The
Skull as Motif in Contemporary Art
Ricky Swallow iMan
Prototypes pigmented resin 2001
Hirst’s appropriation of the human skull as a
motif in artwork is by no means an isolated case. Even a cursory glance around
the contemporary art world will furnish numerous examples. As the artist Steven
Gregory comments regarding his own work, which features human skulls heavily:
I don’t want to be the guy
who does the skulls. It seems there’s a big fashion for them at the moment
(Higgins, The Guardian May 2nd 2008)
Gregory’s own work bears a striking
resemblance to Hirst’s, involving actual human skulls encrusted with
semi-precious stones. These skulls do in fact pre-date For the Love of God, Hirst himself having bought some of the pieces
from Gregory in 2002. When asked whether he saw this as mimicry, Gregory
dismissed the question by pointing to the ancient example of 7,000 year old
Aztec decorated skulls. Hirst too found inspiration in such historic artifacts,
as his concept sketches for For the Love
of God state.
This ‘fashion’ for skulls can in part be
explained by the ongoing concern with popular culture as a focus for art, Andy
Warhol’s 1960s series of screen-printed skulls being perhaps the forerunner to
the trend. Since the 1990s in Britain, this has taken the form of a punk-like
rebellious spirit in contemporary artworks, particularly in the YBA movement,
exemplified by the likes of Jake & Dinos Chapman and Hirst himself.
Justin Paton picks up on this trend in his
discussion of the work of young Australian artist Ricky Swallow, who has been
based in London for several years:
Swallow has been attracted especially to the anarchic, undead energy
that skulls and skeletons exude in popular culture, from the hipster zombies
and skeletons in any number of rock videos to the hell-raising, die-hard
skaters on Powell Peralta skateboard decks, which he places ‘among the most
stubborn images in my subliminal source book.’ (Paton, 2004, p.68)
Swallow’s work has regularly used the human
skull as its focus and is obsessively crafted, even deceptively so. The skulls
in his pieces are often combined with corporate identity. His iMan Prototypes (2001) consisted of
skulls cast in resin with the colours and detailing of Apple’s distinctive iMac
computers. We the Sedimentary Ones/Use Your Illusions Vol. 1-60 (2000) saw the
skull miniaturised and cast sixty times in pigmented resin, the resulting
objects being attached to key rings and presented as if in a souvenir shop. For
Everything is Nothing (2003), he
carved a life-size skull from jelutong wood, encased in a wooden track-suit
hood emblazoned with the distinctive logo of sportswear giant Adidas.
This sense of branding when connected with
the human skull could be seen to evoke the ubiquitous corporatisation of modern
life, an arena in which even the body can become a site for advertising. To
quote Paton once more:
We are dealing with a sculptor obsessed by objects, and skulls, by
outlasting us, make it clearer than any other object that we are objects too.
(Ibid. p. 68)
This merging of the skull as vanitas reminder with the cold
objectivisation of the marketplace seems to be echoed in Damien Hirst’s work.
The combination of this sober, gruesome, rebellious, fashionable icon with the
most opulently expensive materials is by no means coincidental. Indeed, For the Love
of God taps into a
current trend for high-end jewellery which references rock culture, with the
skull as a central device. ‘Why are stylish women suddenly wearing the most
gruesome of trinkets?’ asks a recent article in The Times LuxxMagazine.[1]
The article goes on to examine the large number of
contemporary jewellers who are using skulls and other similar
emblems in expensive designer pieces, noting
‘There is a kind of romance about this look,
as well as shades of Victorian memento mori…but this is not a pastiche, it is a
modern look.’ (Reardon, The Times Luxx 08/03/08)
The skull has also found its way into the
work of many contemporary painters. British painter Nigel Cooke has been using
the device in various guises for many years – from the rock face covered with
creepers that form a large death’s head (Silver
Morosa 2003) to the grinning pumpkin skull (Morning Is Broken 2006), to the numerous small skulls-as-objects
which litter the floor of many of his larger works. Darian Leader writes of
this feature of Cooke’s work:
Motifs of life and death are present both as explicit icons and as compositional
tensions, to make of these works modern variants on the vanitas theme. (Leader,
2006, p.38)
Ricky Swallow Everything
is Nothing carved jelutong wood & milliput 2003
In the curious netherworld of Cooke’s
paintings, objects are both inanimate and anthropomorphised, sometimes acting
as mise-en-scene, at others becoming
characters in the paintings. More recently, his work has involved a lot of
rhetorical reference to art-historical tradition, and the romantic concept of
the painter epitomised by the popular image of artists such as Vincent Van
Gogh. Within this world the skull features as a reference to still life motif.
In the work New Accursed Art Club (2008)
a group of bearded painters congregate in a dreary urban wasteland. They engage
in heroic artistic pursuits (painting from life, drinking, reading weighty
books, urinating) amongst a jumble of detritus. On a sloping walkway to their
left, a small skull lies obliquely on its side, striking in its bold painting
which contrasts with the muted hazy grey of the background.
Compositionally anchored into the central
action through the line of gaze of the micturating artist, the skull arrests
the viewer’s regard as it sweeps across the panoramic canvas. It’s placing and
angle suggest association with the famous memento
mori of Holbein’s The Ambassadors, thus
evoking the atavistic function of art to remind us of our mortality.
As Cooke’s paintings attempt to connect the world
of contemporary painting with the art of history, so his use of skulls reminds
us that whilst they may be fashionable, the trend has a long and distinguished
precedent. However, this relationship in Cooke’s work, as in much of that
mentioned above, is far from straightforward. Whilst the canon of art history
is constantly referenced here, it is done so ironically, knowingly,
tongue-in-cheek, as if no one for a second would believe that such references
were being invoked in a serious, heavyweight way. So whilst Leader’s comment
can be taken seriously to some extent – Cooke’s work does ostensibly make connections with the theme of the vanitas – we must be wary of taking this
too literally. Because the theme is accessed and contextualized through the
interface of popular culture (as it collides with its classical counterpart),
the actual ideas for which the references are shorthand are kept at arms
length; they are bypassed through over-familiarity. In semiotic terms they
could be seen as simulacral, referring
only to other signs. This will be examined more closely in what follows.
Nigel Cooke New
Accursed Art Club oil on canvas 2008
Steven Gregory Midnight
Rambler human skull, jet, pearls, diamond 2008
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