Research Proposal on "Why Do We Look at the Grotesque Images in Modern Art"

Research Proposal 8 pages (2627 words) Sources: 8

[EXCERPT] . . . .

e., purification of the senses via fear and pity). Nietzsche held that a people,"by looking into the abyss of human suffering and affirming it, passionately and joyously affirmed the meaning of their own existence." But even this assessment seems grotesque. Does one ever stop at a roadside wreck where someone has been badly injured or even been killed and use it as a moment to reaffirm his own life's joyousness? It would be considered bad form to do so even by today's standards.

The Romantic Era had a fairly strong obsession with the grotesque: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, for instance, is a novel about a scientist who creates a monster and then spurns it for its ugliness, thus causing the monster to seek its revenge by killing his creator's bride and others whom he holds dear. It was a chilling story that showed what happens when people attempt to "play God" so to speak. Indeed, the Romantic Era suggested that the link between the grotesque and the spiritual was more real than apparent -- that bad things happened when people left the straight and narrow in pursuit of their own prideful aims. At the same time, the era elevated the importance of feeling and emotion -- the Romantic composers Beethoven and Wagner, for instance, viewed feeling and passion as musical laws and guides that had to be followed. Yet, those composers also had deep roots in the classical structure of composition, so their deep feelings built on their classical understanding. By the 20th century, however, such classical understanding was being dismissed as arbitrary and useless -- pure emotion (just as Pure Reason before it during the Enlightenment Revolution) came to be the guiding force -- and thus images like Wassily Kandinsky's abstract spiritual art were produced among other works (such as Picasso's cubism -- or even the odd and considerably grotesque work of the Dadaists -- such as Duchamp's Fountain, a urinal).

Kant tried to reconcile the subjective and the objective by asserting that a "judgment of taste" was a subjective feeling that could also claim universal validity. Kant also posed that the beautiful and the sublime were different -- that the former had immediate appeal while the latter was more ineffable. Aesthetic pleasure navigated the realm between the two.

But what does this say of a photograph by Goldin? Or one by Araki? The grotesque in the modern era is different from the grotesque of earlier eras. Earlier eras were guided by more of a spiritual principle -- a unity of form and comprehension that was viewed as universal (up until of William of Occam began to challenge the principle of universals). By the 20th century, artists were attempting to define reality on their own terms -- to depict their own reality -- subjectivity was elevated beyond the idea of universality. One's own personal experience was deemed more important than the universal experience. Thus the universal application of a crucified Christ was diminished (as the loss of faith in that conception in the modern era facilitated no such application) and the application of the artist's own suffering -- Goldin's bruised eye, for instance -- became a substitute. Indeed, Toth, when he attacked Michelangelo's Pieta, cried out, "I am Jesus Christ!" as he beat the sculpture with a hammer. It was an example of the modern, personal subjective grotesque displacing the Old World, objective, universal grotesque.

In this sense, the grotesque can therefore be considered as a personal expression of grief, of suffering, of something wrong, something decadent, something bad, something terrible, something rotten within the experience of either the artist or the viewer (since, as with beauty, ugliness is also in the eye of the beholder). In short, the objective definition of beauty that the classical philosophers gave applied no longer in the modern era. Constraints were thrown off, and the ability to depict what one felt within oneself became the norm. If one felt a crucifixion in one's brain, as American author Herman Melville depicted one of his greatest characters (Captain Ahab) as feeling, one was at liberty to express that visually. Ahab in Moby-Dick expressed that crucifixion by engaging in the mad quest to kill the white wall (which culminated in his own destruction and the destruction of his crew). Have depictions of the grotesque had similar results in the modern era? Or have they served to uplift or evoke sympathy or humility in their audiences, the way that the Old World's depiction of the crucified Christ did?

Again, it may depend on what the artist seeks to convey in his or her expression of the grotesque. As Susan Sontag noted in On Photography, "in teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe" (p. 3). In Berlin under the Weimar Republic, Otto Dix depicted the "new Frau" -- the New Woman of the German nightlife -- in a way that was certainly grotesque: his subjects looked like vampires, with elongated fingers and dead souls. What was Dix wanting his viewer to see? Was Dix commenting on the moral life of Berlin's notorious celebrities -- femme fatales like Anita Berber? Did his portrayal of the grotesque describe "the aberration from ideal form or form accepted convention, to create the misshapen, ugly, exaggerated, or even formless" essence of the new woman of the 20th century? It could argued that this is precisely what Dix was about -- especially considering that the poster children of Berlin's nightlife (Berber and her lover) died young of lives overspent on drugs, sex and ecstasy.

But perhaps the grotesque does not always have to be connected to a moral judgment. Perhaps it can simply be a reflection of reality -- of how things stand. Perhaps the grotesque can be a memento mori as it was in the old days -- an image of death evoking in the viewer something akin to the reflection that he too must die someday, or that society was capable of self-destructing at the drop of a hat at any given moment. Photographs of 20th century wars and destruction convey such messages. Gardner's Civil War photographs of corpses conveyed the same in the 19th century. Perhaps there is something about the rise of the Industrialization Era that fueled this need to explore more fully the genre of the grotesque. Perhaps industry is responsible for placing something inhuman in society -- something alien that only a reflection of the grotesque can drive out. Perhaps that is why we look -- and why we need to look. READ MORE

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