Man and Gods: Transhumanism and Art

I well remember standard 7 at Northcliffe High School in Johannesburg, it was 1974 and I was thirteen years old and sitting in my English teachers class (I just can't remember his name right now) which was held in a terrapin which was a kind of temporary classroom because they were growing and needed more space.

But anyway . . .  he was trying his best to inspire and excite our collective creativity with some innovative, generation gap, barrier hopping ideas. I remember him well, he was a good guy and managed to keep the respect of the group even though we all knew friendship with the enemy was impossible; the enemy meant "old people. . . especially parents and teachers, over the age of 20".  But in spite of these political concerns I distinctly remembering liking this teacher even though he was especially ancient . . .at least 30. 

He came to class one day with an exercise for us. . . He showed us a poster and asked us to put up our hands and then attempt to describe in words the thoughts it triggered in our imaginations. 

It must have made an impression on me since i remember it well. . . and that has to be a good thing. 

H.R. Giger: Birthing machine, 1967

 In his “Gebärmaschine” (1967), a womb is depicted as the chamber of a pistol, the babies awaiting their birth are arrayed like cartridges. 

The central, recurring theme in his work is described by a portmanteau he coined himself. . . "biomechanoid" in which we see images showing various thinly veiled pornographic  fantasies with a touch of addiction and leather and chain bondage which are combined with technological devices and combustion machines which echo sexual coupling.

Quite a seminal work for the 27 year old Giger who had not yet been elevated to the cult status of the inventor of the "Alien" from Ridley Scott's ground breaking film in 1979. 

Ironically this image of the famous "Space Jockey" that the astronauts encounter when they're exploring the wreck at the start of the movie is the greatest piece of Art associated with the film. . . After 1979 it was all downhill from there. 

H.R.Giger was, however, not included as part of our "history of art" curriculum for the 1960's. Mainstream art in the 1960's was dedicated to memorialising the progenitors of POP art and their chief representative, the anaemic  Andy Warhol, which we will no doubt deal with shortly as his Art presents us with a very oblique look at humankind and its prognostications for the Transhumanist future.  

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych 1962

Andy Warhol said 'I want to be a machine' and the technical skills and invention that Giger employed in his Orwellian pictures demonstrate a totally different mindset from the ideas of Warhol who was attempting to remove any hint of humanity from these images. Why? well he was supposedly making a statement about the distance between the reality that is constructed in our imaginations and perceptions - by the media, and the real world. The image of Marilyn has nothing to with Marylin the person, but rather the commodity used to generate a profit and then discarded. This is a statement that is a cold indictment on the issues of a modern society. 

In contrast to Warhol, Giger's art may has an element of the Romantic which comes from fantasy art which had no place in the modernism coming out of New York in the 1960's.

The "Birthing Machine"  is a far more subtle statement by Giger when compared to the greasy occultic pornography of his later visions. But as so often happens to a prodigy is the  unique vision demonstrated at a young age then slips into complacency upon early success. The work doesn't lose its sophistication but seems to end up in the dangerous rut of repetition as Giger plays out his endless biomechanical sexual fantasies. 

So in his twenties Giger presents us with a pictorial version of an Aldous Huxley/George Orwellian  type dystopia. 
This is the kind of Transhumanist nightmare in which the womb as agent of procreation is combined with an agent of death and destruction as well as the repetitive nature of an automated production line.

Very pessimistic view of the future of mankind, but just as we previously observed with Jane Alexander's Butcher Boys and then Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, this is the work of a young man, who might possibly have been unaware of the power of the image he has made. This is reinforced when once considers the titillating but essentially shallow level of art Giger made after the 1970's . . . post "Alien" and post "Brain Salad Surgery" (Emerson Lake & Palmer 1973),  although his later obsessions were already emerging, this was truly a visionary piece of Album art.

The 1970's were providing a blueprint, it seems for a Transhumanist future that Giger surely did not believe could actually come about in his lifetime,  well he died in 2014 so that part is true, but if we compare Giger's sculpture with the transhumanist sculpture at the Grove Hotel in England we can certainly draw some visual parallels

The Grove hotel was the site of the secretive 2013 Bilderberg meeting.

'The hotel hosted Google’s annual Zeitgeist conference just a few short days prior to Bilderberg’s gathering. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, currently employs top transhumanist Ray Kurzweil as director of engineering. 

In numerous speeches, including those made at Google Zeitgeist, Schmidt has outlined his vision for a collectivist, permanently networked world in which individuality and privacy are ostracized and those who refuse to sign up to the new religion of transhumanism are shunned as sub-human savages.' - from 'The Road to singularity' - DANIEL TAYLOR

Here is Giger's 'perfect woman' looks a bit spiky to me if you hug her you might get bruised - or cut - or electrocuted . . . ! She looks pretty tough for sure, but Giger still loves the aesthetics of his creation even if it is the beauty more akin to the latest car model rather than human beings. Does this sculpture reflect a longing to escape the drabness of the real world the softness and vulnerability of it all?

 The human body has an endoskeleton (inside), this is the common theme here, the toughness of the human body. We bleed and puncture too easily, our soft organs are very vulnerable. So much of our thought life is about how to be tough on the outside as well as the inside. Wouldn't it be great if we could grow our own armour as an exoskeleton. Perhaps we could combine our DNA with a beetle or armadillo and get some natural armour plating.
This is n fact up for discussion and, judging from the specially commissioned sculpture, it would appear was very much on the agenda in the Bilderberg meeting. 

In Space No One can Hear you scream

In the film "Alien" there is a sentient Robot called "Ash" on the space ship "Nostomo", the crew are initially unaware that he is not human until he tries to Kill Sigourney Weaver's character "Ripley". The truth behind the crew's mission is then revealed by "Ash" after he has been decapitated. He tries to kill Ripley and is timeously defended with a fire hydrant. His head is then 'reconnected' by the crew  in order to pump him for information.  

Ash confirms that his order was to bring back the life-form, even if it meant sacrificing the crew. Ripley asks how they can kill the creature. He tells them they have no chance against it, as it is "the perfect organism". He has a silent admiration for it, calling it "a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse and delusions of morality". . . Sounds like a modern day Politician.

So when we have a look at the Bilderberg sculpture in the pool of the Grove Hotel in England, we can draw a parallel to the admiring sentiment of the 'Droid' from 'Alien' what is interesting is the Droid is the one who admires the qualities of the Alien and not the humans perhaps the cold hearted assessment is meant to demonstrate the humanity of the crew, and yet the Droid is just following orders from the humans back home. We discover to our horror that the Alien life form is coveted as a prize and the crew was meant to bring the specimen back with them even if it was at the expense of their lives. So the Alien is more valuable than the humans.

The basis of most science fiction is the idea that Life Evolved from basic to more complex life forms on earth and therefore it is likely that this happened elsewhere in the Universe. The Alien life form is the new Apex of all Evolution, this is the opinion of the researchers of the future or rather, the writers of the film. The development of the imaginary Alien is in fact a projection of our human longing to be just like the Alien.

It seems very strange when we think about this, how is it possible that we somehow ended up being the Apex of evolution in this particular world and yet we are so physically weak? There are plenty of animals here on earth who are a lot tougher than we are. . .

Perhaps Some one will point out that it is our mental capacity and intelligence that has propelled us forward beyond the necessities of mere physical survival. And yet the toughest body is still what is most desired by the leaders of our civilisation. We regret the advanced mental capacity we have since we would rather trade it, or at least trade other humans, for an  Alien.

But that's just a movie someone says, is there any connection to our reality today? 

Well just ask DARPA. Isn't that the whole focus of their research, to build a super soldier? It is my suspicion that research in this area far outstrips any financial budgets for medical developments. 

And so we come full cycle to Giger's art piece the "Birthing Machine", where Giger predicts the development of a superhuman that merges humanity with the machine to create a superior being. But in order to achieve this mankind must make a sacrifice. What essentially makes us human is not desirable, we must protect ourselves and become the Apex of all evolution no matter what the cost. We must be 'unclouded by conscience, remorse and delusions of morality', since these are signs of weakness they must therefore be eliminated in future man.

Very interesting article "THE ROAD TO SINGULARITY" prophetic work of George Orwell C S Lewis and other's pessimistic prophecies about the future of man seem to be coming true.

An interesting aside

In the climax of the Alien film Ripley strips down to her underwear (much to the delight of the audience), but apart from the sexy distraction is the contrast between a frail female human and the all powerful Alien creature. The ensuing struggle ends with Ripley managing to outwit the creature and against all odds she ends up the unlikely sole survivor, and the Alien is blasted out into deep space, where hopefully it dies . . . or does it?

This is very ironic as the apex of evolution is defeated by frail humanity. . .  perhaps this was simply part of the storyline to give the movie a bit of a Hollywood ending, since what should have happened is the complete destruction of the entire space ship since its occupants have no answer to combat the 'indestructible' Alien creature.  

Fun with Hybrids

The one aspect of transhumanism is the technological enhancements our science hopes to develop. The other aspect is the development of a DNA combination in order to develop or speed up our evolution. The arguments for this are about us developing evolutionary 'improvements' in accord to our own desires and wishes instead of leaving the process up to nature. 

Chinese Sculpter Liu Xue created a series of human-animal hybrids that he ironically calls “We Are The World.” 
Most feature obese caricatures of bald men supported under the legs of walruses, bull frogs and pigs. Others include lithe contortionists with bird legs, and a wispy crooked man shrugging over a poised greyhound body.

Well the reference is quite obviously a play on the ancient hybrids in Greek Mythology such as the Centaurs depicted here on the Parthenon frieze.

Centaurs were half-men and half-horses who according to myth lived in a region called Pelion in Magnesia, a coastal region in Central Greece.

The view today is just as follows: The Gods were housed on mount Olympus, an actual mountain in Greece, there is an actual place in the geography of Greece where the history of each and every myth begins or takes place. 

The literal explanation of these creatures being a reality is then naturally dismissed as it is believed that even the Greeks themselves surely would not have believed in the literal truth of these stories. 

So what on earth were they thinking? Why make up stories about human animal hybrids? 

The following would be a somewhat orthodox reply to these questions:

This particular myth is really meant to depict the unpredictable aspects of man's nature which he needs to learn to overcome, such as problems with tempers and lust and all these types of things. You can understand the idea of 'taming' a horse as a metaphor for problematic aspects of our human temperament.  These problems are illustrated through tales that come from a mythological History in which the adventures of the Centaurs demonstrate the base nature of mankind. 

For example in the story of Pholos (a centaur) he hosts the great warrior Hercules in his cave and they start drinking wine from a large wine filled Pithos. This attracts other Centaurs who get themselves drunk and start a fight in which many of them including Pholos are tragically and needlessly killed, this illustrating the dangers of drinking around unpredictable temperaments, or something of that nature.

So what would the ancients think about the 'centaur' of Liu Xue in which a chubby chinaman is joined at the waist to a pig. Is this a moralising tale illustrating the foolishness of gluttony?

Liu Xue has a host of variations on this theme for example a figure that has chicken legs

So is this the metaphor for cowardice? Or is that just too simplistic an explanation? 

I suspect the Greeks would have been horrified at these abominations as all their hybrid beings fell within a carefully evolved canon of aesthetics. 

The myths of the Greeks all posted back in time to a bygone age. An age that was populated by extraordinary beings who mingled fought and played alongside man. 

This mythological age ended and the Gods receded from public life and into the collective memory of the Greek people who kept the Gods and centaurs alive with realistic portrayals carved in marble statues on their public religious buildings.

Today we see the remnants of these in museums and on the remains of Greek holy sites. We associate the sculptures with the white coolness of marble stone and imagine this is how they were originally made. 

Not so - the sculptures were painted to look as lifelike as possible, it is quite difficult for us to even imagine this, but in fact the end product would have had an even stronger connection to the life like qualities of Liu Xue and other sculptors of Today such as Ron Meuck. 

(Boy - Ron Meuck ) the most disturbing aspect of Meuck's work is the tremendous realism combined with changes in scale which creates something familiar and yet so alien, a very existential idea.  

It is true that during excavations of Greek sculpture in the 19th C there were traces of paint clearly visible on some of the artefacts. 

But the entrenchment of an aesthetic idea on the beauty of the pieces just as they were had an enormous effect on the thinking of Historians and art in general. 

Historians such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann so strongly opposed the idea of painted Greek sculpture that proponents of painted statues were dismissed as eccentrics, and their views were largely dismissed for more than a century.

Now doesn't that sound familiar, the fringe dismissed as crackpots once again until the weight of evidence forces the orthodoxy to reverse the accepted viewpoint.  

The dark ages were not as dark as was always previously believed. But it was true that in the collapse of the Roman empire with its Barbarian upheavals and invasions, there  was indeed a great deal of knowledge that was lost. 

In the Renaissance artists, scholars and collectors were digging up buried marble sculptures that had been lying forgotten and ignored for centuries. The renewed interest in these was the result of a burst of intellectual and artistic growth that arose during the 15th and 16th Centuries. This was accompanied by a pervasive idea that Classical antiquity was a kind of 'Golden age' and the culture and art of the ancients was much superior to anything the middle ages had produced. So the Renaissance Scholars actualy looked backwards rather than forwards for inspiration. Any art and writings of the Greeks were painstaking gathered together from any kind of source that could be found. 

The Laocoon statue was discovered in January 1506 buried in the ground of a Rome vineyard owned by Felice de' Fredis. One of the first experts to attend the excavation site was Michelangelo (1475-1564),

Pope Julius II,  ordered the work to be brought immediately to the Vatican, where it was installed in the Belvedere Court Garden. 

The Laocoon statue had a significant impact on Italian Renaissance art in general and Renaissance sculptors, in particular.

But there were many gaps that were still to be discovered. One of these gaps was that the Greeks and Romans would have actually painted their sculpture. Artists followed the examples they found, as they found them, and developed a whole canon of aesthetics around the belief that the sculptures were meant to look like this from the start.

The idea that the Greeks were not at all interested in the properties of the stone was inconceivable. And yet it would appear that to them, marble was simply a means to an end. If the Greeks found a quicker and cheaper way, lets say by casting concrete in moulds, they would not have hesitated at using a more expedient method.

This goes some way to explaining the lowly status of the Greek Sculptors, the politicians and priests of the day were the important people who needed these statues for religious and political purposes. The artists were expected to supply them, it seems these were not regarded as aesthetic wonders by gifted and revered geniuses, not at all, the creators of the sculptures themselves would not have seen themselves this way either. 

Isn't it so ironic. . .  the whole shift in focus during the Renaissance to the artist as a kind of demigod was totally unheard of in the Greek antiquity they were trying so hard to emulate.