Kim Jones

At Pierogi Gallery in Billyburg, NY there is a show of Kim Jones. His works strike me as pretty unique. He's probably the kind of artist who is really messy and doesn't really care about having polished work, but instead seems to have made his life and his art interchangeable. I say this because he draws on works done in adolescence to use in his works of 50 years later. Kim's artistic process seems more central to his work rather than progress (even though process is a progression, but you get what I mean). So he doesn't really limit his resources, past and present, for the sake of being edgy (fuck you lady gaga). I'd like to see his process book! Kim's performance art included covering himself in mud, putting black nylon on his head and an array of sticks and tape on his back and walked around public area. Appropriately, he dubbed this performance alter-ego 'mudman' (not pictured) :-( ~~~~~AL~~~~~)-:

 

ambitious posting

I was doing some tragic homework for mythology and couldn't help but whip out some Eco regarding "Ugliness in the Classical World." I found a lot of images of masks used in tragedies.
Apparently, these surprised-looking masks came about because the theaters for preforming were too large. It was difficult for the actors to portray their character through subtle facial expression and therefore, to oblige the cheap seats, they wore exaggerated (and creepy) masks (that subtly resemble blowup dolls).

"On these grand scales, actors' tools for communication with the audience were entirely different than modern ones. Body language, facial gestures, and vocal tones, though very effective in a small, modern theater, would have been lost in the sheer size of an ancient one. Instead, the actor wore a huge tragic mask to roughly depict his state of mind and relied on his speech to do the rest." (taken from my Clst200 notes)

It is not so much the masks that I find grotesque as the themes in the stories they were used to portray. Themes that we still find to be taboo today were prevalent in most forms of Greek entertainment.

It seems that the expressions of horrification on these masks are not unwarranted. With themes like cannibalism (the stories of Tantalus, Atreus), incest (Thysetes, Oedipus) and bestiality (Leda, Pasiphae) it is obvious why an actor would be freaked out... warranting a face something like this:



While we tend to avoid confronting the grotesque, ancient Greeks seem to embrace it in all aspects of their religion and entertainment. Fascinating

(also, if you have a free ten minutes, Wikipedia any one of the above mentioned Greek stories...)

Ali

For all of those loyal students out there who actually read these posts, you may remember that my last blog was about the Nuremberg Trials and torturous acts preformed on the Jews in the concentration camps.
Well, after visiting the Mutter Museum and doing some extensive picture-ogling of shrunken heads, I came across the image above. It is a shrunken head made from a prisoner at the Buchenwald camp. The head of the camp, Karl Koch, and his wife, Isla, requested a number of these weird "gifts" to be made from the skin of unlucky prisoners. It is also rumored that Isla requested this lamp to be made out of human skin.



Notice the two heads on the left and the lamp on the far right.




Ali

Assorted Grotesqueries

I don't really have much to talk about right now although I feel like I should post. I guess the most I have been thinking about this class comes when I'm walking through business districts. I can't believe how often things considered grotesque are used everyday anymore as an appealing form of advertising. No longer the repulsive, fear-instilling, and lesson-teaching purposes the grotesque traditionally holds (as per Eco's book), grotesque figures are so often used now in mainstream entertainment. Take one look at the new Alice in Wonderland (or pretty much any of Tim Burton's films). Walk past a tattoo parlor, where you are often greeted with "hip", crazy scary paintings of unearthly beings. Watch an episode of TV, not just the weirdest current ones but even things like Ren and Stimpy (how crazy was that?). So I don't know, I think if anything this class has made me observant towards when potentially grotesque forms appear in my day, and make me just a little bit more aware of the reasons for such depictions.

-Colby

Gallows Humor, but not really

I've been wanting to do something music related. I just learned about this really cool Ravel piece called Gaspard de La Nuit. It is a piano piece in three movements each based on a poem by French poet Aloysius Betrand. It's the middle movement Le Gibet (The Gallows) the particularly interests me. Here is the poem on which the music is based.

Le Gibet (The Gallows)

Ah! Could what I hear be the yelping of the cold night wind, or the hanged man giving forth a sigh

on the gallows fork.

Could it be some cricket singing, crouched in the moss and the sterile ivy that the forest wears out of

pity?

Could it be some fly on the hunt, blowing its horn around those ears deaf to the fanfare of tally-hos?

Could it be some beetle plucking, in its uneven flight a bloody hair from its bald skull?

Or could it be some spider embroidering a half yard of muslin as a tie for that strangled neck?

It is the bell tolling to the walls of a city under the horizon, and the carcass of a hanged man

reddened by the setting sun.

The piece is just so eerie. One of the most interesting parts is a repeated figure throughout the whole piece that sounds like a bell tolling, or maybe the hanged man swaying, if you want to look at it that way. Take a listen.

Thin Pale Man

So I tend to enjoy using Eco's categories of the grotesque. They just fit somehow. If one thinks of them as a point system, a particular subject could potentially be more grotesque than another. So while you might say a floating lamp is uncanny, a floating deformity would not just be uncanny, but it would be an uncanny fright, you get what I mean? So if we continue to think of it as a point system, Guillermo's pale man, from his film, "Pan's Labyrinth", is a high scorer, spanning several categories. If you haven't seen "Pan's Labirynth", see it. Anyway, there are so many things about this creature that legitimately unravels one's nerves. His head is devoid of definition, expression and eyes. Still humanoid though - we can't classify it as a person, but bearing a similar form, the creature puts his foot in the door that would close it to humanity, so we are forced to think of it as one of our kind. That his eyes are in his hands and his frame rests on bone legs which defy physics are factors makes him more of an impossibility to our rationalizing minds. His occupation is a classic case of any true monster, he eats children. Period. There remains one more detail that assaults another category of our senses, his utterly pallid, hanging flesh. At this point, I will leave it up to Melville to illustrate the significance of the pale man's hue as he did the white wale in his "Moby Dick"... there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood. This elusive quality, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness (bold mine), even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.

WATCH THIS!!!!

Aphex Twin

You all may have heard of Aphex Twin, or Richard D. James. His music videos are always bizarre. There are two videos which I have posted that have coincided nicely with our readings on the carnivalesque and the ugliness of women. "Rubber Johnny" depicts a grotesque caricature of disability performing unusual feats of wheelchair acrobatics and battles with breakbeat light as his bulgy-eyed dog keeps his distance. Rubber Johnny's full elasticity fails him as we watch him repeatedly crash into the camera lens and break into disfigured gore. There is so much strange detail in this video, but above it all is the impossibility of this creature in this situation. 

"Windowlicker" can be seen as a grotesque parody of music videos whose bread and  butter is 'hoes'. Well, before we can relax, these ladies blossom eerily exaggerated man faces but retain their feminine curves. Better yet, these curves gyrate in the style of what we are accustomed to see in music videos but we still have to look at these faces. We watch what goes on in this alternate universe feeling kind of strange because we just can't naturally relate to what is going on between this guy and his girls. These girls once belonged to our world, but Richard D. James has made them into his own. What's interesting is that the video is extremely provocative at times, but its much easier to stay at bay and watch with unsettled curiosity rather than passive arousal. The real sensory overload comes at the end when wet human flesh made unsavory by slow motion fills the screen.

~Al