This book establishes a fresh and expansive view of the grotesque in Western art and culture, from 1500 to the present day. Following the non-linear evolution of the grotesque, Frances S. Connelly analyzes key works, situating them within their immediate social and cultural contexts, as well as their place in the historical tradition. By taking a long historical view, the book reveals the grotesque to be a complex and continuous tradition comprised of several distinct strands: the ornamental, (...) the carnivalesque and caricatural, the traumatic, and the profound. The book articulates a model for understanding the grotesque as a rupture of cultural boundaries that compromises and contradicts accepted realities. Connelly demonstrates that the grotesque is more than a style, genre, or subject; it is a cultural phenomenon engaging the central concerns of the humanistic debate today. Hybrid, ambivalent, and changeful, the grotesque is a shaping force in the modern era. (shrink)

Greek philosophical tradition, not only the Aristotelian one, is strongly associated with proportion (Eco, 1993: 90). This principle of symmetry is generalisable; forasmuch as it is used as a normative rule in figurative arts. Nonetheless, the proportion for Ancient Greeks does not only describe a mathematical relation, but also represents a metaphysical principle. Thus, beauty is the measurement of the elements of the external form (in the case of tragedy, the meter, the symmetry of the parts, the number of syllables, (...) the number of verses) as well as the aesthetic harmony which the play transmits as total to the spectators (in the same case, the content must be neither superior nor inferior to the chosen form; otherwise the form would give the impression of grotesque or inadequate). (shrink)

This collection offers a set of new readings on the history, meanings, and cultural innovations of the grotesque as defined by various current critical theories and practices. Since the grotesque frequently manifests itself as striking incongruities, ingenious hybrids, and creative deformities of nature and culture, it is profoundly implicated in early modern debates on the theological, philosophical, and ethical role of images. This consideration serves as the central focus from which the articles in the collection then move outward (...) along different lines of conceptualization, chronology, cultural relevance, place, and site. They cover a wide spectrum of artistic media, from prints to drawings, from sculptures to gardens, from paintings to stuccos. As they do this, they engage with, and bring together, theoretical perspectives from writers as diverse as Plato and Paleotti, Vitruvius and Vasari, Molanus to Montaigne. Whether travelling a short distance from Nero's Domus Aurea to Raphael's Vatican logge, or across the ocean from Italy to New Spain, this volume goes further than any previous study in defining the historic understanding of grotesque and, in so doing, providing us with a more nuanced resource for our understanding of an art form once viewed as peripheral. (shrink)

“Artworks are not being but a process of becoming” —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory In the everyday use of the concept, saying that something is grotesque rarely implies anything other than saying that something is a bit outside of the normal structure of language or meaning – that something is a peculiarity. But in its historical use the concept has often had more far reaching connotations. In different phases of history the grotesque has manifested its forms as a (...) means of subversive resistance against society’s prevailing notions of form and power. What aids this impact and distinguishes two of its basic stylistic features is the grotesque’s dissolution of form and its hyperbole. Such grotesqueries, however, soon solidify into new forms, new structures of meaning, hierarchy and practice, and in this sense the history of the grotesque is, on one hand, a continual opposition and transgression of the prevailing notions of art as well as of God and humanity, while on the other hand it offers continual resistance to its own solidifying process. As such the grotesque will not and cannot be contained in form without it losing the very thing that makes it grotesque. Even though it is somewhat easy to point out certain stylistic features of the grotesque, the sum of those features tell us very little about what is at play within it. Definitions concerned with the grotesque’s content rather than its form faces similar difficulties. Throughout history, expressions relating to the grotesque have been used in defense of a whole host of different social and cultural discourse including, for instance, Catholicism (See Erhard Schön’s Der Teufel mit der Sackpfeife , 1536), Protestantism (See Lucas Cranach’s Der Papstesel , 1523), a material folk culture (see Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World , 1984) and an idealistic romantic structure of meaning (see Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature , 1957). Thus though the grotesque cannot be reduced to the expression of certain forms or meanings, in order to examine what the grotesque is about one has to try to see how it’s relationship to flow and process and how, by maintaining this relationship, it attempts to avoid solidifying into form and meaning. The process of the grotesque alluded to here revolves around a play between periphery and center, the marginalized and the dominant. Most often this is expressed as a direct negation of the center of power. In the medieval grotesque tradition of the carnival, for example, it is expressed by its emphasis on the nether regions of the body as the center of creation of meaning. Spirit does not come from above, but from the belly, buttocks and genitals, and there is, expressed in this manner, a mockery of the predominant Christian notion of truth and meaning. Such inversions of the sites of meaning most often explicitly express an increased interest in materiality instead of ideal content which comes to the fore through the play between periphery and center. Even in early grotesque Renaissance art (for example in the works of Raphael) the depiction of the mythological or ideal reveals an exploration of the possibilities of the material. The works of art thus explore their own boundaries rather than act as vessels of the divine and in this way the grotesque explores the limits of form and materiality. This in turn brings to the fore a metaphysical dimension in the workings of the grotesque: It is an immanent exploration of its own boundaries. Materiality and metaphysics are joined together, because it is through the awareness of itself as a structuring (dis)order that it places itself in opposition to the prevailing notions of form and power. This way the grotesque expresses an awareness of the division of sign and reality and a search for this reality. It implicitly expresses the awareness that meaning is not something God-given and static, but fluctuating and man-made. In modern explorations of the history of the grotesque it is commonly seen as a form of realism that manifests a shift from the ideal towards the material, freeing art from representing some hidden higher order and instead making the work of art the very site of creation and meaning. Going even further, the grotesque actively opposes the notions of the ideal by marking a shift from an ahistorical view of the world towards the historical. However, this also makes clear why the grotesque has a tendency to solidify into new static forms of meaning, for by establishing itself as a subversive counterforce there is an idea of transgression and emancipation. That is why the grotesque often historicizes and relativizes only to repeat the mistakes of that which it negates: putting itself in the king’s chair. The exploration of the material seems to create new forms and notions of the ideal. The representation of an otherness outside the prevailing notions of meaning and truth becomes a positive manifestation of this otherness as truth itself. Thus the historical “truths” of the grotesque are superseded by history itself. When the expressions of the grotesque solidify into static form and meaning, they become mere objects like anything else in the world. Instead of being this elusive thing of process and flow, it becomes tangible to the existing hierarchy of power as well as history itself. In this way the grotesque can be expunged, included or simply revealed as yet another false notion of truth, which is precisely what has happened with the grotesque throughout the course of history. If from the beginning the expression of the grotesque has not already been in the service of some structure of meaning and truth, it has quickly been included or has quickly included itself in such a structure. But by doing so it rejects its own basis: the tension between periphery and center is replaced by the attempt to create a new center, a new structure of meaning and truth. The doubleness, ambiguity and flow of the grotesque are then rejected by the grotesque itself. THE NON-FORM OF FORM In the critical thinking of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) the problem of art, caught between a reductive and prevalent notion of truth and meaning and a peripheral and alienated otherness, is reexamined and reformulated. For Adorno, the instrumental rationality of Enlightenment itself reverts into a new form of mythology which is every bit as static and exclusive as the hierarchies of religion it supersedes. All is excluded that is non-identical to the instrumental mastery of the objects of the world, "For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry." 1 As such the non-identical has been banished from the realm of thought and action, and banished specifically to the realm of art. But the realm of art is not able to provide a decent home for it because even modern art is not something entirely autonomous. While it is excluded from the notions of truth and meaning provided by instrumental rationality, it still originates from society. Just like instrumental rationality art is about mastery, structuring and exclusion. Therefore, the problem for art is that it cannot directly provide a space for the non-identical because its mode of operation is similar to that of instrumental rationality. Even worse, art has very few possibilities to free itself from this. If it becomes l’art pour l’art it is at the same time reduced to the very thing instrumental rationality claims it to be: a subjective judgment of taste.expressionism also stands as an example of this. Conversely, art cannot work within the framework of the identity-thinking of society, because any notion of freedom or emancipation would reproduce the exclusive practices of instrumental rationality. For example: Explicit socialist literature may establish itself in opposition to instrumental rationality while at the same time reproducing it. Its language may seem different, but in reality it merely provides a different set of reductive schematics for human life and experience. The problem for the art of the grotesque was, as I mentioned earlier, that far too often it was merely a symbolic manifestation of a notion of otherness—not otherness itself. Because of this the subversive character of the grotesque ends up shaping and containing otherness instead of providing a space for it. According to Adorno the only way to avoid this is to radicalize the grotesque. In order to avoid solidifying into form the work of art has to be an object which cannot be contained in thought or form—a non-form of form. The work of art has to work in a way that it strives for autonomy but without entirely leaving a discernible reality. In other words, it has to pull in two directions at once. Thus the work of art is a paradox. It is autonomous in the sense that it closes itself off from everything outside of the work of art, trying to shy away from the contaminating influence of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality. At the same time though the work of art is heteronomous in the sense that it originates from a specific historical context and is bound to be what society is not. Autonomy and heteronomy are inseparably intertwined. Unable to display otherness itself, but still trying to be a refuge for it, there is only one option for art: It has to turn against itself and destroy its own logic of form, thereby demonstrating how any representation of otherness is impossible. Art becomes a lamentation of the victims of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality and shows the traces of the otherness that is unable to appear. Adorno’s pessimistic theory of art and history stages art as a negative dialectical process where the work of art closes itself off and rejects everything outside, while the individual elements in the work of art destroys its very own logic of form from within: Artworks synthetize ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and nonidentical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole […]. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent compels them to articulate their own formal language, to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant. This reciprocity constitutes art’s dynamic; it is an irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being. 2 Relative to a traditional understanding of the grotesque, Adorno radicalizes the tension between center and periphery, autonomy and heteronomy. In the traditional understanding of the grotesque, as we find it for example in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, the grotesque establishes the display of otherness as a new center of meaning and truth. However Adorno rejects such notions and argues instead for a modernism of the grotesque in which both center and periphery are included in a negative dialectical process and continually synthesizing and destabilizing each other’s positions. A modernism of the grotesque works on the inside of the sign or the artwork, continually outlining and questioning the boundaries between materiality and form. This moves the focus away from the relation between the sign or work of art as a conceptual manifestation on one side and the object it refers to on the other side. Instead it implicitly points to the amorphous mass from which the signs and thereby meaning have been carved, the remnants that have been left behind. Modernism of the grotesque does not imply that it is emancipatory or that it reconciles man with nature, and does not represent a new position or a new ideology. It merely remembers and insists on the double nature of man and art: to write or paint yourself or an artwork whole by inscribing meaning in life or by applying form on a canvas is at the same time both creation and destruction. The very signs we use to center meaning in our lives carry its own alienation in them. Meaning surfaces only when process and flow comes to a halt—solidifying, but at the same time excluding parts that do not fit into that particular structure of meaning. NOTHING DONE AND NOTHING UNDONE It has always been difficult for art historians to find a suitable category for the works of the Danish artist Leif Lage (b. 1933). In his paintings the sensitive figuration seems so fragile that it is on the verge of turning into abstraction. Or conversely: the figurative emerges cautiously and hesitantly out of abstraction. As an art critic once wrote, he can almost paint things away. 3 Working in some undefinable space between abstraction and figuration, the Lage’s works shy away from the realm of words, and as a result few critics have been able to write anything meaningful about his works. In fact even fewer have been able to write more than one or two pages. The Danish author and art critic Leif Hjernøe is one of those few, but even he starts off by saying how impossible it is to write about Lage, confessing that his works exist both as process and in a field of in-between which words cannot reach. He writes: Always you find yourself in a place where nothing is done and nothing left undone, and where the elements of the work of art rest in a continuous motion. Always there is the open wound, where infection rather than surgical intervention is considered as an opportunity. And the conflict between matter and antimatter makes all diagnoses uncertain and allows conditions of uncertainty to spread in a place of raw presence. 4 The art works against the diagnosis and the certainty. Words are being eaten up by what is outside the realm of words: tension, process and doubleness. An approach to an understanding of the work of Lage could be to follow his connection to Samuel Beckett (1906-89). One can note, therefore, that Lage has illustrated several of the Danish translations of Beckett’s works. Though one is an author and the other a painter both seek a place where figuration, where the word, erodes. For both this entails an attempt to question and examine and so move in behind the façade of the surface in an exploration of that something or nothing that may be behind representation. At the same time even in the vanishing point of figuration or words, the meaningless words or the disjointed lines still stand as signs of human activity—signs of movement in emptiness. With very few exceptions Lage’s artworks revolve around one motif: Man—most often “en face.” But unlike traditional portraitures Lage’s people are found within. The artworks do not sense the reality of appearances, but rather the existential dimensions within man. As a seismograph they are sensitive to the utmost subjectivity in order to display an objective, sensuous depiction of the very problem of subjectivity. Instead of a static façade of a man, Lage’s “en face” shows the process-character of man. The people in Lage’s paintings are always in process—in the midst of becoming or dissolving. I will take a closer look in the following at the ways in which Lage establishes this sense of being in constant process, of being in-between modes or categories. THE DOUBLENESS OF THE STROKE Lage’s etchings attract attention in particular for the tension conveyed there between the material and the form. The material physically opposes the violence of the needle. But instead of embracing the violence of the needle and the victory over matter—instead of making the artistic creation and figuration express a heroic mastery of the background it is made out of—Lage uses the stroke to express the very tension between stroke and material, figuration and background. In the drypoint etching Untitled from 1983, which illustrated the Danish translation of Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said , the needle tears up the material in long rough lines: Together, the primarily horizontal and vertical lines form a face. Thus the force needed to etch a line in the metal-plate draws attention to itself: It is there in the absence of curves and nuances. Man emerges on the metal-plate after great exertion and in a very simplistic form. This way Lage enhances the nature of the material, as the material’s resistance is not something to overcome. On the contrary the figuration is smitten by its very resistance and as such expresses the violence of its own becoming. Even more pronounced is the fact that the lines do not just show the violence of creation—it actively erases figuration in the same process that creates it. For example the mouth consists of 8-10 horizontal strokes, of which some seem to be connected to each other as if the mouth has been quickly scratched out. The mouth speaks of the inability to speak. In the same way, the eyes are black holes due to a large amount of criss-cross cuts, which together form a dark middle. Those lines, at the same time, form the eyes of the figuration and scratch out the eyes of the figuration. The extroverted aspects of the face—connected to speech and sight—are portrayed as introverted as well. Just as the etchings down into the metal-plate makes something appear. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1983 (etching) The figuration of the etching is connected to creation. It expresses that something is wrought into existence out of nothing by sheer artistic force. However, this force is at the same time presented as a violence of creation, which makes it impossible for form to truly emerge. Herein lies one of the basic principles of Lage’s art, namely that art cannot be that nothing or something behind the realm of words or signs. Without form, art would lose its ability to express anything at all. Form is a necessity if art is to avoid becoming as devoid of expression as the reality is that we cannot reach behind the appearance of things. On the other hand, art cannot raise itself above its own material in joyous celebration of the beauty of form. This would use the material in the manner of an instrument and thus would suppress the otherness it attempts to rescue. When art becomes mere form, any traces of otherness will have dissolved. Then art would be a question of technique, in no way different from the instrumental rationality of society. Therefore art works in a particular space between form and non-form. As Hjernøe says of the works of Lage, it is in the center of the event, in the in-between where things neither are nor are not, "And everything takes place just before it changes character. As the blood just before it coagulates, as the milk just before it separates, as fried egg just before it turns white […]." 5 The precise emphasis on the in-between of Lage’s art points in particular to the work of art as both outside of and in time. The work of art is a singular point in time, but at the same time it is continually in process. In the borderland between form and non-form, between creation and destruction, it shimmers like a fata morgana . The work is done but at the same time undone. It is only there as a cry in response to the inability to come into being. Akin to the etching is the drawing, but while both, of course, use the stroke or line as their main instrument, the paper does not resist the line in the same sense as the metal-plate of the etching. As a result in Lage’s drawings the stroke frolics in a space with almost no tension at all. There is nothing there to keep the pencil stroke at bay, but at the same time this means that there is nothing there to keep it together. One of the more expressive examples of this is found in an untitled drawing from Tegninger og Text ( Drawings and Text ) from 1999. The drawing consists of one unbroken pencil stroke. It is as if the stroke is confused—it darts around on the paper making doodles on the way or gathers itself in more straight lines in the center of the paper. It is in this manner that the semblance of a body is established. A couple of small circles serve as eyes and are the reason that the rest can be read as both face and body instead of pure abstraction. In fact the unbroken stroke serves as both abstraction and figuration as on the one hand it is the stroke that seemingly outlines the shape of a figure, while on the other hand the unbroken stroke dissolves any truly recognizable figuration by continuously, without end or aim, overflowing the boundaries of the figure. Seen again here is a doubleness to the stroke and the act of creation. In the etching it was all about the tension between the resistance of the material which created the doubleness. Here it is the opposite. It is the lack of tension. The stroke is free to do anything, but has no aim: without some kind of resistance, there is nothing to hold figuration together. It threatens to dissolve into nothingness. Conversely, the drawing can also be seen as a process of becoming. Like a form of automatic writing, the pencil darts around until it finds a point of densification. But even in such an interpretation of the drawing, the figuration appears artificial—it points to itself as the result of the artistic act of creation. The stroke is primarily stroke and only secondarily figuration. With its wild movement it calls attention to itself as stroke. Thus the figuration never becomes something in its own right. It points to the basic principle of creation: Someone has drawn me, I am the result of artistic endeavors, and therefore I am not for myself but always overflowing the boundaries that contain me. It is the stroke that in the very same movement creates figuration and dissolves it. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1999 (drawing) THE LIGHTNESS OF COLOR, THE DENSITY OF PAPER Often the watercolor is used as a precursor for larger paintings, because it has an immediacy in which one can quickly paint the main lines of a composition. However, Lage’s watercolors are not temporary points in a process leading to another final painting. They are not sketches, later to be filled with details in another material. For him watercolor is an end in itself. This also implies that he doesn’t try to work against the paper’s absorption of the water color and its tendency to absorb detail. On the contrary, he examines the possibilities inherent in this blurring of the line and absorption of color. As in the previous examples, there are of course recognizable shapes in Lage’s water colors. But these shapes are rarely separable from color, line or even paper. In other words: the figurative and the abstract more or less become one. One of the reasons for this is that Lage often works on wetted paper which means that the paper hungrily absorbs color into its fabric instead of it being on top of the paper. The paper becomes line because it is the absorption of the color which, together with the brush stroke itself, separates the colors from each other. The line is also color and the color is also line, because there is no separation between the different colors other than the colors themselves. At times this results in almost complete abstraction. In such cases Lage add lines with a pencil as if he wants to hold some sort of figuration together. At other times it is the other way around: the strokes of the pencil are a being dissolved by the water color blurring out the figuration. Untitled 1 from 1999 displays various tones of green. The contour of the colors appears unusually rough. Most of all it is reminiscent of a shoreline which has found its form through the work of thousands of years between water and land. Pockets of resistance surface as islands not yet drowned in color—as paper or color not yet consumed by the dominant color. The shape of the colors does not seem created by the hand of the artist, but rather by the inner workings of the watercolor: color against color over time has resulted in this very image, as if it is all a part of a natural process of change and decay. Despite the fact that there are no strong differences in color there seems to be a struggle taking place in the watercolor. For example, inexplicable holes in the dark color, which cover most of the right side of the watercolor, appear as if the underlying color is eating away the dark color, or that the dark color is in the process of covering up the underlying color. The small pockets of resistance demonstrate a process and development that, almost as a happy accident, evokes a couple of small eyes and a large mouth. Behind the colors a few slanted lines can be discerned, but the hand of the artist has long ago disappeared behind the life of the colors. Thus the watercolor seems to be held at precisely the point in time where figuration randomly appears. The small eyes and wide mouth seemingly express the realization of the figuration’s temporality. It is just a moment in time, soon to be consumed again in the life of the colors. The nature, the background it stems from and is part of, moves on undeterred, continuing its everlasting process of creation and decay. In this sense, the watercolor provides an experience of how neither artist nor man is able to transcend the materiality they consist of. The colors of man, the materials man consists of are “becoming” and “progress” but also “decay” and “disappearance”. The artist’s pencil strokes have been eaten up long ago, and the figuration is living on borrowed time. Human or artistic activity is about creating form, transcending mere matter by shaping and applying meaning to it. But Untitled 1 shows the doubleness of such creation: the transience and fragility of human life. Should the figuration come into being, should it rise and transcend the material, which binds it to its temporal existence, it would become nothing because its very existence is conditioned by the life and work of the colors. In the same sense man cannot escape his own temporality. He too, for better or worse, must accept a life in the volatility of sensation. Leif Lage, Untitled 1 , 1999 (watercolor) In most of Lage’s watercolors there seem to be a stronger artistic control than in Untitled 1 . Most often both the arrangement of colors and the technique in which they are painted express the hand of the artist. An example of this is Untitled 2 from 1999. While figuration in Untitled 1 seemed to appear as a happy accident, the figuration is much more “created” in Untitled 2 . Here the most important parts of the figuration, the eyes, the mouth and part of the skull, are colored black and painted on top of the background’s play of colors. The background primarily consists of blue and yellow tones. Only parts of the paper are covered in color, however, which yet again stresses the act of painting: There is a surface which is being filled by color by an artist. The blue tones are concentrated in the figuration, while the yellow tones surround it. All this means that the figuration stands out more clearly in this watercolor. This is also underlined by the fact that the blue and dark tones cover part of the yellow tones as spots here and there. Thus it is not a background which is in the process of consuming figuration, but rather the emerging figuration which blots out the background. Such an understanding is even suggested by how the mouth and eyes are placed in the larger blue color field. The eyes and mouth are in the center of the watercolor, while the blue color field is placed from center out towards the left side. This gives the impression of a face turned slightly to the right and slightly upwards, which again makes the mouth appear to emerge from the paper. It also helps that the mouth cuts the center axis of the watercolor. In other words, the arrangement of the blue and black colors create some depth and perspective which gives the illusion of a figuration, seen partially in profile, emerging from the background. Seen in profile, the eyes and mouth seem extroverted—they almost seem as if they are put on top of the face. But at the same time they are painted as black holes, sucking in the gaze of the onlooker. The watercolor is even more challenging if one follows what may be the faint outline of the skull, which, on the right side of the watercolor, no longer works together with the blue color, but rather alone postulates the outline of the skull. If not the blue color field, but this line, is the outline of the skull, then all of a sudden the face is not in profile but “en face”—staring directly towards the onlooker. Outline and color seemingly work against each other and establish two different expressions. Without the slightly upward tilted expression of the profile, the eyes and mouth do not seem to emerge from the paper. On the contrary, seen “en face,” the eyes and mouth are really gaping pits of darkness. In this sense Untitled 2 is at the same time surface and depth of perspective. The line gives form but at the same time it dissolves the form created by the colors, and vice versa. Leif Lage, Untitled 2 , 1999 (watercolor) As the last example of Lage’s artistic method, I have chosen another untitled work (as indeed nearly all of Lage’s artworks are)—this time from 2000. This is perhaps one of the most figurative watercolors Lage has created, though that doesn’t tell us too much. The painting depicts a human face in blue and green tones on a yellow toned background. The colors create a clear demarcation between the figure and the background, which compensate for the watercolor’s lack of outline. Beneath the face darker tones imply the beginning of the torso, and nuances of color even hint at something which could be a collar. The hair is in even darker tones and its structure is emphasized using pencil strokes on top of the water color. One eye is marked by a brown spot with a darker spot in the middle, while the other eye is added by pencil. The mouth is a round, red dot. In Untitled from 2000 the work between abstraction and figuration is much less pronounced than in the previous examples cited here. Nonetheless the watercolor has a delicacy to it which almost makes the figuration disappear, even as it appears. This has something to do with the fact that all the individual brush strokes have dissolved. The only outlines are those created by the clash of colors. Even the red mouth seems to be more paint than mouth—unable to be formed truly as anything other than a speck of color with some small semblance to a mouth. In contrast to the other watercolors, there is no movement, no progress or decay, just a vibrating standstill. The figure is not emerging or disappearing but embedded in and as surface, and as such it makes the figure seem stuck in its condition rather than freed by the act of giving form: mouth open as a wound. Pencil strokes add detail and life to the hair as an attempt to help the figure emerge. But all this does is create two levels in the watercolor: The pencil strokes are put on top of the figuration rather than being part of it. Thus they end up highlighting the endless distance between the movement and form-giving of the pencil strokes and the static and stuck figure behind these strokes. Leif Lage, Untitled , 2000 (watercolor) MAN AND THE VIEW OF THE ONLOOKER Lage’s works seem at the same time to be an examination of tensions between form and material in art and a display of an image of man full of the same tensions. This is because the people who are emerging in Lage’s images are not just in his works, They are his works. This means that man is not something emerging from a background but is part of this background and vice versa. The art of Lage inscribes man in its surroundings and background. Man is not the ruler of nature. Man does not rise above matter; there is no truly transcendent position for man to occupy in the art of Lage. Instead man is a part of the very matter, it, at the same time, tries to distance itself from in order to distinguish itself from its surroundings. Man emerges in an attempt not to be line, stroke, color. In an attempt to free itself of matter. Should it succeed in this, however, it would turn into nothing. On the other hand, if man fully accepted itself as mere matter it would disappear in it—in instincts, urges and lack of reflection. The appearance of man is thus subject to a state of being in-between. Only in the tension between material and its negation can the outlines of man be traced. However this also means that in the art of Lage man is never something in itself but always in process—on the way to its freedom and its loss. However, Lage’s art is not just about showing the tensions inherent in man but also about showing such tension on the verge of breaking point. In the moment before everything is done, or when nothing yet has been done, the delicate tension between form and material has been stretched to its utmost in such a way that man’s character of process emerges and is contained on the paper or canvas. Therefore, Lage’s art contain traces of human life. Not only is it an autonomous unity of tensions where man is stretched out between its singularity and the surroundings it is a part of. It is also this pulsation between figuration and material which brings about the traces of human endeavor and activity. Even when man almost seems to have disappeared into the material, strokes and lines are still there as a reminder of human activity and potential creative power—as a reminder that hope is still possible and that man is still there. The view of the onlooker seeks out forms and meaning. It seeks outlines and edges. But first and foremost it is the eyes in Lage’s works of art that allow the onlooker to decode the figuration at play. This creates a distinctive relationship between the onlooker and the artwork. The onlooker tries to wrest the enigma from the artwork, tries to reduce it to solid, meaningful form. But the very same moment that hints at such a possibility sees the view of the onlooker confronted with a gaze of its own. The eyes of the figure in the work of art are most often dark pits, as if they were an illustration of the violence committed against the eyes of the onlookers and their search for meaning. Or as if they were a dark reflection of the onlooker’s failed attempts to delineate the traces of life in the artwork to a solid meaningful form. Therefore, the gaze of the figuration speaks not only of its own powerlessness but also of the powerlessness of the onlooker. When the view or sight has trouble finding solid meaningful forms, it has something to do with the fact that the precondition for sight, light, no longer stems from something transcendent. In Lage’s art there is nothing outside the works of art, nothing outside of human life, and as such nothing to shed light on the works of art or human life and reveal solid meaningful forms. All light comes from within. In a western context, light as a medium for sight is central to the understanding of meaning. People speak of the clarity of thought, while knowledge is tied together with enlightenment, and so forth. But the light no longer originates from a divine point of view. It originates from man, who has created himself in the image of God. The problem with this is that light always covers up its own base. Light illuminates something but at the same time it hides itself. 6 While it was previously God who was unknowable, now it is man. It is also problematic that sight and the medium of sight stem from the same place. Following this thought one can posit two final problems. Firstly, the immediacy and presence established by light by making forms and objects accessible to sight is fake. Light is not some independent entity which present things in a neutral manner for the onlooker. It is inextricably tied together with the gaze’s desire after meaning. In other words: Light perverts the appearance of things because it doesn’t originate from some objective entity which allows them to appear as they are. Instead light is based upon and originates from the subject and its conquering gaze, seeking out meaning and form constantly. Secondly, the joining of sight and light makes introspection within human life impossible. Everything can be illuminated by its use value for the subject but only as long as it is separated from the subject, as long as it is an object. But the subject itself cannot be illuminated. Lage’s art tears down such a dividing line between subject and matter, but it does so without reestablishing a divine position from where the light emanates. Therefore, the light in Lage’s art may not illuminate very well. It may not have the certainty presented by modern science or the religions of yesterday. But it does show what such light tries to hide, namely, the subject as it is in its material reality—inscribed in time and death, which are the basic conditions of materiality, but at the same time also full of life in its joy and will to create. For the onlooker the meeting of the gaze in Lage’s works of art is thus also a destruction of the view of the onlooker. The ability to see is challenged in a radical way. Those outlines will not solidify into static form, as if the light was too dim to see. Just as in Lage’s figurations, the view of the onlooker turns to black: turns towards the onlooker in recognition and becoming—or disappearance. NOTES Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment . (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002): 4-5. Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory . (London & New York, 2002): 176. Carsten Bach-Nielsen. “Mere glæde end gru.” Kristeligt Dagblad . September 24, 2002. Leif Hjernøe. “Den yderliggående inderlighed.” LEIF LAGE—Retrospektiv udstilling 1983 . (Copenhagen: Brøndum, 1983): 18. Ibid. Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation . (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 162-163. (shrink)

In his Lectures on Fine Art (1835), Hegel emphasizes the grotesque character of Indian art. Grotesqueness results, in his view, from a contradiction between meaning and shape due to the incongruous combination of spiritual and material elements. Since Hegel's history of art is teeming with examples of inadequacy between meaning and shape, this paper aims to distinguish the grotesque from other types of artistic dissonance and to problematize Hegel's ascriptions of grotesqueness to ancient Indian art. In the first (...) part of the paper, I characterize the grotesque by the unnatural distortion of natural shapes with the purpose of achieving a direct sensuous manifestation of an indeterminate and impersonal divinity, Brahman. Such an attempt is, in Hegel's view, self-contradictory and self-defeating, leading to an exaggeration of the conflict between nature and spirit instead of the intended reconciliation between the two parts. In the second part of the paper, I compare Hegel's account of Indian art to the ‘monstrous myths’ of early modern Europe. Unlike his predecessors, Hegel legitimizes the grotesque representations of Hindu gods as endowed with profound meaning and the result of a universal human need, yet he describes them as ultimately irrational and repulsive based on a prejudiced view of the Indian people(s). In this sense, Hegel's assessment of Indian art functions as a reflection of modern European culture, its fascination and horror in the face of what Enlightenment could not entirely purge, rather than as a truthful and objective account of Indian art and culture. By questioning Hegel's characterization of Hindu iconography and mythology, this paper contributes to underexplored areas of Hegelian aesthetics, namely Hegel's account of symbolic art, especially Indian art, as well as his views on negative aesthetic experiences and values. (shrink)

This book explores numerous ways in which vulgar language, grotesque appearances, and horrific experiences affect us in our relationships with others and with ourselves. Its compelling case studies and revealing interviews bring together ideas and issues that are a lingering, but unexplored, focus in psychotherapy literature. The grotesque and the vulgar are major inhabitants of the vast unconscious. Their variations and haunting presence are anticipated and reflected in the transactions of everyday life. So too do they manifest themselves (...) in our social institutions, maintaining their presence in the seven lively arts as much as in mental hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, and psychotherapy practices. Most of all, the grotesque and vulgar challenge the contemporary search for meaning and sanity. This book will help the psychotherapist better deal with the rich soil of grotesqueness and vulgarity in the interplay between the psychotherapy patient and the experiential world. Reading it will open new vistas of treatment possibilities. As each contributing author explores the potentialities and obstacles inherent in the competing and complementing forces of the grotesque and socially condoned sensibilities, you will learn about the value of the grotesque in the consultation room. You will further learn how the flaunted and unconscious vulgarities of everyday life enrich the creative vision inherent in therapeutic conversations. Most important, you will be challenged by what it means to abide with the sometimes pesky vulgar and grotesque guises in each of your client's lives. Here's a sample of what you'll find in Inhabitants of the Unconscious: The Grotesque and the Vulgar in Everyday Life: Louis Fierman's recollection of his treatment of a Nazi soldier, which offers fascinating therapeutic possibilities when issues of the grotesqueare at hand an extraordinary analysis of the role of the grotesque in artwork, with special attention paid to the work of Hieronymus Bosch a fascinating look at Sigmund Freud's perspective on the grotesque&#; and what it says about Freud himself the remarkable formative experiences of children with craniofacial difference &#;an exposition that will enrich your therapeutic interventions with children and adolescents who face atypical challenges extraordinary case studies&#;by Robert Marchesani about his therapeutic endeavors with a Vietnam veteran caught in the aftermath of his incestuous past and by E. Mark Stern about a dying woman who was unable to detach from, but ultimately vivified by an unyielding masochistic fixation. (shrink)

Grotesque imagery is widely used by all genres and movements of art and literature without exception, but its historical development and theoretical aspects have not been sufficiently studied. This study seeks to define and diagnose the main aspects of the development of the grotesque as a literary problem. The leading methods of researching this problem are methods of analysis, deduction, induction, and comparison of approaches. The research covers the approaches to the study of the grotesque phenomenon; the (...) interpretation of this trope is provided, its origin is described, in whose works it is widely used; the forms of grotesque and its specific features are described; various theoretical concepts of the question are demonstrated; the codes of grotesque poetics and their levels of display in the artistic system of works are identified; the qualities and features of Poe’s literary activity are diagnosed, and the components of the grotesque aesthetics are defined. The material in this study is of practical and theoretical value to students and literary scholars who study literature and its artistic features. (shrink)

The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500-1700 offers readers a large and fully annotated collection of primary source texts addressing the grotesque in the English Renaissance. The sources are arranged chronologically in 120 numbered items with accompanying explanatory Notes. Each Note provides clarification of difficult terms in the source text, locating it in the context of early modern English and Continental discourses on the grotesque. The Notes also direct readers to further English sources and relevant (...) modern scholarship. This volume includes a detailed introduction surveying the vocabulary, form and meaning of the grotesque from its arrival as a word, concept and aesthetic in 16th century England to its early maturity in the 18th century. The Introduction, Items and Notes, complemented by illustrations and a comprehensive bibliography, provide an unprecedented view of the evolving complexity and diversity of the early modern English grotesque. While giving due credit to Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin as masters of grotesque theory, this ground-breaking book aims to provoke new, evidence-based approaches to understanding the specifically English grotesque. The textual archive from 1500-1700 is a rich and intriguing record that offers much to interested readers and researchers in the fields of literary studies, theatre studies and art history. (shrink)

Paired masks described as beautiful and grotesque express complementary values in several southern Nigerian art traditions. Beautiful masks represent humans, often women, and serve as metaphors for things associated with civilization and culture. Grotesque masks represent animals or men, and tend to be linked with notions of masculinity and nature. Analysis of masks falling into these categories provides us with a set of formal criteria for this imagery. Mask types that fall into this continuum are used by the (...) Okpella, a northern Edo people living north of Benin City in southern Nigeria: a female character commemorating specific women of status and described as beautiful, a more ambiguous character that serves as the festival herald and messenger of the Dead Fathers described as grotesque, and a third masquerade that combines elements of both the beautiful and grotesque is described as fascinating. Why and how these forms communicate to their Okpella audience is the focus of this paper. It is based on qualitative research on the history and meaning of these masks carried out among the Okpella, survey research on aesthetic preference in which 400 individuals were interviewed, and with a panel study in which 100 participants from the original sample were re-interviewed. Key words: beautiful, grotesque, Africa, okpella, masquerade, aesthetics. Resumen Las máscaras emparejadas descritas como ‘bellas’ y ‘grotescas’ expresan valores complementarios en varias tradiciones artísticas del sur de Nigeria. Las máscaras bellas representan a los humanos, frecuentemente mujeres, y se emplean como metáforas de aspectos asociados con la civilización y la cultura. Las máscaras grotescas representan animales u hombres, y suelen vincularse con nociones de masculinidad y de naturaleza. El análisis de las máscaras que entran en estas dos categorías proporciona un conjunto de criterios formales para comprender este imaginario. El grupo étnico Edo del norte que vive al norte de Ciudad de Benín en el sur de Nigeria, los okpella, usan máscaras de este tipo. Existe un personaje femenino descrito como bello, un personaje más ambiguo descrito como grotesco y un tercero que combina elementos del bello y del grotesco y que se describe como fascinante. En este artículo nos interesamos en qué y cómo comunican estas formas con los okpella. Nuestro trabajo se apoya sobre una investigación cualitativa realizada entre los okpella, una encuesta sobre preferencia estética en la cual se entrevistó a 400 personas y un estudio en el cual se volvió a entrevistar a 100 personas de la muestra anterior. Palabras clave: belleza, grotesco, África, okpella, mascarada, estética. (shrink)

In all the Alien films, the environments are gloomy settings originally inspired by Gothic architecture, but it's the creature design, which leaves the most profound mark on us. The interaction between these art‐horror monsters and the sterileturned‐ grotesque environments of the Alien films can produce disgust or revulsion in the viewer. In Alien a fair amount of time is spent on the relationships between the crew members. One of the most horrific moments of the series is the cry of (...) “kill me” that emerges from the half‐conscious hosts as the space Marines explore the former colony of Hadley's Hope. Central to Carroll's theory on art‐horror is revulsion at the suggestion of physical contact with the fusion‐figures. At the end of Alien: Resurrection, Ripley lies in the middle of the Queen's huge mass. It is the most striking image in an otherwise cartoonish film. (shrink)

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment represents a turn toward experience, that is, toward the experiencing subject. Still the Enlightenment involves an aspiration toward objective truth in the ideals of the newly emerging sciences and in the experiments in democracy that were beginning to transform the political landscape of Europe and America. Immanuel Kant's towering philosophical achievement in his critical works helps to reformulate a meaning of objectivity that is congenial to the climate of inquiry and freedom in that remarkable century, a meaning (...) that is unburdened of the metaphysical commitments of many of his predecessors. Kant's revolution in philosophical thought gives us an objectivity that is crucially related to epistemic conditions rooted in subjectivity, a correlation between subjectivity and objectivity that carries over as well into his critical treatises concerned with ethics and aesthetics. This book of essays explores the tension between subjectivity and objectivity as it develops in the Enlightenment in Winkelmann, Hume, and Kant. The focus is upon aesthetic theories concerning the beautiful, the sublime, and the grotesque. The question by two of the authors as to whether aesthetic enjoyment of the blues is morally justified underscores an interest in these essays in the connection between aesthetics and ethics. This concern of the relation of aesthetics to judgments in cognition and in morality underlies an area of peculiar interest to Kant, and therefore to many of these essays. Finally the authors examine a turn toward the subjective in the Postmodern world of art and aesthetic theory, a turn that represents a relaxation of the original Enlightenment tension between subjectivity and objectivity. It also represents perhaps a grotesque turn toward the extreme of subjectivity in the realm of Postmodern theory, an extreme toward which at least one of the authors casts a critical eye. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Art of Interpreting Art PAUL BAROLSKY “The quality of the prose is just as important in nonfiction as in fiction.” —Robert Caro If as Horace famously wrote in the Ars poetica the aim of poetry is to instruct and delight, why shouldn’t the goal of all writing be the same? Why should all readers not enjoy as well as learn from what they read? In the realm of (...) academe, however, although much writing instructs, far too little delights. This is so because the goal of academic writing is primarily that of conveying information and knowledge or of developing new ideas. Delight or pleasure are not of primary academic concern. Too few scholars care sufficiently about how they write. Too many academics write in unreadable prose. Often their writing is ponderous, indeed pompous, because they are insecure in the face of theoretical, philosophical or scientific writing. The outcome can be quite hideous. Sometimes, dare I say often, their writing is dreadfully dry and dull. In the Humanities, the arts, by which I mean those that have been called the spatial arts, that is, architecture, sculpture, and painting, can be studied from a wide variety of perspectives. As some observers have noted, however, frequently in the academic study of art and its history, art as such recedes from view and drops out of the discussion. Art becomes primarily the illustration of something else, something other than itself. It comes to be the illustration of the global, colonial, sexual, political, theological, social, economic, religious, anthropological, philosophical, technological, scientific, or theoretical. It is too often not sufficiently appreciated for its own sake as art. Do I sound as if I am writing about the much-scorned notion of “art for art’s sake?” Yes, but not exactly. Since the arion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 102 the art of interpreting art nineteenth century, when Gautier wrote, l’art pour l’art meant just that, the celebration of art for its own sake. Eventually, however, that notion came to be disparaged as too limited, since it supposedly failed to address the various kinds of associations between art and the other phenomena listed above. The notion of art for its own sake unfortunately came to be seen as a manifestation of aestheticism or formalism— both often regrettably terms of opprobrium. Not long ago a graduate teaching fellow in a prestigious art history program had her students read my essay on the role of writing about art which was published in the spring/ summer 2018 issue of this journal. The first part of that essay concerned atrocious writing, which, our teaching fellow said, made her students laugh—yes, laugh! They presumably laughed because the prose of scholars was so very bad—ridiculous in the root sense of the word, laughable. One example of pompous diction that I have cited often because it is so laughably absurd, is the definition one art historical scholar has given of sex as “inter-corporeal relationality.” No wonder the students laughed! With considerable amusement, the graduate teaching fellow to whom I have just referred told me that she rather doubted her students bothered to read the second part of the essay she assigned, even though it included some exemplary writing about art. Why should they have bothered to read examples of excellent writing? After all, their teachers, who too often do not themselves write well, do not encourage students to think sufficiently about their prose. Let me add to the cluster of grotesque writing illustrated in the Arion article to which I have referred one more example of how bad academic writing about art can be in order to remind the reader of the kind of absurd nonsense or blather that one encounters throughout the Humanities. It comes from a highly esteemed author who “describes influence as a notion which provides a support—of too magical a kind to be very amenable to analysis—for the facts of transmission and com- Paul Barolsky 103 munication; which refers to an apparently causal process (but with neither rigorous delineation nor theoretical definition) the phenomena of resemblance or repetition; which links, at a distance and through time—as if through the mediation of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Destruction and Transcendence in W. G. SebaldMark R. McCullohIFor all the Saturnine pessimism of W. G. Sebald's application of Walter Benjamin's view of historical process (an attitude toward history expounded upon at length in an influential work by Susan Sontag), the author's sense of irony about the human predicament is irrepressible. 1 Human beings seem destined to remain prisoners of various paradoxes—they both create and destroy, they are capable (...) of acts of love as well as bitterness and hate, they make efforts to document and communicate, but at the same time they tend to forget and are given to suppressing the truth, they are driven by ideals, yet remain hobbled by imperfection. Art and music, passed on from generation to generation, seem to be the most common way that human beings transcend the strictures of their imperfections, inadequacies, and their finitude. And to the extent that art indeed survives over time, and continues to be perceived and appreciated by beholders, the aesthetic enterprise succeeds. However, ultimately, as the Book of Ecclesiastes and Shelley's "Ozymandias" remind us, all human endeavor is in vain, and, to assume the perspective of physical cosmology for a moment—and in this regard Benjamin's cosmic vision appears painfully accurate—our speck of earth, dwarfed by a vast universe the true immensity of which has been revealed by the Hubble Telescope, will one day be ground to dust and debris like the rings of Saturn, and our sun will exist only as a burned-out hulk. But such a future world, devoid of beholders, and devoid of creators and their artifacts, is not Sebald's primary subject, even though it clearly forms the teleological backdrop for his third novel, The Rings of Saturn (1995, English version 1998). Rather, Sebald pursues his art in spite of a terminal prospect that will ultimately confront our [End Page 395] planet and solar system. His primary subject, the effect of trauma on individual and collective experience, is instead closely linked with the passing of Europe as a tradition, as an idea—as an idiosyncratic and innovative, but inherently corrupt contributor to cultural history. In the course of his narratives he also addresses the redemptive role of art in memorializing the past and attempting to capture the passing present. In both respects he attends to the humane and the sublime as well as the tragic and the grotesque.Paraphrasing the art historian Svetlana Alpers, one early reviewer of Sebald's novel Austerlitz (2001) points out the self-contradictory nature of preserving the transient moment in art:Why create visual art at all when everything on earth must be represented in its inexorable transitoriness; why paint earthly scenes with such incredible care and precision as if they were permanent? 2The care and precision of the painter's craft (in this case, the Dutch still-life painter David Bailly) are devoted to the representation of a scene that is by its very nature transient and even tenuous—like the scenes of sublime beauty in Sebald's fiction, the artist's depiction "courts and admits" its own fragility. What Bailly does visually, Sebald attempts in words. Take, for instance, the following passage from Vertigo, Sebald's first novel, which was titled in German (with considerably more irony) Schwindel. Gefühle 3 :At a hairpin bend I looked out of the turning bus down into the depths below and could see the turquoise surfaces of the Ferstein and Smaranger lakes, which, even when I was a child, on our first excursions into the Tyrol, had seemed to me the essence of all conceivable beauty.(p. 176)The author has already prepared the reader for this moment of awe by remarking on the otherworldly "slow-motion quality" of the waterfalls descending from the mountain cliffs and on the boulders in their screes spreading downwards into the wooded hillsides, "screes which reached from the mountains down into the forests like pale fingers into dark hair..." (p. 176). Examined closely, the passage in question suggests both the enduring power of natural beauty and, especially with its precise reference to an automobile long since out of production and unfamiliar to... (shrink)

Representations of monsters and the monstrous are common in medieval art and architecture, from the grotesques in the borders of illuminated manuscripts to the symbol of the "green man", widespread in churches and cathedrals. These mysterious depictions are frequently interpreted as embodying or mitigating the fears symptomatic of a "dark age". This book, however, considers an alternative scenario: in what ways did monsters in twelfth-century sculpture help audiences envision, perhaps even achieve, various ambitions? Using examples of Romanesque sculpture from across (...) Europe, with a focus on France and northern Portugal, the author suggests that medieval representations of monsters could service ideals, whether intellectual, political, religious, and social, even as they could simultaneously articulate fears; he argues that their material presence energizes works of art in paradoxical, even contradictory ways. In this way, Romanesque monsters resist containment within modern interpretive categories and offer testimony to the density and nuance of the medieval imagination. (shrink)

Wijsgerig-antropologische verkenning van de betekenis van het groteske aan de hand van voorbeelden uit de westerse literatuur en (volks)cultuur.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Mismapping the Underworld: Daring and Error in Dante’s ‘Comedy’Edward Donald KennedyMismapping the Underworld: Daring and Error in Dante’s ‘Comedy,’ by John Kleiner; 182 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, $32.50.Critics once emphasized the unity and apparent perfection of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In Mismapping the Underworld, John Kleiner emphasizes instead the imperfections, the inconsistencies, and inaccuracies in Dante’s work both to give a more accurate assessment of Dante’s artistry (...) and, as he remarks, to help readers “learn to enjoy” the imperfections (p. 2).The five chapters of the book are devoted to various cruces in the Vita nuova and the Comedy. The first chapter considers numerology in the Vita nuova: pointing out that scholars’ arguments for that work’s numerological symmetry have been flawed, Kleiner asks if Dante had as much “passion for order” as scholars have assumed. The second chapter, from which the title of the book is taken, considers earlier scholars’ attempts to draw accurate maps of Dante’s vision of Hell and inaccuracies and inconsistencies in that vision. Probably not many readers, for example, have realized that Satan, partially buried in the ice of Cocytus at the bottom of Hell, must be about 2,500 feet tall, if one calculates his height from the evidence Dante has given us, and even the part of his body extending above the ice must approximate “the height of the World Trade Center.” One must then ask how Dante, the narrator in the poem, is able to give such detailed descriptions of the tormented bodies of Cassius, Brutus, and Judas dangling from Satan’s mouth: “at their height they should be as insignificant a sight as a trio of deluded tourists waving from the top of the Empire State Building” (p. 44). One of the reasons why scholars have attempted to map the underworld so precisely is, as Kleiner points out, that Dante makes it seem so much more concrete than the “dreamlike” surface of earth. (Here C. S. Lewis may have taken a clue from Dante, in his notion that the concrete belongs to Heaven, that things on earth are only “shadowlands.”)The third chapter concerns Dante’s reputation as a student of classical literature. Here, focusing on two cantos of the Inferno and the Purgatorio, Kleiner considers Dante’s inaccurate citations from Virgil, Statius, and other [End Page 415] classical writers and his intentional use of “masterful distortions” to create the effect he wanted. In the fourth chapter, Kleiner discusses Dante’s use of scientific material, such as his precise description of the duration of a lunar eclipse that no one on earth would have been able to gauge and his design of an impossible experiment concerning reflected light. The final chapter associates Dante’s interest in Geryon, the monster who appears in Canto 16 of the Inferno, with the medieval fascination with the grotesque. Moreover, the Ovidian allusions in this canto, Kleiner believes, make the encounter with Geryon a meditation on poetry and show “fiction’s proximity to fraud, its perilous attractiveness, and its susceptibility to perversion” (p. 132). Thus the Geryon episode represents Dante’s concern with the dangers inherent in reading, dangers depicted earlier in the Inferno in, for example, the Francesca and Paolo episode of Canto V, in which the lovers had been seduced into committing adultery after reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. In such episodes, Dante reminds us of the power a writer has over his readers and of his duty not to use that power irresponsibly.Because of the post-Renaissance emphasis on the importance of unity in a work of art and the later emphasis on realism, earlier critics naturally emphasized the unity and consistency of Dante’s work. A great work, they assumed, had to have these qualities. As Kleiner’s book reminds us, however, earlier writers did not always prize them as highly as modern critics do, and some inconsistencies and errors (some deliberate, some not) seem to have been acceptable. Inaccurate citations of classical works are due in part to the fact that medieval writers often knew earlier works only from commonplace books and in part to... (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article, we will discuss the Bakhtinian concepts of Grotesque realism and grotesque body from various perspectives. We will begin by exploring the synchronic approaches taken by contemporary linguists and semioticians. Additionally, we will delve into Bakhtin’s own treatment of these concepts, tracing their origins to his doctoral thesis during the early 20th century within the context of the Soviet Union. Subsequently, we will examine the significance of both concepts within the work Rabelais and His World, (...) Finally, we will scrutinize some instances of the Grotesque in literary and visual arts from Ancient Judaism and early in Medieval Christianity, which were either directly or indirectly referenced by Bakhtin. (shrink)

While another von Hagens style public autopsy should not be encouraged, the public should nevertheless be able to experience such events as a public autopsy.During 2002 and 2003 there was considerable discussion about the work of Gunter von Hagens, famed for his Body Worlds exhibition,1 which was publicised extensively and with considerable success. The exhibition is a tribute to, and celebration of, his method of preserving organic life through the process of plastination, developed by von Hagens in the 1980s. The (...) process entails a form of preservation, whereby body parts are dehydrated and filled with polymer resin, making them more robust than conventional formaldehyde does.While it was in the United Kingdom, the exhibit was housed at a back street gallery in Brick Lane, London, though the exhibition has toured throughout the world. Despite many millions having flocked to see the exhibition, the reasons for its success are open to interpretation and have provoked strong opinions from the medical community as to whether this physician ought to be entitled to create exhibits from real bodies. Von Hagens would argue that these works are justifiable because they have artistic merit. Others would claim that viewers are being brought to the gallery by the immense publicity. Alternatively, one might suppose that those who attend the exhibition do so mainly because of a fascination with the extraordinary and with the grotesque. Indeed, such fascination with death, and human remains specifically, was the focus of a meeting hosted by the Institute of Ideas and the Royal College of Physicians in May 2003, which was entitled Morbid Fascinations: the Body and Death in Contemporary Culture.The controversy arising from the Body Worlds exhibition pales in comparison, however, to von Hagens’s most recent performance—the first “public autopsy” in Britain …. (shrink)

The images of the clown and the freak and representations of the grotesque body are recurrent motifs in modern Jewish literature, film, art, theatre and dance. Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis is an early prototype of the changeling who leaves conventional human appearance behind and is gradually transformed into an insect-like creature. The story served as a prototype for Woody Allen’s film Zelig, in which the main protagonist adopts a variety of different personas, amongst them a Nazi in the Third Reich. (...) The theme of morphing into a freak, clown, or grotesque body reappears in various forms in contemporary Jewish culture and art: The American Jewish writer Philip Roth declared in the 1960s that he was not a Jewish sage but a Jewish freak. Freakishness, clowns, and the circus have a subversive potential: they constitute a digression from what is considered normal appearance and behaviour and play with presumptions, expectations, and social values. A study of this subject reveals the constant dialogue between religion and culture as far as Judaism is concerned. (shrink)

A short philosophical narrative about an angel wrestling with the decision to rebel against God and leave his post in the Garden of Eden.

It is ironic that, with few exceptions, the now vast body of critical literature about Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas fails to link knowledge to understanding—fails to relate the encyclopedic knowledge we have acquired of its numerous details to a convincing understanding of the painting as a whole. Las Meninas is imposing and monumental; yet a large portion of the literature devoted to it considers only its elements: aspects of its nominal subjects, their biographies, and their roles in the household of (...) the queen or the king. Niceties of court etiquette; concerns about clothing, and shoes , and the small cup of water offered to the Infanta Margarita .This increasingly intimate discussion of the painting’s details is not altogether beside the point; some of this information deserves to be integrated into descriptions of the painting as a whole. But a reader of these descriptive accounts soon begins to suspect they are offered in the hope that some new details might provoke an understanding of the entire painting, might prove to be the key to our comprehension of it. In fact, Las Meninas invites such analysis. Some nineteenth-century critics called it “photographic” in its naturalism , in the profusion of its detail, and in the alleged “snapshot” quality of its composition.1 The underlying motive of this understanding ought not to be dismissed, even thought the photography analogy is clearly grotesque, in terms both of history and visual sensibility. Although we know a great deal about the contention, in seventeenth-century Spanish art theory, that a major function of art is the perfecting of nature according to ideal standards, Las Meninas nonetheless is most commonly taken to be a pure spectacle memorializing an incidental moment, seemingly explicable solely in terms of what is apparent in it. 1. Gustav Waagen, paraphrased in Carl Justi, Diego Velazquez and His Times , p. 419; William Stirling-Maxwell, quoted in ibid. Joel Snyder is associate professor of humanities and of art and design and is chairman of the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a book about the foundations of perspective. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Photography, Vision, and Representation,” written with Neil Walsh Allen , “Picturing Vision” , and “Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost,” written with Ted Cohen. (shrink)

That there is a connection between Romanticism and the sublime seems obvious, and it is indeed evident in the poetic, artistic, and musical production of European Romanticism as a whole. The sublime, as tension toward infinity, as elevation of the soul, and as experience of the absolute in nature, constitutes undoubtedly one of the characterizing features of the poetics of Romanticism. Much less known, however, is the theoretical reflection on the concept of the sublime, and in fact scholarship on the (...) modern sublime tends to neglect its theoretical development after Kant and Schiller, moving directly to Nietzsche and the postmodern. The theoretical definition of the sublime, on the contrary, plays a far from secondary role in the aesthetic of German idealism, where it was not conceptualized in opposition to the beautiful, but rather as one of its constitutive moments. While no longer approached in relation to the aesthetic experience of nature, the sublime has been included in art theory, ostensibly losing its theoretical centrality, but in reality contributing to modify radically the characteristics of the idea of the beautiful. That of philosophers is a form of crypto-sublime that is parallel but distinct from the sublime of poets and artists, and that operates underground to influence the definition of the forms of beauty. The present volume aims to outline the development of the philosophical conception of the sublime from Schiller, who formulated a theory of tragedy based on Kant’s philosophy and thereby laid the foundation of Romanticism, to the philosophers of the Hegelian school, who placed the sublime, together with the comic, the ugly, and the grotesque, at the center of aesthetic reflection. (shrink)

In the article, the subject of the study is art. Some problematic points in the conceptualization of this phenomenon in modern science are considered, the available empirical research is evaluated, as well as the interdisciplinary perspective of the study of the phenomenon of art. The problem discussed in the article is the objectification of art as an independent phenomenon, and not only as a "form of social consciousness". The possibilities of such objectification can bring scientists closer to understanding the importance (...) of art for self-expression, human improvement, and survival in a modern post-industrial society. To solve this problem, some results of the well-known monitoring of changes in value structures are used – the World Values Survey, which contains data on value transformations in cross-country comparison. This study has been conducted for about 30 years and provides a broad understanding of the relevant changes. The research methodology is based on interdisciplinary, axiological and systemic approaches, the concept of "centralization" of values is used as a new perspective of the study. The scientific novelty of the study in general and its main provisions in particular boils down to the following: (1) the need to understand art from the point of view of not a form of public consciousness, but as a value included in various value systems is shown the structure of human existence; (2) based on the materials of the World Values Survey, the position of the value of art in the system of values of self-expression and values of self-survival is analyzed (according to R. Inglehart); (3) from the point of view of value transformations or changes occurring in the hierarchies of values, the "position" of art has been revealed, consisting in balancing (harmonizing) "intellectual values", which include art. The main result is as follows: art as a value is not subject to transformation and crisis, according to the results of the World Values Survey. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking book David Roberts sets out to demonstrate the centrality of the total work of art to European modernism since the French Revolution.

The Art of Randomness teaches readers to harness the power of randomness (and Python code) to solve real-world problems in programming, science, and art through hands-on experiments-from simulating evolution to encrypting messages to making machine-learning algorithms. Each chapter describes how randomness plays into the given topic area, then proceeds to demonstrate its problem-solving role with hands-on experiments to work through using Python code.

This article has three objectives: First, it revises the history of the reception of Ludwik Fleck’s monograph Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache (1935, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact). Contrary to the established picture, Fleck’s book was largely discussed in the years before the outbreak of World War II. What becomes clear when reading these early reviews and especially Fleck’s comments to those written by representatives of Nazi Germany is, second, the political dimension of his epistemology. In this (...) respect, Fleck’s emphasis on the genuinely democratic character of science will be discussed in some detail. And third, Fleck’s notion of “ Denkstil ”—thought-style—shall be examined more closely since, as we will claim, it can be understood as a notion indicating where the democratic dimension of science encounters its limits. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob DylanPeter CheyneThe Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan; 422 pp. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2022.Bob Dylan, like Dante's Virgil, takes us on an odyssey through sixty-six levels, not of the Underworld but of Songworld, in The Philosophy of Modern Song. With playful prose rhythms measured for pleasure and effect, these vistas are almost all seen through second-person portrayals. His gorgeous (...) write-up on Uncle Dave Macon's "Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy" (1924), for instance, conveys the "happy wanderer, the chicken thief," embodying the flagrant aristocracy of freedom: "You're the Dalai Lama, the Black Monk … The Thief of Baghdad … prowling and shoplifting … Multiracial, bisexual, celibate … freethinking … fucking and farting … Long John Silver … a pastry chef … hash slinger" (pp. 237–38). In Dylan's telling, this great song shimmies through a Whitmanesque catalogue of types united in aesthetic thrill.Invented characters inhabit this book, as they do Dylan's songs. Most prominent are the personae he extemporizes from others' songs in barnstorming flights of fancy. Upheld by writerly performance rather than argument, they act out his view that "it's what a song makes you feel about your own life that's important" (p. 9).The standout weird turn is the antihero he conjures from Webb Pierce's "There Stands the Glass" (1953). This is a country song about alcoholic consolation after a breakup, the toper hoping his love still thinks of him, in his misery. Simple, clichéd even, but Dylan invents a backstory hell of a Vietnam vet who "doesn't recall ever having a soul" and is "betrayed by politicians back home." Standard old-drunk fare, but then comes the nightmare of having "stuck a bayonet into babies' bellies and gouged out old men's eyes," "assassinated priests," and a concatenation of sins. "He rounds up the elderly, women and children, torches their huts" (p. 21). No bar-time happy hours for him; all those become "zero hour," "surrounded by the enemy" (p. 22). Dylan still protests the empire grotesque. Following each dark dive or wild fantasia is a straighter section that zooms out to more objective viewpoints, factoids, and historical analysis."You," ubiquitous and protean. "You," Dylan's projected center of subjective meaning. "You," his device, as he brings you along to reinvent a mood and mind frame, a world for each song. A thesis on mimesis, the second-person fantasies urge the reader to identify with the original first-person narrative, then fly it sky high. Dylan maintains that a successful song sings the listener into an alternative existence, a temporary self, through imagery and rhyme. This is just what Plato warned against, and what Dylan values: the art of making the listener mimetically become, for a few timeless minutes, what the writer and performer sing into being. In the ancient tussle between philosophers and poets, Dylan holds the agora through the harp. [End Page 254]Popular song as fiction is nothing unusual, but criticism as fiction? Is this critical license in extremis or is Dylan stressing the idea that music is always subjective? According to Dylan, songs earn their wings not just in the hearing but in how far and wide hearers can take them. While Dylan fabricates characters that weren't even dreamt of by the song performers, this book is also autobiographical throughout. The commentary relates as much of himself as the records he highlights. The book sustains a mood where the host impishly swaps masks all the while (as when he reveals, in a tiny chapter, that "Long Tall Sally" [1956] is about a one-story-tall woman from the Nephilim tribe in antediluvian Samaria). On Bobby Bare's "Detroit City" (1963), he writes, "Everybody assumes you're a bigwig, that things are cool and beautiful, but they're not." Here, many readers will flash back to young Zimmerman in Greenwich Village, desperate to pull off his move to the big city, "and the disgrace of failure is overwhelming" (p. 1). Through songs by selected others, Dylan recounts Dylan.Channeling small-hour talk radio, pulp Westerns, and hardboiled prose, the bourbon-scented mood evokes... (shrink)

Business ethics courses have been launched with professors from business pulling on one oar, and professors of philosophy pulling on the other, but they lack a sense of direction. Let's begin with the basics: What is an ehtical decision? More fundamentally, why the interest in professional ethics in the first place?There are over 300 centers for the study of appIied ethics in this country-why? The events which face our society today are outside the business-oriented collection of shared beIiefs that set (...) our pubIic policy agenda. Cur beIiefs are too narrow, thus we see, understand, and control small slices of life.Business ethics should be the study of the structure and impact on us of what we call "business science," e.g., accounting, marketing, economics, law, etc., and the corresponding study of the process of what Carl Jung called individuation: learning to become one's own uniqueself in the face of these bodies of professional knowledge which have structured our lives and charted the direction for our sensibilities for too long. (shrink)

In a devastating critique Raymond Tallis exposes the exaggerated claims made for the ability of neuroscience and evolutionary theory to explain human consciousness, behaviour, culture and society. While readily acknowledging the astounding progress neuroscience has made in helping us understand how the brain works, Tallis directs his guns at neuroscience’s dark companion – "Neuromania" as he describes it – the belief that brain activity is not merely a necessary but a sufficient condition for human consciousness and that consequently our everyday (...) behaviour can be entirely understood in neural terms. With the formidable acuity and precision of both clinician and philosopher, Tallis dismantles the idea that "we are our brains", which has given rise to a plethora of neuro-prefixed pseudo-disciplines laying claim to explain everything from art and literature to criminality and religious belief, and shows it to be confused and fallacious, and an abuse of the prestige of science, one that sidesteps a whole range of mind–body problems. The belief that human beings can be understood essentially in biological terms is a serious obstacle, argues Tallis, to clear thinking about what human beings are and what they might become. To explain everyday behaviour in Darwinian terms and to identify human consciousness with the activity of the evolved brain denies human uniqueness, and by minimising the differences between us and our nearest animal kin, misrepresents what we are, offering a grotesquely simplified and degrading account of humanity. We are, shows Tallis, infinitely more interesting and complex than we appear in the mirror of biologism. Combative, fearless and always thought-provoking, _Aping Mankind _is an important book, one that scientists, cultural commentators and policy-makers cannot ignore. (shrink)

In serious art, where the best talents of each generation work, we have seen the elimination of didacticism, moral lessons, and the sentimentality so characteristic of the preceding century; in their place we find the celebration of dryness, acerbity, irony, withdrawal from emotion, balance in tension, the reduction of the authorial and, finally, the human presence: "empty words, corresponding to the void in things."1 Literature as practiced and as taught in the schools has tended toward the allusive and the elusive, (...) intellectual games, the pastiche, the echo, the comment on the comment. Brought into relation with twentieth-century political extremism, it has given a large allowance to the grotesque subject and mirrored that subject in an undermining of human consciousness, that naïvely assumed constant that enables moral judgment. While few regret the death of Emmeline Grangerford, it may be that she died only to bequeath us Oskar Mazerath. The corrective swing taken by our literature has given us harpsichord exercises in response to megalithic politics, and "tragedy," the name of our highest inherited literary form, a form we no longer pursue, becomes a devalued label to paste in traffic accidents and on My Lai. Like the Germans who found it "poor form" to talk about certain kinds of killing,2 we may be in a position where our aesthetics works to block our morality. · 1. Norman O. Brown, Love's Body , p. 259.· 2. Raul Hilberg cites in relation to this point the 4 October 1943 speech of Heinrich Himmler on the extermination of the Jews: "It was with us, thank God, an inborn gift of tactfulness, that we have never conversed about this matter, never spoken about it. Every one of us was horrified, and yet every one of us knew that we could do it again if it were ordered and if it were necessary" to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Information: 2d ed. Includes bibliographies.

William Bartram would accompany his botanizing father, John, into the wilderness and he would famously memorialize his own explorations with an account that mixed romantic conventions with natural history and Quaker theology. William’s interior life corresponds to the spirit of Virgil’s Eclogues with its promise of the resto­ration of a Golden Age, replete with bucolic scenes of shepherds tending their flocks and singing nature’s praises. This paper addresses some of the political interpretations that Bartram’s work has received and argues that (...) William was focused on a distant past which he was introduced to through the classical curriculum at the newly founded Academy of Philadelphia. William’s curriculum guaranteed an introduction to the conventions of the sublime and the picturesque, since Addison’s Spectator was also required reading and he was well-versed in Linnaean nomenclature, but wherever William botanized his observations of the natural world were framed by classical literature. His tour of ancient Indian ruins where he imagined an Areopagus and a space free of strife and bloodshed is a dramatic example of William’s habit of importing a place defined by classical literature into his natural history. (shrink)

This is a multicultural philosophy of art applied to common American and European experience and discussed in relation to Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu, Native American, and African traditions.

This dissertation develops and applies, through criticism, a theory of rhetoric which addresses the Modernist achievement in literary expression within the context of the current attacks on communication. A modest conclusion about the limits of communicative efficacy in addressing personal experience is proposed and tested. This "modest proposal" represents an alternative to extreme universalist presumptions on the one hand, and radically skeptical solipsism on the other, thus contributing to current discussions emphasizing hopeful directions for communication theory. ;The study examines the (...) limits of rhetoric in approaching human experience by examining the relationship between expression and personal reference in the Modernist epiphany. Particular attention is paid to how this earlier tradition informs the postmodern loss of faith in communication. ;The study applies a dialectical method which involves locating a closely related text and theory, testing the theory against the criterion of the text, using the dialectical imbalance created out of this comparison to move to a higher synthesis of theory and practice. The study moves through three dialectical phases corresponding to the movement of the expression of epiphanel experience form literature, to film, to artistic expression generally. (shrink)

This is a systematic study of the conceptual framework used by critics and scholars in their discussions of influence in art and literature. Göran Hermerén explores the key questions raised in scholarly debate on the topic: What is meant by "influence"? What methods can be used to settle disagreements about influence? What reasons could be used to support or reject statements about artistic and literary influence? The book is based on descriptive analyses in which the author has tried to make (...) explicit what is said or implied in a number of quotations from scholarly writings on art and literature. Throughout, the emphasis is on clarifying the assumptions on which the use of the concept of influence is based, thus describing the limitations and merits of this kind of comparative research for critics and scholars. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Is education being disingenuous about arts education? When arts education is evaluated, the value of arts education is disputed. Arts education is judged to be of poor educational proof value. I believe a very different conclusion about arts education can be drawn. Pertinent to a good education in general is arts education. Why the arts are educationally troubling and how arts education can improve education is examined here. A brief account of arts education is given in an attempt to explain (...) why the arts in education are not a luxury but, instead, a genuine need. (shrink)

Philosophical practice, an art of living rooted in ancient traditions, is enriched by modern techniques such as individual counseling, Socratic group dialogues, and organizational consulting. Philosophical counseling, a key aspect of this practice, employs traditional philosophical frameworks and rational reasoning to address clients' concerns, distinguishing itself from psychotherapy while respecting individual autonomy. The growing Western interest in Asian philosophies also underscores a shared pursuit of wisdom, spirituality, and meaning. This paper examines the development, key features, and leading proponents of philosophical (...) practice, its relationship with academic philosophy, and the tensions between their differing aims and methods. The outlook for philosophical counseling is promising, offering an alternative to medical approaches for existential issues and expanding its scope to personal guidance, conflict resolution, and life‐skill development. Its future trajectory hinges on societal trends toward secularization, the de‐medicalization of mental health, and the increasing recognition of philosophy's intrinsic practical value. (shrink)

Paper published on author's website available at http://www.garybanham.net/PAPERS_files/Art%20and%20Symbol%20in%20Nietzsche%27s%20Aesthetics.pdf.

In the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911), local gazetteer maps helped to disseminate the innovations of longitude and latitude used in Western cartography. The use of longitude and latitude lines alongside the traditional Chinese cartographic method of “grid scales” suggests that mapmakers chose an ingenious compromise to accommodate new knowledge alongside traditional practices.

"The Traffic in Culture takes us along exciting new avenues in the investigation of art and society, global encounter, and the marketing of culture. These essays will become required reading to scholars in fields as diverse as art history, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies."--Suzanne Preston Blier, Harvard University "These essays break new ground in charting out a critical ethnography of art. They address the complexities of cultural difference while ceasing to respect the boundary between 'Western' and 'non-Western' art which has (...) defined the scope of the anthropology of art for too long. This is contemporary critical anthropology at its best."--Nicholas Thomas, Australian National University. (shrink)