Elevator to the gallows

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Banks Violette and Gerald Matt present artists from different genres who share in a common fascination for the moral chasms of criminality. The seductive lore of the entire “noir” complex between nightmare and world loss is parsed and probed in art, literature, film and music. Dashiell Hammet’s 1930 novel “The Maltese Falcon” first established the American noir series that describes a society – exemplarily with the figure of the hard-boiled private detective who himself is at home in the illegal milieu portrayed – in which the disillusioned anti-hero has lost any belief in a state of happiness. In the perfectly matched film by John Huston in 1941, which made Humphrey Bogart famous, Hollywood discovered the detective movie. Miles Davis provided the sound for the film music of Louis Malle’s “L’Ascenseur de l’échafoud,” an audible commentary on the frame of mind of a disoriented postwar generation between the wars in Indo-China and Algeria. The New York police photographer, Weegee, bequeathed us thousands of pictures of murderers and murder victims, gangsters and gawking onlookers that make up an impressive iconography of crime. The young New York artist, Banks Violette, in his sculptural and installative works, takes up aspects of this noir tradition and carries it over to the milieu of black-romantic youth cultures from the past twenty years, such as Black Metal or Neo Goth.