Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and my name
Speaker 1: is Christian Sager. Robert, When did you first encounter the
Speaker 1: work of hr Geeker? He must have been adolescent younger,
Speaker 1: Oh man, it would have been when I saw the
Speaker 1: Alien movies, or at least began to pick up on
Speaker 1: their existence. Uh. And I don't remember in what order
Speaker 1: I saw them. I think I might have actually seen
Speaker 1: Aliens first, like on TV, yeah, before moving into almost positive.
Speaker 1: That was the same experience I had, was I saw
Speaker 1: Aliens before I saw Alien, but probably saw both before
Speaker 1: I was like, I don't know, twelve or thirteen years old,
Speaker 1: but like, uh, I also always thought of him as
Speaker 1: that guy like you would go to the mall and
Speaker 1: there would be like precursors to hot topic where like
Speaker 1: they would have like t shirts or posters and stuff
Speaker 1: with hr geegers art on them, And that was just
Speaker 1: something I always thought of, like kind of industrial kids
Speaker 1: loved that stuff. They would be like these big hr
Speaker 1: Geeger kind of tapestries that you could get for your
Speaker 1: room or something like that. The other big memory I
Speaker 1: have of of learning about Giger is that I would
Speaker 1: go to bookstores a lot, especially with my dad, and
Speaker 1: he would he would go to the history section and
Speaker 1: look around, and I'd really get into looking at horror
Speaker 1: books and sci fi and fantasy. And then I would
Speaker 1: also check out the the art and photography section, and
Speaker 1: there was all sorts of weird and interesting things to
Speaker 1: discover their, including Geeger. You'd beend up picking up, you know,
Speaker 1: a copy I don't remember if they had a copy
Speaker 1: of I feel like a Barnes and Noble and Huntsville,
Speaker 1: Alabama had a copy of Necronomicon, which was is one
Speaker 1: of his books that was just filled with all of
Speaker 1: these these designs that would lead to aliens, but they're
Speaker 1: so surreal, they're and uh and and engage all of
Speaker 1: this uh this, these these obscene and uh and beautiful
Speaker 1: and alien themes in them. Um And as a as
Speaker 1: a young kid, you're looking at it and you just
Speaker 1: don't even know what to think about it. No, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I was looking over the notes before we came in here,
Speaker 1: and I realized that when I first saw his artwork,
Speaker 1: it made me feel like it was something I wasn't
Speaker 1: supposed to be looking at it made me feel shameful
Speaker 1: because I was a kid and it was probably that
Speaker 1: point in my life where it was like like if
Speaker 1: you saw like another person naked, you were like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm terrible, I'm a bad person, you know, like uh,
Speaker 1: And Geeger's art felt like that somehow, maybe that's uniquely American.
Speaker 1: I wonder if, like the Swiss culture that he came
Speaker 1: from had that same kind of puritanical uptightness about nudity. Well,
Speaker 1: I think based on some of the material we looked
Speaker 1: at here for this episode, that that you saw a
Speaker 1: split there and there were those that they were certainly
Speaker 1: more you know, buttoned down, and then those who understand
Speaker 1: what he was going for. But I also remember in
Speaker 1: college getting on the Internet for the first time and
Speaker 1: discovering a lot of these these especially fantasy and sci
Speaker 1: fi artists, and Giger really stands out from a lot
Speaker 1: of them because a lot of the stuff I was
Speaker 1: getting into it was still basically you know, like beautiful princess,
Speaker 1: beautiful wizard, beautiful barbarian people and then monsters. But but
Speaker 1: Geger's stuff was the beauty and the monstrosity all smeared together. Um,
Speaker 1: it was challenging. You know, there were there were certain
Speaker 1: images that were that were less challenging than others. But
Speaker 1: because there's certainly deep gieger out there, there's certain works
Speaker 1: that you really have to to puzzle over to figure
Speaker 1: out how you feel about them. Um. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: always felt like his work was was certainly more more
Speaker 1: challenging and maybe maybe in a sense more you know, artistically, um,
Speaker 1: relevant than a lot of the stuff that it's often
Speaker 1: grouped with. It's funny you use that term challenging because
Speaker 1: I think, like I obviously was aware of aliens and
Speaker 1: alien but I don't think I knew that he was
Speaker 1: a person who did these things until like the Dead
Speaker 1: Kennedy's used his artwork for their album Franken Christ and
Speaker 1: that was like a big incident where I mean, this
Speaker 1: is the like late eighties early nineties in general, but
Speaker 1: just Jello Biafra constantly getting into trouble and like going
Speaker 1: in and I think that he had to go to
Speaker 1: trial over the artwork. Because essentially, this is probably a
Speaker 1: good point for us to say, like this might not
Speaker 1: be the safest of episodes to listen to with your kids,
Speaker 1: but this artwork is just a series of of orifices
Speaker 1: and phalluses like filling one another, right, and then there's
Speaker 1: a lot of that in his work, but this is
Speaker 1: an example where it's far more explicit. And I think, uh,
Speaker 1: I think the afra of originally brought it up almost
Speaker 1: as a joke, like, well, this should be our album cover,
Speaker 1: and then the joke kind of spiraled out of control. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then uh we So we're gonna get to the
Speaker 1: point pretty soon here on who hr Gieger is and everything.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that we researched for this
Speaker 1: episode was this documentary that came out recently called Dark Star.
Speaker 1: It's on Netflix right now. It's all about him sort
Speaker 1: of in the waning years of his life and his wife.
Speaker 1: I want to say, there's a point where she's talking
Speaker 1: about the frankln Christ album cover and she said that
Speaker 1: that her impression was that the people who wanted a
Speaker 1: band thought it was a photo. They didn't realize it
Speaker 1: was a painting. And she was like, how would you
Speaker 1: possibly arrange all of these people's bodies to be able
Speaker 1: to pull this off? Like, if you've seen this, this thing,
Speaker 1: it would just be it would be impossible. It would
Speaker 1: be like the weirdest game of twister you've ever played. Yes,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, and we should probably before we before we
Speaker 1: get into it too, we should also say both Robert
Speaker 1: and I are fans of Super Egos version comedy version
Speaker 1: of hr Gieger, which is done by Matt Gorley, so
Speaker 1: we may occasionally uh slip been to that. If you
Speaker 1: like Geiger and you've never heard of it, I totally
Speaker 1: recommend it. Super Egoes a comedy podcast a couple of
Speaker 1: years old now, but that was like one of their
Speaker 1: running bits was Matt Gorley doing hr Geeger as if
Speaker 1: he had to interact with with very mundanely events like
Speaker 1: like what's it like if he goes through McDonald's drive through,
Speaker 1: or what's it like when he has to sign paperwork
Speaker 1: for his kid to go on a field trip. And
Speaker 1: will include some links to the videos related to this
Speaker 1: on the landing page for this episode is Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind dot com. So obviously we're talking about
Speaker 1: hr Geiger today, but but I just want to reiterate
Speaker 1: why we're talking about Geeker, and I basically comes down
Speaker 1: to this, we've pretty much all seen alien or aliens,
Speaker 1: or we've seen the imagery from it. Uh, we're at
Speaker 1: least all familiar surface level with Geeger's work, and it's
Speaker 1: so popular, and it's been so popular in mainstream for
Speaker 1: so long, and I say mainstream and just mainstream awareness. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously there are different levels of appreciation for Geeger, but
Speaker 1: I think it's easy in the midst of all of
Speaker 1: this um, this mainstream presence, to forget to lose track
Speaker 1: of or even not appreciate like what the man was about,
Speaker 1: what his work was about, and what sort of of
Speaker 1: legacy it has, especially as we as we move on
Speaker 1: through the twenty first century and look back at the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, look at this this century. Uh, the Gieger
Speaker 1: and his work emerged from. Yeah, this is gonna sound pretentious,
Speaker 1: but I going over these notes and reading up on
Speaker 1: the real deep psychological look at his work and what
Speaker 1: it means and what it kind of brings out in
Speaker 1: people who come to it. I can't imagine another artist
Speaker 1: right now who is as transgressive as Gieger was, but
Speaker 1: was simultaneously evoking the themes of the of the modern age,
Speaker 1: you know, like he was really capturing themes of the moment,
Speaker 1: but at the same time presenting them in such a
Speaker 1: way that they seemed like, like I said, things you
Speaker 1: shouldn't be looking at um. I know, I'd love to
Speaker 1: hear from the audience if there's somebody out there that
Speaker 1: I'm just unaware of. It's like this outsider artist that's
Speaker 1: totally doing that. But Gieger maybe it's just because it's
Speaker 1: our generation to Giger really captured that for me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I like that you mentioned outsider artist because something that
Speaker 1: that definitely came up in the research and comes up
Speaker 1: and watching that documentary Dark Star, is that Geeger is
Speaker 1: kind of in a class all his own because he
Speaker 1: started off, you know, is you know, very much like
Speaker 1: a localized artist, and then he starts getting some success
Speaker 1: shipping posters off to New York, kind of having some
Speaker 1: success as a poster artist, but still he's he's very
Speaker 1: much small time and then he just skyrockets to the
Speaker 1: top via his involvement in an alien and so he
Speaker 1: never is So he was he kind of was a
Speaker 1: was an outsider to the entire arts scene for a
Speaker 1: very long time really until the last few decades of
Speaker 1: his life, because he had kind of skipped over it,
Speaker 1: you know, like like a like a rock skimming across
Speaker 1: the water. So he was he was not quite an
Speaker 1: artist startists, and he was mainstream but also very challenging
Speaker 1: and difficult for a lot of people. He also had certain,
Speaker 1: uh you know, outsider artists sensibilities, especially in the documentary
Speaker 1: when you see his backyard, you know, it reminds you
Speaker 1: of some of these you know, classic examples of say
Speaker 1: Southern outsider artists who are just creating stuff because they
Speaker 1: have to and uh and and there maybe not as
Speaker 1: interested in how it matches up to uh, you know,
Speaker 1: artistic sensibilities at all. This is going to be the
Speaker 1: second time in like two weeks that I've mentioned this
Speaker 1: podcast on the show, but it reminded me of S Town.
Speaker 1: So without spoiling S Town, the main sort of focus
Speaker 1: the protagonist, I guess the character piece that s Town
Speaker 1: the podcast is is an artist in a way who
Speaker 1: lives kind of in the middle of nowhere and constructs
Speaker 1: these crazy things in his basement and in his backyard,
Speaker 1: very similar to geeger Um. And there's there's a there's
Speaker 1: a question in s Town of whether or not the
Speaker 1: like chemicals that he was exposed to over the time
Speaker 1: that he was working on his projects may have affected
Speaker 1: his mental health. And it was something I absolutely thought
Speaker 1: of about Gee, girls, we're watching this and then did
Speaker 1: you put it in the notes or did somebody else
Speaker 1: mention it to us that there's some thought that because
Speaker 1: he spent so much time and enclosed spaces doing airbrushing,
Speaker 1: that he might have inhaled a lot of chemicals. I
Speaker 1: have heard that, but I couldn't find any official source
Speaker 1: that that back that up. So yeah, but he did.
Speaker 1: He lived in this wonderland. Uh. And it's if you
Speaker 1: haven't seen dark starts fascinating. Let's let's just put it
Speaker 1: that way. But this episode is really gonna be us.
Speaker 1: We're gonna if you've never heard of geeger before, We're
Speaker 1: gonna spend a little bit of time just walking you
Speaker 1: through like who this guy was, how his life played out,
Speaker 1: and then we're gonna do a dive into the sort
Speaker 1: of psychological academic look at his work and how it
Speaker 1: represents the human experience. Before we move on, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: read a quick quote from Timothy Leary from his intro
Speaker 1: to Geegers Alien, which is a book of of his
Speaker 1: artwork that he created his commission to create for for Alien,
Speaker 1: as well as his thoughts on the filmmaking process Leary says,
Speaker 1: and here's my best Leary voice. In doing this, Visionaries
Speaker 1: like Geeger overstand too much. They overlook, they oversee, they overstate,
Speaker 1: they overthrill, They physically frightened dutiful hive members and often
Speaker 1: become nauseous or screamingly panicked by this simple exposure to
Speaker 1: the tissue fact and cellular fabric of life. Giger, we
Speaker 1: bless you for taking us back down to meet and
Speaker 1: coil and intertwine with our old Darwinian relatives. That was
Speaker 1: pretty good. It sounded a little bit like Carl Sagan
Speaker 1: to me though, too. Yeah, which is another is a
Speaker 1: little more akermity. Okay, if you if you try and
Speaker 1: do a Kermit the Frog, do a bad Kermit the
Speaker 1: Frog voice, you may Yeah. So this is another thing
Speaker 1: that that came to mind as we were doing the
Speaker 1: research for this. Is again like all of these sort
Speaker 1: of outsider thinkers and artists that you and I grew
Speaker 1: up with the influence, the people who influenced us, they're
Speaker 1: all gone now. Geeger's dead, Leary's dead. Yeah. Like when
Speaker 1: I was thinking about all the people who worked on
Speaker 1: Alien behind the scenes, Mobius Um, Dan O'Bannon, just the
Speaker 1: people who really like came to it and like imagined
Speaker 1: that movie into existence through sheer willpower of decisions by committee.
Speaker 1: You know, like they're almost all gone except for Ridley Scott,
Speaker 1: and you know he's still going strong. Well yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean one of the reasons we're doing this episode is
Speaker 1: Alien Day is the week that we're releasing it, and
Speaker 1: then like two weeks after that Alien Covenant is going
Speaker 1: to come out directed by Ridley Scott. He's still cranking
Speaker 1: out these xenomorph movies and we're still watching them. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's interesting. And I again, like I kind
Speaker 1: of stepped back and I wonder, and I go, like,
Speaker 1: who are the people today who are really like the
Speaker 1: the really gonzo weird thinkers that are influencing kids out there? Well,
Speaker 1: for those of you listening, uh, maybe some of you
Speaker 1: are not as similiar with Gegeger's work. And I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna attempt to briefly describe his work to sum it
Speaker 1: up in one quick statement. An entire man's life work here,
Speaker 1: but essentially most of his work was it boiled down
Speaker 1: to surrey surrealistic bio mechanical realms in which humanoid entities
Speaker 1: shift in and out of an alien landscape, a place
Speaker 1: of cold flesh where birth, sex and death intermingle and
Speaker 1: are at once one and his most famous works are
Speaker 1: an airbrush, but he later abandonedness for pastels and inc Yeah.
Speaker 1: I he worked in so many different kinds of media,
Speaker 1: used the sculptor as well, but I think of him
Speaker 1: mainly as a painter. And one of the astonishing things
Speaker 1: I learned about him from watching this Dark Dark Star
Speaker 1: documentary was that he didn't do any underdrawings. He just
Speaker 1: sit down at the canvas with an airbrush and go.
Speaker 1: And some people might go, well, yeah, I mean, look
Speaker 1: at his stuff. It's so abstract and surreal. Of course
Speaker 1: that he could get away with that, but like, there
Speaker 1: is an anatomical precision to his work. Even if he's
Speaker 1: exaggerating like how long an arm should be, or like
Speaker 1: the way teeth are formed in a mouth, he's thinking
Speaker 1: about actual anatomy and then exaggerating it, and it's it,
Speaker 1: and he's doing all of this improvisationally. It's it's fascinating
Speaker 1: to think about that, just as like a process. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then outside of you know, the obvious sex, death details,
Speaker 1: Geeker as a painter had this amazing ability to translate
Speaker 1: texture in whatever medium he was working in, and that
Speaker 1: really impresses me to like imagine what it would be
Speaker 1: like to reach into one of his paintings and touch
Speaker 1: one of the monstrosities. What would what would it be
Speaker 1: like to pet the head of a xenomorph? I would
Speaker 1: a wet, cold, and ribbed That's what That's the general
Speaker 1: idea I get from most Like, I can't I can't
Speaker 1: decide if the texture would be like hard or brittle
Speaker 1: or gooey or you know, it's just it's all those
Speaker 1: things simultaneously. And you're getting that from I mean that's
Speaker 1: a three dimensional you know, image captured on film, but
Speaker 1: from his two dimensional images you're getting the same thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, he really one of the things that I
Speaker 1: think is great about his work is he really captured
Speaker 1: reflection of light. Most of everybody knows his artwork is
Speaker 1: just being like, oh, it's just a lot of dark
Speaker 1: things and a lot of like phallus is you know, uh,
Speaker 1: going into things, but all of that darkness like captured
Speaker 1: these like you know, unseen beams of light on his
Speaker 1: canvas and then reflected them back. Yeah, and I feel
Speaker 1: like these are these are details that, for a lot
Speaker 1: of us are kind of lost on us when we look,
Speaker 1: especially we don't have an artistic background. You just kind
Speaker 1: of become lost in what he has created and not
Speaker 1: so much the mastery involved in bringing it to life.
Speaker 1: In that documentary, there's scenes where you you get to
Speaker 1: see him more or less starting from scratch, using the
Speaker 1: airbrush to create something, and it's it's amazing just how
Speaker 1: you don't think of an air brush as a precision instrument,
Speaker 1: not at all, and like this, this is what I
Speaker 1: think of when I think of the airbrush. When you
Speaker 1: go to the beach and you get those like custom
Speaker 1: made T shirts, Like that's what I think of as
Speaker 1: air brush art. And then you look at what Gieger
Speaker 1: did with an air brush and it's just this amazingly
Speaker 1: precise detail for a tool that's really I mean, it's
Speaker 1: just spitting ink out and paint, you know. Okay, why
Speaker 1: don't we get into just sort of how this guy
Speaker 1: was made, like like like how he was born into
Speaker 1: the world, how the world gave us hr Geeker. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back, So hands Rudolph Geeger a ka hands Rudy
Speaker 1: to his friends. Um let's talking about Yeah, where he
Speaker 1: came from and uh and how he became the the
Speaker 1: the the icon. So he was born on February five
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty in Sure, Switzerland. I'm not sure if
Speaker 1: that's the right pronunciation. His full name is Hans Rudy Geeger.
Speaker 1: The joke in those super Ego videos is that his
Speaker 1: his real name is hey, really Geeger. But but it
Speaker 1: was Hans Rudy, and everybody in in his life, you know,
Speaker 1: close by, they just referred to him as Hans Rudy
Speaker 1: all the time. Nobody called him Gieger like we do
Speaker 1: here in the West. We're just like Gieger. That's the
Speaker 1: only way we can describe this guy. Um. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: just this fascinating character. Yeah. So he he had a
Speaker 1: loving mother who was very close with the all her life.
Speaker 1: His father was by all counts a bit distant. He
Speaker 1: was a pharmacist and according to a standards Lav Groff,
Speaker 1: a psychiatrist and gear author who will get into later,
Speaker 1: Geger's father was was strict a little distant. Uh but
Speaker 1: he but he only ever struck Geeger once. This crazy,
Speaker 1: this story is crazy. Yeah. So I don't want to
Speaker 1: to go into it in too much of detail, but essentially, uh,
Speaker 1: Hans Rudy, the young Hans Rudy was was stealing power
Speaker 1: cables from a street construction project and he was trying
Speaker 1: to to burn the cables down in the cellar of
Speaker 1: his parents house to get to get lead for making bullets.
Speaker 1: And then the smoke ended up a rising up and
Speaker 1: it polluted and destroyed most of his uh a lot
Speaker 1: of the stuff in his farm in the pharmacy. Everything
Speaker 1: was black and sticky and oily, and they had to
Speaker 1: spend a fair amount of money getting everything cleaned up.
Speaker 1: And so um, that was It was a very tense moment,
Speaker 1: but it just Dad was pretty upset about that one. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then tell the story about him with the skull.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so a little little kid with a skull. Yeah,
Speaker 1: his father gave him a human skull when he was
Speaker 1: a small boy. And I guess you know, this is
Speaker 1: kind of the pharmacist uh reference coming into play here.
Speaker 1: So he gr has said in interviews that he was
Speaker 1: he was kind of terrified by this because here's death
Speaker 1: in your hands. So he tied a string to it
Speaker 1: and he would drag it through the streets like it
Speaker 1: was you know, some sort of a toy boat or something.
Speaker 1: And then he built a ghost train in his backyard
Speaker 1: to scare into the light neighborhood kids. And then he
Speaker 1: would he would later build another ghost train in his
Speaker 1: backyard as a as an old man. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: so all of these seemed to be attempts of a
Speaker 1: child to conquer his fear of death or things that
Speaker 1: scared him, like like tunnels or asphyxiating enclosures, things like that. Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: something I didn't know about him about his childhood. As
Speaker 1: a kid, his uncle Otto taught him how to make
Speaker 1: homemade weapons through lead casting and working with wood and
Speaker 1: other metals. And there was also an antique dealer that
Speaker 1: lived in this same town, and that guy taught him
Speaker 1: how to handle these weapons and also provided him with
Speaker 1: like a bunch of weapons for his personal collection. This
Speaker 1: little kid is handmaking like blades and knives and stuff like.
Speaker 1: Of course, he like becomes this guy who goes on
Speaker 1: to design you know, Zeno morph It's pretty fascinating. But
Speaker 1: then he goes on to get an education. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: his father, his mother was just you know, completely supportive
Speaker 1: of everything he did his whole life. They are these
Speaker 1: wonderful pictures of of him a younger geeger and his
Speaker 1: his his elderly mother and she's she's wearing black as well,
Speaker 1: attending a showing of his work, and so she just
Speaker 1: you know, kind of embraced it no matter, you know,
Speaker 1: how weird. Uh the work actually was, would be pretty
Speaker 1: great if she like put corpse paint on and his
Speaker 1: his bar. Uh. But but his father, you know, a
Speaker 1: getting far more sensible, and he said, all right, you
Speaker 1: need to study industrial design and architecture, and so he
Speaker 1: did at the School for Applied Arts and Zurich. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he also attended military college to learn to be
Speaker 1: a mortar gunner. So this guy has like, uh, this
Speaker 1: trace background in his younger years of like really dealing
Speaker 1: with weaponry. And my understanding was like once he went
Speaker 1: to that military college, like his fascination with guns completely disappeared. Um.
Speaker 1: This is the school though, where he first started doing
Speaker 1: his ink drawings that later became uh titled Adam Kinder.
Speaker 1: A lot of people have seen these and maybe didn't
Speaker 1: know this was the name. Or Atomic Children is how
Speaker 1: it translates into English. And they represented his ideas about
Speaker 1: nuclear war and the mutating effects that it would have
Speaker 1: on humanity. Before he graduated. He also became super interested
Speaker 1: in Freud, which we're gonna talk about a lot. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he started keeping a dream journal that he used
Speaker 1: as a resource for years to come. He would just
Speaker 1: mind this for ideas for all of his creations. So
Speaker 1: he graduates from school, he goes on to work for
Speaker 1: Andreas Kristen, designing office furniture for the Knoll International Company. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he during this time he had his first solo
Speaker 1: gallery exhib exhibition. This was like a year or after
Speaker 1: he graduated school. Uh. So it's a nineteen sixty eight
Speaker 1: and a friend persuades him and says, look, give up
Speaker 1: that job making office furnitures, commit fully to art. And
Speaker 1: immediately afterward he got his first gig, creating monster effects
Speaker 1: for a short Swiss film. Now an important part of
Speaker 1: his biography here is his relationship with Lee Tobler. So
Speaker 1: she was his partner for many years, who was his
Speaker 1: first great love, mused for so many of his depictions
Speaker 1: of the feminine form. But they had kind of a
Speaker 1: temptestuous relationship, allegedly involving, you know, an alchemy of both individuals.
Speaker 1: These things, uh, you know, tend to because he was
Speaker 1: a young determined artist with a fanatical devotion to his craft. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he also recognized no boundaries in his work obviously. Uh.
Speaker 1: She was a young woman with a traditional Catholic upbringing,
Speaker 1: but she was immersed in this world of permissive exploration.
Speaker 1: She suffered from depression and she attempted suicide once and
Speaker 1: then Gieger was was deeply affected by this. But while
Speaker 1: his his his art, such as his famous um Lee
Speaker 1: Too and Lilith, they served as an outlet for him
Speaker 1: after this, but it didn't work for her. Uh. There's
Speaker 1: a moment in the documentary where Giger reflects on this,
Speaker 1: and it's it's rather poignant because he says, you know,
Speaker 1: he was not able to help her with his art,
Speaker 1: and you really see the here's the guy who's who
Speaker 1: always turned to art like art was the thing that
Speaker 1: that made his life possible and and that's how he
Speaker 1: explored his fears and his anxieties. Often we are unable
Speaker 1: to help someone that that is in need of serious
Speaker 1: professional help for their problems. Uh. But but he felt
Speaker 1: kind of I think, kind of trapped that he that
Speaker 1: he and and felt terrible that he could not help
Speaker 1: her with the the one tool that that he really
Speaker 1: knew how to use. Yeah. He struck me as the
Speaker 1: kind of guy who like was able to sort of
Speaker 1: self care through his own art, but he didn't know
Speaker 1: how to help other people, and so he would try
Speaker 1: to help them with his art and they were like,
Speaker 1: that's that's not what I need. That works for you,
Speaker 1: you know. Uh. And so yeah, I mean when you
Speaker 1: look at the body of work that was inspired by
Speaker 1: this woman, you can see her features and so many
Speaker 1: of his paintings. There's this series of photos of her
Speaker 1: where she's topless and he's airbrush painting parts of her
Speaker 1: body so that she's got this kind of biomechanoid appearance.
Speaker 1: And I believe that even like that artwork ended up
Speaker 1: being part of a show that they did to memorialize her. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because in seventies six, she she did commit suicide and
Speaker 1: that was a major traumatic event in his life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he described it as a terrible emptiness. Uh. He
Speaker 1: and his friends through memorial for her. That was called
Speaker 1: the Second Celebration of the Four And then what I
Speaker 1: have seen, you know, titled under this are these various
Speaker 1: photos that were taken from this session with her where
Speaker 1: she's covered in this bio mcanoid makeup kind of kind
Speaker 1: of like what we think of today as body paint,
Speaker 1: but I think he was using different techniques. Um. And
Speaker 1: then his friend Friedrich Kon also died in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: So the early seventies were just filled with tragedy for
Speaker 1: this guy. Uh. And then he gets to work on
Speaker 1: Alejandro Jodorowski's Dune, the ill fated Dune movie that never
Speaker 1: was made. Yeah, for and for extensive details on that,
Speaker 1: definitely check out the documentary that came out about this,
Speaker 1: this grand but doomed project that that you know, ultimately,
Speaker 1: even though it didn't come to fruition, it ended up
Speaker 1: fueling so many other projects, including Alien. It's really the
Speaker 1: main bridge for Geeger to Alien because he was paired
Speaker 1: with Dan O'Bannon, Mobius a k a J. Jim Garrard,
Speaker 1: and Chris Fosse who did spaceship designs and also did
Speaker 1: the Joy of Sex illustrations from the classic Joy of Sex,
Speaker 1: and I think Ron Cobb also worked on both of them.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure Ron Cobb was illustrator. He did some
Speaker 1: the preliminary work on just like the Egg design. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that guy's work is great, Like he Uh. One thing
Speaker 1: that I didn't learn until I was working at a
Speaker 1: library here in Atlanta that had like this great special
Speaker 1: collections archive was Ron Cobb was actually like an underground
Speaker 1: zene artist for a long time, like writing for these
Speaker 1: civil rights znes uh. And he did these like he
Speaker 1: would basically do like little like one shot panel uh,
Speaker 1: comedy things like the kind of things that you'd see
Speaker 1: in like The New Yorker nowadays, but they were like
Speaker 1: intensely detailed. That guy was pretty fascinating as well. And yeah,
Speaker 1: so just before Alien comes out, he publishes this book,
Speaker 1: it's his big art book, Necronomicon, in nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: and it's seen by Dan O'Bannon who had previously worked
Speaker 1: with him on Any or Sorry on Dune. And then
Speaker 1: Dan O'Bannon shows it to Ridley Scott and they look
Speaker 1: at it and they go, this has got to be
Speaker 1: the inspiration for this the creature that we're gonna have
Speaker 1: in this film. Specifically, the painting necronom four is the
Speaker 1: main inspiration for the Zeno morph. So all of you
Speaker 1: out there who have you, you've you've totally seen a
Speaker 1: zeno more even if you've never watched any of the
Speaker 1: Alien movies, you know what they look like. This is
Speaker 1: where it originates from. This one guy's like weird obsessions,
Speaker 1: all right, So this leads us to Alien and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I think everyone is familiar with this with
Speaker 1: this film. But he was brought on to design a
Speaker 1: number of key elements, so an ancient temple, exterior and
Speaker 1: interior temple, spore pods, Alien first phase, Alien second phase,
Speaker 1: Alien third phase and uh, you know that so far
Speaker 1: this sounds like a lot of our artists Hollywood um relationships, right,
Speaker 1: brings them on and do some conceptual designs for the film. Well,
Speaker 1: the Giger was was far more demanding than that, and
Speaker 1: he he insisted on a rather large fee. He was
Speaker 1: arguing that his designs would be the star of the film. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you know, and at the time can say, I
Speaker 1: think even his lawyer was like, you gotta calm down, gig.
Speaker 1: You can't ask for too much money. You're you're just
Speaker 1: doing designs for a monster and some sets. But he
Speaker 1: was like, no, no, this is gonna be the star.
Speaker 1: And and really, you know, not to discount Sigourney Weaver's
Speaker 1: iconic performance or the or the whole host of fabulous
Speaker 1: character actors that that help bring that that movie to like.
Speaker 1: But he wasn't completely wrong, Like his designs are our
Speaker 1: front and center because it's everlasting. I mean, think about
Speaker 1: how many movies have been made from that franchise and
Speaker 1: are still being made. Uh, not to mention all of
Speaker 1: the spinoff work, Like there's hundreds of comics that aren't
Speaker 1: done all because of like the gravitas of that design
Speaker 1: combined with this sort of like very interesting sexual horror
Speaker 1: sci fi tail that Dan O'Bannon and the other writers
Speaker 1: put down. Yeah, everything was just the the synergy of
Speaker 1: his artistic division and the plot. It all came together
Speaker 1: perfectly and and Geeker put a tremendous amount of work
Speaker 1: into this. I mean not only that the initial designs
Speaker 1: for the film, which alone or pretty pretty large tasks
Speaker 1: for any artists, but also in it is the physical
Speaker 1: construction of costumes and sets, and this entail just constant
Speaker 1: changes and improvements, some of the behest of Ridley Scott
Speaker 1: or just the necessities of shooting others fueled by his
Speaker 1: own perfectionism. Plus is, everything was was pretty much caked
Speaker 1: and goo for these shoots. The colors would leach out
Speaker 1: and it was this would require him to repaint everything
Speaker 1: each night so it would be fresh and and look
Speaker 1: exactly as Geeger thought it should look and as as
Speaker 1: the filmmaker's thought it should appear. Yeah, if you've ever
Speaker 1: seen any of the like special behind the scenes extras
Speaker 1: for Alien, I have the Quadrilogy set and I've watched
Speaker 1: almost all of that stuff, if not all of it. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: geekers just like constantly there in the workshop, either like
Speaker 1: tinkering around with the Alien costume and painting it or
Speaker 1: I mean he like, I want to say, the scene
Speaker 1: with the space jockey chamber, he hand painted that with
Speaker 1: an airbrush all by himself. Yeah. And those are enormous sets, huge.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's easy to lose sight of it. As
Speaker 1: awesome as the the set looks like it was. Really
Speaker 1: they really constructed this cathedral out of the man's artwork
Speaker 1: and Uh. Geeger would later acknowledge his fussiness on the
Speaker 1: set and apologize for being a bit difficult uh. And
Speaker 1: he attributes much of this to just not understanding the
Speaker 1: demands and UH and often improvisational aspects of film production. Like.
Speaker 1: One example of this is that Ridley Scott decided that hey,
Speaker 1: they we can just use the underside of the derelict
Speaker 1: ship set uh and repurpose it as a corridor in
Speaker 1: the ship and this sort of thing, which drove Gieger
Speaker 1: crazy at the time because it felt cheap and rushed
Speaker 1: to him using his work in ways that were not intended.
Speaker 1: But again, this is this is often what happens when
Speaker 1: you're making a film, like the directors saying, all right,
Speaker 1: we need to we need to shoot this. What do
Speaker 1: we have. Let's let's just tilt this a different ways.
Speaker 1: Like a known best talents to is like, yeah, he
Speaker 1: makes he's like huge budget films, but he really figures
Speaker 1: out how to make them in like a really um
Speaker 1: quick production fashion. Like he's noted for setting up cameras
Speaker 1: at multiple angles for each shoot so he doesn't have
Speaker 1: to like constantly be shooting the same scene over and
Speaker 1: over and over again. And then yeah, on that set,
Speaker 1: like they were doing everything they could to repurpose things
Speaker 1: and make it look like something else, like these mirrors
Speaker 1: in a lot of places so that it looked like
Speaker 1: the corridors were longer than they were. And Scott actually
Speaker 1: got them to double the budget for that film solely
Speaker 1: based on storyboards that he drew himself, so, like you
Speaker 1: think about it, like going into it, they had like
Speaker 1: a four million dollar budget, which sounds like a lot,
Speaker 1: and then he himself drew some stuff and showed it
Speaker 1: to them. This is even before Giegers involved, and they went,
Speaker 1: this sounds a lot cooler than we thought. Here's another
Speaker 1: four million. So they've got eight million dollars to make
Speaker 1: this movie and it looks still to this day, it
Speaker 1: looks astonishing. Now. One of the questions that you have
Speaker 1: to ask is what what would Alien have been like
Speaker 1: if Geiger had not been there, if we had not
Speaker 1: had Geeger's designs, And it's it's difficult to say, but
Speaker 1: you can consider a few things. You consider the the
Speaker 1: ball monster in uh, you know, An Abandon and John
Speaker 1: Carpenter's Dark Star, which is a great film, but it
Speaker 1: has a really ridiculous looking alien, and that was one
Speaker 1: of the main reasons why Dan O'Bannon wander write this, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because he felt like like that movie just didn't capture
Speaker 1: what he had in his head for Alien. Yeah. You
Speaker 1: can also consider that, like Ridley Scott's one of his
Speaker 1: original ideas that they were testing was let's just take
Speaker 1: an adult, We'll strap a bunch of children to him
Speaker 1: and then we'll cover him rubber to make dan and
Speaker 1: that would make a good effect. So we can imagine
Speaker 1: what if that had taken off. You can say, well,
Speaker 1: Mobius was on board, what if Mobius had done the design.
Speaker 1: And certainly Mobius drew lots of cool aliens in his
Speaker 1: time and even did some production work I think on
Speaker 1: designing aliens from time to time. Wayne Barlow was around
Speaker 1: at the time time. It's you might say, what if
Speaker 1: Wayne Barlow had been brought on, But none of these
Speaker 1: it's hard to imagine any of these guys like creating
Speaker 1: something that would have been on par with Geegers designs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean this is this is like not meant to
Speaker 1: be a pun. But there's nothing quite as alien as
Speaker 1: the xenomorph design. It perfectly captures the idea of something
Speaker 1: that is other than us from somewhere else, but that
Speaker 1: unfortunately comes out of us. And you know, the script
Speaker 1: is perfect for Geeger because it really ties into all
Speaker 1: of his themes of birth and sex and death. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because and that's something to keep in mind. Here is
Speaker 1: we we we briefly, you know, roll through some of
Speaker 1: his his later works. And one of the things is
Speaker 1: that no matter how awesome his design work was, he
Speaker 1: just didn't intended to not really jive with the overall picture,
Speaker 1: with the overall project. Uh, that that was utilizing his vision. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break and when we get back,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk a little bit about his work after Alien,
Speaker 1: and then we're going to really get into the psychological
Speaker 1: sort of matrices of hr Geeger's world. Alright, we're back,
Speaker 1: so post Alien, uh, Geeger kind of just has in
Speaker 1: a sense, he's got it made. You know, he can
Speaker 1: basically devote his life to his work now. And that's
Speaker 1: not saying it was definitely made in the shade. Based
Speaker 1: on the documentary and the uh some of the uh,
Speaker 1: the accounts that his wife gave. Geeger was the kind
Speaker 1: of person who when money came in, he would he
Speaker 1: would spend it on his art. He would buy some
Speaker 1: sort of cool supply or a bone and start creating
Speaker 1: with it. And it was it was kind of, you know,
Speaker 1: it was kind of paycheck to paycheck to us in
Speaker 1: a certain extent. What was one of the stories that
Speaker 1: like his assistant came into the house one day and
Speaker 1: there was a like rotting lion carcass on ibex or
Speaker 1: you know there was an ibex in the bathtubt it
Speaker 1: was a lion carcass by the door because he needed
Speaker 1: the lion's spine for one of of the pieces that
Speaker 1: he did. I think it was that that furniture piece.
Speaker 1: It's like a big chair. So yeah, he was buying
Speaker 1: dead lions. Yeah, you mentioned the furniture. We already mentioned
Speaker 1: some of the furniture designs that that he did. Uh.
Speaker 1: You added in here that he made harcone and furniture
Speaker 1: based on his done design. Yeah. I I don't know,
Speaker 1: like if this was just specialty stuff. I don't think
Speaker 1: there was like a line that you could buy. I
Speaker 1: think these were these were pieces that he you know,
Speaker 1: made individually. And then yeah, he made so many album covers. Uh.
Speaker 1: That Debbie Harry record The Dead Kennedy's one I mentioned.
Speaker 1: Uh oh, yeah, we were talking about this over email. Uh.
Speaker 1: He was heavily involved with Celtic Frost and then subsequently
Speaker 1: tripped to con because that lead guy, Thomas Gabriel Fisher
Speaker 1: was his assistant. Yeah. And then of course any Danzig
Speaker 1: fans out there probably remember Danzig three. How the gods
Speaker 1: Kill that uses one of one of Giger's creations there
Speaker 1: on the front. And then this one. I didn't know
Speaker 1: about this, that he didn't Emerson Lake and Paul Cover
Speaker 1: Oh god, yeah, um yeah, brain Salad surgery. Uh. It
Speaker 1: seems like he kind of said yes to anyone who
Speaker 1: would sort of get his vision out there, even if
Speaker 1: it didn't necessarily jive with the I don't know. This
Speaker 1: is me looking at Geeker's art and trying to figure
Speaker 1: out what what I would pair with it, and right
Speaker 1: not necessarily what another person would or even Gigger himself.
Speaker 1: So he made his own film, although I haven't really
Speaker 1: been able to track it down, The Mystery of Sin
Speaker 1: Guitara though, yeah I have, I have not seen this.
Speaker 1: And then he was heavily involved in a video game
Speaker 1: that came out in the nineties called Dark Seed. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I read a review of this that says that it
Speaker 1: was is a game. It was pretty bad, like it
Speaker 1: it made the worst choices in puzzle games of the time,
Speaker 1: So it was kind of like missed or something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: less you know, like I guess, less graphically advanced. But
Speaker 1: that being said, one thing that everybody tends to say
Speaker 1: is like the look of the game was great. It
Speaker 1: really made wonderful use of Geeger's art. He also come
Speaker 1: to me to do a number of different film projects.
Speaker 1: There's a movie that came out eighty nine, Tokyo The
Speaker 1: Last War, and there's like a big wheel creature that's
Speaker 1: kind of based on his designs um He also was
Speaker 1: a creative consultant on the German horror comedy Killer Condom.
Speaker 1: Have you never heard of that until it's? Uh? I
Speaker 1: think I saw trailer for it once. Maybe if we
Speaker 1: do a trailer. He also did poster art for Future Kill,
Speaker 1: which is a comedy horror film about mutants hunting frat
Speaker 1: boys in a futuristic city. It stars two actors from
Speaker 1: Texas Chainsaw Massacre, including Maryland Burns, and it's a it's
Speaker 1: total USA up, all night material, eighties trash cinema. It's
Speaker 1: thoroughly a geeker, but it's it's still kind of the
Speaker 1: trailer is still kind of awesome. And then there's the
Speaker 1: infamous stories from poulter Geist to Oh Yeah. He did
Speaker 1: several different designs and really made the best moment in
Speaker 1: poulter Geist Too Possible, where Coach a k Dad from
Speaker 1: Poulter guys, he vomits, and the vomit like is this
Speaker 1: thing that quickly grows into this like limbless humanoid creature
Speaker 1: that scuttles off after making this horrifying face at him.
Speaker 1: And it's a you can find YouTube clips of this.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a wonderful scene. And then of course
Speaker 1: there's Species, which is an interesting project to to look at.
Speaker 1: He designed the female alien sill as well as this
Speaker 1: ghost train for a gream dream sequence and the sequence
Speaker 1: was going to be cut. They were Gigger was telling them, look,
Speaker 1: we have to have this ghost train in the film
Speaker 1: and uh, and they're like, no, no, no, we the
Speaker 1: budget is shrunk. We we don't have time. So Giger
Speaker 1: eventually he just contributes a hundred thousand dollars of his
Speaker 1: own money just to to me to film this scene
Speaker 1: and then forces them to put it in, like or
Speaker 1: convinces them to put it in. And it's an and
Speaker 1: it's an interesting Uh, it's an interesting scene. But the
Speaker 1: film itself was I believe it was. It was a
Speaker 1: success of the box office or five or six of these, right,
Speaker 1: it must have been successful. Yeah, I think it was
Speaker 1: financially successful, but I don't think Species is anyone's favorite film,
Speaker 1: and um, and and you know it's it's a shame
Speaker 1: because this was the only chance we really had to
Speaker 1: see what one of Geeger's feminine creations come to life
Speaker 1: on the screen. So I kind of hold out hope
Speaker 1: that maybe somebody will reboot Species down the Road, down
Speaker 1: the road and do it right, or if if not
Speaker 1: silled in, some other biomechanical female will crawl up out
Speaker 1: of his work and into a movie. What was that
Speaker 1: movie that came out a couple of years ago. I
Speaker 1: never got a chance to see this, but it was
Speaker 1: very similar to Species, and it had uh my wife
Speaker 1: jokingly called it like the b York Baby, uh these
Speaker 1: Sarah pallyis in it, and like there's so it's very
Speaker 1: similar plot and like their genetic engineering splice splice, that's it. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that seems like the closest thing to like re envisioning
Speaker 1: Species that I've seen so far. And then there was
Speaker 1: also that movie with Scarlett Johansson that I've seen it
Speaker 1: have seen compared to it Ghost in the show No,
Speaker 1: the one when she plays an alien of some sort
Speaker 1: and oh yeah, yeah, yeah, um under the Skin, that's
Speaker 1: the one. Yeah, that's a great movie. Yeah, I haven't
Speaker 1: seen it yet. You you should really watch that. You'd
Speaker 1: love that movie. Now. One of the things though, with
Speaker 1: with all these gig Gieger films, that my theory is
Speaker 1: the reason that none of them really quite work. And
Speaker 1: the reason that Alien worked is that Geeger's paintings, uh
Speaker 1: and in the sculptures they involved these these strange creatures,
Speaker 1: but they're also a part of this realm. They're a
Speaker 1: part of this landscape, they're part of this setting. And
Speaker 1: if you just have still the alien lady as cool
Speaker 1: as she looked, if you if she's running around the
Speaker 1: streets of l A, it's just not gonna work. Vomit
Speaker 1: monster crawling across a bedroom floor, it's not gonna work
Speaker 1: as well. Whereas Alien, you either had scenes where the
Speaker 1: monster or the or the the creations are within a
Speaker 1: Giger environment or there at least in an in human
Speaker 1: spaceship environment. It is a little more in keeping with
Speaker 1: with Geegers whirld and thematically again, like Alien very much
Speaker 1: revolved around the same kind of ideas that we're spinning
Speaker 1: out psychologically from Geeger's work. I think Species tried to
Speaker 1: do that, but it like ultimately became like an action
Speaker 1: adventure film more than any kind of like psychological look
Speaker 1: at I mean, it was about birth, sex and death, sure,
Speaker 1: but I don't know, it didn't capture it in the
Speaker 1: same way and ended. So you know, before we go on,
Speaker 1: we should just say, like how things sort of ended
Speaker 1: up for him. He opened a museum in nine in
Speaker 1: the Chateau Saint Germain, part of Grier's Switzerland. Uh. This
Speaker 1: museum also hoses his private collection of other artists work.
Speaker 1: In two thousand three, they added a museum bar there
Speaker 1: that features his interior design. This whole thing looks totally awesome.
Speaker 1: I I would love to visit it one day. Uh.
Speaker 1: And unfortunately he died on May after sustaining injuries from
Speaker 1: a fatal fall. He was survived by his wife, Carmen
Speaker 1: Maria Geeger, and she is the director of the museum.
Speaker 1: And from what we've read, it seems like his wife
Speaker 1: and his assistants are still continuing his work and they're
Speaker 1: running the museum, they're putting on exhibitions, they're working together
Speaker 1: and getting books published, you know, but he's no longer
Speaker 1: obviously creating new work. Yeah. Now, watching that documentary that
Speaker 1: It makes me wonder how much new stuff is going
Speaker 1: to emerge because one of the one of the the
Speaker 1: individuals that they're interviewing, they're one of one of his
Speaker 1: assistants or archive is like he just points to something
Speaker 1: on a shelf and it's like, here's a here's a
Speaker 1: picture that he drawing that he drew years ago, like
Speaker 1: no one's ever seen. So there's no telling how how
Speaker 1: many curios and wonders are are are left to uh
Speaker 1: to emerge from that that house. Yeah again, Like if
Speaker 1: you see the documentary, his home is top to bottom
Speaker 1: covered in his artwork, Like it's just filled to the brim.
Speaker 1: That's one of the things that strikes me as odd.
Speaker 1: I'm always thrown by artists who surround themselves with their
Speaker 1: own art. Uh. It feels, i don't know, somehow egotistical
Speaker 1: to me, But with Gieger it felt right. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like a Z's I'm sorry talking about hanging out
Speaker 1: with Kanye and Kane's listening to his own music. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: The yeah that this is just always weird to me. Huh, Well,
Speaker 1: I guess you could say like Geeger is a guy
Speaker 1: who knew what he liked. He knew what he wanted
Speaker 1: and he created it on the canvas and lived in it.
Speaker 1: So uh in terms of living in one's art, though,
Speaker 1: this is a good time to to break off and
Speaker 1: start discussing some of the psychological and cultural interpretations of
Speaker 1: his work. Now, we mentioned Stanislav Graff earlier, UH, psychiatrist
Speaker 1: and he uh and he has written about Geiger. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's Hr Geger and the zeit guys to the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: This is a book available in German and English, The
Speaker 1: Visionary World of Hr Geiger, and you can find that
Speaker 1: in PDF form at Stanislav Graff dot com. Uh. He
Speaker 1: and he also shows up in the documentary and he
Speaker 1: was you see scenes of him working with Giger and
Speaker 1: the rest of the sort of Geeker family to decide
Speaker 1: which illustrations to use in the book. And we're not
Speaker 1: going to attempt to to roll out all of standards
Speaker 1: law of grows ideas. UH certainly refer to his work,
Speaker 1: but I thought we might touch on the broad strokes
Speaker 1: here and a few areas that tie in with previous
Speaker 1: stuff about your mind discussions. Yeah, he especially is really
Speaker 1: interested in the theory of psychological birth trauma, which I
Speaker 1: feel like lines up very nicely with Geeger's work and
Speaker 1: also adds a layer of scientific understanding to what's going
Speaker 1: on here. Yeah. Yeah, The the idea here, if you're
Speaker 1: not familiar with it, is it runs contrary to older
Speaker 1: notions of infants is clean slates or or tabular razza. Rather,
Speaker 1: the idea here is that that birth itself is the
Speaker 1: first great physical and psychological trauma for a new human life,
Speaker 1: were forcifully ejected from a place of safety and warmth,
Speaker 1: pushed screaming into a frightening new world. So Graff is
Speaker 1: really routed in this idea that Geeger portrayed the soul
Speaker 1: of modern humanity, and in that way he sees his
Speaker 1: art as being about technology, human life, ecology, self destruction, violence,
Speaker 1: sexual excess, mass consumption, drugs, and alienation. And yes, birth
Speaker 1: trauma is the real big one here, because Graf says
Speaker 1: that powerful memory is what influences everything else. I think
Speaker 1: it's worth remembering here too that Geeger's work, no matter
Speaker 1: how surreal it is, it's always surrounded by human anatomy. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that's replicated on such a perfect level, like even
Speaker 1: when he distorts it, like I mentioned earlier, he does
Speaker 1: it proportionally in such a way that it feels real. Now,
Speaker 1: Groff identifies four distinct characteristic experiential patterns, which he refers
Speaker 1: to as basic perinatal matrices or bpms, and these are
Speaker 1: the stages of of trauma that did an infant, a
Speaker 1: new born goes through to this theory, So the first
Speaker 1: BPM bp M one is associated with, uh, your existence
Speaker 1: before birth, before the onset of delivery. Yeah. So the
Speaker 1: idea here is that like, while we're in the womb,
Speaker 1: we experience the world as an amniotic universe that's crops words, uh,
Speaker 1: and we don't know anything else. And so when you know,
Speaker 1: we're born and we're in the real world. He relates
Speaker 1: this to regions that have no boundaries or limits. So
Speaker 1: for instance, like when you're just floating in the middle
Speaker 1: of the sea or outer space, these are places that
Speaker 1: remind us of that room like experience or a bathtub
Speaker 1: with Yankee candles burning and on your music playing perfect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was exactly what my moving sperience was like. So
Speaker 1: the second BPM, BPM two is uh the cosmic engulfment
Speaker 1: and no exit or hell uh. And this is this
Speaker 1: is basically contractions taking place yeah, So it's based on
Speaker 1: you know, we we think of it more of like
Speaker 1: from the external perspective of like, oh, the mother's going
Speaker 1: through contractions, but you know, we experience those contractions while
Speaker 1: we're in the womb. So this is associated with imagery
Speaker 1: of archetypal monsters that devour us in some kind of
Speaker 1: claustrophobic nightmare very Geeger uh. And it leads to anxiety
Speaker 1: in a general mistrust that borders on paranoia. So people
Speaker 1: who suffer from this kind of anxiety, it takes the
Speaker 1: form of them feeling like they're always caught in a trap.
Speaker 1: And in Geeger's work we see a lot of imagery
Speaker 1: of tight headbands and steel rings holding together things by
Speaker 1: screws and heads and vices and bodies wrapped up in
Speaker 1: chords and straps. So this is Groff saying, like Geegers
Speaker 1: really capturing that moment. And then we have the BPM three,
Speaker 1: the death rebirth struggle, and this is basically when you're
Speaker 1: pulled through the birth canal, right, and this is all
Speaker 1: about that propulsion after the cervix opens and the head
Speaker 1: descends into the pelvis. It involves crush pains and suffocation
Speaker 1: and reliving it manifests itself. Again, this is Graff not
Speaker 1: I'm not saying this, but that reliving it manifests itself
Speaker 1: as sado masochism and deviant sexuality. UH. It's are typally
Speaker 1: portrayed as Titanic struggles between light and darkness, as well
Speaker 1: as raging forces of nature and technology that wields enormous energy,
Speaker 1: so think of like rockets, bombs, power plants, that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. He also connects it to the demonic aspect
Speaker 1: of mental health, and that's something we've been talking about
Speaker 1: recently on the show, both with our Exorcism Addorcism episode
Speaker 1: and the episode that we recently did on the demon
Speaker 1: Haunted Mind. So potentially there's a connection between this third
Speaker 1: perinatal matrix idea and those things that we've previously talked about.
Speaker 1: And then finally we have BPM four. This is the
Speaker 1: death rebirth experience and this is the actual birth and
Speaker 1: uh and the severing of the umbilical cord. So Graff
Speaker 1: he characterizes this as this explosive liberation that we feel,
Speaker 1: followed by an emergence into light. He says, this is
Speaker 1: just a constant reminder of our vulnerability, our inadequacy and
Speaker 1: our weakness. Now. Gruff also notes that it would be
Speaker 1: hard to see Geiger's mother in the same roles that
Speaker 1: Geiger places women in his art, even with all of
Speaker 1: this sort of application going on here. This convinces Gruff
Speaker 1: even more that these themes come from Geiger's primal memories
Speaker 1: of being born. So, like, you you meet Geiger's mother
Speaker 1: in this documentary, and she seems just like a very
Speaker 1: kind old Swiss lady, right, super supportive of her son.
Speaker 1: Her son seems to love without his heart. There's not
Speaker 1: some sort of at least there's no apparent like twisted
Speaker 1: understanding of his mother. There's yeah, it doesn't feel like
Speaker 1: there's um some kind of Freudian impulse that like he
Speaker 1: wants to have sex with his mother or anything like that, right,
Speaker 1: Like she's not the image of his sexual sexual at ration. Um.
Speaker 1: So Graph translates us then into like it's really all
Speaker 1: about birth and memory for Geeger, right, and and he
Speaker 1: spends a lot of time just comparing these these theories,
Speaker 1: these models, these matrices two Geeger's work, pointing out, of
Speaker 1: course that at any stage during birth, there's often the
Speaker 1: possibility of of of death being present. And uh and so.
Speaker 1: So you see these symbols and elements throughout his work,
Speaker 1: infants and birth, vaginas and breasts, tunnels and emergence, mouths
Speaker 1: and gateways, all of it sheathed in a sense of
Speaker 1: horror and trauma. All of it kind of takes on
Speaker 1: this necro flesh kind of feeling where it's alive but
Speaker 1: it's dead, it's new but it's old, um, you know.
Speaker 1: All at the same time, there's a lot of category
Speaker 1: confusion in Geeger's work, and I think that's that's something
Speaker 1: we feel when we look at it, you know, especially
Speaker 1: some of these larger tryptic type pieces, where you just
Speaker 1: go from detail to detail, form from form, and they're
Speaker 1: kind of becoming the same form. You don't know where
Speaker 1: one thing in is and one thing begins, and you
Speaker 1: just kind of set there gritting your teeth. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm reluctant sometimes to to apply the word Freudian to something,
Speaker 1: but Geeger's work seems inherently Freudian. I mean, he talked
Speaker 1: about Freud's influence on his work. So much of it
Speaker 1: was born out of dream journals, and it really revolves
Speaker 1: around those same themes of birth, sex, and death. Then
Speaker 1: you add in the merger of biology and mechanics to that.
Speaker 1: Graff takes into account the strange human nature that translates
Speaker 1: suffering into sexual excitement too. So you know, he asked
Speaker 1: the question, well, why is sex so linked to our
Speaker 1: fear of death? And it seems like Geeger is exploring
Speaker 1: that question. That's why he's got this fascination with tunnels
Speaker 1: and quarters and ghost rides. Graff speculates that it's all
Speaker 1: related to Geeger's memory of his own birth. Remember this
Speaker 1: is a guy we talked about this earlier, just kind
Speaker 1: of been passing. He built his own ghost ride in
Speaker 1: his backyard and I didn't know what this was until
Speaker 1: I saw the documentary. He literally built like a children's
Speaker 1: train set that like ran around his backyard but through
Speaker 1: like these like haunted house tunnels and stuff. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think graffs Graff's idea here too, that he's
Speaker 1: getting across it's not that the Geiger has this special
Speaker 1: background of this special trauma, the ideas we we all
Speaker 1: have this strange entrance to a cavern in the back
Speaker 1: of our mind. Most of us don't go in there,
Speaker 1: some of us go in there a little bit but
Speaker 1: gieger Is is one of those artists who really put
Speaker 1: on the like the coal mining helmet and uh and
Speaker 1: and spend his life exploring those tunnels. Now, this theory
Speaker 1: of birth trauma itself, it has its roots in and Freud,
Speaker 1: who called birth quote the first experience of anxiety and
Speaker 1: thus the source and prototype of anxiety. Austrian psychoanalyst Auto
Speaker 1: Rank expanded on this idea in and later British psychoanalyst
Speaker 1: Wilfred Byan also I'm den so the idea is that
Speaker 1: again we're born into trauma. We have this proto trauma
Speaker 1: buried inside as primal and potent in our experiences and
Speaker 1: nurturing afterwards, they help us, They help determine how we're
Speaker 1: going to bounce back from all of that, and how
Speaker 1: we're going to understand that trauma. So this might be
Speaker 1: a good point for me to ask a question that
Speaker 1: I have of you, but also of our audience. I'd
Speaker 1: be curious to hear what you all think. Do you
Speaker 1: feel that Geegar's work was inherently misogynistic in any way?
Speaker 1: That's a good question. I was thinking a little bit
Speaker 1: about this yesterday, and I think one could make a
Speaker 1: good case for it just based on the portrayal of
Speaker 1: of feminine bodies, but at the same time, like masculine
Speaker 1: bodies are are kind of equally treated. And I'm talking
Speaker 1: about his core work here, not some of his sketches. Um,
Speaker 1: there's such a surrealist quality and at times it's like
Speaker 1: the feminine body is part of the male body. There's
Speaker 1: hard to iron it down. And yeah, he's just exploring
Speaker 1: like all of human an anatomy. That's sort of how
Speaker 1: I felt about it too, until watching the documentary, and
Speaker 1: then when I saw how he managed his relationships with
Speaker 1: women throughout his life, it really dawned on me that
Speaker 1: he had this this very strange codependent relationship with his muses. Right,
Speaker 1: so you had Lee Tobler and then you had his
Speaker 1: his first wife. But who was after Lee Tobler And
Speaker 1: they interview her in this documentary, she basically says like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's this point where I got like super sick. I
Speaker 1: had to go into the hospital and Gieger came to
Speaker 1: me and was so unsupportive. He was essentially like, look,
Speaker 1: when you're sick, it drives me crazy and I can't
Speaker 1: do my work. And if I can't do my work,
Speaker 1: it drives me even more crazy. So I'm just not
Speaker 1: gonna be with you anymore so I can do my work. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He That was an interesting bit in the documentary, just
Speaker 1: learning about how he approached his relationships. But at the
Speaker 1: same time he also I believe that was the same
Speaker 1: uh that was his first wife. He did marry Lee,
Speaker 1: but he ended up like leaving her a house and everything,
Speaker 1: a very cordial relationship. Yeah, but there's just something strange
Speaker 1: about the relationships that he had with these muses throughout
Speaker 1: his life. And I had not thought of it as
Speaker 1: being misogynistic, And then I kind of wonder if he
Speaker 1: took these women for granted. Maybe I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: there's more out there on this that I just am
Speaker 1: unaware of. Oh, I'll probably come back to this as
Speaker 1: we proceed, But I kept looking at his work and
Speaker 1: I was thinking, well, a lot of this is it's
Speaker 1: not really heteronormative. It's more maybe if you could go
Speaker 1: in the term hetero abnormative, because it's it's very much
Speaker 1: depending on traditional interactions of male and female anatomy. But
Speaker 1: but in a way way that doesn't really line up
Speaker 1: with any kind of certainly not you know, the classic
Speaker 1: examples of misogyny or classic examples of of of heteronormative attitudes. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true too. Huh. I there's somebody out there who's
Speaker 1: written about this, but and we just missed missed it
Speaker 1: when we were doing the research. Um. But yeah, Grap
Speaker 1: is all over all this other stuff, especially concerning the
Speaker 1: birth issues, but also the dreams. Right. Yeah. He points
Speaker 1: out that Geiger, we we touched on this a little bit.
Speaker 1: He he engaged in a lot of Freudian dream analysis
Speaker 1: early on, uh, and engaged in a high level of
Speaker 1: self exploration when it came to matters of anxiety and fear.
Speaker 1: A number of his familiar motifs emerged from this, and
Speaker 1: some of them are not not as obvious as others.
Speaker 1: You if you've looked through a lot of his work,
Speaker 1: you may have run across safety pins or there's a
Speaker 1: there's a picture of of Gieger. He's made sunglasses shaped
Speaker 1: like a safety pin. And uh. There's this quote from
Speaker 1: from Graf's work where Geer is talking about his dreams
Speaker 1: and he says, most of the time in those dreams,
Speaker 1: I was in a large white room with no windows
Speaker 1: or doors. The only exit was a doc metal opening, which,
Speaker 1: to make things worse, was partially obstructed by a giant
Speaker 1: safety pin. So that's that's such an interesting motif because
Speaker 1: it's so clearly personal, and he's not he's not worried with, well,
Speaker 1: how are how's how's the the viewer or the you know,
Speaker 1: the the gallery visitor. How is the average person going
Speaker 1: to react to my symbol of the safety pin? You know,
Speaker 1: he just jumped in like it was all kind of
Speaker 1: self exploration. Yeah, that it would all kind of play
Speaker 1: out on its own in a different language that we're
Speaker 1: not all speaking. Yeah. And and so Groff argues that,
Speaker 1: you know, all of this is Gieger getting down to
Speaker 1: the to the root of his fear, following it to
Speaker 1: birth trauma. Uh And and there are a number of
Speaker 1: anecdotes in there that are that are pretty pretty cool,
Speaker 1: talking about him looking back on his upbringing. There's a
Speaker 1: wonderful bit where he's talking about overhearing people talking about
Speaker 1: subterranean passages in in Sure, Switzerland, where he was born,
Speaker 1: and so he starts thinking about the possible tunnel connections
Speaker 1: to his own basement, and he has dreams about this,
Speaker 1: and again this gets into visions and and uh, you
Speaker 1: know arguably, you know, a proto traumatic memories of tunnels. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's the thing that's like a lot of people
Speaker 1: see his work and they think, oh, this is just
Speaker 1: some like total weirdo freak, right, But it's ultimately, like,
Speaker 1: when you boiled down to it, he's a scared little
Speaker 1: boy who like things like being told that there were
Speaker 1: tunnels under his home or hey, here's a human skull
Speaker 1: my six year old kid or whatever, like things like
Speaker 1: that traumatized him so much that he had to process
Speaker 1: it mentally as an adult through art. And it wasn't
Speaker 1: like he loved what he was creating. It was like
Speaker 1: part of the process for him to get over his
Speaker 1: own fear. Yeah, well to in his own words, if
Speaker 1: I don't if I don't create, I I go matt,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah. So at this point, let's turn to
Speaker 1: to one more area of discussion, and that that is
Speaker 1: trans humanism and cyborgs. We've discussed trans humanism and cyborgs
Speaker 1: quite a bit here on stuff to blow your mind
Speaker 1: and uh, and just to remind everybody, the two real
Speaker 1: lynch pins for our conversations about cyboards, uh, as well
Speaker 1: as just sort of the roots of of the the
Speaker 1: idea itself come down to two things. So we have
Speaker 1: a nineteen sixty paper Cyborgs in Space by Manford de
Speaker 1: Klins and Nathan S. Klein. This is a pivotal work
Speaker 1: of futurism that coined the word cyborg and explored then
Speaker 1: the necessary transformation of Homo sapiens for life beyond Earth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we have a whole episode that we did last year
Speaker 1: about this, but also just like this sort of philosophy
Speaker 1: of cyborg ism in general. And then I also wrote
Speaker 1: something that's on our site that is about the superhero
Speaker 1: Cyberg It's about to appear in all these DC movies
Speaker 1: and how hopefully some of this cyborg philosophy translates into
Speaker 1: that somehow. The other big piece that we talk about
Speaker 1: in these episodes is Donna Jay Harraway essays Cyborg Manifesto,
Speaker 1: and this centers around the ideological cyborg identity. So we're
Speaker 1: talking about the realization that personal identity can itself be
Speaker 1: an intentional hybrid status. It's unbound by the didactic expectations
Speaker 1: of the past. Now, I think when we we we
Speaker 1: take both of these into account and we look at
Speaker 1: Geeger's work, uh, you know, we can recognize elements present
Speaker 1: in his work resonates with with so many of the
Speaker 1: concerns of of twentieth century post war existence. Flesh and
Speaker 1: machine become intertwined, but not in a way that feels encouraging.
Speaker 1: There's a sense of of parasitism, with breathing tubes shoved
Speaker 1: into faces, bodies seemingly mutilated by the robotic hybridization. And
Speaker 1: at the same time, Geeger's work is is unflinching in
Speaker 1: its sexuality. So there's such a as we discussed, there's
Speaker 1: such a melding of individual and identity in his work.
Speaker 1: It's not always easy to to pinpoint, but you certainly
Speaker 1: run across images where entities are absorbed by this category confusion,
Speaker 1: or there seems to be some sort of hybridization of
Speaker 1: gender um and more often than not, one sees a
Speaker 1: masculine figure and a female figure seemingly copulating but also
Speaker 1: becoming one in a way that confus usually confuses whose
Speaker 1: parts are who's Yeah, absolutely not and not to mention
Speaker 1: too like that. He sort of applies the issues of
Speaker 1: modern mass production to biology and sexuality. Yeah, and there's
Speaker 1: a there's a paper that I ran across that explores
Speaker 1: this that this is a paper by Elizabeth MARGETHA. Borst
Speaker 1: and it's her PhD In philosophy thesis at the University
Speaker 1: of Wakato, Hamilton, New Zealand. And she explores a number
Speaker 1: of different cyborg artists, including Gieger. So she points out
Speaker 1: that in looking at cyborgs and art, first of all,
Speaker 1: you have to consider Geeger, because she says, quote, there
Speaker 1: were fewer artists creating cyborg or interface artworks in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies comparable to today. Yeah, and she specifically mentions
Speaker 1: the cyborgs or biomechanical babies they're in one of his
Speaker 1: pieces called birth Machine. Uh. She's pretty focused on it.
Speaker 1: It has themes of birth and death and production, as
Speaker 1: we've already mentioned earlier. But it's this production line of
Speaker 1: cyborg babies that are being loaded into a gun like bullets. Uh.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot to unpack there about the human condition.
Speaker 1: She also cites Eric Gelberg as suggesting that this is
Speaker 1: a symbol of humanities increasing coexistence with technology and that
Speaker 1: our self destructive nature and our incessant desire to procreate
Speaker 1: is what's leading to overpopulation and environmental chaos. I'd also
Speaker 1: add war and violence to that list, especially when you
Speaker 1: note that the cyborg babies and Geeger's work have their
Speaker 1: own little guns, and then I wonder, well, what kind
Speaker 1: of bullets are in those? Are they tinier little cyborg babies? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I saw a quote where Geeger said that the part
Speaker 1: of the idea behind that work was he kind of
Speaker 1: viewed He said, he kind of viewed babies as a
Speaker 1: clean slate um, which you know, that kind of runs
Speaker 1: counter to what we're talking about earlier, but but still
Speaker 1: he was saying that even if you look at a child,
Speaker 1: is this fresh, uh, you know, untarnished soul, it's still
Speaker 1: going to become something that is part of perhaps a
Speaker 1: negative and destructive world. Yeah. Well, and then that leads
Speaker 1: into his work with Death Machine. Death Machine is another
Speaker 1: series he did in Death Machine one is his homage
Speaker 1: to the synthesis of life and death with machine acting
Speaker 1: as mediator. This is about the encroachment of technology and
Speaker 1: production on the birthing process at this time. Rather than
Speaker 1: it being you know, a machine of babies, it's a
Speaker 1: machine that connects to a birthing woman, taking over the
Speaker 1: entire biological processes in a very factory like manner. This
Speaker 1: is when I realized that there's something inherently Marxist about
Speaker 1: his stuff that's criticizing the sort of capitalistic mass production
Speaker 1: of life. And there's one last piece in there, which
Speaker 1: is this is connected. But it's a bronze sculpture that
Speaker 1: he did that many people have probably seen, called the
Speaker 1: birth Machine Baby follows similar themes. There's very you know,
Speaker 1: dystopian stuff going on there. It's basically the same babies
Speaker 1: that were in the gun and the original painting, but
Speaker 1: they're in sculpted form. And his his second wife points
Speaker 1: us out in the documentary that if you look closely,
Speaker 1: the babies are all based on him. They have his
Speaker 1: facial structure. Now, one last thing I want to I
Speaker 1: want to point out we we mentioned movie The Cat,
Speaker 1: and if you if you go deep enough into Geeger's work,
Speaker 1: you're gonna run across two pieces in particular, one titled
Speaker 1: Behemoth and one titled Minion. When I first saw one
Speaker 1: of these, I think on Facebook, just you know, a
Speaker 1: few years back, I thought it was a fake. I
Speaker 1: thought somebody making a clever joke, because they look like
Speaker 1: traditional Giger paintings, you know, bio mechanoids and you know,
Speaker 1: and and the typical uh category confusion flesh going on,
Speaker 1: and then in the foreground a big, kind of goofy
Speaker 1: looking cartoon cat that slightly zombified like some of these
Speaker 1: strange babies that he created, but it's just staring at
Speaker 1: you with big cartoon eyes. And yeah, I saw one
Speaker 1: of these for the first time. I thought I was like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: that's clever. Somebody's having a little but it turns out
Speaker 1: the person having a little fun was hr Geeger. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this reminds me of Um jungji Edo, who I've talked
Speaker 1: about a couple of times on the show before. He's
Speaker 1: this Japanese manga artist who specializes in horror stuff. This
Speaker 1: is the Spiral guy. Yeah, he did Spirals, he did
Speaker 1: Guio Um, he did Tony, And he has this book
Speaker 1: that's all about his cats, and it's it's it's not
Speaker 1: meant to be a horror book because but because he's
Speaker 1: a horror writer and artist. He's writing about him and
Speaker 1: his wife bringing cats into their home and what it's
Speaker 1: like living with cats. But his imagination sees these cats
Speaker 1: in these sort of like otherworldly forms. It's fascinating. I
Speaker 1: love it. Um, and that brings me to a question
Speaker 1: that I'd like to ask the audience. Maybe I'm answering
Speaker 1: it for myself here in you too, if you have
Speaker 1: an answer, But who has Geeger's mantle passed on too? Like?
Speaker 1: Who is taking on this transgressive art about the human condition?
Speaker 1: The best I could come up with this early Cronenberg,
Speaker 1: But you know, the stuff Cronenberg's working on right now
Speaker 1: isn't really like that. And so then I think Jongi Edo.
Speaker 1: If you look at his work, it's very similar. It's
Speaker 1: hard to say like some of the artists that come
Speaker 1: to mind, like I instantly think of of older artists. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think of like Irving Norman, who I've mentioned on
Speaker 1: the podcast before, who who had a very you know,
Speaker 1: it's a different, unique aesthetic. But as far as just
Speaker 1: surrealism goes in dark surrealism, and it had a similar
Speaker 1: vibe to Geeker's work. But I can't I'm not aware
Speaker 1: of anyone out there today who's really working with the
Speaker 1: same energy. But though obviously I would, I would love
Speaker 1: to explore someone's work if they are so, certainly let
Speaker 1: us know, Yeah, let us know, send us some examples
Speaker 1: if you've seen them before. Um, I'm always looking for
Speaker 1: new stuff like this, and I would love to know
Speaker 1: if there's something like this out there that I'm just
Speaker 1: missing out on. Now, before we go here, we thought
Speaker 1: we'd just take a few minutes to chat with a
Speaker 1: friend of the show, um ec Steiner, who's worked with
Speaker 1: us before, or he did. He recently did uh landing
Speaker 1: page illustrations for our book on on on Flesh Bound
Speaker 1: Tombs and uh and he has also helped out with
Speaker 1: the Monster Science series in the past. Yeah. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: he's built stuff for the show. Uh. And he is
Speaker 1: honestly the closest thing to hr Geeger I've met in
Speaker 1: real life, and I know that it's a huge influence
Speaker 1: on him. So we wanted to speak to him more
Speaker 1: about sort of like the process and artistic influence of Geeger.
Speaker 1: So let's talk to him briefly and then we will
Speaker 1: end the episode. All right, we're welcoming ec Steiner to
Speaker 1: the show, an artist, a friend of the show. Uh,
Speaker 1: he's uh, he's helped us out with a few things
Speaker 1: in the past, including prop for Monster Science. Welcome, thanks
Speaker 1: for talking with us, Hey, thanks for having me today.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm really excited to come in and talk about
Speaker 1: Geeger's life and his work. Yeah, we go way back.
Speaker 1: We've known each other for god like almost ten years now.
Speaker 1: I think he worked on collaborative projects together. So it's
Speaker 1: cool to get you in here, because while we were
Speaker 1: doing the Gigger research, I immediately thought, oh, we've got
Speaker 1: to talk to him. We've got a good Steiner in here,
Speaker 1: because he knows more about Gigger than anybody I know.
Speaker 1: And like Eager, you're an artist that works in illustration,
Speaker 1: in paint and in sculpture, so you're you're you're working
Speaker 1: in all this different kind of media very similar to him.
Speaker 1: And I think that's critical too, because when you look
Speaker 1: at giegers appears and his his influences, they're transisplary artists
Speaker 1: as well. They're not blocked in the just oh I
Speaker 1: just do painting or I just do sculpture. They they're
Speaker 1: truly artists in a sense that they're going to use
Speaker 1: whatever tools and media they have available to convey that
Speaker 1: vision as as fully as possible. So let's talk about Yeah, actually,
Speaker 1: like his influence on you, how it impacted you, how
Speaker 1: it led to the kind of art that you make.
Speaker 1: And then I'm also really curious on what his influences
Speaker 1: are what's the through line, because this is an area
Speaker 1: we didn't we didn't really discuss, and I think this
Speaker 1: is this is great because, um, when you look at
Speaker 1: his influences, and I think the key distinction to make
Speaker 1: between influence and inspiration is the inspiration is it's the
Speaker 1: gas and the engine. It's it's what's lit the fire
Speaker 1: for you to go out and create something. Where influence
Speaker 1: is these little fingerprints all over your work, where if
Speaker 1: you tell someone, hey, I really like this guy's work,
Speaker 1: or I've I've really grown up on on this guy's
Speaker 1: approach to creating things, you can then look at my work,
Speaker 1: look at that individual's work, and draw very clear lines. Um.
Speaker 1: And and in terms of of Giger, um, my kind
Speaker 1: of love affair with with Hans Rudy uh is really
Speaker 1: at a at a point where it's it was more patronage. Um.
Speaker 1: I would buy his prints, I would purchase his books.
Speaker 1: I would go see films that he collaborated in or
Speaker 1: had some part in, or what we're inspired by what
Speaker 1: he was doing. Um. But I made a very um
Speaker 1: real decision in my my own work to avoid developing
Speaker 1: a gigg Er esque approach, because you've seen it yourself.
Speaker 1: You can go online, you can type you know, Gigger
Speaker 1: into a Google image search and not only find his works,
Speaker 1: but it works with other artists that are rooted in
Speaker 1: his style and his approach, either through his his applications
Speaker 1: or just the kind of bio mechanical black flag that
Speaker 1: he stamped into his creative domain. Yeah. So I would say,
Speaker 1: like it seems like and we talked about this briefly
Speaker 1: on the show, but that like there's this um affinity
Speaker 1: for Gieger that rose up through sort of like the
Speaker 1: dark art and the goth scenes in the eighties and nineties.
Speaker 1: And I imagine, given what I know about other arts scenes,
Speaker 1: that there's plenty of Giger imitators out there. Oh. Absolutely there.
Speaker 1: There are artists who've made fifteen twenty of your careers, uh,
Speaker 1: replicating that kind of biomechanical style. And you you specially
Speaker 1: see it in in the tattoo community. How they've really
Speaker 1: kind of grabbed on to that biomechanical style. And I
Speaker 1: often wonder if it's because Giger so often worked with airbrush,
Speaker 1: and he he air brushed his his muse lee he
Speaker 1: you know, I know we've all seen those photos of
Speaker 1: where he airbrushed Debbie Harry in the nineteen eighties. Um,
Speaker 1: it's just his application applies so well to the human
Speaker 1: form and then wanting to take that and apply it
Speaker 1: to yourself. It's just a very easy line to draw,
Speaker 1: um from one to the next. But yeah, there's definitely
Speaker 1: an affinity there um both. I think from the uh,
Speaker 1: the visual themes that he grabs onto his kind of
Speaker 1: personal iconography that translates very well in anyone who's interested
Speaker 1: in in the occult or in interested in kind of
Speaker 1: dark visions you obviously see through his techniques uses a
Speaker 1: lot of bone imagery, He uses a lot of um
Speaker 1: kind of uh mutagenic elements that hearken to a very
Speaker 1: kind of dystopian post human future of sorts. So when
Speaker 1: you think about the who's gonna be attracted to it,
Speaker 1: it's it's not just people from those communities, but it's
Speaker 1: anyone who has just an appeal for seeing something that's
Speaker 1: that's off putting. UM For me personally, what I really
Speaker 1: enjoy about his work and what I find uh fascinating,
Speaker 1: especially in this time period that we're in where we're
Speaker 1: talking about trans humanism and post humanism and looking at
Speaker 1: kind of dystopian futures, is that his work really appeals
Speaker 1: to different aspects of of our our culture. If you
Speaker 1: have if you're a deep seated, very religious individual, you
Speaker 1: may find a sense of existential terror in his work
Speaker 1: because he grabs so heavily on us maybe satanic imagery
Speaker 1: or a cult symbolism. UM. If you look at what
Speaker 1: he's done with UM, kind of just the blending, morphing,
Speaker 1: melding of of two or more figures. If you have
Speaker 1: a fear of maybe body horror, something like you're afraid
Speaker 1: of an autoimmune disease or cancer, something else, to see
Speaker 1: something like that could create a lot of psychological terror.
Speaker 1: So there's this right um element to his work where
Speaker 1: it both appeals and repels people UM on different levels
Speaker 1: because of the symbolism, the approach to his subject matter,
Speaker 1: and just his application creating these fast worlds. And this
Speaker 1: is something that we talked a little a little bit
Speaker 1: about in the end the episode, is that you'll have
Speaker 1: an individual piece of his that will inspire all of
Speaker 1: these these feelings in you, or at least they do
Speaker 1: in me, where it's like, oh, well when I focus
Speaker 1: on this detail, yeah, that's that's that's awesome, that's beautiful.
Speaker 1: I can get behind that idea. This section of this
Speaker 1: triptic troubles me more. It makes me ask a lot
Speaker 1: of questions and uh and and so you get I
Speaker 1: feel like you get a lot of counter category confusion
Speaker 1: out of his work and uh. Above all, I I
Speaker 1: always found his work very very challenging compared to certainly
Speaker 1: other you know, so especially this sort of sci fi
Speaker 1: and fantasy artists that are thrown into the same rough categorization. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: In fact, I think what's what's so valuable about his
Speaker 1: work is here this guy who went to school to
Speaker 1: study architecture and interior design. So you look at his
Speaker 1: work and you're not just dealing with with subjects. You're
Speaker 1: not just looking at portraiture. You're looking at completely self
Speaker 1: contained environments that give you a glimpse of this other
Speaker 1: other world. And it's it's a window, it's a threshold,
Speaker 1: it's a portal into something beyond. And I think that
Speaker 1: makes this work so immersive and accessible because it's not
Speaker 1: just these these concepts are drawings that give you a
Speaker 1: hint of what's there. He's fully enveloping you in his
Speaker 1: vision um and you again with his design background. You
Speaker 1: see how Um, through his his sculptural techniques as design techniques,
Speaker 1: that he's taken those images and then pulled them into
Speaker 1: a physical space where they occupy a three dimensional space.
Speaker 1: You can interact with them, you can sit in them.
Speaker 1: I think that's why the Geeger Bar had such an
Speaker 1: appeal for people, Why his museum is is is such
Speaker 1: a great, you know, kind of destination stop on a
Speaker 1: European tour, is because you're not just seeing something through
Speaker 1: the safety of a two dimensional plane. You are now
Speaker 1: able to circle it and interact with it and feel
Speaker 1: so if it's it's coming into your world, it's crossing
Speaker 1: that threshold and Um some of that that wonder and
Speaker 1: fear that he can create in his work is now
Speaker 1: coming at you in a different way. So this is
Speaker 1: actually like one of the reasons why we wanted you
Speaker 1: to come in and talk to us is that you
Speaker 1: understand the process of what he was doing way more
Speaker 1: than us. And one of the things I was astonished
Speaker 1: by was watching him work with airbrush and documentaries because
Speaker 1: he didn't do any under drawings. And it's just to
Speaker 1: me as like I sort of just like fledgling artists.
Speaker 1: It's it's insane watching him come up with this, just
Speaker 1: like meticulous anatomy, just with this like the loosest of
Speaker 1: possible tools, just going over and over and over again
Speaker 1: with it until it's just refined perfectly. And so I'd like,
Speaker 1: you know, can you speak to that and and also
Speaker 1: speak to you know, just his process in general of
Speaker 1: also like you know two D to three D work. Sure, well,
Speaker 1: I think again, what's what's wonderful at his background is
Speaker 1: and he goes to the university to study architecture and
Speaker 1: interior design, and you know, when you're presenting those those
Speaker 1: architectural sketches, those design sketches, you have to be meticulous.
Speaker 1: The draftsmanship quality of that really comes out. And when
Speaker 1: you look at his early work, certainly in like the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties mid sixties, it's a lot of of pen
Speaker 1: and egg again very well rendered, immaculate lines. Its just
Speaker 1: exciting work. So when you look at him, and I again,
Speaker 1: I have in my studio, I have a photo of
Speaker 1: him where he's working and he's just right there, going
Speaker 1: right on the canvas with an airbrush. Um. I think
Speaker 1: the training and the skill that he had going into
Speaker 1: that allowed him to just look at a blank canvas,
Speaker 1: not as something to be afraid of and figure out
Speaker 1: what all, g where am I going to start with this?
Speaker 1: But actually he could already see I'm putting lines here,
Speaker 1: I'm putting lines here, I'm gonna deep in this area.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go in in shade. So it's again a
Speaker 1: very organic process, which again it helps contribute to his
Speaker 1: very organic results. Where um, it's it's not all hard edges.
Speaker 1: Even some of his hard edges seemed very round, almost
Speaker 1: like the kind of like the thorax of a bug
Speaker 1: or a carapist of of some kind of exoskeleton creatures
Speaker 1: we see and you know, certainly his later work. But um,
Speaker 1: in terms of his process, I I truly believe it
Speaker 1: was just his um, his comfort and his command of
Speaker 1: what he wanted to do, and the techniques he added,
Speaker 1: his disposal that he knew when I put this line
Speaker 1: down here, I mean it to be there. It's supposed
Speaker 1: to be there. I trust it's gonna it's gonna work
Speaker 1: with where I'm going with this. So he could just
Speaker 1: dive right in and go to town. So tell us
Speaker 1: a little bit about Geiger's influences. Sure, Um, what's what's
Speaker 1: fascinating about Geiger's influences. And as I mentioned earlier, you
Speaker 1: can find the fingerprint of his his peers, his friends, uh,
Speaker 1: the artists that he looked to as inspirators as well
Speaker 1: as supporters in his work. And when you when you
Speaker 1: see their work and just you know, I'm gonna give
Speaker 1: you some names of people who really impacted what he did. It.
Speaker 1: When you do, for instance, of Google image search or
Speaker 1: you you find a book of their work and you
Speaker 1: flip through it, you're going to see proto gig Or
Speaker 1: work in those in those drawings and those paintings and
Speaker 1: those sculptures. Uh. The first one that comes to mind
Speaker 1: is a gentleman by the name of dado U. And
Speaker 1: I can't even pronounce his Yuo Slavia names, So I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna butcher that um. But was what critical about
Speaker 1: him was that he created these beautiful deformed beings UM.
Speaker 1: And that's when you look at it, you clearly see
Speaker 1: some of those kind of blending, melded uh creatures or
Speaker 1: or beings that Gigger created. There's such a parallel there,
Speaker 1: and you can almost see Gigger being very um enamored
Speaker 1: with how he approached the his his designs of these
Speaker 1: figures and began playing with that in his own work
Speaker 1: and again filtering that through his creative prism. So you're
Speaker 1: not just seeing this these kinds of abstract surreal figures,
Speaker 1: but beings that exist in his his world and his vision.
Speaker 1: And so they aren't taking on more of those those borny,
Speaker 1: organic biomechanical elements, while still harkening back to kind of
Speaker 1: Dato's approach and style. Someone else that I I you
Speaker 1: really see in his work is Earnest a few Fuchs,
Speaker 1: who is an amazing Austrian um draftsman, painter, um printmaker, sculptor. Again,
Speaker 1: one of these these individuals who just wasn't bound into
Speaker 1: one creative box UM. And what's fascinating about earnest influence
Speaker 1: on Hans Ruti's work is the way he presents his
Speaker 1: his women, as you know, geegers women uh, even the
Speaker 1: pieces he did with UH with his musically UM, they're
Speaker 1: always presented in these very almost serene, uh commanding, regal,
Speaker 1: uh sensual and alluring um compositions. Sometimes they're elongated and leaning,
Speaker 1: sometimes they are reclining. Sometimes they're looking at you head on.
Speaker 1: And when you look at work and you look at
Speaker 1: how he approached his female subjects. It's almost as if
Speaker 1: you're looking at an underdrawing for one of Um Geger's paintings,
Speaker 1: because you can see right away where now we start
Speaker 1: adding all of the biomechanical elements on top of this UM.
Speaker 1: It's just it's such a very clear fingerprint on how
Speaker 1: Gieger approached his his more feminine subject matter. Someone else
Speaker 1: it's it's really important to talk about is a guy
Speaker 1: by the name of Austin Osmond spare Uh and I
Speaker 1: hope I'm pronouncing his last name correctly. Um. He was
Speaker 1: an artist who really embraced kind of these occult themes
Speaker 1: and symbolism and building on the psychology that that an
Speaker 1: artwork can have, and I think Geiger really pulled from that.
Speaker 1: When you look at some of his um some of
Speaker 1: the work that begins to reach out more into very
Speaker 1: clear occult realms. You see the repetition of symbols, You
Speaker 1: see the repetition of certain visual elements that create a
Speaker 1: visual language that kind of deepen his vision his world
Speaker 1: that he's trying to share with you, but also challenge you.
Speaker 1: As I know you guys have already touched on some
Speaker 1: of the psychological elements of his work. But again that
Speaker 1: all plays into this. You know, how do you apply
Speaker 1: uh kind of esoteric themes to your work so it's
Speaker 1: not just disposable pop culture. There are clear timeless messages
Speaker 1: in this work that resonate, which again goes back to
Speaker 1: why I think when we talk about things that are
Speaker 1: gigar esque, they are ultimately always going to be derivative
Speaker 1: and in some ways inferior because they lack the message
Speaker 1: of the work. They're just replicating the artifice. I mean,
Speaker 1: anyone can sit down with an airbrush or with clay
Speaker 1: and create these wondrous biomechanical creatures, but they're lacking the
Speaker 1: very personal, occult themes and kind of the secret messages
Speaker 1: that Geiger was folding into his work, both to challenge
Speaker 1: individuals but as well as maybe introduced into things that
Speaker 1: we're a little uncomfortable. Yeah. I think that's a great point,
Speaker 1: because when I think of of of stuff that's derivative
Speaker 1: of Geeger, it is kind of like someone saying, oh, well,
Speaker 1: these are the parts of this painting that I like
Speaker 1: and don't have any issues with that. You know, they
Speaker 1: don't challenge me too much. I'm going to take those,
Speaker 1: boil those down into into into this work exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that I've noticed, and we
Speaker 1: talked about this in the episode, is that there's these
Speaker 1: really broad themes of identification through Geeger's work that even
Speaker 1: if you look at it and it and it seems
Speaker 1: repulsive to you, you know, they're themes that every human
Speaker 1: being can identify with birth, death, sex, biology, right, all
Speaker 1: of these things. And what I'm trying to think of
Speaker 1: is somebody today who's working with broad themes like that,
Speaker 1: but is also transgressive in the way that Geeger was,
Speaker 1: and that like, you look at their work and you go,
Speaker 1: I don't feel like I'm supposed to be looking at this,
Speaker 1: and yet it has a broad appeal. Is there anybody
Speaker 1: you can think of? The best I could come up
Speaker 1: with was John J. E in the episode. Yeah. Jong
Speaker 1: Eto is great. Um He He definitely exists in his
Speaker 1: in his own again, his own visual realm. He's created it,
Speaker 1: he's expanding it with every release. Um I. It's it's
Speaker 1: very hard to point to someone in particular who it
Speaker 1: has the same residence that that Geeger has right now,
Speaker 1: or even anyone who's come before him. Um because with
Speaker 1: the unfortunate time period that we end, we're losing a
Speaker 1: lot of those very strong talents who set a tone
Speaker 1: and a pace for not just pop art or fantasy
Speaker 1: art or dark art, but for the art world. Um.
Speaker 1: And I think today, especially when you look at the landscape,
Speaker 1: so much of art seems to be made for quick digestion.
Speaker 1: It's I'm I'm going for social media likes, so I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do something that's derivative of of someone else's work
Speaker 1: or stranger things art, stranger things fan art. I mean,
Speaker 1: how many how many waffles and elevens can we see
Speaker 1: on them? My Instagram is full of that stuff exactly. Uh.
Speaker 1: And again there's nothing wrong with that, but the artist
Speaker 1: has to accept the fact that why I'm doing this
Speaker 1: is I want to appropriate the momentum of some other
Speaker 1: property and use that cultural currency. It has to perhaps
Speaker 1: elevate my own uh, my own role. Unfortunately though, and
Speaker 1: ultimately that's disposable. Are there people who get work from
Speaker 1: doing fan art from doing derivative work? Absolutely, but are
Speaker 1: they going to have a timelessness that someone like Gieger,
Speaker 1: like Mobius um, you think about even you know Georgeowski,
Speaker 1: who has such an important role for bringing all these
Speaker 1: guys together and then from that, even though that project failed,
Speaker 1: and again we're talking about his his Doom project. Um
Speaker 1: what came out of it alien Uh, some of Blade Runner, um,
Speaker 1: certainly some of David Lynch's Dune. But you think about
Speaker 1: in terms of contemporary film Prometheus, because Radley Scott went
Speaker 1: back to some of those early Dune concepts and said,
Speaker 1: we need to put these in in this film because
Speaker 1: they fit. And I believe one of them is like
Speaker 1: this this giant harcon in um, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: dome that made an appearance in the film. And again
Speaker 1: it's it's a great way of looking at someone who
Speaker 1: has such a fingerprint on that film. And in fact,
Speaker 1: um there's a great documentary I think you can find
Speaker 1: like YouTube about the making of Aliens. And what surprised
Speaker 1: me was James Cameron's reaction to questions about, you know,
Speaker 1: Geiger's involvement. Oh no, no, no, no, no, he we
Speaker 1: we didn't bring him in this one. It's his design,
Speaker 1: but we we want to go in the other direction.
Speaker 1: We want to change things, but you can't because his
Speaker 1: fingerprint is so strongly and and Scott even has like
Speaker 1: recognized that now that he's back on that franchise. Like
Speaker 1: Prometheus and Alien Covenant both have Giger back front and center.
Speaker 1: And I think in Prometheus, don't they have that big
Speaker 1: alien mural that he usually Yeah, yes, yes, yeah, And
Speaker 1: I understand from my understanding is that there's similar stuff
Speaker 1: that's supposed to be in Covenant. So movie I'm hoping
Speaker 1: the movie murals. This is a good place for us
Speaker 1: to end. So yeah, So Mooviie has a huge influence
Speaker 1: on He has three movies throughout the course of his life. Yes,
Speaker 1: there are three cats with the same name. Uh so
Speaker 1: what about you? I know you have two cats, So
Speaker 1: are you planning to just have cats throughout the rest
Speaker 1: of your life and name them with various numerals after them.
Speaker 1: You know that that's probably a great idea. Um, just
Speaker 1: Draco one, Moxi five. UM. I can't admit though, that
Speaker 1: when you create what they called plastic arts, the sculpture,
Speaker 1: or you know, something where it's tactile and you have cats,
Speaker 1: every time you sell a work of art or you
Speaker 1: take on a commission, your client is ultimately going to
Speaker 1: get something that is just filled with cat hair. It's
Speaker 1: in there. You try to covered up Oh, that's just
Speaker 1: veins or I you know, that's just a stray hair.
Speaker 1: You know, it's you know, it'll be fine. But UM,
Speaker 1: I don't know. There's something fascinating about artists and cats too.
Speaker 1: Emery hard conan chair comes with one hair from the movie.
Speaker 1: I kept wondering watching The Dark Started documentary. It's like,
Speaker 1: how how is movie not just scratching the hell out
Speaker 1: at everything? Like my cat If I had artwork sitting
Speaker 1: around on the uh you know, touching the floor. And
Speaker 1: granted some of this was wood and sculpture and all,
Speaker 1: but I would just think, oh, my cat would just
Speaker 1: tear at the pieces. You know what's fascinating is um.
Speaker 1: I I used to let my cats in my studio originally,
Speaker 1: and I would find that when they want attention, that's
Speaker 1: when I would start seeing sculptures on the floor. Arms
Speaker 1: are blown off, legs are are shattered. UM. So I
Speaker 1: would would keep them out, but now certainly, UM, in
Speaker 1: my home where I have my studio, they'll come in
Speaker 1: and I'm more or less just like a recliner or
Speaker 1: a bed. Um, why don't get in a chair next
Speaker 1: to me? The other has to sit in my lap
Speaker 1: while I work? Um, I've developed an entire kind of
Speaker 1: postural approach to how I create so that I'm not
Speaker 1: you know, bumping their heads or unsettling their dreams. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's it's fascinating how and you certainly see
Speaker 1: with with Geeger he has a strong affinity for cats.
Speaker 1: And also, um, something else that really to look at
Speaker 1: his is his home. UM. I know in your research
Speaker 1: you may have touched this already. Early on he was
Speaker 1: living in Squalor. It was like he went from one
Speaker 1: condemned building to the next. And then when he has
Speaker 1: this very kind of fortuitous moment of receiving an inheritance
Speaker 1: and buying a house. UM, I think a lot changed
Speaker 1: for him in that moment because now he has a
Speaker 1: creative base of operations. UM. He doesn't have to worry
Speaker 1: about maybe being transient in another week or so when
Speaker 1: they tear down the building. UM. And I think maybe
Speaker 1: some of that that pressure, that environmental pressure, was playing
Speaker 1: onto his work and certainly driving his relationship with Lee together. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then when he got stable, he had a foundation,
Speaker 1: he had his his his fortress of creativity. UM. That's
Speaker 1: when things really changed with this work. I think I
Speaker 1: think he there was a sense of part minutes, there's
Speaker 1: a think of this is my my entire studio U.
Speaker 1: And when you look at the Dark Star documentary, you
Speaker 1: look at that house and it is just standing room
Speaker 1: only because the art lives there. He just kind of
Speaker 1: lives around it. And when you've got art in your
Speaker 1: sinks and in your bathtubs and um, you know folded
Speaker 1: up behind you know, dinner tables and art stacked on
Speaker 1: top of art on top of art, it's you really
Speaker 1: get a sense that that was his, his creative palace
Speaker 1: and he uh even his his ghost train in the backyard.
Speaker 1: And you go out back and that's not a normal
Speaker 1: patio set up for a lot of people, maybe a
Speaker 1: couple of chairs and a firepit. Not at Geeger's house.
Speaker 1: So so thanks for being with us today. Uh where
Speaker 1: can people find your art online? Where can they find
Speaker 1: you know, follow you see the stuff that you're working on? O? Great? Well,
Speaker 1: um again, thank you for having me here today. I
Speaker 1: love talking about Geeger. Um. He's he's such an important
Speaker 1: influence on my own work and certainly early on and
Speaker 1: trying to you know, find my own creative path and
Speaker 1: my own voice and and and not just replicate what
Speaker 1: he's done. But if anyone's interested in taking a look
Speaker 1: at what I've done, you can find me online at
Speaker 1: caski glass dot com. Uh. That's my my main weight
Speaker 1: set that I'm I'm going through and doing some alterations
Speaker 1: with right now. But from there you can link off
Speaker 1: to my social media account, uh my store where you
Speaker 1: can you know, take a look at some of the
Speaker 1: small artworks that I have available for sale and um
Speaker 1: connect with me there because of course I want to
Speaker 1: connect with other Giger fans and anyone who's interested in
Speaker 1: dark art and no kind of promote the scene as
Speaker 1: best I can. Yeah, and if you're a fan of
Speaker 1: our show and you've seen some of the video stuff
Speaker 1: that we've done, especially Monster Science, you're gonna want to
Speaker 1: check this stuff out because the cyclops head that shows
Speaker 1: up in Monster Science, that's Steiner. Also the Cathulu of
Speaker 1: the house stuff works now, that's true. Yeah, it's in
Speaker 1: our now studio as well, so a lot of good stuff.
Speaker 1: Go check it out. Well, thanks for coming in chatting
Speaker 1: with us that discussing Gieger and uh we'll include links
Speaker 1: to to those websites we mentioned on a landing age
Speaker 1: for this episode. It is stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: dot com. Alright, today you have it, Thanks again Derrick
Speaker 1: Steiner for chatting with us there. And if you want
Speaker 1: to check out some of the links we've been discussing here,
Speaker 1: go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com go
Speaker 1: to the landing page will include some some interesting gateways
Speaker 1: to depl deeper explorations, including standars Lav Graff's website standars
Speaker 1: Lav Graff dot com and the hr Gieger Museum itself
Speaker 1: hr Giger Museum dot com. And if you want to
Speaker 1: get in touch with us and talk to us about
Speaker 1: Gieger or other artists that you think are working in
Speaker 1: this realm where all over social media, you can find
Speaker 1: us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram. Or you can
Speaker 1: just write us the old fashioned way, send an email,
Speaker 1: not a letter. Uh. And that would be at Blow
Speaker 1: of the Mind at how stuff Works dot com. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I say there's a ninety chance we will do
Speaker 1: a trailer talk episode this Friday in which we look
Speaker 1: at the trailers for some of these Giger related films
Speaker 1: we discussed, uh And that will take place on our
Speaker 1: Facebook page and then later I'll upload it to YouTube
Speaker 1: and as always, shoot us an email at stuff to
Speaker 1: blow your mind dot com for more on this and
Speaker 1: thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: The fi