Man is nothing
What is finite and transient has relevance only in relation to what is infinite and eternal. Man can make nothing of himself, if he draws only on his own forces . . . . Led astray by humanism and blinded by the belief that man is the centre of the universe, he fails to recognize his true place in the order of things. He forgets the basis of his existence, and therefore he must perish.
--Excerpt from "Panderma 4," Carl Laszlo, art collector/publisher
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The artist in 1972, when he was the age I am today. |
By now you may have heard the Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger has died. The mainstream reaction is, of course, "The guy who designed the monster from
Alien died." I don't think a law school colleague of mine will mind if I quote his reaction, which I think is a fairly typical one:
His stand-alone art, without the context of a backstory (such as in Alien), was disturbing, but only to the extent that a Metallica t-shirt appealed to me as a high-school student. Weird and grotesque just for the sake of being weird and grotesque.
This attitude toward the works of Giger bothers me much more than it would seem is rational. He is, after all, just one artist. So what if people don't get it?
In case you can't already tell, this is going to end up being about a lot more than just Giger. This is about the purpose of art, or at least one purpose of it, and what that means to me.
Painter, sculptor, filmmaker, designer, and more, his work has spoken to me on a primal level since my youth. So I will agree with the popular sentiment that there is a juvenile appeal to his work. But art that is disturbing--even disturbing for the sake of being disturbing--is almost the only kind of art that I care about. It's why I care about metal, it's why I care about Lovecraft or Poe, and it's why I care about Giger.