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MANIFESTO OF VISIONARY ART
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After his many experiments with mescalin and LSD, Aldous Huxley was also able to confirm that "the visionary experience is not always blissful. It is sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven." (17) In his (appropriately titled) book Heaven and Hell, he describes in detail "the negative visionary experience,"(18) comparing it to the after-life journey through a spiralling, descending inferno: each level of Hell is replete with its unique form of torture. Many of the punishments he mentions - "buried in mud, shut up in the trunks of trees, frozen solid in blocks of ice, crushed beneath stones..."(19) - are also to be found, masterfully depicted, in Bosch's vision of Hell and Doré's engravings to Dante's Inferno.
The gates to "the infernal visionary experience."(20) may suddenly open wide at any unexpected moment. Due to the traumas inherent in life itself - accidents, illness, personal loss or sudden separations - temporary forms of madness, paranoia or psychosis can occur, accompanied by their uncontrollable visions and hallucinations. These may take the form of an unwilled memory regression, in the attempt to unearth the source of our trauma. The descent into our own earliest memories brings about the spontaneous recall of childhood terrors, fantasies, and fears. Dali's first Surrealist canvases offer a series of such motifs, each canvas an on-going attempt to unearth his greatest fear, torment, and forbidden desire.
For H. R. Giger as well, the sudden recollection of childhood nightmares offered unexpected access to his own innermost Hell. During 1966, the artist completed a series of 'Shaft pictures' which, as he later recounted, "have their origin in my dreams." (21) And he elaborates,
"In the stairwell in my parents' house in Chur is a secret window, which gave onto the interior of the Three Kings Hotel, and was always covered with a dingy brown curtain. In my dreams or nightly wanderings, this window was open and I
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H. R. GIGER: THE SPELL (Detail)
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saw gigantic bottomless shafts, bathed in pale yellow light. On the walls, steep and treacherous wooden stairways without bannisters led down into the yawning abyss."(22)
"...Another source of fantasies was our cellar. Approached via an old and musty spiral stone staircase, it led into a vaulted corridor (which had been walled up). In my dreams however, these passages were open and led into a monstrous labyrinth, where all kinds of dangers lay in wait for me."(23)
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