Joanna Ebenstein – Producer
I grew up in California in the 1980s, which was a very sunny, extroverted culture. And I had an interest in darkness and death, which did not make me very popular. I kept dead animals in my room, thanks to my father back there. And I started clubs where we wrote essays for fun and I loved books where – spoiler alert – the main character dies. I don’t know why so many young adult novels are like that, but they are.
The antidote to my life in California were summers spent with my grandparents in Peekskill and Mahopac, New York. My grandparents were both Holocaust survivors and they both studied medicine. And they provided my sisters and I with a love for art and culture, and also a no-nonsense approach to life, death and the body.
When my grandmother was in her 90s and her health very much in decline, and having lost her husband of 60 plus years, she would often tell me that she wanted to die, that she was ready to go, and that she couldn’t tell anyone else but me. And she would call me her father confessor.
And I remember marveling at the fact that it had become so difficult to talk about such topics in our society and wondering how that could’ve come about. How did it become taboo to talk about, as I saw it, just about the most important thing you could say to another human being? Much of my work over the past 20 or so years has been trying to grapple with these questions, and my techniques were to research and photograph as many of these ways of dealing with death as possible with an eye towards practices that were once prevalent and high culture that now seem bizarre or morbid.
The more I looked around, the more I began to believe that the way we look at death in America today is by far the exception rather than the rule.
I really got into this stuff when I went to Europe for the first time in my youth, and when I was there, I got introduced to a lot of objects that kind of merged death and beauty in ways that really shocked my California sensibility. For example, on the obligatory Sound of Music tour, right behind where the Von Trapps got married are these five jeweled skeletons. I had never seen anything like this.
What were these? And it’s Salzburg Cathedral. I was introduced to the concept of the memento mori via this wax anatomical Jesus Christ, a dead Jesus. Memento mori are essentially objects created for the sole purpose of reminding viewers that they will die, with the hope that they will live a holy life and thus avoid the fires of hell. They were very popular in the 17th century when Europe was wracked by plague.
I was also introduced to objects made from human hair, usually that of the deceased, like this piece. Portraits of dead nuns and post-mortem photographs, which were popular in the Victorian age when child mortality was very high. They say three in five children died before reaching adulthood, and photography was very expensive, so this might be the only photograph the family had of a child.
I also went to ossuaries or charnal houses such as Sedlec Chapel outside of Prague and this one, which is San Bernardino alle Ossa in Milan. These are quite common in Europe where until very recently to be buried was more like a temporary rental than a purchase, so as soon as your body was clear to flesh, it would be moved aside to make room for new bodies and your bones would be used in these kind of decorative arrangements in holy spaces where they could still be visited.
As I got older, I continued to do these kind of trips. I went to the Palermo catacombs, which is in Sicily. It’s been a tourist attraction for well over a hundred years, and here the Capuchin monks mummify and display in their Sunday best the bodies of those wealthy enough to afford it in the 17th and 18th centuries. And I began to travel the churches to look at objects from the Catholics called the saints, things like relics which are body parts, remains of saints and martyrs that are believed to have usually magical healing properties. Or corpus sancti, which are essentially effigies of saints that also house their sacred remains – that’s an arm bone, and those are her real teeth.
If anyone has gone to see St. Theresa in Rome, she is directly across from that. And also incorruptible saints whose body is a sign of their sanctity, simply don’t decay, so that’s Saint Catherine of Siena. I also began to be interested in what sort of things might be happening today in other cultures, so I started an annual trip to Mexico, where death is very famously embraced with the humor and whimsy, very unlike our attitudes here today. This is best known through its ceremonies of Day of the Dead, which is essentially a hybrid between indigenous practices and Catholic All Saints’ or All Souls’ Day, with a bit of Halloween thrown in for good measure. On this day, children are given sugar skulls with their names written on them, and children, adults, and sometimes even pets are dressed as skeletons.
People also make altars to their deceased loved ones in public places and at the cemetery. Then they head to the cemetery where they spend the day. And a candlelit night, eating, drinking, singing, laughing, crying, hanging out with their families and welcoming intruders like myself. I was also in Seoul; I went to the Seoul cemetery for Korean Thanksgiving Day or Chuseok, which is not that unlike Day of the Dead. On this day, people go to the cemeteries, they tidy the graves of their ancestors and eat, drink, play with the children and engage in ritual bowing. I also stumbled upon this interesting thing going on today in Fontanelle cemetery. This is an ossuary in Naples and here women adopt these abandoned skulls – abandoned, anonymous skulls – and they clean them, they care for them and they make them these little houses and they pray for the soul’s speedy trip through the purgatory in the hopes that when they get to heaven, they might help their friends on Earth. This is still going on today.
All of this material ultimately led me to what my current body of work is about, which is essentially medical museums. Medical museums are museums that house human remains or simulacrums of human remains in order to educate sometimes medical students, sometimes a general public and sometimes both. As you can see, sometimes the objects within are quite shocking to a contemporary sensibility, and I think that it’s because they blur a lot of our lines between things like art and science, death and beauty, religion and medicine and education and spectacle.
One example is this table, not made of stone inlays, at first appears, but actually a petrified human brain, blood, bile, liver, lung and glands with the centerpiece of a petrified human foot and augmented by four human ears. This was made by an Italian doctor in 1866 for Napoleon III. Or this beetle skeleton tableau called a profane relic and created in the 17th century. Or this écorché or flayed figure made from a real man and a real horse by the French anatomist Honoré Fragonard. Fascinatingly, Honoré Fragonard was the cousin of the much less macabre and very well-know painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, who is most famous for this painting, “The Swing”.
But of all the objects I saw in the medical museum, to me the most bizarre, perplexing, fascinating and seductive was the anatomical Venus. These are full-sized wax women with real human hair and glass eyes. They were created to teach a general public, not medical students, but a general public about anatomy. Some of them are dissectable, and others are in kind of a permanent state of auto-dissection, I would say. Some of them have strings of pearls – this one had a golden tiara – and they were created in the 18th century.
This was the first one that was created and she was created to be the centerpiece of the first truly public science museum in Florence, Italy, called today La Specola. You can still see her there in her original rosewood and Venetian glass case. I very much recommend it. It’s right next to palace Pitti. My fascination with these objects led to me trying to photograph and research all of them that I could, which culminated in a book that was published earlier this year. It was well doing work for an exhibition about medical museums called “Anatomical Theatre”, that I started a blog called Morbid Anatomy. I intended it merely to be a research tool, a way to sort through my photographs and my material and to figure out what I wanted to say in the exhibition.
But before long, people started to ask if they could borrow books on my bibliography, as it developed an audience. A lot of books on my bibliography were out of prints or very difficult to find, so I felt I should open it up to the public.
So I opened up the Morbid Anatomy library and the now-defunct Proteus Gowanus gallery in Brooklyn, New York. And then, Halloween. Around Halloween 2012 I met this woman, Tracy Hurley Martin. I was giving a talk at the time about Santa Muerte. I don’t know how many of you know about Santa Muerte, but it literally translates to saint or holly death, and this is a form of devotion that originated in Mexico, in which death as a woman is worshiped or venerated as a saint – one saint among the Catholic panoply. It’s now spread around the diaspora; you’ll see it all over New York now that you’ve seen this.
This is a shop window in Queens, so this is a life-size… Well, the cat’s there for size. Not quite life-size, but pretty big. But keep an eye out, you’ll see it at Botanica and sometimes even grocery stores. I’ve been traveling around The United States and Mexico and photographing different manifestations of Santa Muerte for the last few years. I also had been collecting artifacts related to Santa Muerte and literature and making them available at the Morbid Anatomy library.
It turned out that Tracy and her identical twin sister Tanya were really fascinated by Santa Muerte and it turns out, death more generally. This shared enthusiasm, if you want to call it that, led Tracy and I to co-found in 2014 The Morbid Anatomy Museum in the Gowanus area of Brooklyn, New York. In a sense, you could call Santa Muerte the patron saint of The Morbid Anatomy Museum, and in fact we give pride of place to this statue in our gift shop.
What I would like to do, one of my goals with The Morbid Anatomy project, more generally in The Morbid Anatomy Museum, is to get people to question our own attitudes about death, to show via a preponderance of examples from other times and places that the way we think about death today is unique to our own time and place. With longer lifespans, advances in medicine and hygiene and the outsourcing death from the home to the funeral parlor, death is for many Americans further away than ever before, and I think that secretly many Americans think that death is a problem that will be solved, and perhaps even in their lifetime.
One thing I’d like the Morbid Anatomy project to be would be a memento mori, but a memento mori with the kind of secular twist. Rather than avoiding the fires of hell, something closer to carpe diem. I also hope that the Morbid Anatomy project has done something to reclaim the notion of morbid. For after all, if everyone who’s ever lived has died, if I am going to die, barring some medical miracle, and if death is still one of the greatest human mysteries, doesn’t it seem more morbid – at least it does to me – not to think about death?
After all, it was basically my own healthy fear of death that led me to do this body of work that led to the museum now, rather than waiting for a future that might or might not come. It was precisely because I so morbidly refused to stop thinking about these things that I was able to do this kind of work. Perhaps we have something to learn from other eras and other cultures, and maybe it is by making friends with death, or the very least making peace with death, that we might paradoxically be able to live the richest, fullest lives possible. Thank you.
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