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'How can you paint the crucifixion without being crucified? To me it makes perfect sense to get close to it,'
In August 2000 Sebastian Horsley travelled to the Philippines to experience a crucifixion.
'Hours of limitless pain, cycles of twisting, joint-rending cramps, intermittent partial asphyxiation and loss of tissue fluids.' 'Jesus was,' says Horsley,' a glorious revolutionary.'
He travelled to the Philippines with Dennis Morris, a photographer who became known from his work with the Sex Pistols and Bob Marley, and the artist Sarah Lucas, who recorded the proceedings on film.
Horsley was nailed to a cross in the Filipino village of San Pedro Cutud in order to gain an insight into crucifixion for a series of paintings on the subject. In doing so, he passed out with pain and then fell from the cross, taking the nails with him when the straps holding his arms broke.
The Filipinos, for whom the crucifixion ceremony is an annual event, claimed afterwards that God had wanted to spare his painter’s hands, although Horsley disputes this.
Talking about his reasons for putting himself through this ordeal, he says "An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering, in order to feel and communicate more,"
"I wanted to break the limits of life, to test the boundaries of reality. I wanted to hack off the ball and chain of personality. To see with real eyes - painting not to imitate reality but to make it real. No pain in the artist, no pain in the viewer. No tears in the artist, no tears in the viewer."
'I have to say, Easter never really meant anything to me. That season when we remind each other of the judicial murder of a Jewish revolutionary two thousand years ago by distributing chocolate eggs to the children of people we dislike.
But then I got crucified. Now, Im not religious. Well its true I worship beauty, and beautiful people like myself, but I never seem to be able to find the right church. But Ive always had a bit of a thing for the crucifixion. A host of ideas are seen to meet at the site. God and Religion, good and evil, life and death. A man should always test himself in the most superficial areas of existence.'
Sebastian Horsley's memoir Dandy in the Underworld is available to buy from Amazon
Tags: sebastian horsley crucifixion
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