Feast of Fools, from the portfolio In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive and You Were Full of Joy

The surgical precision of Witkin’s work brings to mind the practice of dissection. The decomposed nature of the objects—which include amputated human hands and the autopsied corpse of an infant—recalls the photogravure technique the artist used to chemically carve the image into a printable plate. The compilation of such food items as octopus, grapes, and pomegranate references 17th-century Dutch still life, but with the inclusion of body parts Witkin deviates irreverently from the genre’s traditional focus on the sensuousness of ordinary objects. Does Witkin’s staged arrangement reduce human remains to the status of curiosities, or suggest profound connections between all forms of life? The work’s title, Feast of Fools, perhaps offers a clue. The feast of fools was a medieval Catholic ritual in which a low-ranking member of the clergy was elevated to the role of “Pope for a day” in a ceremony alternately considered reverential and blasphemous. Witkin’s work, too, captures the tension between homage and parody, between sacred and grotesque.