Friday Q&A: 5/23/2014
…
Welcome to Friday Q&A. Every week, we’ll put up a question for the staff, friends, bands, and you, the reader, to answer.
We’re running a little light this round with the majority of the staff enjoying Maryland Deathfest. Stay safe everyone.
…
This Week’s Q
What was your favorite H.R. Giger work and what did it mean to you? Or, what is a particularly important piece of cover art in your metal maturation?
…
I’d have to go with his interpretation of Arnold Böcklin’s “Isle Of The Dead.” Not only does Giger do a great job at reinterpreting Bocklin’s imagery — the heart of the trees becoming this grotesque chasm that’s utterly black at its center, the ruined walls transformed into these wasp-built slabs — but he does fascinating stuff with this idea of the natural Gigerian world. Look at how clear that water is, allowing one to see deep into the island’s base. Is it even water? Is it liquid smoke, or amniotic fluid, or maybe some sort of naturally-occurring fluid glass? That, to me, was always Giger’s strong point, this concept that horror and darkness wasn’t built or designed but grew out of the landscape like some sort of horrible chitinous keloid.
…
…
…
To Mega Therion‘s cover is a Giger piece called “Satan I.” I love it for its immediacy, the striking imagery, and the mix of clever humor and darkness. Satan peers at us over a crucifix slingshot loaded with a communion wafer, three phallic tentacles waving around him, a grotesquery of the Holy Trinity. I always saw it as a metaphor for religious oppression: you’ll believe, or else. The true evil, though, are the people wielding violence to advance their spiritual agenda, hiding behind their Savior and using him as justification, unable to see that they are what they claim to hate.
Or maybe it’s that Satan himself — or evil itself — is behind religion and religious beliefs.
The story behind “Satan I” appearing on a Celtic Frost album is nearly as strange as Giger’s artwork. Weirdly, it’s also uplifting and affirmative. Warrior, fresh from a tortured youth, requested Giger’s attention, and in turn, the world famous artist befriended Warrior and took Hellhammer seriously at a time when few did. “Satan I” wasn’t commissioned; instead Giger gave the band permission to use the artwork so long as they in turn didn’t use it for merchandising or other profitable ventures. I think we can safely assume that your local teenage deathcore unit isn’t going to get a freebie from a world famous artist any time soon. . .or ever.
…
…
The Dead Kennedys album Frankenchrist came out in October 1985, when I was 14 years old. I barely knew what art was at that time, but I knew what punk was and I knew what the anti-establishment was. I listened to Dead Kennedys because Jello Biafra satirized everything about society’s hypocrisies that I recognized but could not articulate myself. They were already considered a “dangerous” band, and when the LP version of Frankenchrist came out with these strange horn parts and the insert poster of H.R. Giger’s “Landscape #XX,” or “Penis Landscape,” I knew something big had happened.
The artwork depicts rows of disembodied penises entering vaginas, all done in Giger’s sepia palette. One penis is wearing a condom. Biafra was brought to trial for distributing harmful material to minors, and though the jury did not convict him of obscenity, Alternative Tentacles never quite recovered financially.
Biafra asserted that he included the poster (he originally wanted it for the album’s cover art) because it was both a literal and a figurative representation of “people screwing each other over” and therefore an integral accompaniment to his songs about political corruption, unemployment, racism, and poverty.
That makes perfect sense, but to me the poster was really the first time that I had to confront the twisted ideas of art, sexuality, gender, pornography, anti-social behavior, and freedom of expression all wrapped up in one neat map-folded piece of paper. The poster excited me and I had to figure out why, and how it related to the music that I listened to and the way I felt everyday. I didn’t understand these thoughts at this level at the time, but thanks to Giger’s vision and Biafra’s confrontational use of that vision, I’ve had some success in figuring it out.
…
…
“Birth Machine” has always been my favorite Giger work, primarily because it is so understated. There’s none of the psycho-sexual implications and biomechanical miasma that’s commonly associated with Giger; just a cold, harsh, ugly metaphor for reproduction at its basest. It’s Giger’s Throbbing Gristle to the rest of his work’s Skinny Puppy, if that makes any sense. Also, I think the little dudes about to be shot out of the eponymous machine are sort of cute, so sue me.
…
…
You’ve read ours, now what’s yours? Let us know below and enjoy your weekend.
…
