Omer Fast.

Betty Rymer Gallery | SAIC Chicago, Illinois

Omer Fast's single-channel 2008 video Looking Pretty For God (After GW) fits in the same category of black humor as the TV series Six Feet Under and Evelyn Waugh's 1948 novel The Loved One. In Fast's hands, the modern American funeral business is the object of extended comparison with the culture at large, analogous to the cult of sacred bones in medieval European reliquaries. Dedicated to Gillian Wearing's 10-16 (1997), which shows adults lip-synching to the voices of children expressing their hopes and dreams, Looking Pretty For God (through January 3) pairs mortuary practices with commercial photography and filmmaking, where the children mouth the words of the morticians. A camera slowly pans across embalming tools and shiny caskets in cold, white-tiled mortuaries. In another scene, child models pose for a winter catalogue shoot while eerily describing the art of creating "memory pictures" out of the remains of the deceased, their lips animated by gruff and coarsely cynical narratives on mortality, effectively critiquing the modern glorification of the face.

We present our faces to the world in the same way dogs sniff ass or elk bump horns. Phrenology may no longer be an acceptable technique for determining character traits, but lurking inside the reptilian part of our brains resides an innate capacity to size up potential threats and amorous encounters, giving a primitive intelligence yet also brute animalism to the gaze. Now that our tastes have become so refined, burying powerful instincts has more or less become instinctual. Looking Pretty For God thus squares off two distinct desires in which, if we are to show "good face," youth and beauty remain inescapable options.

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"Death has an ugly look to it," says one mortician, describing chemical tips and beauty tricks for making a corpse's face appear eternally young. Apart from displaying the effects of grooming and cosmetics, these restored Fountains of Youth also get topped up with lethal formaldehyde. Another mortician admits that only the hands and face need work to provide an acceptable parting glimpse for the bereaved family, while a third mentions his extensive studies in cosmetology--in fact, as we learn, he even flirted with attending art school. All this insight into the mortician's craft takes place with the same deadpan delivery as, say, Errol Morris's 1978 Gates of Heaven documentary, aided and abetted by Jessica Mitford's 1963 expose of funerary mercantilism, The American Way of Death.

We're already well into the new millennium, but we don't seem to have moved very far beyond the traditions of Victorian corpse photography and public mourning spectacles. On the other hand, to reflect on the world's abundant artifice--and even to equate a rouged cadaver with the eternally silent photographic image--is a long familiar trope of contemporary art, one that is almost, not to belabor the point, done to death. As for looking in the face of death itself, there's clearly no end to our fascination with the manner in which it forces this look back upon us.