The Goth Within

It has been hovering in the air like a dark ectoplasm these recent years and once the clock ticked into a new millennium it rose to the surface like a fungus or mold, the atmosphere moist with dread and anticipation, an ideal growing ground for stuff better kept in the basement.

As viewers and voyeurs we are both attracted to and repulsed by the grotesque; witness the hordes of visitors to Gaetano Zumbo’s infamous collection, Anatomia Barocca, in the La Specola museum in Spain, or the curiosities and grotesqueries of the Mütter Museum in the College of Physicians of Philadelphia or the jars of deformed foetuses in the war museum of Saigon. There is something about the flesh gone awry or some notion of posthumous awareness that pricks at some dark dread that is mixed with a visceral delight.

The term ‘gothic’ is by now so hackneyed and clichéd as to warrant a yawn the second it is mentioned. But there is no disputing that the imagery that the term garners has become all-pervasive. Fear has become pop, indie has become mainstream, ‘punk’ can be bought at the supermarket and ‘emo’ plays on the taxi-driver’s radio.
‘Gothic’ seems to be one of those terms that, like some infernal virus, finds ways to be rejuvenated regardless of the times. Its origin hails back to five East Germanic tribes who caused all sorts of trouble following the fall of the Roman Empire. By the mid-12th Century it was a derisive slang term referring to the spires and arches of French architecture. It morphed yet again in the 1700s as a description for literature following the release of such novels as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and, of course, Mary Shelley’s marvelous Frankenstein (1818). The literary description continues to this day, embracing everything from Edgar Allan Poe and Mervyn Peake through to the more recent Jack O’Connell (The Resurrectionist, 2008) and Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves, 2000).

By the mid- to late 1980s, Gothic was used to describe a side arm of the punk movement with such music as the existential pop of The Cure and the gritty urban-goth of The Fall which featured city hobgoblins and the Great God Pan in its lyrics.

In the new century it could be argued that its strongest expression is as an art ‘movement.’ From street art and tattooing, to installation and performance, painting and sculpture, elements of the gothic are everywhere.

But what is it? The term Gothic seems to adhere to any aesthetic or literary element that may make one uncomfortable. In this respect the Gothic relates to elements of what Sigmund Freud discussed in his 1919 essay, The Uncanny:

“The subject of the ‘uncanny’… is undoubtedly related to what is frightening — to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is which allows us to distinguish as ‘uncanny’; certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening. …”

In essence Freud describes the Uncanny as something we do not recognise, that is frightening almost purely because we cannot easily classify the object or situation around us. Freud uses the German word unheimlich which is clearly the opposite of heimlich (homely): “the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.”

Which could explain why threads of the Gothic slide eerily through the cultural history of Australia. For the earliest white settlers through to today’s recent immigrants Australia is a strange place indeed. This strange sense of displacement, of the ‘uncanny’ or the ‘gothic’ has always maintained a presence. We can see it in our cinema – Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975), The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978), Wolf Creek and The Proposition (both 2005), our literature – Patrick White and Gerald Murnane amongst others and our contemporary music, The Dirty Three, Ed Kuepper and Nick Cave all spring to mind.

But ‘it’ has arguably been expressed most poignantly via the visual arts. One just has to look at the dark gloom of the night scene in Augustus Earle’s A Bivouac of Travellers in Australia in a Cabbage Tree Forest, Day Break (c.1837) to gain a sense of oppressive mystery the bush exude and how misplaced the travelers in this strange land appear.

Frederick McCubbin’s Down on His Luck (1889) exudes a pure melancholy, a sensibility often attached to the Gothic. It didn’t take long for this strange land to invite European guests such as the pagan Great God Pan, another figure often associated with the Gothic in Sydney Long’s Pan (1898).

The Angry Penguins all embraced the melancholic and the uncanny at various points. Almost all of Joy Hester’s work is imbued with an introspective darkness. Albert Tucker’s ‘Images of Modern Evil’ series during the mid-1940s are indisputably Gothic (indeed, Janine Burke’s biography on Tucker is titled Australian Gothic) as are Arthur Boyd’s ‘Nebuchadnezzar’ works. According to the Book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, was “driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers and his nails like birds’ claws.” This is perhaps an apt analogy for how the early European settlers must have felt as they battled the oppressive bush.

Meanwhile in Sydney, artist James Gleeson was creating darkly surreal works such as Across The Threshold (1958). Influenced by European Surrealism, Gleeson would have been well aware of both the tradition of Gothic literature and of Freud’s notion of the Uncanny. Even an artist such as Brett Whiteley had his darker moments, going back to The Soup Kitchen (1958) (which in turn was clearly influenced by the more melancholy aspects of William Dobell and Russell Drysdale) through to his staggeringly Gothic ‘Christie’ series of the mid-’60s.

The dark and brooding palette continued on. There were Peter Booth’s hellish landscapes and Rick Amor’s shadowy, oppressive architecture. There were Susan Norrie’s monsters and Tony Clark’s Sacro-Idyllic Landscapes of the mid-’80s and Stieg Persson’s obsessions with sickness and melancholia. It filtered through to a slightly younger generation, Louise Hearman with her dark surreality, David Noonan’s Owl paintings, Ricky Swallow’s deaths’ heads and Nick Mangan’s brooding sculptural installations. And in the new century it has become endemic.

One powerful indicator of the Gothic today is the re-emergence of the momento mori. The memento mori has an immense history and elements of it can be found expressed in cultures as diverse as Christian iconography, secret caves in Australian Aboriginal lands and Buddhist temples. One can find it in the back streets of New Orleans and in catacombs beneath Paris and Istanbul where skulls are skillfully arrayed in plenitude.

The Latin phrase, memento mori, translates essentially as “Remember that you must die.” It was used to perhaps dilute the ego of the Roman generals and to avoid them falling into complacency, which, of course, they did, leading to the sacking of much of the Roman empire by the Goths. Another translation of the term reads Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento – Look behind you! Remember that you are but a man!

In many ways this is the guts of ‘contemporary’ Gothic from the 1700s onwards. Frankenstein, a story more than likely inspired by the Jewish mythology of the Golem exudes the humanity of its victim. The works in this show, at times blithe and humorous, retain a degree of sobriety and gravitas. Despite the youth of many of the artists here, mortality and indeed humanity are linking factors throughout.

The skull, with its not-so-subtle hint of death, is clearly a key symbol and one that has been utilised by any number of artists in recent years. The deaths’ head is appearing with unnerving and almost terrifying frequency. Contemporary artists such as Tim Silver, Ex De Medici, Juan Ford, Tony Garifalakis, David Griggs, Rhys Lee, Ricky Swallow, Kirra Jamison, Ben Quilty, Amanda Marburg, Peter Graham, Fiona Hall, Terry Taylor and Sam Leach, amongst numerous others, have all created bizarre variations of the cranium in recent years, and not surprisingly a number of these artists are featured in Neo Goth.

In Kirra Jamison’s eerily titled May Your Wishes All Come True a stark, bleached skull stares at the viewer while flowers and vines swirl, hinting at the inevitable transience of dreams. No matter what one may dream of, those dreams will eventually fade ‘like tears in the rain.’

The skull has been an ongoing motif for literally centuries, and yet it retains a morbid potency. Tony Garifalakis tends to adorn his with tumbling locks of hair; Juan Ford hangs his from gum trees or plants a sapling in the brain-pan; Shaun Gladwell goes for a ride with death while in Heide Yardley’s The Reminder death stares back. Poisonous snakes slide around Ben Quilty’s Rorschach of mortality while Sam Leach’s skull prepares for the role of Yorick.

But the gothic goes well beyond the death’s head. It can embrace vampires and werewolves, strange moribund organic growths and funereal floral decoration, murder and mystery, religion and spirituality. All of these elements run like a dark river through Neo Goth.

In an article penned for The Guardian newspaper in 2005, the English author J.G. Ballard speculated on the appeal of the television series CSI – Crime Scene Investigation – a semi-gothic approach to entertainment if ever there was one. He concluded that: “I suspect that the cadavers waiting their turn on the tables are surrogates for ourselves, the viewers. The real crime the C.S.I. team is investigating, weighing every tear, every drop of blood, every smear of semen, is the crime of being alive. I fear that we watch, entranced, because we feel an almost holy pity for ourselves, and the oblivion patiently waiting for us.”

Much of the current knowledge of human anatomy can be attributed to the Resurrectionists, the grave robbers of Victorian England who would snatch bodies from the grave and supply them to fledgling surgeons – the precursors of the CSI team – to study the body. Whilst gruesome, and naturally illegal, their work supplied the foundations of contemporary understanding of the human body. In a strange way the artists of Neo Goth are also Resurrectionists, their work encouraging us to contemplate that which is usually hidden under the bed. Often imbued with dark humour, these artists nonetheless remind us of our own mortality. They also remind us of the power of story telling, of the things that go bump in the night, of the shadows that flicker on the walls, of that eerie moment between wakefulness and sleep, between life and death.

But perhaps there is an even more profound reading here – beyond the pop culture of heavy metal tattoos and zombie movies. Artists often tend to feel the pulse of society, to be considerably more sensitive and aware than average folk. Perhaps what these works are telling us goes full circle back to the original, plundering and looting Goths. The Goths, as mentioned, were essentially barbarians destroying anything of cultural value. But in this day and age are we not all Goths? We loot and pillage and rape the planet with nary a thought for the future.

Yes, we are all Goths, and if we are not careful these artists may be doing little more than illustrating our future.

Catalogue essay for Neo Goth: Back in Black, University of Queensland Art Gallery, 2008