absence of life through an appeal to death through appearances, emptiness and a lack of message 

- THEATRE IS THE SPACE which actors and spectators perform their ritual of transformation… ‘as if they were to embark on a dangerous expedition’ 

-Theatre= transformation and the last transformation is death… dying… theatre is not the presence of the living actor or the living spectator but the person who has the potential to die 

Argument: Has the online presence of death memorials replaced the need for Victorian death photos? 

 

Cited: Doss, E. (2010) Death, art and memory in the public sphere: The visual and material culture of grief in contemporary America. Journal of Mortality, Routledge. 

 

Are we more comfortable speaking about death, or does our lack of contact with the dead leave us searching for superficial comforts so we don’t have to think about the actual death? Are we so comfortable with the dead that we have a spectacle— or are we so uncomfortable with the actual death that we distract ourselves with a spectacle? “On the one hand, such attention to the visual and performative dimensions of mourning suggests new understandings of death in the public sphere. On the other, a superficial focus on psychic closure—on healing and surviving—skirts the causal, historical dimensions of these visibly public deaths” (p. 71). 

 

We like to publicly show our symbolic sorrow or respect for the dead, even if we do not personally care, or even know the reason in which they died. 

“While an aesthetic of naming is evident—with the chairs featuring the names of those who died—it is largely anaesthetic because the historical and political context of why these deaths occurred has been effaced” (p. 78). 

 

 

Gibbs, Meese, Arnold & Carter (2015) #funerals and Instagram: Death, social media & platform vernacular. 

 

—in contemporary cultures, death is addressed in online environments with recent popularity in online memorials and virtual cemeteries 

—online memorials provide social support for those who are grieving through networking 

—the deceased appear to living as still participating as social actors, possibly showing forms of denial and discomfort with death 

—the dead are moved away from the living/society as they are not themselves, but are repositioned back into everyday life with social media memorialization, as to not disturb/upset those who miss them 

Explains how Victorian jewellery often contained the hair of loved ones as an extension of the body and to provide continued existence of the loved one. Talks of how now we would rather not be physically touched by death. 

Jewellery Transition From Death to Life (2015)
Shows how people used articles from the dead such as lockers of hair and a combination of different stones such as amethysts, which had some sort of significance to the family were used and distributed around the family after a loved one passed, and were used to express their mourning

 

Carol Evans (2003) looks at 1990’s fashion and refers to it as ‘heroin chic’. Photographers produced landscapes peopled by wasted models. She looks at the darker side of fashion through photography paralleled a prevalence for real life disaster imagery in modern media. 

 

Kearl (2015) argues that the repeated exposure to the skull symbol has resulted in society becoming desensitised towards an image which historically represented death. Fashion designers have used the image and this has contributed to the towards the acceptance of skulls in modern culture.

 

Subcultures created who ‘idolise’ death for example, goths. Infatuation with death, vampires and satan.

 

The role of fashion is changing with an example of the ‘Monster high doll’ they are aimed and addressed towards the younger generation and their interests. There are links towards the horror franchises such as Twilight and other death and ghoul related literature.