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

Clutching

Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia

Look closely at the hand above, see how it is pulling on the bed covers? It appears to have a death grip on the sheets. This is a fairly common sculptural element in cemetery art. It’s impact was rather lost on me until I made this photograph. Well, not exactly when I MADE it, more so when I reviewed the images on my phone the next day. Why? Mainly because it reminded me of a Cemetery Traveler blog I had written some years ago. 

As I described in my June 17, 2020 post, “Johnny Thunders Dead in New Orleans,” (link below) I described how the guitarist formerly of the New York Dolls had a death grip on his bed covers when the hotel caretaker found his lifeless body. This was at the St. Peter Guest House – a rooming house - in New Orleans, in 1991. Thunders’ death grip may have looked just like what you see carved in this statue.

http://thecemeterytraveler.blogspot.com/2010/06/johnny-thunders-dead-in-new-orleans.html

So, what exactly is a “death grip?”

 “Death grip: A cadaveric spasm described as an instantaneous tightening of the hand or other body part at the time of death, the mechanism of which is unexplained.”

https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/

Woodlands Cemetery, Philadelphia

At some point back in 1999, I spent a couple days photographing New Orleans cemeteries. As I described in the blog post mentioned above, I also visited the St. Peter Guest House, being a New York Dolls fan. Johnny Thunders died here. The Dolls were a flamboyant glam rock punk band that came into being in 1973, the mechanism of their popularity being also largely unexplained. Back then, you would rarely admit in public that you listened to glam or punk. Now, of course, their music is almost considered “classic rock.” I doubt the Dolls would have expected that their music would be listened to FIFTY years later!

By the same token, I certainly did not expect to be talking to the man who found Johnny’s body when I visited the St. Peter Guest House. As I have previously written, “Royce found Johnny on the floor next to his bed with the bedsheets crunched in a deathgrip by his stiff hands.” I invite you to read my account of this adventure here.

It is odd how things you see, smell, hear, and taste can remind you of a past experience. Often, the memory jumps to the forefront of our consciousness without warning. This is actually a good description of the New York Dolls themselves. In 1973, they jumped to the forefront of the music world’s consciousness without warning. 

In the same way as the death grip adds a stark, mortal detail to the serene form of these statues, we can be reminded of how Johnny Thunders and the Dolls added a stark, mortal detail to music’s serene form in 1973. The Dolls were scraping, clutching their way toward stardom, in the midst of the serene popular music hits of 1973. Take a look at the list below to see what they were up against. We always need someone to continually claw at the sheets of complacency.

Top Songs of 1973  (https://top40weekly.com/top-100-songs-of-1973/)

1 Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree - Tony Orlando & Dawn

2 Bad, Bad Leroy Brown - Jim Croce

3 Killing Me Softly with His Song - Roberta Flack

4 Let’s Get It On - Marvin Gaye

5 My Love - Paul McCartney & Wings

6 Why Me - Kris Kristofferson

7 Crocodile Rock - Elton John

8 Will It Go Round in Circles - Billy Preston

9 You’re So Vain - Carly Simon

10 Touch Me in the Morning - Diana Ross