by Apex Authors
LT: What was, for you, the personal highlight of your writing career so far?
LW: Getting published in the first place. I was very pleased to be nominated for the Clarke. I'm always pleased to be in the Years’ Bests and things like that. Ultimately, however, the highlight is being a professional writer.
LT: Finally, what is your next project? And can you tell us anything about the next Liz Williams book?
LW: Bloodwind is coming out in February 2007, and it's a sequel to Darkland. Next year, Tor will be publishing Vanish, which is partly set in a future and mainly Islamic Britain, and is about political disappearance. I'm halfway through the next Chen novel, The Shadow Pavilion, and the one before that, Precious Dragon, will be published by Night Shade this year.
Unspeakable Horrors: The Legacy of Darkness in the Visual Arts of Western Culture
By Deb Taber
A canvas will be beautiful, or it will not be.... Everything is wasted if the spectator flees and fails to return. And if he should come back, punctured eyes and infected wounds ... would disintegrate and beauty would never again be reconstituted. Total failure.
Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre[1]
To Sartre, horrific art was a failure on the part of the artist, and to paint or depict human suffering in a way that was beautiful rather than offensive was an even worse abomination, a betrayal of human feelings for the sake of beauty. In spite of this, artists have been depicting the anger and grief of the human condition in both harsh and beautiful ways for millennia, without any harm coming to the concept of beauty on the one hand, or on the other hand, betraying humankind for beauty's sake. So perhaps, instead, horrific art is here to stay because it actually defines beauty in one sense by presenting its opposite, and also brings to light the absence of beauty which is part of every human life, the darkness of the world in which we live.
Violence, gore, pain and fear have found a home in art for nearly as long as humans have been creating. Graphic depictions of hunt scenes and battles are nothing new, nor is dark art with fantastical leanings. Not only is dark imagery linked to the human psyche and experience, it is also closely related to the stories we tell through speech, literature and film. It expresses the feelings that words cannot always capture, and strikes each individual differently, allowing a personal experience of darkness that goes deeper than conscious thought[2].
The Birth of Fantasy and Shadow
Fantasy artwork, including dark fantasy and horror, owes its roots to the religions of the world, and to the stories those religions tell. In Western civilization, Ancient Greek artists painted and sculpted their minotaurs, gorgons and angry gods with intense detail and a flair for the horrific. Pottery from the Archaic period in Greece (seventh and sixth centuries B.C.) contains depictions such as a gorgon bare-handedly ripping apart a deer, and heroes triumphing in bloody battles against their foes. The East has its own dark artists and history, but here, let us focus on the West.
With the spread of Christianity, the tone of dark artwork often departed from depicting the fear of godlike monsters. Instead, violence was used to evoke pity and compassion for the victim in various paintings and sculptures depicting the crucifixion. The theme of triumph over enemies, be they demon or human, found new outlets in representations of the crusades, and in his never-completed sculpture, “The Gates of Hell,” Auguste Rodin combined Greek and Judeo-Christian mythology on his panels depicting a variety of mythological and human forms in various states of torment and contemplation. Regardless of the specific mythology represented by these works, the underlying theme is still the same: we are human, we are vulnerable, we are afraid.
In the works noted above, the stories are the beginning, the place where art forms before it steps away into the nonverbal realms where literature cannot follow. The art is inspired by the triumphs and horrors of the culture's legends and beliefs, but the work itself creates its own story, not only retelling the events which the stories detailed, but infusing them with a raw emotion that comes from a place of visual stimulation, rather than an intellectual reaction. This visceral response viewers have to darkly themed artworks is a large part of what keeps it in demand throughout the ages, regardless of the current trends in beauty. It expresses the forbidden sides of culture, the taboos, the stories that those in power don't want to hear told.
Propaganda Backfires: The Birth of Best-Selling Horror
The true marriage of dark art and literature was born by coincidence in Austria in 1463. The printing press had recently been invented, and new processes allowed for the production of cheap paper. Now, rather than meticulously hand-copying every word that was set to print, an early form of mass-production was available, and that meant books could be sold for profit.
In the late 1400's, King Matthias of Hungary had a vested interest in issuing propaganda against Prince Vlad Dracula of Wallachia. He subsidized reports of Dracula's bloodthirsty practices, as told by the monks of the monastery at Lambach, who were said to have witnessed the Wallachian prince's atrocities. By 1463, Dracula had married into the Hungarian royal family and the propaganda was no longer of political use. That didn't stop the printers from seeing a potential for profit, however.
In 1463, a man by the name of Ulrich Hans printed the first “Dracula Pamphlet” sold strictly for the readers’ enjoyment (and coin), rather than with political aims in mind. Although this pamphlet has been lost, at least thirteen others are known to exist, dating from 1463 through the early 1500's. By 1499, the publishers had contrived to boost their sales with a simple strategy: pair the writings with a gory illustration of Dracula's crimes. Pamphlets printed in both 1499 and 1500 portrayed an incident popularized by King Matthias’ anti-Dracula campaign. The popular woodcuts portray the Wallachian prince sitting before a field of impaled bodies while his servant in the foreground dismembers others. Dracula himself is enjoying a meal, and both he and the servant wear pleasant expressions while the bodies beyond them writhe in pain.
Of these pamphlets, Florescu and McNally write:
"The continued publication of the sensational tales confirms the fact that the horror genre conformed to the taste of the fifteenth-century reading public. We suspect that Dracula stories, in fact, became, during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, the first best-sellers on a nonreligious motif ... Sales of each [pamphlet] would have been upwards of 300 to 400 books a year."[3]
Moving into the Modern
In a strong argument against Sartre's comment on the destruction of beauty through horrific art, we have the works of H.R. Giger and other contemporary artists in the modern horror genre. Perhaps best known for his involvement with the film, “Alien,” Giger's works frequently combine technological aspects with the whole or part of the human form.
Giger's art gained a strong following in the 80's in America. Our rapidly rising technology in Western culture at the time was also bringing forth a large number of dark science fiction stories voicing the fear of the roles technology might play in our lives and the personification of that technology into something malicious and destructive, bent on having its own way and sweeping the humans aside.
Giger's work, rather than keeping technology in its place—shiny and mechanical and menacing—used his talent to give an organic quality to the sheen of the machine. In his “Biomechanoids” series of works, the sensuous curves and tentacle-like architecture give his paintings an animalistic feel, while the use of light, shadow, segmentation and hard, clean lines keep them in the realm of the machine. By adding human characteristics—from parts to whole body shapes—we are fully integrated into the machine, becoming something other than human, something greater, but also something we fear.
Giger also incorporated the use of mundane objects, from German garbage chutes to standard weaponry to bathroom fixtures, into his artwork. Through his eyes, a gun becomes a “Birth Machine,” a bathtub becomes a place of claustrophobic fear, and even the landscape comes alive with writhing forms.
Despite the
shudders these alien scenes may draw from the viewer, those who appreciate darkness in their art would not hesitate to use the word “beautiful” to describe them. It isn't a beauty which claws the viewer's eyes out, as Sartre says; it is a beauty that draws the onlooker in, begging him to look closer, to face the frightening scenes and maybe even love them a little. What is it in these works of darkness that gives them their endurance? The answer to this may lie both in symbol and psychology.
The Power of Symbol: Baring the Bones of the Human Skull
For a look at one of the most powerful images in dark artwork throughout history, let us turn to the image of the skull—particularly the human skull. This relatively simple bone structure has been used in art, both religious and secular, throughout history. One of its simplest and clearest interpretations is that it represents the finality of death. The starkness of white bone in contrast to dark eye sockets and the holes of the nose and mouth speaks to the contrast of life and death, being and not-being. There is no hope of reanimation once the body is this far gone, and until recently, no hope of identification. As such, it is the image of ourselves. When we strip away the flesh and hair, the lively eyes and expressive lips, we have an image that is simply human. Dead human. For all we know, the skull could be our own. The empty eyes look back at us, their depths unknown, but it is the teeth—the grin revealed by the lack of musculature surrounding it, that most often brings the chill.
Used to great effect in art, these bared teeth, in the human world, have double meaning. Our ancestral, animal side says they are a threat, a menacing gesture to warn off competitors for food. The bared teeth also are a smile. A grin of happiness, of enjoyment. The bared teeth of the skull carry both the threat of death and something about that joy, a grin that means the joke is on us and the dead are the only ones entitled to laugh last.
Some of the most haunting dark art takes the bare human grin out of the context of any recognizable face and into the body of something twisted, grotesque. Something of fear.
Francis Bacon's classic painting, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion is a series of three panels which morphs a vaguely human abstract figure into three different forms. The panel on the right gives us a protruding neck and a human mouth bared in a haunting grin. Said to be based on the figure of Nazi leader Hermann Goering giving a speech[4], this panel takes that haunting symbol and uses it to tell the story of atrocity and horror that issued from such a mouth and led to the legions of haunting art that came out of that era in our history.
The Shadow and the Self
More than five thousand years after the “best-selling” pamphlet of Dracula and its accompanying woodcut, dark artwork is growing in popularity and establishing a place in the art world. No longer relegated to religious contexts, dark art is taken seriously in shows that offer artists’ reactions to personal tragedies, global trauma, and the celebration of beauty in darkness.
Professionals in psychology and psychotherapy have come to recognize the value of such art, as witnessed by the growth of the expressive arts therapy field in Western culture. Carl Jung, one of the forefathers of modern psychology, had the following to say about the way man deals with his darker thoughts and impulses:
"Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected."[5]
Artists use their craft to bring to consciousness that “shadow” material in a way that may be very personal to them, yet which also strikes a chord in the viewer, allowing him to also recognize the parts of himself revealed in that darkness.
Another school of thought in this posits that traumatic events are stored in the area of the brain known as the amygdala, and that this area being separate from the speech centers means that conventional “talk therapy” does no good in certain cases because the amygdala can't understand that form of language.[6] It is an older part of the human mind, one which works in symbols and sensation, not in words. In cases where the trauma is buried too deeply to respond to conventional therapy work, art therapy may be the only way for people to process the events which have occurred.
The Expressionist movement fueled the art of many Holocaust survivors after World War II, allowing a less realistic approach to the human figure, which became blurred and shadowy, allowing both the artist's and the observer's unprocessed thoughts to come through. The viewer is invited to place his sympathies not only with the victims of the atrocities being committed on canvas, but also to recognize himself in the perpetrator of violent acts.[7] As artists and survivors used the techniques of their work to come to terms with the ambiguity of their feelings, so too were people who merely viewed the art able to be touched by it, and come away with a recognition of the darker side of themselves. Perhaps, as Jung says, this conscious viewing of the darker portions of the self can lead to a kind of visual catharsis, and a recognition in the viewer as well as the artist of his cruder aspects—the knowledge that he really isn't as good or kind as he might think he is or want to be. From there, it is up to the individual to choose whether or not to initiate a change in his own darker nature.
Creatures of the Dark
Not all dark art comes from a place of trauma or psychotherapeutic need, but even the works which don't stem from there tend to take on the artist's view of the world, much as the language of a writer will speak to his worldview whether he addresses the topic directly or not.
Expressive arts therapist and contemporary painter Amanda Wilkening says of her painting, Guilt :
"I painted it as a reaction to a news story about a man whose greed led to the deaths of his whole family. It wasn't until a while after the painting was completed that I realized how much of my own ‘stuff’ came through."[8]
Giger recounts his own realizations more starkly, saying, “Suddenly, I became aware that art is a vital activity that keeps me from falling into madness."9
So if some potential viewers are driven away by the power of these works, is it, as Sartre says, a total failure?
The simple answer is no. If works which generated a visceral repulsion in the viewer were complete failures, dark art would not have survived the centuries of human creation. As much as we love our horror stories, it is often the cover art which draws us in, makes us pick up a magazine or a book and take it home. The picture reaches into our minds through our eyes, sits itself inside our living skulls and looks out, coloring our perception of the words to come.
Whether that art is the black and white print of people dying in pain by Dracula's dining table or the haunted village scene on the front cover of this magazine, dark art is with us, to give us a chill, to draw us into the unknown that we dread to explore, yet crave. The “shadow” side of all of us lies waiting. Perhaps, if we allow it to express itself though the arts, it will stay satisfied a while longer, and the culture can be healthier on the whole because of that expression. We may not be as good as we would like to think we are, but most of us aren't as bad as we could be, and art may be a part of the reason why.
Cited Sources
1 from Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Aesthetics, translated by Wade Baskin, pp.61-62
2 from Robert Bly's introduction to Shadow, Searching for the Hidden Self, p.10
3 from Dracula, Prince of Many Faces, Florescu and McNally, p. 202
4 After Auschwitz: Responses to the Holocaust n Contemporary Art, Bohm-Duchen, p.74
5 from C.G. Jung “Psychology and Religion” (1938). In Collected Works 11: Psychology and Religion:West and East. p.131
6 from Robert Bly's introduction to Shadow, Searching for the Hidden Self, p.9
7 After Auschwitz: Res
ponses to the Holocaust n Contemporary Art, Bohm-Duchen, pp. 41-45
8 Quote courtesy of the artist
9 H.R. Giger's Retrospective: 1964-1984, p.9
Kill Me Then
By Alethea Kontis
2007 has been a long time coming.
I've dubbed 2006 “The Year of the Dark-Hunter” for all the work I did on the Sherrilyn Kenyon Compendium (look for it in stores this October!). But after swimming in Sherri's brain for an entire year, living with, dreaming of, and cataloguing vampires, I was more than ready to jump back into the deep end of my own twisted psyche. I started off the year with a list of projects, a burning desire, and a blank Word document.
It was like trying to remember how to walk.
I stared at the big white nothing on the screen for a very long time, and then I walked away from the computer. I threw myself into my day job so hard I came home every night exhausted. I initiated a complete purge and reorganization of my entire house. I caught up on my emails. I surfed message boards. I even started working out again.
You know it's bad when going to the gym is the lesser of evils.
About a week or two (and 2000 paltry words) into 2007, someone in the Codex Writers Group started a thread with a story about how she had accidentally been a bit too creative on one of her medical school writing assignments. It had almost gotten her into serious trouble with the department. She asked if anyone else had had similar experiences—if their love for the written word had ever caused problems for them. What followed was a spectacular slew of crazy stories.
Mine among them.
Ninth Grade
After years of writing stories, notes and travelogues that friends loved and teachers didn't get, I was really looking forward to high school. Higher Education. English Honors. A place where intelligence is praised and creativity is encouraged. A place where I would finally be understood.
