Monsters and Mediocrity

Includes a recipe for making the perfect monster!

The Contraptions Book Club is currently reading City of Fortune by Roger Crowley, to be discussed the week of January 27. Also, check out the entries and winners of my dev-environment photo-motto contest in this chat thread.

I’ve been thinking all week about monsters. In some ways, monsters are the evil twins of contraptions, and the precise nature of the kinship and opposition involved is our topic for the week.

An example that illustrates the relationship is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Frakenstein’s monster starts off as an organic contraption — stolen body parts rudely sewn together — but is then brought to life via the application of a secret “spark of life” technique that breathes life into the meatbag. In the novel, the method is left unspecified, but in movies, this is usually depicted as artificial lightning created with Tesla coils and such, with perhaps some alchemical vat-of-chemicals involved as well. When Mary Shelley (1818) composed the work, educated people would have been familiar with Luigi Galvani’s studies of animal electricity (1780), and these would have constituted a widespread popular understanding of the phenomenon as somehow related to vitalism.

A key detail is that Victor Frankenstein’s monster does not have a name. As Wikipedia notes:

Part of Frankenstein's rejection of his creation is the fact that he does not give him a name. Instead, Frankenstein's creation is referred to by words such as "wretch", "monster", "creature", "demon", "devil", "fiend", and "it". When Frankenstein converses with the creature, he addresses him as "vile insect", "abhorred monster", "fiend", "wretched devil", and "abhorred devil".

There is an interesting parallel here to contraptions. The archetypal contraption is a Rube Goldberg machine. Contraptions, like Frankenstein’s monsters, typically do not have enough design integrity to merit a name, and as such, prefigure a design space rather than acting as a prototype within it. If they are named at all, they often get generic names. Like Wright Flyer 1. This is not a strict rule of course. There are monsters and contraptions with names. But being unnamed is often a tell for both.

Monstrous Vitalism

What is the role of non-living mechanistic elements in the construction of monsters?

The idea of a contraption applies to any loose assemblage of elements that work together imperfectly of course, and I referred to the pre-spark Frankenstein monster above as an “organic contraption,” but there seems to be some association between monstrosity and life itself. Monstrousness, as the Frankenstein story illustrates, seems to require a vitalist element. The “spark of life” idea seems to be a trope. For example, in Steven Spielberg’s Gremlins, giving water to Mogwai — which is barely more than a plush toy — turns them into Gremlins who reproduce.

Let’s take a clearly mechanistic example. In the most recent incarnation of Mecha-Godzilla, who is a mechanical monster, we find that he is animated by bits of an organic monster slain in an earlier movie, King Ghidorah.

We find the same principle at work in the Daleks of Doctor Who — mechanistic exoskeletons that are revealed to contain tiny, monstrous life forms. Cyber-Men, similarily, are exoskeletons containing mind-controlled humans.

It seems monstrosity requires an organic element. When there isn’t one, monster is more often an adjective than a noun qualifying an incomplete potential for monstrosity. For example a monster truck has some monstrosity in its design, but it requires a human driver to be complete. A monstrous burrito requires a human with a big appetite to wolf it down. If you neatly carved it up into slices to share out, it would no longer be monstrous even in potentia. A monstrous bureaucracy is typically peopled by creepily smiling automaton-humans.

I can’t think of a truly pure mechanical monster though. Perhaps the closest are the robots of the Transformers franchise— who are nevertheless the creations of an organic race. Wikipedia: “A cruel and coldly logical race of alien squid-like creatures with five faces and tentacles known as Quintessons, who were the creators of the Autobots and Decepticons.”

Speaking of Transformers, it is fascinating to me that the multimedia franchise literally grew out of a line of contraptioney toys, but as the fictional universe expanded and deepened, it apparently needed an organic backstory to serve not just as a deus ex machina to get around the need for an evolutionary mechanism, but also to provide some sort of narcissistic wounding and Jungian anima/animus for a compelling “animation” of the robots as characters. The very word animate is revealing. Contraptions must be brought to life before they can exhibit a capacity for monstrosity.

Can something like monstrosity exist without life? I think so, but not of the contraptioney sort. You can have spreading inanimate horrors of the sort found in J. G. Ballard’s stories (my favorite is a story where the entire world gradually crystallizes into a gem-like state within which time gets warped). You can have austere oppressiveness of the sort associated with monumental brutalist architecture. The Shrike in his time tombs in Hyperion is an animate+inanimate type of monster.

It is notable that brutalism, which derives from the French brut — for raw and unfinished, as in naked concrete structures — acquired English connotations of brute and brutality. This observation is often trotted out as a bit of gotcha etymology, but brutality is not entirely unrelated to rawness/unfinishedness. Frankenstein’s monster was brut in the raw/unfinished sense as well a brute in the regular English sense (perhaps a misunderstood one who only wanted a friend, but a brute nevertheless).

A recently emerged source of this kind of non-vitalist monstrousness is any kind of cold and mathematical process, such as geometric growth, runaway chemical or nuclear reactions, tessellation, fractal growth, Turing-complete computations, and so on. For example, mysterious proliferating monoliths, or the more oozy flows of a toxic chemical or gas spill. Such processes can also be entirely invisible, creating an atmosphere of terror rather than horror (which typically requires an object you can sense). Pandemics are an example: individual viruses are not monsters, but aggregated into a pandemic process, they perhaps are.

From these examples we can conclude that there are other natural processes that induce affective gestalts similar to monstrousness, but they have to have a power comparable to life processes.

But though such horror and terror inducing processes are somewhat related, it feels not quite right to include them in the category of the monstrous proper. I think the monstrous requires some kind of recognizably vitalist process to be at work. Other kinds of processes might induce other kinds of fear, horror, and terror, but monsters require a vitalist principle to be at work, though it can be allegorical or metaphoric. For example, completing an electrical circuit and bringing a machine “to life” counts. Sort of.

A good example of the process boundary between the vitalist regime (where monsters lurk) and non-vitalist regime (where other horrors and terrors induced by comparable processes lurk) is the Lovecraftian Shoggoth, the memetic apotheosis of fear of AI. Shoggoths are protoplasmic masses that are poised at the transition point to sentience and life. Their underlying process is a sort of souped-up (heh!) primordial chemistry short of life. They were created by a prehistoric alien race (of true monsters) and escaped their control. Shoggoths are monstrous to the same extent, and in the same way, modern AI is to the fearful, who see in the torrents of matrix multiplications something like a protoplasmic ooze that can challenge its creators.

True monsters though, are more unambiguously biomorphic. In fact, I’d go so far as to say they are typically derived from Chordata. Though there are monsters derived from members of other phyla, most monsters have spinal cords of sorts.

Monsters and Monumentality

The idea of a monster as a recognizable perversion of a familiar being is intuitive. I asked people on various sites what their default image of monster was, and a fairly consistent answer emerged: a being that is somewhat larger than a reference being. So a monster cockroach might be as large as a rat or perhaps dog, but is monstrous because it a cockroach. A monster humanoid is 8-10 feet tall.

I want to try and relate this bit of wisdom-of-crowds about monstrousness to the idea of monumentality.

I have previously referenced Federica Marangoni’s idea (which she attributes to an unnamed “great American sculptress”) that monumentality is not a matter of scale, but of proportions. ChatGPT guesses¹ that Marangoni was probably referring to Beverly Pepper (1922–2020), so let’s name this principle the Pepper Principle: monumentality is not a matter of scale, but of proportions.

Are monsters monumental in their proportions? There is certainly an association between the monstrousness and architecture and sculpture, the typical things we might refer to as monumental. There are gargoyles, there are buildings described as “monstrosities,” there are forbidding haunted mansions, eerie dungeons. In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, monsters emerge from “dungeon dimensions.”

But is there something monumental about monsters themselves?

Now, what we know of scaling in fact suggests that monumentality cannot be about scale per se, since every scale has its own characteristic constraints on proportions. For example, the fact that mass scales as the cube of linear dimension, while surface area and strength (of leg bones for example) scale as the square, is the reason elephants are rounder and stockier overall than gazelles. So an elephant-sized gazelle would not look monstrous. It would look improbable and silly. But a gazelle-sized elephant would still seem monumental in its proportions. And many smaller but stocky animals, such as anteaters and tortoises, do strike me as monumental.

This, by the way, is the reason the cheesy special effects of really old monster movies, which simply zoomed in on small reptiles like iguanas, are not compelling. We instinctively get that we’re looking at something that is not monumental in its proportions. And simply scaling it does not help. A Jurassic Park T-Rex or a Godzilla is not simply a close-up of a lizard.

In our accumulating inventory of reference monsters, many do have monumental proportions, but not all. There are insectoid and squid/octopus like reference points too. So clearly the two are not the same. But they seem related.

So what then, are we make of the wisdom-of-crowds consensus that monstrousness is basically something like an ordinary reference critter scaled up by 20% or so?

For example, the typical monstrous humanoid is not gigantic to the tune of 100 feet, like in Jack and the Beanstalk (who is presented as a giant but not a monster in the tale), but more like 8-10 feet tall. Monster cockroaches tend to be depicted as rat or dog-sized. Godzilla has retained around 2x-3x saurian proportions despite inflation over the years.

I think I have to conclude that monstrousness is in fact at odds with monumentality. Monstrousness is about a slight amplification of scale, not particular proportions. To the extent monumentality can be threatening, it is a different mode.

While monsters can sometimes have monumental proportions, in general, the monumental creates a kind of austere, impersonal distance between us and itself. Monumentality embodies distant, impersonal forces at work, that pose a terrifying threat because they don’t care about us. Monsters on the other hand, care enough to be deliberately threatening to us. They devote intentional, focused attention to us. They stalk us through scary places. This is why they can’t be too much larger than their natural size. They wouldn’t have the same intentions regarding humans if they did.

A monster is derived via amplification of the whole, with exaggeration of aspects of the reference that spark fear in us, while still remaining in a scale range where their intentions towards us can remain roughly the same. A lion the size of a mountain would not be targeting us for food. But a lion that’s twice the size of a normal lion? Yeah, that’s a monster.

A bunny is fundamentally cute, so you’d really have to distort it a lot to make a monster of it — give it sharp canine teeth borrowed from other creatures, rippling muscles perhaps. This mode of derivation points us towards chimera, which I’ll get to in a minute, but let’s stick with pure monsters for a minute. For example, snakes, cockroaches, spiders scaled-up 20% and exaggerated in some ways — these are at least mildly scary to us even at their ordinary scales. So making them larger amplifies the threat they embody. But both imputed intentionality and physical realism (which we have intuitions about even if we haven’t studied the latest Santa Fe scaling research) limits how far you can push mere scaling. Exaggeration has to stay within limits too. Fangs can get longer, the cold predatory look of a lion can get colder. But not to the point that you don’t recognize the reference creature.

The process can operate in reverse too, especially unconsciously, via removal of attractive features like fleshiness and furriness. Before we learned about dinosaur feathers, we instinctively depicted them with naked, leathery skin like reptiles, stretched over the skeletal frame, despite their obvious kinship with modern birds. Now that we know, the idea of feathered dinosaurs with chubby cheeks feels campy rather than scary.

The artist C. M. Kosemen draws pictures of what familiar animals, including humans, would look like if we reconstructed them from skeletal remains using the “movie dinosaur” approach — the pictures are reliably monstrous.

Still, this account is not entirely satisfying. It feels incomplete.

I think monumentality has a role to play in any account of the monstrous, and the connection might lie in cosmic horror. Monumentality may be at odds with monstrousness, but it can react with it to reach greater heights of scariness than either can alone.

Cosmic Horror

One way to understand Lovecraftian cosmic horror is as a genre that generates a unique new mode of fear by exploiting the creative tension between the monumental and the monstrous.

Lovecraftian monsters at once manage to care about humans and not care. They combine a kind of of distant, brutalist, architectural horror with a personal and attentive kind of horror channeled into active agency. Sometimes they also combine vitalist process horrors with non-vitalist process horrors. For example, the horror of non-Euclidean geometries and “oblique angles that look acute” in the case of Cthulhu’s abode.

Godzilla apparently drew some inspiration from Lovecraftian cosmic horror. One obvious way this appears in the Godzilla mythos is through the motif of nuclear power. Godzilla is a kind of largish dinosaur, so by our previous analysis, he “works” as a “20% larger dinosaur monster” perhaps. A souped up T-Rex. But that’s not all he is. He also embodies the horrors of nuclear war. The right scale reference for him is perhaps the height of a mushroom cloud. His monstrous nature is manifested not so much by his blundering about knocking over skyscrapers (which is clumsy and destructive but not monstrous behavior), but by his ability to produce nuclear blasts with his breath, directed intentionally at adversaries.

Godzilla, like many classic Lovecraftian creatures, is not quite a monster because his primary focus of attention is not human. He is a character in some sort of larger cosmic drama, within which he engages his adversaries/allies, like King Ghidorah, King Kong, and Mothra, according to some cosmic rules of engagement that are inscrutable to humans. Human affairs are marginal at best, if they register at all for such creatures.

It is notable that Godzilla simultaneously embodies the vitalist process and another source of process-horror — nuclear chain reactions — that gives him some mechanical qualities. He seeks out sources of nuclear radiation and soaks it up to recharge like a battery. In the latest incarnation, his spinal armor plates light up like a string of LED indicators. He charges up like some sort of science-fictional laser cannon rather than stalking and pouncing like a biological predator.

Speaking of Mothra and King Kong, by the way, I’ve never found either to be compelling. A monster gorilla should be maybe 15-20 feet tall, not 100. And moths are… not particularly compelling referents to derive monsters from. Even good ones.

But the takeaway here is that monumentality is a different vector of horror that when combined with monstrousness, creates cosmic horror. And even if you don’t want to go for cosmic horror, adding a dose of monumentality improves any monster.

Anomalousness, Chimericality and Predation

So far, I’ve been developing this account with the implicit assumption that monsters are scary and dangerous, whether or not they explicitly target us. This seems tautological but is not actually obvious. In fact, a major academic theory of monsters I’ll get to in a minute appears to have focused on their anomalous and chimerical nature in history, ignoring dangerousness.

Chimeras are perhaps better described as “fantastic beasts” that combine features of many animals. Historically, they seem to have been the main kind of imaginary creature. Winged horses that eat flesh. Lions crossed with eagles. Perhaps these were scary and monstrous to humans in antiquity, but somehow they don’t seem scary to me. Yes, they might be dangerous, but not in a particularly exaggerated way. Griffons, for instance, are perhaps a little scary because the eagle part, scaled up to combine with the lion part, is of monstrous proportions. But unicorns? Not scary. Even dragons, perhaps the most truly monstrous creatures of pre-modern imaginations, feel fantastic and awe-inspiring rather than monstrous.

If I had to guess, I’d say most true monsters (by modern standards) imagined in pre-modern times were likely demonized humans, not fantastic beasts. Likely exaggerated depictions of enemies (one entertaining theory of the word asura in Hindu mythology is that it is a cognate of the ahura as in Ahura Mazda deity of Zorastrianism, with the original positive connotation turning negative as the civilizations developed a regional rivalry).

But clearly monsters are dangerous, and deliberately constructed to be so. And it seems to have been academic oversight that this was not always front-and-center in theories of the monstrous.

A particularly interesting paper I found, Why Monsters are Dangerous asks the tautological question and answers it in an interesting way.

Structuralist theory held that some animals are particularly “good to think with”. According to Mary Douglas’s influential hypothesis, this was chiefly true of animals that disrupt intuitive classifications of species— the “monsters-as-anomalies” account. But this hypothesis is problematic, as ethnobiology shows that folk classifications of biological species are so plastic that classificatory anomalies can be disregarded. This led cognitive anthropologists to propose alternative versions of the “monsters as anomalies” account. Parallel to this, a second account of monsters —“monsters-as-predators”— starts from the importance of predator detection to our past survival and reproduction, and argues that dangerous features make animals “good to think with”, and should be over-represented in imaginary animals. This paper argues that both accounts understand something about monsters that the other account cannot explain.

Though there are non-dangerous ways to construct monsters, and non-dangerous aspects to the monstrous, danger does seem to be the essence.

I like the idea that monsters are imaginary constructs that are “good to think with.” You face more danger from lions than gazelles, so if you’re going to create elaborate fictional simulations, to produce synthetic data to train your risk intuitions, combining an eagle and a lion makes more sense than combining (say) a bunny and a duck.

But the latter comical idea points towards a truer understanding of the true source of monstrousness represented by chimericality to the modern mind — the process horror of a perverted vitalism.

What do I mean? To the ancients, chimeras were not “unnatural” as such. They were merely magical creatures from hidden dimensions. They were often imagined as supernaturally beautiful rather than intimidatingly ugly. A superior part of God’s portfolio.

But to the modern mind, chimeras immediately suggest genetic engineering, The Island of Doctor Moreau, the Alien franchise, and so on.

We see a strong element of this in Lovecraftian cosmic horror too. Many Lovecraft tales that are held up as evidence of his racist attitudes seem to me better understood as deriving their power from genetic-engineering type process horror. Fear of miscegenation is typically a kind of cultural fear, alloyed with disgust. But stories like The Shadow Over Innsmouth strike me as closer to a mad-genetic-scientist type horror. Lovecraft was clearly racist too (this is evident in a bunch of throwaway lines rather than in main plotlines), but that’s not why stories like Innsmouth have a monstrous vibe.

This is a quantitative rather than qualitative distinction though. Clearly there is a spectrum ranging from ordinary sorts of racism to the monstrousness of unnatural vitalism. The original King Kong is clearly just racism with extra steps. Beauty and the Beast is somewhere in the middle. The Jeff Goldblum movie, The Fly, starts to veer towards the monstrous end, which The Island of Doctor Moreau anchors. It is notable that sexual perversion as such, in the sense of bestiality, does not feature. These stories usually dispense with sex and imagine some sort of unholy clinical process (where sex enters the tale, I think you’re more likely to get stories with a religious slant to them, with demons in place of monsters proper — monsters to me have no particular religious valence).

Octavia Butler’s Lillith’s Brood trilogy very cleverly plays with the entire spectrum. You are constantly torn between horror and disgust at an unnatural vitalism (cross-breeding with the three-gendered Oankali via a rather creepy process involving a gender that basically does genetic engineering) and the beguiling suggestion that some sort of xenochimerical transhumanism is an obvious next stage of evolution and that to think otherwise is just racism.

These complexities aside, I think we can add to our accumulating model of monsters by noting that a dash of the chimerical can soup up the monstrousness of any monster. Just add 20% alien DNA.

Genius and Monstrousness

There is one last thing to consider. So far, we’ve looked at sensory aspects of the monstrous — aspects you can see, hear, feel, touch, smell, and taste (is there any story featuring the slaying and eating of a monster?). But what about cognitive aspects?

We’ve already touched on one cognitive aspect — the monumental aspect. If that is present it typically presents as a distant other-mind, absorbed in matters of cosmic significance beyond human ken. This aspect is also present in some emerging conceptions of “AGI” monsters. They threaten us through indifference or obliviousness to our concerns or even existence, rather than horrifying attentions.

But there’s another, more personal kind of monstrousness of the psyche, the kind represented by serial killers, sadists, sexual predators, cannibals and other sorts of cognitive deviants. In Monsters, Claire Dederer (I’ve only read reviews/summaries), points out that often what makes someone monstrous in a cognitive sense is not just that they harbor and pursue horrifying desires, but that this drive is packaged along with some kind of genius we might aspire to. Picasso, Dali, and several other artists belong in that set. Many film/TV people too — Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Bill Cosby — who are of particular interest because their work creates access and opportunity for monstrous behavior towards a large and ready prey population.

Fictional serial killers like Hannibal Lecter and Dexter reinforce this idea. They wouldn’t be interesting if there wasn’t also an element of genius — an alien sort of genius — to their monstrous activities.

Monstrousness of the psyche, I’d say, comprises three elements:

1. Inhuman drives and desires

2. Genius of some human sort

3. An alien quality to that genius

The inhuman drives and desires typically involve deep (and not merely rhetorical) dehumanization of other humans, brought about through the infliction of pain. Often, this arises through a deficit of something that makes the rest of us fully human. That lack is usually at the bottom of the “inhuman drive.” You get a free variable because ordinary humans regulate it.

The genius is often of an artistic variety, but not always (Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World presents us with an array of physicist/mathematician monsters). One common alien quality is excessive orderliness, pursued with a kind of inexorable ritualistic drive. Monsters are more likely to have OCD than ADHD. Even when they leave chaos in their wake, monsters are not creatures of chaos but inexorable drives towards narrow ends.

Ordinary, non-genius versions of these genius-monsters are, somehow, not quite monsters. At least for me, they are more like very depressing embodiments of the worst aspects of human nature, realized in extreme forms. For example, Harvey Weinstein doesn’t seem like a monster so much as a truly horrible person I wish I didn’t share a species identity with. He made several important movies happen, but he doesn’t seem to have contributed to the artistic visions themselves.

But Picasso? Woody Allen? I don’t know. This line of thought suggests the troubling idea that there is something monstrous to things we might uncritically aspire to, like crafting good movies. It suggests the thought that we might need to become monsters in order to pursue the sublime.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, this idea is made visual and visceral. As the protagonist turns increasingly monstrous in his psyche, his portrait turns increasingly monstrous visually. But he does so in pursuit of something like the divine.

This is perhaps the deepest aspect of our relationship to the monstrous. If monsters were merely a source of revulsion and fear, they would not be so important to us culturally. We’d just try to fight and get rid of them, the way we do infectious diseases or toxic oil spills. But there’s an aspect to the monstrous that’s attractive and tempting to humans. There is a part of us that aspires to things that require becoming a monster along the way, like Leto II merging with sandworms to become God-Emperor of Dune.

You might say that humans have always suspected that the path to divinity winds its way through monstrousness, or worse, that the divine is merely the illusory temptation that leads us into terminal monstrousness we never transcend. We put this idea in too many of our stories for it to be accidental.

Mediocrity and Exceptionalism

There is a counter-narrative to this sort of monstrous god-becoming though — that of mediocrity.

In my extensive past writings about and around mediocrity, I have often contrasted it with outlier excellence as the antithetical ethos. But I’m increasingly convinced that the actual antithesis of mediocrity is monstrosity. To embrace the mediocre is to reject the monstrous. Narrower things like excellence are only opposed to mediocrity to the extent that they are monstrous.

There are understandings of excellence that I have no problem with; understandings that are not monstrous. I frequently cite the Chambliss paper, The Mundanity of Excellence, on this point. It makes a solid case that what we think of as “excellence” is typically an ability to switch from one learning curve to a qualitatively different one before you hit diminishing returns, so that what is mediocre performance on the next level looks superlative by the standards and frames of the current level. This is striving for excellence the way switching from running to bicycles to motorcycles is striving for higher speeds. You keep going faster but you never need be anything but mediocre.

One way to understand this is that where monstrousness is about being evolution and growth driven by being exceptional, mediocrity is about evolution and growth being driven by changing rules. This aligns with Ted Chiang’s idea that fantasy is about special people, while science fiction is about special rules. I’d restate more generally as: Fantasy is about monsters in ordinary worlds, science fiction is about mediocrities in exceptional worlds.

But… there is no doubt that there are other approaches to excellence (or more generally, exceptionalism, specialness, or anomalousness) that have monstrousness as a co-morbidity. Dexter was an excellent serial killer in a way I wouldn’t want to be excellent at anything. That is what I mean by the idea of embracing mediocrity. To embrace mediocrity is, in some ways, to embrace a humanity without any glaring degeneracies to it. Where the only way to live an exceptional life is to access regimes of exceptional rules and laws.

This brings us full circle to contraptions, and why they are evil twins to monsters. Contraptions might share lots of features with monsters, but they are defined by the feature they don’t share — the ethos of mediocrity. The idea of a serial-killing contraption is intrinsically funny (Futurama has several examples). To make a contraption monstrous, you have to inject something alien into it.

We began with the idea that Frankenstein’s monster was in fact an organic contraption that had a vitalist spark of life applied to it. We can now characterize this spark of life.

The spark of life is the temptation away from mediocrity; an aspiration towards the perfectly divine that necessarily sucks us into perfect terminal monstrousness.

The Perfect Monster

So here is a recipe for creating a perfect monster.

1. Start with a reference creature that has an element of something that scares us.

2. Lower the design integrity and make it a bit contraptiony in morphology

3. Scale it up by about 20%, and exaggerate the scary features

4. Add a dose of cosmic horror by making it inhabit a world of concerns beyond human ken and a slight monumental aspect, either through monumental proportions, or the presence of a non-vitalist sort of process horror

5. Inject about 20% alien DNA to add a chimerical element, preferably through an unholy process

6. Subtract something from the psyche to give it an inhuman drive or desire

7. Add a dose of special genius that humans can admire and aspire to but…

8. …put that aspirational genius on the other side of an alien quality, which…

9. …has something like a godly, divine end state it is evolving towards

10. Send a bolt of lightning through it

The recipe for a monstrous machine is similar, except you start with an inanimate assemblage into which you either inject some vitalist spark or an actual degenerate monster.

1. ChatGPT’s guess about the origin of the idea. I haven’t found an actual reference though.

A strong candidate—indeed the one most often cited in Italian art circles in connection with that statement—is Beverly Pepper (1922–2020). Pepper was an American sculptor who lived and worked extensively in Italy, celebrated for her monumental steel and iron works. She was well-known for insisting that “monumentality” does not depend on physical size alone but on the proportion and relationship of a piece to its environment—an idea closely matching Marangoni’s attribution.

Pepper’s longstanding ties to Italy (she settled in Todi in the early 1970s and worked there for decades) and her direct friendships with many Italian artists support the likelihood that she and Marangoni crossed paths. This would explain why Marangoni, also deeply involved with sculpture (especially in glass), would call Pepper her “great American sculptress friend” in connection with that key insight about monumentality.