Sebastian Horsley: the performance artist who crucified himself
For many, the mere mention of performance art will bring to mind Serbian provocateur Marina Abramović. In the past, she’s invited audiences to pierce her skin, point loaded guns at her head, look into her eyes for 736 hours and watch her throw clumps of her hair into a flaming pentagram. She is, for obvious reasons, regarded as the doyenne of performance art. But her notorious works are small fry compared to what Soho artist Sebastian Horsley did in the Philippines in 2000.
Horsley, an artist and notorious sex columnist, dealt in extremes. His writing was frequently described as derivative, and his art, while impactful, was generally regarded as mediocre. However, as The Guardian wrote in his obituary, “as a modern-day dandy, he was unparalleled”. Sebastian didn’t go in for luxuries. Indeed, the focus of his drawing room was an extensive collection of human skulls. Famed for his witticism and scathing one-liners, he occasionally fell into drug-induced bouts of paranoia and misanthropy. After being insulted by a woman, likely one who had refused his advances, he decided to send her one of his turds in a gilded Tiffany box. That’s the kind of man we’re dealing with here.
Like the turd incident, Sebastian’s self-crucifixion was a calculated decision. After a lucrative period playing the stock markets in the 1980s and becoming very familiar with Soho’s prostitutes (he once estimated he’d slept with around 1000 of them), Sebastian decided he wanted to paint the crucifixion of Jesus. But before he could do that, he first needed to understand what being crucified actually felt like. And so, in 2000, Horsley travelled to the Philippines, where he paid £2,000 to have a team of locals hammer five-inch nails through his wrists and ankles and hoist him onto a cross. He would later recall the “indescribable pain” of the experience.
Just before he lost consciousness, Horsley said he felt a rush of hallucinogenic endorphins. The whole thing ended when the footrest dislodged, and the artist fell from the cross. If his friend hadn’t caught him, the nails – which were subsequently framed and put on his wall – would have torn through his hands.
Horsley always had an odd relationship with death. He liked to sleep with a loaded pistol next to his bed so that he might accidentally pick it up rather than the telephone and unknowingly shoot himself. In June 2010, Sebastian was found dead in his flat in Soho, having suffered a heroin overdose. He was 47, which was already too old, in his opinion. Jesus died at 33.
