'Interview with PIX Magazine 2004' Feb 2004 PIX What was the genesis of the concept? Tell me about the inspiration that led you to explore the themes of identity and mortality, generally, and skulls, specifically? AdeC The Skull Portraits work for me on lots of levels. The original idea was to present an image of who the person was beyond the façade as opposed to how the person appeared on the surface. The portraits are working as an actual record of the subject and also on a metaphorical level. I feel there is often a huge disparity between the appearance and what lies behind this, I have felt this in my own life a great deal: how people see you and who you really are. But then again how can you present ‘who you really are’? I find these sorts of questions enigmatic… As time has gone on I have become quite obsessed by collecting the unique perspectives that I am making of selected subjects. I am always fascinated to see how each subject looks and excited to offer them a sacred glimpse of their identity. PIX The portraits remind me of a meditation technique called Vipassana -- seeing things as they really are -- in which one scans the body to sense what lies beneath the surface, revealing insight into the impermanent nature of the mind and body. Any familiarity? Any inspiration there? I can imagine the Tibetan lama had already seen what the X-ray revealed. AdeC I am very interested in Buddhism, in particularly the teachings of the Dalai Lama. I did a series of subjects from different religious faiths exploring different perspectives of mortality. I didn’t know of this practice in particular, although I feel the concept of what constitutes ‘the truth’ is problematic – I believe that there can only be different perspectives and therefore a sense of ‘the truth’ for each one of us (which of course may vary). I would say these images do at least explore the notion of ‘truth’ – objectivity however, can sometimes be a limited perspective on ‘truth’! The artist Shirazeh Houshiary points out that ‘an artist is someone who is capable of unveiling the invisible, not a producer of objects’ – I guess I would have to agree with that! PIX Who/what influences your work (generally and photographers, specifically). Do you identify yourself (or at least the skull portraits) with the Vanitas genre? AdeC I’m trying to create an art that is in some part sacred. I believe art is a special, sacred activity and has the capability to inspire people to think and meditate about some of the more profound and mysterious aspects of our existence – a contemplation of our own mortality is certainly a valuable activity in this line of inquiry. I think the Vanitas concept is really interesting as applied to portraiture as it offers each subject the unique experience to contemplate their own mortality – this would not have been possible prior to the invention of x-rays in 1899. PIX What's your process? You have the subject (or the skulls of dead subjects) X-rayed in a clinic? Do you just Photoshop the X-rayed images and blow them up? Digital prints? AdeC All my subjects are live and are taken to an x-ray facility where they sign an ethical protocol form acknowledging that the one-off full frontal exposure is purely for the purposes of art. I have done exposures in London, Nairobi, South of France, N.Y. and L.A. (I only did a profile once and that was for my mother’s Yorkshire Terrier who was one of the family and presented better detail in profile as the long snout did not present well on full frontal). My work used to be cibachrome but now they’re all digital prints, generally mounted onto aluminium sheet and gloss laminated. PIX Any particularly interesting anecdotes from working with any of your subjects (alive or not)? AdeC The scariest subject to work with was Kevin Fulton (from my last show at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London). He is still wanted by the I.R.A. and he warned me that if he was discovered in public then he would be gunned down with whoever he was with! The Chief of the Maasai was an interesting subject who requested his portrait commission after seeing my project in the Kenyan Bush – this involved having to charter an airplane and fly him into Nairobi to go to casualty! The most inspiring was the Tibetan Buddhist Lama who used the car journey to the facility as an opportunity to teach: in my case I benefited greatly from a lesson on patience in finding a car parking space… PIX Your latest series is Spies, correct? Working on a new one? What about the neon portraits -- can you describe them? Any other new photography projects? AdeC The spies series was the introduction of the double sided portrait concept – what is the inside without the outside? This series was more specifically exploring issues of identity, of hiding and revealing identity. Right now, I am doing a new series in Los Angeles of Movie Stars….starting with ‘The One’ from the Matrix. The neon portraits are based on the unique x-ray of the subject and the few I have been commissioned to produce have been made in Ultra Violet tube and one was remote control to be brightened up or dimmed down…Other than the movie stars series I am doing a new series of Beautiful Nudes – in these cases the subjects are only flesh deep! I am also doing an ongoing series of ‘Inspiring/Isolated Places’ invariably places I have found really inspiring such as a recent trip to Death Valley and Grand Canyon or isolated lake dwellings in Central Sweden. PIX I noticed the travel photographs. Have you done anything with them (exhibitions or whatnot)? Any other photography projects? AdeC I would love to exhibit my travel photographs of places that have inspired me, but have not been pushing them for exhibition as I am so tied up with other projects – but if anyone is interested please let me know! 'British Spies Series' by Melanie McGrath, October 2003 Alex de Cadenet made his first skull portrait in 1995. It was a self-portrait and it was, he said, an investigation into 'who I really am.' This latest collection of skull portraits - this time of spies and intelligence service officers - develops that theme. Who are spies? Are they self-constructions, mere bits and pieces of their spy personae or is there some essential self, beyond the reach of their manipulations? Which part of a spy is real? And which simply a deceptive mask? These skull portraits do not provide any answers, nor are they intended to. They are both fetishistic, in the sense of being symbolic objects whose power lies in their ability to suggest ideas beyond themselves and totemic, symbols for the guardians of souls. In another sense, of course, they are perfectly literal representations, two dimensional technological recordings of three dimensional objects, all of which happen to be human skulls. The skulls' totemic quality brings to mind de Cadenet's interest in the primitive. A few years ago, the artist created a 'field' of skull portraits in the Kenyan bush. They were there as markers, reminders of the first homo sapiens whose skulls were buried in the desert laterites of southern, northern and eastern Africa. In the eye of the artist, Africa appeared as a more authentic surrounding for what were, both in the skeletal and evolutionary senses, the foundations of the human face. No doubt on that occasion de Cadenet was calling too on the African tradition of masks and fetish objects. In many ways, de Cadenet's skull portraits are conceptually conservative, almost quasi-religious. There is something sincerely spiritual about them which seems, for good or bad, somewhat antique. The careful arrangement of the portraits, and their double-sided nature both bring to mind medieval triptychs which drew on images that were, in their time, banal in the sense of being everyday (Christ on the Cross, the Resurrection, the Virgin Birth) but also freighted with meaning. This disparity between the mundane quality of the image (a skull, a baby born in a stable) and its significance (physical mortality, consciousness, the immortality of the soul) is what creates resonance and numinosity both in the religious paintings and in these skull portraits. The idea represented in both is of mysteries hinted at but not revealed, surfaces that are not simply surfaces but containers of ultimate significance. Seen like this, Spies can be said to be a direct progression from de Cadenet's 2000 Religious series. Whereas the earlier series focussed on the nature of mortality, this latest concerns itself rather with identity and is, in that sense, the more contemporary. What unites the two is the idea that the skull is allowed only to hint at the concept. De Cadenet has himself said that what drew him to Spies was the 'secretive, mysterious nature of their work.' What he does not say, but undoubtedly informs the Religious Subjects and Spies as well as the earlier British Celebrities series, is the power of a particular surface, the x-rayed skull, to convey something more profound and intimate, something, whether it is about the nature of mortality, or identity that is, in de Cadenet's view, both more amorphous and more concrete than the image itself. Some might say that you can see x-rays of skulls in any hospital. Of course you can. De Cadenet's artistry lies precisely in his ability to convert these very ordinary images into something you have seen before but have never really noticed. For all his seriousness, de Cadenet is also a joker, and it is this dual nature of his work, both sincere and tongue in cheek. which places him beside certain of the Young British Artists who so infamously emerged to prominence in the nineties: Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas. These skull portraits are both playfully literal - the skull as literally 'who we really are' or 'who we are inside' (both phrases used by de Cadenet himself) - and a sincere metaphor for the extemporal (consciousness, the soul) and temporal (mortality, identity) aspects of the self. In contrast to the somewhat traditional symbolism of this series, de Cadenet has applied a more ludic, postmodern sensibility to their selection and presentation. Though the images themselves are profoundly intimate (the interiors of people's bodies) and individual (no two skulls look alike) de Cadenet's use of bright, almost plasticized colours, his emphasis on flat surfaces and use of hard, aluminium sheeting calls to mind the distanced alienated quality of Andy Warhol's iconic screenprints. Like Warhol, who thought of the surface as expressing the whole, De Cadenet plays with the idea of the skull being an 'internal surface' of the self. Like any good postmodernist, De Cadenet revels in conceptual contradictions. In his previous Celebrity Series he presented skull portraits without individually naming each, leaving the viewer to 'work out' who was whom. The series played with our preconceptions that the very idea of celebrity offers its viewer or consumer intimate access to celebrities. The immutability of the skulls clashed with the ephemeral nature of fame. In Spies the literal identity of the skulls is given both by naming providing a photographic portrait but how much of this literal identity conceals another, more essential one? Are the identities of spies amorphous, in a constant state of flux? Which is the 'real' spy? The face or what lies beyond the face? The Skull-Portrait: A Metaphysical Thing by Megakles Rogakos When placing Piero Manzoni’s “Merda d’Artista” of 1961 next to any of the untitled skulls of anonymous mixed-media craftsmen in Neolithic Jericho, one cannot but notice an inescapable difference of power: between the sacred and the profane. This is of course not to belittle the significance of Piero Manzoni’s work, and neither is this intended to suggest that wherever the skull is to be found in art it is with a significance of religious quality. Warhol’s obsession with the ‘Skull’ series since 1976 is the epitome of the skull as the celebration of popular superficiality. The skulls of Alexander de Cadenet’s art is a different genre of art altogether. The most important aspect of this art is his attempt to restore to the cranium its ‘grass-roots’ aura. Since the earliest times of civilisation the skull is singled out as the part of the body that deserves reverence for continuing to have a life of its own. In its peace and silence the skull exerts a magical and mysterious influence on the beholder as if dealing with the nature of existence, knowledge and truth. The skull then is metaphysical; suggestive of a physical reality that is external to the body and independent of things. This explains the role of the skull: to satisfy art’s necessity to incorporate a metaphysical dimension that is both spiritually uplifting and intellectually stimulating. De Cadenet sets out to produce an art of metaphysical dimension. With a firm belief that he has a sacred function to perform, de Cadenet makes art that is self-referential. His work is about the work and the skull is the essence of it. To behold his skulls is a transcendental experience. Despite being a portrait of the sitter, any skull resists the identity of its subject. Initially, de Cadenet may treat the sitter as a prize specimen by which to arrive at the skull-portrait; his specimens ranging in diversity from Adolf Hitler to an unnamed hermaphrodite. However, the particulars of his specimen¹s identity are confined in the title alone. Beyond its title the skull ceases to be particular and becomes cosmological. Rid of its subjectivity, the skull-portrait of de Cadenet becomes universal: a portrait of us all. De Cadenet¹s art is an intersection between the tangible and the intangible. Tangible is the physical x-ray with its record of the bony cranium. Intangible is the metaphysical dimension of the soul that remains invisible and unrecordable. Through the perspective of the x-rayed skull de Cadenet offers an experience that is essentially beyond natural portraiture. In spite of its ‘stuffness’ the skull-portrait of de Cadenet is literally a metaphysical thing.