jk: In the Taschen book he talks about how he found you and realized your artwork would illustrate his ideas. He says he was happy to find you because you were the right artist.
G: Even the ink drawings—you know this is first time they have been shown, in the small [Taschen] book—and I did that just after we worked together, and there I had taken some things I had done before and changed a few of them, and again he made selections from these. So, again, these are not his ideas and were done entirely without his input or initial awareness.
jk: What about Baphomet? That was obviously an image you liked, but why did you use it, was it because it was an image you liked, or because it represented some belief?
G: I liked it as an image.
jk: But Akron has turned it into a religion.
G: You know, I did that back when I was doing my Spell paintings, 1973-’76 and I was fascinated by this Baphomet image, and so this was long before I met Akron, who I’ve known for about twelve years or so. Maybe ’88 or so. I mean, it has absolutely nothing to do with his ideas.
jk: You hadn’t thought about this before? You didn’t realize that...
G: No. I didn’t realize that. And you know it’s not as important as for you probably.
jk: Well, I don’t mean to cause trouble.
G: (laughs) Yeah. You know, I said I have this problem that I need to more carefully read Akron’s text because it’s too much, too much fantasy, and so I am busy with other stuff—it’s funny, it’s nice to hear that someone is studying that carefully and now I know a little bit more about that.
jk: The thing is I liked your paintings as Tarot images. And I saw why those choices might have been made, and I was interested to write about that myself, about how that would work. But in reading his website, and his introduction to the book, his main motivation was to talk about his religious ideas. And I don’t think he was trying to do something bad or rude to you, but I think this was something Taschen realized—which is that this work is YOUR work—and that’s what is interesting to people and maybe not so much Akron’s ideas about Baphomet.
G: True. Taschen would never normally publish a Tarot book, he was just interested in my paintings, and not in Akron’s writing, but I think it’s like this—I don’t want to make Akron unimportant, or whatever, because he did the Crowley book, the thing he did with that other guy [Hajo Banzhaf], and Akron does really know a lot of things.
jk: So, back to these Baphomet images, did you know that they originated with an occultist named Eliphas Lévi?
G: Sure. I read the whole book [transcendental Magic] at the time.
jk: You did read that?
G: It was much earlier.
jk: What influence do you think those occultist writings had on you?
G: I don’t know. I can’t tell you. I was fascinated, like everybody, about these magicians, and I was fascinated by Crowley’s drawings and paintings—I got a catalog of an exhibition of his drawings and paintings in London. I was always very interested in his paintings, because I understood that better than his text. His text is very difficult, and it was not translated much at the time.
jk: It’s difficult in English also.
G: Yes, I think so. It’s really hard.
jk: So, you saw these images—
G: I got the catalog from a friend of mine. I didn’t see the show.
jk: So these images of Frieda Harris in the Thoth deck were interesting to you, but the text Crowley wrote didn’t influence you?
G: No.
[end of first interview—we agreed to talk again the next day]
Second Interview: Jan 31, 2001
jk: We talked about a lot of things yesterday, but one of the things I wanted to ask you tonight concerns a kind of trick that seems to be working in some of the cards, or maybe in your paintings, and that is that a number of the images, the cards, seem as if they were designed to turn upside-down, to obtain a second or reversed view. Do you understand?
G: No, not really. Only maybe in the Magus painting, the Spieglebild.
jk: I was looking at the High Priestess.
G: That’s a Spell painting. With the babies.
jk: If you turn that upside down it’s actually quite interesting, because it looks like a reversed crucifixion, the feet become hands, there’s a light which is now at the top, and the head becomes the head on the cross. And so I was wondering if that sort of thing, that result, was intentional. I take it that you’re saying it wasn’t.
G: No, I didn’t work it out upside down, I never turned it around.
jk: Akron talks about turning over a couple of cards, and viewing them that way. Of course, in reading Tarot cards you often turn them upside down, and they have meanings upside down.
G: Yes—I remember that when I was in Dali's home—I had some prints of my work for the Necronomicon with me, for the book in ’75, and I showed him these and there was the Li painting, and he also looked at that upside-down. He turned it around and he had seen some face or some elephant or whatever—I remember that.
jk: A lot of your images are symmetrical—
G: Yes.
jk: So it is probably easy to turn them around and see things.
G: That’s true.
jk: But the creation of a reversed image is not a conscious intent on your part?
G: No, I just did them like that, I didn’t turn them around. It’s also not so easy, you know in the beginning I worked on these paintings just on a roll of paper which I fixed with two nails on the wall and I spread out just the top so I could work on it. I had to sit to work with the airbrush so I set my elbows on my knees, so they wouldn’t move. So then I sprayed with the airbrush at about 70 centimeters high, on the upper part of the painting, and when I finished that part I would roll that up some more and fix the nails higher to move the painting up to work on the next part. So finally I was through with the painting from top to bottom. And so I had never really had an overview of the whole painting till the end when the paper was rolled out completely. Then I finally saw what it looked like. I couldn’t see the rest of the painting when I worked on the upper part—it was not stretched out—the surface was not rolled out so I had only the surface I was working on in my view. Maybe that has something to do with it—it makes the whole thing have less fixed perspective. Otherwise, if you work on the whole image on a piece of wood and it’s upright and you have to stand on a chair to work on a large painting, then you work more underneath it, and you work the figures while standing up or being under the image and so you have more perspective working underneath the whole thing. But the way I worked—that didn’t happen. So the paintings I have like that, with a perspective, have been changed after I finished the whole thing. I made a kind of lift for the paintings in my home, so I could move them up and down in a slit I cut in the floor. I could work on it them even sitting, fixing my elbows on my knees, and working on a part even when the whole work was already done, even with the under part already done, so I could overwork them.
jk: So are you saying that the way you work may contribute to a person seeing a reversed image?
G: I did it so I could eliminate some mistakes—for instance, I made a human figure and that figure was done in the first way I told you, from top to bottom. And then later on, as I saw the whole thing, as I raised it, I might change the perspective, as if seen from underneath. On some paintings I thought I had to change that to a more correct perspective. But on others I have left it so that from every point of view they appear correct.
jk: Many of your images elicit a strong emotional response from the viewer. Is that something you want, or do you think of that? Do you understand?
G: No.
jk: Many of your images cause strong emotions in people.
G: Yes, because they are—Jung talked about it—archetypes.
jk: Do your images come from dreams?
G: Not mainly, no. In a normal dream it doesn’t appear like that.
jk: Some people’s dreams are like that.
G: (laughing) Yeah, but not mine, I don’t see them like that.
jk: Do you think about these images as being awake dreams?
G: I don’t know where this kind of world—I don’t know—it could come from mushrooms, psychedelic images.
jk: You know, that reminds me, I’m very fascinated with the Fool image, the fellow with the shotgun. Now I found a reference to an earlier draft of this same image—did you do an earlier version of this?
G: Of the Fool, Pump Excursion—yeah I did four versions of it, and they were some of the latest things I did. After that I stopped painting—or nearly stopped—I had to finish some things but not much. I think the last painting I did was the work on Species.
jk: So the thing is when I looked at this, and I was reminded of this when you mentioned mushrooms, but the date I had on this was wrong—it’s 1988 right?
G: Pump Excursion is about ’87.
jk: The way he holds the shotgun, is that—
G: It’s to blow away his head.
jk: But is the attitude of his hands significant, he holds the weapon in a very delicate and particular way.
G: Yeah, yeah—I mean the gun is not built to hold it like that.
jk: When I first looked at this I thought it looked like a bong.
G: A what?
jk: Do you know what a bong is?
G: No.
jk: A water pipe.
G: Ah!!
jk: For smoking marijuana.
G: Yeah, it was like a flute, like an instrument to play.
jk: His cheeks are puffed out.
G: Yeah, to make music. I wanted people to think at first that it is an Indian who plays an instrument.
jk: Do you mean from India—or an American Indian?
G: American Indian.
jk: So this pyramid in the back is Mayan or Aztec or something?
G: Yes.
jk: OK, good. And you may recall our discussion yesterday about the guillotine blade and how that seemed to be the Magician’s tool but this is not mentioned. And in the Taschen text, in the English version, they don’t even mention this image in the background. Akron talks about steps, but not about the pyramid. So you intended this figure to look Mayan?
G: Yes.
jk: What’s interesting, and I don’t know if you’re aware of this or thought about this in the context of the choice of this image for this card, but the steps leading up the pyramid reminds us of the blood sacrifice, the removal of the heart, and there is the solar aspect of this, the worship and feeding of the Sun. This is also a part of the occult tradition we find in the discussions of the Fool card. Did you know this when Akron chose this image for this card?
G: No.
jk: Again, I don’t know if perhaps he mentioned this in the longer text and it just didn’t make it to the English version, do you?
G: No, I don’t know.
jk: There’s again a symmetry in this Fool image, a cross at the bottom, a St. Andrew’s cross, several crossing elements.
G: Crosses in this painting? I don’t remember.
jk: Well, the arm and her leg form an "x" at the bottom, and the shotgun and his hand form an upward cross—which matches the pyramid rising up as well.
G: Yes.
jk: So that was not intentional?
G: No.
jk: You do a lot of interesting things accidentally.
G: Yeah, it looks like it. Well, what I wanted to do with that painting was show that in the end he would be looking at the last thing he saw when he was born—where he was coming from was his last view.
jk: Are those headphones on his head?
G: What they are—it’s a kind of joke, they are ear protectors—so he doesn’t hurt his ears when he shoots.
jk: Right. That’s a little subtle. I thought you had him listening to music.
G: Right, that could also be the case. So he wants to avoid damaging his ears.
jk: I think this is a very compelling image, do you—I haven’t read a lot of reviews of your work—do women find this offensive?
G: Excuse me!
jk: Do women find this kind of image offensive? I think a lot of your images incorporate women in ways that some women might find offensive.
G: What does this mean—"offensive"?
jk: Oh—
G: They dislike it?
jk: It would make them angry.
G: That could happen.
jk: Why did you stop painting?
G: Because I was tired of working with the airbrush, it is a lot of work. You know if I have some idea, I just use the ink or pencil or ballpoint, and what I’m doing now is to turn my two-dimensional things into three-dimensional objects. Anyway, my paintings should turn into sculptures.
jk: They look like sculptures anyway.
G: Yeah, that’s true.
jk: So that was what you always wanted to do.
G: Yes, in a way, yeah. I always liked architecture.
jk: So you could make a three-dimensional Tarot card.
G: A three-dimensional Tarot card?
jk: Sure, a Tarot sculpture. See, this is the problem with Tarot, it is trapped in two dimensions. This is actually a problem in some of the images Akron chose for your Tarot, not that there is a problem IN the image, but that the image had to be cut in order to fit the card.
G: Yeah, because some of the cards have been taken from larger pieces.
jk: But there is this problem anyway in Tarot, because the viewing area is so small—you do lose details of the symbols. So in my view the images need to be liberated from this and that’s what 21st-century Tarot will be about, getting the symbolism off these pieces of cardboard into different environments, so you could do a sculpture if you wanted.
G: Yeah—some objects are of course existing, like the gun, I have a pump shotgun like the one in Pump Excursion.
jk: Do you like guns?
G: Yeah, sure.
jk: Do you like the mechanical aspect?
G: Yes, I don’t shoot them. When I was young, a young boy, I already had guns, my father gave me—what was it—a Mauser, a pistol.
jk: How young were you?
G: I was about eight. And my father was in the military, and was an instructor, and I was fascinated about weapons—you know I shot around when I was younger, with friends, we experimented in different ways with weapons—and then when my military service came when I was about 20 I completely lost the interest in it. And then I had this strange dream, when I was about 40, or maybe a little older, and through this dream I went to an instructor of weapons and began again to buy weapons and to shoot but for just a short time and then I gave it up. Strange, no?
jk: What do guns mean to you?
G: Like the airbrush. It’s a kind of magic instrument, you can make something happen at a distance—and you don’t touch the image. It’s like it’s done through someone else’s hands. The airbrush is the same thing, the painting starts to exist without touching the canvas surface and that’s the difference between the brush and the airbrush.
jk: That distance—what does it mean?
G: You won’t see it—how it happens, it just happens.
jk: So in this image of the Fool the shotgun is a flute, so it becomes a musical instrument.
G: I used to play a certain wild saxophone.
jk: Like jazz?
G: Yes.
jk: What kind do you like?
G: In earlier days I liked Dixie-Land and then I stayed with John Coltrane.
jk: Did you like Charlie Parker?
G: Yes.
jk: I wanted to ask just one other thing I think. In all these cards that are in this deck, which one still has the most personal relevance to you—which one are you most connected to?
G: I don’t know—I mean, the Li paintings are very personal—you know she commited suicide one year later. And that was in ’75, and I did the painting in ’74. Two Li paintings. One is in the Tarot—that was the one that Dali turned around and looked at.
jk: Everyone wants to turn them around.
G: It was a method he had of looking at his own images—to see them in another way. Dali liked to have a painting with seven different views or meanings. He called it his "paranoid method", or something like that, to find some new figures or images.
jk: From talking to you it seems that you want and need people to find something in these images.
G: Oh no, no. I did not ask Dali to find something new in the paintings. I just showed him the paintings because I wanted to have him write a Foreword to my book—and because of him I could later on work on a film [Dali had shown a catalogue of Giger's paintings to Alejandro Jodorowsky, which led to Giger's first film assignment, Dune].
jk: I didn’t mean just Dali, I meant in general, most people. It sounds like what you are saying is that the artist is hoping that people will find a part of themselves, their own view, somewhere in that image. Is that right?
G: I don’t know. I mean if somebody likes a painting it is because he sees something personal in it, something he relates to. There are different reasons for it. There could be archetypes of what he likes in it, or some hidden feeling, or something that frightens him.
jk: Do you not like to tell people what your paintings mean?
G: I don’t know what they mean. To me it is sometimes like when I’ve finished them they were done by someone else. And some things in it I can say at that time I was doing the painting I was fascinated about that or just during the work on the painting somebody came with something and I just incorporated that into the painting, like a box or a key or whatever.
jk: So in Tarot you told me that one of the things you wanted Akron to do was to provide meanings to your images. Do you remember that?
G: He had my paintings in books to look over, and he could choose from these, 600 or 700 or so, but he could choose from a lot of images to find the right ones for the Tarot.
jk: But you said yesterday that the reason you wanted to do this was because he was going to give your paintings meanings.
G: I liked the things he was doing in Tarot. I didn’t care about Tarot, so through that I became more interested in it. I was fascinated by the way Akron chose the paintings—sometimes I didn’t understand why he made the choices—and he always gave good explanations. It was funny—I’m not such a—maybe the paintings look like I’m a—I’m not such a serious or tragic person. I like fun. And often people don’t see the joke.
jk: I thought they were funny, and I don’t know if Akron brings this out.
G: I liked the text, the things he saw in the paintings, but then he went and made these fantastic comments, I disliked his fantasies a bit.
jk: You know I don’t think he thought they were fantasies.
G: His explanations sometimes were quite crazy. You know what he interpreted sometimes—it could be the contrary as well. I don’t know the meaning in English but it is that sometimes if he would like to see something then he will see it in the painting. If he wants to have this meaning in it, then he will see it.
jk: So we might say he reads meaning into a thing instead of reading the meaning.
G: Yes.
jk: He projects the meaning.
G: Sometimes. His explanations of the cards are sometimes crazy, but funny—but not probably very serious.
At this point we completed the interview.
©2001, by J. Karlin, all rights reserved
http://jktarot.com/gigertalk.html