Gothic Imagination: Gothic Associations

This is the first in a series of talks I delivered as part of my undergraduate art history module Gothic Imagination. The script has been edited for publication here. As published, Gothic Imagination consists of five talks, accompanied by select presentation slides; slide images have been compressed and animations have been removed.

The talks were designed to be presented in the following sequence. Seminars, being unscripted and interactive, have been omitted.

1. Gothic Associations
   • Seminar—Heritage, Heresy and the Canon
2. Gothic Identities
   • Seminar—Politics, Terror and the Other
3. Gothic Bodies
   • Seminar—Science, Creation and the Unnatural
4. Gothic Landscapes
   • Seminar—Nature, Catastrophe and the Sublime
5. Gothic Visions
   • Seminar—Civilisation, Ruin and the Haunted

Gothic Imagination: Gothic Associations

This introduction to Gothic Imagination is titled “Gothic Associations” to get us thinking about our field of study and how we might define and delimit it.  After all, even when we feel that we are venturing into unfamiliar territory, we rarely, perhaps never, approach anything we set out to study with a blank slate.

So, instead of asking you to forget everything you associate with the matter under investigation, I encourage for you to draw on those associations. Consider making a note of them.  Jot down the first five words or phrases that come to mind when you hear the word “gothic.”

And since we are dealing with the term when applied to visual culture rather than literature, it is useful to remind ourselves of our associations by making a few quick drawings. What images come to mind when you hear the word “gothic”?

I have asked those questions repeatedly over the years, and the word that most frequently pops up in those initial responses is “dark” or “darkness.” Images range from crosses to coffins, from church windows to Dracula’s blood-dripping fangs.

Gothic Imagination poses an open question: what is the use and usefulness of the term “gothic” in the context of visual culture and of contemporary art in particular?

The word “gothic” is hundreds of years old.  But many of its applications date from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when usages of the term became increasingly diverse and diffuse.

Today, the term “gothic” is being applied far beyond the boundaries in which it was understood only a few decades ago, when, in an art historical context, it referred almost exclusively to architecture and design. Just what is “contemporary gothic art?”

So much is being published on the “gothic” that is difficult to keep up, even though most studies are devoted to literature rather than visual culture. As we shall see, however, Gothic literature, as a genre, is important to an understanding of gothic manifestations in visual culture. That is something I did not realize when I studied Gothic literature in New York City, within a few hundred meters from St. Patrick’s Cathedral and surrounded by Romantic art in the city’s many museums. My dissatisfaction with the lack of transdisciplinary interfacing in “gothic” studies led me to create this attempt at a course in the visual gothic.

In Gothic (2021), Roger Luckhurst begins by stating the obvious that is nonetheless worth restating: Gothic “used to be easy to define.” Now, he adds, “there is a concern that the term has become meaningless due to overuse.”

Luckhurst does not agree with that. Still, reading his book and looking at his examples, you may find that he, too, is using the term rather loosely.

You could say that as well about my own uses of the word in various contexts. I have added to the growing list of references by exploring what I call the “Gothic of Audition.” I coined the phrase to refer to responses we have—and that I have had—to speech and sound, and to recorded radio broadcasts of thriller narratives, freely available online, in particular.

Listening, like viewing, is a highly individual act. We all see, hear and respond differently. And, in addition to being scared by what was designed to frighten us, we might feel estranged from aural narratives without recourse to visuals, from worlds of sound with which we, unlike listeners of the pre-television age, are unfamiliar and for the experience of which we feel unprepared.

The gothic is not just a product of culture. It is an experience.

I have also deployed “gothic” in Crying Bleeding Kicking Screaming, a catalogue devoted to works by the painter-printmaker Marcelle Hanselaar. The term is not widely used in relation to Hanselaar’s prints. Hanselaar has not used it. In fact, she asked me to explain my use of the term to her.

That is something I would like us to explore: How might the term be meaningful applied to works that are not labelled “gothic” by their makers? And how useful is the term “gothic” when applied visuals or material culture by curators and writers on contemporary art?

As you no doubt noticed already, “gothic” is a problematic term, and its uses are individualistic, often lacking in clear definitions. What is “gothic,” what strikes us as “gothic,” depends on our identities and experiences.

That means, going in search of examples of so-called “contemporary gothic,” we need to be mindful that some of the images and ideas with which we are confronted may be disturbing, offensive or painful to us or others. What triggers us individually may be difficult to anticipate; but some works labeled “gothic” seem deliberate in their attempt to antagonize, to provoke fear and loathing, anxiety and anger.

Take Cultural Gothic (1992), for instance, a kinetic sculpture by Paul McCarthy (b. 1945). Now, I am not declaring it to be “gothic.” In this case, it is the artist who makes—and encourages us to make—that association.

What warrants the term “gothic”? To begin with, the sculpture resembles an altar. And when you translate into words the main elements of the composition, you will get its visual pun: The Father, the son and … the holey goat.

Beyond that sacrilegious pun and the reference to the altar, what we have here a confrontation with the forbidden. When we see the sculpture in motion, we realise that the “holey” goat is a goat with a hole in it.

In Contemporary Gothic, Gilda Williams argues that Cultural Gothic is aptly titled in so far as it performs a “standard Gothic theme.” In this case, Williams points out, it is “the revelation of an unspeakable family ‘curse’ by a curious innocent,” a plot device present already in Horace Walpole’s seminal The Castle of Otranto; A Gothic Story (1764), the first work of literature proposed, by its author, as “gothic.” Why is a family curse a “gothic theme”? And what makes it “standard”?

We are going to explore many aspects of the mostly visual gothic thematically— rather than strictly chronologically—in various contexts. What becomes obvious from the start is that, even when dealing with visual culture, we cannot do without Gothic literature, including narrative film.

As our time is limited—and as many gothic performances are timebound—I have posted a number of short essays in response to some of the films I screened in conjunction with these talks, in thematic series.

In the title of each of these series—Treacherous Territories, Uneasy Threshold, and Significant Othering—the word “gothic” appears in quotation marks to suggest that the application and applicability of the label are subject to debate. For instance, is gothic another word for “horror”? If the answer is “yes,” do we need the word “gothic”?

Again, what is “gothic”? And what is “Gothic”? Note the distinction between the upper case and lower case. Is “gothic,” as loosely as the term is applied today, an art historically viable term? In the broadest sense, this series of talks is about the responsibilities and the challenges involved in classifying products of culture.

Etymology takes us back to the tribes of the Goths. The Goths threatened the Roman Empire and were responsible for its decline and fall, as visualised retrospectively in, The Sack of Rome (1890), a late-nineteenth century French painting by Joseph-Noel Sylvestre (1847-1926)

The Goths—and the Gothic—represent the anti-Classical, a threat to tradition and order. It is an epic battle immortalized in the 1963 entry in the Asterix series, Asterix and the Goths.

The otherness of the Goths is made visually apparent in the use of a Gothic typeface, even though the culture of the Goths is much older than the medieval Blackletter font. The anachronism aside, it clearly sets the two clashing cultures apart.

“Alaric” refers to Alaric I (370–410), who was King of the Visigoths from 395 until his death in 410.  Alaric is most famous for his sack—or pillaging—of Rome in 410, a decisive event in the decline of the Roman Empire.

The Gothic is often associated with the outsider, with threats against an established order. In an alternative history published in 2020, Douglas Boin reimagined Alaric as a misunderstood outsider. Perhaps not surprisingly, the author identifies as a gay Catholic, and his agenda is queer identity politics.

The author does not have a lot of facts to draw on. His speculative study has been accused of presentism and revisionism, and of being “woke.” Alaric the Goth is perhaps less a portrait of Alaric than it is a portrait of the author as a queer academic. I can certainly relate to that.

Not objective.  Not academic.  Not ideal. The gothic is often defined by what it opposes or calls into question. “Through history the word ‘Gothic’ has been chiefly defined in contrasting juxtaposition to […] the classical” Robin Sowerby reminds us in “The Goths in History and Pre-Gothic Gothic.”

The lithograph Salon of 1827. Great Battle between the Romantic and the Classic at the Museum Door (1827) presents a visualisation of a battle between Neoclassicism and Romanticism. The Classic or, to be precise, the Neoclassic, is represented by an upright figure, clean and plainly dressed in white. The Romantic—or Dark Romantic, as the Gothic is sometimes referred to—is personified as wild and dark, outfitted in an extravagant garb.

At the feet of the Romantic figure we find a remnant of a Gothic edifice. This suggests an alignment of the Romantic with what one side would like to call the dark side: the revolutionary.

Who won this battle? Well, eventually, the Romantic was deemed fit for the academy. It became canonical. Is that a win or a loss?

The “gothic” is an extreme of the Romantic impulse that keeps defying standards and conventions. That said, the notion that the “gothic” is the opposite of the classical is rather simplistic. Gothic is more of a version—a subversion or perversion—of the classical than its direct opposite. In Salon of 1827, both bodies shown at “battle” are powerful. Both are male. They have quite a bit in common. And yet, one future is proportioned and poised, whereas the other is posturing.

The curator Martin Myrone, who staged an exhibition titled Gothic Nightmares, used the phrase “perverse classicism” to describe such neoclassical bodies.

The paintings by Richard Westall in the School of Art collection at Aberystwyth University are a great-great-granddaddy of today’s graphic novels and movie superheroes.

Superheroes are not just superhuman. Like Satan, they are fallen angels; at the very least, they are conflicted. However, before you draw any conclusions, be aware that the words “gothic” and “Gotham” are not etymologically related.

What does all this have to do with Gothic architecture of the medieval period (that is, the twelfth to sixteenth centuries)?

If I had taught this art history module a few decades ago, I would have been expected to restrict myself to a discussion of sacral architecture and the secular architecture they inspired centuries later.

In Lives of the Artists (1550), Georgio Vasari (1511–1574) used the word “gothic” to describe this kind of architecture. He was not being complimentary: “Then arose new architects who after the manner of their barbarous nations erected buildings in that style which we call Gothic (dei Gotthi).”

Gothic cathedrals are easy to identify. They are characterized by flying buttresses, rib vaulting, and pointed arches. Such features enabled them to be taller and also lighter than earlier Western houses of worship.

Gothic cathedrals feature tall stained-glass windows and a great deal of ornamentation. They are less gloomy than the word “Gothic” might suggest. But they are certainly more extravagant than previous architectural styles.

In The Nature or Gothic (1853), the English writer John Ruskin (1819–1900) declared that “pointed arches do not constitute Gothic, nor vaulted roofs, nor flying buttresses, nor grotesque sculptures; but all or some of these things, and many other things with them, when they come together so as to have life.”

I encourage you to consider the “many other things” that, appearing together or working on your imagination singly, may give you what you may decide to call a “gothic” vibe.

Clearly, future generation did not look at Gothic architecture of the medieval period as barbaric. Otherwise, the Houses of Parliament would not have been designed in a style modelled on the Gothic—the neo-Gothic.

The meaning of Gothic changed, and features of the architecture associated with Catholicism were adapted for secular structures built in Britain and the US, countries in which Catholicism, at that time, was not the dominant religion.

That the Gothic was not simply revived but never disappeared is acknowledged in the label “Gothic Survival,” which is much less widely used. The style never disappeared but it was not as prominent for a long time as it would once again become in the Victorian age.

When, in one of his works, the US American printmaker John Taylor Arms (1887–1953) referred to the Gothic Spirit (1922), he was not speaking of horror.  Arms believed in the uplifting quality of medieval Gothic art.  Not all of his prints depict “gothic” subjects.  But all reflect a respect, a longing for the values of medieval artisans.

This appreciation may be termed nostalgia, a longing for what is lost—or perhaps for what never was—assumptions or feelings rooted in traces of a past, whether desirable or otherwise, that we might find in ruins.

In Wales, you do not have to travel far to see Gothic Revival architecture. Just walk past Aberystwyth’s Old College (1860s), now under scaffolding. What you see, though, is not quite what was envisioned.

The Gothic is OTT. It often runs counter to reason and common sense. In fact, that was the mantra of the English architect John Pollard Seddon (1827–1906), who exclaimed “Let spirit, not sense, rule future ages!” (1870). Whether Aberystwyth University’s decision to invest millions in the restoration of Old College is an exercise in “gothic” extravagance that will come back to haunt us I’ll leave you to consider. 

Another prime example of Neo-Gothic extravagance, Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, a suburban district of London, is over a century older than Old College. What makes it central to the gothic—and indeed the Gothic—is that it is a connecting point between the Gothic as architecture and the Gothic as a literary genre.

The house was created as envisioned by Horace Walpole, who also wrote what is now called the first gothic novel—the first novel with the word Gothic on the title page.

I might be wrong—and your responses to the term may prove me so—but more people now think of the “gothic” in terms of horror fiction than of architecture. At least, when Gilda Williams uses the term to refer to Paul McCarthy’s Cultural Gothic, which we looked at earlier, she thinks of storytelling.

Walpole may have been the first writer to use the term “gothic” to refer to his fiction. But there is plenty of “gothic” spirit in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a scene of which is the subject of this painting by Fuseli.

So, do not wait for someone to drop the word. After all, even the first edition of The Castle of Otranto was not labelled “Gothic.” That does not make the first edition less gothic than the second one, which was called “A Gothic Story.” If you get a gothic vibe, explore where it comes from, and be prepared to define your territory and defend the usage of the term.

This is how Elizabeth Campbell Denlinger sums up our whirlwind tour of the gothic so far. “The word Gothic has a long history,” she writes in It’s Alive! A Visual History of Frankenstein (2018), “signifying first a group of Germanic tribes who invaded the territories of other Europeans […].  The earliest sense connotes destructiveness, disorder, a wanton love of violence, from which broader meanings proliferated: particularly in regard to architecture, Gothic indicates […] fanciful and irregular structures by contrast to the straight, symmetrical lines of Greece and Rome.”

“But,” she adds, “if we want to date the Gothic as a kind of narrative rather than a style, 1765 makes sense, when Horace Walpole added to the second edition of his Castle of Otranto the subtitle A Gothic Story […].”

The distinction here is between a style in architecture and design and a genre of literature. What Gothic architecture and Gothic literature have in common is excess. The Gothic is fanciful. Walpole’s Strawberry Hill started out as a cottage, but it was embellished using cheap building materials. It was turned into a toy castle.

Walpole’s novel, presumably inspired by a dream he had in that house, is prefaced by a quotation from the Roman writer Horace: “If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse,” Horace writes in Ars poetica (c. 19 BCE), “could you … refrain from laughing?… [Q]uite like such a picture would be a book, whose idle fancies [are] shaped … like a sick man’s dream….  [A poet’s licence should not go so far] that savage should mate with tame, or serpents couple with birds, lambs with tigers.” Walpole’s novel defies that rule.

“… like a sick man’s dream.” That, as we shall explore in another sessions, just about sums up the most famous of all paintings to be associated with the Gothic at the time when it emerged with a vengeance as a literary genre: The Nightmare (1781) by Johann Heinrich Füssli (aka Fuseli) (Anglo-Swiss, 1741–1825).

Unlike many other works, it was not designed to illustrate a Gothic tale. In fact, it inspired or at least influenced one of the most famous Gothic novels: Frankenstein.

Frankenstein. Jekyll and Hyde. Dracula. Those, in chronological order, are the most famous novels—and figures—of Gothic fiction.

However, the Gothic, as a genre, started well before the publication of Frankenstein in 1818. Not quite with Walpole, perhaps—whose Castle of Otranto was more of an outlier and a precursor of the popular gothic romance—but, nearly half a century later, with fictions that attracted a female audience and that, as this caricature shows, was ridiculed for its extravagances.

Not only the audience was female. Some of the authors were women as well.  Ann Radcliffe, in particular, captured the imagination of British readers both upstairs and downstairs alike. This explains, to some extent, the hostile response among critics to the phenomenon of what is now understood to be the literary Gothic but that, being popular and gendered female, would have been studied as literature in until at least the 1970s.

As we can see in the late 1790s painting Lady Blanche Crosses the Ravine Guided by the Count and Saint Foix by the Irish painter Nathaniel Grogan (1740–1807), Radcliffe’s fictions also captured the imagination of visual artists.

The Gothic was the first popular genre of fiction. Books, which were expensive at the time, were made more widely available through newly emerging lending libraries. Two out of five novels published between 1790 and 1820 were set in castles and abbeys, or in their dungeons and crypts, featuring menaced heroines.

As the caricature The Circulating Library (1804) by Isaac Cruikshank (1764-1811) suggests, the library shelves were full if you wanted history or sermons. The novels are pretty much gone. Catering to the public and attracting a female readership, Gothic fiction was widely dismissed as inferior.

It was also ridiculed by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, a mock-Gothic novel published belatedly in 1818, which contains this exchange:

“[W]hen you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you […].”

“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?”

“A Receipt for Writing a Novel,” a satirical poem, written by Mary Alcock (1742–1798) in 1799, pretty much equates “novel” with “Gothic”:

Would you a favourite novel make,

Try hard your reader’s heart to break,

For who is pleased, if not tormented?

(Novels for that were first invented).

Alcock’s poem mocks the fascination with the Gothic genre by drawing attention to its conventions, suggesting how easy such works are to produce. The writer, the daughter of a classicist, identifies the stock “ingredients” of the Gothic story: “jealousy,” “horror,” “duels,” “Hysteric fits at least a score,” “sighs and groans,” “frantic fever,” “some wicked lord,” a “cruel father,” “a storm,” “a ghost,” “some tatt’ling nurse.”

Indeed, all of them can be found in Mysteries of Udolpho and many Gothic romances that followed. As a genre, the Gothic can be defined in terms of ingredients.  You will find some of those ingredients in twenty-first centuries iterations of the gothic imagination.

Standardised Gothic iconography features in Postmodern and contemporary art, as in a painting by the US American artist Aaron Bohrod (1907–1992), which takes a literal approach to the definition of Gothic by referencing what is probably the best known twentieth-century painting with Gothic in its title.

And you find that iconography as well in the fashion associated with “Goth”: Crosses. Skulls. Chains resembling rosaries.

It is quite easy to trivialise “gothic” by regarding it as a repertoire of conventionalized and readily commodifiable images. And yet, “gothic” is not merely—or not only—a genre or a style.  It is also a way of seeing the world. A way of living. A Weltanschauung. It endures not because it is familiar but because it is forever strange or “other.” It is an alternative to the conventional and normative.

“Goth defiantly returns to life,” Dale Townshend, the editor of the exhibition catalogue Terror and Wonder (2014) argues, “continuously reinventing itself with the same force and energy as that which drives literary manifestations of the Gothic imagination.”

“Gothic” is a mode, a way of looking at the world. And however enduring the gothic spirit may be, it is constantly under threat because of the threat it poses. The killing of Sophie Lancaster was a stark reminder that identifying as a Goth can make you vulnerable to the unrelenting terror of normativity.

Whether or not aspects of this course resonate with you personally, I leave for you to experience.

Another reason I am offering Gothic Imagination is that, as a graduate student taking a class in Gothic literature, I was never encouraged to connect the dots by looking at Gothic architecture, Gothic revival design, Goth fashion or even gothic film.

I have adopted a transdisciplinary approach that, instead of marginalising the Gothic, interrogates academic systems of classifications.

Nothing is inherently marginal or trivial. The trivial and marginal is the product of critical neglect and systemic bias.

Let us sum up.

An important distinction I ask you to make is between the Gothic with a capital G and the gothic with a lower case G. The capital G should be reserved for the Gothic as an architectural style and a literary genre. There is no such thing as a Gothic movement in contemporary art.

Well, let me take that back.   There is a neo-gothic art manifesto.  But it did not yield any substantial body of work by members subscribing to it.

What I would like for us to explore in this module is the gothic as an enduring mode, as a rejection or problematizing of the bright side and the supposed right side.

It is a mode that keeps resurfacing, especially in response to social upheaval, violent regime changes, and acts of terrorism. “On September 11 we all witnessed what could be described as a manifestation of the demonic […],” the New York art critic Jerry Saltz remarked in an article titled “Modern Gothic.” It was published in the Village Voice on 27 Jan. 2004, little over two years after the horrific and transformative event we now refer to as 9/11.

“The Gothic has never really left,” Saltz concluded. “One hell was replaced by another […].” 

The gothic spirit or mode resurfaces in response to crisis. It is no coincidence that the figure of the blood-sucking vampire resurfaced with a vengeance during the AIDS or that the Zombie returned in response to 9/11, when hundreds of ash-covered office workers in New York slowly walked uptown, numb and trembling.

“Gothic” is not just a Western preoccupation with the Middle Ages or the sins of our forebears. Covid, for instance, gave rise again to anxieties about deadly transmissible diseases, to fears of invisible threats to our lives, and to unease about social interactions as well as government overreach in their prevention.

The Gothic, as Roger Luckhurst suggests, is ultimately about us. It manifests our attitude toward the past, our dread of the future, and our uneasy negotiation of the present. Luckhurst relates this to the twenty-first century phenomenon of the Zombie walk. On World Zombie Day, people “around the world dress up as their undead selves […].” 

“It turns out,” Luckhurst concludes, “that after all these twists and turns in the labyrinths of [g]othic culture, what we most want to confront is the enigma of ourselves.” And what subject is more complicated than that?

This series continues with Gothic Identities.