How Nine Keys Is Like a Urinal
Yes, a urinal. Stay with me.
Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) was a French artist who changed everything about what we think art is. (Thank goodness!) He began as a painter but quickly abandoned traditional forms to work with something much riskier: ideas. Duchamp wanted to push at the boundaries of the institution itself, to question the gatekeepers who decided what could and could not count as art. He became referred to as the father of conceptual art.
In 1917, he submitted a porcelain urinal to an art exhibition in New York. That’s right, a wall toilet - that he bought from a plumbing manufacturer in New York - as art. He flipped it on its back, signed it “R. Mutt,” and called it Fountain. The exhibition promised to accept any submission, but the urinal was rejected. According to The Society of Independent Artists, his Fountain was not “art.”
But that rejection was the revelation and the exact response he was looking for. Duchamp wasn’t asking anyone to admire this urinal. He was asking them to wake up. To realize that art is not in the object itself, but it is the idea, it is in the act of reframing, in the concept. The urinal was a scandal, yes, but more than that, it was a crack in perception. It forced people to confront the uncomfortable possibility that the institution was not the arbiter of art. Art lived elsewhere.
Fountain didn’t add to the art world. It rearranged it.
The Nine Keys School of Death Arts is my fountain.
It is not a death doula certification program. It is not a polished training that guarantees you the right words to say at the bedside or how to market legacy projects. Like Duchamp, I am uninterested in reproducing the sanctioned forms. What I am after is subversion. Rearrangement. Keeping the edges of this work blurry, so that it may remain in any hand.
Nine Keys is a durational conceptual artwork that began as an apprenticeship. Its medium is rarely paint and collage, it’s curriculum, community, imagination. The object is not the point. The shift in perception is. If I had to name the object that Nine Keys creates, that would be the shift in perspectives of the students and the shifts in perspectives of people in the general public that happen because of the students’ work.
When people step into Nine Keys, they know that they are not signing up for a ‘death doula’ training, yet they understand that they will leave Nine Keys being fully equipped to be a ‘death doula.’ They understand that they are inside a frame that rearranges them, a studio where the “work of art” is their own becoming.
Nine Keys is not about making art out of death work. It’s about approaching death work as art, holding it as devotion, as cultural intervention, as mystery that refuses to be domesticated. It leans heavily on using deep listening to ones calling and imagination to birth new world death and grief care. No two death workers’ work, coming from Nine Keys, is exactly alike.
They don’t leave Nine Keys stamped as identical “death doulas.” They leave carrying their own wild form of death work. One might become a hospice renegade who guides other nurses out of the system. Another might be a trans therapist writing grief rituals for men who menstruate. Another might be a public health worker embedding grief literacy into their department. Another might be an artist who weaves grief education into their public performance pieces.
Nine Keys death workers do learn how to serve both dying people and dying culture. But they don’t do it by memorizing scripts or replicating someone else’s method. They create their death work out of devotion to the calling itself, and out of relationship with the ancestors of the work. To do it that way requires imagination, sometimes wild, sometimes tender, always rooted in the unseen currents that have carried this work across generations.
And yes, some people don’t get Nine Keys. Just like the art world didn’t get Duchamp’s urinal. They dismiss it as irreverent, confusing, unserious. But Fountain was mocked too, and a century later it is considered one of the most important works of modern art, not because of the porcelain, but because of the rupture it caused, the perception it shifted.
Nine Keys is here to do the same thing in death work. Not to add to the field, but to keep redefining it. To keep the edges of this work blurry so that it remains available to everyone’s hands and is not gatekept. Not to produce carbon copies of a profession, but to seed cultural ruptures. Not to hand you mastery, but to invite you into mystery.
