“Artistic Monstrosities in New Gothic Art: Creating Shock Waves which Help us Find a Lost Sense of Ourselves” .

Abstract

Artistic Monstrosities in New Gothic Art creating shock waves which help us find a lost sense of ourselves

Maria Antónia Lima

Abstract At a time when the media are so preoccupied with projecting shocking imagery and violent narrative, obliging the public to consume violence as if they were completely detached and alienated from its origins, perhaps the role of contemporary art should be to produce the kind of shock waves which help people find their lost sense of self. In Idée sur les Romans, the Marquis de Sade observed that Gothic literature was the inevitable result of the revolutionary shocks which were felt all over Europe. New Gothic art is necessarily the result of the many contemporary cultural earthquakes that have shaken many regions throughout the world, haunted as we are in modern life by the fear of death in its many monstrous guises: for example, the war in Iraq, serial killers, paedophiles, guns and gang culture, environmental disaster and global warming. Gothic creativity and its dark imagery have sought to create a sense of control and orientation with a view to establishing coordinates to guide us towards recovering a sense of identity. Through some monstrous works of well-known artists such as Cindy Sherman, Robert Gober, Louise Bourgeois, Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Paul McCarthy, Keith Edmier, Douglas Gordon and many other creative geographers of our contemporary horrors, through which we may encounter vital pieces of our fragmented and disintegrated selves.