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 peopleĀ āwhat is horror?ā theyāll 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 iād like to call that āthe horror of being eaten/hurt/killedā or more succinctly āthe horror of vulnerabilityā. itās a horror that something, whether itās a killer or a monster or some phenomenon, has the ability to cause us harm. we see large amounts of teeth and we thinkĀ āthat thing is going to tear us to pieces with those teethā or we see spilled blood and we thinkĀ āsomeone has been hurt, thereās a chance we can be hurt too by whatever spilled this bloodā.
but what certain modern sculptures can do is elicit a very physical visceral reaction of a completely different kind of horror.Ā
itās āthe 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 doā
or perhaps, in a shorter fashion, itāsĀ āthe horror of wrongnessā
like one of the sculptures that made me feel this way is this sculpture here, named āMonekanaā located in the American Art Museum in Washington D.C:
āokay,ā you say, with a shrug.Ā āitās a horse made of wood? whatās so scary about that?ā. 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 thatĀ āTHIS IS WRONG. MAKE IT GO AWAY. THIS IS WRONGā, like at any moment you expect it to move, to twist its head, to follow you with eyes that arenāt simply there. it looks like a horse but it is no horse. you could almost argue that maybe it isnāt even an art piece at all, but it wandered in from god knows what kind of world and itās blending in with everything else. maybe itās fooling you. maybe it isnāt.
anyways, iām 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 iām 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, itās THAT feeling that i feel so many writers and makers of horror donāt completely understand. you donāt need teeth. you donāt need blood. you donāt 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 canāt entirely rationalize what weāre seeing.
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