Ideas - The Living Dead: Art and Human Remains

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

Our complicated feelings about life and death are captured in art that uses human remains, says anthropologist Myriam Nafte. Her PhD research looked at how contemporary Western artists incorporate human body parts. This 2014 episode was the first to kick off our decade-long series Ideas from the Trenches, featuring groundbreaking work by PhD students across Canada. Nafte is now an associate adjunct professor at McMaster University. 

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Getting a PhD takes years. It's often hard, lonely work. There are about 50,000 PhD hopefuls across Canada, toiling away in libraries and laboratories on a mission to produce the best new idea of their scholarly lives. But their work will likely be read by just a few professors, and maybe, just maybe, a really patient, perhaps masochistic friend. We think these brilliant but unsung young minds deserve a wider audience. And

so 10 years ago, we started a regular series called Ideas from the Trenches. Today, we are revisiting the very first episode that kicked off the series. It features then-PhD student Miriam Nafti, who was finishing off her thesis in physical anthropology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Physical anthropology generally means looking at skeletons and bones and using them to come up with your theory about whatever bit of human culture the scholar is studying. And often it's something that's very long ago and far away from where that scholar grew up. That's Ideas producer Tom Howell, who co-hosts the series with Nikola Lukšić. Well, the cool thing about Miriam is that she studies human bones and body parts and how they get used, not in other places, but here in contemporary Western society. And you would be surprised to find that there's actually a lot more of these human remains circulating and being used, more so than you think.

Contemporary Western artwork created out of human remains. Not a topic for the squeamish, and certainly a topic rife with ethical and moral challenges. Miriam introduced us to the whole topic very simply. In fact, she literally introduced us to a skeleton that she keeps in her basement. This is where you used to work as an artist? I do, I still do. Still do, sorry, excuse me. Miriam's interest in the human form stems from her background as an artist. Here she's leading us to a small room, full of canvases and art supplies and boxes.

And for the most part these are the remains that I have here. These are very old anatomical specimens. Some are from when I was an anatomy student and we had to purchase bone boxes. So a bone box would consist of one half of an individual. Vertical or top to toe? Yes. They are sitting in a box that's exposed. Is that how they're normally kept're normally kept? I prefer them like that. It's damp in the house and if I cover them, I don't want any mold or any damage to affect the remains. So I do keep them dry and in a cool box. I do not handle them on a regular basis other than when I'm teaching or if I'm drawing. I don't let the kids play with them. I certainly don't let the dog near them.

He's not interested in them anyway, but... No flesh? No, no flesh at all. Miriam's PhD research has involved interviewing people who use or buy or collect bits of dead people for all sorts of reasons. What I found through my interviews with the artists and with Catholic clergy and with anatomists and shop owners, human remains encompass ideas of power and authenticity. No one would be comfortable with having plastic

representations either in their work, in their artwork, in their labs, or in their churches. The authentic, the real body needed to be accessible, needed to be available, and needed to be used precisely because it had a sense of power, inherent power in it already. So as artists, they're taking that power that has already infused these pieces and now integrating them into artwork that is now resurrecting these individuals, but for a different story, to narrate a different story. Miriam looks at artists who incorporate human remains into their art.

Their work shows how dead bodies have special power. They can say a lot with the use of an infant heart or HIV positive blood or a skull and the viewer and the artist and the human remains are interacting at once in that space. And I could say the same for an individual who's visiting an anatomical museum or a church to venerate a relic. These dead, these remains are socially active. Remains are socially active. We are investing them with our emotions, with our desires,

with our ideas, with our dreams, with our nightmares. We are asking them to perform these narratives for us. Asking them to perform these narratives for us. I have to confess that this is where I get a little squeamish. Using dead body parts to perform narratives for us, I find it just a little bit weird to talk about people's bones in that way. It makes me think of using dead bodies as puppets. But that's not quite what Miriam's getting at, as I understand her. She's interested in how using bones in an artwork can overturn what some prominent scholars have said

about the relationship that we, living people, have with them, dead people. One of the giants in the field of death scholarship is Robert Harrison. He's not an archaeologist. He's more of a philosophy and literature guy. Harrison, one of the philosophers I address, he insists that our society is necrocratic and that our whole society is based on the dead, on following their posthumous laws and ideas of their architecture, of their literature, of their sciences, and so on. And he's essentially saying that the dead own us, Essentially saying that the dead own us, that we are in service to the dead. And I am challenging that by suggesting that, in fact, it is the undisposed dead,

the human remains that are circulating in our society, that are in service to us, service to the living. Because we are imposing our narratives, our ideology, our notions, our fears, our anxieties, our politics, in terms of having them express those in whatever context, whether it's in an institution, or whether it's in someone's living room, or in part of someone's collection. We spent about an hour and a half talking with Miriam in that interview, trying to grasp the core of her message. And we're going to check in with her from time to time just to find out if we're on track or straying too far off. I always worry that when I'm trying to pin down someone's complicated ideas and explain them, mostly to myself,

I am just generating a totally different version that completely misses their whole point. I think it's worth admitting that after our first conversation with Miriam, there were a few concepts that we hadn't quite grasped. Here is Tom in the car right after our initial interview. Here's my problem. There are moments where I suddenly glimpse that what she's doing is giving a new insight into what it is to be human today or whatever. And then there are long stretches where I'm perplexed or unsure what it is we're talking about. I find that with a lot of academics. But I think what she was saying, I'm pretty sure what she was saying at the end, is that the reason why this is so interesting and important is because,

yeah, what was the philosopher she was referring? Harris. Something Harris? Harrison? Harrison. Harrison. The idea that the dead are using us is wrong. We use the dead to express something about us in our contemporary lives. The dead aren't manipulating us. We're manipulating them.

We do not live in a necrocracy, yet the dead are all around us. Yeah. Okay, we're going to dig into that big philosophical question of how dead people use us, or we living people use them. But first, we take on a much more straightforward question of how a respectable public institution displays human remains, just to get a clearer sense of what they see as the proper way to relate to a dead body. We went to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto with our guide and archaeologist Dan Rahimi. He introduced us to an Egyptian mummy on display. It's about 3,000 years old.

So when we use the word mummy, we're really talking about the human body that was prepared very carefully, as we all know, and wrapped in linen. And then many other things happened to it in preparation for its voyage to the afterlife. This one is just the mummified remains of the individual in a beautifully painted box in the form of an adult male. It's about 3,000 years old. And if you look at it, if you look at the actual body, you see a very shriveled up face and ears and shriveled up looking hair and shriveled up teeth and obviously no eyes. Yes, the empty eye sockets are quite noticeable. We have toenails, is that correct?

Those are toes. Toes. Anyway, and he is lying out here, obviously for public eyes. What sorts of ethical considerations and protocols do you have to follow when you're deciding to display a human body? One thing I find disconcerting about this display is that the head and the toes, I believe, were deliberately exposed over time. That, as you know, in the 19th century and into the 20th century, these were great collector's items and they were great novelties in museums, particularly in the West.

And I think in those days, people had no hesitation to unwrap the mummy to display these rather disturbing to some people human remains. And that was part of it, that it was meant to be titillating and it was meant to be spooky and it was meant to be intriguing at the same time. But it wasn't meant to teach people about the mummification process and what it meant in Egyptian religion. You know, it was something else.

It was a freak show kind of thing, was it? To some extent, it was. I mean, it did focus on that horrible part of it that people would respond to in that way. And that's the sort of thing we would never do today. And in fact, when we built this gallery, and this is a gallery that I built 20-odd years ago, I had misgivings about displaying this like this and I asked whether we could wrap it up or recover those parts only because it seemed to me to be disrespectful and what museums try to do when they do decide to display human remains is to do it with utmost respect. So if we were doing this today, we would definitely not display a partially unwrapped mummy.

Why did you decide not to wrap up the head again? This was 1991, and the curators objected really strongly to changing it, and they won. You would still want to? Like, if you could get in there right now, and you would want to wrap it up? I think I would drape it with a piece of muslin, or fine linen, linen in this case, because that's linen wrapping. So yeah, I think it would look a lot better

with linen over his face. What is it about human remains that makes them more ethically tricky than other artifacts? It's the fact that certain people care about them. That if people have a connection to that individual that you're putting on display, they say, hey, wait a minute, you know, that's my ancestor. And the body may have come to us in ways that are not so celebrated. So, you know, the theft of mummies from Egypt was not a good story. So it comes from living people caring about the human remains

rather than that we are feeling a particular sympathy or that this cadaver here has kind of individual rights of its own or something? I think so. I think that would be the museum's position. You want to go see the shrunken head? Of course we can. Okay. It's not far away, but if we can walk... Oh, that would be fabulous.

We want to see it because we're... That was archaeologist Dan Rahimi at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. He also designs the galleries. That's true. Miriam's PhD includes this study of what big institutions like a museum or a teaching hospital or the Catholic Church do with human remains. The way large institutions operate shows us one angle on this problematic relationship between us, the living, and them, the dead. Dan's discussion is reminiscent of most archaeologists and anthropologists that work with human remains in a museum context.

In one regard, they have to be very careful of adhering to the policies put down by the museum in regard to whether they're lit, whether they're placed among other objects, or whether they're situated separately. And also, they have to deal with the demand of the public. So, for example, he mentions that he wants to cover up this face of the individual mummy, And they've tried that in the UK. They threw sheets over them because they were concerned of the ethical issues and because they wanted to at least imbue the remains with a sense of respect.

However, the public, they were outraged and they demanded that they be uncovered. So they were, as a result. They needed to comply with the demands of their public. That really illustrated this battle, and also the need for, as I mentioned, the institution to reform our behaviour around the dead. So this gets us back to that philosophical question about the tension between the living and the dead.

Rewinding a bit. Remember that philosopher we were having a hard time remembering? Yeah, what was the philosopher she was referring? Harris, something Harris. Harrison? Harrison. Harrison. It turns out that Robert Pogue Harrison is a professor of Italian literature here at Stanford University in California.

And the author of a book called The Dominion of the Dead. What does it mean to say that we, the living, are ruled by the dead? The we in that statement is a very broad we, and I'm not sure that it includes we who are contemporaries, living in our contemporary world today. But broadly speaking, certainly in Western culture and in other cultures, the dead have had an extraordinary power over the psyches of the living, the behavior of the living, the religions of the living.

We know that the oldest Indo-European religions were really domestic religions based on ancestor worship and caused the living to believe that their laws came from the dead, their commandments came from the dead, and that they were in many ways in bondage to the will of the dead. And by that, Robert Harrison means that the languages we speak, the wars we fight, the religions we follow, it's all laid out there by those who came before us. ...Hathens, where the Athenians won a very significant battle at sea against their enemies. But the generals who... We talked to Robert Harrison for nearly an hour, and to be honest, some of it was less relevant than the other parts.

Like I asked him about Martin Heidegger's book Being in Time because I wanted to get at the concept of the authentic self and what that means in relation to being a slave to all the dead people that came before us, and all of this somewhat went off the rails. And to get us back on track, I asked Robert about his opinions on the power of the human corpse, which he says is very dynamic.

I write in my book that there is nothing more dynamic than a corpse, a human corpse, for those who are the loved ones of the deceased. It no longer fully belongs to the world of the living, nor does it fully belong to the realm of the living, nor does it fully belong to the realm of the dead, because it's in a state of transition. Part of its dynamism is that, on the one hand, there's something of the past in it. This is a person whose life has come to an end, and therefore it refers backwards to the history of that person. On the other hand, it points to the future of the afterlife, where one believes in an afterlife and almost all cultures have believed in an afterlife of the dead.

So the corpse is pointing forward to an afterlife of the dead and at the same time it is imminently present here as a thing in the moment of presence, these three dimensions of time seem to gather together in a very unresolved way in the corpse. Why do most of us want nothing to do with a dead body then? Do you think it's emotional pain or disgust or why do we want to hide it away? On the one hand, we don't want to face up to the call to authenticity that a corpse can impose on us. By facing the reality of death, it's well known that we have a particular talent and inclination to denial and to avoidance. However, one should not easily assume that we want to have nothing to do with the

corpse. Certainly we don't display corpses to the same extent as we used to. But if I may go back to this idea of the dynamic nature of the corpse, if it doesn't belong to the world of the living yet, or to the world of the dead yet, then it imposes an obligation on the living, on the loved ones who have survived it. And that obligation is to ritualistically dispose of the corpse. What I believe is that all human cultures have some form of ritual body disposal, and that the importance of these rituals of body disposal have to do with finally liberating the person from the embrace of the corpse and allowing that person to find his or her place

in the afterlife, however one conceives of that afterlife. We say that we don't want to see the corpse anymore, but what happens to people who are the survivors, loved ones of people who have died in airplane accidents, or for that matter in September 11th, when you deny these loved ones the material remains of the person they loved, they cannot initiate their ritual of bringing their grief to closure. So we need the dead as much as they need us? Oh, yes. I believe profoundly that we need the dead as much as they need us. If one were to take the dead away from any human society, it would quickly be in a state of disorientation that would become not only dysfunctional, but it would lead to hysteria and paroxysms.

Robert Pogue Harrison teaches Italian literature at Stanford University, and he is the author of The Dominion of the Dead. In his book, he talks about how we, the living, follow a chorus of people who came before us, and that we're just a little blip, a link between them and the people who'll come after us. But the main point that sticks with me is that the dead are powerful, and they make certain demands of us. We have our PhD student, Miriam Nafti, listening to everything you've heard so far to give us a better idea of how this fits into her work,

and hopefully let us know that we're not completely missing the point. No, I enjoyed that thoroughly. Specifically, I love Harrison. I loved listening to Harrison because he really summarized this whole field, and his work allowed me to explore this broad philosophical landscape. The point of departure is I agree with everything he has said. And the challenge was that I needed to make the distinction between the disposed dead, which is primarily the basis of Harrison's discussion, and my own in terms of the undisposed dead.

So when he talks about engaging with the dead and the undead status and the withholding of identity and loved ones, he's talking about the identity, the known identity of the dead. I'm primarily looking at the anonymous dead and the dead, the human remains that are circulating in our culture and that are deeply emblematic of Western society. Very similar, it's a variation of Harrison's discussion. The only difference is that we are creating, we are imposing our narratives on these pieces. So if you could take what we just heard in this first half of the show and steer it into the territory that you're working on a bit more, where should we go next?

Following the course of the thesis, where I look at the institutional handling of the dead, I look at churches and labs and medical museums and institutions, other institutions. I found that there were all very common themes emerging from the use of these remains within these institutions. And I found that outside of these institutions, it was very difficult to get a look at who specifically epitomized this institutional handling of human remains. I found the best example would have been looking at artists who use human remains because they straddle both worlds. They are part of broad popular culture. They are artists working

outside of institutions, and yet their work is displayed within established institutions like museums and art galleries and so on. And they operated in what I initially called the gray zone. And for the most part, like my discussions with the institutions, their use of human remains is not to remind us of death. us of death. This is not to scare us or to imbue these remains with a sense of taboo, that these are untouchable items and these are going to contaminate us, but really because they are imbued with, infused with power and identity and membership, but also our ideology, our thoughts, our fears, our anxieties, our loves, our desires, our life experiences. Okay, well, thank you so much, and we'll check in with you at the end of the show. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you.

Thanks. Bye. You're listening to The Living Dead on Ideas. We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on U.S. Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401,

check out This is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. There are about 50,000 PhD students in Canada, toiling in labs and libraries with a mission to make a significant contribution to their field. Their work is often done in relative obscurity, and a decade ago, we decided to start a series to shine a spotlight on their impressive and often groundbreaking research. We've showcased the work of nearly 40 students so far. You can find our series by simply searching CBC Ideas from the Trenches.

Today we're rebroadcasting our very first episode, which originally aired in 2014. It features the work of then PhD student Miriam Nafty, who was pursuing her PhD in Physical Anthropology at McMaster University in Hamilton. The series is presented by Tom Howell and Nikola Lukšić. Miriam Nafty's PhD looks into how living people can get corpses and dead body parts to perform narratives, as she puts it. The project has her out and visiting with some really fascinating people. She pointed us to this artist named Wayne Belger and what he does is pretty unusual and kind of amazing. He works in the woodshop and it's a pretty busy place that he shares with other people. that he shares with other people.

I'm looking for Wayne Belcher. I'm here to do an interview with him. You know, I don't know who he is. I just came in for a second. But he's got his own studio in the back. This is in Tucson, Arizona. Everybody want to go into the darkroom? It's a little bit quieter there.

Wayne's a photographer with a twist. He makes his own pinhole cameras, and he makes a new one for every new photography project he takes on. Each and every camera he uses has a special meaning for him. Like the one he made out of a 500-year-old skull that belonged to a Tibetan llama and he used it to photograph Tibetan llamas. He made another one that pumps HIV-positive blood through it, which was for taking pictures of patients with HIV. The camera with maybe the biggest resonance for him contains an infant heart.

There's a backstory you should know about this camera. When Wayne was in his early 20s, he discovered he was a twin and that his twin brother had died at birth. Learning this as an adult had a huge impact on him, and at first he wasn't sure how to process it. Then shortly after that, a gallery owner gave me this jar and said, here I've got something weird for you. And it was this baby's heart that was in formaldehyde in this glass jar

that had tar all over the top of it and it said diseased body part. And it was in an anatomy lab that was back east and the college went under. So it ended up in somebody's garage for 50 years. And he gave it to me and I just had it for quite some time. And I just felt like I should keep it and just, it needed to be honored. So when I started making the cameras, I ended up using the heart in the back of a camera and made pretty much a shrine for it. And with that camera, with the heart, I photograph women that are right before they give birth, pregnant women. And I go to the place where my brother died because, you know, I was always two heartbeats when I was

in the womb. And so I've been photographing women at the point where my brother passed away. And that's been kind of my own journey with this camera. And also what's been interesting too is with this camera, there's a human heart of a baby that passed away you know before it was born or right at birth and you know i was really nervous at first you know because you know i was going to photograph a woman who's about to give birth and there's a dead baby's heart in it and just to clarify it's built into the body of the camera yeah it's in the in the back of the camera there's a like a acrylic chamber that i made it's all polished aluminum and it's just it just came out really beautiful and it's i feel it's a lot better than the jar with tar all over the top of it it's just disease body part and so

but i did my first photo shoot with this woman and i was kind of nervous about it and i found her to be really nurturing to the camera. Like she kept on touching it. Her husband got freaked out, but she was just really connected to it. And I've shot probably close to 100 women so far with this camera and I've yet to have a negative response

or like, ooh, that's weird or anything. Even though the husbands could get a little weirded but the women seem to be kind of nurturing or connected to it that's interesting because i myself having uh given birth to twins i i think i would find it somewhat upsetting to be photographed by something that had a infant heart in it like that. And I wonder, how would you respond to somebody who would say that this does cross a line that should not be crossed, and this heart should be buried and given proper ritual to say goodbye to it?

I mean, it goes back to personal belief systems. What I've been doing, and actually with body parts, is far more common around the world than it is in western society and so you know if there was a majority you know of thought you know everybody got together with their you know one collective vote it's almost like i think i would be more in the majority than if we are in here in the west here at my shows my shows, I have the cameras out and they're mounted to a wall with the photographs they shot. It's all one installation. They'll go up and touch the skull and they're like, wow, I've never seen a human skull before. Or they say, I've never touched one. And it's like, well, you actually own a human skull. Everybody does. But it's so distant. And I feel like I'm almost given an

opportunity and these objects come to me in really kind of special ways that it gives people an opportunity to connect. And going back to the question of the infant heart in the camera, in the camera. Why do you need an actual heart, and why would you not use a representation or a model of an infant heart? Because I've never done anything that's fake. Whatever materials I'm using, or subject I want to study, or whatever I want to be involved with, I'm going to have 100% connection with that actual object. I wouldn't use something plastic unless I was studying plastic. I don't think there would be that connection, that bridge, that communion I want to have with the subject unless I really had connection or something you know pieces from it and i think one of my strongest tools in my work is vulnerability and being completely vulnerable you know like the whole

project about pregnancy is because my twin brother um you know i have these different things that i really want to learn about myself and i think when people are being really vulnerable and completely exposing themselves you have a real connection because everybody, you know, people look at vulnerability as just being this, you know, you don't want to be vulnerable. You got to hide. You got to put up walls. You got to like. That's why we push death away from us in the first place, right? Is it?

Yeah. It makes us feel vulnerable. Yeah. I want to go the other direction. Yeah, I want to go the other direction. Wayne's way of interacting with human remains steps over some of the conventions that museums and other public institutions follow when it comes to using and displaying dead bodies.

What I find interesting is how his work confirms that Western society has bigger roles for dead body parts to play than just simply preserving them in a glass box and soberly studying their historical importance. The human parts of Wayne's cameras are, in a sense, still socializing with living people. And Wayne's work is just one example. Now, if the thought of using human body parts in cameras is unsettling to you, just wait. I'm Joel Peter Witkin, and I'm a photographer, and I've devoted my life to making the images I make.

Some people love them, some people hate them. Just a warning, there are some graphic descriptions in this next interview, and some listeners could find them disturbing. Joel is 74 years old now. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He's received tons of awards over the course of his career, including the Chevalier of Arts and Letters, one of the top honours in France for an artist. His works are also in permanent

collections of famous galleries like the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And his most famous works are ones with human body parts in them, pieces often with flesh on, which he found in morgues. Why I chose human remains? Because they're powerful. They're powerful and we're all going to look that way. We're all going to be there. And in my case, I'm very interested in creating the vanitas. And of course, that's a branch of visual art, especially from the Renaissance on in a very strong way. That basically is a kind of metaphor for the small time we have on Earth.

We asked him to tell us the story of a very striking photograph. It's a photograph called Feast of Fools. Feast of Fools. That was an event, an event in my life, and I think I've made maybe about 10 events, really, and I think they're really I say this without prejudice, really masterpieces. What had happened is that I was in a forensic hospital in Mexico City

and it took about a year to get permission to basically see in a forensic hospital in Mexico City, and it took about a year to get permission to basically see the head. And Joel got full access to this morgue. The doctor was showing me pulling out drawers and containing bodies, and no air conditioning. The stench was unbelievable. The heat, this was in the summertime, too.

And I was saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And then he pulled out a drawer that contained a swill, a swill. I mean, this is a drawer that's about almost seven feet long, you know, by about two and a half. And it has a swill of human remains, body parts, arms, legs. I was really shocked. It was like a vision of hell. I filled a tray with the parts that I thought that would be necessary.

And even this was, I see to most people that would be a horrific experience. It wasn't to me because these are what constitute the poetry that I want to put together. And, you know, that doesn't make me a sociopath. It doesn't make me anything, I don't think, but a seeker after a truth, which I feel as though providentially I'm involved with at that particular moment especially. I mean, this is an opportunity that's, for me, aesthetic and also profoundly powerful. And it's made me more human. So, I mean, that's the purpose of my work.

made me more human so i mean that that's the purpose of my work but but anyway i i gathered uh the about 14 or 15 parts and then i went into this room which i i normally would photograph in which locks from the inside and that's to protect me and in fact in that room was a corpse uh that i didn't know enough spanish to because my my translator took a break for lunch. For lunch, eh? So it's okay. He was my kind of witness to it. I just started by putting a black background up of black velvet, which was going to be ruined by all the drippings. But it took me a while to clean the parts.

And this was something that would be a sacred act of touching and caring and concern and clarity. And then I started with the arm and then built things up with fruit and hands and legs and feet. And finally I crowned it with a fetus that I masked with a piece of ribbon I had. I carry little props with me because I make drawings before I photograph. And it was just perfect. I swear it was perfect. I have to ask, and I'm sure you've answered this

a million times over the course of your career. Is it not an affront to many of us and to some of the basic principles about how we would want our dead to be treated. We want our remains to be buried and loved ones to mourn for them. Right. But these people have no loved ones. Every person, every part I've ever photographed, and I should have said that to begin with, is inconnue in French, unknown, unclaimed bodies. Because otherwise it would be. It would be wrong.

And my conscience is clear on that. And maybe there are people like me in the world who have a singular view. That's me. I mean, I've done other forms of photography, but I always come back to the things that are the evocation of my deepest concern and what I love. That's not to say that I love a corpse, but that is to say that I love human life, what we've done, what we can do for ourselves.

And that's the kind of message that my work, the way I make it, delivers. Now, I know the subject matter may be dramatic, but finally, regardless of what the presentation is, what the presentation is, it has to resonate to the viewer, the listener, and change their lives and basically show a way to some sort of transcendence. And final question, I'm curious about the distinction you make between corpses that are anonymous and those that have loved ones associated with them. Right. Wouldn't you say all corpses should have some basic rights on how they are treated? Well, the basic rights are actually the rights, the medical ethics of the doctors I'm dealing with. They're there at the time.

It wasn't there at the time in Mexico, but that's an unusual situation. But normally there's a doctor in the room while I'm working. I rely on the doctor that's there to say that I don't like what you're doing. I have no ill feelings about what I've done, what I would ever do as far as the dignity of photographing a human being that's not alive. I've never, I've never degraded or disrespected a subject like that. I feel joyous and positive about what I've done in all the regards of my work. That was photographer Joel Peter Witkin. So back to Miriam Nafti's thesis. These artists are doing stuff that makes people rethink their relationship with human remains.

We, the living, can give new life to the dead. Miriam's focus on bones and flesh of dead humans may sound kind of grotesque. But it also points to a missing piece in one of the biggest conversations in the world of ideas, that is, how humans deal with death. Death is a discouraging and humiliating limit that we all face, but death also inspires some of the most fundamentally human traditions that you can name. And it turns out that death scholarship or death studies is huge right now.

There are whole schools dedicated to it. Miriam said we could get a sense of the big picture of death scholarship by talking to Tony Walter. Tony Walter would be ideal in terms of why and how we need to be near the dead or visit the places where death occurs.

He's the head of the Centre for the Study of Death and Society in Bath, England. Okay, right, so I'm all yours. Tony Walter points out to us that human remains have been used in Western art for centuries. In medieval and early modern Europe, there are collections of bones in ossuries, charnel houses, bone houses, and some of the people who've looked after those in various

places have taken obviously a considerable pleasure in arranging them in a very, very aesthetic way. So that, I mean, there are examples of huge sculptural chandeliers made of bones and that kind of thing. And you find this in a number of Catholic countries, but also in a few Protestant countries in Europe. And I think that's just people who had the opportunity to look after these remains just decided to exercise their aesthetic creativity and then they became tourist attractions. And in contemporary art what sorts of ethical considerations do you think should be followed if somebody's deciding to make art out of human body parts? It's clearly a changing, ever-changing situation. And the whole point of much contemporary art is to push boundaries. And so the boundaries are actually evolving. And in a way, I'm a little

reluctant to actually say this is the limit because then this is the boundary, because then inevitably a contemporary artist is going to want to push the limit and to break the rule. And I don't particularly want to play their game by setting a clear-cut rule. To what extent would you say that as living people, we need to have some kind of buffer between ourselves and the dead? Sometimes there isn't a buffer. If you walk around the streets of Kathmandu in Nepal, you may well just come across dead bodies in the street, which to people not from that culture

can be quite disturbing. But usually we do create a buffer. There was a thinker who wrote several hundred years ago called Roshafuco, and he wrote that death like the sun is not to be looked at directly. You can only look at it through a filter. If you try and look at it directly, you'll get blinded. It'll be too much. And societies provide various filters. They can be rituals, they can be religious

belief systems, but also they can be various death professionals who, as it were, protect us from the directness of experiencing human remains. You mentioned that we do need a filter, and how much of this is rooted in a prudish modern western need for that kind of distance? Well, need for that kind of distance? Well, I'm an academic, so I'll say yes and no. I think pretty much all societies have created a filter of one kind or another between themselves and death, not least afterlife beliefs, which somehow soften the awful reality of death. But I think it has been argued, in fact, the famous sociologist Norbert Elias argued some decades ago, that civilization, certainly as we know it in the West from the 18th century, has entailed an ordering of our bodily functions um we have toilets we don't just um do our business in the street which is what used to happen in the middle ages um we don't eat with our fingers

we use knives and forks and in fact one of the ways in which in the colonial days the colonists quotes civilized the natives was to teach them to use knives and forks and one way in which we civilized two-year-olds is to teach them to use a knife and fork. Don't eat with your hands, dear, it's rude. You know, that kind of thing. And all sorts of other bodily functions. You know, we teach two-year-olds not to pick their nose and stick the fingers up all sorts of places, you know. And that is the mark of a civilized person according to Norbert de Lass. And that is the mark of a civilized person, according to Norbert de Laas, and that's what civilization has become. So in that kind of a context, a decaying human cadaver is a particularly uncontrolled, unordered part of our, example of our physical body if it's not properly looked after in coffin engraved you know put in a grave or or whatever or if it's recently dead um looked after by the funeral director and and so

forth so it's not just it's not just death it's actually our bodies in general that modern civilization likes to control and order and keep in the right place. It's chaos then. It's chaos. It's uncivilized. It's savage. And therefore scary and therefore makes us more afraid of like the saber-toothed tiger in our unconscious or something like that? Yeah, something like that, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, so we have funeral directors who look after recent remains. We have museums and nice glass boxes that protect us and yet enable us to see skeletal remains from old and Egyptian mummies and so forth. But it's all been mediated and controlled and looked after, yeah. Our PhD student talks about how corpses or human remains

when displayed by certain artists can perform narratives in contemporary society. Does that make sense? Oh, indeed it does. And that's what they do with archaeologists and pathologists every day of the week.

When a pathologist is doing a post-mortem, it is looking for a narrative of how the person died. And when an archaeologist is digging a grave, and about half the stuff that ancient cultures left behind were graves and grave goods, the stuff were buried with bodies. They are looking to these remains to find a story, not only about the dead, although that can be part of the story as well, but sometimes the whole culture. You've got to somehow extrapolate from a few remains, a few pots and things left with them to learn about a whole culture. when inspected, well, certainly through the expert eye of the pathologist or the archaeologist, or interpreted through the creative skill of the artist.

Well, thanks very much for talking to us. Yeah, it's been absolutely fascinating. Thanks so much. It's been a pleasure. Good luck with the rest of the program. Tony Walter is a professor of death studies at the University of Bath in England. PhD student Miriam Nafti is back with us to help tie up the threads of the ideas we've heard so far. Miriam, could you pick up on this idea of the dead performing narratives for us?

We're creating these sanctioned means of encountering the dead. We're able to touch them, to view them, to buy them, to display them. And in so doing, as Mr. Walters or Dr. Walters has said, that we need these institutions to filter, to essentially remove the experience of death from our sphere. And the artists are doing that as well. And so in performing these narratives, they've created new biographies and new ethnographies for these remains. So the infant heart in that camera, the body parts, the array of body parts that are on display in a Joel Peter Witkin print. We don't know anything about these individuals, how they came to be, their deaths, their names, their life experiences.

But when Joel puts them together in a tableau amidst fruit and flowers, and Wayne puts an infant heart in a camera, we learn about their personal experiences. We are understanding Wayne's life and need to connect with his dead twin. We're understanding Joel's experience of life and redemption and his need to create these conduits for an authentic experience and also the sacredness. So in that way, they're very similar to what institutions are relaying about the dead, these narratives that we come to when we see mummies on display or archaeological remains. We're learning about these ethnographies. Miriam, you've heard the whole show now, and being completely frank and honest with us,

how well does this help explain what you're doing with your thesis? I think you have a good overview of it, the introduction for the most part. It is still huge. There's still so much more to cover. And it gives you an idea of the extent to which we are circulating the dead, being near the dead. And like Harrison mentions, that we need the dead. And if you were to take the dead away from us, that we would be disoriented. And that includes the undisposed dead. I wanted to bring that forward. That includes the undisposed dead.

I wanted to bring that forward. That includes the undisposed dead. I wanted to bring that forward. As Miriam said, we were just able to skim the surface of her work. But I still find it exciting that Canada is cooking up a world-leading death scholar. I honestly didn't even know there were death scholars. And by the end of all of this, I think I'm getting over the ick factor when I think of bits of human body parts telling us stories. It's less creepy now and it's more eye-opening.

You are listening to the very first episode of our series, Ideas from the Trenches, which originally broadcast in 2014. Miriam Nafty successfully defended her PhD that same year. Since then, she's continued work as a forensic anthropologist, attending and consulting on crime scene investigations involving human remains. She also continues to document public and private interactions with the dead. She's an associate adjunct professor at McMaster University. As for the two artists you heard in this episode, they are both still active, and you can see images of their work by searching their names, Wayne Belger and Joel Peter Witkin. This episode was produced by Tom Howell and Nikola Lukšić, with technical production from Dave Field, Danielle Duval, and Marco Luciano. Lisa Ayuso is our web producer.

Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.