excerpts; Staging the Savage God: the grotesque in performance

image: da Vinci's "study of grotesque heads"

Raft Remshardt's thesis on the grotesque in classical and modern history has a few interesting points; the following quotes are taken directly from his text.

defining grotesque

Supposing a painter chose to put a human head on a horse's neck, or to spread feathers of various colours over the limbs of several different creatures, or to make what in the upper part is a beautiful woman tail off into a hideous fish, could you help laughing when he showed you his efforts?
This is how Horace opens his Art of Poetry, urging the neophyte artist to steer clear of "sick man's dreams" and "idle fancies." The type of laughable incongruity Horace hopes his adherents can avoid is the composition of verse - one to which we might attach, avant la lettre, the term "grotesque" - is poignantly invoked as a series of disjointed images focussing on the disturbed integrity of the body and on the impermissible amalgamation of human and beast.

Vitruvius and the grotesque:

Vitruvius, in his De Architectura, grimly castigates what he perceives as flagrant decorated aberations, complaining of a plethora of odd formations "without rhyme or reason." He sees strangely shaped leaves and columns grow into animal heads and figures, mingling the organic with the architectural with the previously unimaginable license, and exclaims:
"Such things....never existed, do not now exist, and shall never come into being. For how can the stem of a flower support a roof, or a candelabrum pedimental sculpture? How can a tender shoot carry a human figure, and how can bastard forms composed of flowers and human bodies grow out of roots of tendrils?"

the grotesque and metaphor:

The grotesque...is serious about metaphor; it takes what is essentially a sophisticated trope - so sophisticated, indeed, that cognitive psychology has only a vague understanding of its functioning - and deliberately regards it naively, or incorrectly, or primitively, in hopes perhaps of traversing the graveyard of commonplace metaphor and restoring its onomathic origins. The grotesque takes metaphor literally.

posted by chelsea @ 5:35 PM