In a time when high art is toothless, outsider and fantasy art allow us to confront primal fears and desires

Alexander Adams

Dec 27, 2024

H.R. Giger, Bio-mechanical Landscape (1976), acrylic on paper, 200 x 100 cm, © Estate of H.R. Giger

1. Studying the early period of an artist can be rewarding. It satisfies our desire to tie together strands and clues and discern how the artist’s originality manifested itself in preliminary concerns and exposure to identified influences. Recently I looked into the origins of Swiss artist Hansruedi Giger (1940-2014), looking at who he was and the earliest art he made, before he made his iconic designs for the Ridley Scott-directed film Alien (1979). Giger is generally described as a science-fiction or fantasy artist or artist-cum-illustrator, something discussed in the second half of this article.

Giger was something of a loner and daydreamer, described as introverted. His childhood was relatively normal. Giger grew up in a small farmhouse in the Swiss Alps, in Foppa close to the border with Italy. His father (Hans Richard Giger, a pharmacist) had chosen the location because he was worried that his hometown of Chur might be a target during the war. Although Switzerland was neutral, the possibility of invasion was a reasonable concern. Photographs present a healthy child out in pastures, the sheer mountain sides rising over his wooden chalet house.

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.” So wrote Baudelaire and we can describe Giger’s experience as a testament to that insight.

Giger’s birth was apparently difficult. The series of pictures entitled Passages, of the late 1960s-1970s, refer to a recurrent nightmare of birth. They show a narrow vertical slit of an exit in a secure mechanised chamber. Giger later described this nightmare. “I find myself in a large, doorless, and windowless room whose only exit is a dark opening, which, to make matters worse, is half-blocked by an iron bracket. Passing through this opening, I regularly get stuck. The exit, at the end of this long chimney, I recognize only a tiny glimmer of light. But to complete the misery, this exit is barred – as if by invisible force. I’m stuck in the tube with my arms pressed against my body, unable to move forward or backward. I feel that I am running out of air.”[i] These pictures are perhaps his most psychologically effective works. They have the force of a nightmare, one seen with the clarity that imparts a degree of awful implacableness to the claustrophobia and sensation of powerlessness. The series had variations on the machine tunnel with a narrow exit, with colour, design and condition of the composition altering throughout.

H.R. Giger, Passage (1970), screenprint on paper, © Estate of H.R. Giger

Giger remembered being greatly affected by the pictures he encountered at Catholic kindergarten. Images of the bloodied Christ made such a strong impression on him that blood flowing over the face became a motif in his later art. In 1967 he made sculpture assemblage of a head as part of an improvised water clock, with “blood” replacing water.

In the case of Giger, he was an artist unusually attached to childhood fascinations – whether they were pleasures or fears. As a fantasy artist, he was not much bound by his environment, producing likenesses or commissions. He could give free rein to his earliest and deepest preoccupations. Examination at a psychotherapeutic level is actually quite helpful in Giger’s case. Giger was unfettered by the demands of convention, so that he could pursue his obsessions to a level almost unprecedented. Liberated by the writings and examples of post-war liberal American culture and the 1960s revolution in permissiveness, Giger could allow his fantasies to emerge.

Reading art as autobiography is a hazardous pursuit, as it can simplify the complex and nebulous process of thought and expression to a excessive degree. It also discounts the conscious choices of an artist that might work against a more determinist model of creativity, particularly when outside influence is brought to bear upon the art by circumstance, in the form of a friend, patron or colleague. Now, it often happens that the artist adopts images and forms that are close at hand when they seem to satisfy a deep need within him, perhaps a subconscious one that is beyond his grasp. That is perhaps the most subtle and interesting means by which the artist’s essential attachments emerge into visual form, where there is a melding of artist, memory, agency, circumstance and chance. Art is often driven by the most primitive of motives.

Giger was an inattentive schoolboy but a keen draughtsman and much attracted to tinkering with toys, machines and in nature. His earliest art was of cowboys and Indians taken from Westerns and of Disney cartoon characters, which has been preserved in family archives. Later, he was a rebellious teenager, who adopted the stance of the counter-culture of the Beats, American jazz music and reading Satanic literature. His attachment to the macabre becomes evident in his adolescence, as often is the case. He read horror stories and had a fascination with weapons and playing with explosives. He built a ghost train (chamber of horrors) in the basement of the family house at Storchengasse 17, Chur, making large paintings, constructing figures, arranging lighting and setting up an array of skulls. This became called the Black Room, where in later years friends would drink, smoke, listen to (or make) music, dance and make out. This ambience was found in the few jazz clubs and rock-and-roll bars in Switzerland, which Giger photographed. Giger was invited to design stage sets, props and masks for performances by Das Mosaik, an amateur theatre company.

Another insight into Giger’s psychology comes from an anecdote in which he explained an adolescent fixation. “When I was a young lad, there was a time when I went to the Rätisches Museum in Chur on my own every Sunday morning. In its catacombs they kept the mummy of an Egyptian princess. I was enormously drawn to that mysterious black body, but it scared me, too. The absolutely elementary processes of life such as birth, death, sexuality have always fascinated me.”[ii] In the skeletonised body of the woman, blackened through the processes of embalming and decay, Giger found an object that embodied atavistic fears of death and atrophy and the libidinal attraction to female body. He made an Egyptian sarcophagus for his Black Room, complete with skeleton.

The combination of sensual excess, darkness and morbidity cultivated in the Black Room seems to naturally prefigure what would appear in Giger’s art. A pervasive fear of the effects of atomic war caused Giger to obsess over mutation. These fascinations plus his imagination were the drivers of his art but what allowed him to express them articulately was the proficiency he learned as an architectural draughtsman. Interior design and industrial design were also part of his briefs, during the period that ran from 1959 to 1962. This allowed Giger to master the precision and technical skills that made his artistic visions so persuasive. Although it is claimed that Giger was largely self-taught, we should not discount three years study (1962-5) at Zurich School of Art and Design.

He outgrew the sparingly detailed satirical cartoons he produced as a student (skilful but derivative of publications of the time) seeking to embrace more absorbing visions. By the mid-1960s, Giger had achieved his signature style. The elongated, skeletal limbs, fusions of bone and reticulated metal and latex, skull-gasmask heads, flayed anatomy were his obsession. The attachment to mechanised weaponry is apparent is many images. The settings were purely fantastical: the flat floor as expansive as a desert, the stygian bunker, the elaborate mechanised chamber of horror-pleasure. Fusion of biological and mechanical, with sexual overtones, became a regular feature of Giger’s imagination. He worked almost entirely in black and white.

Less known than figural pictures are abstractions using ink mixed with glue, which has been vigorously manipulated with brushes and squeegee, to produce cosmic loops, vortices and spatters. These are in the style of the Tachiste painters working in central Europe at the time and demonstrate that Giger was keeping his finger on the pulse of contemporary art, even if he chose to keep a distance from it. He used the airbrush to draw freehand, which associated him more with commercial illustration and painting on vehicles. This technique allowed him to create uncanny effects of smoothness and depth in his paintings, usually made in ink and acrylic paint, almost all made on paper.

As the fine-art world did not accept fantasy art as legitimate, Giger earned money by designing applied art and rock album covers, existing outside the high-art commercial gallery system. In the mid-1970s Giger was notorious enough to be nominated to do design work for cinema auteur Jodorowsky on his planned movie adaptation of Dune – a visionary project that never reached production stage. The success of Alien cemented Giger’s status as a brilliant outsider not a true fine artist, something Giger lamented. Staying out of that system allowed Giger a degree of freedom to remain true to his vision. Patrons came to him to commission material that would give them a unique piece of Giger precisely because he had developed his vision in private – a vision that would have been compromised if he had to have censored it for public display. Giger is in many ways an artist actually highly attuned to concerns of his age. “His visions evolved very much in the atmosphere of fear that held the whole of the Western world in suspense in the Cold War era: the fear of the nuclear threat and of the global destruction of all life; the fear aroused by war in Vietnam and the Napalm carpet bombing; the fear engendered by rebellions, revolts, and street rioting; and last, but not least, the fear that machines and robots would make human labor superfluous, or indeed that human beings and machines might grow together like hybrids.”[iii]

Interestingly, Giger later assessed that he had done his best and most varied work before Alien.