Reflection on a soldier in a pile of bones

This pic from a Russian gallery called "Retrospektiva" caught my eye yesterday: a soldier crouches over a pile of bones--mostly skulls--all bleached white. Holding up two femurs and a skull (and using his fingers and knee to hold the jaw in place), he fashions a skull-and-crossbones on his leg. The expression on his face, to my eyes, is inscrutable--parodying savagery or menace, perhaps, or maybe with his mouth open in imitation of the skull and jaw he holds.

It's the nonchalance of his stance over the skulls that shocks me, and the symbol he makes (whether it traces back to the pirate insignia or the symbol for poison isn't clear) is too literal a take on something that, at least here and now, has fallen to the innocent savagery of childhood--you build pirate ships out of Legos, you see the skull-and-crossbones on old bottles in cartoons. You certainly don't see the emblem built out of actual bones.

This is, of course, the crux of the image's intended humor, but the effect instead hits like terror. It reminds me of the difference between old fairy tales and their Disney counterparts--and, though I can't be sure the picture itself is Russian (also in the same gallery--shots from Lewis Hine and day-in-the-life pictures from Nazi Germany) the banality with which the soldier crouches in the bones and raises them up definitely feels so. Even the inclusion of Nazi shots in the image stock--one is of a women's hocky team, all proudly displaying the swastikas on their sweaters--speaks of a comfort with horror that we here don't (can't yet) share.

This seems contradictory, considering our comfort with other types of violence. We love the bravado of it. We love guns, we love beef. All that shit. But something here pushes beyond an American sense of spectacular violence. Something here is too banal, really--too everyday, too easy. And in this, maybe, is its horror.