Franz Xaver Messerschmidt
Hello, friends. Welcome to another very special episode of The Irrationally Exuberant. So, three or four weeks ago I sat in my kitchen and, under the watchful, semi-mocking eyes of my wife and children, spit into a tube until I could spit no more, then mailed it off to the good folks at 23andMe to be tipped and toppled and spunned and broken down, analyzed and digitized and turned into data in an easy to read e-document detailing the very building blocks of the meat machine that is Reid Messerschmidt, as well as some information on the meat machines that proceeded me, my ancestors.
It had never occurred to me to do this before. I’m an artist, goddamnit! A man of feelings and knowledge! What business of mine is my disgusting body? And god knows I love a good story, but my ancestors? I’ve known a good swath of them over the years and, while some of them are great and a few I really love, there’s not a one whose kinship is a matter of personal pride. Gratitude, sure, but not pride. Still, my wife, understandably, I suppose, wanted to know what horrible syndromes and diseases would ultimately kill us and our children.
“Listen,” I said. “I know I’ve probably given my beloved offspring Clinical Depression and Alcoholism, do we really need to delve further? They’re going to start resenting my building blocks.”
She believed we did, and I was not uncurious, so a kit was ordered. Everything that could be known about me would now be revealed for a paltry $125. I only hoped it wouldn’t ruin my life, send me spiraling down a depressive, dissociative abyss, ultimately leading to madness.
On the other hand, I’d heard of people finding out their father’s were not really their father’s, and that sounded appealing.
Well, all of that information is now here, in front of me, in an email that I have printed out, because I am old fashioned, even at the expense of our fragile ecosystem.
Some of the information – most of it – is unsurprising. The genetic scientists in their corporate laboratory have discovered that it is likely that I have dark brown hair, blue eyes, and a taste for sweets. Bullseye! These things are true. They also found it likely that I have a muscular, athletic build. This is slightly less true. They further determined that I am unlikely to transmit a propensity for any horrible syndrome or diseases to my kids. Aside from the Clinical Depression and Alcoholism, of course.
Lucky them!
The scientists have also discovered some relatives of mine who were also coerced into sending this deeply personal information through the mail to strangers. Some of them I am aware of. Others I am not, because they are third or fourth cousins and I could not care less about them or their building blocks.
There was no conclusive information regarding my paternity.
But, buried amid all of this semi depressing data about the fundamental makeup of myself – easily communicated in a medium length email and indicating no particular gifts or promise – is one surprising tidbit. A tidbit I had long suspected, and has now been confirmed.
I, it turns out – and you may want to be sitting down for this – come from the same genetic line as Franz Xaver Messerschmidt!
(dramatic sting)
If this doesn’t spin you into a tizzy of excitement and envy or even touch off a glint of recognition, allow me to tell you about my Uncle Franz: He was an eccentric 18th Century Austrian sculptor responsible for the famous “Character Heads”, a series of 64 tin-lead alloy and alabaster busts of his own head, each displaying a different, peculiar, often extreme facial expression.
There, you are now free to spin into that tizzy of excitement and envy.
I have known about Franz for many years. Messerschmidt is not the most common of names, and there are very few famous individuals who bear it. Really, there’s only the despicable Nazi inventor of the Messerschmitt, a German warplane prominent in WWII. The plane is spelled differently – with a tt at the end instead of the truly baffling dt concluding my surname. Doughy middle-aged men with terrible beards who are far too invested in Nazi trivia and mostly work at gas stations mostly don’t know this – the spelling difference – though, so I’m often forced into conversation with these degenerates, which has always been painful, and now, through both two masks and a half inch of plexiglass, is both painful and impractical.
Come to think of it, I don’t really know enough about this Messerschmitt fellow to call him despicable or a Nazi. It’s entirely possible that he was just a particularly gifted engineer and put together something he thought was wonderful and told his kids about and stayed up nights imagining all of the great things it could do and then it ended up a killing machine for a death cult army led by a lunatic with a memorably terrible mustache.
These things happen.
Regardless, his name is close enough that some Nazi association is to be expected, and has prevented much delving into the Messerschmidt past, as you’re sure to come across Nazis pretty quickly and nobody needs that in their life. I’m told my great grandmother had a Nazis flag in her home, and that’s about all I need.
A quick story about her, because this is my show and I’ll do what I want:
At my great grandma’s memorial service, after the funeral, the pastor – who had not known her – asked if anyone had any good memories of their time with her that they’d be willing to relate.
Nobody in a room of every living person she’d ever known said a word for a solid 3 minutes. She was an awful woman.
Finally my Dad – with his first and last selfless, heroic move – stood up, walked to the front and said, “She made good creamed peas.” Everyone solemnly nodded in agreement, sighed with relief and exited the memorial to maybe have a smoke or discuss more important things like the weather and football or how good they were at basketball in high school.
The moral of this story, like all stories with a moral, really, is don’t be an asshole.
Anyway, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt is different. First, he was not a Nazi. Maybe a Monarchist – he did some work for Austrian royalty – but that’s not so bad, in context. Second, and most importantly, he was a fucking artist, as am I. He made artistic heads by forcing earth to do his will and I make heady art by forcing words to make a podcast, which they couldn’t possibly want to do. “My god!” they must think. “Couldn’t he have made us into a beautiful poem on some paper in a book like respectable words instead of this hideous spoken nonsense broadcast into the void?”
Cram it, words, I’m in charge here, more or less.
Uncle Franz’s art has been immortalized more than mine, but I’ve no doubt that in 300 years from now someone will be creating a podcast about this show too, probably via a laudatory psychically transmitted, immersive futuristic tableaux or something. Or maybe the future is more dystopian and they’ll create the tableaux from sticks, rocks, and trash or crude drawings on the walls of a cave – the circle of life and all that. Either way, I’ve no doubt it will be a tableaux and I am honored and humbled by the gesture.
Also, Franz was a depressive recluse with a shaky hold on sanity and I’d bet dollars to donuts I’ll end up the same. I’m well on my way already, sitting in the dark, in my basement, alone, typing and doubting myself even while projecting bravado, staring into the glassy eyes of the taxidermic gator head on my desk, imagining the gator telling me that none of this is very good.
Kindred spirits, and, as it turns out, actually kin.
The moment I saw the first Character Head, as they’ve come to be called – Uncle Franz never put a name to them – I was smitten. They are deeply weird and weirdly modern. Out of context you’d assume they were an inspired conceptual project from some pre-Burroughs Bohemian of the 40s, maybe someone who made time with Buñuel or, probably more likely, given their shared nationality, Fritz Lang. One of the weird but not so weird as to be unpalatable pre-war outré art guys. A pre-irony guy with ironic leanings.
Their modernity comes from their simplicity and a very modern sense of humor, though I doubt the artist had humor in mind when he made them.
They are difficult to explain. If you want to see them, you know, the internet, obviously, but this show’s artwork also features two of the heads – the ones known as The Vexed Man (the brownish one in front with an aggressive frown), and The Yawner (the gray one in back that looks much more like he’s screaming in despair to me, but probably a lot of the power of the piece comes from the unification of existential terror and ennui or something).
The heads in the pictures are cheap, smallish imitations that I bought on Amazon – there are a few of the heads you can own for under $100, and I have all of them. I wanted them as the artwork for the show for obvious reasons – they look cool and have a personal meaning, but also as a gentle, winking siren song to anyone who actually knows who the fuck FXR is. So I set them among some plants in my yard to represent the complex relationship between man and nature and snapped some photos. I think they look nice. It’s probably some kind of Copywrite violation, but no one has caught on because, you know, who’s listening really, and besides, he’s family! And long dead.
I’ve never had the opportunity to see the real heads in person as that kind of thing doesn’t typically come anywhere near Fargo, North Dakota – at best we maybe get Norman Rockwell and Ansel Adams, at worst terrible stadium versions of long out of fashion Broadway shows and the occasional Vatican relic – but they are just over a foot tall, slightly bigger than a real head. Some are metallic, chromish – the tin/lead alloy – and some kind of an aged beige stone – the alabaster. Each is just a head and a neck – no shoulders and no detail in the eyes, giving them a kind of blank, hypnotized, disconcerting look. Some of the heads are entirely bald, with lines etched on the dome to indicate a couple days worth of hair growth. Some are only partially bald, with longish flowing hair circling the crown, pushed back behind delicate, realistic ears. The bald ones give an impression of musculature and health – almost youth, maybe some vigor – but the others are an older man, thin and deeply lined, with more birdlike features. All of their necks are excruciatingly tensed, veins and tendons and Adams Apples, sometimes an impression of a second chin, bulging as though reacting to an electric shock – which they might be, as Uncle Franz was rumored to have been good friends with Anton Mesmer – namesake of mesmerism and purveyor of a crude form of early shock therapy. That’s probably not the case, though.
The story of Messerschmidt and his heads, like any good story, is riddled in mythology and speculation, and, as with most things, I prefer the mythology. It’s more fun.
The mythology is, basically, that Franz Xaver Messerschmidt was an accomplished sculptor and benefactee of royals in 18th century Austria before going insane, losing all employment, attempting to become well via Mesmer’s new methods, failing, moving to the country, living as a recluse and sculpting head after head of his own visage in various forms of distress to ward off the evil spirits that tormented him, specifically something he called The Spirit of Proportion, and ultimately dying by his own hand in an institution, the heads all but unseen, until his brother began to sell them off to various collectors and traveling exhibitions of oddities, to be scattered across the world, then reassembled and given the names they bare today and slowly discovered and even more slowly recognized for their brilliance and kinship to modern semi-absurdist art.
It’s a good story. The fact is that many of the heads seem to be of different people – experts can only agree that one is really the artist, the one whimsically titled “The Artist As He Imagined Himself Laughing”, which depicts an aging man in a fez with a semi-mad, dead eyed smile. But the more I look at them – and I look at them a lot – the more it seems to me that they are all of the same guy, in different peaks and valleys of mental health. My image of myself varies drastically depending on my mood, it was probably the same for my dear Uncle. And artistic license – even with oneself – is to be expected.
Anyway, I don’t particularly care what the real story is. Every character in that story is long dead and why not go with the good story over the true one? I’m not, as I think I have mentioned here before, fucking Tom Brokaw, after all. This is, theoretically a comedy podcast, even if there hasn’t really been a joke in a while.
Here’s a funny story to justify my genre.
My six-year-old son and I often do would you rathers before bed. The other night he came up with, “Who would you rather eat, Hulk Hogan or a regular old man?” I think he might be a genius.
Back to Franz.
As I said, there were originally 64 heads, but only 49 are still known to exist. There’s A Strong Man, A Hypocrite and A Slanderer – his head hung low with regret, The Ultimate Simpleton – the only one with a torso connected to the head, Inflicted with Constipation, and An Intentional Wag, among others. The names may not be what the artist intended, but you have to admit that they are pretty solid, even when they don’t really describe what I see at all. Any one of them would make a tremendous band name. I imagine the heads were created in a spirit of distress, in contrast to the light hearted posthumous names which were applied to the heads by the organizer of a traveling exhibit featuring them. The traveling exhibitors – glorified carnies – were probably a fair bit more mirthful than the reclusive, insane genius.
And I don’t really have to imagine them being created in a spirit of distress. There’s some documentation that this was the case. One man – I forget his name, and it’s not important, let’s call him Kent Butnickel – made a pilgrimage of sorts to Franz’s humble home, partly out of admiration, partly out of morbid curiosity. Rumors were, he’d lost his mind.
Butnickel’s visit did, in fact, confirm that Franz had lost his mind, at least to some degree. He spent his time jabbing and pinching himself while looking in a mirror, said it was to assuage the evil spirit that was assailing him – The Spirit of Proportion. He was also up to his ears in the heads, which, as an art piece are brilliant, but to find a shut-ins cottage filled with them would be alarming. We don’t know how long Butnickel stuck around, but I can’t imagine he spent the night.
And, really, that’s all we know for sure. There’s some record of him possibly selling miniatures of the heads, and the next thing we hear is that, after his death, his brother – my great great and so on Grandfather, perhaps? – took possession of the heads.
Or did they take possession of him?!
(dramatic sting)
No, they did not, or, anyway, we have no reason to believe that they did. He eventually sold them off and went about his life, continuing the genetic line that, ultimately, would lead to me and my children, just after my Grandpa Roy, who I once tried to show a book about Franz – he did the thing he used to do where he kind of grunted and then ignored you – and who knows who else. Perhaps a future librarian or some such noble being.
Next time on The Irrationally Exuberant, we’ll delve into my first experience with psychotropic mushrooms, meeting my Uncle Franz, and realizing that I have Clinical Depression and am just not really a drug guy after all.
Don’t miss it!
