Noah Becker’s
Heavenly Skulls
by Donald Kuspit

In many Asian and European legends the human skull is regarded as on a par with the vault of heaven….This offers an excellent explanation for skull-worship in all its countless shapes, from ancestral skulls to skulls taken as trophies….

Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionary of Symbols (1)

These two poles are:
1. the Great Abstraction
2. the Great Realism….

Between these two poles lie many possible juxtapositions of the abstract with the real.
These two elements were always present in art and were to be characterized as the “purely artistic” and “objective.”

Wassily Kandinsky, The Blaue Reiter Almanac (2)

In Noah Becker’s painting Museum Skulls, lined up on a grid of black dots, forming a square—since Malevich the iconic emblem of high modernism, not to say pure art (that is, art untainted by reality)—two rows of four skulls transgressively appear, for their reality disrupts the abstract field of the dots. It is reduced to a sort of inconsequential backdrop, all the more inconsequential because the dots fade away at the edge of the square, suggesting that it is more hollow than the skulls. Three of the skulls on the top row are in profile, the fourth faces us, but its face is half obscured by one of the profile skulls, muting its fatal glance. Three of the skulls on the bottom row have full faces, but, like the profile skulls, they look to the right, their eyes averting ours. The fourth skull on the bottom row is all but completely obscured by one of the other skulls. The two obscured skulls—the partially obscured one on the top row, the more completely obscured one on the bottom row—appear on the left end of their rows. It is an ingenious arrangement, all the more so because the juxtaposition of the linear grid and the curvilinear skulls—the simple geometry of the square and the complex geometry of the skull—does nothing to reconcile them. They remain uneasily together, the skulls suspended—levitating?—above the square, as though in some strange heaven. Indeed, the skulls are (pinkish) red, (luminous) yellow, and (deep) blue—filled with the primary colors, giving them a kind of buoyancy and lift, not to say “spirit,” altogether at odds with their spiritless whiteness, their usual ghastly and ghostly paleness and emptiness. Skulls are memento mori, but the primary colors breathe uncanny life into Becker’s skulls—indeed, heavenly life, for blue is the color of the sky, yellow of the sun, and red “the basic symbol of the life-principle.” (3)

Where is this heaven? It seems to be the museum, as “The Met” sign suggests. Is Becker suggesting that this great museum is full of dead art, cosmetically embalmed in decaying glory—like his skulls, artistic trophies by way of their colors as well as trophies of life? Is Becker echoing—obliquely and ingeniously—Marinetti’s assertion that “museum art”—traditional art—has no future? Framing the square, with its skulls and “The Met” sign as well as the “cryptic” abstract signifiers next to it, is a wonderfully oscillating decorative design, the black and white deliriously together. It is contained by a more serene decorative frame of alternating yellow, pink, and green. The frames are juxtaposed, the difference between them intensified by the suddenness, not to say unexpectedness of their juxtaposition—and its paradoxicality, for they are connected but at odds—completely, except for the fact that they are both decorative and ornamental, suggesting that the skulls are, perhaps also all art, for the best of it sooner or later ends up decorating a museum. Becker’s works—all of his skull paintings—are a rebellious critique against the attack on decorative art that began with the architect Adolf Loos Crime and Ornament and climaxed in Le Corbusier’s relentless 1925 attack on it, both of which prepared the way for minimalism, that is, art (if you still want to call it that) reduced to a minimum. Becker is an exemplary maximalist, as his most over-loaded skull painting titled Pokémon Nude—two skulls (one red, one blue), an upside down sexy young smiling nude with the word “Pokémon” beneath her buttocks, a piece of crockery with a smiling clown face (implicitly Becker’s), and various other ornamental, household objects (the Playboy nude is also one) suggests.

Becker’s skulls may be kitsch objects—the skull has become a mass-produced decorative object in our society, appearing on tee shirts and sneakers (I own a pair of baby sneakers with skull designs on them), stripping it of existential significance and shock value—but its kitschification and with that popularization or democratization (you don’t have to be a saint to meditate on it, although meditation on death in the hope of salvation is not practiced much in our society) suggests that death is democratic, that is, announces that however good our life we will all die, perhaps badly in war, an accident, or a murder victim. We may not keep company with a skull, as Saint Jerome does in Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1514 print, meditating on the skull every day to remind us that death can come at any time, and to atone for our sins in the hope of salvation, but its presence as a decorative ornament in daily life suggests that we are unconsciously aware of it. The skull is a sinister reminder of the inevitability of death, and the glamorously glistening, colorful kitschified—“entertaining”–skull that appears in Becker’s vanitas paintings is an apotropaic device to ward off its evil hollow eye. The kitschified skull is a defense against death. 

Still life paintings with skulls are traditionally vanitas painting, suggesting that Becker may be reminding us of the vanity of art (and the artist). And also of the United States, as the juxtaposition of an ironically golden skull and an American flag on another grid of blackish dots suggests in his painting Gold Skull America. This painting is a strong political statement, for it suggests the triumph of death in America, signaled by the recurrent mass murders, and the fact that the United States is perpetually at war with some enemy (suggesting its paranoia), and has the largest army in the world. One cannot help recalling D. H. Lawrence’s remark that the American is a natural born killer (in his Studies in Classic American Literature). The juxtaposition of the blue sign with the letter f and the apple of abstract art with its spectrum of delicious colors—like the tempting apple on the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden, the apple has been sinfully bitten into, leading to the expulsion of art from the paradise of reality—is another example of the unresolved dialectic that informs Becker’s skull paintings. They are masterpieces of their kind, not only because of their masterful juxtaposition of decorative abstraction and decorative realism, but because they suggest that the skull is a naturally abstract work of art, and as such more inherently expressive and ingeniously aesthetic than any man-made work of purely abstract art.

Notes

1. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionary of Symbols (London and New York: Penguin, 1996), 888.

2. Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, eds. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 242.

3. Chevalier and Gheerbrant, 792.

—January 21, 2018, New York