This month “GOTH: Designing Darkness ”, an art book by Design Museum Den Bosch, created in tandem with the museum’s GOTH exhibit (which runs now through April of this year.) Western Goth was represented in the book by the Heathen Apostles, who had two BTS photos from their Death’s Head video (from 2014’s Fire to the Fuse album). The following is from promotion materials for the book.
The exhibition is accompanied by a book, compiled by curator Timo de Rijk and cultural historian Eric Smulders and designed by Yvo Zijlstra. It offers a visual exploration of the themes of GOTH – Designing Darkness , in which the works featured in the exhibition are complemented by contemporary and historical images from popular culture, art history and journalism. The book tells the story of Goth through a stimulating combination of images and quotes that have never previously been combined in this context before. It is scheduled for publication at the end of November and will be available through the museum and quality book stores.
Goth is the world’s biggest subculture. A lifestyle steeped in an undefined yearning for the dark side of life. GOTH – Designing Darkness looks for the wellspring of the Goth scene to present two centuries of a cultural history packed with dramatic imaginings, ominous design and melancholic art. In the heart of historic Den Bosch, with its medieval and neo-Gothic monuments, GOTH – Designing Darkness also shows how this dark subculture is given visual shape today. Such darkness as was never before seen in a museum…
Goth is not a style but the visual expression of a feeling: the ‘seductive darkness’, a romantic, melancholic vision that after more than two centuries has firmly anchored itself in our culture. It is a powerful form of escapism – an attempt to forget the regular world and to hold a mirror up to it. Goth rejects a disenchanted modern society in which everything is open to explanation and offers the opportunity instead to lose yourself in a world of deep meaning, black magic and ineffable secrets in search of rapture and sensation. (And this all includes Western Goth).
