Alien Explorations

Ghost of Walter Pichler's "TV Helmet" in Necronom IV?

leading from 

TV Helmet (Portable living room), 1967, Walter Pichler

a) Revelation
For some years, despite the fact I was slowly discovering origins of the Necronom IV running through ancient Egyptian images, and Ernst Fuchs paintings,  I wondered about the Necronom IV suit being like echoing the form of some sort of entity with a submarine or torpedo shaped head without a clue about how that could be.

Later Fred Blanchard was able to bring the question to Facebook on March 23rd 2015 at Charles Lippincott's Facebook page. Many thanks to Fred Blanchard for pointing out the "TV Helmet". So if Giger hadn't been directly inspired by this, they are a product of the same time and in  parallel one another.


Walter Pichler, TV-Helm, 1967 Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin

b) Giger's elongated skulls
From 1965, Giger worked on polyester head sculptures long necks and long skulls as strange as those in the reliefs of Akhnaten and Nefertiti.  In 1967, he was drawing a humanoid with a mechanical extension out from the front in the drawing "Mother and Child", and from 1967 to 1968, Giger worked on his shell for a dog for Swiss Made 2069, and in 1968 Giger was working on his extra-terrestrial suit for Swiss Made 2069 which had a cine camera inserted into the front of the head.

The suit from Swiss Made 2069, made in 1968

No 53, Kleiner Kopf, edition of 23, 1976, 
bronze cast, ca. 35 x 25 cm ;
based on a polyester sculpture from 1965


c) Walter Pitcher's monster appears in 1967
Interestingly back in 1967, in Austria which neighbours the country of Switzerland, Walter Pichler had created a fascinating piece of headgear called the TV Helmet that resembled some sort of long torpedo with a television inserted into the front. It looked very unlike anything that Giger would have designed, but by 1976 Giger would have evolved the idea of his post apocalyptic environment suits with elongated head as in Necronom IV and V.


TV Helmet (Portable living room), 1967, Walter Pichler

d) Did "TV helmet" inspire Giger?
Giger's final Alien beast in the movie would also have the head placed on the human's head in almost a similar way to "TV Helmet" although the latter needed heavy support on the chest and the shoulders. If Giger had seen this contraption and thought further about what he had made for Swiss Made 2069, it might have been up to him to wonder how long he could possibly make the heads for a future biomechanoid suit to horizontally stretch. So, despite the very interesting parallel, we don't have any information showing that Giger had an interest in Pichler's work, however Walter Pichler's "Gebäudemodell" shows up in Ernst Fuchs' "Architectura Caelestis" book which Giger read and was very inspired by. So Giger would have been conscious of Pichler's work.

TV Helmet (Portable living room), 1967, Walter Pichler

HR Giger's Necronom IV, 1976


Source Quotes
  1. The TV Helmet of 1967 is a technical device that isolates the user while imbedding him or her in an endless web of information: closed off against the outside world, the wearer is completely focused on the screen before his or her eyes. This work by Walter Pichler doesn't merely formally anticipate the cyber glasses developed decades later. He also articulated questions of content in relation to the media experience long before the "virtual world" was even discovered. Pichler called his invention a Portable Living Room, and this is usually interpreted as scathing sarcasm. When at least the tube is on in the living room, then we can easily do without varnished cabinets and potted violets, the title seems to say. But that is not the only way to interpret it. (db-artmag.de)
  2. Around forty-five years ago a  man wore a submarine-like white helmet that extended from front to back. His entire head disappeared into the futurist capsule; only the title betraying what was happening. TV Helmet created in 1967 is a technical device that isolates the user while imbedding him or her in an endless web of information: closed off against the outside world, the wearer was completely focused on the screen before his eyes. (https://artselectronic.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/)
  3. b 1936 in Deutschnofen, South Tyrol (A). Studied at the School of Applied Arts in Vienna (A). Lives in St. Martin/Burgland and Vienna. Since the 1960s he works in the border zone between sculpture and architecture, specializing in architectural designs for utopian city-planning projects and three-dimensional models confronting space and individual perception. In 1967, he presented the «Prototypes», a.o.the «TV Helmet (Tragbares Wohnzimmer)» (1967), pneumatic sculpture «Großer Raum» (Large Space), symbolically charged paraphrases of furniture and apparatuses as body extensions. Together with Hans Hollein he demanded that architecture be free from the constraints of construction and that sculpture be free from the limits of abstraction. In a text dedicated to Pichler, Oswald Wiener had developed the phantasy of a cyborg as an apparatus which would free consciousness from its organic base, the body.  http://www.gladstonegallery.com/biospdf/biowp.html  (http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/artist/pichler/biography/)
  4. Fred Blanchard: I know that many out there consider Giger as a genius who invented a style that didn’t exist before him..
    To me he was « just » a great artist who had incorporated ancient influences to his art in order to build his own style (you can spot influences that go from Art Nouveau to Symbolism in his images). 
This to say that when I saw Walter Pichler’s « TV Helmet » a couple of years ago in Stockholm I was puzzled… Could it be that « Necronom IV » (aka « the proto-Alien » Ridley Scott loved so much) originated in this portable TV room (there’s a TV screen inside) that was made in 1967, one year before SWISS MADE 2069, a SciFi film for which Giger designed a rather similar apparatus, was released ?
    (Facebook, March 23rd 2015)

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