GOTH, designing darkness

by Timo de Rijk

In 2021 was in het Design Museum in Den Bosch de tentoonstelling GOTH, designing darkness te zien.
Deze imposante tentoonstelling krijgt een vervolg in dit prachtig vormgegeven boek.
Aan bod komen de historie van het gotisch design, invloeden uit o.a. de natuur en invloeden in sociologie, cultuur, kunst en nog veel meer.
Voor wie de tentoonstelling gemist heeft, heeft met dit boek in handen een mooie kans om te beleven wat gemist is.
Voor hen die wel de kans hebben gehad zal dit boek een meer dan waardevolle aanvulling zijn.

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[Paul Groos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning, gorgeous black gem of a book. I’ve seen the original exposition, which was equally amazing. The book gives way more gothic art, even managing to convey the ideas and feelings of sculpture and movies in 2D-stills. The design of the whole book, from the placement of pictures to the lay out and font of the texts, is spot on.
The authors decided to style the text as a conversation between to people. The two “voices” make the texts more dynamic, but the format gets trite and a little forced after a while. Some of the texts are very interesting, others a little inane. The authors try to grasp an inherently elusive theme and do a fair job of it. Goth is hard to define, but looking at it from no less than 16 different angles makes this a quite comprehensive study.
The pictures and the accompanying quotes evoke a lot of atmosphere and many, many stories, both real and fantastic. I downloaded several books to my e-reader and spent hours on Wikipedia researching events referenced in this book.
A book to revisit time and again.
One gripe though: the cover came loose before I was halfway in, as it was glued very badly. The book is too good to subtract a star for that, but for a beautiful (and expensive) art book, a badly glued cover is of course a bloody shame!

[Eline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let me, first of all, clarify that i'm not the most knowledgeable on goth culture or gothic culture, but, though the terms admittedly are hard to define, i do remember "goth" and "gothic" meaning different things. The terms are used interchangeably in this book, which is a bit confusing, since the book seems to be focused on gothic literature, art, and movies, while it's called GOTH: Designing Darkness. The book barely takes music into account, which was a bit disappointing, but i appreciated that the writers explained the ethics of the subculture (or counterculture) and that they mention goth's punk roots. Though i didn't always understand how works listed connected to either goth or gothic culture, i absolutely loved the selection of works. The works presented were very diverse and inspiring. The selection objectively wasn't particularly coherent, but it still felt coherent due to the overarching dark atmosphere.