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 exhibition on in London - Life Before Death - which shows emotive pairs of huge black-and-white images of terminally ill people in the moments before and just after their deaths.

These, of course, are all stills. For kinetic death, one can view the 'look away now' news footage of Third World suffering, most famously of the Ethiopian famine. And those morbid enough can today trawl the internet for snuff films, camera-phone footage of Saddam Hussein's hanging, or recordings of jihadists beheading Westerners. In the flesh, Iranian police summon up crowds with loudspeaker announcements to cheer as criminals are hanged from cranes. Theirs is not the only country which still carries out public executions.

Part of what distinguishes Schneider's artistic project from these spectacles is his intention to explore death as a natural process. He is covering similar ground to documentary maker Paul Watson, who charted how Alzheimer's sufferer Malcolm Pointon struggled with the disease for 11 years. Publicity for Watson's acclaimed film Malcolm and Barbara: Love's Farewell, purported to show Pointon's final moments, surrounded by his family as he faded from consciousness. Actually though, Pointon died off camera three days later, and Watson was forced to fight a legal case against ITV defending his role in the confusion.

The questions Schneider's plan raises range from moral ones - is it right, who will want to see it? - to mundane ones: will the gallery charge, who would profit? And if, as Schneider says, "the dying person would determine everything in advance... everything will be done in consultation with the relatives", then isn't he merely commissioning the work, not creating it? ·