represent

Watch your step

Skull installation in Singapore

I was hiking a few days ago through Mendon Ponds Park with my brother, and the subject of my skull paintings came up. Like many people, I think he assumed I’d developed a slight, morbid side-interest in death. I tried to explain that skulls go back centuries as a primary subject in vanitas still lifes. A skull painting isn’t a nice Goth fashion statement, or declaration of  allegiance to the occult, or a logo for an Ivy League secret society, or an initiation into the Sons of Anarchy Painting Guild. Skull paintings were, and are, a reminder of what matters most in life: you may die at any time, so live accordingly. Every moment counts. Awareness of life’s brevity helps reveal how meaningless most pleasures are. Of course, as time runs out, you might also go on one sort of binge or another, but that’s simply testimony to how a vanitas paintings test of the viewer’s character. What are you going to do with whatever time remains? Vanitas painters themselves don’t always pass the test. They like to sneak into their paintings delightful but suitably evanescent sources of “meaningless” pleasure, thus giving themselves and their patrons an excuse to revel in those pleasures while feeling righteous about how brief they are. Barkeep, I’ve just contemplated death for fifteen seconds, make it a double. I’ve earned it. The vanitas tradition is certainly alive in Singapore where  Nino Sarabutra has covered a gallery’s floor with 10,000 tiny skulls. I’m not sure if visitors are required to go barefoot, as it would appear in the photograph, but they ought to be. On one wall hangs a painting with the words: What Will You Leave Behind? Nothing morbid about this at all: it’s a question at the heart of any serious philosophical or spiritual attitude toward life. Nota bene: skulls can actually be beautiful in their own way, like old bleached objects washed up on a beach, as complex and full of curving, pitted forms as difficult to paint as a fading white flower. Our bones are like driftwood.

Now that’s the spirit . . .