Red Deer Antler Headdress

 

Early Mesolithic, about 9,500 years old

From Star Carr, Vale of Pickering, North Yorkshire, England.

http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_prb/r/red_deer_antler_head-dress.aspx

Bocio, "Empowered Cadaver", "Cadaver that Possesses Divine Breath", from the Fon people

"When asked the underlying meaning of the term bocio, Sagbaju noted that "this art form is like a man who does not open his mouth because he is dead." In other words, like a cadaver, bocio address at once the world of the living and the dead. Each such work can be said to represent "death living a human life" (Kojève, in Bataille 1990:10)." 

 - Suzanne Preston Blier, "African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power", University of Chicago Press 1996

 
"When we say that someone is "speechless" we do not mean that they have nothing to say. On the contrary, such speechlessness is really a kind of speech. In German the word Stumm (mute) is connected with the word stammeln (to stutter or stammer). Surely the distress of the stutterer does not lie in the fact that he has nothing to say. Rather, he wants to say too much and is unable to find the words to express the pressing wealth of things he has on his mind. Similarly, when we say that someone is struck dumb or speechless (verstummt), we do not simply mean that he has ceased to speak. When we are at a loss for words in this way, what we want to say is actually brought especially close to us as something for which we have to seek new words." 

- Suzanne Preston Blier, "African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power", University of Chicago Press 1996

This is the foundation of all true poetry.

 

 

The Sacrifice of Polyxena

Kali, "Black Earth Mother"

Cain killing Abel

Closeups of the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald

The Face of the Leper

The leper's face is the gold sliver of the sun.  Gold lives in decay, the dead materia, whose navel pierces through to the sun.  The sun is like a leper's face.  The eyes of deformation pricking out from beneath the flesh, the severing images of sunspots.  This is why the leper is a reviled and sacred soul in medieval myth.  The lustful sinner whose filth is the embodiment of both his past ills and of his purification.  His soul lives upon the face of his body, he is not alive, nor dead, for the deformed are between worlds.  His body is a living memory, a road and a relic, a path that leads to ultimate purification, to the realm of God.  He is cursed with blackened flesh, for his soul is black, and this curse is his salvation, for unlike the rest, his salvation lives upon his flesh.  And this is why people used to place gold or silver masks over the leper's face, over any deformity of the body.  Not necessarily to hide it, but to embody in physical terms its holy qualities and to acknowledge the sunspots and specks of the divine speaking through these wounds. 

(image from http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.com/2010/01/philadelphia-medical-film-symposium.html)

Liberation of the Fingers by Dieter Appelt

"Liberation of the Fingers"

Clearing I and Alfred Tuteinbest by Herbert Pfostl

"Clearing I"

"Alfred Tuteinbest"

see more of his works here...  http://papergraveyard.blogspot.com/

Pig Jawbones. New Guinea.