Reason’s Dream, Reason’s Nightmare (#2)
What survived in exile and has comes back an art predicated on the centrality of contradiction, and more especially of self-contradiction pitched to the point of wild hysteria or frozen in catatonic arabesques.
Since Surrealism and, before it, Dada, are the wellsprings of so much of the contemporary grotesque it makes a sense to begin at the beginning with Lautreamont’s description of the "chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sowing machine and an umbrella" and skip from there to Duchamp’s ready-made of a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool. The obvious disparity between the still-life encounter Lautreament hypothesized and Duchmap’s translation of it brings us back to the Roman grottos by way of the hardware and furniture store. For Lautreament’s conceit and Duchamp’s sculpture are nothing other than the grafting of materials and forms of different genuses to create a new whole, palpably at odds with itself that is equivalent–be it combination of any found or appropriated parts–to the grafting of different plant, animal, or human forms in antiquity.
In this regard, however, the crucial distinction between Cubist collage and its Surrealist variant is one of explicit discord as opposed to false harmony. Whereas Cubist collage and its extension by Constructivism emphasized the fragmentation and dissonance of the components used, upending the world as it naturally appeared, then Surrealism forced the viewer to contend with illogical but nonetheless cohensive representations of a supernatural world in which rationally incompatible realities coexisted as they do in dreams.Grotesquery shows up in Cubist collage, but it occurs only as a by-product of formal manipulations and is not the expression of fundamentally uncanny Weltanschauung.
Moreover, the perceptual and conceptual ramifications of Cubist collage are different from those of based in Surrealism. While Cubism lent itself to a materialist if not in positivist recasting of reality in which explosive tensions among disparate objects and perspectives resolved themselves dynamically, in Surrealism inseparable but irreconcialble states of being are manifested in holistic shapes and scenes and left to hover in space and time. The imagination is not permitted to choose between one or another of these conflicting factors–between the bicycle wheel or the stool–but must accept their absolute, irresolvable, but henceforth indivisible incommensurability. It is those characteristics of the marvelous, as distinct from the horrible or comic, grotesque that Surrealism translated from Romantic and Symbolist idioms into one proper to the twentieth century, although recalling Ruskin the distinction is one of proportion which always takes for granted the presence of at least trace elements of one or both of the other qualities.
Thus, while the ready-made and found object are generally regarded as sui-generis avant-garde inventions targeted at academic notions of creativity, with a longer historical view they may be usefully be undertood as lateral descendants of the grotesque tradition which has been, at various times, both the academy’s playground and the redoubt of its radically subversive fifth column. If, on reading this claim, current defenders of avant-garde purity are inclined to accuse the devil of quoting scripture by associating Duchampian practices (currently being realligned to suit a variety of political agendas) with the triffling amusements of art’s interior decorators and court jesters of the past, consider not only Duchamp’s excellent credentials in the later capacity but the high standing in the former of heir, Andy Warhol.
On that score, also consider the warning issued by Harold Rosenberg against what he saw as the degeneration of Abstract Expressionism into "apocalyptic wallpaper." Penned by a man who viewed Action Painting–his term–as an existential agon, the fact that the results might still look good above or behind the sofa was troubling. However, he could offer no formal criteria that would prevent misapprehension of the artist’s gesture as Rococo filligree but only the hope that somehow the sweat and blood of the artist’s struggle would so completely saturate the canvas that the anxiety that went into it would suffuse the room in which it hung no matter what the decor. Warhol’s answer was formal and it turned that hope into an ghastly reality. Taking the grid as his module–in other words the implicit structure of all-over gesture painting made explicit by hard-edge and minimal painting–Warhol loosened its matrices and emptied some zones of imagery entirely while filling them with eye-smarting color in a stunning off-hand parody of high formalist abstraction. Then in a gruesome travesty of the decorative aspect of such work feared by Rosenberg, Warhol plugged the rectangular spaces of his grid with pictures of crumpled cars, smashed bodies, leaping suicides, electric chairs and the like. The extreme cognitive clash between the strict formal codes his silkcreen paintings referenced and his entropic break-down of their rigor coupled combined with the clash between the snazzy though slightly woozy ornamentality of the compositions and the truly nauseating contents of the emblems that patterned them is the grotesque in its most condensed but also most complete contemporary realization.
Peter Saul, a maverick member of Warhol’s Pop generation, has offered another riposte to mainstream abstraction: rude and belligerent cartoon send-ups of modern and old master art that take the comic grotesque of eighteenth century and nineteenth century caricature about which Baudelaire wrote–to his list of Daumier, Garvani, Grandville, Cruikshank, Hogarth and Goya, one might add Gillray and Rowlandon in particular–and pushes the genre to new extremes. Saul too had the problem of Abstract Expressionism’s decorativeness on his mind whenhe wrote: "If a chair covers up a part of a Rubens, for instance, the remaining view of the pciture is crazy, whereas Rothko, Pollock, etc.–you lose a foot of it behind the couch and it doesn’t ‘hurt,’ [sic] just feels ‘generous’ like you’ve got plenty of everything. As far as i am concerned U.S. art after that is just surface after surface to be used as decorations while being talked about as a mental or cultural breakthrough. Putting crime, war, sex, distortion and low class stuff into the picture is a way to take the decoration out of the picture–literally remove it from the dining room because no one is going to drink orange juice in the same room with it." 4 And so the artist has, dedicating himself to finely crafted mannerist paintings with Rubensian volumes and dayglo colors that feature egregiously violent or lurid imagery that resembles and rivals Warhol’s in several ways but for the reasons stated seldom find themselves on the walls of dining or living rooms as Warhols more often do. Saul’s electric chairs have monsterous occupants, his mayhem spatters rubby-red gobs of blood all over the scenery and, along with scatalogical jokes and the pitiless exaggeration of human traits the indecorousness of an angry teenager makes common cause with an adult moralist disgusted by polite society.
For the reasons that patrician taste has always scorned vulgarity an artist such as Saul is beyond the pale to many avowed high modernists. However, conservatives of this order might do well to recall that David Smith whose absract work they celebrate was also the author of wonderful grotesques–most notably his ferocious Medals for Dishonor (1939) but also later, more ‘mature" works full of brutal deformations. Furthermore Smith went on record as saying; "I have spoken of the artist’s use of the vulgar. But this term I use because, to the professional aesthetician, it is a vulgarity in his code of beauty, because he has not recognized it as yet or made rules for its acceptance. To the creative artist, it is his beauty, but to the audience, who will wait for the aesthetcicians explanation, it is too new and has not yet hammered its way into acceptance." 5 This was in fact the view of a number of his contemporaries. De Kooning, for one, said "Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped up in the melodrama of vulgarity" 6 And de Kooning bore this out in his "Women" paintings where painterly fury and earthy wit, the antagonism toward women and the love of them, neo-classicism and proto-Pop–the figure was a dismembering of Ingres while the mouths were partially inspired by a cigarette advertsiements–converge and commingle in ways that are vigorously grotesque. Then there was Ad Reinhardt, rechristened "Pure" by de Kooning wife Elaine in a satirical article titled "Pure Paints a Picture," who, in addition to creating some of the most rarefied abstractions of his period also composed grotesque collage cartoons that are as disrespectful of his Abstract Expressionist colleagues as anything by Saul.
The purpose of zig-zagging through these few connections is simply to establish the fact that when looked without blinders it becomes obvious that the grotesque in all its decorative, whimsical, crude and disquieting guises does nor merely erupt at the periphery of mid-twentieth century art like gargoyles on a cathedral–and nothing so far has really been said in this regard of Dubuffet’s "matiere" portraits and Hourloups, Yves Klein’s "Anthropometries," Hermann Nitsch’s and Otto Muhl’s profane rituals and a host of other examples of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s–but rather that it permeates the entire spectrum of styles and often arises–like an inflammation–from the friction between them.
The same may be said of the present. While Polke is the protean epitome of the contemporary grotesque, at once gloriously impudent and exquisite in his use and misuse of a variety of artistic means, he is far from alone. The late Martin Kippenberger should have been Polke’s natural–or rather unnatural–legatee, but even his truncated career established his legitmate claim to a place among the front ranks of contemporary masters of the grotesque, and his last self-portraits in poses drawn aping those found in Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa–images that pathetic and grandioise, self-mocking and anguished–are perhaps the most complex of this perenial bad-boys many challenges to seriousness and propriety precisely because their ambiguities are so rich. Closer to Polke age and experience Jorg Immendorf ranks high as well for many of the same reasons, but his ambivalences have played themselves out through a series of seemingly abrupt styles shifts, from his antic LIDL performances through Maoist agitprop paintings of the to his Cafe Deutscheland tableaux and down through his inceasingly Baroque recuperations of Hogarth, Gogol and other early masters of the grotesque. Immendorf has spent his talent freely and produced much, which has caused him to be underestimated by critics who think self-restraint is a basic prerequisite for all good art rather than the specific quality of some. Yet neither the public persona Immendorf has created–which like Kippenberger’s is exceptionally theatrical, mutable and polyvalent–or the profusion of works he has produced should be held against the best of what he has done. Instead they should be regarded as the necessary attributes of an anarchic spirit that is given to enthusiastic lurches that release energy in others and a sensibility that is attuned as few others to the ideological and cultural cacophony of his time and place.
Having mentioned the Viennese Actionists Nistch and Muhl above while belatedly adding Gunther Brus to the roster–especially books such as Irrwirsch–the name of Franz West should also be highlighted. West’s gently satirical although melancholy art is the specific antidote to the sinister provocations of his Actionist elders, as are, in a broader manner, those of Maria Lassnig as well. Following these tesellations of the grotesque still further, we may jump back to the United States where the influence of 1960s Funk a la Saul, H. C. Westermann and Edward Keinholz are felt along with the transatlantic impact not only of the Actionists but also of Dieter Roth–a polymorphous figure if there every was one, and an aesthetic polymath as well–whose sojourns in America have, with delayed but profound effect, spawned a host of process artists with a penchant for noxiously biodegradable installations, among them being Paul McCarthy and Mark Dion. McCarthy, of course belongs to a cohort that includes Mike Kelley, a leading theoretician of dissenting artistic practices as well as a major artist in many media, and Raymond Pettibon, whose text-strewn drawings are the authentic voice of the most exalted and the most ignoble aspects of the national subconscious. A poet of borrowed phrases who raids Mickey Spillane and Herman Melville with an equally sharp ear for language and a draftsman who combines William Blake with pulp magazine illustration, marginal illumination of an almost medieaval intricacy with bold Warholeque emblems, Pettibon is, like Polke a erudite exploiter of contraries who acts as if he was simply tossing off gags or lampooning the lyric traditions he mimicks when in fact the jokes rub salt in real wounds and the lyricism rings true.
Psychosexual enigmas were a staple of the grotesque during the
