Adam McEwen’s small masterpieces of the uncanny
We meet at Adam McEwen’s apartment on the Upper East Side, a few hours before he makes a lightning trip back to London, where he was once a journalist working for the Daily Telegraph. After studying art, McEwen worked for a while writing obituaries, and his eureka moment came in 2000 with the decision to turn his day job into art. He began to write fake obituaries for living subjects, adopting the detached prose and visual design of a broadsheet newspaper. Each text was presented as a black-and-white C-print, and subjects included Jeff Koons, Marilyn Chambers, Macaulay Culkin and Nicole Kidman. McEwen’s fictitious obituaries are small masterpieces of the uncanny. In the instant of reading one, the hypothesized death seems real.
