A Skull Filled With Joy

Imagine you’re sitting down to brainstorm a brand identity for the entire human species. What images would make your list? Bleeding Heart? Flaming sword? Chimp with an Uzi? Those are all excellent suggestions, but if you want an icon that captures the hopeless thrill of existence, the fact that we rise from dust, return to dust, and do a lot of dusting in between, you’d struggle to find a better insignia than the human skull (or possibly the chimp.)

The skull icon holds a unique place in human culture. Other symbols evoke “Power,” or “Glory,” but few can capture the terrifying duality of human life. “Behold!” it says, “I drink mead from the skull of my enemy whilst riding in my boat—which is also made entirely from skulls—am I not a total bad-ass?” But it also says: “Is life not fleeting? I am so depressed. More mead!” The skull anchors us within the mortal realm, reminds us that life is but a blink, yet consoles us with the fact that while we’re here we can wreak havoc.

History knows this. The Aztecs respected the skull’s raw power, its ability to inspire undying loyalty among friends, enemies, (and even frenemies.) They invented the skull rack, a wooden framework designed to display the skewered heads of sacrificial victims, ($89.95—from Ikea.) At the Great Temple of the Aztecs archaeologists uncovered a skull rack with at least 240 carved skulls, most of whom looked surprised. The Aztecs are also rumoured to have carved 13 crystal skulls which they scattered around the earth. Legend has it that if you manage to find and gather all 13 skulls a god-like figure will appear and inform you that you’ve wasted your life.

On a bottle, a skull and crossbones might signify “Don’t drink!” but on a flag on a ship it signifies “Let’s drink, then see where the night takes us.” The pirates turned the skull into the world’s first rebel insignia. The Dutch Vanitas artists turned it into another kind of warning, using unconventional still-life imagery to remind us of the rush and violence of life: a skull, a watch, an overturned wineglasses, a snuffed candle, a used condom, the spare key to a lover’s apartment, a stack of CDs. "Lo, the wine of life runs out, the spirit is snuffed, oh Man, for all your learning, time yet runs on: Vanity!" the picture seems to say, reminding us that death comes to us all, and also that we need to pick up wine. One of the best-known examples of the skull in art is in Shakespeare's Hamlet, where the title character sees a skull he can’t place, until he suddenly realises: "I knew him, Horatio; he was alright—in small doses.”

The skull arrives in our century caked in blood, history, half-baked mysticism, gothic pretentiousness, and fascist chic. Now you can find the skull withering like old newsprint on the arms of elderly bikers, dribbling from the lobes of slack witted hotel heiresses, or smeared on the K-mart sweatshirts of a million teenagers. (It’s a great irony that the modern teenager, the most skull-adorned since Black Pete initiated a “Bring your son to work” day, is perhaps the least ‘bad-ass’ figure in history. Sedentary, self-obsessed, lubed in pessimism, he has never fought a war or gone to work up a chimney, and his idea of an outlaw act is to continue skate-boarding on the museum fountain when the elderly security guard told him not to.) The skull, once the mainstay of kings and empires, has now been reduced to an empty logo—Satan’s smiley-face. Everywhere we look, we see skulls, fierce and unblinking, on shirts, ties, sneakers, dresses, phones, bikinis, torches, umbrellas. You can buy a screaming 3D skull cover for your PS3, a Terminator skull DVD player, a Sex Pistols-inspired skull headset from Nokia, skull-wear for your child, your dog, a million billion skull-branded products all designed to put you on the burning edge of fashion with the minimum of effort. The movies and console games that feature the skull are too numerous to list. Is the effect of all these skulls to remind us of death, of the impermanence of life? Or is it to show us—as Andy Warhol did in his prints of soup cans, and starlets, and, yes, human skulls—how the relentless repetition of an image can render it meaningless? British artist Damien Hirst also feels that the skull carries a certain mythic power. Once famous for his pickled animal carcasses, he is now most well known for creating a stunning diamond-encrusted platinum cast of the skull of an impoverished 18th Century European male. Hirst is a rich and powerful 21st Century European male and “For the Love of God”, the most expensive piece of modern art ever created, places him firmly at the head of the modern art pantheon. Not since Warhol has an artist’s work stirred so much debate.

And what are we to make of Ghostbusters star Dan Akroyd’s web-infomercial presentations for Crystal Head Vodka:

“Thousands of years ago, thirteen crystal heads were scattered across the earth – and they are greater and more powerful than anything we have the ability to manufacture today … “

Crystal Head Vodka is a unique liquor, made from pure ingredients and filtered by diamonds. Most importantly, it comes in a bottle shaped like a freakin’ skull. “But why vodka?” you ask. I’ll let Dan field this one.

“Such a symbol that speaks to our own common universality should have joy associated with it, shouldn’t it? … We have this mystic symbol in which we have chosen to enclose joy in the form of a very pure alcoholic beverage.”

So, the skull is ancient, timeless, non-denominational, flexible, luminous, wonderful, an ideal vessel to hold your precious liquor, a perfect home bedazzling project. The real question, I suppose, is: out of the two products, Akroyd’s Crystal Head Vodka, and Hirst’s diamond skull monument, which is the most cynical, most banal, most derivative, most unintentionally hilarious, and—and I mean this ironically—most empty-headed? Which one reveals the most about our species in our age? I visited Sotheby’s auction house last year for Beautiful Inside My Head, a collection of Hirst’s latest work. Part of me now suspects him of being cynical beyond any measure the makers of a brand of skull-themed vodka could ever achieve. His exhibition featured bulls with golden hoofs, pickled sharks, a flayed angel, winged piglets, stained-glass mosaics made from butterfly wings, giant, spinning psychedelic skulls, Roger Taylor from Duran Duran, (not part of the exhibit, but magnificent none the less,) all beautiful but all completely empty. Every single piece reeks of its own frail concept. In every gallery, gaggles of posh young women swoon before pictures which they probably imagine gracing the dining-room feature wall of their new Kensington apartment, while groups of art students in scarfs and skull-emblazoned clothing huddle in corners and dream of possessing just a sliver of Hirst’s great power. So this is how far we’ve come? After countless millennia of human art and culture I find myself looking at Hirst’s skull as, at best, an artistic nod to Paris Hilton: an empty head encrusted with diamonds that smiles a crooked smile from the covers of magazines in a way that once might have said “All life is vanity,” but today just seems to say “Look at me. Am I not beautiful? And ever so thin.”