Outline

Approach

Ultimately, Colour Me Dead is an art-centric exercise, focusing on artworks in order to consider wider social and cultural issues. It chooses this approach not to elevate artistic endeavour as some kind of definitive pursuit (indeed, the project is highly critical of such assumptions), but to study how images in art simultaneously reflect and determine socio-cultural outcomes. Three lines of close-analysis are followed in Colour Me Dead.

1. Works of Art

Firstly, the research for Colour Me Dead has collected and assessed over 1,800 select artworks from nearly 300 artists across 300 years to chart a barometric transformation in changing perceptions of the nude. It follows how the nude incrementally morphed from a neo-classicist attainment of perfection in beauty personified, to an obscured and transfigured object of desire to satiate fetishistic, psychotic and necrophilic compulsions. From this generally chronological increase in the depiction of visceral violence in images predominantly concerned with naked bodies, 18 chapters have been created to outline this progressive destruction of the body. (Stage 1 of the research – completed 2009-2010.)

2. Acts of Violence

Secondly, this purposeful cataloguing has been checked against how such images relate to actual crimes of passion, acts of violence, wartime atrocity, post-war dysfunction and serialist psychosis. Synchronicity is evoked gradually across the 18 chapters by aligning how artists approached their desire for their muse's bodies, with how murderers similarly (and often contemporaneously) satiated their desire for their victim's bodies. Among other things, Colour Me Dead investigates the coincidences between the photographic forensic evidence of 19th century fin de siècle rape and murder, and the distortion, transfiguration and abstraction which surrealists, abstractionists and performance artists eventually employed to represent the nude in the first half of the 20th century. It is under the pressure of Modernism that the nude shifts from a figurative ideal of organic form to an amorphorous aftermath of aberrant deformation. (Stage 2 of the research – completed 2011-2012.)

3. Images of Sexualized Violence

Thirdly, the project aligns these findings with ways in which popular culture - predominantly through cinema (scoping over 500 films), but also other forms of populist media - confuses osmosis with psychosis, by depicting artists as crazy, and psychos as creative. In the last few decades (bizarrely coinciding with the global rise of contemporary art), this has notably accelerated to the point where psycho movies construct the serial killer's apartment to resemble a contemporary art installation. Conversely, biographical portraits of artists' lives more and more tend to accentuate the artist's compulsive demeanour, societal separation, and tragic debilitation of the mind. Colour Me Dead notes how even the most ill-informed attempt to depict an artist and his working situation creates a deluded vision of art-making that many a contemporary artist (and fans, critics, reporters of the artist) has ambiguously or naively replicated. (Stage 3 of the research – completed 2013-2014.)

These three stages are folded into the core writing of the book, whose primary concern is the close-analysis of the artworks listed in the Stage 1 of the research. The critical view taken of these artworks results from perceiving their imagery through the distorting lens of how imagery is generated, quoted, assembled and dispersed today. Yet the writing is impelled by the artworks first and foremost, hence the wide-ranging selection and the intentional exploration of seeing these works free from their historical critical frameworks - many of which have not been revisited since their inception. Driving this perception is an acknowledgement of how cinematic imagery has echoed and amplified Modernism, aping and mimicking painting history for aesthetic effects (Stage 3 of the research), while extrapolating visual evidence of lustmord, psychotic violence, and pathological dysfunction for narrative effects (Stage 2 of the research). Ultimately, Colour Me Dead treats all artistic and creative endeavours as forensic material, following the notion that artworks enact silent dialogues among themselves. The aim is not to judge the artworks, but to audit and perceive what they say and describe, and to do so from a contemporary location rather than illusorily inhabit a neutral historical position.

Importantly, this contemporary lens is used not to argue a case for or against either the historical formation of Modern art or the current proliferation of Contemporary Art. Rather, the idea is to view artworks from the preceding 300 years - some still valorised, many now ignored - to note their uncanny relevance to ongoing transformations of how the body is envisaged and utilised.

Research

The research in all 3 stages is presented to critically elaborate the following areas:

Analytic aims guiding each chapter

a. Define key groups of artists who individually represent key approaches (positing a time frame clustered around the Romantic, Heroic, Symbolist and Surrealist periods)
b. Add artists who uncannily prefigure or consciously extend those key approaches (sometimes including their 'heirs' from later modernist and even postmodern periods)
c. Draw connection to crimes, criminality and criminal/taboo desire either of their period, or of the classical/mythical narratives common to their period
d. Group artists of each chapter into 3 developing tendencies within the chapter’s connection between art and criminality, and acknowledge the resonance their imagery bears with cinematic depictions of deviants and psychos
e. Position the ensuing modern/contemporary manifestations as extensions or developments from perspective evident in the earlier periods of art, assessing the similarities and contrasts between the two in order to gauge how art is treated as a sign of psychosis, and psychosis is rationalised as being a sign of creativity

Techniques and procedeures threaded through the close-analyses

a. The variety of painting and sculpting techniques and their relation to the body – how they aim to make evident and bring to life
b. The variety of murdering and disposing techniques and their relation to the corpse – how they aim to hide and destroy
c. The variety of forensic and investigative techniques and their relation to the corpse – how they aim to uncover and reconstruct
d. The variety of analytic and critical techniques and their relation to the artwork – how they aim to reveal and explicate

Shifts and transformations marked across the chapters

a. Viewed through the eyes and hands of artists, the nude is transformed from the body represented to the body abstracted.
b. Viewed through the eyes and hands of criminals, the nude is transformed from the body desired to the body violated.
c. Viewed through the images and cliches of cinema and associated pictorial media, the artist is depicted as compulsive, deluded, psychotic.
d. Viewed through the images and cliches of cinema and associated pictorial media, the sex-murderer is depicted as impulsive, driven, artistic.