Horror!

A week last Saturday I went with Lady Wildwood and MaisyMaid to see The Horror Show! at Somerset House, a bit nervously as it was my suggestion we should. We all quite liked it though my friends preferred the first bit with its nostalgic glimpses of punk, New Romantic and early Goth ('My memory isn't wrong, people really did dress like that', MaisyMaid mused at the blownup footage of early-80s club nights, being a few years senior to her Ladyship and myself), but I thought all of it was good fun even though a couple of bits were a little queasy: the artist who'd sculpted himself as a hyperrealistic drowned corpse under an archway admitted in the captions that even he'd found it thoroughly unsettling to make. I was almost overcome being brought face-to-face with Sue Webster's Banshees jacket: 

The premise of the show is that the mode of horror has been used to analyse society since the breakdown of the hopes of the 1960s in three broad phases, that the curators categorise as 'Monster' - figures and institutions of power are made monstrous, and to oppose them nonconformists construct spectacular selves that are also monstrous; 'Ghost' - the sense of reality collapses into nostalgia and pastiche, paranoia and hysteria, fragmentation and the uncanny; and 'Witch' - narratives of power and authority are deconstructed and reconstructed into new expressions of self-determination and connection. There are multiple ways of arranging even the specific art of rebellion across five decades, of course, but this is as interesting as any.

Notwithstanding all the horror, the artwork that caught me up most was Susan Hiller's Homage to Joseph Beuys, which is 86 bottles of holy well water collected from a variety of sacred springs and sites between 1969 and 2016. I couldn't quite see what was uncanny about that. Lady Wildwood suggested that the healing capacities of the water were there to counteract the fractured and baleful material around it: nice try, I thought.