John Waters | Tragedy

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 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. The urban legend originated with police photographs of her crashed car with its top virtually sheared off, and what resembled a blonde-haired head tangled in the smashed windshield.  

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.

After Mansfield's death, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recommended requiring a steel underride guard on all tractor-trailers, something the trucking industry was slow to adopt. In the USA, the underride guard is known an "ICC bumper", or a "Mansfield bar".

"John Waters, appropriately known as the 'Pope of Trash', adores bad taste and things despicable, negative, and disgusting. He loves difference and paradox." 

- Christine Macel, Parkett  

"Wouldn't Jayne Mansfield appreciate the irony of my appalling taste inside a tony swiss art magazine with highbrow credentials?"

- John Waters