2011, dimensions variable (each figure is 32” tall), cast plastic, expanding foam, steel, wood, and other materials.
These two sculptures consider what might have happened to Socrates the moment after he drank the poison hemlock and died. After criticizing the Athenian government, Socrates was put on trial and eventually sentenced to death for not believing in the gods of the city and for corrupting the youth. While Socrates was in a prison cell awaiting his execution, he had a series of discussions with his friends and students in which he argued for a permanent human soul. In his final argument, he explained that all physical entities are caused by unchanging immaterial Forms, and we will all transcend death through our participation in these eternal Forms. Socrates saw death not as an event to be feared, but as a liberation of the soul from “the prison house of the body”.
Socrates’ propositions stand in contrast with the strictly materialistic explanations articulated by the Epicureans, who lived in Greece soon after him. The Epicureans also argued that death should not be feared, but they reasoned that “death is nothing” precisely because of our strictly physical nature—since all sensory perception and all conscious awareness ends at the moment death, there will be no pain and no feeling of loss. Their famous epitaph was: Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo (I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care)
We will each inevitably face death at some point, and there is no shortage of competing explanations for what will happen afterward. These two depictions of Socrates are meant to encapsulate the uncertainty and the variety of possible futures (or non-futures) that one faces at the moment of crossing the uncertain divide.
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