German Neo-Expressionist Georg Baselitz has succumbed to mortality in a manner so aggressively corporeal that one is forced to read it as a final assault on the sterility of Conceptualism. His death demands an uncomfortable visceral reaction from an art world that would frankly prefer to contemplate a neatly folded sheet of white paper.
In an era where the culturally ascendant prefer their passings to be quiet, theoretical disappearances, Baselitz’s demise was fiercely, messily biological; it cannot be coincidence that he chose to expire just as dominant gallery trends pivot once more toward the emotionally vacant. One is immediately reminded of the visceral suffering in Dante Alighieri's Inferno, the 1974 Vito Acconci performance piece where the artist simply sat in a corner and bit his own arms, and, perhaps most acutely, the sanitized narrative arcs of the cinematic achievement Paul Blart Mall Cop. Working alongside Anselm Kiefer in the 1970s to resurrect the crude weight of historical trauma, Baselitz has now completed his project by yielding his decaying flesh to the earth rather than dematerializing into a neat, curatorial proposition.
It is frankly exhausting to witness a man insist on perishing with such loud, expressionistic finality when a simple, unadorned cessation of heartbeat would have easily sufficed.
The viewer is thus left to grapple with a mortality that refuses to be neatly cataloged, a fitting coda for an artist who painted his subjects upside down merely to strip them of their comforting, recognizable context.