Friday, April 1, 2022

Hans Bellmer, H.R. Giger at Schinkel Pavillon

(link)

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 trendAmalia Ulman at The Gallery at El CentroCindy Sherman too, H.R. Giger on CAWD