Neo Gothic - Banks Violette

I first heard of Banks Violette when a colleague told me that another artist had made a melting unicorn head. I was bummed - since I was really fond of mine- and was wanting my idea to be unique. Now I see that his work and my work are actually nothing alike. The unicorn is almost an anomaly within his work - it fits but doesn't at the same time. His aesthetic is very dry, clean, masculine, shiny...and almost harsh. The unicorn's whiteness certainly goes with his other monochromatic work...and the idea of deterioration works next to partially torn down guard rails, crushed pieces of metal and scattered white tube lights.

In reading about Violette's work- his focus is on youth and subcultures. According to Interview Magazine, he celebrates 'their revolt and reveal[s] the queasy way they recycle images and slogans to keep themselves alive.'

Much of Violette's work is very pared down: to glossy black, white glowing light, white glossy objects, metal- it works around direct iconography or boils it down to image's base and individual elements (takes it apart and uses elements sparingly). The iconographic images (deer, Christ, skull, cross, unicorn) work in a separate space - where the images they represent carry their own history and weight- as iconic images do.

On the Brask Art blog - where I found the image of his studio with the upside down cross - the author describes Bank's work as:

'The cold, mimimalist visual language Banks Violette (b. 1973, New York) uses, refers to the dark side of American culture: the gothic scene, satanic rituals, death metal,....Violette's installaations evoke violence, aggression and excess, without lapsing into anecdotalism.'

With Bank's work - I'm turned off and very curious about how the cold, minimalist aesthetic carries violence across (vs. imagery that is not minimalist and not necessarily cold). I'm thinking of Barney's work which is also cold but not minimilast. Barney embraces the direct use of iconography. What does Bank's boiling down of iconography do in contrast (in those instances where it is boiled down.)? There is a way in which something cold shuts me out. It becomes institutional and, therefore, unavailable to me as a human being. (Institutional feels bigger than the indiv. human - out of our control in some way). Minimalism has its own distance. These distances from the individual viewer are different from each other - but both are removed.

If I think of Barney's work and my distance from it --- it is in it's coldness. And it's money that makes it bigger than myself. But he brings the human being back around to identifying with what is going on with iconography, historical imagery and fashion and the horror and abjection of the body. He scares us and revolts us with this abjection after we wait sitting in cold, clean well produced, gorgeous images that are familiar and otherworldly at the same time.

Barney and Violette both work with violence. I might have mentioned here before that Barney's work was described somewhere (or I made it up in my head but I don't think so) as 'violence sublimating into form.' I would say the same of Violette's work - violence is going through a different filtering process with the two artists.

A quote from Violette I found on Wikipedia:

"I'm interested in a visual language that's over-determined, exhausted, or just over-burdened by meaning. The heavy-handed one-to-one of 'black-equals-wrong' is incredibly interesting to me-- less as something that has a meaning in itself, but more in how those visual codes can somehow be reanimated. That's constant throughout my work. All those images are like zombies -- they're stripped of vitality, yet sometimes they get life back in them...and like zombies, usually something goes wrong when they awake again."

That is interesting -- he is stripping down (or boiling down) to something basic (like the use of black) and trying to reanimate it. I wonder if he has succeeded. I don't know. I only see stripped/boiled down right now. I don't see the zombie having come back from the dead.
I see boiled down death and violence - the leftover bones after the meat has cooked off.