Category Archives: Anatomy

Is it wrong to say this made my morning? I laughed out loud, it reminds me of Forehead Tittaes, real mature. Can’t say I’m an iPhone user myself, but I can’t imagine this fits well in your back pocket. But for those of you who are willing to try it out, you can actually get this iBoobies iPhone case and stand on Amazon.com. Just don’t pull it out at your next big client meeting and expect to take notes or it or something… Hmmm, I wonder if they have it for iPad? Or, dare I say, a male counterpart?

[via designyoutrust]

A talented young French photographer, Julie N. Hascoët’s still life’s of death symbols, or vanitas, mix in prosthesis and wigs that seem to create tension between the organic and synthetic.  It reminds you that many of the things humans use to enhance their bodies long outlast the owner.

View more of Julie’s work on her site, experiments.fr.

The trend for jewelled skeletons began in the late 16th century. The Roman catacombs, which had been abandoned as burial sites and largely forgotten about, were rediscovered in 1578 by vineyard workers. This coincided with the initial phase of the Counter-Reform­ation; the Council of Trent, called to formulate the Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation, had just concluded, and one of the areas of concern was affirming the efficacy and belief in relics against attacks by their detract ors. Since the remains in the catacombs dated from the second to fifth centuries AD, it was possible, with a bit of wishful thinking, for Church leaders to romant icise the bones as belonging to almost any famed early Christian saint or martyr. In the newfound cache they saw a potential tool to bolster their supply of relics and promote their power.

--From "Bones with Bling: The amazing jewelled skeletons of Europe," by Paul Koudounari for The Fortean Times, June 2011

Click here to read this entire article--a nice walk through the art and history of extraordinary European jewel and bone relics--on The Fortean Times website. All images sourced from the article and taken by author Paul Koudounari.

Thanks so much to Suzanne Gerber over at Wurzeltod for alerting me to this wonderful piece!

Images top to bottom:

• Relics of St Pancratius, Church of St Nicholas, Wil
• St Clemens, Church of Sts Peter and Paul, Rott-am-Inn, Germany
• Holy Martyr Theodosius, Waldsassen
• The remains of St Maximus, Basilica of Waldsassen

For those of you who, like I, are fascinated by the kitten tea parties, bunny schoolhouses, and kitten croquet matches of the undisputed king of Victorian anthropomorphic taxidermy Walter Potter, I have good news! Henceforth, Morbid Anatomy will be distributing the amazing (and very difficult to find!) book Walter Potter and his Museum of Taxidermy written and published by collector and taxidermy scholar Pat Morris.

There are two versions of the book available: the hardcover (see top image)--which sports a handsome stamped canvas cover and an extra signature of 8 full-color pages--and the paperback (see second image down). Both versions are large scale and lavishly illustrated in full-color with scores of nearly impossible-to-find photographs of Potter's unforgettable works, archival photographs of the early museum, and antique and vintage ephemera related to the museum (see bottom two images for examples; click on image to see larger size). The book is also extremely well researched, providing a through biography or Mr Potter, a detailed history of his museum of curious taxidermy, and the stories behind the making of his iconic pieces of anthropomorphic taxidermy.

Books can be purchased on Amazon.com; click here to purchase the hardcover, which goes for $50, and here to purchase the soft cover, which goes for $35. But order quickly: I only have about 8 hardback remaining, and 7 paperback, and these books tend to sell out fast!

And one more thing: I am also distributing the paperback version of Pat Morris' new book A History of Taxidermy: Art, Science and Bad Taste; you can find out more about this book by clicking here. if you are interested in purchasing a copy of this book, you can email me at morbidanatomy [at] gmail.com.

I am very excited to announce a whole slew of Morbid Anatomy Presents events taking place at Observatory, this week and beyond. Tonight, join Colin Dickey--author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius--as he attempts to "conjoin a history of the necropolis with a history of ghost towns and abandoned urban landscapes." This Thursday, join Collector David Freund for a demonstration and discussion of Victorian scrapbooks holding everything "from inventive collages to seaweed compositions to artistically arranged feathers to advertising fragments to human hair to basically anything else that could be glued down." In July, make mummies at one of our popular mummy workshops, take in some “Theatrum Mundi,” investigate postmodern mermaidia, parse the politics of taxidermy, and/or witness antique automatons go through their motions live and in person!

Full list follows; hope very much to see you at one or more of these fantastic events!

Dead Cities / Cities of the Dead: An illustrated lecture by Colin Dickey, author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius
Date: TONIGHT: Monday, June 20th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5

Tonight, author Colin Dickey will conjoin a history of the necropolis with a history of ghost towns and abandoned urban landscapes. The necropolis has always been a vital feature of the city, from its earliest incarnations to today. The dead body has long been regarded as both sacred and polluting, so what does a community do with thousands of bodies? From medieval chapels literally bursting with the bones of the dead to the sanitized splendor of the modern funeral industry, how we treat the dead reveal much about how we view the living. How we treat dead cities--from California ghost towns to Ukraine's Pripyat, just outside of Chernobyl--begs a different question: what do we abandon, and why? What does all this urban ruin say about our future? Colin Dickey will intertwine these two forms of urban death to see what it all adds up to.

Colin Dickey is the author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, and the co-editor (with Nicole Antebi and Robby Herbst) of Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Cabinet, TriQuarterly, and The Santa Monica Review. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he now lives in Los Angeles. This is a return visit for Colin, who lectured on Cranioklepty earlier this year at Observatory to great acclaim; more on that lecture can be found here.

Image: The Metropolitan Sepulcher, a plan for a London cemetery circa 1820

Home-Made Visual Albums: An Artifact-Based Lecture with Collector David Freund
Date: THIS THURSDAY June 23
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Part of the Out of the Cabinet: Tales of Strange Objects and the People Who Love Them Series, presented by Morbid Anatomy and Morbid Anatomy Scholar in Residence Evan Michelson

Home-Made Visual Albums were incredibly popular productions between the the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century; these scrap books contained artful arrangements of a wide range of materials, from inventive collages to seaweed compositions to artistically arranged feathers to advertising fragments to human hair to basically anything else that could be glued down. More than simply collections or scrap books, these albums can also be seen as diaries, and project a sense of their absent makers through imaginative content, arresting design, obsession, and, above all, narrative.

Collector and artist David Freund has been collecting--and classifying, into over 40 categories of his own invention-- these enigmatic and fascinating artifacts over the last 30 years. Tonight, join Mr. Freund as be discusses the history and taxonomy of these artifacts and presents a number of exquisite examples from his collection for your delight and perusal.

David Freund earned his MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop after a BA in Theater at UC Davis. Professor Emeritus of Photography at Ramapo College of New Jersey, he chaired its Visual Arts for twenty years. He also taught at Pratt and was a Dayton-Hudson Distinguished Visiting Artist at Carleton College. His NEA photographs showed gas station environments nationwide. Other grants included New York’s CAPS program and NYC’s Institute for Art and Urban Resources. During a Light Works residency Freund curated a regional photo post card exhibition, Penny Publishing. Exhibitions include Light Gallery and Eastman House. Among collections with his work are MOMA, the Corcoran, MFA Houston, and the Bibliotheque Nationale.

Image: Detail from one of David Freund's collection of home-made visual albums from the 19th and early 20th Century

And onward and upward in the weeks to come:

• July 18: SCREENING: “Theatrum Mundi” Production of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana"
• July 21: Sirens & Society: Postmodern Mermaidia: A Screening & Panel Discussion featuring Prof. Amy Herzog, Mica Scalin, Ilise “The Lady Aye” Carter and Bambi the Mermaid
• July 24: Class: Mummification: Learn the art and ritual of animal mummification with instructor Sorceress Cagliastro
• July 28: Shrinking and Other Acts of Sabotage: An illustrated lecture with Petra Lange-Berndt, University College London
• July 29: Living Dolls: The Guinness Collection of Mechanical Musical Instruments and Automata at the Morris Museum: A live automata demonstration and illustrated lecture by Jere Ryder, Conservator of the Guinness Collection of Mechanical Musical Instruments and Automata at the Morris Museum
• July 31: Class: Mummification: Learn the art and ritual of animal mummification with instructor Sorceress Cagliastro

Marco sent in this video, produced by Jeff Lowe, that showcases the 4 hours of outlineing and 6 hours of shading to create an entire skeleton on his back. Fascinating.