Eliana Willis

“You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you?”
That’s the famous question posed by Ash (Ian Holm) in one of the many tense scenes of Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien. Ash goes on: “Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility… Unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.”
Holms’s character is describing the dark creature at the center of Scott’s masterpiece, an extraterrestrial dubbed the xenomorph. This unforgettably terrifying alien set a new bar for cinematic angst about deep space and existential dream—one that, some argue, has not been matched in the more than 40 years since the film’s release.
The otherworldly creation has an origin story that stems back to a niche in the late 1970s art world. It was dreamed up by a then relatively little-known surrealist artist from Switzerland, H. R. Giger, who created what became the on-film xenomorph years earlier, in a 1976 painting titled Necronom IV.
The detailed work, plus many others that comprehensively chart his practice, is on view in “H. R. Giger and Mire Lee,” an unlikely show at Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin (until January 16, 2022).
H. R. Giger’s Necronom IV (1976). Photo: Frank Sperling.
The exhibition, organized by Agnes Gryczkowska, has been so well attended that the institution decided to extend it until January 16. It pairs the cult favorite artist alongside Mire Lee, who was shortlisted for the Pinchuk Foundation’s Future Generation Art Prize this December.
Lee’s hypersexual, oozing bio-mechanical sculptures draw out the erotic themes in Giger’s gender-bending works and illustrations, and allow for a new, Feminist reading of his early prototypes. The octagonally shaped venue and its early 20th-century decadence gives a lively juxtaposition to these two artists’s harsh but sleek futuristic visions.
Giger fought for recognition in both the film and art worlds while fitting neatly into neither. Despite having been the inception for Alien‘s antagonist (he designed the creature through all its phases, from egg to super-predator) and the spacecraft and environmental settings of the film, he felt shunned by Hollywood.
“Fox started to dread me,” Giger wrote in a notebook on view in the show, referring to the production studio. “Fox does not want to give me any credit at all.”
His legacy also still has room for growth in the art world. In an era of mass production and AI- and VR-generated images, Giger’s meticulously craftsmanlike works, which were time-intensive and material-oriented, are the dark shot to the heart that we need.
See images from the exhibition below.
H. R. Giger and Mire Lee at Schinkel Pavillon. Photo: Frank Sperling.
H. R. Giger and Mire Lee at Schinkel Pavillon. Photo: Frank Sperling.
H. R. Giger and Mire Lee at Schinkel Pavillon. Photo: Frank Sperling.
H. R. Giger and Mire Lee at Schinkel Pavillon. Photo: Frank Sperling.
H. R. Giger and Mire Lee at Schinkel Pavillon. Photo: Frank Sperling.
H. R. Giger and Mire Lee at Schinkel Pavillon. Photo: Frank Sperling.
H. R. Giger and Mire Lee at Schinkel Pavillon. Photo: Frank Sperling.
H. R. Giger and Mire Lee at Schinkel Pavillon. Photo: Frank Sperling.
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In the 1991 animated film Beauty and the Beast, a young woman, Belle, dances and sings inside a magical castle where inanimate objects come to life. The cast of characters includes a French-accented candelabra and a flirtatious feather duster; a matronly teapot and her son, a teacup; a pendulum clock; and a loud-mouthed wardrobe.
These may seem like figments of animators’ imaginations, but in fact their genesis comes directly from the French Rococo, the decorative and indulgent 18th-century style that sought to bring levity and liveliness to the dark seriousness of the Baroque.
The parallel desires of 18th-century Rococo artisans and 20th-century Disney animators—to inspire, delight, and awe their audiences—are the crux of the exhibition “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts,” on view now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In all, dozens of Rococo art objects from the Met’s own treasure trove are on view alongside 150 original artworks from the Disney Studio from three animated films: Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and Beauty and the Beast (1991).
Although the term “Disneyfication” tends to be used negatively, Max Hollein, the museum’s director, writes that Walt Disney exerted an influence like few others.
“It is hard to think of any other American who has had as far-reaching and long-lasting an impact on the visual arts,” he writes.
Below, see images from the exhibition.
Eyvind Earle, Sleeping Beauty (1959). Walt Disney Animation Research Library. © Disney.
Anonymous, Portrait of Magdalena Gonzales (1580). Schloss Ambras, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna © KHM-Museumsverband.
Mary Blair, Cinderella (1950). Walt Disney Animation Research Library © Disney.
Meissen Manufactory, Johann Joachim Kändler, Faustina Bordoni and Fox (ca. 1743). Courtesy of the Met.
Frank Armitage, Le Chateau de la Belle au Bois Dormant, Disneyland Paris, (1988). Walt Disney Imagineering Collection© Disney
Walt Disney Studios, The Vultures (ca. 1937). Courtesy of the Met.
Installation view, “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Photo: Paul Lachenauer, Courtesy of The Met. © Disney
Installation view, “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Photo: Paul Lachenauer, Courtesy of The Met. © Disney
Installation view, “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Photo: Paul Lachenauer, Courtesy of The Met. © Disney
Installation view, “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Photo: Paul Lachenauer, Courtesy of The Met. © Disney
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The line snaked down the block when I strolled up to Galerie König on Tuesday night to see Refik Anadol’s new show at the gallery, which is causing a small sensation among a cross-section of the public that does not normally show up at art exhibitions. In the queue was a pair from the finance industry who were trying to get in for the third time. Up ahead, some Albanian tourists from the tech industry were also waiting, having heard about it online. In front of them, one girl said she was too stoned to talk.
At least she had something to trip on while waiting between one and three hours to get in: projected onto König’s brutalist bell tower was an NFT by Anadol called Winds of Berlin, a giant, data-driven projection that warped constantly into vibrant cascades of color informed by real-time data collected from the city’s landscape and environment.
Refik Anadol Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams at Galerie König, Berlin. Photo: Roman Maerz.
Inside was another massive NFT work occupying an entire wall of the main upstairs gallery, the work’s light washing over the space. People lay around, basking in its glow. The 20-minute algorithmic data visualizations writhed inside what looked like a white box extending from the wall.
Downstairs, a series of abstract digital paintings shifted through strangely bright colors that were indiscernibly culled from images of perennials, forests, and flowers. They pulsated on high-definition screens as crowds of people milled around. The other half of that floor, where traditional artworks are on view, was quietly cordoned off by a velvet rope.
Christian Marclay debuted The Clock, an ambitious 24-hour film project that spliced thousands chronicling every single minute in a day, at White Cube’s London gallery in 2010. It had lines down the street too. David Zwirner’s show of Yayoi Kusama, “Every Day I Pray for Love,” clocked around 2,000 visitors a day in New York when it was on view. So maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams, which similarly warps time and space, has caused a bit of a scene on an otherwise quiet residential street, especially given that it’s coupled with buzzy crypto keywords. 
Refik Anadol, Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams at Galerie König, Berlin. Photo: Roman Maerz.
König seemed pleasantly stunned at the crowds, though he was also focused on his gallery’s and Anadol’s current auction through OpenSea, which ends this week. So far, the price of Anadol’s piece is at nearly 5 ETH (about $19,000)—a far cry from the $800,000 transaction König organized for a similar work by the artist at Art Basel Miami Beach this month.
“Maybe we should have sold the work as a DAO so that more members of the public could collect the piece,” he ruminated. “We knew this would be risky.”
DAO (decentralized autonomous organizations) are leaderless bands of internet users who are known to make collective decisions on the blockchain. That’s a whole other story, but the art industry began taking them seriously when one called ConstitutionDAO nearly nabbed the winning bid for a first edition of the US constitution at Sotheby’s this fall. Ironically, the crypto-buying conglomerate was scandalously beat by Kenneth Griffin, a hedge-fund billionaire who has been the subject of Reddit and retail investor rage since the whole GameStop saga earlier this year.
The Anadol work shown in the U.S. went to a Miami collector in the usual way of an art deal, with handshakes and fiat money, not on a peer-to-peer NFT sales platform. Bridging these two worlds has been complicated for art dealers thus far, especially in Europe where know-your-customer laws, which are intended to minimize money laundering, are in place. 
König’s own web platform, MISA, which will sell NFT editions via proof-of-stake (a consensus mechanism on blockchain), is figuring out those last kinks, but it can’t carry a titanic art piece like Machine Hallucinations, which is minted via proof-of-work, a method that takes a large amount of computational power. The difference? To use the metaphor of trad artworks, think of it like this: “Proof-of-work you would put into a climate-controlled crate and deliver by hand, the other, you ship with Fedex,” said the dealer.
The two NFT sales Anadol made through König this month were not his first. He had his own direct NFT sale through Sotheby’s Hong Kong this fall, where he set a record by selling an immersive NFT for 18,325,000 HKD ($2.4 million). He also recently collaborated with MoMA in New York on another project. The Istanbul-born artist, who is based in Los Angeles, has also been working on his “Data” paintings for nearly a decade.
Refik Anadol Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams at Galerie König, Berlin.
Digital artists, of course, bring their own sets of rules, and their language is just as jargon-y as the artspeak of old. The rapid emergence of DAOs, NFTs, and the crypto art scene have been predictably confusing to traditional art-world gatekeepers—a cohort that König, who launched an NFT auction in Decentraland in March before setting up his own NFT marketplace this fall—seems keen to distance himself from. Nor is he the only Berlin dealer moving into the space: Galerie Nagel Draxler is opening a second space that will be called Crypto Cabinet next year, selling and showing all things crypto- and blockchain-related.
The emergence of not one, but two, Berlin galleries keen on crypto is not surprising, given that the city is a new tech capital, soon to have its own Tesla factory on the outskirts of town and already filled with tech coworking spaces on seemingly every corner. Dealers have complained that it’s been hard to attract tech collectors who like money but tend not to cherish culture in the ways people expect. NFTs were the missing ingredient: Unlike a painting, “they are super liquid, so it’s easy to go into a market if you can exit again,” König said.
The more I think about it, the more tired I become of the rapid dismissal of this nouveau riche who want to spend their wealth buying and trading art. And had König created a DAO, those collectors, and anyone else with some crypto, could have participated not just by visiting the show, but also by potentially owning a piece of it. While the aesthetic language may not please everyone, every art era has its conceptual artists, its sell-outs, and its blockbusters. König said some have compared Anadol to Monet, which even he finds a bit “heavy-handed” (I do too), but the Impressionists were also outsiders to the 19th-century art canon at first.
Something really is happening, and it’s not only speculative market fluff either. Just take a look at the scores of people shivering outside König’s gallery. This is art that seems to matter in a more public way, and we should celebrate that.
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