Meet the professional mourners
Taryn Simon: An Occupation of Loss Islington Green, London N1
What does it feel like to cross the threshold to the afterlife? The ancients told elaborate stories about what happens when we die, including, in the case of the Greeks, a ferryman who shipped souls into Hades across the River Styx.
The American artist Taryn Simon has a rather different vision. According to her latest artwork, An Occupation of
Loss – first staged at New York’s Armory in 2016, and now reprised in London by the arts organisation Artangel – one of the entrances to the underworld is off an ugly atrium to a luxury flats complex at the north-east corner of Islington Green. Having descended through this portal, I can report that getting to the afterlife involves strolling through what looks like a concrete car park.
Beneath, though, the architecture is anything but dull. After scouting possible venues in the capital for four years, Simon selected a cavernous, three-storeyed, subterranean auditorium, built as a theatre by the developers responsible for the flats above, but never used. She chose it for its acoustic properties, rather than any resemblance to the underworld. Still, its catacomb-like atmosphere is brilliantly appropriate for Simon’s work, which invites us to encounter “professional mourners”, ie people paid to grieve publicly on behalf of families or communities, from all over the world.
Once the 85-strong audience has assembled (on the night I attended, the actress Cate Blanchett was among the crowd), an expectant hush falls, before a note struck on a toaca, a Romanian wooden percussion instrument, announces that the performance has begun. A beat slowly builds, and about 20 mourners emerge, passing through pairs of tall, thin, suspended strip lights,
‘Women have enacted grief for others for millennia, especially in cultures that deem it unmanly to cry’
like other-worldly gates from a sci-fi film. The procession is slow and stately.
The mourners take up position in small chambers, the drumming stops, and the time-honoured keening of different cultures begins. How to describe the discordant sound? A primal cacophony – underscored by haunting refrains from an accordion played by an Ecuadorean man wearing sunglasses in the gloom, lending the whole affair the flavour of a surreal dream. Instinctively, the audience understands that they are free to listen to performers up close. There are Chinese mourners and Ghanaian dirge-singers, and representatives of the Native American Wayuu people, whose laments, apparently, safeguard the soul’s passage to the Milky Way.
There are lots of wizened women wearing black, including an Albanian with a lace chemise and silver crucifix. Women, it turns out, have enacted grief on behalf of others for millennia, especially in cultures that deem it unmanly to cry: as I approached a pair of women from Azerbaijan, an attendant emerged to block my path: “These women mourn in the absence of men,” she whispered, uttering the only words I heard during the entire performance. That was me told.
Here’s the curious thing: surrounded by such emotion, I was expecting that, by the end, I too would be sobbing for the tragedy that is mortality. But that didn’t happen. Slowly, it dawns that Simon intends a cool effect. Pay close attention and you will notice that there is no object of grief – no body on a bier. Moreover, we know that the grief of the mourners, while culturally authentic, is simultaneously inauthentic – they are producing crocodile tears for cash.
It is often said that we live in a superficial age and behave according to codes and customs rather than innate biological imperatives. Well, here is a thoughtful, even profound artwork that reflects on both observations, raising questions about “authentic” behaviour, with a terrifying nothingness at its core. The ancients grieved for heroes. We, in Simon’s vision, lament a void. When the mourners finally departed, the audience was left alone and in silence, shuffling uncertainly through Simon’s empty netherworld. The street seemed a long way up.
Until April 28; artangel.org.uk