The Grotesque

The Grotesque:

The Grotesque is the Yang to the Yin of Ideal Classical beauty. Bird describes the duality of nature and mentions Freudian theories of the ego and the id. The ego represents the ugly truth and harsh reality of our gross indulgent behaviors; and the id represents our angelic selves that manifest order and create paradise. Bird goes on to say that our 21^st century visual culture uses the Id, the Yin, the idealist images of beauty and leaves the entertainment business to deal with the ego, the Yang, the ugliness of life.

I am all for the Grotesque and do enjoy the balance. I love to have beautiful art around me yet I would be board if that was all there was to look at. In making art I find this to be an appealing challenge for myself. I think there has to be a good motivation and intention for purposely using grotesque images like any other. I would not just throw a horrific element into my art just for shock or fascination effect. And, I dont think it has to be blatant or identifiably monstrous or ugly to communicate the feeling or idea of the grotesque.

One artist that I found and am amazed by is, Kris Kuksi. He is a phenomenal painter but look at these sculptures he does. He reminds me of JR Giger in some ways.

"He soon discovered his distaste for the typical and popular culture of American life and felt that he had always belonged to the "Old World". In personal reflection, he feels that mankind of the West today is an elastic and fragile being driven primarily by greed and materialism."

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/10/art-of-grotesque.html

http://www.kuksi.com/

Propaganda

Propaganda:

Bird speaks of how the “persuasive power of the visual arts” was used and still is, for propaganda purposes. He states that the word comes from a Catholic council, in the 17^th century, that set out to “Propagate the faith” in other lands. (Bird, 2012) Just as the church wanted to influence and entice people into following their doctrine, and pledging their allegiance, the same went for other political rulers and the wealthy ruling class. Even when artists did not intend their art to be used for propaganda in some cases it was, such as the Abstract Expressionists. Their work was so radical and autonomous that the US claimed it was a statement about how America valued our wide open frontiers, our personal freedoms and our self expressed individualism.

I like the idea of doing a series of propaganda type art posters or mini PSA type videos for my own personal beliefs and causes. I think it is a great idea for students as well and I have done something like this with 5^th graders only they were more like adds.

http://www.deviantart.com/morelikethis/collections/336194805?view_mode=2

http://www.sugarluxe.com/Make-Art-Not-War-Peace-Propaganda-Art-Print_p_111.html

Shock

Shock:

The transgressive spirit in art creates shock value within the status Quo. Bird speaks of how shocking art images were used as a means of control until the mid 18-hundreds when Edouard Manet created a big controversy with his unconventional modern painting Dejeuner sur l’herbe. The public were shocked yet the conversations fueled a new direction and paved a way for the avant-garde movements to flourish.

Besides my early punk performance, which was only sometimes mildly shocking; most of my art, since then, has been within the rang of normal and aesthetically pleasing. I have done a few short videos with racy content and one that may be shocking to some conservative minded; yet I have never intentionally set out to create art for shock value. Im not opposed to it and I will use shock if it is appropriate for what I am trying to do.  But like Bird states, it has become… “Progressively harder to find genuinely shockable audiences or to distinguish between shock with moral intent and the frisson of horrified fascination.” (2012, pg. 170) I’m not into the horrified fascination but I’m all about avant-garde.

Myra: by Marcus Harvey

Myra by English artist Marcus Harvey caused outrage in the United Kingdom in 1997 as it portrayed convicted child killer Myra Hindley.

The paining essentially recreated a well-publicised police photo of Hindley shortly after her arrest in 1965.

The artist used a caste of an infant’s hand to build a mosaic of handprints that constitute the image of Hindley.

http://vandalstookthehandle.com/2012/12/20/painting-by-blunders-spear-me-your-insults/

The reaction to Harvey's painting in London has been compared to that received by Andy Warhol's 36-feet-square mural Thirteen Most Wanted Men, which comprised large copies of photographs from a "most wanted" booklet published by the New York Police Department, and was installed in the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair. After protests by sponsors, Warhol's work was quickly painted over.^[4][19] The reaction to the potent mixture of the sacred and the profane parallels that to Andres Serrano's prize-winning 1987 photograph Piss Christ in Washington DC in 1989 and in Melbourne in 1997, and Chris Ofili's Turner Prize-winning painting The Holy Virgin Mary in New York in 1999. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myra_(painting))