Playfulness and Monstrosity in Contemporary Grotesque
“There are few grotesques so utterly playful as to be overcast with no shade of fearfulness, and few so fearful as absolutely to exclude all ideas of jest.”
-John Ruskin, Stones of Venice (1853)

“Laughter caused by the grotesque has about it something profound, primitive, axiomatic, which is much closer to the innocent life and to absolute joy than is the laughter caused by the comic in man’s behavior.”
-Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter” (1855)

For Early Modern natural historians, the “jokes of nature” were aspects of the natural world that defied explanation or categorization, including strange and exotic animals, rare stones and minerals, plants from the New World, and creatures born with monstrous deformities. These demonstrations of Nature’s playfulness were collected and assembled in Cabinets of Curiosity, where they induced feelings of wonderment, confusion, and uneasiness. Perverse and playful, Nature offers a model for artistic creation that stretches the boundaries of convention, inviting both pleasure and disgust.

The Grotesque inverts, subverts, and perverts the standard order of being. It celebrates a world turned upside-down where the reconfiguration of familiar forms evokes both terror and laugher simultaneously. Horace compared Grotesque imagery to a “sick man’s dreams,” where seemingly contradictory features exist in suspension and monstrous hybrids emerge from the depths of the subconscious. Although seemingly marginal, the Grotesque resists easy dismissal and threatens to subsume the center as a persistent, gnawing fascination. As confrontational as it is seductive, the Grotesque leads to a psychic estrangement filled with horror and wonder as new realities arise from familiar forms that are recombined, transformed, and mutated in a process of unbridled metamorphosis.

By stripping away the confinements of established reality, the Grotesque allows for the unfettered play of the imagination. As an aesthetic category, the Grotesque includes aspects of the diabolical, scatological, pornographic, dreamlike, carnivalesque, uncanny, and caricatured. Such features have been adopted and exploited by a wide variety of contemporary artists interested in the fruitful juxtaposition of the comic and the marvelous, the natural and the artificial, the attractive and the repellant, the refined and the low-brow. By sanctioning combinations of seemingly contradictory binaries, the Grotesque promotes artistic play that generates new realities and new states of being. The contemporary Grotesque, like all the grotesques that have come before, elicits diabolical laughter as it reveals essential truths about human nature that are at once comical and profound, playful and monstrous.
Curated by Geoffrey Shamos & Donald Fodness, 2015