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Metallic Anti-Christic
By House of Coma | February 2, 2008
Christian symbolics and the visual aesthetics of death metal
After an apocalyptic Summer of sorts and a decadent continental Winter, Metamoderne comes back to unearth the uncharted and the uncanny in contemporary aesthetics. We kick off this return of the Phoenix with a topic that offers an enlightening illustration of the clandestine connections between high and low culture, and more specifically between trashy pop music, Z horror movies and cartoons, Flemish court painting and Christian symbolism. All things wonderful which have helped to forge the contemporary visual landscape of death metal as we know it.
The visual origins of “Metal” are most often associated with some of the recurring themes and imagery of horror / dark fantasy and trashy Z culture.
Iron Maiden, for instance, have consistently resorted over the course of their long career and horrific visual output to the twin figures of the zombie and the mummy.
As two instances of a creature that defies the laws of death and revert the temporality of life and decay, they represent a symbolical challenge to the divine order. In both cases, zombies and mummies assume a function that is symmetrically anti-christic in the sense that they come back from the realm of the dead not to save mankind but to exert vengeance and quench their thirst for blood.
The iconography of the band Black Sabbath also provides a fine case in point of a superb and overt recycling of Christian symbolism into mainstream pop trash.
A first key is to be found in Jan Van Eyck’s The Last Judgment (ca 1430) , located in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. This striking piece by 15th century Europe’s most famous painter was probably initially intended as an object of private devotion. It is a good illustration of the moralistic intent of sacred painting in the Middle Ages which aimed to elevate the soul of the viewer by reminding him of the fate which the scriptures assigned to men - depending on how well they obeyed God’s commandments. Organized in three tiers, the painting represents, from top to bottom, Christ with the blessed and the Church fathers, St Michael about to strike Evil, and in the bottom tiers, Satan overlooking the spectacle of the cursed as they are devoured and tortured by a horde of demonic beasts. As we gaze at the painting, our attention is immediately drawn towards the gory vividness of the representation of Hell, typical of the literality of medieval interpretations of the underworld. Considered a master of realism, Van Eyck spares us no details of the torment that awaits the sinner in the Dark Lord’s kingdom. Lucifer himself, represented by a skeleton, is seen masterminding their suffering, covering the mass of nude bodies as they fall into the pit of Hell.
550 years and a fair amount of drugs later, Black Sabbath’s cover for their fifth album, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, designed by Drew Struzan (famous for his work on Star Wars) offers us an interesting take on Van Eyck’s motif of Hell. An almost identical skeleton figure is overlooking the scene, except this time Hell has been converted into an orgiac gathering. On a bed covered with pink silken sheets, a male figure is circled by a round of lustful male and female demons while a snake is strolling around his neck. In an ironic transmutation, the gory realism of yesterday’s damnation thus gives way to today’s trash kitsch erotico-fantasy.
Ozzy Osbourne’s infamous beheading of a bat with his mouth counts arguably as another performatic gesture of the reversal of Christian symbolics. Fans of the band would regularly bring live animals to their gigs and throw them on stage, some of which were massacred in an act whose evocation of the rituals of the Black Mass parallels the ancient tradition of the slaughter of the lamb. During the “Bark at the Moon tour”, a live bat ended up at Ozzy’s feet who promptly engaged to bite its head off, a feat for which he allegedly later required two weeks of antirabies shots.
Symmetrically opposed to the dove, a symbol of the Holy Spirit, the bat, as all animals with featherless wings, was considered a demoniac creature in the Christian tradition. It is a symbol of those who are condemned to wander on Earth instead of raising towards the skies and the Creator. Therefore, by sacrificing the animal and incorporating it within his body, Ozzy would perform an act whereby he incorporated its symbolic attributes as his own.
An exploration of recent contemporary art discloses how similar connections still operate as dormant or overtly expressed properties in the aesthetics of metal.
Take Jonathan meese, one of German painting’s rising stars, who reveals through his expressionistic style a characterized penchant for the figure of the antichrist, seen here as both hero and antihero, as much a negation of glamour as the recurring image of an alternative neo-messianic glamour, steeped in thick layers of black paint.
Using simple typographic effects and a good dose of dark humour, Steven Shearer creates graphic adaptations of the blasphemous intent at the heart of Metal’s discourse. By accumulating in a seamless flow a series of terms alluding to the repertoire of christianity along with a colourful palette referencing sin, violence, sexual perversion, torture, distortion and physical decay, the artist demonstrates the unbound comical potential and dark surrealism that lies behind the surface of metal’s horrific varnish.
From a photographic perspective, the portraits which Peter Beste took of the Norwegian black metal scene represent a landmark work for the disclosure of the negative Christian dialectics which founds the genre’s aesthetics. A look at these images reveals indeed the skillful mise-en-scene of a radically anti-christian posture that fuses elegantly the traditional antichristic elements (inverted cross, goats heads, Nosferatu-like make-up) with a distinctly christic posture which the references to the Scandinavian pantheon cannot completely evacuate (the long hairs, Christ-like stigmata and fake blood as the overt references to the gathering of the Apostles around Christ for the Last Supper) .
Finally, we do not resist the temptation to end this piece with the sublime Personal Jesus, covered in 2004 by Marilyn Manson and taken from their best-of album Lest we Forget, undoubtedly Manson’s best cover to date. Although it doesn’t sound particularly metal, retaining the original Depeche Mode format with additional guitar distortions, nor really has the look of it, more Jesus-Christ-Superstar-meets-goth-punk-Vegas-freakshow than death metal spectacle, the song, a popular theme amongst catch wrestlers, is nonetheless an instant hit by its sheer oddity, and shows that Manson has no lessons to take from anyone when it comes to trash kitsch sleaze.
” Reach Out and Touch Faith ” …
House of Coma
Links :
Jonathan Meese at Contemporay Fine Arts, Berlin
Steven Shearer at Eva Presenhuber, Zurich
Topics: Vision |
August 17th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!