Sibylle Ruppert at Project Native Informant

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We've run out of Giger works to flip so we dig a little further into the basement. A better basement perhaps. Less interested in the surface displays of a HD leathery seduction - than the intermittent potions of past styles, the Ernst, the Moreau, her Giger friend, into some flavor more disgusting than its parts. Hans Bellmer with better graphics, a better refresh rate. Giger had the the good luck to have his monster trophy become icon. These are more acid to dissolve the past into a possible formula. The formula is what most are searching for today. But these have more fun than running the endless permutations, seem devious in the idea. And a ray tracing way ahead of its time. 

Justin Fitzpatrick at Seventeen

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The victorian era surgery of Gross Clinic, HR Giger, The Thing. Stitching mutant art together with premodern surgery? That is most contemporary surrealism, Frankenstein juxtaposition of zombie culture. But the artist today seeks new medical procedures for our content's facelifts. This is genetic mutation, assimilation, a steam punk CRISPR, a Deco horror.

Alexa Hawksworth at Theta

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Giger is hot again so maybe YA book covers - Animorphs via Francis Bacon - seem proper art fodder. A biomorphic carnival. One would wish we could treat illustration as a proper art form - experiments in the commodity aesthetic. Experiments in looking cool as hell. A less disinterested form of connoisseur. "Connected such that our higher faculties have no defenses against. This is not tasteful consideration at a distance but thrall of slumber, dreamed emissions, sick drawings."

Illustratively sick: Kennedy Morgan at Delaplane and Cushion Works, Kye Christensen-Knowles at LOMEX

Hans Bellmer, H.R. Giger at Schinkel Pavillon

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Because our moment is so filled with tortures on the body, with stringing our puppet goo, experiments on flesh? Half of portraiture today looking like medical eviscerations (see: The violence against faces.) - our more genetically modified Picasso, not dismembering the ear/nose it but growing it there. So the lineage for these two - current figuration is medically experimental, grotesque, alien, et al - is here. But at some unconscious base is sexual violence, and the women who suffer at that. (It wasn't until Dan O'Bannon and Alien's brilliant reversal that the sexual violence threatened captains.) I like both Giger and Bellmer much, but acknowledge "the artworld [is] continuously electrified by depictions of women in societal bondage gear. Artists depicting the strictures that force women to conform to cultural mores; images of women made, if only momentarily, powerless or complicit ... that its success is simply a culture that likes seeing - culturally approved - women in bondage." 

The Giger Chair trend, Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro, Cindy Sherman too, H.R. Giger on CAWD

Kennedy Morgan at Delaplane and Cushion Works

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being a young lad looking at snowboard graphics and feeling something navel in the drawings sinuous metal hands. I hadn't yet seen Bellmer's liquid flesh. Or Giger's carapace sex. Ballard's cum drizzled chrome. Tactility is a strong force, bent and harnessed to express urges that only exist visually. Like Lozano's tool drawings for our more pornographically sensitive age. Through the glass of art we now conjure feeling. This is how pornography works. This is what Sontag argued against: "Pornography has a 'content' and is designed to make us connect (with disgust, desire) with content. It is a substitute for life. But art does not excite; or, if it does, the excitation is appeased, within the terms of the aesthetic experience." Current pornographic materialism indicates a shift in art; the overt identification with an object/image is useful means for accessing its viewer. Connected such that our higher faculties have no defenses against. This is not tasteful consideration at a distance but thrall of slumber, dreamed emissions, sick drawings.

see too: nagle Materialphilia, Ron Nagle at Modern Art

Past: Caroline Mesquita

"Giger for whom the mechanistic and biomorphic found waypoint in the skeleton, [...] the crabs and muscle cars who share the PVC fetishist's interest in shiny bulges; it wasn't hard a move to the erotic. ...we can anthropomorphize steel so long as it reflects our own curvature. 

"Suggesting an interiority. A beneath, the inside, indoors, the soft pink innards you imagine. An igloo is crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside. "

full: Caroline Mesquita at T293, Caroline Mesquita at Kunsthalle Lissabon

Liao Wen at Capsule Shanghai

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[H.R.] Giger for whom the mechanical and biological found a waypoint in the skeleton, the complex curvature of the arthropod's organic exo-shell, the crabs and muscle cars who share the PVC fetishist's interest in shiny hard bulges; it wasn't hard a move to the erotic.
And these find waypoint of flesh and bone in wood. A confusion of Ripley and her Alien queen, a newborn mess of biological scaffolding, saying "please kill me" and under flamethrower, flesh that burns like kindling. 

See too: "Unspecific Objects"

Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya at Murmurs

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Book title; Elongated Necks: Italian Mannerism through Anime Mech: mutant figuration throughout history. There's some type of desire for a new physicality. More potent forms of body. Harder forms of body. Evangelion EVAs, a mech that bleeds. Transformers, no coherence to their machine, only endless CGI particles. Gore is just a body undergoing process based abstraction. Teratomas. The body goes rococo. Your face goes baroque. Not to even mention the cyborg. An unidentified animal washes up on shore, decomposing, mythical. The mutation on the mutation, an ever growing corpus. Necks selected for desire, lengthening. John Currin comedy. H.R. Giger's sudden high art popularity. Akira: Tetsuo's corpus extrapolates itself. Ballard's Crash, surprisingly sensuous. Biological tech atrocity. Calvin Klein models, their own El Grecoing body. Etiolated males. The Thing.  New forms of body always giving torture of yours.

“HOOKS & CLAWS” at Gregor Staiger - Bruno Gironcoli

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Ask and any Austrian artist will roll their eyes at how famed Gironcoli is and everyone outside of Austria wonders who the fuck you are talking about. Seems to be the general vibe. Gironcoli has been dead ten years but you could confuse them for a Jordan Wolfson, Marguerite Humeau, Helen Marten or whatever. Just enough for the surrealist soup'dujour.* They are modernist sculptures that abscess with the wrong thing: what is supposed to be the clean lines and  modern ergonomics of say Henry Moore or di Suvero tinges a little too dumb, fecal, stupid, wet. Like Mike Kelley paintings made into sculpture, the abject mess of high/low. The way Children's toys always seem one vibration button away from sex toy. Every one of them somehow far more uncomfortable than a Paul McCarthy buttplug on your plaza.


*As how H.R. Giger was in the past considered campy at best for his blend of Machino-sexual organisms, Gironcoli's blending of hulking pop-sculpture with tinges of Actionist entrails was similarly a bit too on the nose. Similarly having mild resurgence. 

Trisha Donnelly at Eva Presenhuber

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Not quite the Ian Rosen whole-in-one, you can find more images on Presenhuber's website But Donnelly has made a career of limiting the availability of the document that feeds the current apparatus of art, instead edited into an esoterica through regulation, the Donnelly mythos floats on the inability to know, though even actually seeing them never helped answer anything, the nebulous otherworld aesthetic that like H.R. Giger channeled an techno/medical aesthetic for a decade before finding in the Alien its embodiment that Donnelly refuses, a ghost.


See too: Trisha Donnelly at Museum Ludwig, Ian Rosen at The Finley

“Sitting Bone” at MAVRA

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Hasn't this been like the third Giger chair we've seen in the past year? He's been mentioned in at least 2 press releases (Caroline Mesquita at T293 and Anna Uddenberg at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler) and there was for sure another chair at Lomex in their EAT CODE AND DIE. But the last Giger chair on CAD appears to be the Swiss Institute's exhibition of chairs, Fin de Siècle, in 2015.  Gigerian chairs simply feel present in the winds of art with its trends for examining bodies through the technologies that are built around them (Lupo, Reaves, Uddenberg, et al), so the skeleton melded  architecture fit for more cushioned parts feels apt.  Chairs are an innuendo for body, an allusive or oblique remark or hint towards the meat that you don't want to be forced say aloud as the gas bag of "human" so you politely place a chair, like those placed in the corners of hotels/lobbies not to be sat in but to politely declare the room capable of relieving your meat baggage, place a surface whose softness designates the degree of welcome to your reception, like you don't want to say butt so you say Sitting Bone.


See too: Caroline Mesquita at T293, Anna Uddenberg at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue

Caroline Mesquita at T293

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The PR mentions Giger for whom the mechanistic and biomorphic found waypoint in the skeleton, the complex curvature of the arthropod's organic exo-shell, the crabs and muscle cars who share the PVC fetishist's interest in shiny bulges; it wasn't hard a move to the erotic. And like the Iron Giant for beyond parental guidance suggested, we can anthropomorphize steel so long as it reflects our own curvature: what looks like a wormy finger in one starts to look in another like a butthole. Metal is as malleable as you want it to be, can conform your desire, and thus have no issue identifying our own corporeality with metal. It's when we go on T293's website and look at the additional photos there and realize the butt's hole contains a jagged and unformed hangnail like a fishhook that we reject its allure.


See too: Roger Hiorns at Annet Gelink, Roger Hiorns at ELI Beamlines Center,

Aaron Curry at Michael Werner



Sometimes you see something so awful words lack and dismay suspends time to second guess yourself. But these are just the worst. Unbelievable ugly. Appropriated high school noodling made irrepressible paintings. So bad they look from the future. It’s like you thought it couldn’t get any worse, but then it did. All of primitivist colonialism in teenage-bedroom’s unthought posters. It’s like being cybernetically plugged into a powerful video game and then cerebrally taken against your will. Curry’s penchant for theft finally stealing from people without recourse, teenage boys, Giger, all the lowest, brandished in neon green, Curry stealing candy from the helpless masses not consecrated as art.