{"id":4167,"date":"2026-03-11T21:18:38","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T21:18:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=4167"},"modified":"2026-03-24T21:35:38","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T21:35:38","slug":"the-entirety-of-our-human-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=4167","title":{"rendered":"The entirety of our human state"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Owning the ageing process at the Wellcome Collection, London, for the Spectator, 11 March 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

More than thirty contemporary artists — Anna Maria Maiolino, Tam Joseph and the like — contribute to Wellcome Collection\u2019s latest exhibition, which asks what it\u2019s like to age at a time of unparalleled longevity. But as often so happens at Wellcome\u2019s exhibitions, it\u2019s the ephemera that draw the eye first.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese 2 men are the same age,\u201d says a leaflet advertising Kellogg’s All-Bran breakfast cereal. \u201cOne has driving power — energy — the will to succeed. The other is listeless — tired all the time — it is an effort for him to plod through each day’s work.\u201d<\/p>\n

The point being, ageing is a process, not an event. It is as much a matter of style, and manners, and even morality, as it is a matter of medicine. Ageing is, to a not inconsiderable degree, something we do to ourselves, and something we do to each other.<\/p>\n

In 1972 Simone de Beauvoir nailed this point beautifully in her still rather neglected book La Vieillesse<\/em> (the American edition translated that as \u201cComing of Age\u201d; a revealing cop-out). As she sets out to break the conspiracy of silence around old age — this \u2018forbidden subject\u2019, she calls it — she demands her readers use their imaginations and recognise themselves in the aged other.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we do not know what we are going to be,\u201d she writes, \u201cwe cannot know what we are: let us recognise ourselves in this old man or in that old woman. It must be done if we are to take upon ourselves the entirety of our human state.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like those good fellows at Kellogg\u2019s, curator Shamita Sharmacharja wants visitors to own their ageing process, and value the prospect — if not indeed the present reality — of old age.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a Quixotic enterprise because, as Philip Roth once quipped, \u201cIn every calm and reasonable person there is hidden a second person scared witless about death,\u201d and there are few reminders of death more terrifying than the one that confronts us in the mirror each morning. “About a year ago,” wrote the American food writer M.F.K. Fisher, “I suddenly realised that I could not face walking toward myself again in the morning because here is this strange, uncouth, ugly, kind of toad-like woman… long thin legs, long thin arms, and a shapeless little toad-like torso and this head at the top with great staring eyes. And I thought, Jesus, why do I have to do this?”<\/p>\n

Shock and outrage find their visible expression at the Wellcome in Paula Rego\u2019s bruised and twisted self-portraits, made in 2017 after she fell. (Awakened to our society\u2019s ubiquitous ageism, I am absolutely *not* going to write \u201cafter she had a fall\u201d).<\/p>\n

William Utermohlen\u2019s visual record of dementia is only marginally more muted: an achingly articulate series recording his steadily disintegrating impression of his own face.<\/p>\n

How do you weave a worthwhile life-stage from such gloomy material? The older I get, the more I am struck by the profound wisdom of Eric Idle\u2019s song at the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail<\/em>. Looking on the bright side of life are Kimiko Nishimoto and Shiro Oguni. Oguni\u2019s Restaurant of Mistaken Orders<\/em> — represented here by a few knick-nacks, aprons, menus — is a pop-up dining experience employing servers with dementia. By accepting from the outset that orders might be incorrect, the restaurant fosters patience, empathy, and joyful human connection over cold, technical perfection.<\/p>\n

Nishimoto, meanwhile, began taking self-portraits in her seventies, using Photoshop to stage herself left out with the bins, or hanging from a washing line, or drifting serenely from a tree. The moral being, I suppose, that if life discards us at the end, we may as well have some fun with the idea.<\/p>\n

Maija Tammi\u2019s photographic print Immortal\u2019s Birthday Party<\/em> conjures up a space that\u2019s part 18th-century Wunderkammer, half child\u2019s bedroom, like the lair of a particularly naive Nosferatu. The trouble being, of course, that age is real, and there really is a moment when we have to put away childish things, and even middle-aged things, in time.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

Well, look to The Way of Things — the world\u2019s first (and, to everyone\u2019s secret relief, last) verse-form book of popular science. In it the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius argued that it\u2019s not just life that\u2019s finite; life\u2019s possibilities<\/em> are finite, too. Yes, you can fall in love any number of times — but you can only fall in love for the first time once. By the time all gratifications have been experienced, living endlessly is futile. “Do you expect me to invent some new contrivance for your pleasure?\u201d Nature sneers. Growing up and ageing always incurs a loss, but refusing to grow up \u2014 remaining perfectly innocent and untouched by the world \u2014 is an even greater loss. As J.M. Barrie understood, Peter Pan ultimately represents Death.<\/p>\n

Am I arguing that, for all Sharmacharja\u2019s efforts, I came away thinking that ageing is a uniformly bad idea?<\/p>\n

Not at all. For women it\u2019s much worse. (Or as that All-Bran leaflet has it: \u201cThese 2 women are the same age. One has the bloom of youth. The other is wrinkled, gray, careworn, far older than her years.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The depressing fact is, it takes more effort for women to camouflage their temporal nature. They’re the ones who bleed, who give birth, who feed infants, and who, at no great age, cease<\/em> to be able to give birth.<\/p>\n

Wellcome\u2018s approach to exhibition-making can get a bit modish. The desire to connect science to medicine, and medicine to society, and society to politics, and politics to technology, and back to science again, can induce — in this visitor, at any rate — the sort of dazed passivity I associate with getting dangerously drunk with anthropology graduates.<\/p>\n

In this show, however, I think medium and message come together superbly. Ageing, in general, leads to old age, and old age leads to death, and death leads to terror, and terror leads to meanness, especially towards women, whose capacity for childbearing is so painfully and obviously truncated half way through life. No wonder women, just as much as men, judge other women harshly if (by dropping a tampon out of their handbag, say) they reveal their animal nature. (That\u2019s a genuine psychological experiment, by the way — and a genuine result.)<\/p>\n

Is this intimate connection between death-terror and misogyny in any way fair? Of course not. But as a fact of life it\u2019s the very devil to get around. Serena Korda\u2019s striking and powerful ceramic installation Wild Apples<\/em> tries to reframe the menopause as a powerful moment of transformation, but how does it do this? By reclaiming, for hard-done by women, the archetype of the hag and the crone. So much for the escapist power of art.<\/p>\n

The Coming of Age<\/em> wants us to make that Beauvoir-esque imaginative leap and think our way into aged skin. We probably ought to give this a try. The world is getting older by the day; soon it will be getting emptier, as working-age adults find the costs of elder care so burdensome that they can\u2019t afford to have children. I suppose we\u2019d better make our peace with a rapidly ageing world, and make the best of it.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s be frank here: empathy is a bore. And other responses to ageing are available.<\/p>\n

The ancient Greeks (at least according to Hannah Arendt, in her 1958 book The Human Condition<\/em>) developed a surprisingly hard-nosed view of ageing and death. They believed that being remembered was the nearest they could realistically come to immortality. So they revered fame, and the moral and physical excellence that would inculcate fame. Needless to say, they were vain to a fault.<\/p>\n

Remember this, once it dawns on you that The Coming of Age<\/em> is as much about sex, and fashion, and death, and our roles in society, as it is about its proper subject. People are like that around ageing, and have been for the longest time. Get them on the subject of ageing, and they will end up covering everything else under sun, in a frantic bid to evade thoughts of where ageing is leading them (and dress it up how you like, it\u2019s nowhere pretty).<\/p>\n

Evasion is the point. And meanwhile, and as it says on the T shirt (also part of the exhibition, and I desperately want one): \u201cDON\u2019T DIE.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Owning the ageing process at the Wellcome Collection, London, for the Spectator, 11 March 2026 More than thirty contemporary artists — Anna Maria Maiolino, Tam Joseph and the like — contribute to Wellcome Collection\u2019s latest exhibition, which asks what it\u2019s … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[616,78],"tags":[465,1252],"class_list":["post-4167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-ageing","tag-old-age"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4167"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4169,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4167\/revisions\/4169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}