The combination of several taboos

Le baiser (1982) by Joel-Peter Withkin

This black and white picture by Joel-Peter Witkin shows two male severed heads kissing. The background is black with a bit of texture that gives the illusion that the heads are resting on some sort of fabric. The two heads are very similar and we could even think that they are the same head from two different angles and the picture is edited in such way that they appear to be kissing. The heads belonged to white men, they appear to be relatively old, considering that they have wrinkles and their hairline has receded all the way to the back of the head.

This is an unmistakably disturbing image. The representation of death is far from being a taboo, it hasn’t been for a long time. Portraits of dead people were even customary in different periods. Now we see death in movies and television without much shock. However, there are certain ways of showing death that still shock us or disgust us. It remains disturbing to see the body, deprived of any will treated as an object to manipulate. This image is very violent as it implies that the photographer manipulated severed heads to get them into that particular position. From the beginning of mankind, man has taken care of the dead body in a certain way. We bury it, we cremate it, we establish ceremonies around it. The dead body is sacred and the thought that someone might use it, disfigure it, even play with it for aesthetic purposes is uncomfortable. The manipulation of the dead body is a taboo. It is necessary to perform certain rituals but the actual manipulation of the body is left to specific people, and these people are often viewed with a sort of trepidation. In japanese culture it used to taint a persons bloodline to work in such tasks. The burakumin were the families who, among other things (like slaughtering animals), disposed of corpses. Being burakumin was hereditary and they were not allowed to marry outside of their group. This is only an extreme example to show how the manipulation of the dead is perceived by humans.

Furthermore, the act of kissing is supposed to be consensual and the idea that someone forces that action to someone else is in itself disturbing. This adds to the sense of violence that is shown in the picture. It also adds to the idea that this picture represents a taboo because it could be viewed as a form of necrophilia. There are a couple of sexual behaviors that are considered taboo, even in pornography, and necrophilia is definitely among them.

In addition to this, I have to point out what the punctum (according to Barthes, the punctum is the element that grabs our attention when we look at a picture) of this image is for me. The punctum is the necks of the heads. They’re severed heads but they also appear to be rotting so the neck doesn’t have a clean cut, it’s almost as though it has been ripped off. The punctum is in fact much more precise, for me. It is what appears to be the aorta of the head on the right. I think that this element is particularly shocking because it implies that the body was. more than manipulated, butchered and deformed.

There are other things that makes me qualify this image in ‘the unwanted, the ugly and the taboo’ and that is the union it proposes between death, violence, sexuality, sexuality in old age and homosexuality. Witkin chose to represent here a combination of things we either don’t want to see, things that we reject completely and things that cause controversy.

However, if look at this picture making the effort of looking beyond our cultural bias, it could be interpreted in a very different fashion. ¿Could it be a representation of ever-lasting love? “Love alters not when it alteration finds” writes Shakespeare, maybe in this picture we see exactly that. Love does not alter even after death, even in old age, even in violence. It could even be a criticism of the idea of ever-lasting love.

Religious taboo

Heaven to hell (2006) by David LaChapelle

This is a picture by David LaChapelle that depicts a Pieta in which Courtney Love represents the Virgin Mary and Kurt Cobain represents Jesus. They are in a room filled with many different objects such as two light bulbs, stone angel wings, a couple of tables, a flower pot with orange flowers, pill bottles, wine bottles, books, wine cups, stone figurines and, in the front, there are letter cubes in bright colors, organized in such a way that we can read: “Heaven To Hell”. The room has a window in the back, which seems to provide a lot of light to the room. The walls are striped in a way that gives the illusion of light rays coming from the window and it is painted with trees. Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain are placed on top of a hospital stretcher. She is wearing a blue dress, with no shoes or jewelry, her hair is loose and it is the brightest spot in the picture, she is looking up and holding Kurt Cobain with both arms. He is almost naked, except for his white boxer briefs. His head and right arm fall to the side of Courtney Love’s legs and his arm in marked with bruises that can only be made by repetitive drug injection. There is a blond child at his feet who seems to be playing with the letter cubes.

This picture is filled with symbolism, so much so that it is difficult to differentiate between the denotation and the connotation of the picture. For example, I first described the picture as a Pieta, a theme that has been represented in different art forms for centuries and consist of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Jesus. It would be almost impossible to describe the image’s denotation without resorting to that term that rightfully belongs to the connotation of the image, that is to say, the cultural assignation we make on it.

There are many questions that surface when I look at this image: why is Kurt Cobain associated with Jesus Christ? Why is Courtney Love the Virgin Mary? Why “Heaven to Hell”? To answer them I would like to analyze the parallel made between the rock stars and the religious figures. Obviously, the analysis of the whole picture would take a much longer and detailed work, but I think that this parallelism is the main point to discuss.

First, I have to point out that when we think of Kurt Cobain we rarely associate him with anything religious. We may even think that he is the exact opposite of Jesus. He was a man who never believed in God, who didn’t preach for any kind of morale and who was so tormented with his own demons that he never got the chance to worry about others. A for Courtney Love, the popular image we have of her is almost that of a monster. She is often blamed for the death of Kurt Cobain, she has never been able to take care of their daughter, and her behavior is loud and overly sexual. Again, she could be considered the opposite of the Virgin Mary. It could be considered taboo to associate these people with Mary or Jesus.

I believe that this picture is meant to reflect modern society. To put Kurt Cobain in the place of Jesus in the picture suggests that maybe he, and others like him, have taken the place of Jesus in society. We adore rock stars the way we worshiped religious figures, in this case Christian religious figures. In general, our culture gives so much importance to famous actors or musicians that it seems they have taken the place that previously belonged to religious worship.

Furthermore, the association between Jesus and Kurt Cobain may convey much deeper aspects of our society. Jesus Christ is a symbol of sacrifice, he sacrificed his life for humanity, to purge the sins of men. Could it be that Kurt Cobain has that role in society nowadays? Kurt Cobain is the poster boy for social problems. His parents divorce and the suicide of his uncle affected him so much that he developed serious psychological trauma that lead to drug use and eventually suicide. Is it possible that what LaChapelle is trying to convey is that Kurt Cobain died for our sins? He did die because of a malfunctioning society, but could it be considered sacrifice?

On the other hand we have Courtney Love in the place of the ‘mother of God’, which, as I said before, is in itself quite shocking. However, maybe this image tries to convey the fact that the public role models we have of motherhood have changed so much over the centuries that they have evolved from the Virgin Mary, the ‘perfect’ mother, to Courtney Love, who has so many issues with motherhood that the custody of her daughter has been contested several times.

To put it in a nutshell, the impact this picture creates through the association of rock stars with the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ drives us to think about the way modern society perceives both and how they could be similar.

The Socially Unwanted

I'd like to comment on a scene from the movie The Daybreakers. This is an action movie about a distopia where human kind is almost extinct and was replaced by vampires. As humans die, great companies take the lucrative business of farming brain-dead humans as a food source. However, the blood is beginning to become a luxury, the price is so high that the middle and low class start growing hungry. As they grow hungry, they become mindless creatures that attack their own kind.

The scene I am going to analyze takes place near the end of the movie as the government takes the decision, pushed by the media and the 'concern population', to exterminate these creatures, as they represent a danger for society.

The denotation level of meaning of this scene is a group of deformed beings, chained by the neck, are dragged, as they scream and fight, into a courtyard where the sun sets them on fire until nothing remains but the chains. This is witnessed by a group of soldiers and a few people with ragged clothes that cry as they watch.
I find this scene particularly interesting because during the whole movie we are made to understand that the whole society was meant to be a failure. Everyone knew that the humans were getting extinct and nothing was done about it. We get to this scene with a sense of helplessness because these are people they are burning, their families are watching and yet society approves of their removal. They are the direct result of a social system that doesn't work and yet society views them as 'other'.

This could be linked to Hyden White's concept of the 'savage', this being that serves as a counter example of the identity of a nation or a group. "I may not know who I am but I am certainly not that." Nations, religions and groups have used this to form an identity different from the others. The scene from the Daybreakers shows us how within a society this happens but with twist, because 'the other' here is nothing more than the least favored part of the society.

We could make a parallel between capitalism and this distopia. We often see in the news or even in conversation comments about homeless and poor people . We recognize them for the way they are dressed, the way they look (the same way in the Daybreakers, the hungry vampires are deformed, they are easily recognizable) and we see them as 'other'. They can be aggressive towards us and vice versa so we define ourselves as 'not them' but aren't we both the result of the same social structure? Do we not come from the same ideals?

The mistake

These two pictures I pulled out directly from Facebook. The first one depicts a group of school girls and the second one some of the same school girls twenty years later.

When the first photograph was taken the film of the previous photograph taken got stuck on the film of this picture resulting in the unintentional mixing of both. We see here one of the school girls that is sitting to the left of the picture also standing to the right.

The second picture was taken with a digital camera and the movement of the hand makes the picture seem blurred and even double.

These two images have one thing in common: the mistake. Sturken and Cartwright write that even the settings of cameras meant to take decisions out of the normal user's concern, have a certain 'ideology' for it is based on pre-conceived ideas that a picture must be clear and neat.

What I find interesting about these two pictures is the way they are broadcasted to the world in a place like Facebook, even though they are 'mistakes'. The user was unable to 'properly' use the camera the way it was preset to be used and yet they are shown like any other picture. It seems that our internet culture has completely erased the boundaries between what is wanted and what is unwanted in images.

Old age and femininity

Andres Serrano

Budapest (The Model) 1994

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

The meaning of this image changes a lot for me depending on where I see it. The first time was in Umberto Eco's History of ugliness in a chapter dedicated to the ugliness of women depicted in paintings from the Middle Ages to the baroque period. According to Eco, in this era women were seen as morally ugly, their obsession with outer beauty signifying a need to 'cover up' the ugliness inside. The picture of an ugly crone is interpreted as the image of moral degradation and sin. Now, when I first saw this picture just after reading this, my first thought was "what drove Umberto Eco to put this here?". Two pages after this he explains that during the Renaissance, old age in women and the 'ugliness' it gave was perceived in a more melancholic point of view. An old woman was seen as the embodiment of the decline of beauty and the loss it brought with it. This made me see that this photograph can give a great insight into what is unwanted, ugly or taboo now. Do we (or I) see this picture as it would have been seen in the middle ages? Do we see it as in the Renaissance?

According to Roland Barthes, each image has two levels of meaning: denotative and connotative meaning. The denotative meaning is, in a way, the surface, what we plainly see, while the connotative meaning is the cultural assignations we give to the image.

In this picture the denotative meaning is a relatively old woman, posing naked for the camera, leaning on a cane with one hand and smoking a cigarette. She has pearl earrings, a bracelet, a ring and a simple necklace. On the background we see a rather bare room, the corner of a window, a bed with someone naked lying on it and behind the woman we see the edge of some sort of wooden thing.

The connotative meaning of a photograph can be different for each person, or in this case it can depend on where it is seen. When I learned that this image was part of a collection of portraits by the same photographer with a similar style but different models, I thought that this image could be understood as a pro-feministic message. This is a lady, she wears pearl earrings, which remind us of Hollywood glamour as does the way she holds her cigarette. She is proud and stands before the camera with all the attitude of a model in a perfume commercial. I can see in this woman someone who is living her sexuality with pride even at her age. The edge of what I called 'the wooden thing' could be the edge of an easel so not only does she lend her body and personality to an artist (the photographer) but she herself could be an artist too. I see a lot of clichés of alternative, artistic life-style: the bare room, the easel, and the person on the bed. As we look at this picture we are also seeing thousands upon thousands of other images that have been engraved in our memory. We see Grace Kelly in a similar posture, holding the cigarette in the exact same way.

When I place myself in this interpretation, I could wish to be that woman when I grow old, to have that poise, that liberty but I cannot deny that this picture also makes me deeply uncomfortable.

The way this woman is leaning on her cane, the fact that we can't see the white in her eyes, that they seem hollow, that she is growing a bit of a beard and that she is very much trying to embody this Hollywood glamour, it all brings me back to the first time I saw it in Umberto Eco's book.

Is the connotation of this image that of a woman burdened by her 'sins'? Is this moral ugliness we see leaking out of her glamourous façade? Or do we see in this picture a veritable simbol of the decline of beauty? This glamorous woman needs to lean on a cane, her eyes are lost and looking somewhere outside the picture. Is she mourning somehow the loss of this Hollywood beauty?

In summary, I think is that, when we, the XXIst century viewers, see this picture we can see at the same time the medieval pictures of the ugly crone, the renaissance view of old age, the beauty of Grace Kelly, the feminist movement, our own mothers or grandmothers and a thousand other things. In a way, we still see the unwanted in this picture (feminine old age), we still see the ugly, but we don't internalize it the way would have in the middle ages. We can see beauty and melancholy too here.

This photograph of 'the model' shows very clearly this distortion of the concepts of unwanted, ugly and taboo. What in other times would have embodied these concepts, seem to be able to represent the exact opposite.