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The Fall Of Man Into Machine - Response To Giger

 



The Fall of Man Into Machine – Response to Giger

Impressions of Erotomechanics VII (1979)

By Swiss artist Hans Rudi Giger (1940-2014)


Reading Rainer Maria Rilke -


    'We live in a machine,

    and inner things have become the same as the outside,

    as if the soul were but an exhaust fume irksomely

                pouring from a loud engine.

    Things curl up in themselves ...

    like sick girls who have forgotten what love,

                            flowers'

 

Notes:

Human and mechanical forms

Biomechanoid – human is entangled in symbiotic relationship with mechanical world

Technology is no longer a tool – it’s become physiologically integrated – man is in servitude

Man is intimately involved with his creation

Woman figure is human, discernible – they are in profile – we (viewer) are looking on

Man is an object, a device, disembodied

Realistic representation

Clinical light

Highly stylised - Giger’s style in paintings are instantly recognisable

Compressed frame – claustrophobic, asphyxiation - horizontal frame (cinematic)

Engulfing matrix is technological and architectural, not organic

Figures are framed in an iron womb (Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam) – birth of twins

Minimal variability of colour - palette is black, grey and white, with occasional blue and sepia tones

Textures - metal, concrete, marble

Fossil-like, sculpturesque quality

Like relief sculpture (Chartres Cathedral)

Frozen action

Ecstasy and repulsion, sexuality and violence, life is suffering

Perverted – etymologically means ‘to turn around or about’ – bodies are contorted, twisted, inside is on the outside

Merging of human and machine - post human - is this a horrific vision of the future?

Organic forms with straps for maintaining integrity, exoskeletal

Spines, bones

Worms, snakes, tails, reptiles

Curves and straight lines

Atmosphere of Gothic church interior

Female skin - texture and colour of octopus

Nightmare, phantasmagoria, something disturbing, unnerving, macabre

Stark and compelling - once seen, never forgotten

Airbrush to create transition, merging

Strange intimacy – proximity of bodies, symbiosis of biological and mechanical

The Gnostic story in implied in Giger – the origin myth, fall of spirit into matter through the demiurge – here, in Giger, the fall of man into machine

Influences –

The Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych by Jan van Eyck (1430-40)

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch (1480-1505)

Saturn Devouring One of his Sons by Francisco Goya (1819-1823)

Also, Salvador Dali, Francis Bacon, the Art Nouveau of the French architect Hector Guimard and the Catalan Antoni Gaudí, the Fantastic Realism of the Austrian artist Ernst Fuchs, the sexualised dismemberments and reconfigurations of Hans Bellmer, and the erotic machinery of Marcel Duchamp

Literature is a source of inspiration - writers Samuel Beckett (‘his theatre especially’) and HP Lovecraft

Speculative – the tomb lid of the Mayan Palanque (so called) rocket man (603-683)

Bulgarian French Philosopher Julia Kristeva’s reaction to Giger –

“A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me radically as separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either.… [O]n the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me”

 

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