Artist’s death wish raises the bar

If and when the controversial German artist Gregor Schneider manages to find a terminally ill volunteer to die for him under public gaze in a gallery - a project he has been mooting since 1996 and this month revealed has the backing of a doctor at a Dusseldorf clinic - art will have crossed what seemed like a final frontier.

Artists have always tried to depict and demystify human death - in crucifixions both serene and savage; in Hieronymous Bosch's sadistic warscapes; in Andy Warhol's cold, macabre prints of electric chairs and car crashes; or in formaldehyde - but Schneider is planning to turn it into a live public spectacle for the first time.

Death is a recurring Schneider obsession. He feigned his own in 2000 by lying stretched out on the floor of the Haus Lange museum in Germany. Of others who have

engaged with the subject over the last decade, Gunther von Hagens - though he wouldn't call himself an artist - is the most renowned. More than 25m people have seen Body Worlds, his exhibition of preserved corpses and organs. A trained anatomist, in 2002 von Hagens performed the UK's first public autopsy for 170 years to widespread indignation - and massive curiosity.

Before that, American Andres Serrano took a series of photographs in a New York morgue in 1992. One of them, Jane Doe, shows an arresting close-up of a woman who had died in police custody. Her temple shows a bloodied wound, her hair is discoloured. Joel-Peter Witkin's 1993 Man Without a Head is, curiously, wearing black socks. Walter Schels, a German photographer, currently has an