Charlie Fox

‘I call “monster” every original inexhaustible beauty.’
— Alfred Jarry

Ghosts run amok, identities melt, everybody’s in costume, and reality is nowhere to be found.

that was my face and yet it was not.

I felt the same shiver: fear speedballing with wonder. I was electrified inside. That was the monster feeling.

The abundance of monsters in circulation now proves that the collective imagination is in a strange and disorientating state, at once fearful of what can be done to the body through technology or trauma and fascinated by the possibilities those changes represent.

A monster is a fear assuming a form.

The kids in the video for Aphex Twin’s ‘Come to Daddy’ (1997) (directed by Chris Cunningham) have a wonderful time, terrorizing the same London estate that Alexander de Large roams in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange

Transformation, which is the monster’s whole game, simultaneously altering their bodies and changing the surrounding culture like radioactive fall-out, is a mode of catharsis, along with a strategy for abjuring a body that feels way too vulnerable or out of control.

Monsters cause trouble, they disturb definitions, they discombobulate what we think we mean.

He was machismo off the leash