Some Say the Devil Is Dead
Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe | Tolka, Issue Two, June 2022
In 2008, Marcella Beccaria, curator of the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, commissioned a solo exhibition by celebrated artist Roberto Cuoghi. Šuillakku – as the show was to be titled – would represent lamentations for the fall of the ancient Assyrian city Nineveh. The pièce de résistance was a sculpture of Pazuzu, a fiendish demon of evil spirits and keeper of frigid winds which were thought to bring blight, famine and pestilence. The Met Museum’s description of Pazuzu offers: ‘He stands on two legs and has human arms ending in claws with two pairs of wings, a scorpion’s tail, a snake-headed erect penis and a horned, bearded head with bulging eyes and snarling canine mouth.’ Cuoghi’s nineteen-foot-tall Pazuzu dominated the third floor above the entrance to the castle in Turin, a towering threat keeping watch over the unwitting visitors.
Cuoghi recalls an incident towards the end of the exhibition at the Castello, when he set about trying to transport Pazuzu to London. The statue was to be displayed on the roof of the capital’s Institute of Contemporary Arts – ‘so the demon from Mesopotamia had to wait for the permission of the Westminster Council, Royal Parks and Crown Estate, the Office of the Queen. After a week of silence, an objection arrived: ‘Obscene’. They requested crotch photos and the measurements of the demon’s penis, and everything had to wait three more weeks. No one had heeded one obvious particular: ‘Pazuzu is not a classical nude,’ Cuoghi said.
Fifteen years later, a historic town in County Clare seems to have stumbled across its own incarnation of Cuoghi’s Pazuzu: the statue of a púca. Conceptualised by sculptor Aidan Harte, it draws on Ennistymon’s equine heritage as the centre of an annual horse fair. Harte’s design was selected in a competitive process through open tender. But when plans for the sculpture were unveiled to the public, it drew conflicting opinions ranging from beautiful and fantastic to sinister and grotesque, eventually gaining a niche notoriety when a local priest denounced it as a pagan idol.
The grotesque – a word which derives from the ruins of Domus Aurea, Emperor Nero’s unfinished residence, owing to the corridors and rooms nicknamed caves, or grottes, where these frescoes were originally housed – is a style that often elicits unease, straddling the line between what critic Tim Smith-Laing terms ‘a playful aesthetic and something that feels far more threatening’. Harking back to animistic rituals and the worship of idols, it situates human belief in a space outside – often before – religion. A key characteristic of the grotesque in art is its apotropaic function: employing the monstrous to protect against even greater evil. Pazuzu, for instance, was noted for his ability to ward off the malicious influence of the fiercest Mesopotamian chimera Lamashtu, a blood-sucking, flesh-eating, child-slaying demon. Likewise, in regional variants of legends of the púca across Ireland, the creature has been known to intervene and rescue humans from the curse of wicked spirits or terrible accidents.
Formally trained in classical sculpture at the Florence Academy of Art, Harte admits he would have been the first person to call his work grotesque. In his practice, he employs a technique known as écorché – ‘flayed’ or ‘skinned’ – in which the figure is sculpted without skin in order to reveal the bones and musculature underneath. This remarkable physical detail, coupled with a human stance and expression, gives Harte’s Púca a resemblance to our species that perhaps accounts for the more disquieting effect the hybrid horse-man evokes for some. Harte speaks of a sort of spirit that animates his figurative sculptures: ‘There comes a stage where there’s a personality in the room other than yourself – it has its own charisma or its own presence, menace or humour. That’s the stage when I usually walk away from a sculpture because then it has become something. Those are the most powerful sculptures – they seem to have a presence of their own.’ Cuoghi talks about his art similarly, skirting a question concerning his relationship to his work with the response, ‘I cannot say that I love my work, because it isn’t that kind of emotion. It’s like raising an animal that could eat you. I wouldn’t know what to call that sort of affection.’
While the púca is rarely portrayed as a man-eating monster, a distinction reserved more appropriately for its counterpart the each-uisce, it remains a mythological highlight of Irish folklore, engendering a curious affection among its champions. A mischievous spirit, it can be, by turns, both malevolent and benevolent in its intentions. Accounts of its characteristics vary: it could appear with black or white fur, as a goat or a horse, rabbit or raven, wolf or cat, fox or dog, even a wild colt in chains. What is common to all accounts is that it is a shape-shifter, with the ability to assume human form and, perhaps more profoundly, the power of human speech. On 1 November, the day of the púca, it is believed to behave as an oracle, patiently prophesying the future for all those who approach for its advice.
This correlation of malign manifestation with guardian spirit tends to find expression most evidently, in the grotesque, through the gestures of the limbs. In Pazuzu’s case, the deity is always shown with its right hand raised, either as a blessing or a warning – ‘an imperative, like vade retro, to cure or to protect oneself.’ Cuoghi remembers a group of Japanese tourists taking photographs in front of the Pazuzu, smiling, with their hands raised: ‘It seems like they had misunderstood the position [of the sculptural gesture] as a wave of the hand,’ he says, noting the resemblance to the Japanese figure of the Maneki-neko – a ceramic cat with a raised paw often displayed at the entrance of a space to attract good fortune. Misinterpretations in the meaning of gestures frequently occur when translating the divine and the demonic across cultures and time, such as the case of the Egyptian child god Horus, appropriated by the Greeks as Harpocrates. Images of Horus depicted him with his finger resting on his chin – its tip just below his lower lip – the hieroglyph for child, which the Greeks mistook to be a gesture of silence, so Harpocrates became the god of silence and secrets in the Hellenistic pantheon. Harte’s Púca’s hands are jovially clenched into fists, but the artist encourages people to rub its big toe to invite good luck.
This talismanic quality of the sculpture brings it closer to the concept of a personal amulet – carried close to the body, rubbed lightly over the skin – than institutional artwork. Harte’s proposal for a life-size Púca, six and a half feet tall, was submitted in response to Clare County Council’s call for a work of art that would perform as a tourist attraction, aiming to increase ‘visitor dwell time’ in the town. True to the maxim ‘height is power in public art’, Harte’s Púca’s stature itself created a bit of a stir. Yet perhaps this is precisely the scale at which the figure of the púca is most effective, a scale that does not detract from either its mystery or power. Cuoghi recognised this as well, using the original dimensions of the first millennium fifteen-centimetre-tall statuette of Pazuzu housed at the Musée du Louvre to recast the demon as a six-metre bronze. The artist justified his statue’s commanding presence, that dominated the facade of the Savoy Castle, as congruent with the deity’s purpose. ‘Pazuzu is a watchdog,’ he affirmed. ‘The display case in the museum makes him fall asleep.’
Casting has currently been paused on the sculpture now colloquially referred to as the Púca of Ennistymon, and a decision on the follow-through or relocation of Harte’s Púca sculpture has yet to be confirmed. In the meantime, a small bronze version – Púca Beag – is on display at the Sol Art Gallery in Dublin. Harte affectionately refers to his Púca as a figure of chaos. Fittingly, his own rendition of the trickster has a lightly crazed look in its eye, an intoxication reminiscent of the wild god Pan. The line in Harte’s sculpture is gleefully kinetic; it revels in movement. For all the brouhaha it has created, its spritely appeal – that elusive, spirited presence – appears to remain undiminished. As I turn back at the door to catch its gaze, I can almost see the prankster pony gambolling off into the undergrowth, grinning.
‘Some Say the Devil Is Dead’ was first published in Issue Two of Tolka (Dec 2021). Issue Two is available to purchase here.
Photo credit: Karen McHugh
Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe is founder of the Play It Forward Fellowships, poetry editor at Skein Press and Fallow Media, and contributing editor with the Stinging Fly. Auguries of a Minor God, her first poetry collection, was published with Faber and Faber in 2021.
Photo credit: Gillian Hyland
