Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Each Cell deals with fear’ the artist has claimed; particularly the Red Rooms with their blood-red colour and title lifted (accidentally?) straight out of The Shining (1980) are Gothic on many levels. Like a Gothic novelist the artist sets the scene in an unfamiliar and frightening place; the ghost of young Bourgeois occupies the Cells like the virginal female trespasser of so many Gothic novels from Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796) to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Bourgeois’ Cells moreover enact what literary critic Anne Williams considers the core of the Gothic narrative: ‘Gothic plots are family plots: Gothic romance is family romance’. A ghastly family secret is similarly the subject of Paul McCarthy’s disturbing mechanized sculpture Cultural Gothic (1992) in which a father obligingly passes on to his son the technique (delight?) of zoophilia: Cultural Gothic is aptly titled in so far as it performs another standard Gothic theme i.e. the revelation of an unspeakable family ‘curse’ by a curious innocent (a plot device present already in Horace Walpole’s seminal The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story [1764]). Along similar lines artist Charles Ray’s Family Romance (1993) is a sculpture of a father mother young son and toddler daughter all monstrously reaching exactly the same height. With its dwarfed father figure Family Romance can be read as embodying a crisis in the diminishing role of fatherhood a theme also central to Gothic literature and exemplified in Anne Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797). Because Gothic literature foregrounded the symbolic rather than biological role of paternity it has been credited with pre-empting concepts later formalized in Lacanian psychoanalysis as the Law-of-the-Father itself a notion applied to the unfolding history of modern art. (LL)