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Without trying to sound
pedantic, I want to note some obvious points:
Art was used, in the beginning, for communication - pictures that
developed into symbols for writing, for recording history on the walls
of caves or grottos, for illuminating manuscripts, for plastering the
faces of saints and deities on frescoed church walls or stained glass
windows. Then for portraiture eventually (the portraits of the rich,
who could afford them, mostly), and for bookish illustrations. Then
came the 20th century, a roller coaster of excessive experimental
highs, artists pushing the boundaries of art as expression or
philosophical idea, like an adolescent child with eager hands exploring
his newly-discovered topography.
Since the beginning of
human civilization, art has served a purpose for
its time and has significantly mirrored its concurrent culture and that
culture's perception of the world. But now? We've moved beyond the
need for art as a primitive communicative device. We have photography
to record history and to capture portraits. And we've tired the limits
of abstraction.
Now to my point: there
has arisen, over the past few decades, a new
kind of art, something that has nothing to do with New York's obsession
with splats and squares and junkyard installations. For lack of a
better or more precise term, "dark art" is the title appropriated
to
this infant and increasingly popular genre. My work somewhat falls
into this category, as does that of hundreds of established and
emerging artists. Our mothers cringe, some people scratch at their
skulls in mild dismay, others ignore it altogether. But there's no
denying it strikes a chord with an ever-growing number of people.
After considering the properties of this genre, I think there are two
primary reasons for the magnetism of dark imagery.
1) Dark art is a response to an antiseptic society, one that has swept
all things religious, supernatural, mysterious, mythical, or magical,
under the rug. Thanks to Darwin, Spencer, Freud, (and the list goes
on), man has been reduced to a biological smudge on the cosmic map (a
reduction that has also great empowering potential, but in the light
of
my commentary, does provide a bleak backdrop in the sense that we are
starting over from scratch in many ways, and are not encouraged by our
modern disposition to seek out dark places of the psyche or the nature
of our human frailty, of death, etc.). And it rubs against our
intuition to refrain from searching out mysteries, or understanding
the
mythical qualities of man and of nature.
Dark art touches on this
intuitive desire to understand. So you see in
the work of artists such as Daniel Martin Diaz all
kinds of ancient alchemical symbols, a torquing of religious imagery,
dismemberment of bodies: elements harkening to an older, deeper place,
certainly not of our plastic society. Or the work of the Brothers
Quay, who have mastered the art of the kafkaesque surreal, employing
such props as brittle glass dolls, dirt, raw meat, and the limbs of
dead animals in their films to communicate properties of the
subconscious in their work. Other respected artists such as Saturno
Butto,
Trevor Brown, and Brom have created work that breaks
away from historic artistic convention, cutting through the crust of
our 21st century world into otherworldly realms that may speak more
truly to our present condition.
The terms "visionary
art" and "outsider art" also largely apply to this
artistic modus operandi. In an attempt to reconnect with our humanity
and spirituality, we've returned to an almost primitive form of
art-making. Like Faust we've become sickened by the anemic offerings
of our culture, and have turned to summoning knowledge of self and of
universe, both material and immaterial, from darker, older things. Art
as a philosophical idea or postmodern crumb no longer interests us.
2) Another function of so-called dark art is, I believe, the
preshadowing visions of apocalypse and the hazards of our globe
careening towards an unforeseeable future. H. R. Giger, of course, is
the
father of art that welds humanity to technology. In a striking blend
of bone and metal and phallus, Giger created a world of future
primitive man, often horrifically bleak, primal in its overbearing
sexuality, and helpless in its grasp of the modern machine. Countless
artists have, in recent times, echoed this vision, less a celebration
of technological advance than a latent apprehension of the coffin we
may be fashioning for ourselves. Such art marks the grim paradox of
our "advanced" existence: in a world bursting at the seams
with
unprecedented medical technologies, scientific discoveries, and
improved living conditions, we can, at any given time, instantaneously
destroy the entire planet with bombs or unleash plagues on whole cities
or nations. Our world is both grimly beautiful, promising,
threatening, and many individuals can identify themselves and their
world through dark art's varied representations of our future.
So dark art
(to sum things up) is an introspective and visionary
response to our age. We're teetering at a point in history where we
need to explore our meaning and existence, uncorking a few mirky
bottles that have been so efficiently shelved by our modern
philosophers and scientists. Dark art is, I think, for many people a
response to this searching.
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