The Afterlife of Life as Art

This article explores the work of Israeli conceptual artist Dov Or Ner (1927–2024), whose radical artistic practice consistently challenged the divide between art, life and death. Informed by his experience as a teenage Holocaust survivor whose parents were murdered in Auschwitz, Or Ner’s seven-decade body of work proposed a vision of existence as totality, in which apparent endings become metamorphic phases within abiding continuity. Framing his conceptual practice was ‘The Museum of Museums’, a concept that dissolved boundaries between art and life and proposed a vision of spatial and temporal limitlessness. Acts such as burying artworks and personal objects projected cultural material and meaning into an open-ended future, anticipating what he called ‘future archaeology’. By allowing his work to undergo natural cycles of decay and transformation, Or Ner positioned destruction as a generative force within both ecological and artistic systems, challenging conventional preservation paradigms.The article argues that Or Ner’s view of the end of life is not rooted in religious, scientific or eschatological frameworks, but reflects an idea of existence as continuous metamorphosis. Drawing on Georges Bataille’s philosophy of existence as totality, continuity and immanence, it suggests that Or Ner’s work enacts a concept in which the boundaries between the organic and inorganic, past and future, life and death are transcended

Afterlife · Conceptualism · Temporality · Work of art · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Architecture

• Performing Remains

  Rodrigo Schneider, Rebecca Schneider•Performing Remains•2011

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