Koudounaris elucidates the macabre splendor and tragic history of Europe's catacomb saints. Paul Koudounaris is not a man who shies away from the macabre. Though the Los Angeles-based art historian, author and photographer claims that his fascination with death is no greater than anyone else's, he devotes his career to investigating and documenting phenomena such as church ossuaries, charnel houses and bone-adorned shrines. Which is why, when a man in a German village approached him during a 2008 research trip and asked something along the lines of, "Are you interested in seeing a dilapidated old church in the forest with a skeleton standing there covered in jewels and holding a cup of blood in his left hand like he's offering you a toast?" Koudounaris' answer was, "Yes, of course." At the time, Koudounaris was working on a book called The Empire of Death, traveling the world to photograph church ossuaries and the like. He'd landed in this particular village near the Czech border to document a crypt full of skulls, but his interest was piqued by the dubious yet enticing promise of a bejeweled skeleton lurking behind the trees. "It sounded like something from the Brothers Grimm," he recalls. "But I followed his directions-half thinking this guy was crazy or lying-and sure enough, I found this jeweled skeleton in the woods." The church-more of a small chapel, really-was in ruins, but still contained pews and altars, all dilapidated from years of neglect under East German Communist rule. He found the skeleton on a side aisle, peering out at him from behind some boards that had been nailed over its chamber. As he pried off the panels to get a better look, the thing watched him with big, red glass eyes wedged into its gaping sockets. It was propped upright, decked out in robes befitting a king, and holding out a glass vial, which Koudounaris later learned would have beenbelieved to contain the skeleton's own blood. He was struck by the silent figure's dark beauty, but ultimately wrote it off as "some sort of one-off freakish thing, some local curiosity." But then it happened again. In another German church he visited some time later, hidden in a crypt corner, he found two more resplendent skeletons. "It was then that I realized there's something much broader and more spectacular going on," he says. Koudounaris could not get the figures' twinkling eyes and gold-adorned grins out of his mind. He began researching the enigmatic remains, even while working on Empire of Death. The skeletons, he learned, were the "catacomb saints," once-revered holy objects regarded by 16th- and 17th-century Catholics as local pro tectors and personifications of the glory of the afterlife. Some of them still remain tucked away in certain churches, while others have been swept away by time, forever gone. Who they were in life is impossible to know. "That was part of this project’s appeal to me," Koudounaris says. "The strange enigma that these skeletons could have been anyone, but they were pulled out of the ground and raised to the heights of glory." Resurrecting the Dead On May 31, 1578, local vineyard workers discovered that a hollow along Rome's Via Salaria, a road traversing the boot of Italy, led to a catacomb. The subterranean chamber proved to be full of countless skeletal remains, presumably dating back to the first three centuries following Christianity's emergence, when thousands were persecuted for practicing the still-outlawed religion. An estimated 500,000 to 750,000 souls—mostly Christians but including some pagans and Jews—found a final resting place in the sprawling Roman catacombs.
For hundreds of skeletons, however, that resting place would prove anything but final. The Catholic Church quickly learned of the discovery and believed it was a godsend, since many of the skeletons must have belonged to early Christian martyrs. In Northern Europe—especially in Germany, where anti-Catholic sentiment was most fervent—Catholic churches had suffered from plunderers and vandals during the Protestant Revolution over the past several decades. Those churches’ sacred relics had largely been lost or destroyed. The newly discovered holy remains, however, could restock the shelves and restore the morale of those parishes that had been ransacked. The holy bodies became wildly sought-after treasures. Every Catholic church, no matter how small, wanted to have at least one, if not ten. The skeletons allowed the churches to make a “grandiose statement,” Koudounaris says, and were especially prized in southern Germany, the epicenter of “the battleground against the Protestants.” Wealthy families sought them for their private chapels, and guilds and fraternities would sometimes pool their resources to adopt a martyr, who would become the patron of cloth-makers, for example. For a small church, the most effective means of obtaining a set of the coveted remains was a personal connection with someone in Rome, particularly one of the papal guards. Bribery helped, too. Once the Church confirmed an order, couriers—often monks who specialized in transporting relics—delivered the skeleton from Rome to the appropriate northern outpost. At one point, Koudounaris attempted to estimate in dollar terms how profitable these ventures would have been for the delivery men, but gave up after realizing that the conversion from extinct currencies to modern ones and the radically different framework for living prevented an accurate translation. “All I can say is that they made enough money to make it worthwhile,” he says. The Vatican sent out thousands of relics, though it’s difficult to determine exactly how many of those were fully articulated skeletons versus a single shinbone, skull or rib. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, where the majority of the celebrated remains wound up, the church sent at least 2,000 complete skeletons, Koudounaris estimates. For the Vatican, the process of ascertaining which of the thousands of skeletons belonged to a martyr was a nebulous one. If they found “M.” engraved next to a corpse, they took it to stand for “martyr,” ignoring the fact that the initial could also stand for “Marcus,” one of the most popular names in ancient Rome. If any vials of dehydrated sediment turned up with the bones, they assumed it must be a martyr’s blood rather than perfume, which the Romans often left on graves in the way we leave flowers today. The Church also believed that the bones of martyrs cast off a golden glow and a faintly sweet smell, and teams of psychics would journey through the corporeal tunnels, slip into a trance and point out skeletons from which they perceived a telling aura. After identifying a skeleton as holy, the Vatican then decided who was who and issued the title of martyr. They are also ornately beautiful. In their splendor and grandeur, Koudounaris says, the skeletons may be considered baroque art, but their creators’ backgrounds paint a more complicated picture that situates the bones into a unique artistic subcategory. The nuns and monks “were incredible artisans but did not train in an artisan’s workshop, and they were not in formal dialogue with others doing similar things in other parts of Europe,” he says. “From my perspective as someone who studies art history, the question of who the catacomb saints were in life becomes secondary to the achievement of creating them,” he continues. “That’s something I want to celebrate.” In that vein, Koudounaris dedicated his book to those “anonymous hands” that constructed the bony treasures “out of love and faith.” His hope, he writes, is that “their beautiful work will not be forgotten.” Fall from Grace When a holy skeleton was finally introduced into the church, it marked a time of community rejoicing. The decorated bodies served as town patrons and “tended to be extremely popular because they were this very tangible and very appealing bridge to the supernatural,” Koudounaris explains. Communities believed that their patron skeleton protected them from harm, and credited it for any seeming miracle or positive event that occurred after it was installed. Churches kept “miracle books,” which acted as ledgers for archiving the patron’s good deeds. Shortly after Saint Felix arrived at Gars am Inn, for example, records indicate that a fire broke out in the German town. Just as the flames approached the marketplace—the town’s economic heart—a great wind came and blew them back. The town showered Felix with adoration; even today, around 100 ex-votos—tiny paintings depicting and expressing gratitude for a miracle, such as healing a sick man—are strewn about St. Felix’s body in the small, defunct chapel housing him. The Second Coming Not all of the holy skeletons were lost during the 18th-entury purges, however. Some are still intact and on display, such as the 10 fully preserved bodies in the Waldsassen Basilica (“the Sistine Chapel of Death,” Koudounaris calls it) in Bavaria, which holds the largest collection remaining today. Likewise, the delicate Saint Munditia still reclines on her velvet throne at St. Peter’s Church in Munich. In Koudounaris’ hunt, however, many proved more elusive. When he returned to that original German village several years later, for example, he found that a salvage company had torn down the forest church. Beyond that, none of the villagers could tell him what had happened to its contents, or to the body. For every 10 bodies that disappeared in the 18th and 19th centuries, Koudounaris estimates, nine are gone. For Koudounaris, however, it’s not enough to simply document them in a book. He wants to bring the treasures back into the world, and see those in disrepair restored. Some of the church members agreed with Koudounaris’ wish to restore the skeletons, not so much as devotional items but as pieces of local history. The cost of undertaking such a project, however, seems prohibitive. One local parish priest told Koudounaris he had consulted with a restoration specialist, but that the specialist “gave a price so incredibly high that there was no way the church could afford it.” Still, Koudounaris envisions a permanent museum installation or perhaps a traveling exhibit in which the bones could be judged on their artistic merits. “We live in an age where we’re more in tune with wanting to preserve the past and have a dialogue with the past,” he says. “I think some of them will eventually come out of hiding.”
It's also fair to say that Johan Renck, the Swedish TV director who persuaded Bowie to write the theme song to his crime series The Last Panthers, is orchestrating a mix of cinematic techniques. There are rather nice refractions, lens flare and focus jumps. It is what you might call performative, or plastic: the Pina Bausch-esque dancers, the wax dripping candle, the ritual display of the Damien Hirst-y skull, the Soviet-Maoist shot of Bowie holding up a Blackstar book. (I’m less keen on the deliberately fake-looking, set-built backdrops that litter the video: a tired tactic of artist-film-makers getting all excited about the "artificiality" of film.) Is Bowie commenting on current social culture. Or is Bowie possibly referencing Hirst's is one of Hirst's most important and widely recognised works, For the Love of God, which in itself references the imagery of classic memento mori as well as Mesoamerican tradition of decorating Hirst combined the imagery of classic memento mori with inspiration drawn from Aztec skulls and the Mexican love of decoration and attitude towards death.
David Bowie interviews Damien Hirst. The meeting of two cultural icons, who can perplex and infuriate just as they can provoke and inspire, provides intriguing insights into the mind of Britain’s most controversial contemporary artist, writes David Lister. Faced with a superstar as committed to multimedia experimentation as he is, Hirst eschews his routine cynicism to give a rare exposition of the philosophy of the installation artist. Next week Modern Painters, on whose editorial board David Bowie sits, carries the entire interview which took place in New York where Hirst is currently exhibiting. Below is a key extract. David Bowie: The piece [the installation pictured above right] sounds extremely confrontational. Are you concerned at all about the puritan eyes through which some of your American viewers will be seeing? Damien Hirst: Well, I suppose the work sounds incredibly gruesome when described, but I think you can talk it in, out and over, but never really visualise or get near to the physical experience of standing in front of something like this. However well it is described, the actuality is just something that you don’t expect. You could read about it in the tabloids if you wanted toand it would sound sensational, but when you actually encounter it, there’s something sad and very quiet, almost fragile and very beautiful about it. It’s very difficult. If you try to talk it up as being something gross and excessive, then it’s almost like spiralling down through your own mortality or something like that. I mean, the fly pieces that I did a couple of years ago worked much in that way. They sounded quite disgusting but when you actually saw them, you underwent a considerable self-revelation. You could not really look away but somehow one could not actually criticise either. Bowie: What seems to define your work as being so different from that of your peers is a far greater degree of personal passion. A strong resentment of the idea of death. It certainly strikes me as emotive, a reverberation of sorts, whereas in the work of your friends like Gavin Turk or Sarah Lucas say, the basis seems to be a no- nonsense cynicism, a dark ironic stance maybe. You seem to straddle two worlds - conceptualism and a rather more traditional self-expression. Something that smacks of an emotional life. Is that at all accurate? Hirst: Yes I think it is. I mean I can’t deny it. I think that at the end of the day,art is not only a visual language that completely communicates an idea. The ideas maybe don’t change but the world certainly does. So then, does the context of that idea change? However, something that really gets to me is that the work should be totally delicious visually and that you shouldn’t necessarily have to work hard at the intellectualising of it. It can just be something fundamentally expressionistic. Like Bonnard said, “I just love these colours.” Bowie: So, what’s the title of your fabulous pieces with the butterflies embedded in the paint? Hirst: In and Out of Love. Bowie: Yes, In and Out of Love. Those pieces are as strongly aesthetic, as thoroughly beautiful, as they are broadcasters of ideas. Hirst: I think they contain contradictions. I mean, they’re beautiful as paintings I suspect, but if you look closely, the butterflies are stuck in the paint, so you ask yourself, did they get there by accident or is this a result of some evil little scientific experiment or is this merely a display of some kind? I find it beautiful. I also find it repulsive. Imagining oneself as the butterfly in question, it would be quite an awful thing. Bowie: Does one have to have a social conscience as an artist? Hirst: I have no social conscience when I’m working. It’s out of my hands. The viewer may want to make that judgement. I’m not too concerned with interpretation. Neither can I allow myself to be bothered by taboo or even an idea of integrity. Integrity you either have or you don’t. Bowie: Which artists had an effect on you? Not necessarily their work but maybe their attitude towards their work. Hirst: Some are obvious, I suppose. Like Bacon, like Soutine, Gericault, Dennis Potter. Anybody who dealt with the gruesome. Then I went through the Goldsmith’s experience and made some strange connection with minimalism, and then the gallery became merely a piece of white paper, a situation for a visual experience. For me it can be the contradic- tion between life and death, the body and existence. The body against a creative landscape, say ... Bowie: Does the work you produce bounce from real life experience, or do you work until an idea begins to form, or is it a combination of both? Hirst: A combination I should think. I’m always looking and playing. Living in a world of so many objects in so many juxtapositions, there are a million ideas. I will often be stopped by an everyday object placed in a frightening situation. But then, sometimes I start with a visual sculpture. For a long time I’ve had the image of an umbrella in my head, from Bacon I guess, and I’ve been trying to thin of a way to use that in a very physical and horrific situation. A sort of three-dimensional Bacon. Bowie: It seems that it’s painters that stimulate you far more than sculptors. Hirst: It’s such a completely illusionary world. It’s a kind of belief in the square. If you look at many of the paintings that I’ve done, there’s always a sculptural approach. They’re almost like a logo as an idea of myself as an artist. Some sort of sculptural consumerist idea. Bowie: Product plus personality equals brand. Hirst: Artwork plus artist equals art.
“I just thought, ‘What can you pit against death?” ‘For the Love of God’, a platinum skull set with diamonds, is one of Hirst’s most important and widely recognised works. Its raw materials define it as an artwork of unprecedented scale. The 32 platinum plates making up ‘For the Love of God’ are set with 8,601 VVS to flawless pavé-set diamonds, weighing a massive 1,106.18 carats. The teeth inserted into the jaw are real and belong to the original skull. The skull from which ‘For the Love of God’ was cast, was purchased from a London taxidermist and subsequently subjected to intensive bioarchaeological analysis and radiocarbon dating. This research revealed it dated from around 1720 - 1810, and was likely to be that of a 35-year-old man of European/Mediterranean ancestry. The title originates from exclamations Hirst’s mother would make on hearing plans for new works when he was starting out as an artist. As he explains: "She used to say, 'For the love of God, what are you going to do next!'" 'For the Love of God' acts as a reminder that our existence on earth is transient. Hirst combined the imagery of classic memento mori with inspiration drawn from Aztec skulls and the Mexican love of decoration and attitude towards death. He explains of death: "You don’t like it, so you disguise it or you decorate it to make it look like something bearable – to such an extent that it becomes something else." The incorporation of the large central stone was inspired by memories of the comic '2000 AD', which Hirst used to read as a child. He relates how the comic, “used to have a character in it called Tharg the Mighty who had a circle on his forehead. He was like a kind of powerful, God-like figure who controlled the universe," Hirst explains. "It kind of just looked like it needed something. A third eye; a connection to Jesus and his dad." Alongside their dazzling brilliance and "Eucharistic" beauty, Hirst's fascination with diamonds results partly from the mutterings and uncertainty surrounding their inherent worth. In the face of the industry's ability to establish their irreplaceable value, it becomes necessary to question whether they are "just a bit of glass, with accumulated metaphorical significance? Or [whether they] are genuine objects of supreme beauty connected with life." The cutthroat nature of the diamond industry, and the capitalist society which supports it, is central to the work's concept. Hirst explains that the stones "bring out the best and the worst in people people kill for diamonds, they kill each other".