A Giger Harvest in Switzerland
When I contemplated Switzerland, I didn’t think of luxury watches, fondue or secret bank accounts. I thought of Carl Gustav Jung and his writings on alchemy — the transmuting of base metals into gold as a metaphor for personal and psychological improvement. I thought of the macabre surrealist H.R. Giger, whose horrific biomechanical nightmare worlds influenced morbid self-seekers for generations.
So before infiltrating the Swiss countryside in 2009, I first infiltrated my local public library and borrowed a used copy of Richard and Iona Miller’s The Modern Alchemist: A Guide to Personal Transformation, a work utilizing some Jungian concepts. The experience became my way of fusing the worldly with the local — as above, so below — a theme I would later explore in many newspaper columns.
After all, world travel should involve continuous transpersonal renovation rather than giddy sightseeing — at least in theory — so while digesting that particular book, I followed in the footsteps of H.R. Giger, using Jung as the inspiration. Both individuals were worshiped across the globe, but neither was popular in his own country. Only in Switzerland would this occur.
My home town of San Jose was quite similar. Many people, events and histories had given San Jose a degree of name recognition over the years, yet 99.9 percent of the local population didn’t care about any of it.
When I arrived at the H.R. Giger Museum in the medieval village of Gruyères, I was transformed. The place stuck out like a decapitated thumb.
Giger, rhyming with meager, was the notorious troublemaker best known for designing the creatures in the 1980 film Alien, for which he won a well-deserved Oscar, but he also created ghastly airbrush paintings, furniture, sculptures, album covers and graphic designs featuring erotic-occult-fantasy transmogrifications of the most disturbing sort. He said he painted whatever scared him.
The population of Gruyères tipped the scales at about 1700. It was a village that existed almost entirely for tourists. Thousands were bussed in on a regular basis for the famous castle and cheese of the same name. No one departed without dining at the obligatory fondue restaurant. The main village road was just a few blocks long.
Over time, Giger fell in love with the area, calling it a “beautiful cheek of Switzerland.” In 1998, to the explosive annoyance of the locals, he acquired an old stone fortress, the Château St. Germain, and converted it into a permanent three-story museum of his work. Two levels of the building highlighted the entire span of his career, including wall-size airbrushes of wicked Baphomet imagery, Lovecraftian horror scenes and bald women whose nether regions morphed into weapons. The actual latex creatures from Alien were also present, as was a wall of Giger tattoo photos. The infamous painting “Penis Landscape” — the one that got Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys arrested and tried on obscenity charges — was behind a curtain, inside the 18-and-over section.
The top floor showcased other artists Giger had personally collected, while the gift shop on the street level featured limited edition Giger posters, t-shirts, books and even bottles of absinthe with Giger’s labels. This was legit stuff, not bootlegs. Commendably, the entire facility seemed to be staffed by Swiss goth women.
“Most people travel to Gruyères for the castle and the cheese factory,” said Aurore Sierro, one of the museum’s tour guides. “And when they come in here, they get disgusted.”
With an angelic French accent, she schooled me on many aspects of Giger’s life: His birth was unusually long and traumatic, with the doctor needing forceps to get him out of the womb; detractors blamed him for his first wife’s depression and suicide; and as a teenager, he set his dad’s pharmacy on fire by trying to melt lead. (Read: alchemy, transformation.)
After ascending a spiral wooden staircase, we eventually arrived at a room featuring huge airbrushes of The Spell, I, II, III and IV — one on each wall. Spell III included Giger’s version of the Baphomet symbol at its center, complete with the Caduceus — two snakes coiling into a figure eight around a shaft. Baphomet and the snakes represented male and female energy or dark/light polarity.
“But he is definitely a Swiss artist,” Sierro enthused, pointing out traditional Swiss doily textures Giger had stenciled on the skins of the snakes in Spell III. “He also painted aliens eating fondue.”
Minutes later, in a different room, she pointed out another famous Giger painting, Anima Mia, an otherwordly nightmarescape of flowing interconnected biomechanoids. Mia was Giger’s second wife and inspiration while he created this particular work.
The title was a play on words: Anima meant “soul” and was also a Jungian concept representing the unconscious feminine aspect of the male psyche. By sheer synchronicity — a Jungian term — I had just finished Chapter Three of The Modern Alchemist, titled “Anima,” while on the airplane. My own inner feminine slowly began to emerge. What a place.
My transformation didn’t stop there. Outside on the cobblestone pathway, some tourists paused to have their photos taken in front of the 500-lb cast aluminum Birth Machine sculpture, instead of actually visiting the museum itself. This seemed to be common. The massive work was two meters high and featured mechanical babies in place of the bullets inside a revolver. The piece was one of many where Giger explored the lifelong psychological effects of a traumatic birth.
Across the cobblestone path from the museum, in the same building as an old folks’ home, I found the Giger Bar, a cavernous environment featuring concrete vertebrae ceilings, biomechanical furniture and hundreds of dead baby heads everywhere. Inside, one was immediately transported to more mutated world.
In the daytime, the bar was frequented by oldtimers from the retirement facility who, along with their walkers, meandered in for glasses of wine, completely unfazed by the macabre environs. A sign on the wall advertised “Coffee sans alkool,” so I guess sober folks were also welcome.
Of course, there was only one place left to go, one remaining spot at which to trace the genealogy of Giger’s haunted mind. At my journey’s end, I made my way to the town of Chur (pronounced KOOR), Giger’s birthplace and the location of another Giger Bar. A small town pretty much off the radar of most travelers, Chur brought everything to a transformative conclusion, although it might be years before I figured out what it all meant.
After arriving in Chur, I stood right in front of the building where Giger grew up, in a flat above his dad’s pharmacy at 17 Storchengasse, which meant Stork Street — another baby connotation. It now boasted a bright yellow facade with a women’s cosmetic shop on the ground level — the closing irony of it all, I suppose.
I can think of no better example of art improving one’s relationship to trauma than the life of H.R. Giger. In that sense, he should inspire us all.
(Earlier versions or pieces of this story were published in GoNomad, Metro Silicon Valley and Inked Magazine.)