Art: Stay calm and carry on?

Over at I Love Horror, Mr. McHargue has post a handful of illustrations from a 1910 issue of The Strand depicting a giant insect attack on London. Half steampunk, half '50s Atomic Era horror, all awesome - the full gallery is a treat.

Art: The masks people wear.

It's been forever since we've done one of these. For new readers, I used to regularly share images of gas masks on a semi-monthly basis. No reason, other than I find them strangely captivating. In this batch look for the image of Hitler youth training for chemical warfare. The photog's shadow serves as a powerful and ominous visual.

House of Silent Scream: The extension of horror.

Today's House of Silent Scream is a real treat.

Here's an odd little factoid about Zoe, mistress of the beautiful and brilliant Zoe in Wonderland bog. Today's installment of the House of Silent Scream will be the second time Zoe's been a guest blogger here. That's not the factoid. Here's the factoid: Zoe's first post, a collection of gas-mask themed art work is one of the most popular posts ever featured on this blog. Not only was a big hit when it posted, but it remains a popular entry point for the blog and regularly ranks as the third or fourth most visited post in the entire history of the blog. Seriously. She could do this blog without me!

So, without further ado, here's Zoe and her partner in crime Gabriel - CRwM


"We crossed long, high-vaulted corridors; the wavering light borne by Franz threw a strange brilliance in the thickness of the gloom. The vague forms of the colored capitals, pillars and arches seemed suspended here and there in the air. Our shadows moved forward at our side like grim giants and on the walls the fantastic images over which they slipped trembled and flickered..." --ETA Hoffmann, Das Majorat



The 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari found in the Expressionism of post-war Germany a perfect stylistic match for its tale of madness and murder. The art movement preceding Expressionism was Art Nouveau: flowers and natural ornament, wild curls of hair, free-flowing imagery. As people went into and then came out of the "Great War," the art world morphed into one of Expressionism, which focused more on vicious angles and dark, cavernous, claustrophobic, unbalanced settings. There had been a general loss of faith in man's ability to be "alive" in any real sense of the word; people felt that their souls had been sapped out, they felt there was a real evil to humanity that had before seemed impossible. Even nature became suspect, no longer the bountiful and embracing world of Art Nouveau, but abstract, sharp, aggressive, made up of sinister trees and dark caves...




"Prager Street"
Otto Dix
(note the focus on destroyed bodies, begging and militarism, with sharp angles expressing severe physical pain. Also the "stacking" effect: instead of showing the audience the distance covered by the street in perspective, the artist has piled everything on top of itself.)

"In the months between Armistice Day and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, an estimated 700,000 Germans died of hunger. "The German people," Count Harry Kessler, the eloquent chronicler of post-WWI Berlin, wrote in his journals, "starving and dying by the hundred thousand, were reeling deliriously between blank despair, frenzied revelry and revolution. Berlin had become a nightmare, a carnival of jazz bands and machine guns." " (GreenCine)

Though several considerations (such as limited resources) went into the decision to make the 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in an Expressionist style, it cannot be denied that this style served the film exceptionally well. It strikes me that Expressionism, especially German Expressionism, is a natural fit for the horror genre. This is all the more true in a silent film, where the audience cannot hear blood-curdling screams, or the menacing sounds of approaching danger. Horror films found in Expressionism a kindred spirit, a visual manifestation of the alienation, menace and danger which is their subject (theme). In the Expressionist set, there are no open spaces free of the shadows which conceal threats. Even interior spaces provide no relief, composed as they are of "absurd geometries."
The twisty, threatening trees and the narrow, suffocating hallways, heightened in their strangeness by the sharp contrast of light and dark are then matched by the pallor of the somnambulist's face and the dark rings under his black eyes, or the bizarre streaks in Caligari's hair and gloves. Caligari's total control over the somnambulist, his patients and his audience is shown by his almost constant placement over them, on stage or at the top of a long flight of stairs. The madness of that total control can be seen clearly in the over-wide shiftiness of his eyes.



Caligari
(From the MoMA collection)


Cesare climbing up with Jane's body

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is, as we see it, the tale of a madman, giving life to his illogical and paranoiac fears about the very man who aims to cure him. He imagines his doctor, in reality a kind and determined healer and a thoughtful scientist, really has the intention of wreaking his own personal vengeance using the the poor souls trapped in his realm as his tools. He tells a story of the Doctor traveling with a carnival along with a somnambulist, a man whose mind has been taken from him, who has no control over his own actions. The somnambulist, Cesare, is presented as having the ability to tell the members of the audience their futures, including the hour of their deaths. At night, the Doctor sends Cesare out to enact that final hour--for anyone who has annoyed him during the day.

In the original story by Janowitz and Mayer, the Doctor, representing not only Mayer's own former psychiatrist and nemesis, but also "the madness inherent in authority," (From Caligari to Hitler) was discovered at the end of the movie to be the evil controller of the somnambulist, as he was in the madman's rendition. Overwhelmed by his desire to document and analyze, to study certain habits and certain effects (read: to contribute to the advancement of science), he directed an evil and senseless violence, destroying both the soul of the somnambulist and the lives of his victims. Janowitz and Mayer were voicing a highly stylized and creative complaint against the authority that had led their country into WWI and society's unquestioning acceptance of the cold, violent march that industrialization and scientific advancement were leading them on.

All around them, the artistic world was heaving with this complaint:



"Explosion"
George Grosz
(Note the main contrast of black and red, the lack of shading, the angles and twisted trees, the sensation of things piled on top of each other)




"Bourgeois values, cold logic and unattainable beauty were tossed out the window; their art would be as raw, violent and dark as the world they lived in, driven by furious emotion toward a set of aesthetic characteristics that would later roughly define what we talk about when we talk about "Expressionism." " (GreenCine)

Janowitz and Mayer were furious with the decision of the director and the film company to add a frame to the story which exposed the narrator as a madman in an asylum and the story itself as no more than his odd, paranoiac ramblings. "A revolutionary film was thus turned into a conformist one--following the much-used pattern of declaring some normal but troublesome individual insane and sending him to a lunatic asylum" (From Caligari to Hitler).
But here's what's key about the artwork in this film. Even though Wiene ended the film with the scene which allowed us all to breathe a sigh of relief, realizing it was all just a paranoiac fantasy whose dreamer/creator was safely locked away, the visual aspect of that final scene is the same as it had been during the entire subjective telling of the story. That pressurized, constricted, violently shadowed and angular experience of madness and treachery was not simply in the madman's mind, because when we are brought out of his mind, in the end, to "reality," the world still looks the same: evil, terrifying, off-balance. As Caligari makes his diagnosis of the "mania" of the narrator, in the final seconds of the movie, he flips his hair arrogantly, and as the blackness comes into a circle around his face to mark the end of the film, the expression on his face is absolutely frightening. "I think I know how to cure him," he says. Behind him, the first steps in the cure are clear: the narrator is strapped tightly in a straight-jacket, lying on a bed (where Caligari had begun his diagnosis looking down on him from above), isolated not only from society by his commitment to the asylum, but even from the other members of the asylum.
The only "real" setting, in fact, is the gently curved wall on a garden path with actual, normal trees, where the narrator tells the story--that act of storytelling, then, is the one honest and sane thing that happens in the entire film. So in the end, it seems Wiene subverted his own subversion of the original film. He put the narrator in the nuthouse, yes, but isn't that what happens to those who protest too much against the evils of total authority? So that they don't disturb the general populous...

"You fools! This man is plotting our doom! We die at dawn!"

A small gift to CrWM, in thanks: "Stormtroops Advancing Under Gas," an expressionist etching and aquatint of faceless, soulless authority by the German Otto Dix, 1924.




--zoe and gabriel

Art: The fumes of romance.

Before the month's out, it is time to indulge in ANTSS semi-monthly parade of gas mask weirdness. Regular readers know that I like to fly my gas mask freak flag now and then - it has more to do with my love of its bizarre aesthetic and my love of the Golden Age Sandman comic book character than any kink o' mine. Here's a new batch of gas mask pics to ponder.

Art: The men who brought the zombie to America.

Recently, Publisher's Weekly, casting about for good news in an increasingly bleak biz context, has taken notice of, get this, some sort of uptick in consumer interest for zombie books. I doubt that readers of this blog will be particularly surprised at this President-Garfield-still-dead grade reportage, though the story does show that, really, this publishing "movement" is basically two books: Brook's World War Z and the Austen mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The former's 200,000 copies sold puts it in the realm of genuine hit (20,000 is a solid performance while 1 million puts you in Harry Potter territory), while the latter's rep looks secured on the basis of printing data (600,000 copies, the book's in its 16th printing already), though actually sales data has yet to surface. No doubt the other titles mentioned fetch a pretty penny or two for their publishers, though the data provided suggests that we're looking at two huge redwood trees and a lot of otherwise undifferentiated ground clutter.

Furthermore, to put this new phenom into perspective, the last book in the Twilight series sold 1.3 million copies in its first day of release. Even if every single copy of P&P&Z printed sold – which is unlikely – that single YA vamp book would trounce the combined sales of both titles. For those curious, the sales for the entire series are just south of 30 million. Next time you see somebody bashing the vampire romance franchise, imagine Stephenie Meyers responding, "These jabs sting, but then I just rub some money on the wound and that seems to ease the pain."

Charges of coming late to the not-much-of-a-party aside, the article's author gets extra points for comprehensiveness – the article ranges from Image Comics' excellent Walking Dead series to teen tales like Never Slow Dance with a Zombie - and a gazillion extra points for name dropping the father of American zombies: William Buehler Seabrook.

A restless and often self-destructive man, William Seabrook became a journalist and travel writer known for his extreme tales of far-of lands, retold with lurid detail for the subscribers of Cosmo, Reader's Digest, and Vanity Fair. An uneven and disciplined writer, given over to deploying now embarrassingly simplistic cultural and ethnic stereotypes, much of Seabrook's literary legacy is justly forgotten. However, three major milestones in American literature remain his. In Asylum , Seabrook turned his stay in the Bloomingdale mental institution in New York into the first celebrity rehab memoir. In Jungle Ways Seabrook gave American literature is only extended description of the taste of human flesh produced by a professional writer: "It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable." Finally and most importantly, in The Magic Island, Seabrook's sensationalist account of his wanderings in Haiti, the author introduced American audiences to the zombie.

It is sometimes erroneously stated that Seabrook introduced the word to the English language, though evidence for the term stretches back to at least the mid-17th century. However, these earliest uses are often vague references to various aspects of Caribbean and South American religions or are now archaic reference to culturally specific phenomenon, such as the resurfaced corpses of the buried dead unearthed by seasonal flooding. What Seabrook did was link the term zombie specifically to the concept of a person raised from the dead, and presented this definition in such a lurid way as to kick off a craze for the reanimated corpses in pulp lit and film. Seabrook's Island hit the shelves in late 1929. By 1932, Lugosi was starring in White Zombie.

The Magic Island includes original illustrations by the mysterious Alexander King, a once prolific and now obscure artist whose bio is lurid as Seabrook's. An abrasive man who was, at times, a painter, a failed playwright, and late night television regular, he was briefly an art thief and was busted after boosting 50 prints from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

King's images, shown below, are the first images of the walking dead to reach American shores.

[UPDATE: The ever on top of things Zoe has found a link to an online edition of The Magic Island. Check the comments for the URL. Thanks Zoe!]

Guest Blogger: Zoe on gas mask art.

Screamers and Screamettes, I've asked blogger Zoe Blue, surrealism guru and art fancier, to curate this month's gas mask display. Enjoy.

Gas masks in Art





Delirium:
A disoriented
condition with
clouded consciousness,
often accompanied
by hallucinations,
illusions,
misinterpretations
of events and
a generally confused
quality with reduced capacity to
sustain attention.
(from Victor Koen's Funny Farm alphabet)

From gas masks

"Delirium," by Victor Koen


"The obsession with the "perfect baby" and children who would be progressively more intelligent and fit than the last generation, is an ancient one. Today through genetic technologies, social engineering and developmental psychology we believe we control previously inaccessible natural workings that strongly influence the way children are born, learn and grow...From extreme authoritarian rhetoric to schooling systems of total autonomy. The revolution in reproductive science has come to add yet another dimension to the issue, and blurred the borders between fact and fiction. 'Tasks & Games, portraits of the never young' is a series of 24 portraits, depicting children caught in the middle of the pursuit of perfection before and after their birth....Dramatically lit and staged in traditional photography studio settings, in front of bizarre backdrops or locations that some times overtake their little bodies, or what's left of them, the children are posed with their favorite toys or objects, in their Sunday best. A closer look will reveal signs of severe pain. We get to observe visual renditions of the nightmares they live in, and through them, maybe we face some of our own. They have obviously taken their toll on the kids even if most of them are smiling or smirking. ...The majority of the raw photographic materials originate from the early nineteen hundreds. The children are ...are fused with contemporary objects and environments that seem to consume them. The images are titled after traditional tasks and games. A sharp juxtaposition between the pure nature of old fashioned children activities with scientific methods and their results."

From gas masks

This one is called "Dusting." Victor Koen

From gas masks

"Vanity Study #39" Victor Koen


Another Fine Artist who has some exceptionally creepy images of gas masks is Chris Anthony. He is most famous for his award-winning 2007 series of photographs entitled "Victims and Avengers," which caught women and children at the moment of violently overcoming their abusers. A more recent series, called Venice is, as he describes it, "a metaphor for a sinking city, deserving of nature's wrath, leaving its citizens to tread water and explore new ways to sustain life on aquatic earth." In keeping with his apparent leaning towards--or at least readiness for--apocalyptic moments of reckoning and punishment:

From chris anthony

by Chris Anthony

From chris anthony

by Chris Anthony

I think these are also gas masks, though I'm not an expert...

From gas masks

by Chris Anthony


Fred Einaudi also seems to enjoy apocalyptic themes. He likes to place images of innocence together with images of death and dissolution, and gas masks help express his ideas quite clearly:

From gas masks

"The Button Maker" Fred Einaudi

From gas masks

"Chocolate Donut" Fred Einaudi


Chet Zar has tons of them in his paintings, often with the mask merging into actual flesh, as in an evolutionary mutation. Here's Clown of Doom, and Uncle Sam, and It's All Good:

From gas masks

From gas masks

From gas masks

Moving into more political territory, we have street graffiti artists. A minor amount of wandering on the web gave me all kinds of commentary on why gas masks are so popular in this art form: graffiti artists often have to be very quick, so rapidly understood symbolism is a must, and the gas mask is easily seen as representative of government oppression (riot police-- so also as a symbol of preparedness for engagement with them), the effects of social violence but also environmental violence, and general dehumanization (facelessness). Greg Nog says, "It's a perfect symbol for anyone fearing the impending decay of civilization." A comment which would also fit nicely next to the Chris Anthony photos or the Fred Einaudi paintings.

From gas masks

Cellist with gas mask: a photo by smiling bag production from stenciled graffiti in Tel Aviv. There's a whole series here: http://www.bigartmob.com/meta/artist/Smiling%20Bag%20Production/ .

From gas masks

Bansky

Here, Nicole Dolly made her own, gothic, version of a gas mask, I assume for clubbing (or maybe just so when the day comes, you can maintain your style):

From gas masks

And onward into full-blown sculpture, here is "Dystopian Art by Yanobe Kenji: Mickey the Knight:"

From gas masks

This was actually a commissioned work, commissioned for Disneyland's 50th anniversary celebration in 2005. Strangely, they didn't actually end up displaying it. Yanobe Kenji has several other sort of terrifying child-centered sculptures which use gas masks. You can see his work here:
http://www.yanobe.com/works.html
Apparently, though, he actually got the idea for this sculpture by reading his history books. According to a gasmasklexikon article written by Major Robert D. Walk:

"The Mickey Mouse Gas Mask was produced as part of the war production program. The Sun Rubber Company produced approximately 1,000 Mickey Mouse gas masks and earned an Army-Navy ‘E’ for excellence in wartime production in 1944. Overall, production of the Noncombatant Gas Masks (and in fact, all gas masks) was one of the most successful production programs of the war. In fact, production had to be curtailed early due to the vast quantity produced."
More on this creepiness is available here:
http://www.gasmasklexikon.com/Page/USA-Mil-Mikey.htm

From gas masks

In case the mask itself isn't enough for you, I'll leave you with this extended version:

From gas masks

Sweet dreams!

--zoe

Zoe's own mind-warpingly beautiful blog, Zoe in Wonderland is worth checking out. Go forth and dig hard, my friends.

Books: Freddy's heat bills are atrocious and that money's got to come from somewhere.

So let's say you're some forest dwelling slasher. You live a simple, Thoreau-esque life. Your needs are no lavish. You have a pair of overalls and some army surplus. You have a head bag for casual wear and a hockey-mask for formal occasions. You don't watch television, play video games, or read – so your entertainment costs are at a minimum. You don't pay rent because you would presumably disembowel anybody who came to negotiate a lease for the accursed patch of sleepover camp that you call home.

Still, there are those unexpected costs that creep up on you. The cost of arrows, for example. Sure, a study machete will get you through a good 98% of teen slaughter situations. But it's nice to have ranged attack options. And you know you don't have time to go around recovering every arrow you let fly at some undergrad doofus who decided to leave his empty beer cans and spent Coney whitefish all over your nice clean woodland. These kids roam in packs and there's always a lot of screaming and yelling and running. Oy, the endless running. It gives me pains! Those 390 A/C/C Pro Superlight alloy/carbon broadheads you liter about really start to add up.

What? Make your own arrows? Sweetie, please. You're a slasher, not the last Mohican.

So you need money, but what to do? You can't just get a job. If the locals see you, you'll lose that all-important edge of sinister mystery. Plus, like, you're kinda justly wanted by the law for being a mass murdering psycho. What you need is a lucrative option that takes you far from your core market, allowing you to capitalize off your image without diluting the brand identity in your core market.

Well, you're in luck, my homicidal friend. Welcome to your new revenue stream. Pulp fiction book covers in India!

The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction is a sampler-plate intro to the delightful world of Tamil-language newsstand lit: a pulp universe recognizably similar to our own mass-market pulp alternoverse, but filtered through distinct cultural norms and given a unique spin. Editor and translator Pritham K. Chakravarthy selects ten notable Tamil-language market lit legends that give new readers a sense of the range in subject and tone of the Tamil pulps. I don't know that fans of American pulps will find their new favorite author hiding in these pages, but the talent on display in these stories is undeniable. Furthermore, the combination of familiar tropes and foreign culture make reading the volume a surprising pleasure, like eating comfort food that somebody has spiked with a particularly rich and unusual spice.

Why should a shambolic, seemingly sub-literate mass murderer like yourself care?

One of the treats included in the Tamil Pulp Fiction anthology is a series of color plates showcasing the trippy covers of this market lit. Several of these covers include images, both iconic and obscure, from American horror flicks. Below are samples of covers that rip off images from the legendary, The Exorcist, to the cult, Fright Night. The crappy scans are my fault. Chakravarthy's book contains high-quality reproductions of these and dozens of others.