Can Contemporary art still engender a grotesque reaction? Or are we still being shocked at ourselves? ‘One needs rest from everything, even the beautiful. It appears, on the contrary, that the grotesque is a time of rest, a term of comparison, a point of departure from which one raises one’s self towards the beautiful with a fresher and more excited perception.’ In the quote above, Kayser, the 18th century writer, explores the perplexing idea of the Sublime. Sublimity binds the grotesque within the beautiful where humor and the inverted are endemic. Both beauty and the grotesque innately engender a dramatic response. What I don’t understand why unilaterally in western art history, such a reaction is intrinsic, when it seems that such a complex set of coding is set up. What Kayser asks is, what is beautiful and can ugly things be sublime? This problematic perspective, and the contradictions that are set up within the relationship between beauty, the sublime and grotesque intrigue me. What is a grotesque reaction? The Oxford Dictionary of Art defines grotesque as; the ridiculous, absurd, monstrous, or abnormal. A reaction to grotesque art, for myself, is one that produces a disgust that is felt in the pit of your stomach. This gut wrenching anathema is caused by sense that our world is not right. But I propose that we are conditioned to feel this reaction. What has established this sensation? Where in our psyche is this founded? I intend to link the idea that religious doctrine through the creation of beautiful artworks has unbalanced our natural acceptance of bodily functions. This has been done in order for us to concentrate on serving God better, as earthly pleasures were seen as frivolous. The question seems can artworks still create reactions in a post God-fearing, media driven world? We are bombarded with images that now render art and shock, redundant in some senses. How are we still surprised by events? Upset by the affects? Are we now able to differentiate the real world from that of art and fantasy? Has the media machine confused our sensibilities and reactions, or are we still following a pre-determined set of reactions that our culture has prescribed for us. ‘It may be argued that that the senses of taste and humor are culturally conditioned, so that people of a given tribe find hysterically funny things that appall us, such as the death throes of a wounded antelope.’ Danto writes in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, that we are simply following our designated cultural paths. It is logical to define aesthetic choices being dependant on your upbringing and your sphere of knowledge. So where does mine come from? In European tradition, the idea of the grotesque is founded in pagan traditions and the carnivalesque. The reaction to being constrained by religious doctrine created a period of engagement with people’s own visceral nature. The performance of acting out was to allow themselves the freedom from burden of responsibility to God and their masters, to whom they were duty bound for the rest of the year. Danto below describes how we need a sense of responsibility in order to function as a society. The creation of a disturbance is in fact a way to uphold the sense of responsibility.
‘It would be difficult to know what moral life would be like, or if indeed there could be such a thing as a moral life, if there were not responses like indignation, concern, shame or sympathy…values involve a relationship between ourselves and the world, though there may be a natural tendency to project these responses back onto the world and think of them as if they were there.’ What he describes as our moral life is a construct of rules that we live by, indicated and expressed through our reactions to situations. The grotesque then is also a construct as it is formulated through a response to it. Take for example disgust, it denotes a horror or distaste. These feelings are learnt and explored through our daily interactions with the world outside. The Carnival creates an opportunity to subvert this. It allows you to dress up and being ‘disgusting’; the mask of liberation permitting what was not ordinarily permissible. With the suspension of embarrassment about how we interact with each other in relation to bodily function, an intrinsic desire for exploration is unbounded. Roger Malbert touches on this in his essay in Carnivalesque: ‘Most theories of Carnival invoke nostalgia for an authentic popular culture, spontaneously creative, communal and steeped in tradition. Carnival is inseperarably linked in the European mind with Christianity, and discourse on the subject tends to be governed by the conventional dualisms of ‘high’ and ‘low’, order and disorder, government and the people, God and the devil. These polarities set the terms for the radical reversals we expect of the carnivalesque.’ The carnivalesque and the grotesque both inhabit ‘high’ and ‘low’ art simultaneously. They create a vacuum for actual classification to what defines them, they seem that they can be only defined by what they are not. The opposite of the grotesque is not Kitsch, because Kitsch has its own set of rules. Its not classically meditative, its selfindulgent. It is so consumer driven that It belongs to its own naughty secret. Beauty should ultimately be the opposite of grotesque, due to its reserve, its ability to allow us to ponder and its ability to make us feel more like mere mortals. The problem with beauty is that it is always associated with the sublime, and the sublime runs parallel with and subverts the grotesque. In Sublime the Darkness and the Light, Jon Thompson compares Kant with Burkes’ concept of the Sublime. ‘For Kant, the experience of ‘beauty’ is an experience of the ‘measurable’, while ‘sublimity’ is an experience of magnitude without limit. Indeed, ’the sublime’ can be part of every kind of overwhelming feeling, from ‘quiet wonderment’ and ‘pastoral contentment’ to extreme states of ‘fearful excitation’ and ‘delightful horror”. Earlier he states that: ‘Burke argues that beauty stays within the compass of human comprehension and in this respect confers a sense of well being on the subject, while both ‘the grand’ and ‘the sublime’ seem to reach for, or suggest, a state or condition beyond the scope of immediate comprehension and the distinction that he draws between the grand and the sublime hinges upon the notion of fear. While both lead eventually to feelings of pleasure…’sublime pleasure’ only after an initial feeling of terror.’
Both Kant and Burke talk about the sublime in terms of ‘fear’. Linguistically fear denotes a sense of anticipation, and therefore engenders certain expectations of behavior in situations. As a viewer of art we are preconditioned to have parameters in which to make assessments. We make value judgments subconsciously, which are created by our sense of aesthetic. Where does the grotesque feature in terms of aesthetics? In the Art of the Sublime Principles of Christian Art and Architecture. Roger Homan talks about western art. He tries to say that there is no canon to speak of, we are simply a product of our time. ‘In much of the literature on art, taste is discussed as though it has a stable, constant and normative form that belongs to a single intellectual group. However, neither taste nor distaste is an absolute. Taste varies over time and according to social status and cultural context… To define something as art invites a number of expectations, standards, criteria for evaluation and methods of study.’ I don’t believe that taste has any relevance to social status, it is informed through understanding. Comprehension of the value that we place on artifacts (art or otherwise) is born from recognition and understanding of cultural contexts. Because, in this particular case an object has been placed in a church, it will be held in reverence for those understanding religion, and therefore is significant in its cultural context. Irrelevant of its aesthetic value we can evaluate our intellectual position against it. When defining something as art it does layer it with expectations. All ‘artworks’ are appreciated through formal considerations; impact on the viewer, its ability to provoke thoughts, the labour of the artist. (also other considerations, like market value that come into play.) Danto, in his books The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and The Abuse of Beauty writes that: ‘We cannot appeal to aesthetic considerations in order to get our definition of art, in as much as we need the definition of art in order to identify the sorts of aesthetic responses appropriate to works of art in contrast with mere real things.’ If we are to place this knowledge into the context of grotesque art then formally the artworks must have value as they are defined as art, and is pertinent in its context. The encounter with them is already constructed in some senses. So why is the grotesque still understood in terms of its unacceptability? Is that its only asset? I suspect that beyond the cheap thrills its value is contained in its subversion of normality. Allowing judgment outside your normal philosophy. Matthew Barney’s philosophy is concerned with logic of body’s function and appearance, which leads to artworks that are full of metaphor, costume and movement. His broken logic that pervades his Cremasters series uses the theatrics of cinema to explore research into our notions of contemporary bodies. He takes the concept of the Greek, classical body, which we all desire to emulate, (because beauty has given us a notion to live by) however, he tweaks our psyche through prosthetics, costume, and dance, which illuminates the precarious real bodies that we live in. The idea that we are actually real living, breathing, and digestive systems is the grotesque element because these are everyday notions that we don’t talk about. What Barney does so effectively is to allow us into a glossy world that, over time, metamorphasises into our own biologically surreal journey. He wishes us to realise that our bodies
contain all of these operations, and to throw away our traditional outlook and perceive ourselves as biological facts. This, as a notion, has been hidden for so long that we try to pretend that it doesn’t even exist. We don’t wish to confront the idea that our bodies change and die, and produce excrement from different orifices. We do not wish to examine our real body because it causes us to examine our visceral, or lower body. Religious doctrine wishes us to forget our lower body and only examine the considered ‘higher’ body. Much like the sublime connects both ‘low’ and ‘high’ art, Barney tries to tie concepts together in order to examine this conditioning about our ideal body. He questions our ignorance of the elevated standpoint that we try to live up to. By alluding to the grotesque through beauty, he is able to explore how much we ignore by reflecting our bodies back at ourselves. See Fig 1,Here both the characters stand in this revealingly intimate scene, revealed and exposed. The only real cogent piece of information in the scene is the sense of relations set up between the two figures, and a sense that they are in a clinical environment. Standing, with a sense of classical posturing they stare at each other, with recognition. There is still an incompleteness that hovers within the setup. Maybe because of the juxtaposition of the classical pose with the imperfect bodies. The nurse, if we may label her as such without her complete body, impresses us with her physique and then repels us with her lack of complete legs. Her prosthetic legs also references hospitals, and how the body can be re-created, manipulated exchanged and then sewn back up. What makes the perfect body? How are we conditioned about what the perfect body is? Her extensions, or inclusions (in reference to what she should have in order to be a whole human being) will impede her walking abilities, even the beauty of the curves created through the high heel boots that replicate legs interrupt the whole picture. The reason this is so pertinent is because it also highlights the male character on the right’s high-heeled shoes. The ideas that we presuppose about sexuality and human nature start to blur. For a man to wear women’s shoes is a gender faux pas, It means that we cannot label that person, they become the third sex, unknown, a shifter between things. This is too precarious for ‘common society’. You are aware that both characters are exposing the same amount of flesh, and by wearing the same uniform, there is little differentiation. They have similar sexuality even though they are what we understand and recognise them as of different sexes. As an image, this disturbance of our cultural reality forces us to reconsider our transcendental ideal of the human body. Civilisation has conditioned our ideas about sexuality and our approach to gender. He wishes to question gender identity, there can be no question of that. He has named the series of films ‘Cremaster’, which is the muscle that alters the height of men’s’ testicles in order to control their temperature. His knowledge of these issues is paramount to the creation of his art. Does he wish us to laugh at how ridiculous and over zealous he has been in his research? Or does he want us to take sexuality seriously? I think that the quality of the work balances on this knife-edge. Some parts are so gloriously ridiculous that you cannot help but laugh at him (but not the film). However he knows this. The work seems to tie up so neatly. His hermetic world is too precise, it holds up too well. The real world is flawed and he has forgotten that elemental factor. We are captivated by the exquisiteness of his performance and the underlying unpleasant connotations that he invokes. The viewer however has to undergo the mammoth task of watching his anally retentive, self-
absorbed ego trip through his own warped brains’ processes. It eventually leaves you cold, it can’t help but alienate. The hubris of his own personality that we see in some of his characters has spilled over into the making of these films and here we see the collapse of certain meanings. Barney seems to use the grotesque for his own means, he uses imagery that we understand and then subverts it. Goya the grandfather of grotesque gives you the unfiltered images. He is considered as the first truly modern artist because he questions belief in God. He drew on what he saw and felt as a corporeal human. His own psychological theatre condensed into mysterious paintings and nightmare prints. Allowing consideration and disgust at shocking images, against our disposition. How can God be on both sides of the battlefield? Goya has the distinct ability to make the viewer question how humans could relate to humans in such a manner. Posturing how could God the almighty let this happen, without retribution? A prime example of this is in his ‘Disasters of War Series”, with the full collective title of “Fatal consequences of the bloody war against Bonaparte in Spain. And other Caprices.” A collection of prints that outline his documentation of the Spanish War with the French and the civil unrest that pursued. Interestingly enough he only produced two documented paintings about the war, which hold little of the same intrigue or disaster as the prints achieve. They are lost in the guerilla manufacture of weapons and organization of war. There is a sense of precaution and trepidation but none of the mania that inhabit the etchings. They do however hold the same sense of reportage. I fear though that the eyewitness account was probably fictional. He adorns the etchings with titles like ‘I saw this’, which gives them a sense of reality but I question if he did see this, how he would have survived to enable him to make the artworks. The series starts with bombastic images of death and rape and finishes with more abstract animals that represent the church and state and all the corruption which he seem to state more unmistakably in the beginning. It’s as if his conscious became clouded. His sense of right and wrong with which he starts the series off with becomes blurred as the situation’s realities evolve. Who are the killers? Morally, how are they able to commit such atrocities? Who is gaining from this situation? Who is really in control? Goya brings these realities to the forefront of the picture plane. His murky world does not have a background just lines and shadow(Fig 2). Which only goes further to illuminate the bodies that are strewn across the page. These humans that are denigrated, mere carcasses, their souls long departed. Through the sublime manufacture of these prints has founded the essence of the grotesque. He lays oblivion on the page, without excuse. Nature, repression and the nationalistic fervor hungry men destroy all that we believe should be upheld. This tact differs greatly from Barney’s slick operation, which makes it indisputable as grotesque. Both use the human form as a tool to explore our psychology, however Goya is literal in his depiction. The Chapmans great exponents of Goya wrote of the disasters of war: “The body is elaborated as flesh, as matter. No longer the religious body, no longer redeemed by God. Goya introduces finality- the absolute terror of material termination.”
The Chapman brothers are insistently poking at the conventions of knowledge about Art and our own persons. I have deduced that they are actually just acting out, as children do. However conscious their art production, they are still ‘airing their laundry in public’ letting the questioning child out, whilst giving us back the ability to think like children. Like them when enabled to regress, and allow our conscious thoughts wander into the realms of pure experimentation you can ask, what would happen if you attached two fetuses together? Children have sheer fascination with learning about what surrounds them. This presumed innocence is sometimes shattered by their interest in things that revolt adults. We then pass contrived notions onto others by imposing our moral belief systems. Moral codes that have been executed by generations of covering up. How will the world react, with its subconscious convention about how things are ‘supposed to be’? Do they revel in what is not supposed to be said? Are they making a point? How do they get away with it? The Chapmans artwork is always up held by cleanliness with which they perform their experiments. The production is immaculate which in the vein of Matthew Barney entices us (with cheap thrills) and then reveals its nature. In the catalogue for the Apocalypse Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art. James Hall finishes his article on their work by saying ‘Yet after 2000 years of Christianity, in which the crucifixion is the central episode, it is scarcely possible to separate out these two strands of feeling. Christianity teaches believers simultaneously to love and hate the most horrifying wounds. What the Chapmans are doing, with mordant wit, is to underscore how tangled are the webs of human desire and disgust.’ Their lack of Political statements to accompany such political work liberates the viewer, allowing the surface of the sculpture to present all its defining qualities. You are enticed to pay more attention to its manufacture and its presence. The Chapmans make you aware of the precision but multiple readings are put forward. They seem to attack capitalism, colonialism and consumerism but give no agenda, all being bound in art historical references. The concept of reconstructing art historical moments, or subverting those moments through changing the context allows the viewer space in which to consider the human conscience. The use of grotesque imagery underlines the parts of our existence that we pass by without recognition. Presumably because we do not wish to explore the parts of ourselves that we have left culturally subconscious for so long. So why are these artworks accepted by the populous? They seem to only put forward questions and give no real answers to the questioning. For example where do they stand on eugenics? They make a mockery of Nazi’s but elevate them to being works of art. This is why they are grotesque, and sublime all at once. They frolic in the barbarity of human subconscious and they tease out our disgust at our own nature. I think what intrigues me most about these the brothers is their placement in Art history with their re-constitution and re-contextualisation of ideas. In the creation of Great Deeds Against the Dead (Fig 3), the Chapmans taking shop window mannequins and elevating the denigrated bodies creates so many differing dialogues. It is pornographic in comparison to the etching from which it is taken. Not because the content has been changed, but due to the fact that it is human size, and visually accessible. The viewer engages with the characters as if they were soulless, dismembered bodies. However, there is a sanitation that still exists, it is still sculpture
because it doesn’t smell of rotting flesh. You are still able to laugh off the misfortune and an awareness of the signatory black humor is brought to the work. The subversive wit emancipates the art from the usual encoded critique. You do not celebrate the perversion of dead but you do not mourn their loss, they are too plastic for that. You revel in the absurdity of the metamorphosis of shop mannequins into sculpture. They relay a sense of the nature with which we consume both art objects and material goods, without actually thinking. Subconsciously we understand that we dress ourselves in order to attract sexual partners but we tell ourselves that we do it in order to engage with our own personalities. The interesting part is that the mannequin, which has no organs or orifices, propagates myth. Allowing us to shop with the notion that we are purchasing fine textures and colours. Why else would people buy objects if not to impress others? The sculptures however are undeniable sexual, either though a lack of sexual organs or excessive amounts scattered around the bodies. Their placement seems irrelative to sex however their symbolism screams sexuality. The penises are erect, the vaginas and assholes are red and swollen. All are evidently painstakingly painted and articulated. The intense and anally retentive production of the artworks makes them both incomprehensible and grotesque. You want to find the seams that make them fake but you are also taken in by their nature. You become a voyeur of these pornographic shop window dolls. The fiction has become reality; the technology, materials and techniques exist, which enables the most astonishing things appear realistic. The Chapmans seem to have tapped into this hyper-real situation. They realise that we are so permeable that the shock just passes through us, you don’t feel any emotion. We want the immediacy that the Chapmans give us, however the realities of our cognition are not always appreciated. The outrage that you emblazon upon their souls dissipates as you realise that they have no real agenda to speak of. Just careless educated play. ‘McCarthy’s topsy-turvy art stands our familiar models on their heads. Throughout his oeuvre, he has mixed cliché and convention to breakdown our social stereotypes. Ultimately, his unadulterated genres and scatological childhood myths return our attention to the social norms that they defy – not to shock or offend but in order to underscore.’ McCarthy has many relations to the Chapmans, as this comment could be directed similarly at the Chapmans art. The reactions that he creates are also rooted in his understanding and distaste with the world surrounding him. However he occupies the space between video performance and sculpture. Which has allowed his expressive artworks to flow with a deep sense of mimicry, sexuality and disturbance. I use the word disturbance carefully because once you get over the explicit nature of the artworks you find that they are a neurotic ticking time bomb that explodes and implodes, as he describes in his book HeadshopShophead ‘like an alcoholic man that goes too far’. This seems to be personified in the muttering and confused character (usually male) that seems to be present in most of his later videos. Where he has introduced masks, he adopts characters because they are a cover up, a way to express his dysfunction, but it not actually expose himself on the screen. The fact he is embarrassed by his subversion of society that he is performing is interesting. He involves himself in the identical shame that carnival goers would feel, why else would they adopt a caricature of themselves? McCarthy likes to play with conventions like
the carnival. He bases his work in the comprehendible and then destabilises it with a destruction of conventional boundaries. This Fantasy world has a freedom that invokes amazement and disgust, playing on our own sense of play within our sexual desires. In an interview in his monograph Paul McCarthy he says. ‘I mistrust a lot of what of what has been conjured up in this culture. At one point I mistrusted reality completely’ What reality is he talking about here? Is he talking about the physical world that we live in, or is he questioning the perception of reality, that lives in our heads. Our individual views of the world differ greatly. So is this just another ramble from a neurotic man or is there a greater schema? His creation of his own worlds in his artworks means that he controls of the staging. A base on which he formulates an alternative reality but also alludes to his hate for the homogenised Hollywood film industry. He demonstrates this in two ways, both his overt use of condiments instead of blood and explicit use of nudity. Both being frowned upon by society because he reveals the falsification. He is also known to rip off famous personalities in order to supplant their original (childlike) connotations and replace them with a realistic sexual, violent, confused characterisation. They are allowed to free their suppressed inhibitions that the Walt Disney code of practice has encased them with. Maybe this is his truth, the freedom to express yourself and not be bound by conventions. He believes that the customs of the reality that we consume as our own, and now bind us needs to supplanted. In an interview with Kristine Stiles he says ‘I don’t know whether I associate beauty with truth. I mistrust the notion of truth – maybe beauty is recuperation, satisfied acceptance, as opposed to a fractured sensation and alienation. The notion of beauty is associated, I think, with the sublime – the sublime being tranquil. Do you think of beauty as associated with tranquility? That somehow it’s possible for humans to find value? He wishes us to find our own truths. If we can consider our own desires and wishes maybe we could create a reality for ourselves that will bring a greater knowing. He models a way to approach this and then leaves you up to your own desire. I would like to realign the carnival back to its original roots. It has the potential to subvert and elevate all of our desires. The communal bringing together of peoples is what is lacking in the self-motivated society that we live in. when can we contact our true natures? How would our communities react if this were to happen? Confusion would ensue. ‘The “giving up” or “farewell to” meat (carnem levare or carne vale) …the period of license and excess, when inversion of rank was a central theme. Slaves were set free and given the right to ridicule their masters; a mock-king was elected; the lost golden age of the deposed God Saturn was temporarily reinstated. Affinities to more distant traditions- the Jewish Purim or the Indian Holi – suggest a structure deeply implanted in mankind: a moment in each year when for a few days the laughter of disorder comes out form the margins and assumes centre-stage.’ As humans we enjoy a structure, it enables us to fulfill our favorite pastime, to moan. We enjoy berating the structures of government for not fulfilling our lives, whilst complaining about paying too much tax. We want police on our streets to reduce
crime but complain that we have been caught with a speeding fine. The idea of having a period that we can upturn the protocol entices a sense of human self-indulgence. Religion has always guided our moral sense of right and wrong, a structure that the western world still seems to adhere too in many senses. The allowance of a period of revelry within the construct of something greater that we can always rely on gives us a valid awareness of self-indulgence with the ability for forgiveness in the end. Religion therefore keeps its position and we are still in awe of its greater notions of our reality and the construct that it gives us. The artwork that I have looked at here takes these themes out of the closet and positing the fears that we have in a humorous format so that we are allowed to look and indulge ourselves, revealing the questions that are inside us. Recounting on the artworks, they all relate to the body, and the subversion of the psyche in order to portray a message to the viewer. The artist use of the sublime to portray a grotesque agenda. The opacity of the art is defined by how much you want to see. If blinded by your reservations you will only see the crudeness. Barney uses the glossy beauty of his films to lure you into his obsessive world of trans-sexuality and biological function. Goya leaves us with disgust at a human nature’s cruelty but within the format of his desirable hand crafted etchings. The Chapmans through their immaculate production alarm and acclimatise you to the deprivation that Goya hints at, whilst layering more socio-political confusion into the mix. Finally McCarthy with his neurotic insecurities about the realities of the situation that we live in, confronts and challenges himself and us to question, what he is actually subverting. We understand desire and disgust, it formulates our lives. So why can’t celebrate our bodies more? If our pagan and carnivalesque traditions highlighted these ideas why can’t we do it now? All are asking questions that can’t be answered, but surely they should still be considered. (Confusion ensues)
Bibliography: Apocalypse, Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art, Royal Academy of arts, 2000 Carnivalesque, Hayward Gallery Publishing, Timothy Hyman and Roger Malbert, 2000 Fransicso De Goya: The disasters of War Etchings, Phiadon Press, 1937 Goya, Robert Hughes, Random House, 2003 Paul McCarthy, HeadshopShophead, works 1966-2006, Steidl, 2006 Matthew Barney, The Cremaster Cycle, Nancy Spector, Guggenheim Museum, 2002 Paul McCarthy, Phiadon press, 1996 Sublime the Darkness and the Light, Jon Thompson, Hayward Gallery, 2000 The Apocalyptic Sublime, Morton D. Paley, Yale University Press, 1986 The Complete Etchings of Goya, Crown Publishing, 1943 The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Arthur C. Danto, Harvard University Press, 1981