Rock and Roll culture has always had an uncanny relationship with
death. The death of a rock star creates a cult(ure), marking an
unyielding mnemonic point where personality, musical genre and event
combine to produce myth. (Think of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Sid
Vicious and Kurt Cobain to name a few; their individuality, unique
musical contributions and the particular way in which each died are
forever fused together in our collective memory). If Rock and Roll
culture is exclusively within the domain of youth, a premature death is
the event that insures it will always remain so. (Pete Townsend never
got his wish)
The death of a rock star is culturally transformative, creating the
moment for a larger, shared and collective experience. It is almost as
if the death-story competes with the life-story, eventually to become
one story. This phenomenon is unique to Western Culture; like a war
hero, the way one died is forever bound to the one who died. From purple
hearts to purple haze, the iconic rock star lives like a character
within a Greek myth.
Taken down by the iconoclastic forces of Rock and
Roll, our hero re-emerges larger than life within the pantheon of dead
rock stars, forever eternal.
Death by Rock and Roll is an opportunity to reconceive the
crematory urn on terms gleaned from the cultural practice of Rock and
Roll. In this case, the urn takes on the role of noting the particular
rituals of these heroes, (always stranger than fiction) and leverages
them as drivers for a new expression altogether different from the
conventional urn typology and practice.
This urn for Kurt Cobain is not a singular vessel, nor will it simply hold
his ashes in the conventional sense. Instead, a retroactive urn for
Kurt Cobain will be made in multiple pieces, as a family of parts, and
will be synthesized from his ashes. Composed as a series of geometric figures and made from
his ashes suspended in a substrate, we imagine they will inspire new
forms of sharing and distribution rituals enabled by their multiplicity.
One configuration (of the four) is to be kept by his surviving wife,
Courtney Love. The second will rest in Portland’s Satyricon Nightclub,
where Courtney first met Cobain on January 12, 1990. Their daughter,
Frances Bean Cobain will keep the third, and his sister Kimberly will
keep the fourth. All four parts will eventually be reunited in the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame when he is (inevitably) inducted.
The urn is not alone. Each configuration will rest on a custom
fabricated mantel. The mantel transforms into a docking plane for the
urn. It both receives the urn (by dimpling its surface) and
provisionally nests at three particular points of contact. The contoured
section of the mantel is derived from an extrusion of Kurt’s facial
profile.
Like a lost set piece from Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast,
the (traditional) fireplace mantle is caught in a feral moment. While
one end of the mantle dwells in a figurative reality, the other occupies
a deep psychotropic trance, a time-space proper to the ecstasy and
wonder of the Rock and Roll induced dream.
The urn is (in)formed by the prosaic aspects of Kurt’s death (age:27,
type: suicide) along with the unique characteristics of his musical
persona (raspy voice, album cover art). These attributes are converted
into the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the urn as an object.
Just as rock and roll is a medium that counters main stream culture, the
sinuous and unstable nature of the form serves as a counterpoint to the
traditional urn type. Together, the size, weight, shape, color, and
texture of the urn is intended to simultaneously deliver an immediate
and visceral affect as well as sustain traditions of ritual associated
with death.
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