Skull Art and Other Transgressive Behavior

One frigid morning in January, I headed out to my local cemetery to do some photography. There was snow and ice all over the place, so why would I not head out to my local cemetery to do some photography. In fact, weeks later an ice storm was forecast for the following day and my brother told me to be careful - I told him I was prepared: I knew which cemetery I was going to visit.

On this particular January day, I was rather careful each time I stepped out of the car, cautious with each step. Last year, I slipped on the ice in a cemetery and tore my rotator cuff. Took eight months for that to heal. Had my hip replaced at the end of April 2024, so I really did not want to break any more body parts. Still, I am always looking for a new place to spend the rest of my sins.

I did not want to slip, fall, and crack my skull. Actually, either of my skulls. Today was BYO Skull Day at the cemetery, and I had two of my largest with me. One might be a quondam deer, the other a pit bull. Of the roughly ten skulls I own, all but one was found in an abandoned cemetery. The largest, an antlered deer, I severed from its spinal column with an ice chopper (in an abandoned cemetery). Yes, I know, you have questions. Really wasn’t as dramatic as it sounds – most of the flesh had been either eaten away or rotted off the bones by the time I got to it. Most of the other skulls were picked clean and bleached white by the sun by the time I found them. Takes forever for that to happen. It intrigues me that people go to such extremes to strip flesh from bones. 

Assuming I haven’t lost you by this point or severely grossed you out, lets get to the photography part. I was hoping there would be snow on the statues but there was very little. Still, the snow on the ground lent a stark, uncluttered backwash for the photography I’d planned. Well, “planned” is a strong word. Planned in the sense that I brought my skulls and some cameras. I began by looking for skull settings, i.e. statues of appropriate scale to maybe hold one of the skulls. That’s a photo of St. Lucy above holding a skull as opposed to holding her own disembodied eyeballs (look that up, I’ll wait…… I think my image is actually less bizarre than what the statue is really meant to portray.) 

For what I was doing in this cemetery today I wished I could have visualized the end product or at least recognized what step I was at in the process. Pursuing a new artistic endeavor like this is like brushing your teeth with your less dominant hand. Awkward. But you know, nothing great ever came from people who operated solely in their comfort zone. My friend Jason calls this “leaning into your limitations.”

Physically, being there that day was far from comfortable. It was almost too cold to think. Temperature was about twenty degrees Fahrenheit and even though I was wearing long underwear and had chemical warming pouches in my shoes and gloves, my fingers got cold, red, and numb on many occasions. I had to repeatedly jump back into the running SUV and blast hot air out the dashboard vents onto my numb fingers.

I would drive to a statue, decide whether it was skull-worthy, then perhaps spend twenty minutes staging a photo. On two occasions, police cruisers drove by. I assume they just figured I was some photography nut photographing statues. And of course they would be right. I kept the skull of the moment close to my chest so they wouldn’t see it as they drove by. I assume, I hope, they would’ve stopped to question me if they thought any skullduggery was afoot.

Maybe I’m channeling my inner Joel-Peter Witkin with all this, but I’m sure Witkin did all his startling, grotesque, and macabre body parts-photography in a fancy studio, with assistants - not outdoors in below-freezing winter. Maybe we’re searching for a similar grail here, I don’t know. The process of arranging skulls on cemetery statues got me thinking about Witkin’s process, what he may have been thinking or planning. The viewer typically only sees the final product. 

But art “is an event in itself, something that comes into being,” says Karl Ove Knausgaard, in his New Yorker (Feb. 3, 2005) article, Private Eye. The piece is about how a particular artist creates presence in her painted portraits. Without a doubt, a Witkin still life, or one of my images here clearly imply presence of the artist in the creation of the piece. What I’ve done should elicit a different reaction from the viewer, different from the viewer seeing a simple photograph of a gravestone. The viewer certainly can feel my “presence” in these images.

As with any still life, the material world is supposed to suggest something else. If Witkin’s and my photographs seem about as joyous as the Doomsday Clock to you, consider this other skull fun: see how artist Filip Hodas creates “cartoon fossils.” There are in fact, people even more deviant than I. Visit this website to see his lovely work!

Glenn Hendler asks in his book, Diamond Dogs, is there any way to ‘use’ a medium without being at the same time ‘in’ it? He wrote this about the David Bowie album of that name. He describes Bowie’s music on this album as having “randomness balanced with an assertion of control.” I think that might be an honest description of my own photographs. Like Bowie as he was writing these songs, I think I’m trying to stimulate my own imagination. Maybe what you see here is merely a step in a much longer process, rather than a final product. I’m not a U2 fan, but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

Staged still lifes can be beautiful, but random beauty can be startling. A week after my photo shoot at this cemetery, I visited another snow-covered one, where I saw the most beautiful red fox break the stillness of the snowscape with its gentle trotting. It was so fluid and graceful as it padded through the snow between the tombstones, it seemed random, but for the fox, it was probably the same path it took every afternoon. The fox trotted up the small hill toward a mausoleum. It turned around, looked at me, and flopped down in the sun alongside the mausoleum. Seemingly random nature can be more beautiful than anything a human can create.

It made me feel better about my progress, transgressive as my behavior may be. As Douglas Adams said in his novel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” 

For reference and further examination:

Joel-Peter Witkin | Artnet

Karl Ove Knausgaard Latest Articles | The New Yorker

A 3D Artist Imagines the Realistic Fossilized Skulls of Endearing Cartoon Characters — Colossal

"I Returned Your Skulls."

Image by Michael Kauffman 

“What the world needs right now is another endless musing on staying at home during the coronavirus pandemic; the C.D.C. has declared these pieces to be a symptom of COVID-19 that can be treated only by gentle snoring.” -  Libby Gelman-Waxner in her New Yorker article “If You Ask Me: The Last Quarantine Think Piece” (May 18, 2020)

While I agree with the above statement, I’m still going to write this blog. As my friend Mike Spak would say, “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.”

This past summer I was walking up the street toward my house, end of the day, coming home from work. A few neighbors were outside their homes chatting (from an appropriate COVID social distance) – I live on a tiny street of row homes in an old nineteenth-century Philadelphia neighborhood. My neighbor Michael, who lives around the block, addressed me in a relatively loud voice, “Hey Ed, I returned your skulls … left them with your wife.” Ok, that’s a wee bit embarrassing – but in a good way, lol.

I am very selective when it comes to my choice of friends – they have to be anything but normal and boring. And they say the darndest things. One time a few years back I got together after work with a friend to have a beer. We were walking down the street on a Friday evening, lots of people on the sidewalks, summer. I asked him how his day went, as he appeared to be tired out. He sighed and said, “Well, we got all six bodies out of the ground.”  Couldn’t help notice the startled looks we got from those around us! Frank worked in a graveyard, and I knew he was working on a project to move some graves.

Michael, my neighbor, is an artist. He appreciates Caravaggio, a Baroque era painter who seemed to rather enjoy painting people getting their heads chopped off. Some of his art evokes Caravaggio. Over the course of the last few years, Michael and I have each learned a bit about each others’ art. As an aside, I shared with him the fact that I pick up skulls in abandoned graveyards – everyone needs a hobby, right? 

Just to be clear, my skulls are not human skulls. You just don’t run across those as often as you do skulls of other animals - even in abandoned graveyards! 

During the spring/summer 2020 coronavirus lockdown, Michael had been stuck in the house, so he’d spent some of that time creating art. Either he asked to borrow some of my skulls, or I offered them to him, I don’t remember exactly how that went, but he created some startlingly gorgeous photographs with them, which he planned to use as components of larger digitally collaged art work. Michael has a glorious light tent in his garage in which he does digital macrophotography. I was jealous so I had Amazon send me one. Not a garage, a light tent. An inexpensive version of his (mine is shown below).

It was probably in May that I lent Michael my skulls. May was an absurd month, full of fear and coronavirus. Lockdowns and masking. A lot of artists spent this time holed up, creating. In November, Michael shared some of the final results with me, one of which you can see at the top of this blog.

My skulls formerly belonged to an assortment of animals – fox, pitbull, deer, cat, bird, groundhog, etc. They were all found in abandoned cemeteries. I never spent much time photographing them, but after I got my skulls back and saw some of Michael’s preliminary results, I decided to take a stab at it myself. 

Here you see one of my first experiments. This one at left is based on the rainbows everyone had hanging from their homes during the Summer of COVID. Finding and counting rainbows seemed apropos of the time – a way to pretend that you again had some control over your life, and that there was eventually going to be a positive outcome. This image represents both possible outcomes. 

During the lockdown, I was one of the few people allowed on the roads, being a healthcare worker. Every once in a while, I’d stop by a local graveyard to do some photography. Graveyards were one of the only public areas people could visit during lockdown - you were lucky if there was one within walking distance of your home. I wasn’t confined to my house, like most people, but when I was home, I decided to use the time wisely and creatively. Actually, more experimentally and experientially. 

I’m writing this at the tail end of December, 2020. Since March, artists have been lamenting their situation. No galleries or public spaces to display or sell their work. For those who depend on this for income, for a livelihood, this has been devastating. But wait – we all create art in private anyway, right? During lockdown (when was that, mid-March to June?), we were FORCED to work in private, and forced to use whatever we had on hand to create. Hopefully, artists had supplies (yet another advantage of digital over film photography, huh? Otherwise we’d all be stuck with bags of undeveloped film).

COVID is like an entropy puzzle, a puzzle we have to assemble without the benefit of having a picture on the box showing the end result. And just when some of the pieces seem to fit together, they magically change, so they no longer fit. Who knew the pandemic would continue into August, when I began writing this blog? That was two weeks before virtual school began for the world’s children. Distance learning, two words that I am now convinced are mutually exclusive. Now it’s the end of December, 2020, and we don’t even have the border of the puzzle completed. The new normal, life in a pandemic.

As artists, we sometimes need to get out of our old wheelhouse – we need a kick in the ass to get those creative juices flowing. For some artists, COVID is that KITA. It seemed to influence Michael Kauffman’s work – see his gorgeous tombstone image below!

I intended to close this piece by bookending the opening New Yorker quote with these lyrics from the band Cracker’s song, “Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now):”

“…what the world needs now

Is a new kind of tension, …

'Cause the old one just bores me to death…”

So that’s good for artists (and maybe others) who needed the COVID KITA to move their art (or their lives) to the next level. However, I watched musician Devin Townsend’s Christmas Concert performance the other day, and this quote from his song “My Life,” is a kinder, gentler way to say goodbye to 2020:

“How long can this life go on? Who we are, what we are. See you on the other side."

- (Devin Townsend - Acoustic Christmas Special (Live 12-23-2020) - YouTube) 

Further Adventures:

See Michael Kauffman’s artwork on Flickr: Michael Kauffman | Flickr