god i can never stop thinking about certain sculptures used in modern art and how they can be used to elicit the beautiful and terrible feeling of true and genuine horror in ways that a lot of horror movies can never do
like when you ask people âwhat is horror?â theyâll tend to give examples of monsters, of killers, of dark places, of sharp teeth and too many legs and lots and lots of blood. which is true, that can be used as horror! but iâd like to call that âthe horror of being eaten/hurt/killedâ or more succinctly âthe horror of vulnerabilityâ. itâs a horror that something, whether itâs a killer or a monster or some phenomenon, has the ability to cause us harm. we see large amounts of teeth and we think âthat thing is going to tear us to pieces with those teethâ or we see spilled blood and we think âsomeone has been hurt, thereâs a chance we can be hurt too by whatever spilled this bloodâ.
but what certain modern sculptures can do is elicit a very physical visceral reaction of a completely different kind of horror.Â
itâs âthe horror that something is a thing that SHOULD not exist, and you are absolutely powerless to understand what it is, but it is existing in your space, right now, it is real and you cannot make it unreal no matter what you doâ
or perhaps, in a shorter fashion, itâs âthe horror of wrongnessâ
like one of the sculptures that made me feel this way is this sculpture here, named âMonekanaâ located in the American Art Museum in Washington D.C:
âokay,â you say, with a shrug. âitâs a horse made of wood? whatâs so scary about that?â. but this is the lie of the photograph! a photograph of a sculpture rarely grasps the experience of standing next to a sculpture. you have to picture yourself walking into this room, practically devoid of people, and coming face to face with this sculpture that is very large and very real.
and your brain screams that âTHIS IS WRONG. MAKE IT GO AWAY. THIS IS WRONGâ, like at any moment you expect it to move, to twist its head, to follow you with eyes that arenât simply there. it looks like a horse but it is no horse. you could almost argue that maybe it isnât even an art piece at all, but it wandered in from god knows what kind of world and itâs blending in with everything else. maybe itâs fooling you. maybe it isnât.
anyways, iâm not trying to say that this sculpture in particular is SUPPOSED to be scary, it may make other people feel nothing at all (or even positive feelings!), but what iâm trying to say is that feeling i had that day, when i saw this thing, when i felt this fearful instinct to stay away and not stare, itâs THAT feeling that i feel so many writers and makers of horror donât completely understand. you donât need teeth. you donât need blood. you donât need to make Spooky Scary Skeletons or chainsaw-wielding villains. all you need is to create something wrong in its existence, something to make parts of us fear the fact that we canât entirely rationalize what weâre seeing.
areudirty
janainaart
2087
jacobvanloon
snowghoul
turnnoffyourmind
