It is now my turn to bravely wade into the art.party blogosphere.  Howdy all!

I thought it best to start with something nice and light hearted.  So here we go – a few thoughts on the nature of the grotesque.

A couple days ago I spent an afternoon wandering the Chelsea art gallery district.  During my outing I happened to stroll into the Andrea Rosen Gallery.  Currently there on exhibit is the recent work of Nigel Cooke.  His work was fascinating.  The beings in his paintings are all at once visually unsettling, otherworldly, pitiful, decrepit, and yet at the same time charming and oddly inviting.  The same is true of his collection of mini busts/statues.  These drift even further into the world of the horrid and wretched with mummy like bandages, mangled teeth, and clown-like bulbous noses.  Yet once again in those eye-less sockets you find an intense amount of whimsical humanity, a humanity which I was forced to confront in a much more immediate manner as I was in a state of complete imbalance still busy being repulsed by the forms.

Having just finished working on out.reach’s first piece, Big Love (pictures of which can be found in Mary’s prior post), a show in which we attempted to transpose our subject theatrically with the use of masks and the low-tech, blatant augmentation of our bodies, my mind has been doing a lot of thinking about the power of the grotesque.  After our first performance an audience member stopped us and explained the piece really interested him as he didn’t know how to react.  He was “repulsed, amused, entertained, and also saddened because [he] really felt for the fat guy.”  Now we might have been able to achieve the same effect without all the theatrical trappings, but I would venture that our choice allowed us the opportunity to have much greater impact with our storytelling as we had already invited the audience into a different world, one which was unfamiliar and abnormal.

So the question I’ve been asking myself and I now pose to all those reading: How can we most greatly profit from the imbalance created by the grotesque?  What new ways or styles can we discover to wield it?  The danger we face in this journey is falling prey to the use of the grotesque merely for its “shock value”.  The challenge then is how we might use it not as an affront to our audience but rather as an invitation to come in and play with us.  Hey folks, it may look a little “weird” or “odd” but really it’s a boat load of fun in here!!

I finish with a cheesy yet incredibly true adage.  All journeys begin with imbalance.

Until next time,

Kyle

Note to self:  Pictures make blog entries so much more readable.  Use them.