PRIZE-winning German artist Gregor Schneider has caused an uproar by launching a search for a volunteer willing to die for art.
The enfant terrible of the German cultural scene is looking for someone whose dying hours will be spent in an art gallery with the public admiring the way the light plays on the flesh of a person gasping for the last breath.
The 39-year-old artist has been concerned with death for much of his career. He gained critical acclaim for a sculpture, Hannelore Reuen, of a dead woman.
He has been hatching his latest idea since 1996, and now has a pathologist and art collector to help to find a candidate who wants to become a work of art in the final days of his or her life.
"The dying person would determine everything in advance, he would be the absolute centre of attention," said Mr Schneider.
"Everything will be done in consultation with the relatives, and the public will watch the death in an appropriately private atmosphere."
Death is commonly seen as the last taboo, although artists have been trying hard to demystify it.
Gunther von Hagens, nicknamed Doctor Death, has been travelling the world with an exhibition of plastinated corpses, showing genuine human bodies in living poses, playing chess or on horseback. The Wellcome Collection in London has an exhibition of portraits of people pictured before and after death by two German photographers.
The Schneider project, however, seems to have gone too far. It is being compared with watching executions in the US.
The influential gallery owner Beatrix Kalwa spoke for many German curators who rule out the idea of giving space to Schneider's artistic endeavour.
"Existential matters like death, birth or the act of reproduction do not belong in a museum," she said.
"There is a fundamental difference between portraying these acts in an art form, and showing them in actuality."
The head of the German hospice foundation that provides care for the terminally ill, Eugen Brysch, said: "This is pure voyeurism and makes a mockery of those who are dying."
But Schneider argues that death is already undignified and that his aim is to restore its grace.
Original here
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Artist Gregor Schneider wants volunteer to die as artwork
Career women work longer hours than men
Housework and child care are condemning millions of career women to much longer working days than men, a major report claims today.
Women who go out to work still do the bulk of household chores, according to the study by Cambridge University of more than 30,000 people.
So while men may spend longer at the office, it is women who work more each week if domestic and paid employment is added together.
Several commentators have argued that the "have it all" woman with a career, children and husband has turned into the "do-it-all woman".
Shirley Conran, author of the 1975 bestseller Superwoman and founder of the Work-Life Balance Trust, said recently that women needed to fight for "domestic democracy", with men sharing a bigger burden of the chores and child care at home.
Today's European Union-funded report, which examined working practices across member states, says that the average man in full-time employment works about 55 hours a week.
In the UK that figure includes about 3.6 hours commuting, and eight hours of domestic work such as cleaning, cooking and child care.
By contrast, the average working week for a woman in full-time employment in the EU is 68 hours.
For British women that comprises 40 hours in the office, 3.3 hours commuting and 23 hours a week spent doing domestic work.
But even women who work part time put in longer hours overall than men in full-time work, because they do so many household chores.
Women with part-time jobs work on average 57 hours a week. That is made up of 21.3 hours in paid work, 2.4 hours commuting and 32.7 hours of domestic work.
The domestic workload also prevents millions of women from working the long office hours typically required to break into the top management jobs on high salaries, the report says.
Many more women with school-age children are only able to work part-time because they have to pick their children up at 3.30pm, cook their dinner and help them with their homework.
The upshot is that three quarters of the EU workforce is still managed by men and just nine per cent of full-time male workers are managed by women, says the report.
In the UK, women make up just under half the workforce, but they represent less than a third of legislators, managers and senior officials.
The lifestyle divide must change if women are to have equal opportunities in the workplace, the report says.
"The working lifestyles of most people in Europe still seem to be determined by gender," said Dr Brendan Burchell, a senior lecturer in sociology, who will present the study in Brussels today.
He added: "A lot of women feel they don't have choices. They have children with a partner and reduce their hours in the early stages of a child's life and when they want to re-establish themselves in their careers and in terms of their earning power, they are so far behind their husbands.
"There should be more equal career breaks between men and women when children are born - for instance, by encouraging men to take their parental leave entitlements."
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