{"id":6122,"date":"2015-06-23T10:51:44","date_gmt":"2015-06-23T14:51:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/?p=6122"},"modified":"2015-06-23T10:51:44","modified_gmt":"2015-06-23T14:51:44","slug":"morbid-beauty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/2015\/06\/23\/morbid-beauty\/","title":{"rendered":"Morbid beauty"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Morgues<\/a>This post is part of an ongoing series featuring material\u00a0from the\u00a0Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection<\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Of the many altered states of consciousness chronicled in the Santo Domingo Collection, death may be merely the most permanent; as a subject often circumnavigated out of discomfort, fear, superstition, or propriety, it takes its place alongside sexuality and drug use. This striking volume, Morgues<\/em>, confronts death directly, though not without a sense of beauty.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Printed in a scarce edition of only fifty copies, it is a collaboration between the American photographer Andres Serrano (most famous for the image Piss Christ<\/em>); the Spanish novelist Mario Bellatin; and the designers Olivier Andreotti and Harri Koskinen. Andreotti supplies the book\u2019s visual design, with lines of Bellatin\u2019s text snaking across silhouettes comprising bones, viscera, and surgical instruments. Koskinen, for his part, is responsible for the packaging: the loose portfolios of text rest in a plastic slipcase, which is itself contained between two halves of a stainless steel shell. This shell is held together with two thick rubber straps, fastened with magnetic pads; this outer casing, cold and heavy, evokes the sliding storage drawers for corpses in a morgue.<\/p>\n

\"Morgues<\/p>\n

\"Morgues<\/p>\n

This lavish presentation frames the content of the work: five photographs by Serrano, accompanied by a short story in five parts by Bellatin. The text, in French and Spanish, reads like a dark folktale. The images, selections from Serrano\u2019s 1992 series The morgue<\/em>, are intimate yet anonymized portraits of dead bodies \u2013 the frame captures a hand or a brow, rather than the entire corpse.<\/p>\n

\"Morgues<\/a><\/p>\n

Taken\u00a0as a whole, the words, images, design, and boxing of Morgues<\/em> work together to examine our complex, often artificially distant, relationship with the inevitable.<\/p>\n

\"Morgues<\/a><\/p>\n

[Paris]: Toluca \u00c9ditions, 2006.<\/span> FC9.B4147.2006m, HOLLIS number 14356270<\/p>\n

Thanks to rare book ca<\/em>taloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring material\u00a0from the\u00a0Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection.\u00a0 Of the many altered states of consciousness chronicled in the Santo Domingo Collection, death may be merely the most permanent; as a subject often circumnavigated out of discomfort, fear, superstition, or propriety, it takes its place alongside sexuality and drug […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1761,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[64929],"tags":[905,18605,5033],"class_list":["post-6122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-houghton-library","tag-art","tag-artists-books","tag-death"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5TUly-1AK","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1761"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6122"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6170,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6122\/revisions\/6170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}