Frances Larson's Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found is a cultural study of decapitation in all its forms: beheading as capital punishment, heads taken as trophies from enemy soldiers, the heads that are taken and frozen in cryogenic suspension. Fun stuff. Well, for me, anyway. There's an anecdote about the British artist Damien Hirst. When Hirst was a teen he broke into a morgue and, along the way, had his picture taken with a severed head. The print would be released in the early 1990's under the title With Dead Head.
As is covered in the book, surgeons desensitize themselves to working with dead bodies, and they do it in a much more systematic way. This is our species, one of the ways we try to make sense of things.
Hirst was acclimatizing to the dead. He did it with a teenage bravado that continues to colour his work: "The people aren't there. There's just these objects, which look fuck all like real people. And everybody's putting their hands in each other's pockets and messing about, going wheeeeeeyy! with the head...it just isn't there. It just removes it further." Had Hirst objectified the dead so successfully that he no longer thought of them as people at all? Or were the disrespectful jokes an attempt to hide his own emotional fragility? He said that he was terrified the severed head would come back to life, as though confirming that it was not just an object or a plaything after all.
As a work of art, With Dead Head can be interpreted as an image of conquest, but as a photograph it also documents a moment of childish swagger in what was, ostensibly, an honourable pursuit for a sixteen-year-old boy. Hirst was at the morgue to learn how to draw. If he went back there again and again to draw the dead, there must have been quieter moments of contemplation during his work too. Drawing dead bodies necessitates a complicated emotional journey.The picture is weird, and it's no surprise that it might be a little off-putting. Hirst looks like what he was, a suburban British teenage boy. His normalcy, with a touch of what could be giddiness and/or snottiness, makes you think the head must be a prop made of wax or clay. But evidently it was not.
As is covered in the book, surgeons desensitize themselves to working with dead bodies, and they do it in a much more systematic way. This is our species, one of the ways we try to make sense of things.
2 comments:
What else could I do but go off to find the image (thanks for not making it part of your post, btw). It seems to me that discovering enough about severed heads to write a whole book is a pretty bizarre, if not to say macabre, way of spending one's time. Nevertheless, I can understand how reading about the subject could provide an entertaining evening or two. I know the skulls of saints have long been part of Catholic church collections and the Tibetan Buddhists use skulls as a teaching device about impermanence. Still, it seems to me there's the aspect of showing respect for the dead, one I believe Damien Hirst crossed back when he was a callow youth posing with that head in the morgue, a picture that later became a museum artfact related to his artistic expression. He's not someone whose oeuvre I personally have any use for.
I did come across the story of what happened to Oliver Cromwell's head in Neal Stepenson's Baroque Cycle. He died of natural causes but two years later Charles II had the body exhumed and tried for the murder of his father. The corpse was hanged in chains and the head was later removed and put on a stake that hung above Westminster Hall for the next twenty-five years. Now that's what I call revenge.
Well one reason I didn't include the image was I didn't want you or any other reader to have to look at it unprepared. To me it's an interesting story but I'm not sold on it as a work of art. I can't really blame him for having the picture taken, since it seems to have happened on the spur of the moment when he was just a kid. Printing it and publicizing it is a choice, though. Anyway, I'm not big on Hirst, generally, although I like other members of the Young British Artists, like Gillian Wareing.
Stephenson didn't make up that story about Oliver Cromwell. It's in Larson's book too. The Stuarts really did dig him up and behead his corpse. On the principle of turnabout being fair play, I guess. The Wikipedia article on him shows his death mask, which is fairly handsome. Doesn't hurt that he hadn't been decapitated yet.
Oh, and reading a book like that in public does spark conversations.
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