Monsters, monstrosity

Not so long ago, Old Ken, the Famous Anthropologist, and some other friends were sitting around the proverbial campfire in London-town, rappin' about this and that. Artist friend Rob Worley, whose ceramic "Skull" (2002) can be seen above, was talking about a sculptural commission he has received and the talk turned to the place of monsters and monstrosity in his work more broadly: see http://www.robertworley.com/sculpture.htm .

Quite a raconteur, Rob told us an amazing story about how, in his childhood, he had seen an image in perhaps National Geographic or some other source that had a formative effect. It was a human skull from a pre-Columbian meso-America that had been wrapped in textiles and transformed into a little monstrous mannikin. Now, Rob must have remembered some greater detail than this because, having received a fellowship to support his sculptural work, he set off to find this actual object.

Turns out, the object was produced by the Taíno culture of the present-day Dominican Republic and it is currently kept in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in Turin, Italy. As Rob told it, this museum is not easily accessible to the public (or at least his strange object with its incorporation of human remains is not) so he had to blag his way in. When he did so, here is what he saw (photo thanks to the Famous Anthropologist):



Pretty incredible, eh? Well, no less interesting was what appears in the front page of the entertainment section of today's La Times:



This is a still from a forthcoming animated film called "9" wherein cloth doll-like creatures such as that which we see above (admittedly Old Ken has altered the image to remove an eye, but I'm sure you can get the general resemblance) are terrorized by "vicious, robotic monstrosities." Coincidence, or maybe something more?