Dance Floor Dale

I tend to think its better when this video speaks for itself. It break the mold by taking explicit material and making it playful and colorful. Its a parody on the normal sexual imagery we are exposed to.


http://www.dancefloordale.com/

-Christian

Alice

A few semesters ago I took this really interesting class on the History of animation. Seeing Chris’s post on Tim Burton reminded me of something I had seen in that class. Tim Burton is doing his take on Alice and Wonderland, which is supposed to be a dark departure from the familiar Disney version by. In that class on animation I saw a version by a Czech artist named Jan Svankmajer that seems to similarly exploit the disturbing nature of the Carroll’s original text. Svankmajer recaptures this disturbing character by celebrating the grotesque. Stop motion animation is usually done with clay puppets, which Svankmajer replaces with taxidermy animals and pieces of meat. The effect is this gritty and dirty; grotesque in a Salvador Dali meets Eastern Europe way.
-Christian P
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5wHMgTPF-s

Documentary Photography and the Grotesque

Documentaary photographers often focus on grotesque situations and people who are outsiders, outcasts, ill, insanes, etc. The above photo is by Jessica Dimmock who spent almost two years interacting with (and sometimes staying with, for days) a group of addicts in a squat apartment. You can see more of her work here: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/02/jessica-dimmock-dove-headlong-into.html. This site contains A LOT of interesting work - please spend some time looking though it and we can talk about whose work you found most interesting.

_Erin

A picture you may have seen

(Hopefully this picture comes out animated). We've all seen the still picture as one of the horrors of the Vietnam war but I personally never saw the film (or animated gif) of it. What's really grotesque, besides the obvious, is the following:

"Adams later apologized in person to General Nguyen and his family for the irreparable damage it did to Loan's honor while he was alive. When Nguyen died, Adams praised him as a "hero" of a "just cause"."

To be grotesque is to apologize for the truth.

The Anatomical Venus

So Colby has his mannequins and mummies and the Franklin Institute has Body Works again so what better time to introduce my favorite desktop images - the Anatomical Venus in her many incarnations.

"Anatomical Venuses are life-sized wax anatomical models of idealized women, extremely realistic in appearance and often adorned with real hair and ornamental jewelry. These figures consist of removable parts that can be "dissected" to demonstrate anatomy-- a breast plate is lifted to reveal the inner workings of the mysterious female body, often with a fetus to be found nestling in the womb..." (taken from Morbid Anatomy check it out along with Curious Expeditions. Most of these images were taken from those blogs.)

My reaction to these figures is similar to my reaction to many of Eco's examples. Any initial discomfort is immediately overwhelmed by a sense of awe leaving me with no difficulty describing them as beautiful.





-theresa

Baby Rosalina

Wow, I cannot articulate how much I love this book, On Ugliness. The images are so beautiful (somehow) and everything just seems to flow so well and still be reminiscent of other things I've read. I plan on posting more about it in the coming days because there's some really cool stuff I need to show everybody. For now, I am looking at the pictures on page 65 of the mummies in the Capuchin catacombs and I was reminded of things I'd learned about in seventh grade. With a little help from google, I found I was spot on. So... has anybody ever heard of the mummy of Baby Rosalina? There are tons of sites that discuss it, but here is just the first one I found. Basically, she is just this perfectly preserved little baby girl in the Palermo Catacombs. Rosalina Lombardo died in 1920 but she looks like she's just sleeping to this day. Eerie? Yes. Beautiful? Yes. Grotesque? I'll leave that up to you to decide. Nonetheless, it just had me thinking more about what constitutes ugliness and how something can be both compelling and off-putting. Here's some links.


here


and here


Oh, and if any of you want to look up more about her, it's kind of unfortunate that the character in Mario Kart is also Baby Rosalina. Oh well...




-Colby

Everything Is Bigger In America!

Since the dawn of stores like Sam's Club and Costco, Americans have become obsessed with buying in bulk. A 30 lb t-bone (grotesque) and four dozen watermelon seem reasonable at the time of purchase but after several weeks, just the thought of a melon and steak sandwich makes us want to heave.
While wholesale purchases have made it easier for us to host holiday parties and cheese tastings, bulk-buying has seemingly revolutionized our need for birth control. Turn on TLC and you are swarmed with families numbering well into double-digits. How do you feed/clothe/bathe/afford that many children? you ask. We can only assume that the modern convenience of wholesale has made feeding a family of 21 (and counting) a lot easier.

Our reaction to cultural phenoms like "19 and Counting" and "Octomom" vary from fascinated to mortified. Is having so many children "fulfilling a religious duty" or is it contributing to world problems such as starvation and overpopulation? What is the quality of parenting received by a child in such a huge family? Are the parents kid-hungry, sex-fiend loonies or blessed and nurturing caretakers?

With the ability to field their own football team (defense and offense) are mass births grotesque?

-Ali Blum