The obscenity trial that made H. R. Giger an icon for punk rock and free speech

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Jello Biafra (center), H. R. Giger (right), and Chris Stein (left) of the band Blondie in 1993 at Stein’s New York loft. (Courtesy of Leslie Barany, Giger’s longtime agent.)

In 1985, Jello Biafra, the singer of the punk band the Dead Kennedys, came across a painting by the Swiss surrealist artist H. R. Giger in a copy of Omni magazine. “I was absolutely floored,” Biafra says in a new interview (audio) posted on the website of his record label, Alternative Tentacles. “Best stuff I’d seen since Bosch.”

The encounter of the two iconoclastic artists led to one of the opening salvos in the 1980s culture wars—and an emotionally satisfying victory of artistic freedom over censorship, even if it turned out to be only a pyrrhic one.

When Giger died last week at 74, after a fall, he left behind a trail of images that linger in the mind much like the nightmares that troubled his sleep. His visual style, which mixed gothic decay with serpentine futurism, left a deep impression on anyone who experienced it in the 1979 sci-fi classic Alien (for which he won an Oscar for visual effects). But Giger also had a powerful effect on visual culture in an entirely different arena, far from multimillion-dollar Hollywood franchises.

His artwork became the center of a legal case around the Dead Kennedys’ third album, “Frankenchrist,” after Biafra inserted a poster of Giger’s “Landscape XX” (also known as “Penis Landscape”) in the record sleeve. “This picture is like Reagan America on parade,” Biafra recalls thinking the first time he saw it.

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http://qz.com/210900/the-obscenity-trial-that-made-h-r-giger-an-icon-for-punk-rock-and-free-speech/