Posts Tagged ‘weird’
21
Apr
2010
Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia
Prison storytelling, subcultural anthropology, and the allure of darkness.
In the 1970’s, while American hippies were busy inking themselves with peace signs and psychedelic rainbows, Danzig Baldayev, a guard at St. Petersburg’s notorious Kresty Prison, began documenting the far less Woodstockian body art of Russia’s most infamous criminals.
For 33 years, Baldayev used his exclusive access to and rapport with the prisoners to hand-illustrate and capture in artful photographs more than 3,600 inmate tattoos — as admirable a feat artistically as it was sociologically.
In 2003, when he was in his late 70’s, Baldayev began releasing his magnificent archive as a series of books revealing a rich and eerie intersection of art and violence.
Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Volumes I, II and III offer not only a visceral record of this intersection, but also Baldayev’s aambitious effort to, through text and illustrations, parse the meaning of these tattoos and place them in the context of this fiercely self-contained subculture. (Or, as it were, institution-contained as well.)
Perhaps even more striking than the body art itself is how Baldayev was able to talk some of Russia’s most dangerous convicts into posing for such intimate and often vulnerable portraits.
For a related glimpse of this darkly enigmatic world, the excellent Oscar-nominated 2007 film Eastern Promises about the Russian mob in London, starring Naomi Watts and Viggo Mortensen, offers an intriguing look at tattoos as storytelling, a narrative through which prisoners told their life stories and conveyed their credos.
Each of the volumes is an absolute masterpiece and a fascinating slice of (sub)cultural anthropology. It’s the kind of thing that adds instant conversation potential to any home library or coffee table, and guaranteed you’re-cooler-than-my-other-friends gifting recognition.
We’ve launched a weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
07
Jan
2010
Death by Design
Minimizing your mortal footprint, or how to write a shopping list — literally — with the dead.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” according to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. If you want to understand the life cycle in more specific molecular detail, though, you should look to a surprising disciplinary source. That’s because the most contemporary thinking on decomposition doesn’t come from religion or science; it comes from industrial design.
Perhaps it’s the passing of another year that has us thinking about the ultimate human passage. That’s right: today we’re all about death. More specifically, it’s about designerly approaches to death, and why this topic merits interest for reasons beyond aesthetic fetishism. The objects we’re considering today illustrate how design can imbue death with dignity, while also creating value for the people and earth that remain behind — not a bad legacy to leave.
SPIRITREE
Recipient of an honorable mention in I.D. magazine’s 2009 Annual Design Review, Spiritree is one option for those looking to leave the lightest footprint at the end of their lives. (As an aside, we were dismayed to learn that I.D. is itself meeting an untimely end because of the death of its publishing model. RIP, I.D.)
Spiritree is a futuristic-looking pod that transforms the traditional funerary urn into something that looks like the lovechild of Karim Rashid’s brain and a bird feeder. Spiritree’s website cites eco-entrepreneur Paul Hawken as an inspiration, and we can see why. Designed by Arquitectura/Diseño in Puerto Rico, the Spiritree turns remains into fertile fodder for “a living memorial in the form of a tree.” Its pieces are intended to biodegrade as the seeds added to it germinate; and the pod’s ceramic upper half eventually cracks as the emerging plant grows strong enough to break it.
We don’t like to talk or think about what happens to our mortal coils when we shuffle them off, but, like all of our remains, they have to go somewhere.
And like much else we humans leave behind as a species, we haven’t been good at disposing of ourselves. Death is a resource-intensive business. By some estimates, 200 million pounds of steel are used each year to build caskets; many are also lined with copper or zinc. Embalming usually involves carcinogenic chemicals — not much of a concern for the recently departed, but definitely bad when they eventually leach into our groundwater. And many cemeteries encourage water waste and other landscaping evils.
POST-MORTEM PROJECT
Thankfully, intrepid industrial designers like Nadine Jarvis have been ruminating on the vessels via which we meet our earthly rest.
Jarvis’s thesis project at the University of London took the form of a series of alternative proposals for the post mortem. In Carbon Copies, Jarvis turned cremains into a lifetime supply of pencils — 240 to be exact — to be used by the deceased’s survivors. Rest in Pieces takes the form of a ceramic urn suspended from a tree; the cord from which it hangs deteriorates over a period of one to three years, at which point the urn drops and smashes, scattering its contents.
Jarvis’s Bird Feeders gesture at reincarnation, relying on birds’ ingestion of the ash and seeds that comprise the pieces. Her work engages the grieving process with elegance, enlarging through form the spaces in which we mourn. Pieces from Jarvis’s post-mortem research are in the collections of London’s Design Museum and Funeria, the founding agency behind the only (to our knowledge, anyway) biennial for funerary artwork, Ashes to Art.
ECOPOD
Finally, for cradle-to-cradle coffins, look no further than the Ecopod. Made by hand from recycled paper products, Ecopod was designed by natural-birthing practitioner Hazel Selina. Selina created the product in response to a friend’s death and her research around the limitations of traditional casket and coffin design. Ecopods come in a variety of colors (including the gorgeous gold version above), and can be screen printed with various designs or lined with feathers. We weren’t surprised to learn that the UK-based Selina was fascinated by ancient Egyptian burial rituals, since the Ecopod looks like what we imagine a 21st-century Tutankhamun might choose for his own final rest.
We realize that since the world couldn’t even agree on carbon limits at Copenhagen, we’re unlikely to see mass reform around such a personal topic as death. Still, it’s at least worth considering how we might, in our final act, try to leave the earth better rather than worse for our wear. For more resources on green burials, visit the non-profit Green Burial Council.
Kirstin Butler has a Bachelor’s in art & architectural history and a Master’s in public policy from Harvard University. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn as a freelance editor and researcher, where she also spends way too much time on Twitter. For more of her (non-morbid) thoughts, check out her videoblog.
In 2009, we spent more than 240 hours a month bringing you Brain Pickings. That’s over 2,880 hours for the year, over which we could’ve seen 29 feature-length films, listened to 72 music albums or taken 960 bathroom visits. If you found any joy and inspiration here this year, please consider supporting us with a modest donation — it lets us know we’re doing something right.
Help
Brain Pickings takes 200+ hours a month to curate and edit. If you find any joy and value in it, we would really appreciate a modest donation.
Subscribe
Connect