jueves, 15 de octubre de 2009

HELL BOUND, new gothic art. Introduction by Francesca Gavin

Has anybody seen the Devil? Mephistopheles does not have a clear-cut image anymore. The iconic personification of evil has disintegrated and become absorbed into all other aspects of modern life. Hell is no longer simply a destination after death. It is within the landscape and the architecture, within our own bodies, within communities, within technology. Hell is humanity itself.
In the past decade there has been an increasing numbe rof artworks that play with the imagery of horror, death, torture and violence: a gothic blackness. Why now? the cliché that horror is an expression of millenial anxiety -the ´fin de siècle´syndrome- doesn´t fit. The idea that as a century or millennium comes to a close we panic about the end of the world, and this spills out into a cuture of horror, is inappropriate. The year 2000 has come and gone and the taste for the gothic is increasing. Nor does this theory explain the penchant for horror imagery in the 1940s, 1960s and 1980s. we are far enough into the twenty-first century for it to be founded on something else.
One argument is that the gothic is a response to what Michel Moore coined ´the culture of fear´in his film on America and guns, Bowling for Columbine. He suggests that teenage ultra-violence is partly a response to the contemporary media´s sensationsalist reportge of crime and violence. It could be claimed that horror in contemporary art is another step n this violent cycle. Shootings are carried out in response to a culture of materialism and fear. The Marquis de Sade argues in his examination of the novel, Ideé sur les Romans, that gothic literature ´was the inevitable result of the revolutionary shocks which all of Europe has suffered´. He established the idea that the manifestation of horror in creativity was a response to a world desensitized to violence. Charles Baudelaire complained about the sensationalist aspectof the media in the 1860s, calling newspapers a ´tissue of horrors´and an órgy of universal atrocities´.
Arguably the media has always been preoccupied with shocking imagery and violent narrative. ´Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience´, as Susan Sontag put it in her book Regarding the pain of Others. Positive news has always been in the minority (except when an instrument of propaganda). The media is a reflection of the ideology of everyday society. Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek observes in Alfonzo Guarón´s documentary The possiblity of hope that the main mode of politics today is fear-of immigration, of a strong state, of taxation. People in the modern world are mobilized through fear and pleasure.
what are we so afraid of? Anything that transgresses the safe, cultural codes of `civilization´; anything that crosses between reality and fantasy, social laws and taboos, the rational and irrational. There is a lot to be afraid these days. Exploring dark imagery or ideas in art arguably helps create a sense of control in a world where we have none. Catherine Spooner argues in the book Contemporary Gothic that ´gothic contains our fears so we can live in saety´. That safety is looking pretty tenuous. This imagery reflects our struggle to have an identity in a society losing its sense of self.
Horror also connects to one of our most primal desires: voyeurism. The imagery of death and evil could be a metaphor for art itself -the uncontrolable desire to look. By looking at violence or horror we become complicit in its creation, prt of the cause- hence part of the discomfort in looking. We know that humans are often the cause of terror, not some imaginary outsdie evil force. we are creating our own nightmares.
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