To Loose A Head

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”-Banksy

If we ponder the age old statement that art is in the eye of the beholder, then anything could be considered art. I for one, am a slave to the grotesque. I am transfixed, mesmerized, bewitched and possessed by things that are simultaneously grotesque and beautiful. I simply cannot turn away.

To me decapitation represent our most vulnerable fears, it is death's most visceral triumph over all mortals of all distinctions. Whether you live an entire life as a no body or born with a silver spoon, when the moment of surrender comes you are an impotent pile without power to resist or protest. Your speech is muted, your limbs obsolete, your hair a "rope" in the hand of your killer, aside from the flashing pain you only have your five senses draining away.

Yet it is also the last ebb of life, the last time where a human being still get to look like they have always been, before their form, their face is forever compromised. In a way for many it was also the climax of their lives. How many saints and heroes, fair and strong are validated with this final public ritual? How many of people actually was deemed to be immortalized in history if they are not conferred by this most savage of cruelties? Yes, I would like to point out human beings have been commemorating death for millenniums. What strange creature we all are. 

The contrast is jarring, and at the two ends we see the most beautiful potentials of existence collide with the most ruthless hideousness of entropy. Something beautiful dies and will never be again. But if we think about this moment; this supreme moment before the fall of the ax, the glide of the guillotine blade. We find the two utterly different worlds razor thin next to each other, so close that to blink might miss a world.

That my friends, is what I see as the best source of art: An irreplaceable moment full of contrasts, emotions, and meanings. For these supreme moments I will keep making my artworks. I have a right to be here, no different from Goths who loves dark and entropic things, no different from Poe or Baudelaire or Ozzy who cannot turn away from the darkest recess of human imagination and human cruelty, no different from anyone else transfixed by simultaneously grotesque and beautiful things.  Let me close with a quote from Robert Herrick, one of my favorite 16th century poets who was often demonized and persecuted because of his often controversial erotic poems:

Ne blame my verse of loose unchastitie
For painting forth the things that hidden are,
Since all men acte what I in speache declare.

~ Decollate