Corpses - Stephen Smith lifts the lid on our squeamishness at the sight of dead bodies
Death features in some exciting new projects in the arts, putting his pasty face round the door of a major exhibition and dipping a tagged toe in the waters of publishing. The timing couldn't be better, because recent front-page news has confirmed what a great appetite we have for being provoked by representations of our extinguished selves. On two mornings during the same week, the Daily Mirror splashed with photographs of what looked like mummies: hospital fatalities for whom no room could be found in the mortuary drawers. I combed the copy for the word "dignity", the invariable rubric on such occasions. It duly appeared, in reference to overlooked government guidelines for the disposing of the dead. But dignity is a slippery concept. In Cuba, adepts of Palo Monte, a mixture of Catholicism and African creeds, were, until very recently, in the habit of jemmying open the caskets of paupers in the vast Colon cemetery and carrying off their skulls as familiars. Not much dignity there for the dear departed; or, at least, not as many people would understand the idea. On the contrary, the headhunters of Havana had a profound respect for the dead, and believed that, by taking home bits and pieces of bodies, they were placing their former occupants with loving families. The real reason we are upset by coming across corpses where we don't expect them - on the floor of the hospital chapel, in the tabloid propped up against the toast rack - has very little to do with dignity and a great deal to do with fear. A body is a reminder of what awaits everybody, if you'll pardon the expression. Encountering a corpse when you don't bargain on doing so is literally mortifying, or as literal as it gets without you actually keeling over and joining the deceased.
It's a hundred years since Queen Victoria's doctors pronounced that life was extinct, their task made a fraction lighter, you like to think, by the pleasing symmetry of closing the royal eyes with pennies bearing Victoria's own features. One of the exciting recent death-related projects is a book that explains how our immemorial ways of mourning are, like so many other things, the day-before-yesterday invention of the Victorians. In an inventory of funerary haberdashery, without which none of them would have been seen dead, The Victorian Celebration of Death by James Stevens Curl (Sutton Publishing, £20) itemises "black-edged envelopes and linen handkerchiefs embroidered with tears". The author is impatient with our ancestors' squeamish retreat into euphemism on the subject of getting rid of earthly remains. By contrast, he calls a spade exactly what a sexton would call it as he lists modern methods: "freezing bodies or crushing them, firing corpses by rocket into the sun or limitless space, or even processing them as manure or dog-food".
Professor Stevens Curl is a pawky pall-bearer for Victorian values. Their baleful influence has made death shameful, he writes, "a new pornography". As I understand it, the professor's take implies that art lovers have the Victorians to blame if they are offended by Andres Serrano's exhibition, now at the V&A. Certainly, Serrano's photographic images of dead flesh are pretty strong meat. He had the co-operation of a pathologist and a forensic scientist in the preparation of works that include Burnt to Death III and Rat Poison Suicide II, so presumably his Morgue series does exactly what it says on the tin, as it were. The artist has "unresolved feelings" about his Catholicism. A wound in a foot in Rat Poison Suicide II reminds him of the stigmata. Serrano shares the good professor's concern with the "hygienic separation" of death from daily life.
The Sicilians enjoy a reputation for knowing their way around mortality; the dishing out of it, in particular. But it is not only in their legendary flair for cement outer garments that they demonstrate a familiarity with the hereafter. In Palermo, even the confectionery bears the mark of Cain. Sweets resembling fruit are laid out in trays, in a waxy pastiche of the greengrocer's art, and each sugary apple is blemished with a black spot. It is as though Sleeping Beauty's wicked stepmother had gone into retail. Sleep, the living state that mimics death, is the great business of Sicily. As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa says in his tremendous novel, The Leopard: "Sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts."
A new collection of photographs between hard covers gets intimate with eternal rest in Sicily. Inspired by the works of a Capuchin order of monks, it is a large-format album, but it is not for every drawing room. Indeed, if the brothers had not lent their name to a foaming beverage, there would not even be the excuse for making a bad-taste joke by calling it a coffee-table book, because The Living Dead is a portfolio of what the Sicilians call "excellent cadavers", by the photographer Marco Lanza (Westzone, £40).
In 1570, Friar Seraphym of Palermo succumbed to the plague and was consigned to the lime pit. But when, for some reason, his remains were unearthed 30 years later, they were found to be "fresh and sanguine", according to Laura Facchi's liner notes. Inspired by this miracle, the Capuchins went into the undertaking business, employing various chemical and drying processes, including arsenic baths. The extra they offered to the customer was that he would be restored to a reasonably faithful replica of himself and go on post-mortem show in the monastery catacombs. Naturally, a fee was involved, so the sepulchre became the preserve of the well-to-do, in more senses than one.
Apparently putting herself in the shoes of a guide, Facchi says, "I live in a little horror museum", as though the catacombs were a cheap freak show. But in Lanza's photographs, the crypt is most unsettling when it lives up to the monks' claims and makes the dead look human. Their mouths are set open, like dozing airline passengers. Cinch-waisted and turning a dainty ankle, the promenade of the posthumous is a dark parody of the fashion runway. What is most disturbing is not the bodies at all, in fact, but the clothes. In normal circumstances, the dead wear shrouds, but the figures in the crypt are fully dressed, like suicides or murder victims. The Living Dead is an unofficial souvenir of the must-see attraction in Palermo. There is nowhere like it on earth (nor above or below).
Andres Serrano's work is exhibited in the "Give and Take" show at the Serpentine Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London SW7 (020 7942 2000), until 1 April
Stephen Smith is a Channel 4 News reporter. His book on Cuba, The Land of Miracles, is published by Abacus (£7.99)
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