JOEL-PETER WITKIN ^©  

(Brooklyn, New York, 1939)

Cm 78 x 100

Signed, titled and editioned on verso

Edition 10/12

Framed (black wood) size cm 107 x 120 x 3,5

Original provenance: Pace McGill Gallery, New York USA

Our voyeurism is excited by the severed head. A severed head is a conclusive proof that its owner is irrevocably dead; and in Western cultural history, a severed head probably means a judicial punishment however misplaced, witness Salome’s John the Baptist, Judith’s Holofernes, Elizabeth’s Mary Queen of Scott, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, Danton, Louis XVI and Marie Antoiette. Charles I was reunited, body and head, in his coffin, whilst the decaying corpse of his enemy, Cromwell, was decapitated and the head exhibited on Tower Bridge and then blackened with soot in a chimney for a hundred years until it was politically safe to exhibit it as a trophy. This could be Cromwell’s head - his features held in a tight smiling grimace, his brain-pan sectioned to examine his revolutionary politics, out of which flowers the lilies of early democracy - my subjectivity on fire here - but that’s the way it goes with Witkin - hints of turgid History revisited and distressed for a surprised viewer to smile, grimace and shudder all at the same time.

My local severed head interest is with the case of a certain heroine of Boccaccio and of Keats who put her lover’s head in a pot to furnish a basil plant with nitrogenous energy.

But Within knows that there are so many, and so much older, examples. Crevalcore painted my favourite - a Saint Catherine of Alexandria, complete with lachrymose open eyes and evidence of two hacks of the axe.

And there is often painted severed head of the Gorgon which is strong precedent here through the example of Caravaggio’s portrait of the same, for here also are Caravaggio’s signature fruit and flowers presented on a shallow table in a shallow space against black. The black and whiteness of the image perhaps gives its subject matter a neutral documentary air and helps to suggest a surreal piquancy of a death on a bourgeois sideboard in the shadow of an afternoon sitting-room.

We should not be alarmed. Witkin’s normal vocabulary of distressed surface and damaged patina - as though the print had been left to rot on a highway hard shoulder, or in an undertaker’s dustbin, is here absent - this photograph of a decapitated loved one has come to us safely from the pages of a family album - first cousin Albert, whose body is where it should be in the family tomb, but whose head, via an innocent- enough post mortem investigation, is with us now. May he rest in peace - “Would you like a grape?” .

Peter Greenaway

© 2000 Photology Editions

100 to 2000 the century of Photoart