Also on the theme of Yellowstone, very highly recommended for children, and distributed by Farcountry Press, is "Yellowstone National Park: A Cautionary Coloring Book" (
Caput Mortuum Books, 9780692747254, $8.95, PB, 32pp).
The engaging flatscreen work Company of Colors, Shadow Box 9, 2009, meanwhile, reinterprets live images of viewers as an array of little rectangular palette chips; it informed at least one of them that his skin tone was an unfortunate combination of
caput mortuum (literally "dead head") and bister (a brownish -gray pigment traditionally made from soot).
In this regard, the exhibited trophy serves as what Marx calls a
caput mortuum, the dead-head trace that remains to haunt all attempts at occluding the intimacy--or even the inextricability--of law and lawlessness, justice and injustice, in gold-rush California.
The latter is a humanist, even a sentimentalist, in abstract disguise, whereas Soulages illustrates Adorno's idea that "abstractness in art signals a withdrawal from the objective world at a time when nothing remains of that world save its
caput mortuum."
In her series "
Caput Mortuum," 1990, (placed under the rubric of fire in this show), photographic self-portraits were juxtaposed with mutilated plaster casts of the artist's head.