Introduction//How Deep Is Your Goth? Gothic Art in the Contemporary
‘Gothic’ is a borrowed term in contemporary art, applied liberally to artworks centring on death, deviance, the erotic macabre, psychologically charged sites, disembodied voices and fragmented bodies.
inaccessible spaces, phantom bodies, loaded objects and body fragments
virginal female trespasser
‘Gothic plots are fam ily plots; Gothic romance is fam ily romance’.2
the revelation o f an unspeakable fam ily ‘curse’ by a curious innocent
haunted houses and uncharted dungeons
Like the original literature, Gothic contemporary art is principally AngloSaxon, w ith a sprinkling of excellent examples from continental Europe as w ell; however there is also a Latin American, arguably Catholic strain which looks closely at rituals o f death,
death, transgression, patriarchy, ruins, ghosts and the supernatura
In the end, ‘Gothic’ in contemporary art is necessarily a partial term which serves m ostly to identify a peculiar, dark sensitivity shared by the artist and the observer who has chosen to respond to the w ork in this manner
Although the themes in contemporary Gothic art are grounded in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic literature, they are today combined unselfconsciously w ith, among other things, medievalism, Romanticism, skull imagery, science fiction, Victoriana and punk-derived Gothick subcultures - all w ith o u t concern fo r the contradictions and anachronisms therein.
im precision in no way damages the term, but in fact contributes to making it so evocative and resilient
Goya’s blood-soaked caprichos to mid-1990s Goth fashion w ith the founding themes generated in the early literature
In sum, ‘Gothic’ in contemporary art is more atmospheric than neatly defined.
particularly the uncanny but also the grotesque, the abject and horror
the Gothic is aesthetic and seductive
Horror must be to some degree stagey and symbolic in order also to qualify as Gothic.
all attesting to the Gothic’s remarkable a b ility to update itse lf perpetually according to current tastes, politics and fears
Always present in the Gothic is this; tw o things that should have remained apart - for example, madness and science; the living and the dead; technology and the human body; the pagan and the Christian; innocence and corruption; the suburban and the rural - are brought together, w ith te rrifying consequences
The Gothic is anti-bourgeois and rejects such values as hard work, fam ily, good cheer and common sense.
The Gothic tends towards the dramatic, art-directed and excessive.
The Gothic is regressive, even juvenile
Teresa Margolles, Catherine Sullivan - or Stan Douglas and Douglas Gordon, for that m atter
intrepid female heroine, boldly exploring forbidden landscapes
‘the mad scientist’;
484076769-gilda-williams-the-gothic-1, p.17 vampiresque, Poe-like figure
484076769-gilda-williams-the-gothic-1, p.17 architects o f unwelcoming labyrinths.
484076769-gilda-williams-the-gothic-1, p.17 phantom o f the opera-like
484076769-gilda-williams-the-gothic-1, p.17 m odernist ruins and follies.
484076769-gilda-williams-the-gothic-1, p.17 , the appellation ‘Gothic’ in art can only ever provide an incomplete picture o f an artistic practice.
484076769-gilda-williams-the-gothic-1, p.17 Jeff W all on Dan Graham; Nancy Spector on Douglas Gordon; Hal Foster on Robert Gober; and Jonathan Jones on Smithson, Matta-Clark, et al. Many critics discuss Gothic themes w itho u t necessarily citing the Gothic per se, i.e., Amelia Jones on the Law-of-the-Father in Paul McCarthy; Andrew O’Hagan on the ghosts occupying Gregor Schneider’s inhospitable places.
The Gothic returns, in sum. as an enduring term particularly serviceable in periods o f crisis - today as it did in the late eighteenth century, as an escape valve for the political, artistic and technological crises underway.
ese are a select sampling o f contemporary art exhibitions o f a Gothic nature; a
Other things to check outPotentialReading
as inform ed by popular culture as it is by art history,
This chapter introduces the rest of the book which is divided into tropes or themes connected to the gothic as a genre. The term however is slippery, and enbodies an atmosphere more than it does cover a particular movement or technique. There is overlap with the uncanny, abject and horror in general, also sci fi. This imprecision is not a bad thing, but potentially accounts for its recurrence in art and pop culture in times of political, artistic and technological crises. There’s a flamboyance, adolenscence in some ways, but it can be subtle and sophisticated. Art is often not explicitly called gothic (even if it is), so its an imperfect and hard to quantify term, although it does have roots in anglosaxon literary tradition (although there are mexican and south american Catholicism based works also).
Edmund Burke A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful // 1757
Whatever therefore is terrible, w ith regard to sight, is sublime too, whether this cause o f terror be endued w ith greatness o f dimensions or not; for it is impossible to look on anything as triflin g , or contemptible, that may be dangerous.
As serpents and poisonous animals o f almost all kinds.
Indeed, terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle o f the sublime.
Mary Shelley Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus // 1818
Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, w hich I should firs t break through, and pour a torrent o f lig h t into our dark world.
No father could claim the gratitude o f his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.
Hubris, ego. mirror to other forms of corporate hubris?
In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase
Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher // 1839
staircase
I feel like staircases could be a thing I explore in more detail
twins
twins, doubles, bodily other
cataleptical
fits, faints, visions, trances, hallucinations
Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of the Gothic 1995
complex, problem atic status as a category.
all attem pted classifying systems are both inconsistent and incomplete and evade the problem of its historical development.
Ann B. Tracy in her instructive appendix to The English Gothic, 1790-1830. A sample includes ‘abduction’, ‘blood’, ‘cave’, ‘dreams (prophetic and erotic)’, ‘earthquake’, ‘feeblemindedness’, ‘gaming’, ‘harem’, ‘in q u isitio n ’, ‘laudanum ’, ‘m asking’, ‘noble savage’, ‘p o rtra it (anim ated)’, ‘reputation (lost)’, ‘suicide’, ‘tw ins’, ‘usury’, ‘vengeance, vow o f and ‘wedding (aborted prior to ceremony, clandestine, counterfeit, forced, interrupted, by spectre clergyman)’. And these features represent Gothic only u n til 1830; Victorian Gothic would demand the addition o f ‘the mad scientist’ (such as Dr Jekyll), w hile tw entieth-century (post-Freudian) Gothic requires the term ‘demonic child’.2
[!PDF|yellow] 484076769-gilda-williams-the-gothic-1, p.28
Gothic systematically represents ‘otherness’,
Which is a relative term
These tw o columns, once commonly called ‘the line o f good’ and ‘the line of evil’, were fam iliar in intellectual discourse w ell into the Renaissance.3
This is also linked to the queer gothic Notes - The Queer Uncanny and excess.
Read this in more detailPotentialReading Art of Darkness Poetics of the Gothic
Gothic’ is an expression (in the Freudian ‘dream -work’ mode) o f the am bivalently attractive, ‘female’, unconscious ‘other’ o f eighteenth-century male-centred conscious ‘Reason’
(The ‘other’ is culture specific, as indeed, the unconscious itse lf may be.)5
[47] Both Juliet Mitchell and Nancy Chodorow make this suggestion. #asidePotentialReading
Mark Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Steet: Angels, Sadomasochism and the Culture of the Gothic, 1997
They too are haunted by some form o f past abuse, so that their bad behaviour takes on an air o f inevitability. At times, Oprah is an apostle o f fate w orthy o f Edgar Allan Poe: if you were molested by your father, you’ll be a molester in turn. There’s no way out.
Oprah’s guests are frequently addicted - our current word for the traditional Gothic term ‘haunted’. Snap. Addicted to what? Company, lack of boredom? Attention? Knowing (what’s wrong with us, and certainty about how to fix it)
divided nature, inte rm itte ntly possessed by a demon w ithin.
(‘Addiction’ is one o f our contemporary words for haunting, the Gothic state proper, just as ‘obsession’ was one o f Freud’s.)
The psychological theory o f the double is both reductive and powerful. It assumes that we are all playing a role in life, that inside a raving beast waits for the chains to loosen or snap. Doubles stories seem to proliferate when people sense an unnegotiable divide between the true or natural self and society, between nature and culture.
Again, this thing about the Queer Gothic Notes - The Queer Uncanny double life lived by passing
Gothic works invite the audience to acquaint themselves w ith, and to fear, the shadow that dwells w ithin . (
No Gothic narrative can w ork unless the villa in is in some way an admirable figure. ‘He is the animus regarded as forgivable victim o f passion and circumstance, as admirable sufferer,’ w rites Leslie Fiedler
In the 1990s, apocalyptic Gothic often comes in an ecological mode. Thus one encounters the fear that, as a punishment for human excess, especially o f the technological sort, the w orld is doomed to become a flyblow n waste some tim e in the next decade or two. This scenario divides the field into tw o parts: the cultural, made up o f polluting hum anity and all o f its institutions and works, and the natural, the once-pristine w orld. Nature, despoiled and outraged by hum anity’s wrongs, turns from the sweet nurse described by W ordsworth and Rousseau into a decaying, foul monster, seeking vengeance. […
AI!
Most disturbing is the discourse o f AIDS, surely our major public occasion for indulgence in apocalyptic Gothic.
In the Gothic worldview, every crime is punished: you can run, but not hide. Susan Sontag captures the com patibility between AIDS and the Gothic idiom when she describes the effect the epidemic must inevitably have on post-AIDS sex. ‘The fear o f AIDS imposes on an act whose ideal is an experience o f pure presentness (and a creation o f the future) a relation to the past to be ignored at one’s peril. Sex no longer withdraws its partners, if only for a moment, from the social sphere: It cannot be considered ju s t a coupling; it is a chain, a chain o f transmission, from the past.’4 […]
Jacques Derrida’s antagonist is the metaphysics o f presence, the phantom form o f tru th that haunts Wester
I didn’t get this bitrereadDummy
The Gothic w riters were, in the main, progressives, Monk Lewis was, give or take, a man o f enlightened political views. He disliked absolutism and superstition, and unresponsive state, and an unbending church. But the Gothic w riters also greatly feared the upshot o f their iconoclasm. They feared the freedom they ardently desired,
gothic and motivates its plots is the guilt of the revolutionary haunted by the (paternal) past which he has been striving to destroy; and the fear that possesses the gothic and motivates its tone is the fear that in destroying the old ego-ideals of Church and State the West has opened a way for the irruption of darkness: for insanity and the disintegration o f the self.
Many of us have, I think, turned from hope in benevolent religion to fascination w ith the Gothic. There is something to gain in accepting the harsh belief that the world is infested w ith evil, that all power is corrupt, all humanity debased, and that there is nothing we can do about it. W ith the turn to contemporary Gothic - no-fault, dead-end, politically impotent though it may be - we recover a horizon of ultimate meaning. We recover something of what is lost w ith the withdrawal of God from the day-to-day world. W ith Gothic, we can tell ourselves that we live in the worst and most barbaric of times, that all is broken never to be mended, that things are bad and fated to be, that significant hope is a sorry joke, the prerogative of suckers. The Gothic, dark as it is, offers epistemological certainty; it allows us to believe that we’ve found the truth.
Woosh