Funeral Songs

Death Be Kind

2010-05-01T16:29:00.000-07:00

The artists Elvis Richardson and Claire Lambe have initiated a 12 month project gallery in East Brunswick in Melbourne called Death Be Kind. It opens 29 June 2010 with an exhibition called The Memorial. I'm contributing Nan's Rod Stewart album collection for display in the big event.

I Killed Ike Turner

2007-12-15T14:28:00.000-08:00

Proud Mary, 2007
Digital video, 5 min 47 sec

For the Funeral Songs installation, I made a music video for my song with the assistance of artist Sari TM Kivinen. All the other 160 or so funeral songs I collected were installed in a jukebox, but as it's my funeral and I'll cry if I want to, I decided on audio-visual treatment for my song.

My song (at least for the moment) is Proud Mary by Tina Turner. I often dance to this song when drunk at home with friends. Sometimes people join in as my backup dancers. Dying is a bit like rolling down the river.

In fact, for future incarnations of Funeral Songs, I'd like to make this a 2 channel video, with the other screen depicting me floating in a lake as if dead. Either floating for real, or with the assistance of a blow-up raft. I just ran out of time and budget this time around.

That aside, the feedback I had on Funeral Songs at MOP has been quite fantastic. The Art Life blog called the installation "fairly simple, yet amazingly profound" and on the video, they said, "he's [got] some serious moves in his dance repertoire".

Another amazing, albeit spooky thing about this project is that on opening night, 13 December a MOP, people came up to me to say how Ike Turner died the day before, though the news had broken in the southern hemisphere on the 13th (the day of my show). This came as a shock and I felt like I killed him! But my dance moves are dedicated to Tina and I selected a post-Ike 1993 version of the song.

Even though the song was first performed by Creedence Clearwater Revival in 1969, Proud Mary really is Tina at her most amazing. Tina used to perform the song with Ike and in 1972 they won a Grammy for the cover. I saw Tina live in concert twice in the 90s and Proud Mary was always the set's money shot. Just as the song gets "rough", fireworks go off and the stage comes alive with hyperactive dance moves and piercing light show. You could die right at that moment and know your life's work as a spectator has been rich and meaningful.

Most people think I'm really uncool to like Tina Turner. But I always tell them that her Number One fan is the very cool John Waters. Waters preferred her early days "when she was still with Ike, had a mustache and wore ratty mink coats" (Liner notes to A Date with John Waters CD, 2007). I interviewed John Waters earlier this year and the article appears is in the 320 page Andy Warhol book produced for the GOMA/Queensland Art Gallery show, which I am yet to see. If I knew Ike was gonna die, I would have dropped an Ike and Tina reference into the conversation. (In this interview by Scott Gordon, John Waters talks more about his love for Tina).

Tina Turner and John Waters share the same stage in the legend stakes. Now poor dead Ike - bless his wifebeating soul - may posthumously restore some of that early legend status that made him such a star back in the day. I wonder what Ike's funeral song would have been? River Deep Mountain High is what I hope was played.

So now you're in the mood, check out my Proud Mary dance moves at:

www.danielmcunningham.com (in the artist section).

Sailing

2007-12-01T22:00:00.000-08:00

Sailing 1979 / 2007

My maternal grandmother Pauline Cooper (1933-2004) introduced me to the concept of the 'funeral song'.

Nan was my best mate. A couple of times I ran away from home during primary school years in the mid-1980s. As we lived at Hurstville and my Nan at Rockdale (in the southern suburbs of Sydney) it wasn't the biggest journey. Actually it was on foot and my mum was always a bit flabbergasted that I'd walk there.

Nan was cool. She used to let me stay up all hours watching Rage on the ABC, but only if I would tape music videos for her as she liked to have them playing when she did the housework. She was a big fan of Rod Stewart, Tina Turner and Michael Jackson. She thought Madonna a "Jezebel". Nan even recorded some songs herself off the Saturday morning show Video Hits - back when it was palatable (pre-bling, denim hipsters and date rape).

I recall circa 1987 that Nan was so proud that she'd managed to be in the right place and time to tape Fleetwood Mac's music video Everywhere. I haven't seen the video for ages, but it's typical Fleetwood Mac: white horses, shadows and magic. But within days of her taping it, I accidentally recorded another music video over it. The video accidentally replacing Fleetwood Mac was Walk the Dinosaur by Was Not Was - a ridiculous song that I'd say no one remembers except it has been viewed on YouTube over 100,000 times! When I confessed to Nan, she was really upset and it was the only time I remember her being mad at me. (But I think she was probably only mad for about half an hour).

And I don't blame her for being upset: I would get mad if anyone fucked with whatever was my favourite song at the time. If she was alive today I would find it for her on YouTube. And I just know that after playing it for her she would tell me to rewind it. She had a thing about archiving her VHS and keeping them in pristine user-friendly condition. I just know that Nan would hate the digital era - she never had a DVD player even though she watched them when she visited family members who had DVD players. But she could never get her head around the fact that a movie (on a disc) had the same formal properties as a format renowned only for audio. And it took her ages to comprehend the audio CD after years of saying she'd never stop buying vinyl. I'm glad she stuck to her guns as her vinyl comprises some of the best I have in my collection today.

Music was a huge part of my Nan's life and she introduced me to heaps of music that I still listen to today. For as long as I can remember Nan would tell everyone in my large Irish Catholic family that if we didn't play Sailing by Rod Stewart at her funeral, she would haunt us. As she had Parkinson's Disease for about 20 years before passing away in 2004, she could be quite a handful, so the thought of being 'haunted' was not alluring.

When she died, we played Sailing at her funeral, twice actually. Her funeral was held at a small, discreet cemetery near Sanctuary Point, on the south coast where she moved after retirement. As Sailing played the second time, a very conspicuous jet plane flew overhead, showing off with a nosedive before flying away and leaving a thick cloud of exhaust in its wake.

To this day my family talk about how Nan's exit was so theatrical, so uncannily fitting.

Porcelain

2007-11-30T10:41:00.000-08:00

Porcelain 1985 /2007

I took these photos of Trevor in 1985 when he was about four years of age at Carss Park, Sydney. The photos were taken with a plastic Instamatic camera that I took everywhere. As I was an aspiring photographer, Trevor was always a willing model. During the 80s I took many photos of Trevor in really weird poses and scenarios. He never complained until reminded of those same photos as an adult.

For Funeral Songs the image on top is being used for publicity purposes and it will feature in the exhibition. In the second image you can see my other brothers Chris and Sean, standing together knee-deep in the water on the left hand side of the frame.

Trevor

2007-05-11T02:17:00.000-07:00

Funeral Songs is a project I started in response to having been to a lot of funerals and having seen a lot of death.

The hardest death was my brother's death: Trevor Mudie.

We never played the funeral song Trevor requested. Strangely, a few weeks before he died, he asked Mum if she'd play Moby's Porcelain at his funeral. When he died, Mum couldn't recall what the song was so we played something else (Jane Siberry's Calling All Angels). Later Mum remembered the Moby song.

I started Funeral Songs as a way of honouring Trevor. I know he'd really like this project - he never really 'got' any of my other projects.

Funeral Songs: Dedicated to Trevor Alec Mudie (1980-2001).

Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris

2007-05-11T02:01:00.000-07:00

Man Ray. Charles Baudelaire. Henri Langlois. Jean Seberg. Marguerite Duras. Jean Paul Sartre. Simone de Beauvoir.

Some of the most amazing people who ever lived, and they're all interred at Montparnasse Cemetery, which Drew and I visited on 12 January 2007. Maybe I could be buried here too?

Catacombs, Paris

2007-05-09T04:08:00.000-07:00

The Lonely Planet guide for Paris categorises the Catacombs in the "Quirky Paris" section. Drew and I headed to the Catacombs after visiting Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise on 11 January. Quirky or not, we had decided that this day was a day of the dead. The catacombs were fascinating. You go down this long narrow spiral stairway into the bowels of Paris. I think it was a couple of km or something. It was below the Metro at least. I got in trouble (in French) for taking a closeup photo of a bunch of skulls with a flash from a security guard who was lurking undetected in the darkness. That scared me more at first. After the shock I just turned on the English-speaking idiot-savant schtick I'd been using as a defence mechanism for not knowing much French. After one shop keeper spat my change back at me I realised I hadn't said pour favour. The irony is that English speaking people don't have rules about saying please all the goddamn time!

Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise

2007-04-28T15:54:00.000-07:00

Early morning on 11th January, Drew and I visited Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise. That's French for Père Lachaise Cemetery. This was indeed a Paris highlight. We entered quite randomly from the Rue du Charonne side (where we were staying) and there was no kiosk for maps of where the dead famous people are buried as I'd hoped. I really had this fantasy that there'd be a gift shop. I wanted a coffee cup with Oscar Wilde's grave on it. But no.

After the disappointment we wandered randomly throughout the massive cemetery. We agreed the first to find a famous dead person's grave was the winner. I can't recall what the prize was. Maybe it was just the satisfaction of being a winner. I found Sarah Bernhardt and when Drew gave me this puzzled "who the fuck is she" look I secretly wondered if he thought Sandra Bernhard had died and nobody told him.

Eventually we found the other side of the cemetery where you could get a free map (if this was LA they would be called "Star Maps") and then made our way through to some other graves. We passed a black cat and we suspected it was Edith Piaf until I realised she was often referred to as a "little sparrow" and could, therefore, not be a cat and a sparrow unless her afterlife was an ironic one.

Jim Morrison's grave was boring. A few tourists with unwashed hair took photos. While I took my perfunctory pic, I couldn't help thinking that if my grave was used as an ashtray when I died that the culprits could expect a recurring nightmare of that last scene from Carrie played endlessly on loop in their dreams. The scene where Carrie's hand reaches out of the grave and grabs Amy Irving who screams and screams as the end credits wait in the wings.

After all the excitement of finding a Star Map for the dead, we decided we'd walked enough and that it was time for more delicious French carbs. We would have to find Oscar Wilde another day. Or settle for Oscar on a coffee cup.

Monmatre Cemetery

2007-04-28T15:23:00.000-07:00

Drew and I just stumbled on this quaint little cemetery while walking around Montmartre, Paris on the 10 January 2007.