Art World Undercover #3: H.R. Giger at Lomex Gallery, by Adam Lehrer
Lehrer goes back undercover into the ideological ghetto that is the art world. In the 3rd entry of this column, he finds H.R. Giger's entry in the NYC downtown art world a beguiling proposition
Hans-Ruedi Giger, so long dismissed as kitsch and unserious by the intellectual vanguard of contemporary art, casts a shadow great and wide over the art being produced by the youth of today. Against my best judgment, I regularly log onto the ultra hip art blog Tzvetnik to identify potential assets amongst this new crop of young artists. For a blog that positions itself as the cutting edge underground of the art world, I find myself rather dismayed that seemingly every young artist that the site publishes thinks it’s a radical aesthetic statement to produce images of goblins, demons, biomorphic forms of one kind or another. It’s not that the art is bad. On the contrary, from time to time you’ll indeed see something quite good. What’s upsetting is that this kind of fantastique imagery, which for decades has been gate kept from the art world and instead been the domain of outsider creative productions like manga, occult art, record sleeves and otherwise, is now being gate kept by the art world. If you enter “H.R. Giger” into the Artforum digital search engine, you will find that the publication hasn’t once published a critical analysis of Giger’s work and that the only mention of the artist’s name in its pages is in passing reference to Giger’s influence on other artists.