Gore

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Maggie Dunlap Various, 2022-2024
‘In 2014 I had an office job where I managed social media accounts and wrote copy for an estate agent in Aberdeen, Scotland. The job was underpaid but okay overall, mercifully allowing me to work with headphones which sounded great at first but very quickly caused me to develop a hatred for almost every form of music I could think of. Eventually I started just listening to podcasts instead, finding my spike in headphone-time coming almost in unison with the first episodes of Serial – the series often cited as bringing the boom in True Crime media into the mainstream. In spite of the show’s enormous popularity, listening to descriptions of graphic violence whilst tapping away at a corporate Facebook account in an identikit office felt surreal, especially when the genre’s enormous popularity meant that shows like Casefile – with a significantly darker, less journalistic approach, found their way onto the apple podcast charts. Something that should have felt deviant – listening to graphic depictions of murder, sexual violence, kidnapping and torture – could no longer, millions of people worldwide were doing the same thing. As the phenomenon has grown, an interest in True Crime media has entirely transcended subculture. Viewers have no further interest in transgressive or violent media beyond the genre, maintaining entirely mainstream media diets – the very real murders becoming just another piece of reality television.’

Dead Body Found in Warehouse, 2022

 

Teenage Murders, 2024

 

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King Cobra/Doreen Lynette Garner White Bread, 2021
bamboo, resin clay, hair weave, acrylic, silicone, tattoo ink

 

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Stewart Uoo No Sex, No City: Samantha II, 2013
Polyurethane resin, epoxy, ink, pigment, acrylic paint, wires, cables, clothing, accessories, ferrofluid, razor wire, steel, feathers, human and synthetic hair, makeup, glitter, synthetic eyelashes, maggot cocoons, flies, dust, and other materials

 

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Agnes Questionmark Attempt 1, Attempt 2, Attempt 3 (2023)
‘In Attempt I performed last year at Mimosa House in London, she became a pregnant being participating in a failed birth. In her most recent Attempt, performed for KÖNIG GALERIE in Milan’s STUDIO STXDYOZ in December, she lies on an operating table as metal machinery constrains her and a doctor opens her insides. “I call them Attempts because as an artist, I’m attempting to reach this new evolution of the human being, and I still don’t know what it may be.”’

 

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Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller The Killing Machine, 2020
‘In an automated ballet of robotics, props, light, and sound, Cardiff and Miller’s The Killing Machine operates on an unseen, imagined victim. You may activate it by pushing the red button labeled “press here.”’

 

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Anantaphoto Amazingly gore Christ, 2016
‘My work can not be used for personal or commercial purposes.’

 

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Nguyễn Duy Mạnh Phách Lạc (Lost Spirits) I, table no.1, 2018-2023
‘Phách Lạc (Lost Spirits)’ is a bullet-pocked table-setting for six, a suite of ‘blue-ware’ style ceramic crockery (in Vietnamese known as the Chu Đậu style) viscerally flayed, like skin, revealing bleeding incisions of deep red. On one plate the auspicious dragon has become a vulgar noodle dish; the phoenix (the incarnation of a woman in Vietnam) is served as a wrinkled skin; a classic vase is presented as bone marrow; while the traditional bánh cuốn (Vietnamese rolled crepe) is made from the skinned surface of the actual plate.’

 

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Hermann Nitsch 66th Painting Action, 2013
‘Regarded as a major artist in the Viennese Actionism movement, which he co-founded, Hermann Nitsch was born in Vienna in 1938 and died in April 2022 in Mistelbach, where he lived and worked. Internationally acknowledged as the master of Austrian performance art, the artist produced a powerfully expressive body of work, borrowing from religious dramaturgy to develop a total art that culminated each year from the 1950s onwards in his “Orgien Mysterien Theater”, when he invited friends and the public to six days of uninterrupted festivities and performances.’

 

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Mire Lee The Milk of Dreams, 2022
‘The Milk of Dreams (2022) resembles organs entangled in machinery. As the machinery turns, the organs spill out, conveying a sense of something visceral and painful happening at once.’

 

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Shahnama of Muhammad Juki Buzhan Slays Human, 1440s
paint on wood

 

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Anish Kapoor The Unremembered, 2020
Steel, canvas, silicone, paint

 

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Rick Melton Various, 2011-20121
‘Come in out of the rain, shake off those brollies and prepare yourselves for a hair-raising tour of my most spectacular, spooky and downright sleazy artworks!’

 

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Zoe Leonard Beaver Guts, 1998
Gelatin silver print

 

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‘Some artists use paint, maybe some brushes, but not Butcher Bob. Butcher Bob has been a Butcher his entire life, but in 2013, he decided to use his profession as a butcher as his inspiration as an artist. He said, this is painting, but with his own twist. “In 2013, I felt like I wanted to start painting with the blood. I just felt like that’s something I wanted to do. I went to Hobby lobby, I bought some canvases and came back to the butcher shop. But my beef that I had Butcher that day and save the blood and I just started finger painting with blood.” saidRobert “Butcher Bob” Long, Animal Blood Finger Painter.” Butcher Bob claims he is the only person in the world finger painting with animal blood as a butcher. He was joking around saying, his art wouldn’t be the same with a brush and paint. He said everyone has their hobbies, and this is his. “It’s just whatever , it’s whatever I feel inside me I put on canvas with my hands on the blood and I love doing this. Everyone’s got their hobbies people like fishing golfing whatever I love finger painting with blood.” said Butcher Bob.”‘

 

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Nancy Spero Homage to Ana Mendieta, 2004
‘Spero decided to make a spontaneous and improvised homage to Mendieta. Ink the colour of blood was mixed up in a bowl, and from the artist’s memory of the Franklin Furnace performance which she recalls as being ‘powerful and tremendous’, she directed one of her assistants to retrace the marks that Mendieta’s body had left on the paper, this time down the surface of a white wall.’

 

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David Černý Art Robbery, 2011
‘I came up with this action movie scene in which robbers steal art from the pavilion. It’s not just some specific work of work, but art in general. Except that’s hard to explain to someone who sees paintings only as aesthetics. But everybody understands the virtual world of film. I wanted to indicate that contemporary art is being crushed by film and television media.’

 

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Suzzan Blac Your Suffering is Real, 2019
oil

 

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Wong Keen A Butcher’s Place, Pig (2018)
‘What becomes immediately indisputable upon any first encounter with Wong Keen is the dedication to his artistic cause. Strong sentiments of eagerness surround the manner in which he talks about his craft, and at 76, he shows no signs of stopping. Huai Seng Chong, co-founder of The Culture Story states how “At 76, most artists would be ready to hang up their boots, but Wong Keen is still building and exploring new frontiers. This is a sign of him as a strong artist.”’

 

 

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Jane Howarth Bonne Bouche, 2012
Taxidermied seagull with pearl innards

 

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Doreen Garner Removing the Veil: Vanity as Material for Incision, 2016
‘Garner has named incision as her guiding sculptural gesture, and thus she’s cleaved, refashioned, and re-fastened female body parts, exploiting them to the limits of their material aesthetic potential. Such literal objectification threads beauty, value, and utility, and each work presents a different angle of the purgatory they combine to create.’

 

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Francesco Albano The Taste – The Count of Monte Cristo, 2014
‘Francesco Albano’s human body sculptures drip, melt, hang, and often appear to be boneless – even the work primarily featuring bones is distorted and lumpy. Working with wax, polyester, latex, iron, and other materials, Albano sculpts shapes and contortions that render the erect and boundaried body flaccid and grotesque.’

 

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Yoshihiro Nishimura Tokyo Gore Police, 2008
‘When a crazed scientist called Key Man develops a virus that causes humans to mutate, samurai sword-wielding cop Ruka is called in to annihilate the unnatural creatures.’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Jules, Hi, Jules. Coincidence upon coincidence. My only copy of ‘Sure Fire’ is on VHS, which doesn’t do me much good. Your show sounds plenty exciting. And complicated to perform? Wow. It’s probably not something a video document could do justice to, I’m imagining, but do try to film it if it’s easy. Like Nevada, haha, but with actual foliage and without overly moist sunlight, I’m picturing. You know Yucca Valley. It was interesting to film there. But we were there for two months, basically in one spot, and there were lots of far right survivalist types and meth heads hovering around in the menacing distance. But, yes, interesting even more so, I guess. I hope your weekend panned way out. ** Steve, Okay, thanks to your alert and your impending tune, I intend to be uncharacteristically aware of Bandcamp Friday this month. How is ‘Sinners’? I’m strangely very curious about it. My weekend was A-okay. That Albert Serra bullfighting documentary is quite good although about 25 minutes too long and pretty brutal if you care about the lives of animals. ** Carsten, Hey. That period of Jost — the three films starring Tom Blair — are especially excellent. Oh, on the post, you can put it altogether in, say, a Google doc, or you can lay it out in a Word doc or that sort of thing indicating in the text where any pix or videos or links go, and I can put them in, but you’ll need to send me the photos as email attachments. Or those are the usual ways, there could be others. Thanks, pal. ** jay, Hi, j. I’ve actually seen ‘Demonlover’. Yeah, it’s quite interesting, and I remember that section particularly. Assayas is an interesting director, kind of uneven, but sometimes really good. I recommend ‘Irma Vep’ if you haven’t seen it. Video game structure has been a really big influence on my fiction and how I try to make fiction/wordage work in a similarly labyrinthine, completed directed way while giving the semi-illusion of freedom of movement. So, yes. Visual novel suggestions … let me think about that. I think I must have some ideas. I hope your week’s start has a lovely sparkle to it. ** Steeqhen, I suspect you really needed that sleep, and no doubt you’ll catch up. ** Poecilia, Hi. My notion of the sigil came from Chaos Magick, and especially the Peter Carroll variant, which a friend (model for the character ‘Luke’) was obsessively into at the time. Well, for sure say hi if you come to Paris. Where can I/we see your fiction? What are you working on thereby? ** Nicholas., The pics of the French pizza were not raunchy, which is, yes, an ominous sign. Yep, that was my concept and hope — all those unsuspecting sigil receivers/activators. It didn’t work all that well, though, as far as I can tell. ** Thomas H., My pleasure, Mr H. I don’t know a single one of those books you accrued, unsurprisingly, I guess. Let me know if any of them thrill you. There really should be a bookstore equivalent of Record Store Day with ltd. ed. releases and reprints and stuff. I’m kind of surprised no enterprising book person has gotten that going. Weekend was pleasant enough. Now let’s see what the week has in store for us both. ** scunnard, I wish you all the luck in the whole word with that Crowdfunder. I’ll pass the word along as best I can. Have you thought about having an IRL local benefit/auction event or something? Artists donating works and people donating rarities that they can live without? ** _Black_Acrylic, So how did Nick do? Any colourful anecdotes? ** catachrestic, Sorry for the roughness man. Those rough weekends do happen. Better than rough weeks maybe. Wealthy cultural people in the US only want to spread their money around to institutions basically, museums that’ll name a wing after them and so on. Zac and I lived that first hand when we were trying to raise money for ‘Room Temperature’, and the people we approached who had vast amounts of money and who seemed like the most likely people to help us always had some excuse. ‘Cash flow problem’, ‘already filed my taxes so I couldn’t write off a donation, sorry’, … It’s grotesque. Lynch, right, and John Waters was trying to make a new film for ages, and no one would pony up with the money. I don’t even understand the world where that could happen. Prose-wise, I think ‘Juliette’ is probably the best Sade work by far. ** HaRpEr, Hi. Mm, by ‘fucked up’ what did I mean? I think I meant that it was considered his weirdest or least ‘successful’ novel, his most experimental one, and I do remember it being kind of a mess, but a riveting mess, and I’ll take an exciting mess over refined gamesmanship any day maybe. I should look at it again. “The Rainbow Stories’ is very good, my favorite of his. Franzen is sort of the Christopher Nolan of novelists, and that’s being very flattering to him. ‘Three Hundred Million’, on the other hand, is great! Blake Butler, now there’s a fantastic novelist right there. I’m starting to suspect that I’m not going to make it to London in time to see the Leigh Bowery show, which is very sad. Let me know when you’ve seen it. Yeah, wtf on the anti-trans stuff in the UK right now?! I don’t know nearly enough about British politics to venture an opinion, but I’m kind of very surprised that this is happen with a Labour government. As wishy-washy as the Democratic party in the US is, I do, I guess, see parallels between Labour and the Democrats, and I can’t imagine that kind of law being enacted with a Democratic government in charge. But I don’t know. What total insanity! ** Okay. I strongly suspect that today’s post is self-explanatory. See you tomorrow.