Alien Ant Farm

Shown above is “Landscape XXX” by Hans Ruedi Giger, aka H. R. Giger.  This son of a Swiss Chemist (no, not that one, though Giger’s works certainly seem to be influenced by Hoffman’s famous concoction). Giger is extraordinarily talented, his works exactingly rendered. He creates disturbed, fantastical visions of biomechanical lizards and aliens. His works and influence are inescapable. Yet up until now, I haven’t posted a single one of his works….

That’s because Giger’s art has almost no appeal to me. Looking at Giger’s work is like viewing an exhaustively detailed description of someone else’s nightmare. There are people who like taking in these stories about other people’s dreams. But for me, however extraordinary these stories, they all seem to be made of the same drab gray goo. Vivid and poignant for the teller, eye-glaze martial for the tell-ee. I chose the above work because it is Giger’s most interesting. In so much of his work the central image is instantly provocative, a blunt shot of repulsive, disgusting, or pornographic imagery. “Landscape XXX” has all the detail of Giger’s other works, but presented in a subtle way. The story here is hidden, the message scrambled in a mysterious tangle of lovely, yet frightening curves.