Mastering Death: Artistic Perspectives
Contemporary Artists on Medical Ethics from
the Nazi Doctors ´ Trial to the Present
2nd March - 1st April 2017
Josephinum, Medical University of Vienna, Währinger Straße 25, 1090 Vienna
www.meduniwien.ac.at/josephinum
Mastering Death: Artistic Perspectives
Mastering Death:
Artistic Perspectives
Euthanasia became an important question in late-nineteenth-century Germany
after medical breakthroughs extended
lifespans, leaving increasing numbers of
people to meet their ends from painful
terminal illnesses. Shouldn’t the terminally ill have a right to avoid suffering by
choosing when they wanted to die? And
shouldn’t people too sick or injured to
choose for themselves have others give
them a merciful death, just as suffering animals routinely receive? In 1913
a terminally-ill German patient asked
these questions in support of a proposed
euthanasia law. The courts rejected the
proposal because its vague definition of
impairments that warranted mercy killing
could lead to a slippery slope.
During World War I, the German government rationed food and medical supplies
to support its troops. As a consequence,
many of the more than 140,000 patients
in government asylums who died between
1914 and 1918 perished of malnutrition
and epidemic disease. Understood by
some as a necessary sacrifice, the deaths
fueled a debate in the economically
difficult interwar years that followed. Less
concerned with patients’ suffering than
with resource allocation for the mentally
ill and physically disabled in government
asylums, the most extreme writers argued
for “the destruction of life unworthy of
life“. To bring health to the body of the
German state, they believed, useless or
harmful parts should be removed.i
Mastering Death: Artistic Perspectives
Adopting these arguments, the Nazis created their Aktion T4 program for secretly
killing asylum patients, which their propaganda called “worthless eaters.” Officially
established on 1 September 1939, the
first day of World War II, the T4 program
would save money and free hospital beds
for wounded soldiers. Eventually utilizing
gas chambers and crematorium ovens,
T4 would also serve as a model for the implementation, two years later, of genocidal
policy against the Jews. During those years, the term “euthanasia” (or Gnadentod)
became a euphemism for mass murder.
Immediately after the war, in 1946 and ’47,
the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial held German
physician perpetrators accountable for
their crimes. It also established the tenets
of modern bioethics, above all, that patients and human experimental subjects
must understand and consent to medical
intervention. Physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia today, legal in some
countries and some American states,
gives patients the control over their lives
that early advocates sought more than a
century ago. But these new developments
have inspired fresh criticism, some of
which draws on the knowledge of German
history and the fear of another slippery
slope.
Mastering Death: Artistic Perspectives
presents artwork by eight contemporary artists that explores the history and
ethics of induced death. Who decides the
worthiness of a life? By which criteria?
What, if anything, constitutes a “good
death”?
Artistic Strategies
and Questions
The eight contemporary artists in Mastering Death: Artistic Perspectives employ a
range of formal and philosophical strategies to explore the topics of Nazi murder,
as well as physician-assisted suicide and
euthanasia since those dark times.
Reflecting on Nazi crimes, some memorialize: Arie A. Galles draws in charcoal to
recall the ashes of cremated victims, and
the poet Anna Halberstadt, in collaboration with artist Vitaly Komar, reflects in
verse on familial loss.
For his part, Komar emphasizes Nazi
secrecy and deception about state
murder. He creates a sinister swastika by
adding four skulls to a benign sign of the
Red Cross.
Susan Erony incorporates historical evidence in her art to call attention to an arrogant and reductive way of thinking that
many associate with the Nazis because
they presumed to understand the value of
human lives. Verena Kaminiarz recognizes that thinking today in bioethical
guidelines for the purportedly humane
treatment of laboratory animals.
Given this grim history and troubling
legacy, Ruth Liberman ponders what it
means to be human and animal.
Suffering with ALS, artist Betsy Davis
recently orchestrated her own physician-assisted suicide in front of an audien-
ce of family and friends, including Niels
Alpert, her frequent artist-collaborator.
Out in the open and entirely under her
control, Davis’s death would seem to have
nothing to do with the Nazis’ secretive
murder of patients under the guise of
mercy killing.
But Manfred Menz and Julijonas Urbonas,
with weird suicide machines, each raise
troubling questions about the right to die.
Menz suggests this freedom may be a
trap. Urbonas’s euthanasia roller coaster
presents a literal slippery slope. We know
that compassionate calls for euthanasia in Germany more than a century ago
gradually morphed into state-sponsored
murder. Are we wiser now so that we may
avoid a similar unanticipated fate?
Andrew Weinstein, PhD
Curator
Associate Professor of the History of Art
at the Fashion Institute of Technology,
State University of New York, USA
Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: ‘Euthanasia’
in Germany c. 1900-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1994), 11-19.
i
Mastering Death: Artistic Perspectives
Mastering Death: Artistic Perspectives
Checklist
Curated by Andrew Weinstein, PhD
Niels Alpert, Untitled, 2016. Inkjet print.
Image size: 28,5 x 40,6 cm
Niels Alpert, Untitled, 2016. Inkjet print.
Image size: 27,1 x 40,6 cm
Niels Alpert, Untitled, 2016. Inkjet print.
Image size: 30,3 x 40,6 cm
Verena Kaminiarz, ‘may the mice bite
me if it is not true’ installation detail:
Felix, 2008. Inkjet print.
Image size: 30,5 x 40,6 cm
Verena Kaminiarz, ‘may the mice bite
me if it is not true’ installation detail:
Habitat, 2008. Inkjet print.
Image size: 30,5 x 40,6 cm
Niels Alpert, Untitled, 2016. Inkjet print.
Image size: 25,2 x 40,6 cm
Vitaly Komar and Anna Halberstadt,
Broken Cross, 2016. Number 5 of 12,
C-print.
Image size: 77,3 x 50,5 cm
Susan Erony, Tower of Babel:
1 September 1939, 2016. Inkjet print.
Image size: 58,4 x 55,9 cm
Ruth Liberman, People Are Not Animals,
2017. Inkjet print.
Image size: 81,3 x 81,3 cm
Susan Erony, Tower of Babel: Tree of
Races, 2016. Inkjet print.
Image size: 57,8 x 55,9 cm
Manfred Menz, EUTHANASIA
SOLICITATION, 2017. Ed. 5, Inkjet print.
Image size: 59,5 x 76 cm
Susan Erony, Tower of Babel:
Useless Eaters, 2016. Inkjet print.
Image size: 57,5 x 55,6 cm
Julijonas Urbonas, Euthanasia Coaster,
simplified technical drawing, scale
1:1000, 2010 Silkscreen on metal sheet,
Image size: 90 x 120 cm
Design, engineering: Julijonas Urbonas
Medical advisor: Dr. Michael Gresty, Spatial Disorientation Lab, Imperial College
London
Arie A. Galles, GNADENTOD, 2017.
Charcoal and conté on Arches BKF.
Image size: 74,9 x 55,9 cm
Cover: A technical drawing of the front projection of the Euthanasia Coaster. Julijonas Urbonas, 2010
Niels Alpert, Untitled, 2016. Inkjet print.
Image size: 30 x 40,6 cm