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Clive Barker's EyeExhibition catalog by Supervert for the first-ever gallery showing of drawings and paintings by horror meister Clive Barker. Originally published in exhibition catalogue, Bess Cutler Gallery (March 1993). Clive Barker has a wandering eye. While most artists doggedly pursue their medium of choice into the deepest recesses of tunnel vision, Barker has a vision — often a horrible one — that he injects into whatever medium his sights are set on, like a glass eye that he pops out of his head and plugs into a movie camera or a writing machine. Oftentimes this glass eye gets plugged into another machine as well, a sort of art machine that has produced scores of paintings and drawings over the course of some twenty years. Or would it be more precise to say that, when Barker paints, he becomes an art machine, puts the glass eye back into his head and uses his very own hands to transcribe the visions it transmits to him? Either way, the vision migrates from the glass eye to the canvas or paper. The surface of a body is riddled with holes: pores, nostrils, orifices, the occasional wound. But the eye socket is the only one of these holes to hold an organ in its lips. Perhaps that is why it's so easy to imagine the eye wandering off to other settings: the mouth, the anus, the eye socket — they're all holes, so why not experiment a little and see where an eyeball feels most at home? In the paintings Barker made for the Books of Blood, the eyes that rest content in their sockets are the ones that are always put out, while others sprout on the ends of tongues, burst through the tops of skulls on stalks of flesh, or nestle in Marilyn Monroe's vagina. "The dress billowed up a little higher and he stared, fixated, at the part of Marilyn he had never seen, the fur divide that had been the dream of millions... the lips parted a little as she moved her hips, and he realized the glint of wetness in her interior was not the juice of her body, but something else altogether. As her muscles moved the bloody eyes she'd buried in her body shifted, and came to rest on him." (Son of Celluloid) What did she see? What does someone look like from the point of view of your crotch? The eye that wanders provides a dramatic change of perspective. "Oh, for a voice; for a fist, for a body to use for a time. Then he'd show this meat merchant how bodies should be treated." (Confessions of a [Pornographer's] Shroud) How should bodies be treated? If the Good Book exhorts us to treat a body as a temple, do Barker's Bad Books (and Films and Paintings and so on) undertake its desecration? These eyes that wander, sprout, and multiply are just the beginning. Throughout Barker's work, there is a sustained maltreatment of bodies (whether human, dog, or dragon). In his earliest drawings from the 1970s, the body is subjected to unnatural geometric shapes frequently delineated by sharp, angular cross-hatchings. In the Marquis Dog (1976), for instance, a dog composed of severely planar fields doesn't look as if it is wearing but rather is made of plate armor. Is this a Euclidean twist to sadism? Perhaps the Marquis in question has discovered how delightfully cruel it can be to ram a round, squishy body through a small and perfectly square hole.  Clive Barker, Stilts In more recent years, Barker has created image after image in which bodies mutate, become animal, develop alien appendages, turn into monsters, or serve as hosts for cities of parasites and parasitic cities. However, the most horrible of these images are the ones closest to home. "Despite these malformations, it was horribly lifelike." (In the Hills, the Cities) The drawing Stilts (1991) is similar in effect to Georg Grosz's depictions of veterans mutilated by the horrendous weapons invented during the course of World War I (the machine gun, the tank, the bomber, etc.). The picture shows a naked, nameless amputee who walks on all fours using prosthetic limbs that look like spindly table legs. Is this a refugee from some unknown Auschwitz, a man forced to suffer not only the first indignity of having been mutilated but also the second of having to walk like a dog? Barker's drawings, unlike his stories and films, rarely furnish any such answers. Rather, what they furnish is the brute existence of a brutal vision. Other images take this vision on a further flight of fancy. Some treat the body as if it were made of modular components that could be rearranged at will. In See and Be Seen (1991), a naked woman lies on her back, legs held high in the air to reveal her crotch. Are there any eyeballs in there? The eye, the most modular of body organs, has wandered out to the extremity of each of the woman's legs. It can see us as well as we can see it, but what we can't see is whether there are toes growing on the woman's face. In Barker's image bank, entire faces are often transposed with genitalia. In Siren (1982), a woman peers at us from her crotch. In Clowns (1975), two men sprawl naked on the ground. Each has a face and an erect penis, but not in identical positions of bodily latitude and longitude. What's so funny about these clowns? They can do the sixty-nine standing on their feet. In addition to these dry, modular rearrangements of the body, there are wet, fluxional transformations. "Her body was the flood." (Weaveworld) A 1987 drawing from Barker's Weaveworld shows every orifice of the character Suzanna's face exploding in streams of an undifferentiated fluid called the menstruum. Though tears, snot, and spit may not flow from anyone's face as copiously as the imaginary menstruum, every body is composed largely of fluids. And any fluid, of course, takes the shape of its container. So what happens when you switch containers? In the drawing Suzanna Becomes a Dragon (1987), Suzanna's legs have already become the head and neck of the dragon, but this transformation is not a simply modular exchange of body parts. "She sensed her body growing larger, and larger still. Her bloodstream ran colder than a shark's. A furnace flared up in her belly... She had claimed the skin he'd lost." (Weaveworld) When Suzanna takes up the dragon container, her body melts into it, disperses itself into the contours of anew skin. But is that all there is to Barker's vision of "horror"? Image after image in which bodies are mutated or mutilated in one way or another? "It was useless, this power over flesh, if it had no direction behind it." (Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament)  Clive Barker, See and Be Seen Is there any direction behind Barker's artistic power over the body? He has often propounded the idea that evil is not a result of transgressing boundaries (biblical commandments, constitutional laws, etc.), but that evil consists of boundaries themselves. "Evil is limitation," he has said. "Hell is anything forever." Consequently, it is not yet precise enough to say simply that Barker's work comprises a sustained maltreatment of the human body per se. Rather, what he attacks is the staid or limited form of that body and, by implication, the forces that artificially create limitations (religion, society, etc.). Any kid who has ever gotten flak from his or her parents for wanting pierced ears understands this. And this is also why Barker's work is considered "horror" while the bodily deformations painted by someone such as Picasso are considered "art". There's nothing horrible about Picasso because his distortions of the body are construed as pushing at the limits of mere art, whereas Barker's visions are horrible precisely because they challenge the social viewpoint of a bodily normality. After all, why treat your body as a temple? Why not treat it as a laboratory or a playground? Put another way, Barker's constant transformations of the body are in fact affirmations of what a body is capable of. Pinhead is merely an extreme form of the experiments punks and "modern primitives" have already performed on themselves. Horror is not what you feel when you catch sight of a monster. "He began to see the creature not as a monster terrorizing him, but as his tool, his public persona almost." (Human Remains) There are nothing but monsters, anywhere. Horror is simply what you feel when you see someone (or something) more monstrous than yourself. By consequence, if Clive Barker is a master of horror, it is because his glass eye wanders out to the furthest limits of the human and spies on the monsters that live out there. As his stories are their history, so is his art their collective portrait. Email this page to a friendTell someone about Clive Barker's Eye at supervert.com. (Email addresses are not recorded or used in any way.) Your name
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