RIP H.R. Giger. From your brief, recent interview in Jodorowskys DUNE , it was painfully evident your life was nearly spent. You were one of the most influential visionaries of the 20th century. I first learned your name in an old back-issue of Heavy Metal Magazine when i was 13. I realized you were the pure aesthetic source for countless inferior pop-cultural derivatives id been exposed to for years. My life was changed by the epiphany that it was possible for a contemporary artist to work physical magik directly upon the world, unleashed from the sterile confines of galleries & museums, manifesting thought to warp reality in perfect previously unseen ways. At the same time, i could not help but feel a tragically crass wrongness in the specific ways your personal visual lexicon was metabolized by pop culture. The questions raised in my mind then, still have no easy answers. The compromises artists must make for their work to be seen, and the niches art occupies in the hierarchies of culture and sources of finance are complicated. Your genius deserved a different & better place in our culture than the one you achieved during life. You should have been commissioned to build cathedrals, not monster-movie-franchises, nightclubs, & album covers. If Jodorowskys Dune had somehow come to fruition, perhaps things would have been different. I will miss you.
Posted on: Tue, 13 May 2014 13:26:22 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015