By James Balestrieri
LOS ANGELES, CALIF. — The essence of “Guillermo del Toro: At Home With Monsters,” the strange and wonderful exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) through November 27, is this: Guillermo del Toro, born in 1964, is a major writer and director whose films include Cronos (1993), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Hellboy (2004), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Pacific Rim (2013) and Crimson Peak (2015). He is a master who creates worlds that embrace horror, science fiction, fantasy and fairy tales. He insists that, as fantastic as they are, these worlds are located and grounded beside, beneath and in the real world, our world — a world, he might argue, that we merely imagine as real. The membrane separating these worlds is thin, porous and portal-ridden. The worlds are distorted reflections of one another. This distortion becomes the occasion for his ideas and art.
Jointly organized by LACMA with the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario, this first retrospective of the filmmaker’s work arrays sculpture, paintings, prints, photography, costumes, ancient artifacts, books, maquettes and film to create a complex portrait of a creative genius. Roughly 60 of the 500 objects on view are from LACMA’s collection. More belong to the artist.
An important work of his imagination is his suburban Los Angeles house, a place where he is entirely at home — hence the exhibition title — a place filled with his own creations and the inspirations for those creations, images of nightmarish “elsewheres” and “elsewhens” that he has amassed and commissioned.
The LACMA show recreates some of the rooms and spaces in del Toro’s home, Bleak House (thank you, Charles Dickens), and asks some important questions about the shimmering immanence of certain things in our lives; about the power they have and hold for us and over us; about the nature of collecting and the feeling that the things we collect actually collect us; about the window into the collector’s life and soul that the private collection, the cabinet of curiosities in all its eclecticism, opens, and how that differs from the encyclopedic motivation of the museum, which, of necessity, sacrifices that deep connection for scholarly, political and civic goals.
Del Toro lives with muses like H.P. Lovecraft, whose life-sized statue stands in one of the artist’s rooms, opposite a seated life-sized Edgar Allan Poe. Poe and Lovecraft are arguably the twin dark princes of horror, weird and cosmic fiction. They are wellsprings for del Toro’s art. Though they deal and dwell in some of the same primordial anxieties, there are significant differences between del Toro and his forebears. Lovecraft, for example, wrote in his essential 1927 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
Later in the essay, he wrote, “A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”
Lovecraft was afraid of the creatures of his imagination and the otherness in the world that gave rise to those creatures. Though Lovecraft had shed the worst of his phobias before his early death, characters in his beautifully rendered fictions still only barely manage to stave off what he saw as an inevitable doom.
By contrast, Guillermo del Toro’s career (career is a weak word for it; better to speak of life and mission) is to make the invisible visible, to bring the outsider inside, to make monsters not so that we may measure ourselves against them and find them hideous, malevolent and amoral, but so that we might see how human they are and know that what we find wanting in them is nothing more than a pale, spectral reflection of the hypocrisies that shoot through the conventions of our upright, moral lives.
According to Britt Salvesen, curator and department head of LACMA’s Wallis Annenberg photography department and its prints and drawings department, del Toro sees himself as an outsider and a champion of difference. Del Toro, says Salvesen, suggests “that the most frightening, dangerous people are those who are profoundly certain or profoundly ignorant…. In his films, he creates worlds that exist between those extremes of certainty and ignorance: complex worlds where outsiders find community, where ambiguity and loss are acknowledged, and where hierarchies of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture are ignored. Celebrating diversity, difference, curiosity and historical self-awareness, he inspires viewers to be open to the world in all its beauty and brutality.”
Del Toro’s favorite monster is Frankenstein’s “Creature,” as evidenced by the enormous head in Bleak House, sized to match the size and height of the image as it would have appeared on screen in the classic 1931 film that starred Boris Karloff as the “Creature.” Frankenstein, to del Toro, sums up all of human creation — including filmmaking. The “Creature,” like all works of art, is a patchwork of pieces constructed according to an ideal that both falls short and, as it comes to life, exceeds its creator’s intentions. Elsewhere in his home, del Toro has a tableau of Karloff and his makeup artist, transforming the actor’s head. The incongruity of the Frankenstein head atop Karloff’s body adds yet another layer of creative construction to what began as a ghost story that came to Mary Shelley in a dream in 1814.
Del Toro, who began his career as a makeup artist, has a fascination with movie magic, though he avoids computer-generated images when he can, preferring hands-on, dream-factory effects, like those of stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen. In life-size likeness, Harryhausen sits in a corner of del Toro’s house, tickled joyously by tiny, fairy versions of his famous skeletal warriors, sown from dragon’s teeth, that rise to fight the Greek heroes in the classic 1963 film, Jason and the Argonauts.
What is unique about the collection of objects in del Toro’s home, and about his collecting impulse, is that they celebrate who he is, not who he wishes he were. His house, strange as it may seem to others, is an emblem of his contentment, resembling a giant galvanic conductor or Tesla coil that channels his creative force. Guillermo del Toro dwells in a cabinet of curiosities that is, in fact, an alchemical battery.
By contrast, the impulse to collect oftentimes seems to arise out of the collector’s perception of an absence, an affinity with a lost, unrecoverable past — sometimes the collector’s own past, sometimes a very distant era. The objects from that past, whether they are landscape watercolors, antique fishing lures, Colonial pewter, jadeite netsuke or anything else, make a connection, throw a bridge from now to then, from here to there, papering over the gulf. Owning a piece of the past is a delicious impossibility, but those of us who love art and antiques embrace the paradox unconditionally.
When asked about the difficulties del Toro has faced in his drive to bring Lovecraft’s finest novella, At the Mountains of Madness, to the big screen, and the challenges of recreating Lovecraft’s cosmic worlds and inhabitants, which are Cyclopean, non-Euclidean, immense and beyond description, Salvesen replied, “Del Toro grew up absorbing literature, medical encyclopedias and art-historical texts, alongside comic books and horror movies. His approach to creature design and world building is correspondingly wide-ranging. He is fascinated with the literature of magic and occultism — the persistent human quest for alternative realities, forbidden knowledge, transformation and immorality. His knowledge of these traditions fuels his concepts of space and time, which he often depicts in terms of multiple realms with permeable boundaries.”
Alternative realities, immortality, multiple realms, permeable boundaries — this is the lifeblood of every serious collector. In Cronos, del Toro explores the world of antiques when an old dealer finds a golden scarab created by an alchemist. The scarab restores the old man to health but also transforms him into a vampire. To covet and be consumed by the things we love does not generally make us want to drink blood. As with all loves, it can be a source of great happiness and joy, even when we pine for one last missing piece.
The catalog to the exhibition will surely keep you up at night. Published by Insight Editions, it is edited by Salvesen, Jim Shedden and Matthew Welch and contains contributions by del Toro, Keith McDonald, Roger Clark and Paul Koudounaris.
Following its close at LACMA, “Guillermo del Toro” travels to the Minneapolis Institute of Art from February 26 to May 21, and to the Art Gallery of Toronto from September 30, 2017, to January 7, 2018.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is at 5905 Wilshire Boulevard. For information, www.lacma.org or 323-857-6000.
Jim Balestrieri is director of J.N. Bartfield Galleries in New York City. A playwright and author, he writes frequently about the arts.
