Description
Anarch is a profound work of sinister animism and sorcerous practice, a unique account of the path taken towards the dark sacred in a lifetime of personal struggle and artistic creation.
Gast Bouschet is a singular artist, who has gone from desecrating the white cubes of the contemporary gallery space to a withdrawal into the crucible of forest from which issues his howls of vengeance, and potent spells against the excesses of civilisation.
Anarch collects a sequence of Bouschet’s excoriating elemental texts, which attest to his journey from the gallery shows of the international art circuit to a withdrawal into the primordial darkness of the forest and an encounter with power. Rejecting commodified art and the restrictions of a capitalist market he proposes an occult art, a counter-poison. Engaging with the non-human world of microbes, larvae, disease and predation, he shows how ‘the radical otherness of Radiant Darkness teaches us the demonic art of living beyond the edge of a fixed form.’
Bouschet discusses his techniques, practices and meditations; and shares diary extracts, revealing the signs and sacrifices he receives and undergoes. Here is the true black alchemy of the Sol Niger and the Saturnian current laid bare.
The texts lead us inexorably to the encounter with the works: 100 moments are exactingly reproduced in full colour, as they decay and are transformed by the forces of the forest. Fetishes, animal remains, paintings, spellbooks, moments of epiphanic revelation draw us into the tortured guts of the Ardennes which bask beneath the splendour of a black Sun. He writes,
‘They exist somewhere between the living and the dead: elementals, bacteria and fungi inhabit them, dragonflies land on them, birds shit on them, rats and mice feed on them, spiders weave their webs around them, insects lay their eggs inside them. Sorcery is a dangerous and messy affair as it brings together what is supposed to stay apart.’
Anarch transgresses the boundaries of the human experience and confronts us with the abyss. It is the epitome of what has been described as ‘black metal philosophy,’ is an example of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, and Bataille’s base materialism. Defying even these categories, Anarch is ultimately a work of clandestine sorcery and ecological resistance, and an unrivalled record of contemporary magical artistic practice.
The book is prefaced by writer and philosopher Jason Mohaghegh and by Bouschet’s longterm collaborator Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))).
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