Joel-Peter Witkin's art: legally accessing trauma corpse

Factual Questions
1

this thread is graphic and even i find the content disturbing–so be warned.

so, this photographer Joel Peter Witkin shoots a lot of polarizing, disturbing stuff in gorgeous ways. he will make still lifes out of severed limbs, dead baby heads, faces cut from skulls, and what all us non-sadistic types consider pretty must straight up gore.

here’s a google image link but be warned: there’s also hermaphroditic nudity and other draconian nightmare-fodder. BE WARNED.

now, i’m a freelance working artist, so i understand the artistic vision and beauty of a lot of weird stuff–and i get this guy’s work at times (altho i must say i have a STRONG aversion to gore and his concepts and tableaux really bother me, even if i really love a few pieces).

this is indeed a GQ topic, tho–because i am curious if anyone knows how one might be able to make such art in a legal manner.
according to one blog’s biography, they claim Witkin collects John and Jan Doe corpses from morgues and mutilates them to meet whatever concept he has in mind.
the implication was this maybe was done in less-regulated nations.

my friend, who is a major fan of his (and is also inexplicably demonly-rabid about being a vegan) claims that’s just a rumor.

i can’t, for the life of me, figure out a way someone could legally obtain traumatic limb-loss victim’s limbs, unprepared (meaning they are raw biohazard), to take back to a studio to fiddle with endlessly in a still life for hours on end, to photograph until you’re happy.

there’s photos of a guy with his head cut off–and it’s not a medically prepared cadaver.
the friend debates that people often donate their body to science or art–but even if you do that, can one just take your un-embalmed raw biohazard corpse back to his studio, headless and all, and mess around with it?? LEGALLY?

isn’t death extremely highly regulated??

accessing trauma limbs might be easier–i know i had a lot of questions about limb-loss on accident sites with my brother (who was a CSI) and if i remember correctly, they scoop it up, put it in biohazard bags, and pretty much trash it straight away. so i can see how one might–MIIIIGHT be able to access something along those avenues on “the up and up,” but for the most part, i can’t see how this guy’s art is legally created.

any ideas, thoughts or information?

let me give you a few perplexing (graphic) examples;

in this image, we see a bifurcated corpse’s lower half. you can clearly see the autopsy/morgue sewing from whatever medical inspection.

then you can see he’s cut the crap right in half across that. so needless to speculate, this person was cut in half after they were dead, after the morgue did their thing.

even if someone wills their body for donation, can you legally mutilate a body for art…?

in this offputtingly beautiful-yet-the-worst-thing-i’ve-ever-seen piece, we have a heap of limbs and dead babies and i dont know what all.

that foot in the foreground has meat and blood coming from it–which wouldn’t indicate a medically-released biohazard but a recently found straight up cut off foot. i’m not debating the freshness or the implications of foul-play–i’m just asking–can anyone under any circumstances legally access a full-scale biohazard foot, along with skinned, cut-off arms with all the sinews and tendons intentionally splay to artistic affect, heap them in the worst pile ever, LEGALLY?

that’s a damn dead baby. even if a family willed you access to their dead baby corpse, would medical authorities allow you to take it away…?

i dunno if this blog post kiboshes the whole thread, because again, i was told this is all rumor–but thisexplains he did this in mexico after arranging some kind of deal to allow him access to death in all forms.

could anything in these photos be legally produced in the US?

2

there’s an image of a human face/head sewn to a dead dog’s body. how can that be legal…or morally equivocated…?

ok that really does sound like i’m asking for a debate–i’m not. but if this gets moved to great debates i’ll sure understand why.

3

Some of Witkin’s works, namely those with corpses in them, have had to be created in Mexico in order to get around restrictive US laws. [5]

4

Anyone thinking that they’re dead inside, and thoroughly inured against the shocking would do well to know that the above pics are way, way, way worse than you can possibly imagine.
I’m really hoping I never remember what I just saw.

5

While that very well might be the answer, the footnote reference for that wikipedia assertion actually doesn’t say anything about Mexico, American laws dealing with obtaining and mutilating dead bodies, or really anything that answers the OP’s question - footnote 5 is just a link to this page, which is a short bio of his TWIN BROTHER Jerome Witkin.

6

I changed the reference to Joel-Peter Witkin’s bio, instead of Jerome Witkin’s, but I still don’t see anything on that page about his working in Mexico because of laxer laws regarding dead bodies and parts.

He clearly has done a lot of work in Mexico, though, and that’s probably the reason.

7

I only looked at the one labeled “offputtingly beautiful yet the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”

Yes, you’re right, it’s really horrific.

But I have to admit–I think it’s an incredible photograph. So I’d actually, yes, encourage people to look at it if they think it’s possible they’d be able to stomach it from its description.

8

i’m struggling with this topic, just on a moral level. because the guy HAS to be sociopath with strong amoralistic values to do what he does.

and people LOVE him.

my…whatever…girlfriend thing called him “the photographer she most admires,” and she is a photographer professionally. this whole thing started because she’s wanting to support a kickerstarter project he’s begging money for.

like i said, she’s a vegan, a staunch vegan, and i can’t reconcile these two cognitively dissonant attitudes. i know, i know–that’s debate, not GQ, but wowee, that does not jibe for me.
so i guess another follow-up question would be: given the horrific nature of the images and the no-way-in-hell-one-could-produce-them-in-a-legal-manner subject matter, what is the legal consequence of them even existing…?

this stuff is morbid, so i hope my warnings were adequate. i had already come across some of this via tumblr but i had no notes or cites as to what it was. some of the heads in various memento mori settings, i thought, were actually turn-of-the-century daguerreotypes. my thoughts were “ugh what insane morbid nonsense the victorians were into!! (save photo).” i didn’t know someone was mutilating sdead strangers for the sake of making this stuff happen.
anyway any more proof/cite of his mexican disembowlery and/or cites on the legallity of human-parts trafficking would still do me some good.

9

i found this: Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos

^^the part about the family suing over the use of their son’s corpse is something i already had imagined would be an issue. because my goodness, could you possibly imagine the horrifying trauma of just happening onto a photo of a loved one’s head removed and exploitatively photographed?!

livid. just. ugh.
i have to admit, the lack of information on this stuff is kind of surprising, what with how popular he is and how much people are dedicated fans of his work.

10

I don’t understand what your girlfriend’s being a Vegan has to do with anything.

11

I think you mean “*whatever…*girlfriend thing”

12

it has nothing to do with the question i’m asking, but i find the fact she’s willing to donate money to a guy who cuts people’s faces off and sews them to dead dogs a little uh…conflicting to the fact she won’t buy milk because it’s too mean to cows for her conscious to allow.

what i’m saying is she has polarizing ethical ideas that swing in wildly different directions that i can’t even begin to wrap my head around. she calls cheese inhumane, but looks up to the guy who piled a dead octopus onto a lump of cut off limbs and dead baby and stuff.

am i really coming from outerspace because i can’t reconcile the two…? it’s not just that there’s moral equivocation afoot, it just seems counter-logical that she refuses to spend money on, say, an egg because of the ethics involved yet would blindly donate money to this guy’s kickstarter account without knowing anything about how he came up with his bodies. which, btw, she just presumed all the people donated themselves to his cause and that they just ended up decapitated in a life-immitates-art luck of the cosmos. when i pointed out he was mutilating people to get the effects to match his concepts, she called piffle.

my thing is for someone who cannot stand the idea of drinking milk because of the harm to the cow, it’s kind of odd she didn’t ever go “i wonder if how that dog died…”

it’s what you might call “complicated.” :slight_smile:

13

back on the topic at hand, i found more info out:

first of all, depending on what state you are in, “using a corpse in a way that impinges on a communities sense of dignity” is a class 4 or 5 felony offense.

desecration, mutilation or destruction of the dead is also a felony.

Thisarticle runs down the rights of the dead and how you can’t even will your body for “any” use whatsoever, nor does the bereaved have all that much of a right to do much with your body. the state retains ultimate power to declare what is decent (you cannot croygenically freeze grandma, or in the case of a freezing a couple as per their last wishes).
Thisarticle has some actual dialogue from Witkin himself explaining the process of body collection in the mexican hospital, which i think is just a good old fashion fact at this point.

if i read correctly, he found most of the parts of the Feast of Fools in what must have been the most god-forsakenly awful drawer in the history of time…and was like 'what do i do with this sludge of human decay…" and came up with the idea more or less impromtu.

it seems he even kind of was disgusted by the thing himself.

it doesn’t get into how much mutilation he’s done, but another article i found, which i’m dang sick of looking over and linking to his images so you’re going to have to trust me on this one–

ugh. ok, so it’s a reclining nude female who is relatively normal and undead and undestroyed. but around her are putrid decapitated heads in various states of decay. he claims they were medical school specimens and were around 10 years old, and that “the stench was so unbearable he could only get off about ten shots before calling the shoot.”

he also admitted to pulling off flesh, removing teeth and cutting up/scratching the heads to get the required trauma he sought.

so that is a first hand account of desecration of corpses–
or is it?
because if they actually were medical specimens from a school, do they have carte blanche on how they are treated and handled and to what end? does destroyning them for art fall under the usage limits for medical cadavers?

and finally, i found this article on the illegality of the the plasticized human body exhibits.

this linktouches on it but is not what i am referring to, i’ve just reached my corpse-tolerance for the week and it’ll have to do for now.

from what i gather, there’s two different exhibits: the german dude who started it, with Body Worlds, which is “mostly” donated bodies with full consent and paperwork to back it up.

the second is a copy-cat, called “Our Bodies: the Universe Within” and is nearly 100% black-market chinese corpses of unclaimed bodies. some are rumored to be grave-robbed, other are rumored to be state-assassinated dissidents. this show was outlawed in many areas due to corpse-trafficking laws and the lack of provable paperwork.

all that makes me think Witkin would, at some point, have to attest to his images and the lawful manner in which they were created. i cannot find any cites that attest to any legal recourse against him. all i can find is anecdotal accounts of some family suing him over the use of the head. which i can’t find any proof of ever happening.
so. question still lingers on: even if someone wills their body to you, can you mutilated it for art…?
and could there be any legal recourse against Witkin because he has photos of mutilated bodies…? it just seems like someone in some kind of position of authority would be investigating how these images were created and the circumstances surrounding the mutilation.

14

Well, I mean, I feel a little ethically confused about it and didn’t look at the pictures very closely on purpose, but he didn’t kill anybody, right? Or enslave or torture them? So I don’t see the ethical issue with the vegan girlfriend.

15

His real point WRT veganism is at the end of post 12 - how does the artist get the dead dog corpse, and how exactly did that dog die? I highly doubt that it was a dog who lived a long and happy life, died in his sleep, and the owners donated his body to art.

16

(here comes the debate. sigh.)

i’ve never once killed a cow myself. i’ve done nothing unethical by eating the cow i myself didn’t kill…?how does that figure…?

and i just need to clarify: did you just say it’s ok to mutilate stolen corpses of unwilling parties, maim them and cut off their heads and sew them onto dead dogs and whatever else all without ever breeching any ethical boundaries…?
nothing unethical about all that so long as you didn’t actually do the killing?
would you consider it unethical if, say, your wife died and one day you find pics of her headless torso, naked, posed in a photo, holding her own head which has had the top removed and is being used as a vase…? and the person responsible did all of his accessing and destruction of her body via illegal means without you, her or anyone’s consent other than the people with keys to the morgue…?

this gets into a whole crazy rat’s nest of morality.
you can do anything you want to a dead body so long as you didn’t kill it…?
…necrophilia?

i’ve already pointed out everything done to the bodies for his photos are felony offenses in the US–so i’m not sure how anyone could call it ethical.

how much it steps on veganistic ideals goes beyond just the fact he chopped the head off a dog, or the many other dead animals in the photos, or the dead octopus on top of the dead baby, or who knows what all else…
if it’s wrong to use the skin of a dead cow in an *exploitative *way (leather) for money, how is right for a dude to use the flesh of a human carcass in an exploitative way to make money…?

cutting off an already dead cow’s back for a purse: bad. cutting off a dead woman’s face and sewing it to a dog: eh. no biggie.

???:confused:

17

That guy has a serial killer name, that’s all I know.

18

I get where the photographer’s actions invoke questions of morality, but I can also see where a vegan’s morality questions might be an entirely different set.

In other words, I could answer ‘will I drink milk, knowing that a cow has to be impregnated and give birth every so often to keep giving milk, which leads to more cows than can be kept alive, so they kill the calves?’ one way, and ‘am I okay with a photographer mutilating dead bodies?’ another way. I don’t see any hypocrisy, necessarily.

The question about the morality of desecrating the remains of peoples’ loved ones is compelling enough. I don’t think “and she’s vegan!” adds anything to it, at a non-emotional level.

19

in all fairness to her, she really thought all the bodies were procured via donation to be used as he saw fit, and in light of my research, she’s rethinking her stance.
it’s not like some major dealbreaker issues, it’s just something that causes me, as a more centrist thinker, a lot of cognitive dissonance. because her views or so morally extreme about the use of animals and the humane treatment of them that she can’t ethically use honey–
but this never caused her enough ethical concern to even research it–and there’re images with cut off horse heads, the aforementioned dead octopus and dog–and there’s many other dead, posed, stuffed, cut up and sewn back weird dogs, other dead small animals, birds, --one image has a lady naked laying next to a dead cow.

to me, this reads “eating animals is wrong. using them as leather is wrong. killing them and cutting them up for art is ok–so long as i find it lovely.” and that is where i take my objection–because it just seems like a bias based on aesthetics.

it’s off topic but i only said something because i find the moral ambivalence sort of appalling. meat is murder–unless the meat is a dead baby in a pile of leg and arm meat with octopus meat and the end result is kind of lovely. then meat is art and that’s ok.

we can totally drop the vegan thing, as she and i will no doubt discuss it in great length after she’s had time to digest the reality of her favorite artist’s methodology.

i just want to reiterate the reason it was so shocking to me is because her veganism is based on a level of compassion for animals that eclipses mine by leaps and bounds, but my compassion for humans (and trust me, i am a pretty hardcore misanthrope) causes an aversion to this art and the method of creation while she’s ambivalent to it. i just thought that vegan compassion would carry over to, you know. being compassionate to people.

the dead have rights…and i think ethics extends to them as well. it’s just perplexing one would afford more rights to dead animals than a dead human child.

20

I can’t contribute to the legality issue, but I just wanted to say thanks for posting this. I had never heard of Witkin before. His images are stunning, disturbing, and beautiful.