A metal skull poised almost in three-quarter profile inches forward on the cover of Noah Scalin's Skulls. It's gold but weathered, which means it's not really gold. It has the aura of a relic, but the jagged edges of the cut-out eyes and teeth reveal its more recent origins. The background is two-tone: gray-black, Baroque decorations that look an awful lot like skulls repeat themselves on a deep black ground.
Skulls the book was born from www.SkullADay.com, which Scalin began on June 4th, 2007, when he decided to make an image of a skull out of something, every day. In the introduction to the book he says, "there really was no grand impetus for the project." What began as a perhaps off-the-cuff challenge to himself turned into an exploration of materials, with art historical references, kitschy undertones, and real meditations on life and death.
In the Morning It is Green: Food Is Life
The book includes skulls made of rice, an egg, soy sauce, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a squash, a pile of sugar cubes, and more. Food as a medium reflects the quotidian nature of Scalin's project, as well as his own personal interest in gardening and agriculture – he started a community supported agriculture group called Sprout in Virginia, where he lives.
Food is life. And Skull-A-Day reflects on death, which in turn is part of life. Using food as a material to construct skulls makes this connection resonate. A pan of spaghetti and marinara may not be rich in associations. But Scalin's "Eat Your Vegetables Skull" composed of tomatoes, lettuce, zucchini and other organic vegetables definitely references Guiseppe Arcimboldo's allegorical portraits of the seasons. The natural cycle of life is celebrated, in which death inevitably plays a role.
Scalin's skulls made of milk and cocoa spread on plates recall contemporary artist Vik Muniz's series Pictures of Chocolate from 1997. Muniz himself is no stranger to non-traditional materials. In addition to his intricate compositions made from chocolate sauce, he has composed what look to be photographs of work by Richard Serra and Barry Le Va out of dust. Of course, Scalin made a dust skull, too.
The sugar cube cranium in Skulls resembles a chunky, unadorned Day of the Dead skull. The gleaming whiteness of the carved bar of soap recalls the traditional Mexican holiday treats, too. The skull carved out of a butternut squash, on the other hand, becomes Edvard Munch's The Scream in extremis, with the widest-open mouth ever.
Ephemeral Skulls
Yanked out of a videocassette but still attached, a tape is artfully arranged into... a skull. A crumpled up napkin, a twisted sheet on a hotel floor, and a string of lights on a lawn all become skulls. Makeshift, fleeting, these skulls are here today, gone tomorrow, except that they're documented. Scalin also created photographs of skull patterns made with sparklers using long exposures. Their brief existence underlines the one-a-day attitude of the project. On a more profound level, the ephemerality of life and the Victorian notion of death always lurking around the corner also surface.
Technology, Life, Death, and Plastic Skulls
And it is contemporary America's disavowal of death that Scalin wants to confront, in part. "Until relatively recently most people around the world have had a healthy relationship with the reality of death and dying," he contends in his introduction. At the same time, he acknowledges the current vogue for skulls. Goth attire has been adopted by the general public, and Damien Hirst made an exorbitantly expensive skull covered in diamonds
Technology and death have a complicated relationship; in many ways technology represents an escape from the great inevitable. Scalin may not directly address this, but he does use high-tech materials for some of his entries. Skulls begins with a skull assembled from his old computer keyboard. There's also a simple pixel grid skull that looks like a video game creature circa 1980, which looks both elegant and cute, whereas the computer mouse skull is one of the scariest and most menacing in the book.
Apart from the technological, there are the plastics and disposables. The skulls made from a styrofoam cup and a plastic bag are painful reminders of their near-eternal existence; they will remain on earth unchanged for dozens of generation to come. Like death, they are also both ubiquitous. And yet they seem to designate the tragic and undignified. The vinyl LP skull, on the other hand, can't escape heavy metal associations. And the little yellow guitar pick skull is gemlike.
The End of Skulls?
Scalin completed his goal and posted his 365th skull on June 2nd, 2008. His blog now continues thanks to other people's skull contributions. In the back of Skulls he has included a few of the skulls sent to him by blog readers while he did Skull-A-Day. There are also some Do-It-Yourself skulls for readers to assemble. At the end of his introduction Scalin comments that all the hard work he put into his project may not have taught him anything about death, but he did learn something about the importance of living in the here and now.
Noah Scalin, Skulls. Published by Lark Books, 2008. ISBN 13: 978-1-60059-375-8
Read more about skulls and Skulls at the Art Books blog.
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