In the vast New York  Park Avenue Armory Taryn Simon presented from September 13-25 as a world premiere a uniquely themed performance piece in which professional mourners from 30 countries shared rituals of grief and mourning with a small audience. Mourners from all over the globe, including  Cambodia, Russia Kyrgyzstan, Venezuela, Armenia, Bhutan and other countries participated and shared their lamentation, The artist placed the performers at the bottom of eleven tall 48 feet high hollow circular concrete towers. They were arranged in a semi-circle lit from within in the darkened armory and contained at the bottom a small space for the mourners entering through a low portal.   At nighttime they offered in separate half hour segments through music, songs, crying, praying, and speech the rituals from funerals their countries to groups restricted to 50 people.

Visitors entered the dark and quiet Armory drill hall from the side of the building and enjoyed from a high balcony the installation from a bird’s eye view. After the mourners slowly took their spaces at the bottom of their towers the ceremony began in a startling mix of chants, music and sounds. The expressions of grief were articulated by the mourners simultaneously for about half an hour. The audience was allowed to descend to the ground floor when the presentations started and walk around the installation. Most visitors shared briefly the mourners’ laments by entering in tiny groups their space.  The space was crowded and one could follow the articulation of sorrow, yet it was difficult to experience intimacy or empathy with the grief, unless the one opted for staying in a mourning space for a longer period. For me sole exposure for about ten minutes to two mourning monks from Bhutan and their lamentations came close to an immersive experience. When silence set in ending the rituals the mourners left their columns and the visitors exited through the Armory’s back door.

Without doubt Simon’s concept guiding the performance from towers of grief is most original and the research she carried out for the project must have been enormous. It is difficult to narrow the gap between compensated mourning and our forms of privately expressing grief about the passing of loved ones because it is bound in our societies in most cases to religious services or a funeral that follows secular ways. In contrast the articulation of grief and sorrow is expressed in many other cultures through recitations of grief by professional mourners. Our pain is mainly expressed in the private realm and the overt expression of grief unusual. In other societies where traditional cultural norms still prevail mourning is shared with the community through the service of hired mourners. In their chants they frequently express the link to the social communal setting and the family, report about the life of the person who died, allude to the afterlife, and praise the passed person’s life. As reflected in the Armory performance, the manifold rituals incorporate music and sounds, spiritual songs, vocal wailing, spoken words and instruments. They can be embedded in a timeframe lasting frequently many weeks. This socially constructed mourning period seems to have a greater bearing on the grieving relatives and community than the impact of funeral arrangements on family and friends in our societies with their more fragmented structure’s, decline of underlying symbolic systems, and the private expression of pain.
 

Claus Mueller, filmexchange@gmail.com