Jeffrey Silverthorne: Travel Plans 1970–2010

December 2011. See the entire magazine online here

Galerie VU, Paris

9 September – 29 October

By Christopher Mooney

A corpse is this world’s most powerful corporeal presence, even when it is just an image: think of the ‘trophy’ photos taken by American soldiers in Afghanistan or Andrea Mantegna’s painting of the dead Christ. Now, enter Jeffrey Silverthorne’s giant retrospective – four rooms of postmortem photographs interleaved with images of nudes, puppets, female impersonators, dwarf wrestlers, bullfights and a Mexican bordello blowjob. You see? Nothing is sacred and nothing is profane, because death, and our fear of it, bleeds into everything, corrupting all. Naked self-portraits of the artist are no match for autopsied crib-death babies, their torsos sewn up like homemade baseballs. The transgressive aura of a spread- eagled man’s fat cock shrivels in comparison to the battered face of a boy killed in a car accident, or the lifeless gaze of a beating victim, or two carbon monoxide-poisoned lovers lying side by side in pulled-out mortuary drawers. Silverthorne, as the cliché goes, is unflinching; and he forces us to be likewise, to see and ponder things that our eyes and brains would rather avoid.

Sometimes, however, we flinch because of another haunting presence – the spectre of Art. This takes different forms. In the lovers image, for example, it is Silverthorne’s leg, visible in the bottom of the frame. In another, it is his hand, which holds an Elvis Presley postcard next to a laid-out cadaver. In others, the corpses themselves hold postcards. These poses give reflective pause. In a letter to Silverthorne (reproduced in his catalogue), Robert Frank, the doyen of American photography, tries to articulate why: ‘All I know – when you are Dead you go into that Hole and that is it. It is painful to look so long – so sharp at it. But once you stepped over that line – well, it becomes another photograph. It’s not ART  –  how horrible, if it would be – and maybe the photo tells me (us?) how wonderful it is to be alive.’

Stepping over the line: for four decades, Silverthorne has documented and staged outré scenes in hotel rooms, bordellos and, most notoriously, Rhode Island morgues. The work crosses borders and delineates boundaries, as we critics like to say. But when he literally steps over the line while documenting the material experience of death, and poses the dead, or poses with the dead, what happens? Is Robert Frank right – it’s not ART? Or are these, rather, the moments when it becomes art, when the documentary becomes the aesthetic? Or was it already?

The aestheticisation of death has troubled and comforted us for centuries. It gained special currency with the arrival of the photograph: think of Mathew Brady moving Civil War corpses to create a more visually arresting tableau. Now flash forward to the Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. This is the zone wherein Silverthorne’s morgue work will evermore reside. And thrive. Because in a digitally deluged, chronically voyeuristic world where everything is banalised into images, it is encouraging to see some refuse to be numbed down. Curiously, the blowjob photograph was the only image that the gallerists, in a last-minute loss of nerve, decided not to show: apparently, we can stomach death and life and everything in between, including cocks – but not when they are jammed inside a transgender prostitute’s mouth.