Go with me

It is entirely fitting that it requires a ferry to get to the beinhaus (charnel house) in the remote village of Hallstatt, Austria. 

The mythological river Styx, the conduit between the world of the living and the world of the dead,  entailed a notorious ferry ride.

Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx, Joachim Patinir c. 1515–1524, Museo del Prado of Madrid, Spain.

Situated between a lake and a mountain, Hallstatt has a famous ossuary, a site frequently used when burial space is scarce. It is filled with remarkable, and hauntingly beautiful, painted skulls.

“As a child, I visited the ossuary, with its painted skulls, one of the strangest places I have ever been—a mystic and very silent place,” the photographer Paul Krasner told The New Yorker this month. “As one would decorate a grave with flowers, the skulls were painted by the local gravedigger. Earth pigments were used, and the women’s skulls were painted with colorful flowers, the men’s with ivy leaves. The deceased’s date of birth and death were written on their forehead. This tradition began in 1720 A.D., and there are now over twelve hundred skulls, six hundred and ten of which have been painted."

"All are at one now, roses and lovers,

Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea.

Not a breath of the time that has been hovers

In the air now soft with a summer to be."

~ Swinburne, "A Forsaken Garden"

Paul Krasner's photo project, Vademecum, began in 2010. The title derives from the latin vade mecum, which literally translates to “Go with me” or "Walk with me"  and refers to a handbook, manual, or guidebook.

Bone houses present the living with the opportunity to confront or commune with death and the dead. (It is an interesting fact that human beings housed their dead before they housed themselves.)1.  Krasner's project offers access to the timelessness and connectivity that these unique spaces possess. They are at once alive in the present, staring at the past, and beg contemplation of the future. "For what is a place if not its memory of itself - a site or locale where time turns back upon itself?" 2.

We are all "eventually united–as people were in these places, in these homogenous piles." - Paul Koudounaris, author of The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses 

1. Robert Pogue Harrison, Dominion of the Dead, University of Chicago Press, 2003, p38.
2. Harrison, p23

Paul Thek’s Studio 1967

Peter Hujar - Shelf With Hand - 1967 / 2010.

In 1967, Peter Hujar photographed his friend Paul Thek’s East 3rd Street studio in 1967. The Brooklyn artist Thek was a sculptor, painter, and one of the first artists to create environments or installations. As he frequently used perishable materials, Thek accepted the ephemeral nature of his art works—and was aware, as writer Gary Indiana has noted, of “a sense of our own transience and that of everything around us.”

The images Peter Hujar took of the studio explore Thek's ephemera, process, and persona. Originally taken for potential use in association with Thek’s 1967 solo exhibition at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery in New York, many images in this series document the making of his infamous sculpture The Tomb/Death of a Hippie, a life-sized effigy of the artist laid to rest in a pink ziggurat. A full-size cast of his body lies entombed dressed in a suit jacket and jeans, painted a pale pink, and adorned with jewelry made of human hair and gold. This sculpture is now considered to be the masterwork of his 1960s sculpture. The Tomb was destroyed after languishing in storage, with Thek reportedly having refused delivery of the piece in 1981. Thek had grown tired of the work, “I really don’t want to have to do that piece AGAIN! Oh God no! Not THAT one. Imagine having to bury yourself over and over.” Both Thek and Hujar died of AIDS related illnesses in the late 1980s.

Peter Hujar -  Thek’s studio - 1967.

Peter Hujar's images are on view at Maureen Paley in London from September 7 – October 2, 2011. Photographs from this studio session were uncovered during the research for Paul Thek: Diver, a retrospective which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in October 2010, toured to the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh and is now on view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles until September 4, 2011.

Peter Hujar - Thek Working with Bicycle Wheel Above 1 - 1967.
All images are© 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC;
courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Morbid Preoccupation

"La Belle Rosina" by Antoine Wiertz 1847

"While seeking out the dead I see nothing but the living."

~ Honoré de Balzac

Look at her voluptuous nudity. The childlike gaze of curiosity. The contrast of spindly skeleton to velvety flesh. Is is death that mocks life or life that mocks death?

Endless forms most beautiful

Gregory Crewdson from Natural Wonder series

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us...Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of species by means of natural selection..." (1859)

A Painful Pill to Swallow

"Make Believe Damien Hirst For The Love of God" by Jim Riswold

I don't understand our economy. How can it be possible that telling Americans to borrow more money is good for the economy, when we're all already in debt above our eyeballs. And how does it make sense that lower gas prices aren't good for the economy? Is it just that the oil executives aren't making their multi-million dollar profits? And how come retail prices coming down from their inflated levels is bad for the economy when no one's incomes are going up?

So here's another question, how is it that Damien Hirst, one of the world's richest artists, who made £111 million British pounds selling his artwork at his latest auction (just his latest folks), how come he now has to "be mindful of the current economic climate." Just this week Hirst canceled the contracts of many of the poor sods that work for him for a measly £19,000 a year, 17 of the 22 artists that make the pills featured in a number of his works. However, "In June 2007, Lullaby Spring, a cabinet filled with hand-painted pills, sold for £9.65m."

Am I missing something here? Well, it turns out he wants to stop making his pill cabinets, but still...he can't find other work for these artists? All together their wages are a measly £323,000 a year.

According to an article in the Guardian, "Last week, Hirst admitted that art had probably become too expensive in recent years and said he welcomed the prospect of selling his work at cheaper rates in the present climate of recession." Hmmmm, seems to me he could just sell his work for less. How much less could he possibly pay his workers?!?!

I say it makes no sense and he's being a scrooge, breaking the news that by years end they'll be out of a job! It's shocking and despicable!

Bah Humbug.

The Grotesque

FROM GROTESQUERIE TO THE GROTESQUE: On the Topicality of Ornaments

This exhibition closes tomorrow at the MAK (Museum of Applied Arts) in Vienna. Oh if only it were just uptown, a subway ride away, I would be racing over there! It is intriguing that the curator describes the grotesque as “an attitude of mind.” These images are flights of fancy -- dancing and laughing in a most joyful way at, and in the face of, mortality.



As a consolation, the museum has collaborated with two other institutions to put their print collection online.


The MAK’s Works on Paper Collection comprises 17,413 folios and features holdings dating from the 15th to the 18th centuries, originating mostly from Germany, Italy, France and England. The library collection includes reference books; literature on art, the applied arts, graphic arts; and numerous pattern books, folios, and ornamental prints.

One notable collection of ornamental prints is the Neuw Grotteßken Buch by Christoph Jamnitzer of Nuremburg, dating from around 1610. It is an exemplary example of the German grotesque, that includes “60 folios with panels, goldsmith ornaments, ornaments in the auricular style and scrollwork ornaments, putti, erotic drawings and monstrous forms. Because of the wide variety of designs it contains, the volume enjoyed great popularity among craftspersons of the time.”

As eloquently stated by Kathrin Pokorny-Nagel, Head of the MAK Library and Works on Paper Collection

There is no doubt that ornamental prints have lost none of their importance as a resource for cultural and artistic research: for rediscovering lost historical information about interior decoration, garden designs and the compilation of collections, for localizing the origins of applied arts objects, classifying their aesthetic development and dating them… and, not least, as an ideal image or embodiment of an attitude of mind.