Erik Varela

On Schacht Nr. 7  (Shaft No. 7)  (ink and paper by Hans Ruedi Giger)

 

What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose.  And yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and to wonder. (Heidegger 150)

 

It’s dark.  We are in a shaft, not at the top and not at the bottom either.  Light pierces down to illuminate the walls from… somewhere.  It must be coming from above, or then again, maybe not—maybe it’s just “around.”  Perhaps its source is at the top of the infinite staircases the crawl along the walls, like hatch marks clinging to the edges of sanity. 

 

A figure—it’s too difficult to really call it a human—drifts by in the darkness, the only other thing down here with us, though it’s hard to tell if she’s our companion or not.  Still, the fact that she has revealed herself to us is somehow comforting.    

 

H. R. Giger’s Schacht Nr. 7 is a work that seems simple if nothing more than a superficial glance is thrown its way, but even a moment’s examination quickly reveals that it is a complex—and beautiful—accumulation of things unknown and making themselves known.

 

The light is among the first things that caught my attention, since it is clearly foreign to this place.  But where is it coming from?  It illuminates the walls of the shaft almost at random—there is no clear source or direction.  In the upper-right corner, the edge of a wall is lit up to a pale luminescence, but how is this possible?  There is no light source shining onto the wall from the other side of the shaft, and the light cannot be spilling out from around the corner, since the opposite side is clearly dark! 

 

The stairs pose an interesting set of questions themselves:  Where do they lead and why were they built?  Furthermore, why have we, as observers decided to descend them?  (A similar set of questions could be asked about the shaft itself.)  Still, the fact that there is light shining down and that there are stairs that lead somewhere reveals a broader world than the mere darkness of the shaft. 

 

And then there is the figure itself, floating along in silence.  (I cannot imagine there actually being sound in this place, except maybe for the breathy whisper of silk on silk as her trailing garments flutter in her wake.)  And what are these appendages that whip and trail around her?  What is this morbid wedding train from whose edges the cranial domes of skulls seem to want to rise?   

 

These questions and the aura of soft, silent mystery that permeates and emanates from the picture are what draw me to it again and again and formulate its beauty for me.  Unlike the other pictures in the Shafts series, I do not think that this one falls into the category of the sublime.  There is no stygian Gateway Arch, its femur structure rising from turgid waters at the bottom of a murky pit.  There are no torture devices or other blunt reminders of our capacity to suffer.  Giger’s bizarrely mutated Atomkinder do not make an appearance either; they are replaced instead by a less threatening and far more seductive being.

 

If the older concepts of the sublime and beautiful as espoused by Burke and the early Kant do not quite manage to describe this image, perhaps something more modern does.  The figure clearly lacks arms and other body parts.  Her abdomen is cadaverous, and it is difficult to tell if she has legs.  Strange filaments or cables trail up into the darkness above.  Do these pull her along on a track perhaps, an overhead force that guides her movements like a director handles his actors or a dictator his people? 

 

Or perhaps it is the totality of the work and not any of its separate, immediate parts or implications that invokes thought, wonder and beauty.

In commenting on his own work, Giger writes that “it is only afterwards that you find out exactly what everything means and can explain it” (Falk 63).  As regards the Shafts series, he explains

 

In the stairwell of my parents’ house in Chur was a secret window, which gave onto the interior of the Three Kings Hotel next door, and was always covered with a dingy brown curtain.  In my dreams, or nightly wanderings, this window was open and I saw gigantic, bottomless shafts bathed in a pale yellow light.  (Falk 34)

 

So here is a work, revealing itself out of dreams but created in an unforced way—the artist does not have an agenda for it, preferring the work to develop without have a specific meaning built into it from the outset. 

In writing on artworks, Heidegger says

           

The more solitary the work, fixed in the figure, stands on its own and the more cleanly it seems to cut all ties to human beings, the more simply does the thrust come into the open that such a work is, and the more essentially is the extraordinary thrust to the surface and what is long-familiar thrust down.  But this multiple thrusting is nothing violent, for the more purely the work is itself transported into the openness of beings—an openness opened by itself—the more simply does it transport us into this openness and thus at the same time transport us out of the realm of the ordinary.  (191)

 

This concept seems carried out almost physically in Schacht Nr. 7.  The work itself is solitary, inspired by a nebulous experience but not created with a meaning in mind.  There is little human about it; the solitary figure is a being but certainly not a human being; indeed, it is more an expression of the strife at the center of creation, it’s bizarre garments forming a physical rift in its wake.  The light and stairs indicate an outer world, but the stairs descend down, into the earth and concealment, while the extraordinary figure rises, unconcealing and opening itself, and taking us with it. 

 

Ultimately it is not merely the strangeness of the setting or the figure itself that gives us pause, but the fact that there is a sort of dramatization of the very essence of creation, a process that is rarely displayed—Heidegger’s “unfamiliar source.”  Perhaps more than anything else it is seeing this conflicted, creationary process reflected in a completed work that does not attempt to show its origins that is most beautiful and causes us to think, and to wonder more than anything else.

 

 

Works Cited

 

Falk, Gaby, ed. H R Giger ARh+. Tschen:  Köln, 2001.

 

Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. David Farrell Krell, ed.  HarperCollins: San

Fransisco, 1993

 

 (from the Shafts series)