Gabe Bartalos’s Mechanical Baby on display at UAM. Photo by Brian Addison.
What is the grotesque? And why does it sometimes evoke opposite sides of the spectrum, both laughter and disgust?
These are the questions being asked on a panel tonight at Long Beach State entitled Confronting the Exquisite Corpse: the Grotesque in Contemporary Culture. The panel runs in conjunction with the now on display exhibit of the work of horror effects guru Gabe Bartolos, whose work can easily be described at grotesquely beautiful given the painstaking detail he puts into creating monsters.
According to modern thinkers—Charles Baudelaire immediately comes to mind in his 1855 essay, “On the Essence of Laughter”—the comic and the grotesque meet at a juncture. Comedy is where imitation meets creativity while the grotesque is where creativity meets imitation. Each give rise to laughter in the sense of the idea that man is superior: in comedy, we laugh at the superiority of man over man and in the grotesque, we laugh at the superiority of man over nature.
But this laughter at the grotesque—oftentimes evoked out of discomfort or horror—is something more profound. Even more, many artists, thinkers, and authors have used the grotesque as a form of argument against the wrong-doings that face society, generating not just laughter but horror and obscenity.
This makes the grotesque elusive in that it is simultaneously horrific and humorous. This ambiguity is precisely what three of CSULB’s most respected scholars—German Studies Chair and Professor Dr. Jeffrey High, Professor of Political Theory Dr. Mary Caputi, and Professor of Arts Dr. Karen Kleinfelder—will examine. After all, the playful work of Bartalos and other contemporaries like Matthew Barney (a close friend and colleague of Bartolos) stands side-by-side with grotesque masters such as Francisco Goya and Honoré Daumier, but the question of how they stand is what remains fascinating for these scholars.
Confronting the Exquisite Corpse: the Grotesque in Contemporary Culture will occur tonight at 7PM, at the West End of the Horn Center at the back entrance to the University Art Museum on Long Beach State’s campus. The event is free and open to the public.
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