"Everywhere there were people living out their
lives using aspects of suicide against themselves. They did not even have the authenticity
of the final act to speak for them. Suicide is, in short, the one continuous, everyday,
ever-present problem of living. It is a question of degree. I'd seen them in all varying
stages of development and despair. The failed lawyer, the cynical doctor, the depressed
housewife, the angry teenager.. all of mankind engaged in the massive conspiracy against
their own lives that is their daily activity. The meaning of suicide, the true meaning,
had yet to be defined, had yet to be created in the broad dimensions it deserved."
Daniel Stern.
Man in a Knot by the Straight Back of a Woman.
Cryla on paper. 15 inches x 14 inches. 1980.
The room on 'Death' in Lenkiewicz's Library has a large section devoted to the subject
of Suicide. He had studied this material for some time, and subscribed more or less
entirely to views like those of Daniel Stern. Lenkiewicz found the whole issue the most
compelling of subjects. Viewing life as a tragedy on the grand scale, and well aware that
people can suffer, he explored this theme with the intention that he might re-explore it
every ten years or so. Suicide raises such harrowing ironies both for the perpetrator as
well as the witness, that even the casual observer is haunted to the quick by it.
Some social activities immensely popular in a wide range of cultures, eg. marriage and the
family are viewed by Lenkiewiez as suicide techniques. He feels strongly about this and a
number of the images in this project relate to the misery people inflict upon each other
in short or long term relationships. Depression locks its sufferer into a cage through
which one can neither see out of nor in to. It is, in a sense, the psychic equivalent of
black holes in space. Great pain leads to silence. Except for suicide, silence is the most
extreme form of revolt. As Kierkegaard has observed, whether one does or does not think
about despair one musters:
" . . . everything to re-explain and explain away entrance and exit,
simply lost in the interval between the birth-cry .. and the death struggle. "
What interested Lenkiewicz in this project was the notion that suicide was murder
through mistaken identity; that the suicide may not be motivated towards his personal
extinction but rather, he wishes to annihilate the world. Psychology has a great deal to
say about this; but how interesting it is that we live so irrationally and insist that
suicide cannot be rational. The complex issue of euthanasia will raise its head again and
again until it is no longer unlawful. When that day comes, suicide as a whole will become
far more acceptable.
Robert Lenkiewicz