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Towards a Definition of Modern Gothic

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Towards a Definition of Modern Gothic Making monsters: Gothic Processes and Metaphors in Contemporary Art Lecture Gilda Williams 28 Oct 2009, University of Westminster 1. Endless varieties of Gothic ‘There is a lot of second-rate work these days that illustrates Goth motifs, wearing gloom on its sleeves with big winks for everyone.’ – Ralph Rugoff, frieze, 20041 a dark strain of contemporary art gothic-themed exhibitions 2 and publications3 in the US and the UK, and a March 2009 auction at Sotheby’s, 1) spooky motifs such as skulls, bones, tombstones, shrouds, devils; 13) references to horror film; atmospheric, often elaborate interiors suggestive of a haunted house; 16) knights; castles; pointed arches, stained glass and other medieval or Shakespearean motifs; 2) Goth subculture; 3) adolescence, often evoked in labour-intensive, obsessive and overwrought (‘psychedelic’) drawings; 4) monstrous combinations of human and animal forms, or the organic and the inorganic, in ‘Frankenstinian’ creations; 5) mirrors, masks and doubles; 6) references to 19th century gothic novelists, particularly Edgar Allan Poe; 7) evocations of death, decay and nostalgia; 8) blood; matted hair; dissections; amputations and prosthetics; 9) exotic settings and details, tending towards a Victorian, Egyptian or Orientalist flavour; 10) erotica obliquely suggestive of sado-masochism, often in illustration and cartoon; 11) demonic children and children/doll/animal hybrids; 12) demonic animals, particularly bats, leopards, rats; flies and insects, sometimes dead or dying; 14) texts in gothic typeface; 15) ruins; desolate or dream landscapes; phantom cities; 17) shadowy or clouded images and projections; night scenes; 18) a predominance of the colour black from medieval architecture to 18th-19th century literarature, from mid-20th century B-films to late 20th century goth subcultural style 2. What Gothic has become/what gothic could be vaguery and anachronism. historically rich and potent term, which only returned meaningfully - late 1990s, will lapse into an art purely of motif ‘Candygothic’, a set of instable if recognizable ‘gothic’ triggers which play to a niche audience and corresponding market? signs of ‘otherness’ (sub-cultural fashion; a generic preference for the disturbing and violent over the life-affirming; distant times, people and places, etc.) frieze 2003 ‘Too many young artists today simply regurgitate a slew of diluted Pop-Goth signifiers, filling graduate studios with a plethora of skulls and spider’s webs, vampires and fake blood, zombie heads, eyeball sculptures and ninth- generation variations of old Bauhaus videos. Thus defanged, Goth has never been more tiresome.’ […] 1 Ralph Rugoff, ‘Anthony Burdin’, frieze, issue 87, Nov-Dec 2004, http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/meg_cranston/, accessed 5 April 2009 2 2 Among these: ‘Nightwood’, Rhodes+Mann Gallery, London, 2003; ‘All the Pretty Corpses’, The Renaissance Society, Chicago, 2005; ‘I see a darkness. .’, Blum & Poe Gallery, New York, 2007; ‘Spectre vs. Rector’, The Residence Gallery, London, 2007; ‘Gothic’, Fieldgate Gallery, London, 2008; A Gothic Story’, Shoreditch Town Hall, London, 2008; ‘Through a Glass Darkly’, Kenny Schacter ROVE projects, London, 2008; ‘You Dig the Tunnel, I’ll Hide the Soil’, White Cube and Shoreditch Town Hall, London, 2008. 3 See for example Francesca Gavin, Hell Bound: New Gothic Art (London: Laurence King), 2008 and my own Gothic: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Gilda Williams (London: MIT Press and Whitechapel), 2007. 1 ‘In the past artists and writers were the necessary voices urgently articulating these truths and struggling to understand them. With this in mind, is it too much to ask where are the de Sades and Goyas, the Poes and Artauds, of today?” 4 - interface between life and death - he role of science and religion in determining the conditions of life - the effects of patriarchy and the domination of women and other oppressed groups - the legacy of slavery - the limits of pain and pleasure - how humankind defines monstrosity and Otherness - and the psychology and lingering effects of dysfunctional families and an unhappy childhood - contemporary gothic art express or expand meaningfully this set of themes? - anemic evocation of the weird and the deathly, relinquishing the genuinely destabilizing power 3. How can we define Gothic? parallel investigation into the literary, architectural and art historical understanding of this term - originates in architecture history - renewed definition via the arts and primarily the ‘literature of terror’ invented in the 18th century and later developments - is revived again through Victorian Gothic Revival architecture - today used interdisciplinarily to denote a ‘dark’ strain of art, literature, film, fashion and music. an ‘accident of etymology?.5 Literary theorists, Varma, ‘gothic spirit’ Linda Bayer-Berenbaum writing in 1982, the two principal disciplines of gothic share numerous essential qualities. restless energy; enquiry into the unknown; intertwining motifs; nervousness; the supernatural; excess 6. Gothic novels set in gothic abbeys and cathedrals Horace Walpole: wrote gothic novel, built gothic architecture 3a Chris Baldick’s - 1992 ‘Introduction’ to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales- most valid and resilient.7 ‘[The Gothic] should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce a sickening descent into disintegration’8 history, claustrophobia and disintegration – Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair and Louise Bourgeois’ Cells 3b: curiosities about gothic Gothic: can easily accommodate bad art (Sedgwick: gothic novels not worth reading) (Rotten Tomatoes) Easily slips into parody: Jane Austen parodies - comical Northanger Abbey (1818), via the 17 year-old protagonist, Catherine Morland’s 4 Charles LaBelle, ‘I see a Darkness …, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles’, frieze, issue 76, June-July-August 2003, 116. 5 Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, ‘The Relationship of Gothic Art to Gothic Literature’ in The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses), 1982, 51. Linda Bayer-Bernbaum, ibid., 47-71. 7 Spooner calls Baldick’s ‘the most satisfactory definition of literary Gothic’ (Spooner, op. cit. 18) while for curator Christoph Grunenberg it provides the parameters in his examination of gothic contemporary art as defining ‘a true Gothic work’ , Gothic:Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art (Boston: ICA), 1997, 195. 8 Baldick, op. cit., xiii. 2 continual disappointment with what she has determined gothic ought to be. Arriving at the medieval abbey - how ‘distressing’ the difference is to her.9 medieval period and, by extension, the Gothic, to give way to contradictory forms Gothic: slippery, anything that makes you ‘feel gothicky’ (Alexandra Warwick) Catherine Spooner : antithetical moments and ideas in culture. ‘[Gothic] can be progressive or conservative, nostalgic or modern, political or apolitical, feminine or masculine, erudite or trashy, transcendentally spiritual or doggedly material, sinister or silly. It is difficult to say what contemporary Gothic “is” of even what it is like, since it does all these things so well.’10 Jerrold Hogle: Gothic is always fake; no ‘authentic gothic’ ‘revival of something that never happened’ You always choose gothic, adopt gothic: unlike abject, uncanny which happen to you (share supernatural, no ‘surprise ending’ – return of the Unfamiliar – also NOT automata, built like a robot, but not one (gothic monsters can talk, gothic monster dress well – zombies?) seductiveness 3c. Bad Gothic/good gothic Modern architects and historians- self-conscious, derivative Victorian Gothic architecture (bad Gothic) and the far superior, structurally daring and spiritually uplifting Gothic cathedrals of the 11-15th centuries (good Gothic) If ‘bad’ contemporary gothic -e contradictory motifs - what is its counterpart, ‘good’ contemporary gothic? shift from ‘bad’ (anti-modern) to ‘good’ (contemporary) constant ‘good gothic/bad gothic’ dualism: purposeful gothic/sensationalist gothic; transgressive gothic/harmless gothic; honest gothic/artificial gothic; pure gothic/corrupted gothic, and so forth (barbaric gothic/classical) Vasari/Ruskin; medieval architecture/revival architecture Modern architects and historians- self-conscious, derivative Victorian Gothic architecture (bad Gothic) and the far superior, structurally daring and spiritually uplifting Gothic cathedrals of the 11-15th centuries (good Gothic) If ‘bad’ contemporary gothic - contradictory motifs - what is its counterpart, ‘good’ contemporary gothic? 4. Gothic as an antidote to modernism ‘Return of death’ ‘It only makes sense that artists are channeling a more intense aura: 9/11, the war in Iraq, the turbulent global economy and the recent SARS viral outbreak in Hong Kong have all left society and culture in a paranoid state’ (Michael Cohen, ‘The New Gothic’, Flash Art, 2003)11 I find this an inadequate explanation from the extreme volte-face - from Greenberg’s derogatory attitude toward gothic, and the art world’s interest today(despite some continued reservations) in, the Gothic. end of the 18th century, Martin Myrone offer exactly the opposite reason for its popularity: 9 Jane Austen (1818): ‘The windows, to which she looked with peculiar dependence, from having heard the general talk of his preserving them in their Gothic form with reverential care, were less what her fancy had portrayed. To be sure,
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