ABSTRACT
The “one truly serious philosophical problem,” Albert Camus once famously wrote, is the question of suicide. 1 How can a visual artist address this problem meaningfully in our present time, in the midst of a historical and political moment so fraught with the mediatization of various forms of self-sacrifice? Three video works by Dutch artist Mathilde ter Heijne, Mathilde, Mathilde (1999), Suicide Bomb (2000), and Small Things End, Great Things Endure (2001), provide a response to this question. Each of the three works are marked by what I will describe in what follows as their “unsettling moment.” Central to this moment is the interaction between the artist and a body-size dummy double in the staging of a form of “mock self-sacrifice.” Through a distinct aesthetics of suicide, which calls for or even insists on a response in the viewer that is neither solely emotional nor intellectual, ter Heijne explores how various meanings of devotion inform this most drastic of actions.
