Katarina HERGOLD
Tisnikar's Paintings – A Challenge
to Reflect on the Relationship with Life and Death
Outside the narrow circles of art
connoisseurs, Jože Tisnikar’s paintings and drawings, which depict the
inescapably finite nature of human life with a persuasiveness that cannot
be put into words, have long evoked primarily fear and unease among viewers
of these images of transience and death. In the milieu of Jože Tisnikar’s
life and work, the problem of the altered meaning and attitude towards
death in modern, or modernising, society bears its own specifics connected
with the strong presence of traditional phenomena primarily manifested
in the crucial moments of the life cycle of an individual. In modified
social and economic conditions, with the absolute expansion of technology
and the media, these moments have to some extent been transformed, they
have adapted to new conditions, so that today and in our surroundings we
see an intertwining of old and new customs, of old and new ideas, meanings
and attitudes towards life and death.
Tisnikar was also interested in
other border states of human life apart from death. Images from the prosection
room stand beside pictures of everyday human life. This inevitably brings
us to the issue of the social milieu in which Tisnikar was formed and which
he depicted, that is, the issue of the way of life and thinking of the
Koroška people and, in particular, of the conceptual world and the manner
in which people have comprehended and conceived the perpetual life cycle
of community and the mortality of every individual. This was Tisnikar’s
original world, in which he was born and grew up, where his personality
was shaped and where he lived his daily life. And it was this world, as
he saw and understood it, which he then depicted with his peculiar, individual
artistic expression based on his personal life experience. He was constantly
looking at death and thus saw something which is not frequently seen, or
which others refuse to see: that every living being is mortal, and this
fact characterises every moment of our lives from birth onward.
Tisnikar’s paintings reflect the
world of ordinary people, they are infused with basic traditions. We live
our everyday lives in perpetual interaction and communication with others,
and we consider this to be a self-evident reality structured in time and
space. This is also the world of the artist; his creations have brought
him to the defined contextual sphere of art, and then returned him to the
daily world. The time structure of life guarantees historicity which determines
the position of an individual in the sphere of daily life. The era into
which we are born, the conditions in which we grow up, go to school, work,
etc., form part of a wider history, and these conditions basically determine
the position of an individual in the world, and their relationship with
this world.
Tisnikar’s worlds: his primary surroundings
of the family in which he was born; the village community in which he grew
up; the war which he experienced as a youth; all the particulars that finally
led him to work as a male nurse in the department for the seriously ill,
and later as an autopsy attendant in the prosection room; the people who
discerned and stimulated his talent for painting; his own family; the world
of village taverns which he frequented; his work, in which he saw the most
dismal moments of human existence; animals as his companions – all these
represented the surroundings in which he lived. The artist realised his
ideas primarily through some inner impulse which was, however, subordinated
to the given time and space in which it occurred. The interaction of the
actual surroundings on the one hand, and the artist’s genius and unique
expressive language on the other, led to the creation of art works which
specifically manifested both the artist’s perceptive world and the surroundings
which enabled them.
This article does not wish to emphasise
the social determination of the artist’s life and work, nor to ascertain
the indefinable motives of the artist’s subconsciousn by psychoanalytic
means, but merely to point to the specific atmosphere of space and time
in which the artist lived as actor and onlooker at the same time. Although
Jože Tisnikar has exhibited his works throughout the world, he still prefers
the Koroška region, where he has lived all of his life. It is well known
that a prerequisite for the evolution of his painting was his moving away
from his native Mislinja to the regional centre of Slovenj Gradec, where
certain people were sensitive enough to notice his artistic talent and
enable his development in every possible sense. In the search for creative
inspiration he did not need to move further into the world, however, since
all the essential themes of life existed in their totality on this tiny
piece of Koroška. I am convinced that we must take account not only of
the prosection room, for which Tisnikar has become widely renowned, but
also of the socio-cultural situation of his surroundings on a wider scale.
In the 20th century, especially
its second half, the way of life in Koroška and elsewhere has been marked
by the transition from the old society to the new one. In comparison to
other historical periods, the rhythm of changes has now become so fast
that new generations cannot imagine living as their grandparents did, at
least no more than they could imagine living as their most distant ancestors
did. Transitions have never been so turbulent. The generation born before
World War II, however, largely lived a traditional way of life, it assumed
the customs and traditions of its predecessors. In the post-war period,
when the old had been destroyed and the new constructed through voluntary
work action, ways of living were changing alongside the establishment of
new bases of life, related primarily to rapid urbanisation and the modernisation
of life. Some traditional forms of culture and the conceptual world, however,
have stubbornly persisted and adapted themselves to new situations, and
old customs persisted along with new ones especially in rural areas: Church
weddings and funerals besides civil ones, village quack doctors and traditional
medicaments besides modern doctors and medicines, and so forth. The fact
is that old traditions persist for longer and more strongly among the rural
population than in towns, and thus we can say of Koroška that despite changes
in material resources, several old traditions persisted side by side with
the new ones produced by the modern era.
As Tisnikar created within a space
and time essentially defined by this very transfer from the traditional
to the modern, or the coexistence of both, it is precisely this transfer
that we must take as the main characteristic of the time and space in which
he has lived and which inspired him - new conditions and old traditions.
Although the secular prevails in routine everyday life, people still perform
old ritual practices to dignify the critical moments in their lives.
The tangle of old rituals and new
social conditions characteristic of the local countryside and its inhabitants,
has led to a way of life in which the old world of beliefs and myths has
been intertwined with the growth of secular thinking, which began to develop
in the first half of the century when bourgeois behavioural manners also
began to spread among the rural population. The post-war period brought
ideological excuses for the elimination of both traditional beliefs and
expansive bourgeois codes of conduct, but on the concrete level of everyday
life they both continued. If today the Christian belief in Heaven and Hell
is losing its strength even among believers, the world of consumerism as
an ordained and accepted mode of living and thinking generates a series
of new syncretic beliefs resulting from a growing hunger for the spiritual.
Besides the currently practised manifold mixtures of superficially transformed
Eastern religions, horoscopes, and Christianity with mythological new-age
modifications, scientific inventions and various para-sciences, traditional
ritual forms (frequently mere formulae with modified contents or no contents
at all) also remain in force.
Today, the ritual practices related
to life and death in the Koroška countryside are largely performed in the
habitual manner, but the primary ritual meaning has been pushed into the
background and the performers are frequently no longer aware of it. But
it is precisely the stubbornly deep-rooted nature of such »rites of passage«
that points to the need for their performance within a given social group.
Tisnikar’s creations are not limited
to depictions of hospital life, or of his work in the prosection room.
His subjects include all aspects of human life: apart from the motifs of
the dead in the prosection room, Tisnikar has presented in his paintings
the whole caravan of life, starting with birth and ending with death. Even
in the first monograph on Tisnikar we find a statement which summarises
the primary dimension of his painting: »Wherever you start, the way always
brings you to death; be it birth or marriage, an extinguished wax candle
or a voiceless deaf mass – sooner or later the way will turn towards the
graveyard, the gaze will stop at the cross bearing the crucified (whose
arm was cut off to increase his sufferings), or else, we will shudder at
the vengeful emptiness of the horizon, which threatens us with the point
of no-return - us, the pilgrims of life and the horses with pointed ears
, which help us to pass more swiftly from arriving to departing.«
But it is not death as the final station in a long journey called life,
but life itself (so valuable precisely because of the constant awareness
of the presence of death) which speaks out from Tisnikar’s paintings, which
narrates tales of our own selves, of the crucial moments of our existence.
With his unique expressive language
the artist depicted the most sensitive moments of human existence, the
moments of passing from one phase of existence into another, the moments
at which individuals, or communities, are extremely vulnerable and are
therefore protected by an abundance of ritual practices.
As to everyday life, Tisnikar was
primarily a painter of marginal, critical situations in life. In all societies
and cultures, the passing from one state of existence to another - from
non-being to being at birth, from being to non-being at death, and from
one phase to the next throughout life – is accompanied by ritual practices,
and all of them, according to Van Gennep , are structured in the same manner.
Regeneration, permanent re-creation is the basic law of life and the universe:
the energy of all systems is gradually consumed, and therefore it must
be renewed at certain intervals. According to Van Gennep, this regeneration
in the social sphere takes place in rites of passage, in rituals of death
and rebirth. For the duration of this passage, an individual, or a community,
leaves the profane sphere of former existence and enters the sphere of
the sacred. This new state demands rituals through which the individual
will finally become a member of a new group and return to the world of
the profane, to the normal routine of life.
Ritual practices performed at birth,
marriage, and death, ease potential problems in these periods of passage,
and they are conducted according to the principle of cyclic regeneration.
They bring certainty to the life of the community, and in exceptional situations
they ensure that every individual has a precisely defined position and
set of responsibilities in events. They also represent the guarantee that
the appropriate performance of procedures will protect and guard the individual
and community from the workings of unknown forces which could endanger
the life of the community or individual. If today the ritual of baptism
is still widely performed in churches following a birth, or if the funeral
ritual is still led by a priest, these rituals not only express Christian
contents, but hide within themselves the residues of ancient beliefs that
have survived to the present.
The expansion of industrial and
urban civilisation has caused significant changes in the social system,
and one of them is a growing secularisation and the disappearance of holy
rituals. Although such rituals primarily concern the individual, they are
also an opportunity for group participation, as in the case of a funeral
or wedding, in a rural community. But the secularisation of the modern
world has not reduced the need for the ritual expression of the passing
from one stage of human existence to another. If people are deprived of
rituals, they must make such passages alone, and this can cause psychical
disturbances in certain individuals.
Human life is a series of passages
from one period to another, from one stage to another. These consecutive
passages from one phase to another, all with similar beginnings and endings,
are implicit in human social existence: birth, the passage from childhood
to adulthood, marriage, pregnancy, parenthood, death. In a certain sense,
the entire social life of an individual is construed as a series of passages
with rhythmic changes between periods of repose and intensive activity.
Human life is similar to nature; it is not and cannot be separated from
nature, it reacts with nature. Nature and the universe are also defined
by periods, by phases and passages, by progress and periods of relative
stagnation. This correlation of man and nature is less noticeable in increasingly
urbanised modern surroundings, but certain rites of passage which represent
cosmic changes in yearly cycles, such as the transition from one season
to another, from the old to the new year, etc., are still carried out in
the customary and habitual manner. The actors in the rather modified, but
nevertheless persisting traditions of shrovetide and carnivals, which mark
the passage from the old to the new, from winter to spring, still view
the ritual as the exception to everyday social rules and norms. The original
meaning, presumably based on the cult of ancestors and spirits of growth
and fertility , have gradually been forgotten; when the pagan contents
vanished, the initial thrill of the mask was replaced by licentious pranks.
The Renaissance eruption of the new meaning of life, directed towards the
existing world, found its expression in a lively carnival which spread
from towns to villages. In the countryside, the preserved ancient masks
have been incorporated into the vivacity and subversity of carnival practices.
The archaic remains of ghosts and spectres figure in Tisnikar’s carnival
scenes: his »Death Mask« depicts a masked man representing the spirit of
the ancestor, but at the same time he had already become this spirit himself.
Life in hospital was the main source of Tisnikar’s themes. Not only patients, the dying, and the dead in the prosection room, but the whole hospital universe, including physicians, nurses, animals in the dissection rooms, and disfigured foetuses. The events documented in his paintings acquired new dimensions: the carnivalisation of the hospital world in Tisnikar’s paintings is based on real events from rural life, where tradition is so strong that the hospital doors could not restrain it; on the contrary, carnival elements have entered the world of physicians and patients, i.e. the modern hospital world.
The district hospital of Slovenj
Gradec was built at the end of the 19th century, but until the post-war
period, and discounting exceptions, it was not the place where human life
began and ended. The development of medicine at the end of the 19th century,
and its spread to the countryside, helped essentially to change the notion
of life and the attitude towards death: the Church lost its centuries-old
monopoly on the human body, its life and death, and the development of
medical practice started simultaneously to modify the traditional notion
of the natural inevitability of death. For a long time people had
sought physicians and gone to hospitals only when all traditional forms
of medicine proved ineffective, and we still find today a rather ambivalent
attitude towards medical help among the most traditional sectors of the
population. Despite the fact that the physician’s profession is highly
respected, there remains a covert mistrust of official medical practice.
The progress of medicine, along
with the parallel increase in hospital capacities and the increasing education
of the people, has resulted in the fact that hospital has gradually become
a place where the majority of children are born, and also that all those
who would previously have waited at home for death to come, are now cared
for in hospital.
Tisnikar’s paintings tell us that when the course of life ends for an individual, it continues for the human race: birth, the perpetual antithesis of mortality, occurs on a daily basis, in parallel with death which nowadays takes place in another department of the same hospital. They express the course of life which begins again and again, the eternal cycle of life in which the human race is regenerated. In the Koroška countryside, as well as in every other traditional society, traditional beliefs and connected rituals related to childbirth comprised a number of practices aimed at the protection of the child from the workings of unknown and dangerous forces, ensuring her or him a happy life and introducing her or him into their respective community. Such rituals not only concerned the child, but also the child's mother. Although today the belief in the Fates, in the dangerous »trutamora« and in various spells no longer dwells in human consciousness, some actions are still connected with it. Thus people believe that Baptism - according to official Church doctrine, the act of erasing the child’s supposed original sin, through which the child enters the community of the Christian Church - protects the new-born against spells and other evil spirits. In Tisnikar’s paintings, both the birth of a child and Baptism as a ritual that introduces a new member into the community and guards the child from unknown forces, supplement death and funeral rituals in a complementary way as their opposite pole. At the same time, the artist warns us against the lurking shadow threatening the newly arisen life: the perpetually emerging primary link between mother and child can represent the basis of a new family, although child birth is not always a happy event: the suffering of labour pains is not always rewarded with new life. As the stillborn child is carried away, Tisnikar asks himself: »Where is the beginning of life, and where is its end?« Despite the decline of infant mortality in the post-war period, there are still a number of dead, disabled, or sick children being born. And there are still children dying for a wide variety of reasons; Tisnikar compassionately calls them the angel children. Today we have special social institutions ensuring that sick or disabled children are hidden from the world of contemporary society, of the beautiful and the healthy: from Tisnikar’s canvasses, however, a one-eyed being looks at them with dread and reproach.
At all times and in all cultures,
death has represented one of the greatest mysteries of life. It is
a strong symbol, also marking the absolute end of something positive; it
is a transitory and destructive aspect of existence. In most cultures,
death is connected with passage into the unknown world, into the life in
the kingdom of the spirits. It is connected with rites of passage, for
every initiation passes through the phase of death before the gateway to
a new life is opened. But despite the faith in the regenerative power of
death as the liberator of negative and material forces, which dematerialises
and liberates the forces of the mind and enables them to rise above the
material world, it is usually regarded as something fearful and terrifying,
sourcing primarily from the fear of the unknown. In popular culture, the
relationship with death has primarily been expressed in relation to different
forms of post-mortem life, and in relation to dead ancestors. In the traditional
rural world, unfavourable living conditions resulted in greater exposure
to death and the uncertainty surrounding one's life span. Although life
in harmony with the cyclical rhythms of nature's regeneration, and a conviction
in the fragility of life did not entirely eliminate the fear of death,
it is also true that traditional society has been taking the death of its
members as a fact of nature.
Is death in modern society really
tabooed, as claimed by Gorer and Ari?s ; is it true that in the 20th century
it has replaced sexuality as the dominant taboo, or is it only shrewdly
hidden from the gaze of those who have not experienced it directly, from
up close? To some extent, their claim about death as a new taboo is true:
in former societies, a strict silence about sexuality reigned, but children
were present at the deathbed just as adults were; today children learn
about sexual life at a very early age, but the death of a member of the
family is presented in an embellished and masqued form. On the other hand
there is a growing interest in death, or the after-life, throughout the
world: we only have to think of the growth in the number of popular books
on dying and death, the presence of death in newspapers, television programmes,
etc.
The modern world certainly talks
about death, although not in a uniform manner, but rather as a function
of various ideological discourses, related to both individual points of
view about the world and the position from which people face death: as
physicians, priests, or undertaker’s clerks; as philosophers or artists,
writers, painters, film makers; or – as a particular feature of modern
society – as tradesmen who embarked on the most reliable business, using
commercial and marketing language when talking about death in the context
of offering funeral services.
Writings on the significance of
death in modern society are also marked by several paradoxes: the thesis
of death and dying as a taboo subject, present in many scientific and popular
articles in the West, is opposed by the very phenomenon of the immense
quantity of literature on the subject of death and dying. On the other
hand, however, the growth of literature about death also points to a new
state of disorientation among people when confronted with the issue of
death.
The social perception of Tisnikar’s works is marked by a similar paradox: he claimed that he did not sell any paintings in twenty years, since outside a narrow circle of connoisseurs, who had recognised and appreciated the artistic value of his works, people did not accept his works, they did not want to look at them on the walls of their homes, but perhaps only occasionally at exhibitions, on the neutral surface of gallery walls. An interesting question comes to the fore in this context: how to explain the change in the social perception of Tisnikar’s paintings which appeared sometime in the eighties? What was it, after twenty years, that motivated people of such various profiles to seek out and buy his work? Does the sale of his paintings stem from general recognition by the specialists and the media promotion of the artist, so that the ownership of his artistic work may seem to be a status symbol of guaranteed quality, or should the reason be sought in the new phenomenon of postmodernism as a life style in which the change in sensibility, in the relationship to the key existential issues – thus including our relationship with death - occurred precisely because of the resistance to technological dehumanisation? Monographic presentations of the artist, his international success, and the media interest in his exceptional life have probably also contributed to the rise of his fame, and thus swelled the ranks of his admirers and the possible buyers of his opus. However, if we wanted to determine the actual reasons that brought the current owners of his works to actually buy them, we would have to analyse their social and professional structure and also to look in detail at the conscious and unconscious impetuses of their motives. We could also ask whether it was not precisely the enduring presence of Tisnikar’s paintings that motivated at least some viewers to start - after the initial shock - to think more carefully about the circle of life and death, and to stop rejecting images that warn them of their own mortality.
The omnipresence of death speaks
of the way in which people are essentially the same when facing it, of
the inevitable mortality of every individual, and of the end of one’s life
and the continuation of the lives of others who will, one day, also come
to the end of their life cycles and leave their places to future generations.
But despite this unity in the finite nature of human destinies, perceptions
of death, of the dying and the dead, are very varied both from the perspective
of the dying person and of the surroundings in which they lived. The notions
of one’s own death and that of someone else are inseparably connected with
the social and cultural contexts in which they are expressed.
The experience of someone else’s
death, especially the death of someone important to us, and the related
anticipation of our own death, represents a border situation par excellence
. The world of symbols, which provides order in the subjective comprehension
of life experience, also comprises the realities of border situations which,
according to Luckmann, represent the severest threat to self-evident and
routine social existence. The legitimisation of death is one of the most
important consequences of the symbolic world, regardless of its origin
or recourse to religious, mythological, or metaphysical explanations of
reality, for an individual thus includes death in her or his symbolic world
and learns how to live in society also after the death of important Others,
and ensures the recipe for the »right« death. And the »right« death,
i.e. the death legitimised within a certain social form, depends on the
particular historical and cultural surroundings. The surroundings, which
invested Tisnikar’s canvasses with images of life and death, was and still
is profoundly saturated with traditional patterns of behaviour and perception
of the world, fully manifest primarily in the key moments of the life cycle,
in the border situations of experiencing the passage from one form of existence
to another.
The relationship with death, dying, and the dying is prone to modifications connected with change in the concrete conditions of life, and thus also of death, in modern society. The growing privatisation of individual life, in connection with the phenomenon of continuous medication, represents the essential context of current reactions to death. Medication has subdued the process of dying to the control of experts, and contributed to the relocation of death from the ambience of the homely community to the institution of the hospital. If hospital is not and does not want to be the place of death, but rather the place where life begins and is renewed, the prosection room is nevertheless a necessary component part of it, for frequently there is no other medicine for a sick person than – death.
At the end of the nineties, the
social and material conditions of life in different social groups in Koroška
are very different than they were in the days when Tisnikar embarked on
the road of painting. The distance of places and people from regional centres,
which in the post-war years still conditioned the power of tradition and
the response to the new, currently plays a much lesser role. In the post-war
period in particular, the differences between the city and the village,
between peasants and labourers, people of the mountains and those of the
plains, the more and less educated, the religious and non-religious, have
changed from a relatively unique traditional perception of the world to
manifold variations regarding the world, life and death; on the other hand,
these are not finite, but change together with the social conditions of
the life of particular groups.
It is only recently that new elements
regarding death - and particularly regarding customs related to death –
have emerged in our immediate living environment. Despite the strong post-war
secularisation, the prevailing conceptions of death originated mainly in
Catholic imagery, although empirical surveys among young people at the
end of the sixties showed that conceptions of death and the(absence of)
belief in posthumous life are not necessarily connected with the declared
faith or atheism of the individual. Religious ritual practices, however,
have frequently been preserved regardless of belief in posthumous life,
for they perform an important function for all mourners at the moment of
crisis.
Hospital as a place where many lives end in death - despite the contrary efforts of the physicians - is a modern phenomenon. The tremendous progress of medicine in this century has instigated hopes that some illnesses have ceased to be fatal, and it has pushed death into the background of human awareness. The absence of reflection on death and dying is a modern phenomenon. We have ceased to speak of dying people, we speak rather of the sick, who must be kept in ignorance of the fact that they are dying for as long as possible. The consequence of the current means for the precise diagnosis of a certain disease – in contrast to our ancestors, who did not have our modern diagnostic methods at their disposal – is a conviction that people with incurable diseases know exactly when they are going to die, and that they are doomed to die relatively soon. But this is not entirely true: that which enables modern people – if they are accurately informed, of course – to precisely comprehend their illnesses, at the same time prevents them from recognising the moment of their own death; incurable illnesses can change into curable ones, living during the process of dying is alleviated by different analgesics, and prolonged with the aid of medical equipment. The hope of staying alive is greater, and so is the degree of panic in the face of death. But the period during which a person already knows that she or he will die of a particular disease, can last much longer today than it did in the past, when medicine did not provide means for the prolongation of the fading life.
Modern everyday language provides
a good example of the growing disregard for death, since people often avoid
naming it directly. We employ euphemisms, like »they have departed«, »they
have left us«, »they are no longer with us«; in the case of violent death
we say that they »tragically passed away«; the corpse becomes »posthumous
remains«, »the body of the departed«. The language of death is not composed
merely of words and sentences, but also of the silence surrounding it:
except for informing the community of the death , mourners in urbanised
surroundings are expected to keep their grief to themselves, as a private
matter, and not to express it publicly and thus create awkward situations
in which people do not know how to behave any more, since the old expressions
of solidarity and compassion have become inappropriate under the modern
conditions of living and working. Although death is not a forbidden subject
or regarded as taboo, it is currently more and more concealed in terms
of its exclusion from the public sphere, it is increasingly becoming the
private affair of the family and friends of the deceased, and not a matter
for the community as a whole.
The fact remains that most people
today do not want to hear, see, or know anything about their own death,
or the death of someone else – until the moment it happens in their immediate
surroundings. Thus all care for death and the dying is entrusted to a small
group of professional specialists. A physician, a nurse, an attendant –
they accompany not only convalescents on their way back to a healed existence,
but also the dying on their way to unknown oblivion. When a body becomes
a corpse, its way to the graveyard has a half-way station: the prosection
room. This is the space where deaths which are out of the ordinary are
clarified, where the inner organs of human bodies speak of hidden aberrations
in the process of life. In Tisnikar’s paintings we never see these inner
parts; we see the expressions on faces, which bear witness to the weight
of past inner struggles within the deceased.
People have been more shocked by
Tisnikar’s images than by the bloody death scenes from distant battlefields
reported on daily televised news, which have been frequently perceived
as fictitious, since these images confront people with a real sense of
their own end, and prevent them from forgetting about death. Constant presentations
of death, of deceased individuals or mass deaths, imaginary or real, daily
coming into our homes via mass media along with a plethora of other messages,
have lost their power, they leave us indifferent and passive because of
the information overload. But they always present scenes of distant deaths,
the deaths of unknown, foreign people. These are abstract, anonymous deaths,
mainly forgotten the moment they pass from our sight. Endless images of
death
do not provoke reflections on death, they leave us unmoved.
With his singular depictions of
death and the world of the deceased, Tisnikar has cut deeply into the consciousness
of the world where people wanted to push death to the very back of their
awareness. At first glance, the viewers see only the things which they
did not want to see, and the images of the dead in his paintings push the
world of the living around them into the background. Death bursts forth
from his paintings into the consciousness of the living, and touches the
Achilles heel of every individual – the finite nature of our own being.
His paintings do not speak of the fate of others, the foreign, the unimportant;
they implicate us, for they show the fate of each of us, but they also
warn us about our indifference. His images must be taken seriously: he
saw countless deaths of both the anonymous and the famous, strangers and
friends. He has known death to its very heart; he has not been afraid of
it; looking at it and beyond it he came to know the constant flow of life,
occurring in endlessly repeating cycles.
The fact, repeated time and again, of the decisive role of environment in the formation of a human being, individual attitudes and – as a consequence - actions, must constantly be repeated in the case of the extravagant personality of Tisnikar, but this does not change the fact of the crucial role of the artist’s specific reception of the world, and of his specific originality in experiencing and depicting the world. Even external impetuses for the permanent presence of death inhabiting his world should not be sought only in his enduring and characteristic work with the dead, since his work in the prosection room did not represent his first contact with death. Images of death first inhabited Tisnikar’s soul when he experienced and observed war atrocities in his youth, and looked into the face of death himself. The bodies of people and horses, crowds of refugees rushing through the Huda Luknja canyon and over Mislinja towards the north at the end of the war, have been etched in his memory forever.
Death and the dying represent the
last rite of passage in human life. The events remain essentially the same,
while the respective places and feelings change. The attitudes of the living
towards death and the dying vary; they depend on time, space, faith or
the absence of it, the form of death, the relationship with the dying,
the role we play in someone’s death. The old society knew an ancient, permanent,
and strong feeling of affinity with death, without fear or horror, a feeling
somewhere between passive resignation and mystical surrender. Dying
was a public ritual, performed within a wider family group, and the dying
person was sovereign master of her or his own death and of the conditions
in which it took place. The fear of unexpected death has always been present,
in bygone societies it was connected primarily with the inability to prepare
for one’s own death, to prepare the final things with which the dying wished
to ensure their life in the hereafter. Today, the tragedy of a sudden,
unexpected death survives mainly in the shock experienced by the relatives
at the sudden loss of their beloved, while concern for the world beyond
has been replaced by regret about the end of the delights of earthly life.
This new phenomenon, pointing to the disappearance of traditional modes
of thinking and living, is present in the fact that no one wants to see
how a dying person is actually going to die: the relatives wish the dying
person to remain in hospital until her or his death, while in hospital
they want the dying to die in their own homes.
Is it true that, in modern society,
the dying are robbed of their own deaths? Today people frequently die alone;
in cases where death is expected people no longer die in the ambience of
their own homes, where they can think and take decisions about their own
end, but in hospitals. In place of family members, the dying is mainly
frequented by physicians, nurses and attendants, who find themselves in
a special situation dictated by attendance on the dying person.
Tisnikar’s first job in hospital
was in the department for the seriously ill. Tomašević’s statement points
to the typical phenomenon of the modern era, the emergence of social death
even before physical death: »It frequently happened that when death was
approaching, the surroundings ceased to take care of the dying, leaving
them to die alone. The dying were not attended by relatives and friends,
and thus Jože replaced them and lived with the dying through their last
moments. ‘They suffered, became oblivious, and as I held their hand they
imagined that I was their son, their mother, or their father. They called
me by different names, and when they regained consciousness, they asked
me not to leave them alone.’« In hospital it is difficult to
meet the wish of the dying for the presence of those closest to them which
would last longer than just a visit. Modern care for the deceased and the
dying in modern hospitals has prolonged the period of dying; a longer period
of dying often causes relatives to cease caring about the dying and sometimes
only to wait for death to come.
Tisnikar not only depicted the dying
and the dead in hospital, but also the entire social drama taking place
on the death of a member of the community. The dead and their relatives
become actors in the rites of passage, which show a characteristic, universal
tripartite structure. It pertains to all traditional customs connected
with passages from one state to another, including those practised in Koroška
in the transitions from one phase of life to another. It also applies to
the rituals connected with death which have been preserved to date partly
in a traditional form, while many of their features have been adapted to
the modern principles of life.
The rites of separation include
the detachment of an individual, or a group, from their former status or
position. In this phase, the deceased is separated from the living members
of the community, and so are – temporarily - those mourning the dead. Another
set of rituals concerns transition, during which an individual, or a group,
is placed between two social states and frequently also physically or symbolically
excluded from the community. The dead pass from the world of the living
into the world of the dead. This period lasts from the moment of death
until the funeral ceremony, the time of the »wake« for the dead. For the
mourners, the period of transition represents the period of grieving, during
which they gradually pass from the world of the dead back into the world
of the living. The final set is the rites of incorporation, which incorporate
an individual, or a group, into a new social state or position. This set
comprises the funeral ceremonies, during which the deceased is ultimately
included in the world of the dead, and enters the world beyond, while for
the mourning it has an important role as the symbol marking the time limit
of the process of mourning, during which they gradually return to the world
of the living. In earlier societies, the period of mourning was strictly
defined and characterised by a number of restrictions and rules for the
mourners: a withdrawal from social life, a ban on participating in festive
social events, the wearing of mourning garments, and so on. The abandonment
of the outer signs of mourning meant the ultimate return to the world of
the living.
Historians and anthropologists
claim that funeral rituals belong to the most ancient elements of civilisation
and that it is impossible to delineate their Christian and pagan aspects
as the archaic folk customs have merged, through the centuries, with the
new Christian elements imposed by the Roman Catholic Church.
The Christian concept of the body
as the source of sin has marked the body, and thus also the corpse, with
a negative symbolism. The contempt for corporeality and bodily pleasures
was the core of Christian pastoral theology in past society. The Christian
degradation of the body as the source of sin, thus the cause of human sufferings
and difficulties, and the obstacle preventing the attainment of Christian
wholeness, also influenced the notions of religious people in traditional
societies. In the Christian funeral ritual the soul departs from this world,
it abandons the body which is condemned to degradation. But the trickling
of urban and secular patterns and values has triggered, since the end of
the 19th century, a change in the traditional notion of death, while in
the 20th century the growing affinity for life and the positive evaluation
of body have increased in a complementary manner with the growing secularisation.
The irruption of new patterns of thinking and behaviour did not begin only
in the 20th century. Apart from Church writers and preachers dictating
primarily care for the posthumous salvation of human souls and the corresponding
behavioural models, the emergence of the germs of secular thinking among
the still weak bourgeois class of the time can be noticed already in the
19th century. But the secular and religious notions of life continued to
coexist in individuals and groups for a long time: concern for the body
did not immediately and universally undermine concern for the destiny of
the soul.
The unease, or even aversion, evoked
in many people by the dead bodies in Tisnikar’s paintings, can also be
explained as a consequence of affinity with the worldly life and our own
bodies, which in modern society has replaced the orientation towards the
world beyond and the posthumous life of the soul. The aversion to a dead
body, understood as a source of evil and thus representing only a burden
for the soul, as suggested by the Catholic Church, has now acquired a new
basis: at a time when the axiomatic belief in posthumous life has been
replaced by affinity with the existing world and by doubt, or mistrust,
in life after death, the corpse has become a warning of the finite nature
of corporeal life, or life in this world, which attracts the attention
of modern people in contrast with their ancestors who hoped for eternal
life.
Today, the relatives of the deceased take over the corpse in the hospital’s prosection room. Besides facing the known and unknown dead, Tisnikar’s work in the prosection room also meant permanent confrontation with the suffering living: those who remain, who accompany their dead with tears and grief, and finally put them into mother earth. In the prosection room, Tisnikar repeatedly came into contact with people who had just experienced the worst traumas of their lives, i.e. the death of a loved one, and the confrontation with the corpse. In connection with the painting »In Memory of« he says: »I often take off the ring and give it to the relatives as a memento … I have poured every scene of mourning and pain into one single image …«
Tisnikar witnessed countless distressing
confrontations between the living and the dead, countless life stories
that emerged at the outlet of life. As both actor and viewer faced with
the shaken and grieving relatives, he expressed in his paintings a simple,
but absolutely truthful message: »Here all might is in vain« . Naked human
corpses do not differ from one another in terms of social status, wealth,
or beauty. But the end of individual existence, devoid of any meaning,
has different consequences for people affected by death in this way or
that. The comments accompanying his pictures in Tomašević’s monograph,
written by Tisnikar himself, point to the scope of his compassion and understanding
for those who experienced the death of a loved one as their own social
death. The example of a man who died within a day of his wife’s death because
of his loneliness and desolation, that is, because of the social isolation
of the pair, and the cases of widowed, uneducated women left without security
after their husbands’ deaths, suggest a growing social alienation in the
modern era, when communal solidarity apart from assistance at the time
of the funeral is rare, and care for the aged and the abandoned is becoming
increasingly dependent on the social institutions of the state.
Until the recently introduced practice
of cremation, the modern pattern of dying in hospital - outside the ambience
of the home and in the absence of the closest relatives – was usually followed
by rituals and customs of the wake for the dead, and by a traditional funeral.
In the traditional village community, the death of a family member was
primarily a matter for the narrow and wider family circle, and then also
for the wider village community. The departure from the world of the living
is still announced by the custom of ringing church bells , although the
ritual meaning of the majority of customs still practised between death
and actual burial is now almost forgotten. Until the introduction of mortuaries,
the deceased lay on a catafalque in her or his own home. People »watched
over« the corpse; the relatives, friends and other members of the
community came to sprinkle holy water on the corpse, and brought flowers
and funeral wreaths. It is known that before the introduction of mortuaries,
when all-night vigils were abandoned, night prayers often ended with joking
and singing. The humorous demeanour was supposed to protect against the
evil powers of the deceased; the laughter made way for a special psychic
mechanism which enabled the living to look into the eyes of the forces
of death, and provided people with relief from their unbearable anxiety.
Because of the ominous power of
death it was necessary - according to popular belief - to separate the
dead from the community of the living, to ensure the soul a safe transfer
from this world to the world beyond, and to protect the community of the
living against the return of the departed. Funerals are also conveyors
of social messages: they are indicators of social standing and respect
for the deceased in the community. The ritual also enforced social relationships
necessary for the preservation of the collective identity of the community,
threatened by the death of one of its members. The funeral ceremony
with its central role played by the Catholic priest still principally represents
the basic framework of the funeral ritual, only that today the role of
a lay person, who carries out the secular farewell to the dead, has also
became important. For a long time after the war, a hearse in the funeral
procession was still drawn by black horses, while today the transport has
been motorised. The images of people in funeral processions, and horses
drawing the hearse, attracted Tisnikar even in his youth. A component part
of these processions was the musicians, usually acquaintances and friends
of the deceased. From the house – and today from the mortuary – the procession
of people headed for the graveyard: an old man carrying a cross, and an
old man or a child carrying a light at the head, followed by men in pairs,
musicians, a priest and altar boys, a hearse, then the closest relatives,
and finally the women and children. The addition of civil elements to the
funeral ritual and modern changes in transport means, and the relocation
of the wake, have not affected the basic structure of funeral processions.
Every event in the community, including
death, was normally accompanied by music: in most cases choral singing,
sometimes accompanied by musical instruments, as an intonation of the emotions
experienced at the event, be it joy or sorrow, and as a mechanism enabling
the introverted character of local people to relieve their otherwise restrained
emotions.
Graveyards and the cult of graves
connected with the memory of the dead, as we known it today, is a relatively
new phenomenon. Together with the growth of cities and the rise of population,
the individualisation of graves and the introduction of family vaults has
resulted, in most places, in graveyards being gradually moved away from
churches to the outskirts of cities. Customs have also changed, and the
currently common habit of visiting and tending family graves was not known
in the past. The graveyard as the final destination of people and the ultimate
location of the dead, has also found its place among Tisnikar’s themes.
Another rich set of themes is the images of the crucified. The crucifixes,
installed throughout the country, have been transformed in his paintings
into his characteristic images of the crucified: »I have raised all the
dead from their coffins, and transformed them into Jesus on the cross.«
Among the funeral customs that
have found a place in Tisnikar’s paintings is the funeral repast, »the
feast for the dead«, usually held in a local tavern. Its form was frequently
connected with the social status and financial capability of the family
of the dead. Nowadays it has largely been abandoned in urban surroundings,
but it is still performed in the countryside. The compassion for the mourners
which is figured in Tisnikar’s paintings, originates in the tragedy of
loss, but also in the tragedy of those remaining alive: a number of people
at a funeral repast, or the lonely widow whose low social status does not
allow her to host the mourners in memory of the deceased. The funeral party,
or »the seventh-day repast« (formerly performed on the seventh day after
the funeral), as well as all the other preserved customs, is based on ancient
folk beliefs that the soul of the deceased remains for some time in the
proximity of the living. Funeral repasts and feasts at weddings and
baptisms, are carried out in the same places, in taverns. Festive feasts
with food and drink, which are precisely and traditionally defined according
to each occasion, are a necessary element of the festive events for all
the crucial rites of passages in life. But if the ceremonial feast marks
the cohesion of a certain community during some important transition of
one or more of its members, everyday tavern life is something completely
different. The tavern scenes in Tisnikar’s paintings appear just as he
himself has seen and experienced them: the social life of a great part,
or even the majority, of the local population is reduced to socialising
in taverns, with the obligatory consumption of alcohol. The merrymaking,
which finally turns into the vacant stares of destitute beings, indicates
the way of life and the destinies of many people in these surroundings.
The painter has always been a spectator,
but often also an active participant in events, and his self-portrait is
frequently included in the narratives of his paintings. He is a herald
and a witness, but also a participant in the crucial events of human life;
moreover, he is an artist who perceives - be it consciously or unconsciously
- impulses from the social environment in which he lives but which he also
transcends by means of his special and unique artistic expression.