Archive for May 27, 2015

Building Your Own Macabre Museum, and, Brief Art History for Serious Horror Fans

“Theo” from Artsy (www.artsy.net), who may or may not have a last name but has so far concealed it if he does, contacted me one time and got ignored–I figured he was just some advertiser who slipped by my awesome new spam filter–and then again and got his email read. What’s the possible angle in merely wanting me to link to a site, with the connection to me being the work of Francisco [Jose de] Goya [y Lucientes], an image of whose I included in an earlier post?

Francisco Jose de Goya-y Lucientes, "Two Old Men Eating," 1819-1823, exemplifies Goya's use of the grotesque to interrogate broad human concerns within specific historical and social conditions, even in the "black" period that suggests suppression of all context.

Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes, “Two Old Men Eating,” 1819-1823, exemplifies Goya’s use of the grotesque to interrogate broad human concerns within specific historical and social conditions, even in the “black” period that suggests suppression of all context.

 

I visited the site and read Artsy’s mission: “Artsy’s mission is to make all the world’s art accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. We are a resource for art collecting and education.” Considering that the vast collection of resources made this simple and rather noble mission seem, in fact, to be what is on Artsy’s mind, I told Theo, sure, I’ll even write a little post about Goya, the fact that I’ve got a poster of the famous “Saturn” about a few feet from my shoulder where I do most of my writing these days, but when I went to get these Goya images as free downloads, I got carried away.

Goya, "Saturn Devouring One of His Sons," 1819 - 1823

Goya, “Saturn Devouring One of His Sons,” 1819 – 1823

The image quality is excellent, and just about everything I could think to look for was available, curated with information about the artists. Furthermore, the site isn’t just a museum of the “masters”–that’s one small section. A great deal of the site is dedicated to contemporary artists, both well-known and emerging, whom one can “follow” through the site. Thus, the site offers classical and contemporary education–and a chance to shape the the art world by participating in spreading word about images you think matter.

Yeah, okay, I’m endorsing, but they’re not paying me. I just like the idea of combining well-informed curation with exposure both to the experience of and for the judgment of anyone who cares enough to look. Artsy has the potential to combine the inherently liberating power of art with the inherently democratizing power of the web, in both of which I will believe until I die, as do or did many of the artists on the site, and some of them–believing in the former ideal  at least–died horribly as a result.

So I decided to see whether, with the list of names in my head, I could put together a quick historical overview of Classics to get a would-be serious Goth/Horror Nerd started, and sure enough, Artsy had everything my mental list spat out.

Nightmares as the subject of visual art likely begin with cave paintings, but the first master is arguably Hieronymous Bosch. Here's "Death and the Miser," 1485 - 1490ish

Nightmares as the subject of visual art likely begin with cave paintings, but the first master is arguably Hieronymous Bosch. Here’s “Death and the Miser,” 1485 – 1490ish

A Bosch triptych. The closer you look, the weirder it gets, but the third panel, of course, anticipates Surrealism by several centuries.

A Hieronymous Bosch triptych, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” circa 1505 – 1515. The closer you look, the weirder it gets, but the third panel, of course, anticipates Surrealism by four centuries. My favorite Artsy Bosch isn’t available for download.

Important for anyone with horrors of body snatchers,  Rembrandt [Harmensz van Rijn]'s "The Anatomy Lesson [of Dr, Nicolaes Tulp]," 1632, is required viewing.

Important for anyone with horrors of body snatchers, Rembrandt [Harmensz van Rijn]’s “The Anatomy Lesson [of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp],” 1632, is required viewing. Even painting this controversy was daring.

Salvator Rosa's often demonic imagery isn't widely represented on Artsy, but that it makes an appearance is impressive. Here's "Jason and the Dragon, 1663 - 1664.

Salvator Rosa’s often demonic imagery isn’t widely represented on Artsy, but that it makes an appearance at all is impressive. Here’s “Jason and the Dragon,” 1663 – 1664.

 

[Giovanni Battista] Piranesi, long before M.C. Escher picked up a   pencil, joined his contemporaries in contemplating Gothic ruins, and haunted geometries began to emerge, as in "The Sawhorse," 1761.

[Giovanni Battista] Piranesi, long before M.C. Escher picked up a pencil, joined his contemporaries Horace Walpole and William Beckford (who tried to build such things!) in contemplating Gothic ruins, and haunted geometries began to emerge, as in “The Sawhorse,” 1761. The roots of cosmic horror?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Used and imitated on more book covers than perhaps any other painting, Henry Fuseli's "The Nightmare" may be the definitive painting on the subject, at least from a Romantic point of view.

Used and imitated on more gothic/horror-genre book covers than perhaps any other image, Henry Fuseli’s 1781 “The Nightmare” may be the definitive painting on the subject, at least from a Romantic point of view.

Thanks to Jacques Louis David’s just-in-time 1793 depiction “Death of Marat,” Jean-Paul Marat‘s may be the most famous suicide ever.

 

William Blake's "The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun," 1805. If you claim to care about fantasy art and don't know Blake images you suck, Thomas Harris used the Biblical passage and the painting in RED DRAGON; I am merely using the passage in MANUFACTURING MIRACLES.

William Blake’s “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun,” 1805. If you claim to care about fantasy art and don’t know Blake images, you fail. Thomas Harris used the Biblical passage and the painting in RED DRAGON; I am merely using the passage in MANUFACTURING MIRACLES. And yes, he’s the same guy who looks like Johnny Depp and says, “My name is William Blake. Do you know my poetry?” And something about tygers.

 

 

Eugene Victor Ferdinand Delacroix, "Death of Sadanapalus, " 1827, isn't my favorite Delabroix, but it presage how the French Revolultion, Napoleonic Wars, and almost unending violence of the early nineteenth century began in literature with De Sade and ended with Grand Guignol.

Eugene Victor Ferdinand Delacroix, “Death of Sardanapalus, ” 1827, presages how the French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, and almost unending violence of the early nineteenth century  in France help explain its literary beginning with De Sade and ending with Grand Guignol. The conditions of experience change the conditions of thought. This art shows us one trail through history, a Gothic trajectory that I will let Goya’s work “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” 1796 – 1798, the next image, summarize.

 

francisco-jose-de-goya-y-lucientes-the-sleep-of-reason-produces-monsters-no-43-from-los-caprichos-the-caprices-1796-98

 

Finally, although Artsy doesn’t offer as many (or any) free downloads from contemporary artists or recent artists whose work has not entered the public domain (reasons obvious–artists and their families depend on this stuff for their livings!), their collection of more recent work is astounding. I did a quick check on established favorites, which I shall represent by plugging good books (both available on Amazon!), but clicking their images will take you to the Artsy artist profiles.

CindyShermanRetrospectiveBookCover

If you don’t know the photography of Cindy Sherman (1954 – ), you have missed one of the great phenomena of the last century.

Cover art (lower image) by the Chapman Brothers, Jake and Dinos, follow the link for staggering images

Cover art (lower image) by the Chapman Brothers, Jake and Dinos, click the cover for staggering images

“Leer Reel,” REEL DARK, and the Fincherverse

Okay, as I say in my editor’s intro, you don’t even have to read my story “Leer Reel” in REEL DARK to get your money’s worth. However, I am grateful people are reading… and are having a serious “WTF did I just read” reaction.

Although I won’t try to touch scariest–my kudos still go to Amy Grech in that category (you freaked me out, so I can’t wait to meet you!)–or even list the folks who beat me for most provocative, I don’t think anyone would bother challenging me for most viscerally extreme (feel free, co-authors, as I’m out of the editor’s seat now). “Leer Reel” is fucking disgusting; it shocked me while I wrote it, yet I came to understand what mad narrator Louis Jardin was up to, making media references (which from Dickens to rock lyrics appear in almost every sentence) secondary to structuring his ravings according to movie protocols. As I said to a friend, yeah, there’s a story there, but it’s so much less important than the onslaught of imagery that people understanding it is not the point.

However, people DO like stories, and furthermore, the three of you who follow my work might like to know where “Leer Reel” fits. So I’m going even further. All the dates are fake and may be contradicted by story details because I was too lazy to look up what I’d written (I am not that lazy when crafting the fiction itself!), but here is the clearest key to my fictional world I have ever shared (fyi, I am not including all stories published and unpublished linked to the Fincherverse, just those essential):

FincherverseTimeline

 

REEL DARK, a collection of masters, has arrived

The converse is not true, but all monsters are hybrids, or at least John Locke thought so, and although I’d like to believe the human imagination isn’t limited in the way he says it is, I can’t think of a counter-example, and I’ve looked at thousands of variations on monsters and their subtypes around the world.

John-locke

So last weekend, at the World Horror Convention in Atlanta, BlackWyrm Publishing and I introduced to the world our latest monster!

Reel Dark COVER 050415png

Go to Amazon to get the marvelous back-cover blurb that co-editor Pamela Turner crafted, but the monstrous gist is that it’s a book about film infecting the world with dark realities, so while we’ve got comedy, western, sci-fi, and, yes, horror, the bottom line is that it’s dark and smart and full of fresh voices and some amazing pros. Hal Bodner! James Chambers! James Dorr! JG Faherty! Amy Grech! Jude-Marie GreenKaren Head! Lots of other great people–accomplished poets, storytellers, and filmmakers as well–and I am honored to be in their company and to have had an opportunity to work with their words, to arrange them so that they can have conversations you can now overhear.

New from BlackWyrm Publishing

New from BlackWyrm Publishing

 

To round out this post, here’s my intro to the volume:

“The film delivers baroque art from its convulsive catalepsy. Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified, as it were.”
—André Bazin, What is Cinema?

“The cinema combines, perhaps more perfectly than any other medium, two human fascinations: one with the boundary between life and death and the other with the mechanical animation of the inanimate… the answer to the question ‘what is cinema?’ should also be death 24 times a second.”
—Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second

These two quotations—from two of the most important thinkers about the cinema since mad scientists pieced it together from other art-forms in the late nineteenth century—tell us that even in the silent era that so few horror fans pay due, people saw a close connection between reels of film and the realities of horror and death. Our mission as editors was to find stories that offered dark, diverse perspectives on how far that connection between reel and real might go, and we wanted diversity in both the types of films people wrote about and in the writing itself. Rose Streif attends to the silent era’s neglect by horror’s mainstream in “Caligarisme,” and in addition to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919/1920), my own movie-obsessed madman narrator in “Leer Reel” riffs on many a silent: he jumps in time but has 1928 as home base. Arguably the first horror film, “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots,” made by Thomas Edison’s studio the year regarded as cinema’s beginning, 1895, is just a few short seconds of a woman guillotined. The other contender for first horror film, Georges Méliès’s 1896 “Mansion of the Devil” (or “House of the Devil” if you want Ti West continuity) focuses on magical apparitions. People understood at the outset that just as the photographed, moving image made an action immortal, the immortality was “change mummified,” the immortality of the undead, and, as our debut poet Caroline Shriner-Wunn writes in “Confessions of a Woman of a Certain Age,” “The Mummy,” and some others we’ve scattered in between, the undeadness of the film real is not likely to be your sparkling friend. Think about a movie from 1900. Every frame that shows you a person is showing you a corpse. That person is dead. Chances are, if you’re my age, that person’s corpse looks younger than you do. And it’s smiling. Film, on average, advances at 24 images, or frames, per second. Those corpses are smiling at you 24 times per second. Cheeky bastards.

We selected stories that are dark (that was the point), so though we’ve got laughs and action and western and sci-fi and twisted relationships and WTFs, along with some light as well as extreme horror, expect chills, smart ones, as a thread. Our featured story, Hal Bodner’s “Whatever Happened to Peggy… Who?,” is fast, fun, and creepy on its own, but it pays double if you know mid-20th century American and British horror movies, quintuple if you’ve not only seen but really know Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), with bonuses if you know The Bad Seed (1956) or a lot of what Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were up to around then. Likewise, Jude-Marie Green’s “Queen of the Death Scenes” harkens to an age of screen queens that is behind us. Pamela Turner’s “Rival” riffs on 40s and 50s film noir with a twist; James Dorr’s title “Marcie and Her Sisters” points toward prime late 70s and 80s Woody Allen, but this editor’s opinion is that, intentionally or not, he manages in Jane Austen comic-horror adaptation territory better than many recent adapters have in several media. Sean Eads also takes us toward more contemporary territory with “The Dreamist,” on the Inception (2010) side of the postmodern mind-game.

Wait! Stop worrying! This ain’t a history book.

We offer you three sections, mostly short stories, with short poems providing different sorts of pleasure scattered in each of the three. Many selections could appear in more than one section,so we placed based on where we thought they leaned.

Part 1 is “Decaying Celluloid,” and selections here either center on specific films or specific genres. In addition to the stories by Bodner, Turner, Dorr, and Streif, you’ll find Shriner-Wunn’s “Last Show at Hobb’s End” especially meaningful if you’ve seen John Carpenter’s Lovecraftian In the Mouth of Madness (1994). Prepare yourself for a story that matches the inversion in the title of Jason S. Walters’s swan song to the classic Western “Low Midnight” (which makes me want to discuss post-Kurosawa samurai films with him… Walters understands bleak but doesn’t present it like Sam Peckinpah or even Sergio Leone). The section concludes with our featured poem, the inimitable Karen Head’s “Amnesia,” a layered reflection on watching/living David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001).

Part 2, “Framing You,” transitions from Head’s poem and focuses on how audiences—the “real” world—might get caught up, often in ways far more literal than most people would think possible, in media. Thinking about Amy Grech’s “Dead Eye” still gives me  hills; all I’ll say in an intro is that she derives horrific concepts from the multiple meanings of “frame” and “shot.” Shriner-Wunn’s brief contributions here focus on spectacle, particularly the spectacle of the mutilated woman and what its cultural appeal seems to say (if you don’t know about it, read the poem once before you web search the real Black Dahlia case). Jay Seate and Mike Watt take us into fictional film production worlds, where films have very different ways of absorbing their makers. Sean Taylor’s “And So She Asked Again,” has maestro Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960) and its legendary star Barbara Steele as major references, but it’s about obsession with the power of film more generally… and what it could deliver. Likewise, master storyteller J.G. Faherty concludes the section with a tale about a man who finds immense, horrific power in a camera.

The book concludes with Pt. 3, “Pathological Projections,” the smallest and likely weirdest group, as their uniting feature is that they take a (usually kind of abstract) aspect of the medium of film itself and expand it into a (generally fairly messed up) story. Russ Bickerstaff kicks it off with ruminations on the 24-per-second concept in the dark sci-fi “24 per second: Persistence of Fission.” James Chambers suggests the medium may be the monster in “The Monster with My Fist for Its Head,” and in “Queen of the Death Scenes,” Jude-Marie Green finds that manipulating the medium’s immortal qualities could have unwanted side effects Shriner-Wunn’s “The Mummy” recalls Bazin but again goes fuller monster; “Cigarette Burns” by Jay Wilburn finds a perspective on the horror of being in the movies that nothing else I’ve read captures in the same way. My own story… well… it’s last. You get your money’s worth without it. You don’t have to read it. Perhaps you shouldn’t. The narrator is looking at you while you read.

—L. Andrew Cooper
April, 2015