Horror, Fantasy and the Grotesque in Art

Thank God the Web hasn't yet succumbed to the flattening principle of commercialism, the blandness of the television dial. In the shadows of Web bandwidth, alongside the brightly lit Time-Warners and Mercury Centers, there's plenty of room for obsessive, eccentric, even disturbing personal visions. Horror, Fantasy and the Grotesque in Art is one of these dark corners that exists because weirdos are still allowed on the Web after dark. This bandwidth-slurping site offers a gallery of masterpieces for the morose and twisted--i.e., any of us suffering the 1am retinal twitch. Maintained by a Caltech physics geek who describes himself as a "fairly conservative" Baptist from Taiwan, the site is about as ecclectic and all over the map as its curator. He's divided the tour into categories that might be considered the Eight Deadly Fixations--Fear, Religion, Paranoia, Madness, Torture, Sex, Death and War. Each page contains four-to-a-half-dozen works of art, from the obvious (Edvard Munch's original pre-inflatable-toy version of "The Scream" and a requisite Goya) to the slightly more obscure (George Tooker's wonderfully paranoid "The Subway," which perfectly captures the midnight pall that falls over of any city's mass transit warrens). Click on the thumbnail GIF and a crisp full-screen scan unfurls itself for your horrified inspection. Log some rapid eye movement in front of Ivan Albright's 1940s rendering of "The Picture of Dorian Gray," which prefigures the EC Comics "Tales from the Crypt" style of the 1950s; cringe at of Gregory Gillespie's mixed media sculpture, "Fragment from a Vietnam Shrine," essentially a pulpified human head; analyze Alfred Kubin's haunting 1904 drawing, "Madness," a Freudian-influenced chiarscurro depicting a shadowy sprite taking hammer and spike to an invalid's cranium (I'm not sure whether the wraith represents the medical profession or the gremlins of mental disease.) There's no commentary here--which, considering the curator's malapropism-filled vanity bio, is probably for the best. And anyway, in the Web zone, one visual gross-out is worth a thousand words. (JW)

[ AlterNodes | CyberScape | MetroActive ]