Ars Moriendi, 2006

Liane Lang (b. 1973)

RA Collection: Art

This photograph was the first in Liane Lang’s Casts series made during her final year at the Royal Academy Schools. She animated plaster casts in the RA Collection with seemingly living figures which are, in fact, latex casts. In Ars Moriendi, she inserted a latex cast representing the Virgin Mary into a cast of Michelangelo’s Pietà, which was missing the female figure. It is not known why this figure is missing from the cast but Lang states, “I thought it was funny, that thought process of taking something that you clearly think is a masterpiece and then you just chop it in half and leave one of the characters out of it”. She adds that she intended to 'create a picture where the female figure in the image would be both looked at, a sculpted figure, so she’s nude, but at the same time she’s active, she’s doing something creative, so I made her create the miniature version of the Christ figure. It’s a reference to the symbolic history of women artists, they have existed in that in-between space for a long time. Maybe not now but certainly at the RA women used to be mainly models and muses'. In the original sculpture, Mary’s arms are underneath Christ supporting him. Lang has placed the arms above Christ, as she models the small version of his figure. Lang explains, “Christ becomes a kind of worktable and I was interested in what happens to the composition when you do that”.

A plaster cast of the classical sculpture known as the Venus de Milo, also from the Royal Academy Collection, stands on the right (03/1486). The Venus de Milo represents an idealised female figure from Ancient Greece as a counterpoint to the Virgin Mary as the central idealised female figure from Christianity. Lang was interested in the fact that originally classical sculptures would have been highly coloured, unlike the monochrome versions we know today. She therefore saw parallels with her own doll-like sculptures she was making at the time.

The title Ars Moriendi means ‘the art of dying’ in Latin. Lang learnt Latin at school, which she equated with the Royal Academy Schools using classical casts for teaching well into the 20th century. She thought both practices were outdated. By using the casts in her work, Lang attempts to reconsider them from a contemporary point of view. Lang described the act of making these sculptures as an “intervention with an existing object [which] is an act of vandalism. It’s similar to graffiti”.

Quotes from unpublished interview with Liane Lang 2017.

This work won the RA Schools Keeper's Purchase Prize in 2006.