the artist’s corpus
In the obituary of the antiquary, wit, Satanist and M.P., George Selwyn, The Times disingenuously observed, “One of his oddest fancies was a taste for Witnessing executions!” What they did not add, probably for proprieties’ sake was that his favoured attire for executions was a woman’s dress.
Selwyn’s fascination with death was perhaps sometimes affected, he was after all a member of those most theatrical of Satanists, the Hellfi re Club and was thrown out of Oxford for saying a parody of the Mass in a Chapel. Yet his interest in death was also a philosophical one. As with most Gothic writers he was fascinated with mortality and the old trope of the transience of existence, however for him dead bodies also expressed something of the moral character, and indeed of the intellect.
For a man whose interest appears to be so ghoulish, he fundamentally believed in the nobility of the corpse. His direct contemporary, George Stubbs, emphasises the other end of the intellectuals’ involvement with corpses. In the later 1750s he spent 18 months in a farmhouse in Lincolnshire dissecting horses and making meticulous drawings of everything that he found.
His fascination with the corpse was artistic, if not mechanical, part of the Enlightenment desire to rationalise and to understand the world. There are many other artists who were fascinated by dead bodies as a medium for the exploration of the living; Michelangelo, Leonardo and Rembrandt. It was also often the case that the artist directly benefi ted from the exertions of the anatomist.
Many positions or poses in the seventeenth century were copied from the exquisitely illustrated works of Anatomists such as Vesalius. An exhibition called Bodies has just opened in London. As with the work of Dr Gunther von Hagens, it presents preserved corpses in various poses to demonstrate the workings and genius of the human body.
Although it may claim to take the moral high ground of being an artistically and anatomically interesting display, there is something that smells even more rotten than the preserving fl uid. There is something of the Selwyn about these exhibitions, something ghoulish that revels in shocking people and exciting them by placing them in proximity to death.
It is true that many of the bodies are taken from prisons, the same arrangements that gave anatomists their corpses and gave Selwyn many of his thrills, but there is not the same air of scientifi c or moral curiosity • it is merely the ghoulishness of Selwyn without any of the redeeming intellectual considerations. These are not a form of memento mori but objects that are designed to titillate and disgust the viewer at once.
As Marc Quinn’s famous sculpture, Bloodhead suggests, this dialogue between the form of the enquiry and art is still a productive one, but shows such as Bodies are philosophically as much artistic endeavours as freak shows. For all his love of corpses, Selwyn, as well as Stubbs, would I feel have been disgusted by Bodies and may be proof that Huxley was wrong when he observed that: “Death…It’s the only thing we haven’t completely succeeded in vulgarizing.
20th Apr 2006