Cemetery Piss logos

by Lane Milburn

by Chris Calabrese

Hermann Nitsch

Hermann Nitsch, Viennese Actionist and founder of the Theater of Orgies and Mysteries, was recently featured in the book Blood Orgies: Hermann Nitsch in America.  I got to take a look at the book and watch some videos of his performances and became really excited about his work. These videos were posted by Incubate, a showcase of independant artists and performers in Tilburg, Holland, and show an “action” from 1982. I strongly recommend viewing these full-screen.  This passage from the Saatchi Gallery website gives a good, concise summary of Hermann Nitsch’s work:

Hailed by many as the Pope of Viennese ‘Aktionism’, Hermann Nitsch, together with Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, and Rudolf Schwartzkogler, reformed the face of sixties art, shunning the illusionary confines of traditional painting and sculpture, reinventing an art that exists in real, corporeal, and violent terms.

Hermann Nitsch was celebrated and reviled in equal measure as he took the semblance of a pagan ceremony and incorporated robed processions, symbolic crucifixion, drunken excess, nudity, animal sacrifice, the drinking of blood, and the ritualistic incorporation of viscera and entrails. Even today, his audiences aren’t mere visitors, but active participants in his artistic liturgies.

Mt. Auburn Cemetery and the Forgotten Remains of the “Vanished Cemetery”

This past weekend I had made plans to visit Mt. Auburn Cemetery, a necropolis best known as a victim of vandalism and neglect.  In anticipation, I was searching for an old Baltimore City Paper article about the place when I stumbled upon another article that described a whole slew of interesting cemeteries.  So I decided to visit St. Vincent de Paul Cemetery, or the remains thereof, as well.

I found out that St. Vincent’s was the target of desecration for a period spanning three decades, starting in the 1950’s.  An area gang subjected its initiates to the gruesome task of exhuming a body from the graveyard or one of the mausoleums lining the edge and spend the night in the looted resting place.  Later, bodies were burned.  On one occasion, a ressurectionist dug up a freshly interred infant.

Between disposing of the bodies, selling the property and stopping the vandals, neither the church nor the city could come to a solution.  Finally, as the article linked above says, “the church got the authority to tear down the mausolea, bury the bodies, and stockpile the gravestones so vandals and thieves wouldn’t know where to dig.”  According to the City Paper, the gravestones were deposited behind a 19th century pony barn somewhere nearby.  With a city map in hand, a companion and I were able to locate what was left of the markers, eight years since the article was written and roughly three decades since the headstones were placed there.  The first four photos show the remains of St. Vincent de Paul Cemetery, or as Jane Bromley Wilson calls the place, a “vanished cemetery,” in her book, The Very Quiet Baltimoreans: A Guide to the Historic Cemeteries and Burial Sites of Baltimore.

I have wanted to visit Mt. Auburn Cemetery for quite some time.  The place looks abandoned for the most part, and large areas are so overgrown you can’t even penetrate them let alone see graves.  The “nice” part, in the northeast quadrant of the grounds, is populated by roughly hacked out overgrowth revealing overturned headstones, flooded tombs and garbage.  Towards the south, I found a small path maintained by foot traffic leading to a grave no longer marked by a headstone, with only a recently placed cross to signify that whoever is interred there is remembered by some one.  Beyond that is an area to which I could only reach the very edge, only to find grave markers, tires and refrigerator parts strewn about.  There is a dilapidated mausoleum or shed standing less-than-proudly to the west.  Near the entrance, as we noted on the way out, is the grave of  a Masonic woman whose status is marked by the pentagram and the letters “F.A.T.A.L” adorning its facade.  In this forbidding decor, the letters of the word “fatal” actually stand for “fairest among thousands, altogether lovely.”  And of course, there is the caretaker’s shed with a sign remorselessly revealing how this cemetery fell into such a state as it is now.

More Photos

Lightning Storms and Church Fires!

The summer before last, on August 2 (2008), the steeple of a church two blocks down from my house was struck by lightning and caught fire. Here are some photos of the aftermath.