Fear of growing up art9/13/2023 This year alone is due to witness the reboot of a string of seemingly inexhaustible horror film franchises, from Saw to Friday the 13th to Halloween. ![]() Just as we rarely turn now to poets to tell us epics – a job more alluringly tackled by novelists and filmmakers – we’ve ceased looking, too, to artists to frighten us into a new consciousness. Perhaps contemporary art, like contemporary poetry, has contented itself in deferring roles it once performed to other shapes of culture that seem better suited to the task. But the lasting impression of displays such as One Last Trip to the Underworld (2019), comprised of darkly comic sculptures of fantastical flora and fauna that flicker freakishly into life by the light of looping films, is one of quizzicality and wonder more than tension and terror. The word ‘fear’ is frequently invoked to characterise too what’s elicited by the recent work of Swedish video artist and sculptor Nathalie Djurberg, whose uncanny and carnivalesque installations (often conceived in collaboration with the sound artist Hans Berg) invite visitors into a repressed realm of engrossing grotesqueries. But to my eye, the formidable figures we encounter in Rego’s work – from The Policeman’s Daughter (1987) who portentously polishes a jackboot to her portrait of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in the menacing red room – invariably defy fear rather than embody it. A recent academic article by the art historian Leonor de Oliveira entitled To Give Fear a Face: Memory and Fear in Paula Rego’s Work eloquently argues that Rego’s recurring motifs are indebted to the British art critic Herbert Read’s famous concept of “the geometry of fear”, coined by Read to describe the work of post-war sculptors whom, he clarified, had forged an “iconography of despair”. So where has fear gone in visual culture? The celebrated Portuguese painter Paula Rego is often cited in the context of terror and fright. While it’s true that Hirst’s peers, the British brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman, routinely flirt with fear as a potential aesthetic element in a body of work that embraces creepy haunted-house mannequins to childish defacements of appropriated images from Francisco Goya’s chilling The Disasters of War series, their meta mockeries of the macabre are, perhaps unintentionally, less scary than silly. So concerned with ceaselessly skirmishing over whether what they do is or isn’t art, many recent artists, one begins to sense, have simply lost touch with the full palette of emotions with which art is capable of being inflected, with the pigment of fear having arguably dried up the most. Hirst’s grimacing curio, comprised of more than 8,600 flawless diamonds, does not so much excite fear, however, as bemusement and exasperation at the outlandish cost of constructing such a gaudy gewgaw, let alone purchasing it. “The blessed arrange themselves in neat rows on the right hand of Christ,” as one scholar describes the scene, “while the damned stream in twisted shapes, bodies elongated, flowing downward… attacked by demons who stab, burn, and pull them apart”.īut what about today? Is there a discernible legacy in contemporary art of such incitement to fear as one finds in Giotto or Bosch, or of the perennial ambition – from Michelangelo to Munch – to forge the quintessential face of fear? Damien Hirst’s notorious diamond-encrusted skull, For the Love of God (2007), springs to mind as a notable modern reinvention of the memento mori tradition in art history, which customarily features skulls and skeletons not so much intended to make you merely ‘remember you must die’ (the meaning of the Latin phrase) but scare you witless by death’s imminence. Giotto’s deeply disquieting Day of Judgement (which broadcasts above the rear door of the chapel on a split-screen fresco that simultaneously portrays the matriculation into heaven of the righteous and redeemed) may not be subtle, but it is effective. The last thing worshippers witness on exiting the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy, for example, is a ghoulish glimpse into a sump of damned souls as they are sucked into the fiery maw of hell as imagined by the late-13th Century Florentine master, Giotto di Bondone. ![]() The first time sex was depicted in art? Terrifying visions of what eternal discomforts await in the afterlife should parishioners fail to live piously in this world (typically positioned near the exit to a church in order to leave an indelible impression), served a clear, if ghastly, purpose: to scare the congregation straight. Medieval and Renaissance religious artists were especially tuned in to its appalling power. ![]() Has art forgotten how to frighten us? In times past, artists understood fear and exploited it as among the most potent emotional levers that a painting or sculpture could pull.
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