SKULLS

MY SKULL COLLECTION, TAOS, 2007

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We got back from San Francisco and Taos about a week ago, and, WOW, I saw a lot of skulls on that trip. Maybe it was just because I was "tuned in" to seeing them... you know how when you are attuned to something, you see it everywhere? Like, if you are interested in birds or flowers or sports cars, you will notice more of them? Well maybe it was that. Or maybe, as my photos below will demonstrate, there were just a LOT of skulls on that trip. 

I have had a long relationship with skulls. 

I can't quite remember when it began... but it was a long time ago. I remember being 16 years old, living in the heart of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury and one day mounting a small skull on the front of my Honda XL250, which I kept parked on the sidewalk. 16-year-old me thought that looked really cool! It had been stolen by the next morning. I guess that's my earliest memory of actually owning a skull.

A few years later, in college in New York City, I started collecting for real. Possibly my best skull-collecting story... certainly my craziest... dates from my third year in university. In search of animal skulls, I located the largest animal crematorium in the area; they handled all the roadkill and otherwise unclaimed animals in the whole New York area. When I first contacted the guy in charge, I gave him a bullshit story about being an anatomy student needing skulls for a school project, but when I showed up on my Honda XL600R, he saw right through it. "You're not really studying this stuff... you're just into skulls, right?", he asked... "Uhh, yeah I guess.." I replied. "Cool, come with me" was his answer. He led me into a huge walk-in freezer filled with large wheeled carts stacked full of dead animals and said I could take whatever I wanted, except that I had to take the whole animal. He was not going to allow me to cut the heads off and leave him the bodies. That stipulation rather limited my options, having only a motorcycle. But I took what I could carry in black plastic bags on the back of my bike, and after 3 or 4 visits I had quite a few skulls. Nothing too exotic; mostly cats and dogs and at least one goat. I was living with roommates in a communal house on 113th and Broadway at the time, and they were not very excited about me preparing animals skulls in our kitchen, so I eventually broke into the abandoned building next door and used the kitchen there. The stove still worked and I was able to work in peace. Oh, the things we do when we are young! Crazy times...

Two of the best skulls in my collection also date from those days in NYC. I got my first human skull from a flea market on 26th St. and 6th Ave. sometime around 1990. There was a vendor there selling nothing but bones and when I saw this beautiful skull priced at $300, I had to have it. 

Skulls in this condition now sell for a lot more than that. A little later in this post I will discuss the trade in human skulls; it's interesting and, some would say, a bit controversial. 

The other skull which I really treasure and which also came from those years in New York is this one...

I saw it in the window of a little curio shop in the East Village - the kind of shop that sells a curated selection of just about everything - and right away I was pretty sure it was a rare find. The size of the skull - it measures about 215mm long (or about 8.5 inches) - told me it was either a juvenile lion or a leopard... but the adult teeth excluded it from being a juvenile anything... and leopard skulls are exceedingly rare (as well as being basically illegal to sell without paperwork). The woman in the store told me she had bought it from the estate sale of an old hunter (there were several other skulls and skins from Africa, from the same estate sale), and that she believed it to be the skull of a young lion. By this time I was pretty sure it was actually a leopard and so, without saying a word, I bought it. I've since confirmed it to be a leopard and it is the pride of my collection. I really love cat skulls. I also have a tiger skull, two lions, a bobcat, a caracal (also a gorgeous skull), and several domestic cats.

Speaking of domestic cats, this is Havoc. He was Christina's favorite pet, ever. 

I prepared his skull for her as a present. 

He was really a great cat and it's nice that he is still with us.

After graduating from university I was involved in a theater production in Scotland and eventually found myself in Africa, where I had some pretty crazy adventures in search of skulls. At one point I befriended a petty criminal in Uganda who was also a really funny guy. I told him I was interested in finding a skull from the cat family and the next day he tried to sell me a dog skull, swearing that it was a leopard! He also asked me to provide change for a few $100 bills which were obviously counterfeit. It turned out that HE had made the fake bills and when I told him that they were clearly fakes, he was at first offended... then surprised... and then he wanted me to tell him what was wrong so he could make them better! 

By the time I reached the Western Uganda town of Kasese, I was traveling on another Honda XL250 and nearing the end of my trip. I must have been an unusual sight in that part of the world... a 22 year old white guy on a motorcycle, and as soon as I pulled in I was approached by a very confident 12 year old local boy named Sam who basically offered to be my tour guide. He spoke perfect English and for the next week or so Sam and I rode around Kasese on all kinds of adventures, including looking for skulls. As amazing and hard-to-believe as it sounds, he took me to two different local witch doctors... old men in small huts surrounded by medicinal plants and dried animal parts and skins! I wish I had pictures. None of these visits turned up any skulls, but they were amazing adventures. Sam was a great kid, and towards the end of the week he even invited me for dinner at his family home. 

On the Equator in Uganda

I did buy some monkey skins from a tribe of real pygmies, but I made the mistake of trying to send those home to myself through the mail and the package never arrived. 

With the Pygmies

By the end of my trip I had managed to collect a chimpanzee skull and a baboon skull, both of which I basically smuggled back into New York (this was before the days of baggage x-rays!) These two primate skulls are the brown ones in the first picture above; they were painted brown because they were originally included as parts of sculptures. I also brought back a small hyrax skull that I picked up while climbing Mount Kenya. 

A better picture of the Baboon

I've also gotten a few skulls from roadkill over the years, including a kangaroo skull I grabbed while on a road trip in Australia in 2009.

When we moved to Sweden almost three years ago I was advised by the agent helping us with our shipping container NOT to include my skull collection due to Sweden's stringent rules on things like that. But I miss my collection and have been trying, in a rather slow and lazy way, to start a fresh collection here. 

A few months ago, in the course of doing some research about sculpting the human face, I read about the importance of understanding the structure of the skull, and suddenly my interest in skulls was fired up again. I started seeing them everywhere...

 So.. back to San Francisco and Taos... Here is what I mean when I say that I saw a lot of skulls...

Wayne Thiebaud painting...

4 pictures above, all from the San Francisco Hall of Sciences

Mummified cat in the workshop of my artist friend Reto Messmer, who uses skulls in his sculpture. I loved this cat so much that I tried to trade with Reto, offering some of my nicest skulls, but he wouldn't budge! (It was a gift to him, so he felt he couldn't trade it away...) But it got me searching for a mummified cat of my own....

Another cat from Reto's workshop

Drawing by Nocolai Fechin

A dog and a coyote, from the Taos Mesa

I mentioned to my friend Michael Lujan in Santa Fe that I was on the hunt for a mummified cat, and he blew me away by gifting me this little fellow for my birthday! Thanks Michael!!

I took many more photos of skulls on this trip, from my own collection, from the museum in San Francisco, from Reto's workshop, and from Taos's coolest new store Taxonomy (they sell skulls!), but for the sake of brevity I haven't included them all.

But the coolest skull of all is the one you get to bring home, right? 

During most of the 20th century, every doctor and dentist in the West was required to own their own human skull (or in some cases a whole skeleton), and this one...

...belonged to my father, until last week. He graciously gifted it to me during those few days in San Francisco, and now it is back in Sweden with me. In contrast to what my shipping agent told me during our move here, as long as the bones in question were not originally intended for burial or cremation, it's no problem to own human bones here. 

So yeah, let's talk about private ownership of human bones and skulls. Some people think it's totally normal, while others appear to think it's kind of creepy or even morally wrong. 

The situation is interesting. The vast majority of skulls for sale on the private market are medical skulls, which is to say that they were prepared as a commodity to sell to all those doctors between about 1920 and 1985 who were professionally required to own one. Most of them have "medical preparations" of some sort, such as a cut calvarium (top of the brain case) and a sprung jaw. Unmodified skulls, meaning those with no cuts or hardware, are more rare. Both of mine are clearly medical skulls. 

But what does that really mean? A little internet research quickly reveals the fact that most of these skulls were originally obtained under questionable circumstances, sometimes linked to slavery, and typically without the consent of their "owners." And yet, they exist. They are out there, available. So what to do with them? The answer, currently, is to make them available for sale on the open market. Many people collect them. But is that the right thing to do? Opinions vary widely. If you just read the comments from this one video, you can see that opinions range from "This whole thing is sick and morally wrong" to "I would be honored if someone kept and owned my skull after my death." Christina and I keep Havoc's skull as a way of honoring and remembering him, so why not human skulls? Are humans so different from animals that they demand a whole different set of rules? (I mean, maybe they are. Maybe, because of the depth of our relationships with other people, owning a skull just feels like too much for some people. Owning a skull of someone you knew would probably be too much for most people. Maybe that's one of the reasons why so many of these skulls are "medicalized," with cuts and springs and hardware; it allows us to distance ourselves from the humanity of these skulls and see them more like objects...?)

As for me personally, I'm somewhere in the ambiguous middle. My own opinion about owning skulls reminds me of my own opinion about owning guns. Yes, I think the world would be a better and safer place if all guns would magically disappear, but that's not going to happen. They exist, they are here to stay, and as long as that's the case I would like to own a few. Plus, they are fascinating and beautiful. Same with skulls.

So that brings me finally to: Why collect skulls? What's the source of the fascination? On one hand, I feel like the answer is self-evident, and it's a question that doesn't really need answering. I mean, why is art fascinating? Why are motorcycles cool? Why is sex fun? They say that the human skull is the only human body part that is just as powerful dead as alive. The experience of holding and handling a real human skull is powerful and charged. To think about the person that once lived in that skull can be complex and intense. They are the ultimate Memento Mori, a reminder of the inevitability of death, and therefor of the brilliance of being alive! Skulls are beautiful. They are structural. If they had been designed by a person, that person would deserve the "Best Designer of the Universe, Ever" award. But of course they were designed by Nature, and they are perfect. They are graceful. They are fragile and yet strong. No two are the same. 

I want more of them.