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People Feature
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The '80s, in their naively serious, death-rock demimonde tone, were good to Joel-Peter Witkin. He was awarded a flurry of NEA grants in 1982, 1984 and 1986 and received his MFA in 1986 from the University of New Mexico.

Over the years he'd developed an involved and zealous process for making his prints, which resulted in the silvery, found-antique quality his work became known for. Witkin scratches the negatives, then prints them through tissue paper to fuzz the texture of the image, giving the prints a specifically blurry, "timeless" quality. He then mounts the image on aluminum and applies pigments by hand. Finally, he covers the photographs with hot beeswax and reheats them, then cools and polishes. With this procedure, Witkin, a rabid perfectionist, produces an average of 10 of his coldly luxurious finished prints in a year.

Witkin's engrossing work paid off, and he continued to receive many of the best grants and awards the art world had to offer: In 1988, he received the International Center of Photography Award and the Distinguished Alumni Citation from Cooper Union; in 1990, the French minister of culture awarded Witkin the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres; in 1993 he earned a residency in France through the NEA and the American Center in Paris. What's more, he had the unquestioning reverence of all the ultra-cool, black-clad hipsters and morbid dirge-rock bands.

Witkin's subject matter is, in fact, atrocity itself, or anyone who looks like a victim of it, by accident or unfortunate birth. In 1985, he ran this advertisement to solicit models, asking the following people to contact him:

Pinheads, dwarfs, giants, hunchbacks, pre-op transsexuals, bearded women, people with tails, horns, wings, reversed hands or feet, anyone born without arms, legs, eyes, breast, genitals, ears, nose, lips. All people with unusually large genitals. All manner of extreme visual perversion. Hermaphrodites and teratoids (alive and dead). Anyone bearing the wounds of Christ.

Witkin succeeded in reaching so many amputees, pre-operative transsexuals and other pinnacles of unseen society as modeling fodder that in 1989 he added to his original request: "women whose faces are covered with hair or large skin lesions willing to pose in evening gowns. People who live as comic-book heroes, boot, corset and bondage fetishists. Anyone claiming to be God. God."

God is a big theme for Witkin. Like many good perverts, Witkin seems to suffer from what I like to call "Catholic burn." As a practicing Roman Catholic, he appears to be obsessed with the fetishizing of everything nasty on the fringes of Jesus' world, of all the "other" stuff ordinarily shunned by suburban philistines and the religiously repressed: freaks, violated corpses, fists up the ass, bondage, etc.

But Witkin routinely insists it's not for prurient reasons. Oh, no. His work is a product of his higher religious leanings: "The images tended to repel and shock. Yet, I believe they possessed tender and enlightened qualities which were strangely moving ... the figures were always isolated because the Sacred is always beyond nature, beyond existence."

As Witkin explained to the Seattle Times in 1994, "My work shows my journey to become a more loving, unselfish person."

While art-pop intellectuals devoured his work gleefully as an excellently trendy, shocking blackboard to wank long-haired Lacan/Foucault-inspired postmodern critiques over, the Christian Coalition was unmoved by Witkin's search for the divine. Objecting to a $20,000 NEA grant Witkin received in 1992, NEA foes featured the Witkin print "Testicle Stretch With the Possibility of a Crushed Face" in their 1993 anti-NEA protest in Washington.

Fans celebrate Witkin's ability to make the ugly beautiful, and champion his work as an explosion of mankind's refusal to confront and embrace the abject. Others, like 1993 Artforum contributor Keith Seward, argue that Witkin

often claims to see himself as "loving the unloved, the damaged, the outcasts," and such unconditional acceptance characterizes his work in general: like St. Francis of Assisi, who drank the pus of lepers in order to overcome his repulsion of them, Witkin is not a rubbernecker, an exploiter or a pessimist, but one who says Yes to everything questionable, even to the terrible. Why would you want to say Yes to death, dismemberment, or any of the other staples in Witkin's banquet of the bizarre? It's sort of like an extreme form of multiculturalism, a respect for that which is drastically foreign to you, even terrifying.

Next page | A love of excess, with reference to decadence and ecstasy