Nothing Sacred

Nor dread nor hope attend

A dying animal;

A man awaits his end

Dreading and hoping all.

W. B. Yeats (Death, 1933)

Up the street from the Frank Gehry-designed library, across from The Church of Scientology's 'L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibit' and nestled amidst such diverse entities as The Cave (Private Nude Dances), The Hollywood Wax Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Mann's Chinese Theater, Ripley's Believe It or Not, and Bob's Frolic III, stands the newly opened Museum of Death.

Arriving in the midst of the half-billion dollar revival of Hollywood's 'Walk of Fame' (which was never anywhere near as glamorous as Tinsel Town legend would have it), the Museum of Death is perhaps an omen that, despite the city's best efforts, Hollywood will never acquiesce to the sanitisation that Times Square has suffered. Hollywood is just too slippery; its natural weirdness and love of the macabre just too deeply entrenched. Even today, walking down Hollywood Boulevard, one is struck by a recurrent style - an incongruous mixture of Wild One-era Brando, Lord Byron, Sid Vicious and Daisy Mae - that is endemic to Hollywood. It's the look sported by the band X and owes a lot to the films of Kenneth Anger (who still pops up, phantom-like, around these parts). Betty Page haircuts and black Victorian gowns; skinny, tattooed arms and biker boots; poodle skirts and pierced labia - is it any wonder then that the Museum, which was founded by Cathee Schultz and her husband, J. D. Healy in 1993, has received more media attention after just one month in Hollywood than all its six years in San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter?

Schultz and Healy both studied art and spent eight years running a small gallery where they showed an eclectic group of fringe artists/musicians, including a young Raymond Pettibon. The Museum of Death began as a kind of interventionist social sculpture, a Dadaesque prank designed to stir up the shit in sleepy San Diego. It has subsequently evolved into something unclassifiable, adrift in the limbo between art and pop culture, education and tourism. Like a 3-D punk 'zine, the Museum has a did-it-at-Kinko's feel that makes it even more unnerving. With a permanent collection of some 400 objects and photographs (including an electric chair, guillotine and antique morticians' apparatus), the Museum presents displays devoted to such subjects as the Manson Murders; coffins from around the world; 'The Horrors of War'; train, plane and automobile fatalities; the Kennedy assassination; the original letters and artwork of famous serial killers; executions (including a badly stained T-shirt worn by a man put to death in 'Sparky', Florida's infamously short-circuiting electric chair); and the Heaven's Gate Cult. In fact, the Museum's most recent acquisition is one of the bunk beds from the Heaven's Gate house, bought at auction for $120.

Of all the things the Museum claims, however, perhaps the strangest is the idea that it serves a therapeutic purpose, functioning, as Schultz sees it, 'as a necessary outlet for grief in a world where death is no longer celebrated'. Certainly, in San Diego, the Museum became a favourite stopover for policemen and paramedics on their way home from work. It was a place where they could talk about the horrors they'd witnessed with impunity, over a beer and a laugh. But one has to question whether such moments are about grief at all. Perhaps, in dealing with death, such people are simply looking for a way to make light of it and the Museum is a place where death is conveniently reduced to a harmless joke.

The Museum revels unabashedly in the messier side of death, presenting utterly gruesome images that frequently send squeamish souls rushing for the door (or the toilet). The graphic photos of accident victims, burn victims, torture victims, murder victims, autopsies, suicides, executions and mass graves are relentless and assaulting. It is interesting how, even in the jaded wake of so much Hollywood gore, these images read as 'real' and provoke uncontrollable emotional and even physical reactions. Sitting in the video room and watching grainy footage of bodies falling from burning buildings or a careless pedestrian smashed apart by an on-rushing train is truly disturbing; it made me reconsider Hal Foster's supposition that, in recent years, there has been a 'general shift in conceptions of the real: from the real understood as an effect of representation to the real understood as an event of trauma'.

At the Museum of Death we are confronted with real trauma, scenes of human bodies reduced to impossibly abject states. Significantly, one of the photos, haphazardly Xeroxed and stuck on a corridor wall, is the famous image of a Chinese execution that Georges Bataille discussed in Tears of Eros (1961). The image depicts a man being dismembered alive. His arms have been severed and his chest muscles sliced off so that you can see the rib cage. One of the executioners is working on his leg with a saw. Bataille's interest was in the correlation between physical torture and ecstasy - the rapture he sees in the victim's face. But it is also possible to locate this image, as Rosalind Krauss does, in Bataille's writings on the social realm, in which bodies are dehumanised, made abject, and converted to waste by State systems. Certainly, issues of power and the nature of the sacred underlie much of the material in the Museum of Death. Unfortunately, this critique (or even an awareness of the possibility of this critique) is totally absent from the Museum, which, in the end, makes it an unwitting participant in transforming the human body to an object of disgust. Neither art nor entertainment, the Museum engages in the worst kind of punk hucksterism at the expense of human dignity. I'm not suggesting that these images should not be seen, I'm simply stating a heart-felt conviction that by eliminating any sense of what is sacred about death, the museum also eliminates what is sacred about life.