It might be said that the choice of H. R. Giger for a brief overview on a site mainly devoted to heavy metal is a predictable one; the only response needed to that indictment is that the work of the Swiss artist deserves all of the attention and critical scrutiny it can get at any opportunity. Giger’s visions, which manifested in our world via paintings, sculptures, architectural work, body art and design commissions for many different creative endeavours, are not only remarkable on their own but also hold sociological value, having left a subtle but incisive mark on modern popular culture through his contributions to projects of wide appeal and, above all, the profound resonance they established with certain particularities of the contemporary mind. Highly shocking and controversial at the time, his creations continue to inspire astonishment and fright through their fusion of flesh and machinery, the blend of pure terror with a dark eroticism and the seductive power of their dreamlike otherworldliness.
Born in the Canton of the Grisons, in Switzerland, in 1940, Hans Ruedi Giger began making a name for himself in commercial art, having his first posters printed and distributed by a friend’s company, while he worked at developing a very personal and idiosyncratic artistic language through drawings and paintings, many of which would later be compiled in the famous compendium titled “Necronomicon”, published in 1977. His unique style would begin to arouse the awe, admiration, disgust and sometimes outrage of his contemporaries, and it was only a matter of time before he began being sought for a variety of collaborations, most famously his design work in Ridley Scott’s iconic film “Alien”, and cover artwork for albums such as ELP’s “Brain Salad Surgery”, Magma’s “Attahk” and Debbie Harry’s solo debut “KooKoo”; an infamously controversial piece was also to be used as the cover of Dead Kennedy’s “Frankenchrist”, but, upon the label’s rejection, only ended up making it as an inserted poster. Within heavy metal, the inevitable sympathy between his sensibility and the genre’s practitioners began with his long collaboration with Celtic Frost, when they were still a newly-formed group named Hellhammer and timidly reached out to him to share their first recordings, believing their music and the artist’s work to be spiritually kindred. From this first contact, an enduring special relationship would blossom, resulting in his designs for the cover of the band’s “To Mega Therion” and the two albums of frontman Thomas Gabriel Fischer’s subsequent project Triptykon (Fischer would go on to become Giger’s personal assistant and co-director of his museum in Gruyères). Other notable work for metal bands include the covers for Danzig’s “Danzig III: How the Gods Kill”, Carcass’ “Heartwork”, Atrocity’s “Hallucinations” and the microphone stand of Korn’s frontman Jonathan Davis.
It has been said that Giger’s work reflects with special acuity the fears and anxieties of contemporary society, in particular the ever-expanding domination of technology and machinery and its potentially dehumanizing effects. The idea of an obscure power inherent in technology seems to be as old as humanity’s first technical undertakings, being present for instance in the magical connotations of metallurgy (including the “demonic” essence traditionally attributed to the metals) which survived in the symbolism of medieval alchemy. However, a monumental breakthrough was certainly signaled by the dawn of industrialization and all the developments that followed. The preoccupations of humanists who have tackled the subject lie not only in the visible damages of unbridled technological expansion but also on the spiritual effect that an almost entirely artificial environment completely mediated by all sorts of technical apparatuses can inflict on its denizens. The idea that humans become increasingly subordinated to their technical instruments and the systems that integrate them gains popularity as the march of technical advancement is consistently accompanied by a greater sense of bewitchment and submission before the power of technology and its revelations. By the time we get to the post-modern philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, the logic of the machine has been proclaimed the fundamental ontological instance. We could thus speak of a sort of gnostic machine-mysticism according to which the ultimate reality is not a heavenly, transcendental realm like in the ancient religious doctrines, but a world of seething, eternally clattering pulses whose infernal workings can only be glimpsed through the devilish trudge of machinery.
It is perhaps this world that is portrayed in the work of H. R. Giger; it is certainly a world other than ours (yet uncannily familiar). Giger is one of the few artists of his century who have successfully managed to spawn their own universe, with its own laws and distinctive features. Notice, for example, the relative absence of open spaces or visible sources of light. The vistas we’re presented with seem cloistered in claustrophobic, subterranean chambers or labyrinths. The beings that populate these environments appear to be intrinsically plugged into a system (and into each other) in a permanent state of simultaneous pain and pleasure, chained in a clutch of a machine-libido that pulsates like electricity through these imposing mechanisms. This orgy sometimes acquires a seemingly ritualistic presentation, but for the most part it assumes the contours of an inhuman process far removed from our common notions, such as sacred and profane, in which the human shapes are only instrumental or transitional technical appendages to the machine, echoing the aforementioned fears of the witnesses of the technological fusion going on in real life.
For art to be truly immortal, however, it can’t solely refer to ever-changing temporal matters but also say something about the immutable truths of life; this certainly applies to the work of Giger, as any closer look at his images after the initial shock will reveal certain shadows that will surely prove resonant with the onlooker, like desolation, distress and, perhaps most prominently, death. Death pervades all of Giger’s creations; in fact, its omnipresence is of such a degree that it effectively becomes diluted into a shade of the landscapes, like the salt in a saline water solution. After all, one of the implications of life’s merge with the non-organic is (at least from the point of view of the organic) death; Giger’s cosmos is one where life and death are indistinguishably mixed, an intermediate purgatorial realm beyond our usual conceptions (it’s appropriate to draw our attention to the frequent theme of tombs/sarcophagi and similar devices pointing to transitional states). More important, however, is the way the identification between life and death is reinforced by a series of persistent motifs: babies are represented as moribund and decaying, reproductive imagery (phalluses, uterine chambers, nude women in positions suggestive of sexuality or childbirth) appears always hand in hand with hints of decrepitude, orgiastic vigour combines with putrefying flesh and rusty metal and, overall, vitality seems inseparable from decay.
Stanislav Grof, the famous transpersonal psychologist and author of “H. R. Giger and the Zeitgeist of the Twentieth Century”, draws attention to the theme of the trauma of birth (popularized by psychoanalyst Otto Rank) as it features in the artist’s work: from the menacing depiction of spaces and structures similar to uteruses or birth canals to the anguish of the infants in his paintings, the trauma of being thrown into the world (and the resulting resentment and regressive longing for non-existence) is suggested in a great number of Giger’s paintings. From this ejection onwards, the individual will be irreversibly subject to host of unsparing laws and wear a body that will inevitably suffer and decay until an eventual final failure. Emil Cioran remarked that “nothing is a better proof of how humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.” Perhaps we could say that Giger’s work recaptures this primordial intuition of the tragedy at the heart (and start) of human existence and the immanence of death within all of life’s vital processes.
Thus, we have here a great example of how the apparently alien landscapes that define the artist’s realm seem to reverberate directly with the contents of the unconscious, certainly one of the main reasons for their psychological resonance with the audience and the collective imagination of a culture that tries with increasing effort to repress any thought of death as much as possible. These sights evidently came from Giger’s own psychic depths (he confessed to suffering from nightly terrors and using his work as an outlet to “exorcize” the visions that haunted his nightmares), and this proximity they have with the depths of the psyche has led some to categorize his work as surrealist.
The world of Giger’s paintings and sculptures is one filtered by this primordial, birth-traumatized id; everything is stripped back except the bare realities of birth and death (which are identical), suffering and sexual ecstasy. Of course, this isn’t to say that his art is conceptually limited or easily “explainable”; after all, these are observations that merely reflect my own engagement and impressions of his work. The conscious mind is ultimately powerless in its interpretative dealings with the contents of the unconscious, specially if they’re presented in such a viscerally authentic form as this. In any case, when it comes to art, the most important thing is the experience it provides, and we are fairly convinced that no (attempt at) analysis can diminish the powerful effect that Giger’s art has always had on those who come across it, and which has predictably led to many rumors about the artist and a sinister aura surrounding his person (complete with accusations of witchcraft, satanism and perhaps other, more outlandish claims).
We conclude with the following words from Fischer, the Celtic Frost/Triptykon frontman who enjoyed a personal acquaintance with the artist; they seem to delineate a profile that I feel to be typical of any creator possessed by genius:
“Giger himself did not dwell on analyzing his paintings, however. In fact, to many eager admirers (such as me, for example) it sometimes felt almost anticlimactic when confronted with the detachment Giger exhibited with regard to the deeper symbolism of his work. Moreover, his occasional superstition – sometimes even anxiety – served to keep him from becoming too involved in deeper studies of the occult intricacies and effects of his work. If anything, he sometimes viewed his paintings in a somewhat abstract, astonished manner, almost as if pondering what had caused him to find the inspiration that led to the finished work. Carmen Giger [the artist’s wife] related a moment to me when Giger walked through his newly completed museum with her, openly wondering if all of these paintings had really been created by his mind and hands. Perhaps this explains why he frequently felt fascinated, at times even surprised, upon hearing other people’s analysis of his creations.”
H. R. Giger (1940-2014)
