John Waters
Tragedy
Zurich, Switzerland: Parkett, 2015
46 x 46 x 12.5 cm
Edition of 25 signed and numbered copies
Scalp as sculpture, for Parkett magazine issue #96. Made of acrylic, synthetic hair, painted silicone, and urethane, the work resembles a serial killer's trophy, with all of the type of 'bad taste' artist and filmmaker John Waters is known for.
Waters has had an obsession with Jayne Mansfield since he first saw Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It, as a skinny ten year old boy in 1956. "This wasn't a movie that my boy classmates wanted to see or cared about," he told The Director's Guild of America Quarterly, "they weren't interested in discussing Jayne Mansfield's complete lack of roots. I really had no one that I could be enthusiastic with about it. So it was a private secret of mine, this movie."
He has referred to his frequent collaborator, the performer Divine (Harris Glenn Milstead 1945 – 1988) as his own Jayne Mansfield. "Well, Jayne Mansfield mixed with Godzilla."
When Mansfield died in a car accident in 1967 it was reported that the actress was decapitated. Twenty years later the New York Times sent a journalist to interview the undertaker, who clarified that it was only her wig that came off in the crash. Shortly afterward another report claimed that part of her scalp was separated from her skull, also.
"Wouldn't Jayne Mansfield appreciate the irony of my appalling taste inside a tony swiss art magazine with highbrow credentials?"
- John Waters
Available for $6600 US, here.
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