Art Meets Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy

On the occasion of the 1990 "Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy" initiative, positioned by the authors as induced by a global acknowledgement of the essential and universal nature of creativity and its necessity in light of social shifts in a changing market economy. Includes biographical introductions and interviews with leaders in the fields of art, science, spirituality, and economics, as well as notes on 16 exhibiting artists' works on the same theme. Biographical notes

The missing wit(h)ness: Monroe, fascinance and the unguarded intimacy of being dead

In 1985 journalist Anthony Summers published a post-mortem photograph of Marilyn Monroe, titling it ‘Marilyn in death’, in his book, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe (1985), which investigated the theory that her death was not suicide. The photograph thus acquired forensic significance. My questions are these: Is there an inevitable transgression and even violence in the exposure of an image of a dead woman such as we find in Summers’ and other publications? Under the rubric of this collection, unguarded intimacy, I address a set of paintings made from the morgue photograph of a derelict Marilyn Monroe in the era of feminist ethics by two painters, Margaret Harrison (b.1940) and Marlene Dumas (b. 1953). What are the material and theoretical possibilities of creating feminist e(a)ffects in re-workings of this stolen image if we can distinguish between the forensic notion of the silent witness (the pathologist performing an autopsy whose aftermath this photograph in the morgue indexes) and a concept derived from the Matrixial aesthetics of artist-theorist Bracha Ettinger – aesthetic wit(h)nessing? Can such aesthetic wit(h)nessing deflect the unguarded intimacy of seeing an unattended body in its absolute helplessness by inciting compassion