Fahrstuhl zum Schafott by Gerold Matt & Banks Violette (eds)

"Dashiell Hammett's novel 'The Maltese Falcon' founded the American Black Series in 1930, which exemplifies the image of a society through the figure
of the hard-boiled private investigator, who is also an illegal milieu, in which disillusioned anti-heroes have lost faith in happiness. 
Hollywood discovered the detective film with the congenial film adaptation of John Huston in 1941, with which Humphrey Bogart became famous.

With the film music for 'Elevator to the Scaffold' (1958) by Louis Malle, Miles Davis provides the sound that comments on the state of mind of
a disoriented post-war generation between the Indochina and Algeria wars.

Police photographer WEEGEE from New York City left behind thousands of pictures of murderers and murdered people, gangsters and onlookers and
thus an impressive iconography of the crime.

The young New York artist Banks Violette takes up aspects of the noir tradition in his sculptural and installative works and transports them into the milieu of
black romantic youth cultures of the past twenty years such as Black Metal or Neo Gothic." (freely translated publisher's note, © Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Nürnberg)