There is an infamous building on our campus, called “Montgomery House” or more commonly, “Monty.” Monty is the building for animation, game design, special effects, sound design, and basically everything that requires highly powerful, highly specialized computers and software. The building is infamous for a couple of reasons. It’s located pretty far away from any other building, for one.
The building itself used to be a coffin factory, no joke. Another is the building has no windows. None. There are also no clocks anywhere. Once you enter Monty, you are completely separated from the flow of time and the light of day. Probably the reason Monty is most known though is because students in the “monty majors” have to spend a lot of time there. A lot. It is not uncommon for somebody to spend more than a few days exclusively within the sunless, dark walls of Monty. If you go to the building, it is not surprising to see students sleeping on the floor, on the few chairs available, on the computers. Some bring sleeping bags and rations. Some just forgo sleep, buy espresso shots and work. The entire building just smells of coffee and sweat. It really seems like an exageration, but its not hyperbole.
Why I bring this up is because of something that’s started recenetly. Inside the building, the school has hung up artwork on the walls from other majors as is typical on campus. One of the artworks was a self-portrait painting of a man with long, scraggly brown hair and a full beard looking pensively off into the distance. The painting became known as “Monty Jesus.”
Students, in their desperation for their files to render, or the computers to work, began to offer prayers to Monty Jesus. Soon, they began writing their prayers and taping them next to the painting. The wall is now covered, completly plastered, in prayers to Monty Jesus for things like “Fix the wifi” and “let me live through finals” and more simply “help me.” Candles have been added. Literal candles are placed around Monty Jesus in hopes he will help them.
This is how religions are born. Monty Jesus is considered a “joke”, but people at Monty still hold…. quite a lot of superstitious faith in the concept. There is even talk of a “Monty Satan” that creates software failures. It might be in jest, but these students really are hoping for some force to help them. And they’ve given it a name, an image, and respect. Monty Jesus is real, and I’m sure of it. The desperate students have created their own spirit and their own form of worship, out of need.
Religion, spirituality, didn’t stop being relevant. It didn’t stop being something people need and want, and have the desire to create. It’s still happening, and it always will as long as their are people. The spirit of creation, new deities and new worship, is alive and well today and should not be ignored simply because it is “new” or “a joke.”
Monty Jesus is Real and Strong and Our Friend
SCAD is such a weird and magical place.
As soon as I saw “Monty” I knew this was about my school
I go to this school and I can confirm he is real. Another weird happening that occurred in the dorm adjacent to Monty is the smashed fly incident. Basically, someone smashed a fly on the stairway wall in the dorm and, because no janitor in this building ever bothers to thoroughly clean the place, the fly stayed there for a good few weeks. Eventually, one of the students wrote “ART” next to the fly with a sharpie, and a few days after that, someone made a tiny frame and name tag to accompany the art piece
Eventually some fool took this beautiful art piece down, and someone wrote a goddamn article about it in our school newspaper
which prompted several students to erect a mini shrine on the stairwell in honor of the smashed fly. Art school is truly a magical place.
Sculpted by Kevon Ward and maybe you think this is one of those cases where a “realistic interpretation” goes over the top but really this is 100% what they would have looked like if they were alive.
Kapoor or one of his agents has, it’s worth noting, violated the terms of service put forth on Semple’s website, and Semple isn’t happy. He expressed his deep concern over the situation in an email to artnet News:
We are all extremely disappointed to see that Anish Kapoor has illegally acquired the world’s pinkest pink. He’s walked into this paint war with a gesture that cannot be misconstrued. He’s given the art community a bright pink middle finger. He is still very much at large. Not only has he refused to share the black, he’s now stolen our pink. Rest assured, we will get to the bottom of who has purchased this on Anish Kapoor’s behalf and broken their contractual agreement with culturehustle.com, and we will instruct our lawyers to take appropriate action against such breaches. We are pleased to note that he has not managed to get his hands on the World’s Glitteriest Glitter—yet—and we urge purchasers not to share the product with Kapoor or his associates.
god i can never stop thinking about certain sculptures used in modern art and how they can be used to elicit the beautiful and terrible feeling of true and genuine horror in ways that a lot of horror movies can never do
like when you ask people “what is horror?” they’ll tend to give examples of monsters, of killers, of dark places, of sharp teeth and too many legs and lots and lots of blood. which is true, that can be used as horror! but i’d like to call that “the horror of being eaten/hurt/killed” or more succinctly “the horror of vulnerability”. it’s a horror that something, whether it’s a killer or a monster or some phenomenon, has the ability to cause us harm. we see large amounts of teeth and we think “that thing is going to tear us to pieces with those teeth” or we see spilled blood and we think “someone has been hurt, there’s a chance we can be hurt too by whatever spilled this blood”.
but what certain modern sculptures can do is elicit a very physical visceral reaction of a completely different kind of horror.
it’s “the horror that something is a thing that SHOULD not exist, and you are absolutely powerless to understand what it is, but it is existing in your space, right now, it is real and you cannot make it unreal no matter what you do”
or perhaps, in a shorter fashion, it’s “the horror of wrongness”
like one of the sculptures that made me feel this way is this sculpture here, named “Monekana” located in the American Art Museum in Washington D.C:
“okay,” you say, with a shrug. “it’s a horse made of wood? what’s so scary about that?”. but this is the lie of the photograph! a photograph of a sculpture rarely grasps the experience of standing next to a sculpture. you have to picture yourself walking into this room, practically devoid of people, and coming face to face with this sculpture that is very large and very real.
and your brain screams that “THIS IS WRONG. MAKE IT GO AWAY. THIS IS WRONG”, like at any moment you expect it to move, to twist its head, to follow you with eyes that aren’t simply there. it looks like a horse but it is no horse. you could almost argue that maybe it isn’t even an art piece at all, but it wandered in from god knows what kind of world and it’s blending in with everything else. maybe it’s fooling you. maybe it isn’t.
anyways, i’m not trying to say that this sculpture in particular is SUPPOSED to be scary, it may make other people feel nothing at all (or even positive feelings!), but what i’m trying to say is that feeling i had that day, when i saw this thing, when i felt this fearful instinct to stay away and not stare, it’s THAT feeling that i feel so many writers and makers of horror don’t completely understand. you don’t need teeth. you don’t need blood. you don’t need to make Spooky Scary Skeletons or chainsaw-wielding villains. all you need is to create something wrong in its existence, something to make parts of us fear the fact that we can’t entirely rationalize what we’re seeing.
The experience of sculpture absolutely gets lost in images. I’ve walked into museums and been like WOW THE FUCK even when I knew it was coming.
I love this subject, though. I love “implication horror.” You see something, and the realization of what it means, which often comes a few moments later, is where the real horror lies—not in how splattery or gratuitously shocking it is. The wrongness of a thing in fiction, when done well, is the best. I was watching Melancholia the other day, and what a terrifying example of wrongness horror.
Anyway this is such a great post thanks for putting the whole idea into words so well. <3
This is how I feel about wind turbines (I tried to walk up to one once and felt the most inexplicable terror I’ve ever felt in my life), or most things that are ridiculously large, for that matter. Ships fascinate me but make me feel very uneasy. Certain buildings, especially if they look old-timey in any way kind of freak me out.
Examples: The Halifax shipyard building made me feel almost nauseous, and I have to drive past this cold storage building in Winnipeg every time I go to visit my boyfriend’s parents. I do not like it one bit.
Also, I got to see that sculpture of a giant newborn baby last year. That was very surreal in the way that is described here.
WHAT AMAZING ADDITIONS TO THIS POST, thank you! I didn’t know of Kalus Pinter’s work and now I REALLY want to see it for myself, goodness.
Honestly, I’m so glad so many people have responded and reblogged this post with examples and stories of their own!! It’s so cool to see just what people think and perceive as this horror of “wrongness”. I also see some people saying that this is essentially the uncanny valley effect, which is only an aspect of this kind of horror - the uncanny valley primarily deals with something we perceive that looks close to human and yet doesn’t quite make it there. It’s just one subset of a really uneasy sort of horror that can be found in so many forms, which may really honestly differ from person to person.
Overall, THIS HORROR IS WIDELY UNDERUSED IN FICTION and I’m so glad to see so many examples of it posted here!!
I feel this way about kangaroos. If you really look at a kangaroo for a minute it’s deeply unsettling, they’re bipedal and they have insane abs and they move wrong, it’s too human and I get that creeping horror that this thing exists. If I look at kangaroos too long I feel like I’m going insane
Louise Bourgeois’s spider sculptures did this to me, a bit. It was less the shape than the form–the lumpiness, the uneven shine–but mostly it was the scale. Most of these examples of horror don’t feel quite so wrong when they’re at a scale we can look “down” on. But when they overshadow us, or at least when they overshadow our general certainty of control, even for just a moment, the disorientation can slip suddenly into horror.
consider the Gelitin collective’s enormous pink rabbit left to rot in the Italian alps for the next 10 years
Eoin Mc Hugh - The Ground Itself is Kind, Black Butter, 2014
Kiki Smith’s lilith sculpture is more humanoid but i feel like it belongs on this post because walking into the stairwell in the met and seeing this fucking thing was one of the most unnerving experiences in my life
If “the horror of wrongness” makes your soul sing as it does mine, read literally anything by Robert Aickman. My favorite is “The Hospice”.
in terms of literature, my favorite example of the horror of wrongness is ‘declare’ by tim powers. if you want to be slightly creeped out by concentric circles for the rest of your life, read it. it’s… mostly a spy novel.
