Witkin's Backwoods High Art Freak Extravaganza

In Joel-Peter Witkin’s 1992 photograph titled “Cupid and Centaur”, the viewer finds several different animal skeletons, one of them human, combined to create the illusion of two unnatural creatures. The human skeleton is complete, down to the base of the spine, at which point Witkin has attached it to the body of an ostrich, in the middle of its neck. The length of the combined vertebrae is similar to that of an ostrich’s natural neck, so the viewer can more easily perceive these mutilated bodies as a single mythical beast. On the back of the ostrich sits what appears to be either a complete ape skeleton or else a human child’s skeleton with a baboon skull—the legs are long enough to rouse that haunting suspicion. The ape-headed creature, whatever it is, also has a large, fully-feathered bird wing fixed to its back, and sits slumped with its arm dangling, staring lazily off to the side like a sub-moronic jockey.
Witkin seems to intend the surrounding set to resemble a turn-of-the-century artist’s studio (the skylight, the large stained curtain, etc.)—or else Frankenstein’s laboratory—and goes further to impose this phony antiquity onto the photograph by physically distressing the surface with scratches and smudges when printing. These tactics come across as cheap ways to hide the irrefutable goofiness of Witkin’s whole project. All he’s really done is had the stomach and, I suppose, audacity, to work and play with the creepy-crawlies—bones, heads, fetuses, the like. However, his combinations of these things hardly bring anything to light. The viewer confronts his images like any circus-goer would: with a dull sense of wonder and a brief pang of disgust. At least, in this particular piece, Ringmaster Witkin is not directly exploiting the oddities of living human beings, as he does in much of his other work.
Perhaps the most obnoxious thing about this freak show science project is Witkin’s title, in which he designates his forms the two familiar mythological figures, Cupid, and the centaur. Although he does not even accurately recreate the figures as the legends call for—obviously Cupid was no monkey, and centaurs were part horse, not part ostrich—he seems to long for this connection to Greek Mythology as a way to pirate its legitimacy as high artistic source material. Besides, any recognition of combined animal forms calls back to mythology anyway, so there is no need for Witkin’s reiteration. Either he must think that the intelligence level of his audience is equivalent to that of a second-grader, or else he’s spotlighting the difference between all the “mainstream” mythology paintings and his outrageously radical combines with snotty sarcasm.
In general, what is irritating about Witkin’s work is the distance he goes to ensure his work a sense of fine art authenticity. I find his amalgamations in “Cupid and Centaur” interesting objectively, however, the excessive layers of artsy motifs (the black and white film, the faux smudges, the artists’ drop cloths and dried flowers on the stage) wind up absolutely smothering the minimal uniqueness that Witkin’s project might have had going for it in the beginning.