31 Days of Horror--Day 9 H.R. Giger Tribute

I have to admit, I am mesmerized by Swiss artist H.R. Giger's imagery.  His bio-mechanical creatures are equal parts primitive, almost dinosaur-like, and cyborg futuristic.  With penis-like heads, weird orifices, and dual layers of razor-sharp teeth nestled in wet, gooey, gaping maws, the Alien xenomorph introduced into visual culture in Ridley Scott's visionary Alien (1979) lives on, and on.  The creature's combination of delicacy and danger troubles any understanding of inside and outside, epitomizing what French theorist Julia Kristeva and cultural theorist Barbara Creed term "the abject."  While Creed invested a great deal of theoretical energy describing the Alien landscape, and its inhabitants, as examples of the "monstrous-feminine," I don't think Giger's world is so easily defined.  He constructs bodies and creatures that are both penetrated and penetrating, creating Escher-like fantasies that mess with your eyes.  ***Be prepared, these images may be NSFW!

Perhaps one can chalk all this stuff up to weird, twisted bondage imagery, but I don't think his images are that simply explained.  Sure, one can see body parts that are undeniably female, but where do they begin and end?  This image above recalls Egyptian imagery, mixed with perhaps some werewolf stuff, and there are breasts, balls, metal connecting wires and skeletal tubes. 

Is his stuff just weird tentacle porn dressed up as art?

Yes, there are plenty of phallic shapes and tubes penetrating bodies, but the scale of these landscapes are utterly wacko.  When I watch Alien, and see these Lilliputian "explorers" climbing into crazy, drippy holes and walking down dark, wet corridors, they are tiny compared to these vast spaces.  If you look at the above image, I can just picture some little people in space suits crawling all over this thing, clinging to all those sinuous lines.  Yet those lines also look like train tracks, part of some vast circulatory transit system.

For Giger, female bodies and sexual imagery are not easily traceable to common notions of "reproduction," as the Alien facehuggers and chestbursters both prove.  He tends to illustrate what one might call "baby machines" that are like a twisted mash-up of Donald Cammell's Demon Seed with The Matrix. 

Giger certainly has a thing for icky looking infant figures.  They kind of look like him.

What I really want to do is go to one of these Giger Bars in Switzerland, and actually sit in one of these creature chairs, like a whacked-out Alien space jockey that swills Martinis.

This bar puts all other bars to shame.  Now I just have to find a conference in Switzerland to get me there.