From fantastic art to science fiction: the visionary work of H. R. Giger
Few contemporary creators arouse as much fascination as H. R. Giger. His graphic, sculptural and pictorial work is unique in its genre. Less well known than his recurring work with cinema productions, it shapes a personal universe in which Giger has established himself as the brains behind impossible forms and fantastic nightmare worlds. All along his artistic trajectory, he has taken up the problem of the human situation in modern times – particularly in the technological era – by carrying out various investigations through plastics modelling. He has accomplished this task of exploration thanks to an expressive style which makes his contribution to modern art unique: biomechanics.
His art evokes great admiration in avant-garde and underground cultures, which consider him as a cult artist. His work is not hermetic, on the contrary: it is continually subject to reinterpretation and is linked to other contemporary philosophical and artistic questions. Moreover, with the advent of the digital age and the cyber-boom in recent decades, there has been new interest in his artistic message which is being re-read and reconsidered on account of the visionary character of the questions raised by his work.
Although Giger is a difficult artist to class, his art is connected to currents such as surrealism, symbolism and art nouveau, and his work can be situated with the fantastic realism of the second half of the twentieth century. There is no doubt that Giger stands out as one of the main representatives of visionary art and as the driver of contemporary fantastic art. Two factors were notable in the formation of Giger’s creative imagination: the obsessions of his youth (his fascination with guns, music, bones and skulls) and his taste for horror literature.
On his artistic trajectory, he has, on occasion, established interesting dialogue with other fantastic artists, notably, with surrealists such as Hans Bellmer, René Magritte and Max Ernst, and in particular with Salvador Dalí, one of his main references, along with the monstrous creations of Jérôme Bosch and Ernst Fuchs. But even stronger was his relationship with creators of horror. We would refer to the work of Francisco de Goya and his Black Paintings, the dark drawings of Alfred Kubin or the existentialist terror of Francis Bacon.
In spite of the large number of film projects which he has worked on, his work can only be fully appreciated in four films: Swiss Made 2069 (Fredi M. Murer, 1968), Alien, the eighth passenger (Ridley Scott, 1979), Poltergeist II (Brian Gibson, 1986) and Species (Roger Donaldson, 1995). On the other hand, his creations have been sought for highly ambitious artistic and conceptual projects which did not finally take off: failed attempts at an adaptation of the novel Dune by Frank Herbert (the first by Alejandro Jodorowsky in 1975, the second by Ridley Scott in 1980), for which Giger created the Arrakeen sandworms as well as the Harkonnen castle and furniture; The Tourist (1982), a film for which he created a new alien species; The Train (1989) and Dead Star (1990), in a more independent sector.
Alien, the eighth passenger is without a doubt one of the most influential films in modern fantastic cinema. The success of this production surely lies in the striking and worrying symbolic imagery which it uses, the fruit of Giger’s work as he conceived everything to do with the alien environment, from the planet, the spaceship and its interior down to the evolutionary phases of the space creature.
Many fantastic films owe something to Giger’s universe, particularly those with infrahuman murderers populating nightmare worlds, such as Scared to Death (William Malone, 1980), Predator (John McTiernan, 1987), The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982), Galaxy of Terror (Bruce D. Clark, 1981), Deep Rising (Stephen Sommers, 1998) and Pitch Black (David Twohy, 2000). A significant sample which covers film ofa the last two decades. Giger’s influence in the Matrix series of films (Andy et Larry Wachowski, 1999-2003) should also be pointed out, with their biomechanical creatures and other entities taken from Giger’ s visionary principles.
Giger can also be considered as one of the pioneers of the conception and development of an original artistic identity and a new postmodern aesthetic sensitivity which together are known as “new flesh”, an expression that came from the film Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1984). Giger’s paintings, Cronenberg’s films, Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs and Clive Barker’s texts form an ensemble of visions and images which create a genre where the human body and its alteration by chemical and technological means – the definitive degradation of the flesh – constitutes a new plastic beauty based on the abject.