ANARCH
by Gast Bouschet
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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Table of Contents
Nemesis (First Among Perils)
Jason Mohaghegh
The Mirrored Ladder of Strata
Stephen O’Malley
Letter to Sorcerers (Here Too There Are Stars)
What Dreams! Those Forests!
Here’s the Prophecy
Soiled by Rebel Powers
Part 1: Toward a Dark Sacred
Part 2: Revolutionary Withdrawal
Alchemical Futures
Some basic reflections on the images included in this book
Only Chaos Sings the Truth
Forest, Forest, Forest (Until My Blood Contains All)
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Hardcover Edition - Limited to 800 copies
160 pages. Bound in bound in deep black paper stamped in red and black foils, with 100 colour images.
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Press, reviews, endorsements
“ANARCH can be read as a revolutionary manifest against the modern art world; a synthetic and yet brutal realm, suffocated by exploitative curation and capitalist investment strategies. Equally, ANARCH can be approached as an initiatory passage into the chthonic body of the underworld; a body that encounters eroticism, pain and delight just as much in decay and death as in germination and birth. Or ANARCH can be devoured as a satanic celebration of the black sun, the alchemical principle which does not offer light and warmth, but dissolution and decay, in order to break open objects – and this includes human bodyminds – for their flesh to be permeated by a lived understanding of the Other.”
Frater Acher for Paralibrum - read the full review here
“From the outset this work – with its masterful blend of fine photography, fine writing and fierce engagement – made me think of that other masterwork of sorcerous intent – Austin Osman Spare’s Book of Pleasure. Even though these two works are as aesthetically and literarily divergent as its possible to imagine; nevertheless, they are both imbued with and exude the distinctive frisson that the presence of “Promethean Fire” stamps upon, and serves as the hallmark of, all creative engagements with essentially otherworldly subject matter.”
Peter Mark Adams for Paralibrum - read the full review here
“Bouschet’s writings are a manifesto for a sorcerous art primordial in its obsessions but forward-looking rather than regressive; a dark and Promethean art that confronts the earth’s geopathy unflinchingly. It is an art that responds to a civilization limping into an epoch of permanent crisis and upheaval, and so it must work directly with the poisoned and crippled world upon which we all now stand.”
Mark Nemglan - read the full review here
Interview with Gast Bouschet on the Antibody Nation channel - watch on YouTube here
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About the Author
Gast Bouschet is an artist and occult philosopher born in Luxembourg in 1958. Since the 1980s, alone or in collaboration with Nadine Hilbert, he has created a complex body of work that challenges the fundamental principles underlying structure, visibility and power. His work spans a wide range of media, including photography, sound, video, painting, sculpture and writing. Bouschet’s art has been presented in some 300 solo and group exhibitions worldwide. In 2009, he represented Luxembourg at the 53rd Venice Biennale together with his partner Nadine Hilbert. In 2021, the Grand Duke of Luxembourg appointed Gast Bouschet a Knight of the Order of Merit. In recent years, Bouschet has increasingly focused on sorcerous interventions, which he carries out in the Ardennes Forest away from the public eye.