Johanna Fateman on H. R. Giger
The sci-fi hellscapes of H. R. Giger (1940–2014) are curiously placid, as contemplative as they’re ominous of their ashen airbrushed desolation. The Swiss artist, maybe most well-known for his creation of the ambushing parasite predator in Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie Alien, didn’t—in his personal work—favor quick motion. The topics of his portraiture typically seem embalmed or asleep. Different compositions symbolize his bleak futurism by way of cropped views of sinister circuitry and coital hydraulics—the lubricated equipment of a sexed-up totalitarian posthuman world, both on pause or operating with grim effectivity.
Among the many earliest works on view in “HRGNYC” at Lomex was the silk-screen-on-aluminum Gebärmaschine (Beginning Machine), 1969, an apt introduction to the artist’s mythos and the post-Surrealist, dystopian Pop model he termed biomechanical. It’s a nonetheless lifetime of types, depicting the cross part of a gun loaded not with bullets however with fetuses, each armed and armored. Curated by Alessio Ascari and Alexander Shulan, the present featured a career-spanning array of Giger’s drawings, prints, and sculptures, loosely anchored by a give attention to his New York–associated initiatives, although no unifying theme was vital; the artist articulated his darkish imaginative and prescient with the conceptual unity and insistence of a prophet.
For essentially the most half, he was impervious to the traits of his time, however as a result of his world was so seductively expanded upon by generations of acolytes—artwork administrators, vogue designers, video-game creators, tattoo artists—one thing of a subcultural suggestions loop emerged. (Punk, goth, and industrial aesthetics, for instance, inflect his work.) Right here, pictures by Chris Stein of Blondie fame had been proof of Giger calibrating himself to the lighter New Wave vitality of New York’s downtown scene. Shot on set throughout video classes for Debbie Harry’s 1981 solo album KooKoo, for which she collaborated with Giger, the photographs present a goofy facet to the Swiss artist, for higher or worse. (Within the not-uncharacteristically juvenile cowl artwork for KooKoo—which is consultant of Giger’s strategy to the venture—Harry seems as one among his dreamy-eyed Egyptian-inspired intercourse empresses, her head and throat pierced straight by by big needles.) The shiny black Harkonnen CAPO chair, 1981—a throne of vertebrae and stacked skulls atop a base recalling that of Herman Miller’s Ergon chair—boasts a New York provenance, too. This work, the exhibition’s centerpiece, initially conceived for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s shelved manufacturing of Dune, turned a seat of energy in clubland when Limelight proprietor Peter Gatien commissioned Giger to design his VIP room in 1998.
Giger’s substantive engagement with town, seen as each muse and postapocalyptic city prototype, is extra obvious in a print collection from the early ’80s. In skyless vistas and disorienting topographies, infrastructural density and decay change into the idea of hallucinatory, rhythmic architectures. Whereas the sturdy verticals of N.Y. Metropolis XXVIII, Cross Reverse, 1981/1982, resemble skyscrapers—the dick-shaped subterranean prepare automobiles operating perpendicular to them indicating that the image will not be an aerial view of countless conduits however a frontal one—the semifigurative N.Y. Metropolis VI, Torso, 1980/1982, with its rear view of a comely cyborg skeleton plugged right into a community of tubes, offers no sense of perspective or scale. It may not depict an upright human-size physique, however fairly an immense facedown edifice belonging to an evil metropolis—one which has waited patiently, for millennia maybe, to emerge from the floor of an incinerated planet.
Such twinnings of unfathomable violence and hypnotic calm are on the coronary heart of Giger’s attraction. These forces are as hanging in his smaller preparatory drawings as they’re within the grander, extra polished works, delivering a constant image of the longer term—cataclysmic however not chaotic, with countless streams of anesthesia to quell its countless ache. Sure, you could survive nuclear holocaust solely to change into livestock in an industrial organ farm or a intercourse model for the AI gestapo, Giger admits, however you’ll by no means comprehend it. “In house nobody can hear you scream,” warns the classic Alien tagline; in Giger’s terrifying cosmos, you’ll by no means even strive.
— Johanna Fateman
