The much awaited and celebrated Eid-ul Azha is based on the idea of sacrifice, of animals, of precious belongings. The feast is also associated with celebration, mainly of delicious dishes prepared with beef, mutton, camel meat - even poultry and sea produce. Some food enthusiasts also go for the delicate meat of birds - fried, grilled, or cooked otherwise. During the rest of the year, too, we are no less enthusiastic about meat. Many Christians of diverse locales, means and resources, roast turkey on December 25 (in Pakistan chicken is the frequent replacement). From ancient times and across cultures, believers have consumed flesh of other species to proclaim their pleasure, gratitude and respect to the divine. The joy and worship depend upon the death of animals.

In a sense, artists as individuals follow what other people do in their community rituals, or serve at their dinner table. Both use life – actually death - of other beings, in order to satisfy their sense of accomplishment, personal satisfaction and social (or commercial) success. Often their subjects, or sources, extend from human to animal, from intimate to general. One example, a famous painter shared was his feeling while offering the funeral prayers for his father. He said he was also registering the details of the coffin, noting the perspective and the background space, observing other mourners – and planning to convert all this into an artwork. He did paint several canvases based upon that crucial moment in his life, but whosoever looks at these paintings, can hardly guess that a dead father provided the alluring imagery and enticing composition.

Artists have often drawn death, from Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808 (1814) to Edouard Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1867-68). The former depicts a firing squad of Napoleon’s army taking aiming at the Spanish freedom fighters and the latter the annihilation of the Austrian-born emperor of Mexico by the soldiers of the Mexican Republic on June 19, 1867. Both masterpieces illustrate atrocities and bloodshed.

One can speculate on the intention of these two and several other artists: preserving the ethos, passion and fervour of revolution, rebellions, and freedom – or creating a dramatic visual about violence. One suspects that these canvases are more appreciated for their formal features, i.e, distribution of space, application of paint, capturing of human bodies and chromatic order than their link to the carnage. The aesthetic qualities found in these paintings are visible in the artists’ other work too; the subject matter, which deals with power, brutality and oppression fascinates a number of viewers. Actually, the reaction could be two-fold; some connect with these episodes of fatality narrated in pictures for their hatred against the savage use of force; while others appreciate the excitement, extraordinariness and intensity attached to these spectacles.

Their sentiments could not be delinked from an ordinary movie goer’s, who applauds the slicing of arms in Quentin Trantino’s Kill Bill I, or stabbing, dismembering, blood spattering in the Punjabi cinema (of Sultan Rahi and Mustafa Qureshi). Death is the ultimate stillness/ demise for the person, but it becomes a sort of departure for the family, the tribe, the society. Mohtarma Shaheed Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi (2007). This sacrifice by an individual led to the electoral victory for her political party and followers. The passing away of a close relative often shakes/ switches us from our banal routine and boring existence into activities out of our ordinary drill.

To some extent, art performs the same task. It wrenches us away from our usual and drab living, into an unknown, unfathomable and unreproducible experience. Viewing a work of art, is taking part in a sublime venture/ encounter. No matter if the work on the wall or in the gallery is a monumental abstract canvas or a conceptual piece of art, a comment on political situation or a cartography of current barbarity, all these offer a chance to grasp an entity removed from everyday reality. The presence of blood, images of murder, views of mass destruction eventually become – pictures, to be looked upon, enjoyed – or purchased and possessed.

Death scares most people, but it fascinates artists. Works which deal with the barbarity of war, or famine (like Zain-ul Abedin’s sketches of Bengal famine in 1943), genocide (Holocaust), atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atrocities of Vietnam War, 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and subsequent violence across the globe, are part of mainstream art history (like ancient, medieval and Renaissance themes of war and murders).

Many contemporary artists have consciously opted to address the issue of target killings, suicide attacks and bomb explosions, making these a means to investigate the everchanging and never-reliable power structure/ system. They (including Rashid Rana, Imran Qureshi, Adeela Suleman, Farida Batool and others) have been focusing on death and destruction in our present and past – delineating separate points of views/ references/ positions.

From historical to immediate, from political to social, from global to local: they have been dealing with tragedy, though not glorifying it. Scenes of slaughterhouse of Lahore (Rashid Rana) splatters of bloodbath (Imran Qureshi), views of fire, looting and chaos in the heart of Lahore (Farida Batool), sequence of war with decapitated soldiers (Adeela Suleman) frequent their art pieces.

Why have artists been obsessed with death? There are innumerable paintings of Christ on the cross, with bleeding ribs, nailed palms and feet. Mughal illustrations of Hamza Nama include images of skinned victims in dripping blood, miniature paintings illustrating chopped heads of enemy rajas, kings, sultans.

Death is not a new, contemporary or political component in art; it has been part of art making in a practical way. Death is equated with dust (“for dust you are and to dust you will return” Geneses. 3:19.), hence a term for brown hue. If an artist paints a dead body or a gloomy subject, he prefers the variation of browns for his palette. But besides being represented in brown, the dead bodies actually facilitated brown colour in the past.

The mummies in Egypt used to be sold to English merchants for making a dark bitumen like brown pigment. The deceased flesh was collected, ground, processed and converted into a brown pigment known as “Egyptian Brown” that came in jars or paint tubes.

Segments of decayed carcases of Egyptians – filtered and mixed with binders and varnishes – were marketed and labelled as Mummy Brown. These were available at artists’ materials shops till the early Twentieth Century. Favoured for its potential of translucent layers, the pigment was widely used by painters, till they made the connection and became aware of its origin. There is an anecdote about a teenage Rudyard Kipling attending a Sunday lunch in 1881 at his painter uncle Edward Burne-Jones’ house, who after hearing that his browns were extracted from the carcasses of dead Egyptians, “rushed to his studio to find his tube of mummy brown, and insisted on giving it a decent burial there and then.”

The writer is an art critic based in Lahore