News item: "The physician with a scalpel wore bright blue scrubs and a
signature black fedora. The cadaver lay on a metal tray below a large
copy of Rembrandt’s ‘Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp." In the
former brewery in East London, the television cameras turned, a paying
audience squirmed and Britain’s first public autopsy in 170 years–since
the practice was banned to discourage body-snatching–was under way.
Ghoulish? Maybe. Grotesque? Perhaps."
Reason’s Dream, Reason’s Nightmare (#1)
Robert Storr
News item: "The physician with a scalpel wore bright blue scrubs and a signature black fedora. The cadaver lay on a metal tray below a large copy of Rembrandt’s ‘Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp." In the former brewery in East London, the television cameras turned, a paying audience squirmed and Britain’s first public autopsy in 170 years–since the practice was banned to discourage body-snatching–was under way. Ghoulish? Maybe. Grotesque? Perhaps."
As reported in The New York Times of November 21, 2002, the medical manifesto, performance work, publicity stunt of Dr. Gunther van Hagens was ready-made for the media, which dutifully supplied further details on the history of authorized post-mortems, of illegal violation of corpses, and the history of art, making of note, for example, that a painting (actually a print) by William Hogarth titled Reward of Cruelty, features the ghastly scientific butchery of a dead man. They might have added, but did not, that with his gaunt cheeks and hat Dr. van Hagens resembled the late Joseph Beuys a good deal more than Rembrandt’s comparatively well-fed surgeon–and was undoubtedly intended to inasmuch as Beuys remains the Godhead of messianic art provocation. Then, as quoted in the commentary of a doctor called upon give his view of the event that word comes up once again, and this time without any qualifying query. The operation was, he said, "a travesty of medical science, a grotesque pastiche of a dark but necessary side of the healer’s art."
Grotesque? we may ask once more. If it was a matter of the dissection alone it would hard to justify the term in its proper usage. After all, if an autopsy were being carried out in a pristine clinic by men in white suits, we would simply avert our eyes and leave the unpleasant duty to the experts with professionally strong stomachs, and cast no aspersions on the their motives or conduct. In short, for something to be grotesque, it has to be in disharmony with the world as we normally understand it. However such nuances are generally lost in common parlance, where the word "grotesque" has come to mean anything disgusting, upsetting or absurd, of which the diminutive "grotty" is the comic expression of the same otherwise morbid or distasteful qualities.
Much the same devolution has occurred with the word tragic, such that every plane crash, car crash or bloody crime is a tragedy, disregarding the essential dynamic of classical tragedy which is contradiction. Natural disasters, mechanical failures and ordinary murderous rage, greed or carelessness do not involve conflicted motives. Storms, tidal waves and forest fires do their business with supreme indifference to the human consequences, just as short-circuits and failing breaks make hideous messes out of people with no malice at all, much less any anguish. As to homicide, most of it is done with conviction: someone wants you dead so you end up that way if only because you posed an obstacle to what they crave though occasionally removing you forever is that obscure object of their desire. When murder lacks conviction it is likely to be accidental, for example, the consequence of a miscalculation in the commission of an armed robbery, reminding us that murder can be virtually random and often is.
True tragedy, however, is not just a matter or bad luck: of being in the wrong place at the wrong time when lightening hits, engines cut out or bullets fly; or of being the unambiguous target of ill will. A tragedy is fated, and that inevitability is the result of a collision between two forces–frequently within the same person–that cannot be averted. Nor, in tragic circumstances, can the contention be resolved despite the ability of witnesses to imagine such a solution. The result of such ineluctable crises is the dramatic illumination of competing values at the cost of cathartic suffering
The mechanisms of the true grotesque have much in common with tragedy, not least in that one definition, advanced by Thomas Mann among others, is that the grotesque is, inherently that which is the tragi-comic. In other words a compound of those conflicted aspects of human nature that produce calamity with those that produce farce–and do so simultaneously such that it is impossible for one to know whether to laugh or cry.
The principle of irreconcilable antithesis is thus essential to the grotesque as it is to tragedy. But rather than culminate in the purging of bottled up emotions, which is the case with tragedy, the grotesque binds opposing responses together in baroque psychological knots. Or it leaves one incapable of any coherent reaction whatsoever to the extent that all the once familiar aspects of the divided consciousness of which one has abruptly and emphastically been made aware acquire an inassimilable strangeness that defies normal interpretation. And as Freud was among the first to point out, the reflex such sudden disorientation triggers is as likely to be a nervous giggle as a cry of alarm.
Through most of history the comic grotesque has generally been the dominant mode, with Charles Baudelaire and Mikhail Bahktin among its principle theorists, Baudelaire in a Saturnine spirit, and Bakhtin in a democratically burlesque one. As the level of the viewer’s or the reader’s confusion and discomfort increases, and the Satanic inflection of the grotesquery become more pronounced–for Baudelaire and other late18th and 19th century writers this element was usually fundamental–the humor shifts from the vulgar, ritually insurrectional laughter of the peasant–Bakhtin’s emphasis–to the derisive laughter of those who mock the divine order of the world according to which everyone and everything exists on their own terms and lives according to the laws of nature which forbid their miscengartion or hybridization. Above all these laws prohibit mankind’s attempts to rival God a creator, such hubris, according to the parables of the Rabbi Low’s Golem and Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, guaranteeing a terrible retribution.
Without insisting much on the theological implications of Baudelaire’s formula which I have roughly paraphrased, the literary scholar Wolfgang Kayser’s account of the grotesque leans more heavily than Mann’s on its uncanny and macabre dimensions, thus anticipating Franz Kafka, Alfred Kubin and other 20th century masters of disorientation and menace. This of alienated and alienating strain of grotesquery connects the Renaissance description of the aberrant flora and fauna that embellished Neronian temples, and, imitation of them, Renaissance Palazzos as "sogni dei pittori" [the dreams of painters]–with Goya’s more ominous understanding of the word "caprichos" [caprices]. The emblematic plate of Goya’s series features a nocturnal sky filled with the silent shrieks and glaring eyes of owls and bats, under which a man slumbers. Below his head is inscribed the caption "el sueno de la razon produce monstruos." In English this is generally translated as "The sleep of reason produces monsters." However a version more faithful not only to the original Spanish but also to Goya’s signal position as an early modernist who witnessed the bloody eclipse of Enlightenment effected by Napoleon’s military conquests and who lived in the dusk where the subconscious plumbed successively by the Romantics, the Symbolists and the Surrealists first awakened, would be "The dream of reason produces monsters." For inn the aftermath of countless utopian schemes of the last two hundred and fifty years which thoroughly reimagined how the world might be and ruthlessly pursued the realization of their rational prototypes, it would seem that we have less to fear from merely dormant reason that from reason’s speculative reverie.
In that regard Sigmar Polke’s recent recapitulations and transformation of images from the "Caprichos" more or less parallel to his grotesque reworking and displacement of Rococco ornamental motifs combined with scenes of atrocities from the French revolution would seem to be late 20th century allegories of Goya’s late18th century, early 19th century forebodings. In Polke painterly elegance and phantasmagorical–or should one simply say psychedelic–lushness of technique establish an equivalence between ancien-regime pleasure-seeking and contemporary hedonism. Meanwhile images of the Terror remind us of the ideological slaughters of our own period which dwarf their historical precursor in extent and while exceeding it in "rational" method. If you are looking for the contemporary grotesque in its most sophisticated, resonant, and disturbing incarnation you have no farther to go than Polke, though it is his entire repertoire–his blasted lyricism and his Pop cool, his pictorial alchemy and his gleefully obscene graphic jokes–that demands attention, not only these late, great reflections on "Enlightenment’s" dark ridiculousness and radiant brutality.
Regardless of whether its manifestations are amusing or appalling, the grotesque is insistently artificial and anti-natural. Genetic distortion may inspire invention in this domain, but the clash of thoughts and feelings that engender the grotesque and result from it do not occur to atoms or chromosomes. What is grotesque about a freak show is not the freaks but the show; the aura of perverse hilarity and delight in suffering that surround the unfortunate creatures on display. By the same token the grotesque element of Dr. van Hagens Grand Guignol resides in the atmosphere of artistic piety and voyeurism he cultivated not in the eviscerated body on display.
Inasmuch as the grotesque is never given but always a construction it is the manner and proportions in which oxymoronic characteristics are put together and presented that determines its psychological and aesthetic register–from abject buffoonery to white-knuckle unease. Nevertheless. both qualities are necessary. John Ruskin, another expert in the ambivalences which give rise to a taste for the grotesque said it best: "The grotesque falls into two branches, the sportive grotesque and the terrible grotesque: but…we cannot legitimately consider it under these two aspects because there are hardly any examples which do not in some degree combine both elements: there are so few grotesque so utterly playful as to be overcast with no shade of fearfulness, and few so fearful as absolutely to exclude all ideas of jest." 1
Ruskin’s aesthetic preoccupation was the Gothic in which the grotesque flourished, and its very profusion made him uncomfortable. For squeamish temperaments such as his, an essential condition for appreciating the grotesque was its marginally. In medieval times the vulgar or demonic inventions of sculptors and manuscript illuminators were, for the most part, confined to distinct zones leaving the primary structures and surfaces of cathedrals and the sacred texts of book unblemished, although at their edges every kind of creature cavorted and every dimension of human folly disported itself. During the Renaissance, when the concept of the grotesque came into being with the discovery of subterranean Roman ruins adorned with fantastic motifs of every description, the "grotesque," named after these antique "grottos," expanded its territory at the borders of art while making tactical inroads into art’s core. In the Baroque and Rococo periods, the margins finally overran those previously inviolable precincts and the abstract lineaments and expanses of buildings, books and pictures disappeared under a welter of hybrid ornament.
In response to this gradual, sometimes reversed, but finally inexorable erosion of classical clarity of form–imagine Vitruvian villas overgrown with vegetation and inhabited by disfigured vagabonds and beautiful but untamed waifs–modernism sought to banish the grotesque altogether by erecting new structures that precluded even marginal decoration from which the grotesque might again spread its spore. Surveying the overdressed denizens of his native Vienna and the over embellished products of the first phases of the industrial revolution during the waning days of the nineteenth century, the iconoclastic architect and designer Adolf Loos, took this narrative of decline and fall and recast it as a reversion to the "primitive." To that polemical end he drew a sharp line between the "barbarous" penchant for decoration which he equating with tattooing, scarification and other customs, and the progressive preference for plainness. "The less civilized a people is, the more prodigal it will be with ornament and decoration. The Red Indian covers every object, every boat, every oar, every arrow over and over with ornament. To regard decoration as an advantage is tantamount to remaining on the level of a Red Indian. but the red Indian within us we must overcome. The red Indian says; That woman is beautiful because she wears golden ear rings in her nose and in her ears. The civilized person says: this woman is beautiful because she has no rings in her nose and in her ears. To seek beauty only in form and not to make it depend on ornament, that is the aim towards which the whole of mankind is tending." 2
The moralizing tone of this proscription derived from a complex of assumptions and beliefs that have stigmatized the grotesque for most of the twentieth century but which date back as far as the phenomenon itself. Thus the grotesque, particularly its more flamboyant manifestations, has repeatedly been called up on charges of corrupting an unsuspecting public and of sowing chaos. For example, in his seminal essay The Sense of Order, E.H Gombrich begins his study of the psychology of decorative art with two quotations from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. "The world is dedeived with ornament" says one character; "ornament is but the guiled shore to a most dangerous sea," 3 says another. Implicit in the later statement, of course, is an equation. which, transposed, virtually defines surrealism in the sense that the willing surrender to amazement can lead the imagination into the deep waters of the unconscious. From this vantage point, and all that it implied, surrealism was the dialectical counter-term to puritan modernisms which aimed to cleanse the temple of art of illusions. By contrast, Andre Breton and his surrealist cohort set out to create a revolutionary science out of the "sogni dei pittori," and in practice metamorphic anomalies and monstrosities were the laboratory specimens of this new discipline.
Compounding the accusation that forms which mask reality or fool the eye into believing in the existence of things which cannot be are aesthetically as well as socially intolerable falsifications, scolds have, on the one hand, emphasized the grotesque’s frivolity, and on the other, bemoaned its degradation. The first criticism is often accompanied by class-based indignation at the oblivious self-indulgence of the privileged; the second is generally made by those who decry the leveling or debasement of culture by the masses. However, given its very amorphousness, the grotesque lends itself to many angles of attack at once and some modernists have simultaneously cursed the effete excesses of aristocratic taste and the coarseness of popular taste, both of which have been fertile ground for the genre. Indeed, with its essentializing program modern formalism has been the avowed enemy of the grotesque in all its guises, choosing particular lines of social and political critique to trump its basic aesthetic antipathy where necessary.
If, in opposition to Constructivism de Stijl, the Bauhaus and other fundamentalist modern tendencies Surrealism was one hotbed of the grotesque, then Expressionism and its off-shoots was the another. And if Surrealism and Expression fused in the late 1940s and early 1950s to produce a variety of styles that were grotesque-prone from the gesturalism of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, the Cobra group and their ilk, to the eccentric pictorialism of Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon, the institutionalization of reductive forms of abstract painting and sculpture and of severe structuralist types of architecture increasingly repressed this impulse in "mainstream" culture.
In the United States whose impact on cultural discourse grew in the postwar era along with its economic and geopolitic reach, the principal spokesman of this repression was the formalist critic Clement Greenberg. Although Greenberg was capable of seeing merit in historical work that contained aspects of the grotesque–Max Beckmann, for example–there was no place for it in his ideal of an art stripped of narrative, symbolism, or representation and pared down to its basic abstract elements, an art, so he said, devoid of "schwarmerei." For Greenberg Cubism and all that its spare armatures presaged established the overriding paradigm of modernism, with Surrealism, at best a nuisance, at worst the absolute nemesis of art’s self-evidence and quality. Thus Greenberg actively discouraged the surrealist impulses of his two model artists, Pollock and the sculptor David Smith, while conveniently rechristening Joan Miró a late Cubism to avoid having to deal with any but the plastic or chromatic dimensions of his pictures.
From this formalist combination of sweeping condemnation, disapproving reticence and willful blindness to incidences of the grotesque we owe the curiously fragmented and distorted image of the genre we now have. In fairness one must perhaps say, however, that insofar as fragmentation and distortion are the operating principals of the grotesque a mise en abîme of these qualities that produces a grotesque of the grotesque is self-consistent with the phenomenon being described and therefore not such a bad thing. Yet, while being treated in this manner as the exception to the rule of aesthetic self-discipline and coherence that "high" modernism proposed, the grotesque has degenerated into an epithet for "lowness" of artistic ambition or achievement, a universal pejorative that is entirely defined by what supposedly negates it in a specific situation rather than by its own motivations, logic and possibilities. It is the single word which once applied to works that fall into the most ambivalent areas of consensus taste that can be counted on to push them definitively out of bounds.
Nevertheless when you tote up the examples of the things which are truly grotesque but not called that to shield them from opprobrium at the cost of any appreciation of their inherently disturbing and disruptive potential–in the past the formally simplified and poetically pasteurized Miró is a case in point–and add those which are called grotesque in order to preempt serious consideration of them the category swells to vast, some may complain amorphous proportions. But as previously acknowledged one is obliged to accept that vagueness as intrinsic to the grotesque, since we are not speaking of something that can be understood according to canonical standards but rather something that refutes them, something innately contrarian, and unruly.
In this context, the modern grotesque and its contemporary, some would say post-modern incarnations, consitute the return of the repressed not the momentary resurgence of an always decadent or deplorable tendancy toward unrestrained flights of fancy.
