Conspiracy Weary

“Healter Skelter”-24″ x 36″ – Oil on canvas (2012)

“I saw Elvis in a potato chip once.”

Fox Mulder, the X-Files

Today marks fifty years since the strata was jolted by news of the Manson killings, and other than the brouhaha around Tarantino’s latest desultory offing, it’s barely warranted a footnote in the press.

Unsurprising really, and frankly warranted, given the eclipsing daily horror show in this country right now. Although, given that both eras represent discriminate murders, initiated by cult members and galvanized by the rantings of a deranged egomaniac, it could be argued that recent headlines could give those of half a century ago a run for their money.

Still, I note the anniversary because of the Man/son and the haunting of the American Madonna showcase, that consumed me through much of 2012.  Back then, bolstered by a literary diet that comprised things like the hefty volumes of Peter Levedna’s Sinister Forces,  Adam Gorightly’s The Shadow over Santa Susana, and every dank rabbit hole on the dark web-I crafted myself a tinfoil hat so tight, I almost microwaved grey matter.

That’s not to undermine the revelations I made during that particular artistic odyssey-I stand by what I said at the time, ” the connections around the Manson case are unfathomable and have far reaching implications not just on our lives, but on a level that defies understanding”.
It does however give me a micro speck of insight, into the malaise of modern conspiracy theorists; basement dwellers, pulling on threads so to weave a magical carpet, and comfortably seat their confirmation biases on.

For what began with conspiracies about the Kennedy assassination, Roswell, the moon landing, Manson -has mutated and become the provenience of alt right agitators from 4chan cesspits, promulgating batshit schemes about Pizza parlors and the Earth being flat.
Or mass shootings as false flag events where the victims are crisis actors.

When ultimately, it’s all just another spiritual quest for understanding, a way to mollify the shared human guilt of  barbarism.

In making Gods of our fears, and seeking sense of existence as a wasted byproduct for some omniscient grand plan…one discovers there isn’t any to be measured.

Killing is the ultimate zero sum, self destructive act where man is nihilist,and nothing divine.

You can read my musings from the series, in my book Rise-Man/son and the Haunting of the American Madonna, available from the following link or purchase a signed art print:

Man/son Art book

Healter Skelter Art Print

The death of Manson

You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody’s crazy.

Charles Manson

“Something Witchy” (2012) Oil on canvas, 11″ x 14″

So Charlie-the self proclaimed “God of Fuck”-has finally left this mortal coil. I’ve already said everything I thought I had to say in that regard, but I guess I ought to share my thoughts since so many comments were curious what those where now he has passed.

Whether one wants to believe that Manson was a mind-controlled, puppet messiah, programmed to terminate the hippie dream, or a patsy prophet, he certainly shouldn’t be lionized or vindicated, regardless of how ultimately complicit he was in snuffing the lives of Stephen Parent, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Sharon Tate, Paul Polanski, Leno LaBianca and Rosemary LaBianca.

One thing is certain, Manson was an able and charismatic grifter with the gift of the gibber gab. A pontificate who stoked a climate of paranoia, hatred and apocalyptic level fear to a group of gullible and disenfranchised cult disciples, who would go on to do something truly diabolical in his name.

For myself, it is a welcome reminder to be mindful of parallels, of false prophets who profiteer, because it seems no less apropos, that Manson dies in the era that he does.

You can see the entire series I produced for the 2012 solo exhibit at Hyaena Gallery from the following:

Man/son and the haunting of the American Madonna 

Or watch my interview expounding my research on the Manson case, in John Borowski’s Serial Killer Culture streaming on Amazon Prime.

Or read the art book I compiled from my research:

RISE

SERIAL KILLER CULTURE NOW STREAMING ON NETFLIX

Hard to believe that just two short years ago, I was in a similar storm working on the Man/son showcase. Of course-the scale, proportions and the month of fevered frenzy it took, are worlds apart from the years work I have just undertaken. Still, evoking as it did; the dark Cabalistic, turbulence surrounding a ritualistic killing during the summer of 69, and threading the seeping black tendrils of madness and paranoia spanning centuries, is not the best of pursuits when you are painting for fourteen hours a day,  inhaling turpentine in 106 degrees and listening to Revolution 9 on repeat.

Still, I came out the other side, none the richer or wiser, and now since it's part of the segment of a documentary called Serial Killer Culture, you can stream my fifteen minute moment, to see and hear more for yourself.

SERIAL KILLER CULTURE ON NETFLIX

Stream Serial Killer Culture

 Just a missive to tell you that Serial Killer Culture is now available to stream for just $19.98, watch it now and receive a Free copy autographed by the film maker John Borowski when it drops on April 1st. I've not had chance to view it myself yet, as I'm doing some killing of my own, but having seen some snippets, it'll make for great viewing on this wet and windy weekend.

Stream and order from the following: serialkillerculture.filmbinder.com

Edit: You can also stream it from Amazon HERE

Man/son Bizarre Bazaar

Finally bagged myself a copy courtesy of my daughter-Bad Vibes and Something Witchy sharing column space in an article about Serial Killers. Splendid.

Newcomers whose interest was piqued enough to make it thus far-Most Welcome!! For the uninitiated, the Cliff notes are as follows...

My insidious study of sinister architecture surrounding the Manson case culminated in a month of frenzied activity for the Man/son and the haunting of the American Madonna show, which ran during October 2012 at Hyaena Gallery in LA. 

It was an undertaking borne in the mouth of madness,and by the end I was frazzled from dancing with dark forces and could hear Charlies grizzled voice in my sleep.

 The full gallery's for the show can be found on my website: 

http://davidgoughart.com/Manson_gallery.html 

Those paintings, plus my crazed meanderings are noted for posterity in a book entitled Rise-which was released February last year and can be purchased from the following:

http://davidgoughart.com/Art_Books/Rise-Manson.php

The pieces are to be featured in a forthcoming documentary entitled Serial Killer Culture, which premiered in Chicago recently, and shall be streaming on Netflix soon-trailer below, details to follow:



I also did a podcast to discuss the series last year which you can listen to here:

Upon a midnight dreary podcast

I think that's about the size of it, but you are welcome to stick around,there's bigger and better things to come.

Man/son series featured in Bizarre magazine

Way back when I was living in old Blighty, there was a crucial subscription of esoteric reading retinue which would inform and inspire the old muse, should she feel a dark appetite for general weirdness. That magazine was aptly titled-Bizarre.

It's with great delight and honor then, that I can announce that those awesome folks at Bizarre HQ have selected some of the pieces from the Man/son series for a feature on serial killer art, as well as decorating the cover with the work 'Something Witchy'-whereupon the deadly triumvirate of Manson,Hitler and Blavatsky glare ominously alongside a lucious redhead looking perhaps like a distant relative of Sharon Tate.

The arc continues. 

I've not had a chance to look through a copy myself yet, but it goes on sale in the UK on the 21st and is available elsewhere (probably) at specialist outlets or through Zinio.com.

Sharon Tate and the daughters of Joy

One of the most tremendous and extraordinary happenstances to come in the wake of the Man/son show last year, was my introduction to David Herrle, whose opus Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy, has just been released. 
Expounding a similar trough, Davids prose is a fascinating rhythmic riff on an eternal arc of the goddess, femme fatal and eviscerated muse through history,and I was honored then to be asked to contribute my 2010 piece-the Valley-as the frontispiece. That aside, I make no bones when I say that I believe Herrles work is as profound as Ginsberg's "Howl" and every bit the master painter with epigrams, I'll leave you with a selection of his remarkable prose, and the hope that you will click the  following link and fill someones stocking: 

check out Sharon Tate and the daughters of Joy


UNTITLED, or UNTAINTED
 
Scatalogicians say “we’re born between urine and feces”
and evolutionists reduce human births to fishy non-events.

I rebut that we burst from Zeus’ head and correspond
to true love as the moon reflects the sun.

We are one part piss and shit, three parts magic.
There is a vast heaven between the hole and the hole.

REVERSE GALATEA

 I stand against genetic egalitarians, insisting — and proving —
that there are perfect tens among us, that the streets, malls,
schools, slums and cubicle lands teem with females that shame
Playmates, Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, Gibson Girls, Miss USAs.

Physical beauty and limbic dope can't make us righteous or
inspire peace (those darling pinups on bomber noses: all femmes
fatales) so we must abstract delectable flesh into concept, Muse,
trickle-up aesthetics: unveil the Sublime, inform the world of Forms.

This is the Reverse Galatea, an unreification, a Cocochanelism.
Let's piss off gender-feminists and Left and Right ascetics.

My radical subversion compels me to saturate the social sphere
with post-Pre-Raphaelite cream women, hot ebon lovelies and
supermodels, conflate proto-Soviet Plato with Marie Claire, shine
pop culture's flooziest swan-sired Helens into Nurse Ratcheds' eyes.

Offend puritan Hitlers, Marlene Dietrich! Toss your bra at social
realism, Dita Teese! Muffle Rembrandt noses, Courbet bushes!

The Aesthetes were right in praising scopophilic and olfactory
bondage: arresting style and images, powder, blush and perfume,
Prada over Pravda, because curative visual frottage stimulates a
sugary ooze to gum up utilitarian machines and appall soul-police.

Mary Poppins is Julie Andrews (not the marm of the books), Gypsy Rose
Lee frees, Trudy Stein jails, Joplin's a jalopy, and Katy Perry's a Ferrari.

We need gorgeous gargoyles to repel drab demons, a return to pulp
magazines' dichotomous depictions: an aesthetic equivalent to war-
propaganda art that defends the pure genius of being good-looking.
Who's afraid of Naomi Wolf? Not us! Beauty is an ever-expanding box!

Pin-up artists Vargas and MacPherson are high-treasonous.The centerfold is a revolutionary act.

Darkness falls

"The night will always win.
The night has darkness on it's side"

Elbow


You can't see it yet, but I never had a painting defy me so much before. Shall I tell you, that we've had the most torturous, tempestuous, taciturn, tantrums together. A veritable Tempest in fact, which-given the theme and adjunct velocity of recent events-is as close to tapping the vein as nicking an artery with a straight razor.

 I think of Manson whenever I hear "straight razor", along with "boxcar" and "jug of wine", which-given my inclination to the latter-means he's constantly in the shadows, even when he isn't making the news for pending nuptials to a 20 something Mansonoid.

 I digress.

The shadows is certainly why then, the new one is behaving so precociously willful, since my every intention with the last series was to exorcise black from my palette...in more ways than one might imagine. 
Naturally, the dark is a constant periphery for me, the oily slug of lamp black-an oxymoron if ever there was-my default. Why that is I could attribute as much to some unfathomable predisposition as much as the dark pockmarks stung by life, but there you have it.

It took the faux Frieda Kahlo exhibit at Liberty Station to shake me of my doldrums, shine a beacon and all that cliche jive. My word-all that pain and bitter disappointment, embellished by other hands in garland hues, light dancing in every corner, vivid brilliance illuminating sharper than a boxcars glass shards. Misery by proxy.

Except, afterwards, I scrawled something on a dogs ear, about her legacy seeming like the suffering theater of female empowerment in the face of misogyny, but it felt misogynistic to even pursue the trains thought.

It struck me that in all things, it's too easy to cast shadows. 

In that light, Vincent begins to almost make sense.

Final trailer for Serial Killer Culture

Dropped today, the latest trailer for John Borowski's Serial Killer Culture-the documentary I was interviewed for about my Man/son showcase. Featuring as it does, Joe Coleman, the Crawlspace Brothers, Hart Fisher, Matthew Aarronn, Macabre and a host of others,  I appear briefly at around the 1.15 mark.

No word on a release date, but I have it on good authority that it should be available at select screenings soon, as well as on general release through Netflix streaming in the new year.

Permanent fixture at Hyaena Gallery (for now.)

I was reminded by a link on my news feed today, that along with some fine Art prints-you can still see some of the original pieces from Octobers Man/son show at Hyeana, including the pivotal painting-'Healter Skelter' (below)
Check out the link or contact myself or Hyaena if you are interested in purchasing any of the available work.

http://hyaenagallery.com/davidvangough.html

Rise-Man/son and the Haunting of the American Madonna.

On February 18th, it shall be 41 years since the death sentence of Charles Manson and his three followers was revoked to life imprisonment. Its seems almost timely then, that as a reminder of why he and his murderous cohorts were incarcerated, I am pleased to announce that I am releasing my second art book-Rise: Man/son and the Haunting of the American Madonna, which will include art from last years exhibition, along with annotations, sketches and notes that accompanied the series.

More details to follow.

Bad Vibes: The Devils Business by David Van Gough

"I'm the Devil, here to do the Devils business." With those words, Tex Watson scatter-shot the oncoming carnage at Cielo Drive with diabolical import.

Tex-who like Susan Atkins-would conveniently find God in the cold concrete realities of a State penitentiary 6" x 8".
Tex, whose parole would be advocated by Susan Struthers, the daughter of the slain La Bianca's.

But that was later. There were grander forces at play in Tex's telemetry before Cielo Drive.

Several hundred years of bad vibes "man",sacred geometry's, archaic symbols, clandestine orders, dark intentions, threads colliding and colluding on the psychic human tapestry, to form the foundations of a sinister architecture.

Or in the words of Manson...


"From the world of darkness, I did loose demons and devils in the power of scorpions to torment."





The Man/son show runs until the 31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA.  

The Death of the '60's by David Van Gough

 

"There was something horrible permeating the air in LA in those days. The stench of Manson and the Sharon Tate murders." 
David Bowie talking about living in LA in the 1970's

August 9th 1969. It was meant to be the dawning of the Age of Aquarius....the final median before the new decade.Two weeks on, the grainy spectacle of the Moon landings still resonated, mollifying the shadow of Vietnam and two dead Kennedy's. It was also the anniversary of Nagasaki*, as well as the birth date of Ed Gien. Two disparate moments, connected by a thread no less devastating in its repercussion.

For whilst the events at 10050 Cielo Drive that night, paled when measured against the true horror of 80,000 deaths, the fallout that radiated from the bloody carve up of a pregnant celebrity and her three friends was a secession on the hedonism of the decade, farther reaching in the collective conscious (or conscience) of America's fucked up tapestry, than any atom bomb.
The dawning of the new age was ritualized with the blood of an innocent.

That's the true travesty of Manson legacy, the true infallible obscenity, a decade christened by a faux slain Madonna and her unborn infant.

The 70's stillborn. 

There could only be ashes beyond.

* for those wanting to pursue further Occult significance around the date, the flag from Nagasaki is the five pointed star, with five hermetic crosses in the center.


The Man/son show runs until the 31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA.  

Man/Son preview night on Cartwheelart

Saturday was the official opening night of the Man/son showcase, and was easily my most successful show to date. I could give you all a full account, except the wonderful people at Cartwheelart have done it so much more eloquently than I could. Thank you Lisa at Cartwheel, thank you Hyaena, thank you Dahlia Jane who looked incredible in her Manson dress especially made for the occasion, and thank you everyone who came out and supported me.

Cartwheelart article

Paul is Dead by David Van Gough

Around the time the Beatles were supposedly seeding there waxings and sleeve artwork with messages that one of their number was deceased, Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski conceived a child who would be named Paul.

Had Sharon been hastily Cesarianed-as Sadie ghoulishly considered- Paul Polanski might have been born as an offering for Charlies Collective.

Paul Polanski,  an infant spawned of sacrifice and ceremony like Rosmary's baby, a lion cub born of Jupiter like one of Crowleys moonchildren birthed in ritualized blood, a pupae that could be imprinted as a Monarch for the new dawn.

Paul would have been forty three years of age this year had he lived. What kind of life would be brought to consciousness by a baptism of slaughter and fire, I wonder? What kind of Man?

A son of man?

A son of Manson?


The Man/son show runs from the 1st-31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA. Opening 6th October 8pm-12am  

Pig by David Van Gough

It was the doorway of a new perception, a doorway to carnage, smeared with Sharons blood the word "Pig"-a welcome matt, a single label pronouncement that could have come courtesy of Orwell's Animal farm.

On the fag end of the 60's, Police, politicians and squares were pigs.  If you were the man, you were a pig. Tricky Dicky was most certainly a pig. And to Charlie's far out assassins, Sharon and her four friends, with there beauty and privileged Hollyweird lifestyle, were pigs of the lowest order,ripe for the butchers knife.

 I wonder if Atkins knew she was conjuring allusions to the pregnant Egyptian Goddess, Neuth as she daubed the letters on the door with her blood stained towel. I wonder if she knew it signaled a ritual passage for a birth of a new dark age.

Sharon's new role, sacrificial Mondo Goddess haunting the vacant B-movie lots. Sharon as Eve and the rotten Apple record. Sharon as Aphrodite from the succulent fruit of Dionysus. Sharon as an adolescent artist's muse, a phantom sex symbol of flickering white porcelain for the late night double feature. Sharon as dead Madonna and child castrating the 70's like Adonis's boar, a limp tail curled like the number six, like a semaphore.

We are the pigs, for the threshold beyond the bloody epitaph makes a narcissist of us all.


The Man/son show runs from the 1st-31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA. Opening 6th October 8pm-12am 

Healter Skelter by David Van Gough

"When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide
Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride
Till I get to the bottom and I see you again."

The twists and turns of Helter Skelter, led Bugolosi into the hall of mirrors, one which he saw himself reflected,forging a lucrative new career writing the most successful 'true' crime fiction novel ever. 

Helter Skelter-or Healter Skelter as it was written in blood on La Bianca's Freezer, a killer's catchphrase to hang with the shopping lists, postcards and fridge magnets.

"Listen" asks Bugolosi cupping his ear to the ground...Intoned in McCartneys raw vocals, in the shredding guitars, was the Devil unleashed? 
Was he? 
Was this song Charlies Catcher in the Rye, an inferno of annihilation embedded in-between the first note and Ringo's blistered fingers, composed to awaken the Mansonian candidate.  

Helter Skelter coming down.

He(a)lter Skelter-recapitulated. 
Easter Hell Trek
Hell retake rest
Lethal Seer Trek  
You begin to sound like Bugolosi.

And yet...and yet,at the base of the downward spiral,in the labyrinth of tunnels beneath Laurel Canyon, echoed in the coyote howls of Death valley, or in the hollow of native Indian bones beneath, or scrawled in the bloody epiphets of  victims blood, lies something dormant. A specter that stains the ether beyond the hallucinogenic haze. A dark totem constructed of ritual murder, ancient orders and corrupt organizations.

And when I get to the bottom there is her-Sharon Tate, the disfigured goddess, eternal mother of the stars,leading me back to the top again, the questions swirling as I go around and around the serpent again to the tail,stoking the fires of hell.

The hell of Helter Skelter.



The Man/son show runs from the 1st-31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA. Opening 6th October 8pm-12am

God of Fuck by David Van Gough

 

Around about the same time I was born, Charles Manson met Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme on Venice Beach, introducing himself as the self aggrandized 'God of Fuck'. 

He wasn't wrong, because the amount of Charlies Angels, willing to spread the gospel as well as their nubile thighs for the holy father, numbered around thirty by the time of trial.  

I thought of Charlie- instilling his message with his divine wand  and I painted the Scorpion from Revelation's fiery Pitt, engorged with blood and the eternal eye of Horus, like a phallus weeping blood and semen. 

I thought of the bullshit Beatles/Bible hybrid that counted for pillow talk in his Hippie harem, and painted a copy of the White album under his arm. 

I thought of the LSD that he doled out like Spanish fly and painted the little green tab as holy sacrament . 

Charlie-the cartoon messiah, small hands, big head, like a marionette who had gotten loose of his strings, 

Charlie-the literal God of fuck sewing his poison seed.

The Man/son show runs from the 1st-31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA. Opening 6th October 8pm-12am

War by David Van Gough

 

War, may have been etched in Charlies black heart, and in the Swastika on his forehead but it was Tex who got to do the crafty work on the plump gut of Leno LaBianca. 

The war Manson hatched was black against white, but in the bloody epitaph of each letter lay seeds of a light and darkness battle, beyond the color of skin. 

It was branded there in the lines of the slashed W, ascending and descending to form the square and compass of Freemasonry. 

It was there in the anarchist A, and the occult numerical values of the R: 6+6+6. It was there buried in the word reconstituted as the alchemical symbol for the Hermetic cross and its directive "As above, so below"
 

And it was there resonant in the Eastern mysticism's and ancient Hindu deities that informed the era-Kali with arms like a decade of blood spattered tendrils brandishing tools of death, along with Lennon's decapitated head, hanging like a semaphore on the love and peace generation forever.

War-that's what it was good for.

The Man/son show runs from the 1st-31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA. Opening 6th October 8pm-12am

Something Witchy by David Van Gough

Do 'Something Witchy'....Those were the instructions Manson allegedly gave to Tex Watson before the family went slaughter happy at Cielo drive, thus forever saddling the murders with  cabalistic connotation. 

That and a few several hundred other associations.

For me, the straying tendrils of madness all converged at the taloned toes of Madam Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Theosophic mystic, seer, witch,and general bullshit artist with a parlor trick that could give David Copperfield a run for a saps money.

In the ancient Tibetan grimoires she discovered, said to reveal the future of humanity, I wondered if she divined the shitstorm her literary foray's would unload; Adolf, hot for the Madam's petticoats,hatching the little matter of his grand master-plan to incinerate an entire race, or anyone else who didn't fall into Helena's Aryan seven step theory. I wondered if she envisaged the fuhrerling subvert her adopted Hindu symbol for the sun and taint it until the light was tar black with the congealed blood of millions.

I wondered in her bugeyed reverie's if she determined a Charlie Manson-a bastard son of Mengele's Eugenic fuckery- brain fried like a KF Chicken,(or Bluebird) cooked by CIA lab chef's, spiced and peppered with Eastern philosophy and LSD, carve the Madams little totem over his minds eye, but not before getting his disciples to do some home style buffet carving of their own.

If Tex and his cohorts-Charlies Angels- were faking Something Witchy that night, then it came in the wake of 80 years of occult dressing post Blavatsky, precisely at midnight August 9 1969, heavy with the invocations of dark symbols, ritualistic style murder and Ma(n)sonic lore.

I wondered all this and I painted Blavatsky's withering left eye exploding and morphing into the serpentine 's' of Himmler's guard and the lightning bolt of the O.T.O. 

I saw Hitler and his tyrannic stare arced into a bloody sickle, an axis connecting the S to form the hood of a 3, the sacred number of the Scottish rite.

I saw Manson, inbred maniac,mutant child of the two sneering at their ordered schemes with blanket chaos swirling in his programmed, drug addled brain.

I saw it all as an ectoplasmic loop, the Madams mink reanimated by one of her seances-shrieking death and thought...."You fuck with the devil, and someone gets their finger's burned eventually" 
  

The Man/son show runs from the 1st-31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA. Opening 6th October 8pm-12am