INSIDE artzine #14

Content

14: Dan

Cover: Seth Siro Anton - Insect Figura (Greece) 02: Pierk - The Storyteller (Italy) 03: Jason Felix - Plug Lady (USA) 04: Ralph Manfreda/Cryptonaut - Enunciator (Austria) 06: Kapreles - The Eye (Belgium) 06: jenz - Dead Meat (Germany) 07: jenz - Artscum (Germany) 08: Olivier de Sagazan - De Cotè/Suspendu (France) 10: Chris Mars - Halt-Parrot (USA) 11: Jan Schleevogt - The Innermost Circle (Germany) 12: Navette - The Twin Towers (France)

Verkys, Karl Persson, Jon Beinart, Mark Powell - Hellburn (Australia) 18: Justin Aerni - Think Of Your Next Move (USA) 20: Seth Siro Anton - Hierophant (Greece) 21: Oliver Schott - Floria (Germany) 21: Navette - Marie-Antoinette (France) Poster: jenz - Fallen Cathedral (Germany) 24: Tachas Tachas - Disvästäciön (Argentina) 25: Oliver Wetter - Call of Cthulhu (Germany) 25: Sybille Lengauer - Transition (Germany) 26: Michael Hutter - Triptych (Germany) 28: BastartWorx - Who (Germany) 29: Lovecraft Wasn‘t Wrong/The Fishpeople Of Dagon 32: Fero - Repressione (Italy) 33: Editorial/Contacts 34: Reviews 38: Patrick Byers - Hell Close (Canada) 40: jenz - Inner Emigration (Germany) 41: Kapreles - Ouch! (Belgium) 41: Nils Parthey - Smothering (Germany) 42: Tom Bresemann - Slogan (Germany) 43: Frederico Bebber - Things Where Never Been (Italy) Back: Dan Verkys - Aggression (Australia)

All images and texts © the artists 2010 / contact page 33 Translations © Ni Gudix, www.myspace.com/gudixtransliterarix, ni.gudix@web.de

INSIDE artzine

INSIDE artzine #14 · International Artscum Magazine · 2010 www.inside-artzine.de (Backissues, Poster, Shop, Blog)

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This is a „light version“ of the INSIDE artzine #14.

Paintings, (Digital) Collages, Sculptures, Stories, Reviews from Europe, USA, Australia, Japan, Outerspace, +++ (A4, 44p., full color, full sickness, quality paper, english) Order your printed copy on: GERMANY/EUROPE/WORLD: www.inside-artzine.de >>direct shoplink: http://terminalart.shop.wosbee.com USA: PROFANE EXISTENCE www.profaneexistence.org AUSTRALIA: POLYESTER www.polyester.com.au Contact: jenz@inside-artzine.de

Hellbourne

The others’ laughing faces tore past me in an amorphous beam. Sometimes I thought they waved at me. In a friendly way. Just as if to wave goodbye. But that was impossible. They didn’t even have the slightest idea that, deep below them in the track bed, my desperate life trickled into their black shadow. Not interested.

In the night before the call, I’d had a confusing dream. Confusing because dreams usually never descended on me through the thick, impenetrable, black cloak of sleep. Hard to tell whether this truly apocalyptic vision was prophetical or just a mentally vomited cry for help. As usual I didn’t listen to it.

I had staggered past a long, dead straight alley of red monoliths. The chunky hewn stones were fully ablaze. It was completely silent. Except for my rattling breath struggling in irregular jerks out of my nicotine-sticky lungs. Coal-black people were crouched between the stones. The dancing flames seemed to be unable to harm them. Burnt out. Or flameproof. Brutally wise eyes were sparkling out of their wrinkled faces. They were placed so deeply inside their heads that you could think their eye sockets were just peepholes to peep out. Their blockish, padded end plates were painted with white, teeming snakes. The unholy reflection of the rage of fire surrounding me was dancing on their coal-black, shiny skin like the thin threads of pouring-out power current, when a skyscraper collapses.

Despite the consciousness of being in a nightmare, an infernal feel of thirst punished my petering-out organism. The heat had vaporized any drop of liquid in my cells. As my heart was about to announce a longer respite with six tumbling beats, I heard something race up the alley with a booming sound and part my head from the body with a clean cut. As I jerked up from sleep I could still hear the booming sound curve away elegantly, and disappear in the spots of mould above the destroyed hotel television in the wall.

Damn. How is it possible that only 3 hours after that the head editor of ARTREKTUM called, and with the question “Have you ever been to Australia” spoilt my chance to spend a one-dimensional, soothing, semi-conscious day?

Of course I never had been to Australia before. The last 3 weeks I hadn’t even once left this abandoned hotel room. If he hadn’t sent me a taxi with the air ticket, an advance, and the order to move my arse to the airport this hadn’t changed essentially, I’m afraid. I suppose he couldn’t stand it any longer to watch his best man slowly rot in his own filth. The guy didn’t have the slightest knowledge of how long a desperate man could hold his breath in a pool of shit. When it was necessary.

A portrait of Melbourne as art capital. Fuck. I wasn’t a travel reporter, was I?! Was I the right person to recommend something to people who would always be strange to me? The highlights? Fuck it. My whole life had been a low-point.

The look through a gully cover from below. Worm’s eye view. Knocked flat.

But did I have a choice?! I couldn’t stay in this miserable room forever, dazed by the moody violence you usually only use against yourself. One aim was just like the other one.

As we turned off at the exit to the airport I realized again at last in which city I was. While I, after the check-in, slowly put the 3 bottles of vodka into the duty-free carrier, my rotating think tank briefly remembered something like luggage.

Well, it was too late for that anyhow. Like usually.

As the plane departed it was raining cats and dogs. Just like a farewell of a familiar dreariness, off we Karl Persson - Titel

go into a twisted hell fire, filled with sweating, bursting Australians. Flooded, charred brains. A merciless neutron star in the ozone-free sky. Why, the usual job…

At least with a minimal shred of effort I wanted to try not to break the mould of human conditions too much in that decent long-distance flight, so I drank the first bottle of vodka on the neon flooded plane toilet. The music there soothed me.

Somehow. If this was still possible at all in my life.

I still had no plan of how to do this job. The head editor of ART-REKTUM had imposed, along with the ticket, a journalist pass, and some leaflets of the “Melbourne International Arts Festival”, on me. In my view, which became clouded again at last, colourful pictures mixed, of big and very small paintings, of black and white photographs of vases in the desert, of performances in skin-tight jerseys, of visual arts, and of design. World premiere. Media centre. Young lads with fabric scarves around their necks and a facial expression as if they had paintbrushes transversely stuck in their arses.

I was tired and clueless. Since I couldn’t stay on the toilet for the whole eternity of the flight to be awaited, and since the vodka was already finished over Romania, I decided to prepare for my destination, and ordered some cans of Foster’s. Despite the bad reputation of the brew (“the Aussies only brew Foster’s to export it”) it was quite a good drop. I liked the big red “F” on the can. “Know your limit, mate,” the back of the can said. Someone to look after me at last.

A woman beside me gazed at me with a blank fish look as I tried to bite the “F” out of the emptied cans (what failed, of course – as an only result I began to bleed heavily out of my mouth). It was time to leave this part of the world now. I opened the second bottle of voddy.

Dan Verkys - Gallows of Sorrow

I was completely down and out when there was this call. Evacuated by the steel hail of a relentless life. Not able to jump on one of the trains racing across my head.

An unpleasant joggle of my body finally finished my plastered coma and fatally made some clots of blood from my thrombosis-ragged legs to wander straight up towards my think tank. Marching straight up to the light. Like fat flies filled with blood.

I tried to find my bearings. Despite my heavily staggering sight, my arse seemed to have landed. From the right, a dark red sun was shining in through a window not bigger than a thumbnail. Like a wicked, glowing eye controlling who had dared to enter its continent.

I had no choice. I had to acknowledge to myself that the reason for the unpleasant joggle of my body was the stewardess who more and more desperately was trying to bring me back into the world of the living dead. The plane was just emptying, and so was my mind, swimming deeply anxiously in an alkalinely charged, acidic sea made of a fading-away drunkenness and a sardonically brooding hangover. I could hear her thin voice whirr from far away, and as I dragged that ton weight called skull up to her, the first tentacles of the Australian nightmare were twining themselves around my shaking legs. And pulled me down rigidly.

I don’t know WHAT the stewardess saw, I hadn’t been able myself to look at my image in the mirror for the last 3 years.

But it was definitely enough that every cell of her body blew up in panic fits and, after a period of frantic swelling and going down, collapsed again. Her colourless eyes widened like Old Almighty Nick’s sulphurous arsehole on Judgement Day. She had opened her baggy mouth wide, it was a Siren flooded abyss, and she poured this completely vibration-free, endless scream directly into my baffled death mask.

Like a nightmare being stuck at the wrong passage, the hours of this really ear-splitting screaming fit were expanding endlessly, and my mind was longing for the silence of the preceding bingeing coma.

Then, with growing horror, I saw her screaming head swell alarmingly and her skin change into a lucent yellow. As the clear, clinking sound of her scream began to die away with a burble, due to the blood that entered her windpipe, I finally had to break through the leaden air around me, and act. In the moment her skull exploded with an incredibly smacking crash, I jumped over the three rows before me, kicked the emergency exit door along with some other skulls, tumbled, besmirched with blood, onto the wing, and bounced in a mixture of embryonic and bungee pose 8 metres down to the concrete track. During the fall I briefly thought that I might have had a fatal accident aboard the long distance flight directly over the Indian Ocean but the hard concrete of the Melbourne landing strip put me right. Yeah, welcome to Australia!

When I regained consciousness again I was lying on a long bench in a dirty, windowless room. A heavy-weight something sat on my breast and worried me. Something that was going to clasp my balls in the following hours of my inner darkening, just like God’s controlling hand: heat.

The door, probably locked from without, said in big white letters “Melbourne Airport.” Aye barry, so at least I had already arrived at the destination of my sponsored staggering. This hadn’t been always like that. Whether the blood in my face had to do with too many cans of Foster’s or with my present whereabouts couldn’t be stated for sure.

I felt the torrent doors of reality open.

On my left, there was a guy with a red Mohawk. He stared at me. Blankly. Spiral labyrinths rotated in his eyes. Very slowly and as if they were illuminated from within.

On my right, there was a crouched figure lying on the floor.

It wore something like braided straps. His head was hidden behind some kind of a gas mask which obviously sucked in his face with a high barometric pressure. Wasn’t it possible, only once in a while, that things were completely normal when I returned from a blackout?

A partly incomprehensible reality had again taken possession of my plans. What, regarding the minimal content of my plans, wasn’t fair in my opinion. I had to expect a charge of destruction of the flight crew. Drunkenness, rioting, pessimism. One more file reference in the legal expenses trust of Art-Rektum. Again I had managed to mess a job up completely. I was as far away from Melbourne’s art scene right now as George Bush was from the whipping he deserved. Or wasn’t I? But I couldn’t have known that yet.

So I delivered myself up to Australia’s reality and allowed my mind to fill the sweating body around it with energy.

Dan Verkys - Primal Scream

“It smells of burnt flesh here,” I arose beside the Mohawk man. Most often I begin a conversation with pretending to be a lunatic. Or a misanthropist prophet.

In this case unconsciously, though.

“It’s this heat, man,” there was something brooding in his eyes. Something that usually could be found merely in putrescent carcasses at the very bottom of the Amazon or in the most outward inside of rotting suns. „At it’s hottest the city burns, the dry heat can play tricks with your mind, it really effects an artist, it either sets the mood for some angry, venomous art, or it can become so intense that all you can do is find some kind of dark cool sanctuary to escape it. Melbourne isn’t the hottest city in Oz, however it’s rolling greenery can lull you into a false sense of security. The main problem here during the hellish dry heat are the fires, terrible, raging fires that in recent times has killed hundreds as they race across the landscape like a screaming demon incinerating entire towns and leaving vast black death in its wake. The scary thing is most of the fires are lit by crazy fuckers who are excited by flames.“ He had made one good point there. This heat had nothing to do with climate, or nature. It was wicked, abysmally devious. It wanted to finish you off, to decoct you until there was only a wee bit of lunatic decoction left that trickled out of your wrinkled butt. Fireproof.

“Listen mate… within the next 12 hours I have to present the distilled balls of Australian art on a cocaine-sandblasted high gloss tray to a self-righteous arts elite in Germany. If this fails I’m fucked,” to give more points to my words I noisily choked on some flakes of gastric acid, “and all I’ve seen on this continent so far is a half-dead madman in straps,” as if to confirm this, the crouched figure honoured us with some panting sounds through his gas mask, “a jailed guy with a red Mohawk, and this scorching heat here.”

My despair made him sick. This was obvious as he stretched out his paw, “I’m Dan. Dan Verkys. I can show you the only cold place in this city… if you want to,” he grinned sardonically, “man from Germany.”

I didn’t know whether it was due to the heavy-weight pressure of his hand or to my soft, mouldering flesh. His squeeze travelled like a fleshly compression wave through my arm which was suddenly shaking as if hyped up towards my brain.

Amazed panic went with it towards my cerebellar cortex. As the amorphous slub was widening my constricted throat threefold, the cell door popped open in a bright white explosion, flew across the room, and came to a standstill in the crouched, strapped figure.

A burning cop in a shaking cloud of dark blue flames staggered in and fell down onto the floor in front of us. He seemed to scream like mad, his cheeks had been burnt between his teeth. But no sound at all. Only this extraterrestrial noisy hissing, as if fat was heated in a pan.

While I was paralyzed with fear from the neck down, Dan didn’t seem to be impressed in any way. We didn’t want to deliver ourselves up to either the consequences or the verisimilitude of this pumping nightmare, so we dodged and ran. The buildings seemed to be deserted, the smouldering burn marks in the hallways and on the desks were no more but signs of my own dying fantasy.

Just to make sure.

Finally, after we had reached the airfield in front of the building, my circulatory, distorted by hangover, collapsed, and I fell on the seething concrete ocean which, blowing bubbles mighty fine, spread out to the oh so alluring horizon.

Dan Verkys - One Kiss Before Dying

Jon Beinart - Toddlerpede

Dan Verkys - Divine Intervention Dan Verkys - Indomitable Rage

This was the end. Me, the job, time.

A complete failure. Having been shot halfway around this teetering, cretin world to conk out now, inside one’s own Ground Zero. Of lack of life-sustaining substances. Melbourne Airport at the curved horizon, viewed from my familiar perspective, looked like a stinking gathering of painted tin huts rammed into the inevitable red ground.

Surrounded by jet-black boomerang throwers and bouncing nuisances, and spanned by an unindebted hole in the sky through the core of which the invisible cosmic emission vaporized the topside of every Australian skull. And this massive heat was inherent to everything, boiling out every organism to the last cell.

The happenings around me were gleaming in bizarre blackouts. The next snapshot that was jammed into my emptied organism was the littered-up footwell of a compact car barrelling along. The stinking streaks of a stomach-controlled outburst were smiling at me from the outside of the front seat window. I was on the well known way down. There was nothing that could go flooey anymore.

We raced down Tullamarine Highway to the city centre which seemed like a dark, smoky skyline at the horizon. It was actually convulsing, as if with pain.

“Dan,” my saviour was stuck behind the wheel as if seized with massive convulsions, his Mohawk-armed skull popped up and down onto the plastic paneling of the special Japanese model a small black Honda to the beat of the destroying, guttural death metal band „Elrazor“ from the CD player, “who the fuck are you?” „Artist, purveyor of dark digital art seen on numerous CD and DVD covers, books, posters, in magazines, on the net, anywhere that I can release my locked away at times insane moments that seem to make my brain cry out for a silence that never comes.“ My mind stopped. The familiar feeling of hope in a strange environment.

Somehow. Hope for the survivability of an alien element. I was staggering through an unintelligible nightmare called job as usual, and in all the chaos I had met up with an artist of the city – unfortunately he was completely daft, but he knew about things.

“Is your art exhibited at the Melbourne International Arts Festival?”

I admit, this was a very silly question indeed, but in the state of panic hangover I suddenly remembered my return ticket. „The Melbourne Art scene, is filled with vibrant colours and packed with wonderfully talented and eccentric artists, artwork that appeals to me is usually slightly odd, lets face it not everything needs to be boring images of fucking Eucalyptus trees and kangaroos and farmlands, nor should it consist of the continual vomiting out pretentious portraits of the ridiculously ‘beautiful people’ who grace our beautiful garden city.

What I find really sad is the amount of talent that seems wasted or unappreciated. I see people struggle with life everyday. You can turn any corner in

the city to find a scraggy looking artist on the pavement, not begging, but creating the most beautiful art using coloured chalks or pastals, I like to stop, appreciate their efforts, perhaps drop a few coins in their hat if I can spare them, then step back just in time to have a business man with mobile phone in one hand and a chai soy latte in his other hand, stand straight on the artists work oblivious to what he is doing, and with no apology or recognition walks off, leaving the artist to silently repair the damage done. Any one who appreciates art and how personal it is would understand just how difficult it is to fight the temptation to grab the business man, beat the shit out of him, drag him back to the artist and have him deliver his apology, just so he can respect what he missed while he was on his phone with his head up his own ass.

Artistically I find it hard to relate to people, but my eyes have been opened in many ways by a fellow artist who’s conversations have inspired me to look at the things I do in different ways than I have in the past. Melbourne artist Josh Lord, who’s work, to me, is a terrific Frankenstein like combination of traditional painting, commercial, stencil, pop, sci-fi, and wartime propaganda, an odd list of ingredients that he makes work, and the results, Andy Warhol himself would admire.

Oddly he has made me understand or appreciate how my own art works in my head, and although I personally don’t think I could make a living off of my own crass work, Josh Lord is evidence that this city does produce some of the finest artists in the world who certainly can.

Melbourne has a fairy diverse population however the alternative art market here seems to be in its infancy, there doesn’t appear to be many outlets for dark art, with the exception of newer places like Grim Fandango’s. It is really seen as a novelty, one that certain art houses would prefer to exploit to their own amusement at Halloween etc. Which in turn causes many people like myself who work in the dark/horror genre to seek other outlets such as band CD cover art or web galleries etc. We can only continue and hope for darker days, awaiting people’s views to change, not only to digital art, which seems to be the unappreciated bastard son of the art world, but to all forms of dark art in general.“ Damn, how could such a depraved, depressed journalist like me be so lucky? The man knew the ropes. He knew where he was. This was the essential difference between him and me.

For ever.

“Is this overheated place in the middle of a burning stoma of an angry, red divinity inspiring for an artist like you? „I love Melbourne, and its alternative arts really appear to be growing, we are blessed with awesome talent, from our beautiful burlesque dancers like Miss Nic to our fire eating, angle grinding stars like Kerri Neven from Fireworks Dance Company, all artists who all provide excitement and entertainment that is definitely not tedious and mainstream, these are the types of people who continually inspire me, make me laugh and make me feel less alone out there.

I don’t have Idols, I don’t believe in them, They’re just people like me, no better, no worse, however I do appreciate the talent of artists like HR Giger, Zdzislaw Beksinski and Mike Bohatch.

I prefer to appreciate the everyday things in my life that are important to me, like my family, my daughters Hayley and Natasha, my beautiful wife Julie, who has saved both my mind and my life countless times, and my dear friends like Kris, Jasmine and Cat. These people I love, they make me feel comfortable and worthwhile, these are people who ask for nothing from me and are just happy with me being whatever it is that I’m supposed to be hahaha. Truthfully these people inspire me everyday in positive ways, keep me alive and creating art, I couldn’t ask for more.“ The highway drilled with architectural obsession in a deadstraight line into Melbourne’s city centre. Meanwhile, the traffic consisted of nothing more than burning car accidents.

Distorted brass seeming to melt in the merciless sun, producing big, poisonous mercury puddles beneath the wrecks.

Meanwhile, my alcoholic turkey had reduced me to a bibulous German tourist. The big red “F” of a neon sign of a plundered gas station in front of us appeared to me like a bleeding Madonna in an isolated monastery after Assumption Day. “Hey boss, we need booze.” Aye, sometimes my logic was as pure as it was simple. “Our consciousness needs expanding!” „Everyone has experimented with drugs, my past is no different. However for quite a few years now I’ve not partaken

The innermost circle / Jan Schleevogt The blood fled down her skin. The record player stylus sighed with a crunch through the grooves of a soundless record. She asked, “Didn’t you want to shag me?” The crackling of the LP increased, and the scene vanished in a hazy eternity.

“Why did you come here?” the man in the elegant suit asked, wiping the blood from her thighs with an old grey cleaning cloth.

“I wanted to take a vacation. Just relax!” she said.

“You’re working a lot?”

“I don’t know. I’m working in the innermost circle. And I’m bleeding dry.” Softly, almost carefully, as if she was trying to defuse a bomb, she took the blood-soaked cloth out of his hands. “I cannot relax, see?”

“Do you want me to put it away?” the man asked, and she looked at him blankly. “The cloth,” he explained. “I mean the cloth!”

She only nodded and turned her face away from him.

“I knew a man once”, she said. “He lived right down there. At the end of the street. Two sweet kids he had, Lilly and Billy. I always watched them playing on the lawn.

You know that lawn, don’t you? Two nice swings, newly painted. The man worked in a company that was often located on the Old Market Square. In the factory building there. Sometimes it’s moving, but not two weeks after it’s located in the factory building again. One of the managers had a great idea. Quite a complicated marketing strategy.

Having to do with the sale of sweets. And Lilly and Billy became local advertising icons… in the front hall… impacted behind bars…”

The man took off his elegant suit and put it on the chairback. He went out into the morning, and from far away he could hear the tooting of a heavy steam locomotive ploughing its way into the next town. He ought to have sat in it, but he didn’t dare to leave the innermost circle anymore.

Catching some air, that’d have to do. Fresh, filtered air. He breathed in deeply. Cloth still in his hand.

He walked down the street to a small suburban, white painted house and sat on one of the two swings while the cloth in his shivering hand slowly defied his grip. And fell down.

He recollected last night’s dream. He held her in his arms and licked some whipped cream out of her belly button, and he wanted to penetrate her but she didn’t allow. Pushed him away with her cream-smeared hands. Without a word. In his dreams, no one ever said a word; that had always been like that. He didn’t talk to people much either, even when he was awake, or thought he was awake.

“Sometimes I wake up and don’t know whether or not I’m awake,” she said to him. With every syllable, blood squirted out of her mouth and soaked the lawn red. “I think of my lost brother, but at the same time I don’t know

if I ever had a brother at all. I think we went into the factory down on the market square, and the next morning I left it alone. And the market square wasn’t there anymore. I had signed a contract with blood. And I didn’t know anything of my brother anymore… Whom I loved. He was very sissy when he was a child. Was always sick. Did always cry. The wimp! I had to look after him, see? He was my brother! And I can’t remember if he ever existed. I can’t remember anything at all! Where is he now? Maybe still in the factory!”

She fell on the lawn like a rag doll and dug her fingers into grass and humus soil. He could go towards her but he didn’t. Just stood up and went past her. Stopped then, however, for a brief moment, turned to her once more, and said, “He isn’t in the factory. Your brother isn’t there, do you hear me?

And the Old Market Square doesn’t exist anymore for quite a long time! It’s gone!”

Hollering kids rushed past them on the street with balloons in their hands, from the end of the street you could hear the thundering of a church bell, once… twice… thrice… a sunny afternoon in Suburbia. “Sleepless in another town” ran in the cinema.

“Hey, do you know Billy?” the man asked one of the little girls who stopped at that and let her balloon go. She wore braces of blood-red plastic and grinned at him wolfishly. She pointed down the street where the last strike of the church bell was fading away. “Does Billy live down there?”

The girl just shook her head, looked once more yearningly after her lost balloon which would have reached the horizon in a few hours to vanish there, and then rushed after her playmates.

Disappeared in an alleyway.

“When I crawl across the street I can see every single stone,” the woman on the lawn said. “Go out there, man. And blow them all away for me. Come on, Billy!” The man turned to her appalledly and saw her naked, bleeding figure crawl towards him. “Get your gun and finish them all off!!” she bickered. “AFTER THEM!!” She stretched out her claw towards him, and the blood ran greedily out of her mouth. “AFTER THEM!!!” she bubbled…

And the man rushed off. On the street, past the front lawns, and he felt as light as a feather, just as immortal and frightened, just as if there would be no tomorrow, just as if there never was any tomorrow… music from afar, the crackling of a record.

“Diagnosis: loss of reality,” the female voice at the other end of the line said. “Time of death of Jane Doe: 5.33 p.m.”

“This isn’t her! She only thinks that! She’s had hallucinations during the film. Oh my God. Get her out of there… get her out of there!!”

In the warehouse of the factory, there were some rusty components left; the current had been switched off for a fairly long time already. It smelt of oil and putrefaction, and in the backmost rooms, someone was singing about daydreams and loving mates…

“Get him out of there!” the cops outside on the street hollered, and tear gas filled the hall. “Come on, get the bastard out of there!”

The woman on the lawn stretched out her hand and shouted for her brother… and Billy bent over her, and decayed in tears in the innermost circle where oil and putrefaction covered memories and dreams… © translation: Ní Gudix

Obj. 56/dm_67 „Idiotgod“

Obj. 3/dd_34 „Fishface“

„...they were mainly coloured in grey and green, but their bellies were white.”

Other inhabitants of the realm of the shades who became immortal, like Dracula from Transylvania, or the soul eater from the inner Amazon Basin were based on folk tales whose contents more or less are not verifiable. Whether Vlad III. Draeculea really drank his enemies’ blood through a direct bite into one of their main arteries, or whether the insect weighing more than 25 lb, which was up to now discovered only in the shape of a withered carcass in Brazil, really sucks its victim’s soul through a hollow sting out of its ear, scientifically neither can be proved nor validated.

There are some few cases where science was abused to prove the existence of rather fictional creatures, for example “Bigfoot” in America, or the “Ghoul of Bangkok.” A similar case like these, however, basing on extremely worrying discoveries from the 80s of the preceding century, has never been documented by relevant science before: the fish people of Dagon.

H. P. Lovecraft’s literary works is usually correlated with the genre of “supernatural horror.” His short stories and few novels, all of which originated in the early 20th century, are crawling with inscrutable monsters, blasphemous scholars, and cryptic mythologies whose terror caused a very subtle fear in the minds of his readers because it hided behind the self-serving declaration that, for protection of sanity and reason, it couldn’t be specified. Many of his fans adore him as a prophetical visionary; his critics, however, think he’s a misanthropic, lunatic amateur. It is of no significance what one thinks about him as an author and how important he may be for speculative fiction up to now – nobody has so far tried to see an, even but approximate, realistic truth claim in his works.

Related to his Cthulhu myth and the anonymous terror sitting in forgotten abysses of our cosmos and waiting for its comeback, nobody ever wanted to think about that, though. Until the present day.

Until the long-lasting research of Professor Juan Cabanas from the Anthropologist University Boston (AUB) finally reached results. Results that were both shocking and exciting, as well as disturbing and frightening.

And that support, however, but one conclusion…

Professor Cabana is a highly decorated scientist but his audacious theories have damaged his reputation a little. Back in the early 80s, he has already run ample, mainly secret, researches in some hard-to-reach coastal areas of US state Rhode Island about the use of which the specialist press only announced either vague rumours or arrogant defamations then. Thus the response on the shocking discoveries he made in the year 1987 was quite faint. It was the year of the lowest sea level ever, since the beginning of metering, in this region.

He and his few assistants found a great deal of monstrously degenerated fishes whilst this definition on his discovery was used merely by his critics. After perusal of the unfortunately small available pictorial material one could rather refer to them as mutants outside evolution! And even with due regard to the scepticism essential in this kind of studies, when looking at the pictures, one has to think of a crossing between man and fish!

Unfortunately it’s not possible anymore to find out whether or not Mr Cabana’s researches were already planned on the basis of Lovecraft’s attempts (his choice of the research area, however, suggests this since

Obj. 23/bk_13 „Babynymph“

H. P. Lovecraft has lived in Providence / Rhode Island for most of the time in his life). After having published his results, the peculiar scholar was defamed vehemently in the press, his chair at the AUB was abolished upon flimsy grounds; he has completely retired from public life now and didn’t even want to express himself upon request within the scope of this trial. “(…) some of them have strange slender heads with flat noses and bulging, staring eyes which they apparently never close. Their skin isn’t alright somehow, it’s rough and scaly.

The neck is shrivelled and wrinkled on both sides.” (from: H. P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Visionary Publishing Company 1936) This seems like a random coincidence of Lovecraft’s novella and Cabana’s researches but it’s not the only one. A great deal of further details follow, being alarmingly exactly in accord with facts of reality. In the aforementioned, strange novella, a young first-person narrator, the amateur historian Olmstead, tells about a decaying, avoided seaport called Innsmouth (today it isn’t existing anymore) in which an abnormal, yea blasphemous cult has taken possession of the people. “(…) and we are all devoted to the Order of Dagon, and the children shall never die but return to Mother Hydra and Father Dagon where we all come from.” A captain named Obed Marsh is said to have imported this cult of “wogs” in the year 1840 from some indefinite place in the South Pacific. Human sacrifices, offered up by the people of Dagon living in an ocean trench off the coast to their god Cthulhu, are said to have caused abundance of fish and gold gifts since then. Blinded by their avarice, the inhabitants of Innsmouth didn’t realize that those sacrifices were mixed up with the unholy amphibians so that bizarre, composite beings finally rose from the dark sea: “(…) a neverending stream of waddling, jumping, croaking, baaing figures, rolling across under the eerie moon, like in a grotesque, evil saraband (a baroque music court dance, known since about 1650; A/N) from a spooky nightmare. (…) They were mainly coloured in grey and green, but their bellies were white.”

Despite Lovecraft’s strange language one can find some facts between the lines. The great abundance of fish in this area up to now as well as occasional findings of hoarded amounts of gold could be explained differently, i.e. naturally. But Professor Cabana’s discoveries from July 1987 at some places of the coast can’t (for further details of the finding places see map).

The “corpses” having been washed ashore here, obviously due to the peculiarly low sea level, make everything appear in a new, pale light of doubt: grotesque fishes with human faces, blind mutants with arms and pinnas and as big as human beings, scaly monsters with long fishtails, or completely degenerated, shapeless bodies with crippled lungs, fill the spectator, along with a forbidden, scientific fascination, with a nameless horror.

These discoveries were followed by a completely non-scientific discussion on “blasphemy” and “freak show” which was trailed by the aforementioned defamation of the finder and finally culminated in a destruction of the pieces of evidences through a residual fire in the local post-mortem room.

Despite the scruples about the authenticity of this monstrous flotsam, which can rather be ignored considering the photos shown here, the question arises how credible Lovecraft was.

Are Professor Cabana’s discoveries evidence that he, after all, wasn’t that esoteric madman of literature he was said to be? Did he watch grotesque, blasphemous, yet emotionally comprehensible, happenings at his home coast? Should there really be a dark, rotten core of truth in his works?!

If so, this trial has to end with an unsettling message by the strange author. A message for the future of all of us: “(…) the Deep Beings cannot be destroyed. At first they will remain silent; but one day – when they will remember – they will rise again to exact the toll Cthulhu the Great is longing for.”

Obj. 12/kh_44 „Mothman“

Places of discovery

Fishface Albinohybrid Idiotgod Babynymph Dehumidified Mermaid Mothman

Research by jenz/INSIDE artzine More pictures and details of Professor Juan Cabana‘s studies by: www.thefeejeemermaid.com The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society: www.cthulhulives.org

Obj. 12/wd_87 „Dehumidified Mermaid“

Grimm Soft cover, ca. A5, 164 pages German, 13 EUR. www.grimmoire.de Purchased: www.averse-publishing.com Good ol’ Grimm, the German word for wrath, grudge, is oozing through your bean while you’re watching what happens. A book in time. A book that cracks the plasma-sealed apathy of the livingrooms.

Staggering insanity from semi-credible reports on coffins, microstates, funeral folk, and J. G. Ballard, via unverified ego statements on bacteria and zombie banks, through to full-page art attacks that are a complete pack of lies: this is reality.

Irritating. Names like KD Matheson, Wolfgang Sangmeister, Artfart, plus a monstrous, beetle-shaped (indeed with a beetle imprint on it), UV lacquer-refined, cover – that says it all: “All that is left at the end is what we do and what does us: wrath.”

Grimm. Yeah!

Spartan Dog Magazine Web magazine, English www.spartandog.com Well, you all know my opinion on web magazines… right: cool! But they must be made like this helluva pixel whip. Topics like “Funeral,” “Twilight,” “Women,” or “Darkness Redux” have produced 15 issues so far that are filled with optical art frenzy at the very highest stage!

Names like Matt Lombard, Spyros Antoniou, Paul Booth, and Chris Mars are to be explained only to compulsively ignorant coma returnees, aren’t they?

What drifts past your monitor-infested eyes here in the way of photos, manipulations (whatsoever), and paintings could actually only be topped by an A2 sized, high glossy, art book. So squeeze the screen close to your pupils, ignore the impotence-enhancing TFT emission, and have a nice evening.

Art that creeps

Hard cover, 192 pages, 25x20,5 cm, English, 26,60 U$ www.strychnin.com Purchased on www.amazon.com or www.korerobooks.co.uk I think the state of “getting the creeps” doesn’t include a pumping rain of blood from a great height. Nor a chopping up of unconcerned extremities into soup-appropriate cubes. Thus the gentle art autistic here gets fear implanted from behind, in a creepy-crawly way. Unnoticed.

Only step by step the pleasantly unsettling thrill makes itself felt, kindled in your posterior frontal lobes by grandmasters like Chet Zar, Naoto Hattori, Nicoletta Ceccoli, Richard Kirk, John Santerineross or David Stoupakis. So watch out, ye blunted torture freaks out there: horror isn’t always naked and bathed in blood.

Trust the beauty of creeping putrefaction.

Deathbook

Hard cover, A4, 112 pages, English, 29,90 EUR www.negoist.com http://shop.negoist.com „This book is not about death. It‘s about your life.“ I admit I hadn’t expected this. I had expected that raving Grim Reaper cuts through our bowels with his carnivorous scythe, showing around his cold face in a pathological omphaloskepsis to the congregated arts scene. Howsoever, Death is still capricious, even here.

First he comes round the corner in a crazy, stylish way (Hèctor Pineda, Bonnie Wood), then rather minimalist-abstractly (Via-Elena von Braun), fleshly-cold (Jeff S. Love, Richard Rasner), but of course as the beloved, suicidal sycophant, too (Piotr Filutowski). Philosophical, naïve, soothing, incomprehensible, hopeless: Death has many faces. Some of them you’ll find in this book. I bet your one is among them, too!?

Monster Robot

Etticut Issue 4 Mug Affair

272pages, paperback, 21x14,8cm English & Dutch, 22,50 Euro http://kapreles-tk.blogspot.com/

20 pages, web magazine, English, Flash http://issuu.com/matthewmacro/ docs/mug_affair After all this splatter-film crap, this going berserk, this destruction of any sensory perception – here’s some material now to de-contaminate your blinded and blood-smeared sense organs again: “A collection of Andre Kuche‘s portraits of his only companions as a kitchen porter!” What sounds like a subversive compendium of How to Communicate with Cockroaches, is, with deadly certainty, a hopefully successful catharsis: mugs.

A whole e-magazine full of them.

And not in the form of high-tech 4D airbrush epiphany but of simple, full-page, scrawly drawings by a man whose job has obviously driven him out of his mind! Very disturbing stuff indeed, and very threatening in its nihilistic consequence.

Salvaged The Art of Jason Felix 160 pages, hardcover, 27,9x22,4cm English, 35 USD www.jasonfelix.com The art of Mr Felix has been dogging me for quite a long time. His machinoid crossbirths have been

accompanying me on my lifelong descent since that half-hour blackout in my incubator.

His digital nightmarish deliveries link pernicious monstrosity to designer beauty in a troubling way of obviousness. It’s not that the sorely dealt bodies of his chosen models are defaced by his implantive manipulations; the creeping-in certainty of perfection makes his works a threatening trip into one’s own imperfection. A 160 page, high gloss revolution, embedded in an awefully cool layout – the monster inside you will triumph!

Who doesn’t know them, the LSD drenched, large-pored, bizarre creatures of the Belgian comic outlaw Kapreles? You? Of the Keith Haring of the Abnormal? The pumping, bluntly chopped monsters with their often Dadaistic-philosophical marching order? No? Then say you wanted this fat art book when you’re asked what you want for a solitary confinement discharge present. Large-sized figures, deeply black or gaudily coloured, areas, and shadings that set your retina cells vibrating uncontrollably rhythmically while leafing through the book, and whose impacts you only really feel when you suffer from your next fever attack.

When you turn on this book you’ll notice that “comic” doesn’t derive from “comical” but from “cosmical”… Great!

Bad Acid

DVD/CD/Magazine, Tab 9: 15-19 USD www.badacidmagazine.com Holy shit. Properly speaking it’s rather a music magazine than an art book; but this intensity, this bursting lunacy of enthusiasm, this lust for rummaging around in the darkest and stickiest corners of the underground, is hereby appointed by me as independent art genre. DVD (video clips), CD (music), and mag (band interviews) are the Unholy Trinity of optical and acoustic apoplexy that editor Dave has welded together here. The range goes from grindcore metal via drug space rock, hippie sound, some musical styles not yet invented up to now, and no-fi Schrammel music through to background noises from the ether of the absolutely wicked.

Abnormal proto-vibrations that’ll alter you. Talking of alterations: according to unverified rumours, ACID-Dave has quit his job, sold his flat, killed his therapist, and completely stopped using drugs… so that BAD TRIP can crumble your perception from now on MONTHLY!!! An effort like this must be rewarded. So BUY!

19

Slogan / Tom Bresemann

Cancer mayonnaise for all!

In the kitchen cabinet Danger, billionfold, just like In the fridge, on the telly Caviar dies out, that’s right: There ought to be 7 degrees So that nothing can be bred!

© translation: Ní Gudix

INSIDE

artzine #13

Seth Siro Anton (Greece), Pierk (Italy), Jason Felix (USA), Ralph Manfreda/Cryptonaut (Austria), Kapreles (Belgium), jenz (Germany), Olivier de Sagazan (France), Chris Mars (USA), Jan Schleevogt (Germany), Navette (France), Dan Verkys (Australia), Justin Aerni (USA), Oliver Schott (Germany),Tachas Tachas (Argentina), Oliver Wetter (Germany), Sybille Lengauer (Germany), Michael Hutter (Germany), Juan Cabana (USA), Fero (Italy), Patrick Byers (Canada), Bastart-Worx (Germany), Niels Parthey (Germany), Tom Bresemann (Germany), Frederico Bebber (Italy).

Artscum worldwide! www.inside-artzine.de