The Supplement: H. R. Giger

In common with the squirming erotica of  Hans Bellmer, the artwork of Hans Rudolf Giger is a psychosexual pick-and-mix of lust and loathing.  Best known as the Oscar-winning designer for Ridley Scott's 1979 'spam-in-a-can' sci-fi shocker, Alien, H. R. Giger is the artist your mother warned you about.  His bloodless, monochromatic world is characterised by orifices, labial, anal, mechanical; by phalluses lethal with teeth; with pox-ridden babies and  pentagrams; with machines hewn from cartilage and bone.  Giger's view of flesh is not the glistening pink of the pornographer, but rather the waxy shine of the embalmist - worse, these are necrophiliac dreams - or nightmares more accurately.  As an 'artist', Giger is disparaged and dismissed - a one-trick pony and probable misogynist - and yet, the popularity of his work is undiminished, his design for the Alien unsurpassed in terms of true 'other-worldliness'.  

"Giger’s art has often been called “biomechanoid and Giger himself called one of his books Biomechanics. It would be difficult to find a word that better describes the Zeitgeist of the twentieth century, characterized by staggering technological progress that enslaved modern humanity in an internecine symbiosis with the world of machines. In the course of the twentieth century, modern technological inventions became extensions and replacements of our muscles, our nervous system, our brain, our eyes and ears, and even our reproductive organs, to such an extent that the boundaries between biology and mechanical contraptions have all but disappeared. The archetypal stories of Faust, the sorcerer’s apprentice, Golem, and Frankenstein became the leading mythologies of our times. Materialistic science, in its effort to gain knowledge about the world of matter and to control it, has engendered a monster that threatens the very survival of life on our planet. The human role has changed from that of a demiurg to that of a victim.

When we look for another characteristic feature of twentieth century, what immediately comes to mind is unbridled violence and destruction on an unprecedented scale. It was a century, in which internecine wars, bloody revolutions, totalitarian regimes, genocide, brutality of secret police, and international terrorism ruled supreme. The loss of life in World War I was estimated at ten million soldiers and twenty million civilians. Additional millions died from war-spread epidemics and famine. In World War II, approximately twice as many lives were lost. This century saw the bestiality of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the diabolical hecatombs of Stalin's purges and his Gulag Archipelago, the development of chemical and biological warfare, the weapons of mass destruction, and the apocalyptic horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We can add to it the civil terror in China and other Communist countries, the victims of South American dictatorships, the atrocities and genocide committed by the Chinese in Tibet, and the cruelties of the South African Apartheid. The war in Korea and Vietnam, the wars in the Middle East, and the slaughters in Yugoslavia and Rwanda are additional examples of the senseless bloodshed we have witnessed during the last hundred years. In a mitigated form, death pervaded the media of the twentieth century as a favorite subject for entertainment. It has been estimated that in the USA an average child witnesses on television 8,000 murders by the time he or she finishes elementary school. The number of violent acts seen on television by age eighteen rises to 200,000.

The nature and scale of violence committed in the course of the twentieth century and the destructive abuses of modern science – chemical, nuclear, and biological warfare and use of concentration camp inmates as human guinea pigs - gave this period of history distinctly demonic features. Some of the atrocities were motivated by distorted understanding of God and by perverted religious impulses resulting in mass murder and suicide. This century saw the mass suicides of the members of Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, Marshall Herff Applewhite’s and Bonnie Lu Nettles’ Heaven’s Gate, the Swiss Sun Temple cult, and other deviant religious groups. Violent terrorist organizations, such as Charles Manson’s gang, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Islamic extremists acted out deviant mystical impulses, This was further augmented by a renaissance of witchcraft and satanic cults and escalating interest in books and movies focusing on demon worship and exorcism.

Yet another important characteristic of the twentieth century is the extraordinary change of attitude toward sexuality, of sexual values, and of sexual behavior. The second half of this century witnessed an unprecedented lifting of sexual repression and polymorphous manifestation of erotic impulses worldwide. On the one hand, it was removal of cultural constraints leading to sexual freedom, early sexual experimentation of the young generation, premarital sex, promiscuity, popularity of common law and open marriage, gay liberation, and overtly sexual theater plays, television programs, and movies.

On the other hand, the shadow sides of sexuality surfaced to an unprecedented degree and became part of modern culture – teenage pregnancy, adult and child pornography, red light districts offering all imaginable forms of prostitution, sadomasochistic parlors, sexual “slave markets,” bizarre burlesque shows, and clubs catering to clients with a wide range of erotic aberrations and perversions. And the darkest shadow of them all – the rapidly escalating specter of worldwide AIDS epidemic - forged an inseparable link between sexuality and death, Eros and Thanatos.

The stress and excessive demands of modern life, alienation, and loss of deeper meaning of life and of spiritual values engendered in many people a consuming need to escape and seek pleasure and oblivion. The use of hard drugs – heroin, cocaine, crack, and amphetamines – reached astronomic proportions and escalated into a global epidemic. The empires of the drug lords and the vicious battle for the lucrative black market with narcotics on all its levels contributed significantly to the already escalating crime rate and brought violence into the underground and streets of many modern cities.

All the essential elements of twentieth century’s Zeitgeist are present in an inextricable amalgam in Giger’s biomechanoid art..."

 Stanislav Grof, H.R. Giger and the Zeitgeist of the 20th Century, 2005