Curiosities & Dark Humor/Gallery/File AC-0126

The Grotesque Gallery: Six Plates

Six works in the grotesque manner, with notes: a choir of teeth, a face with too many eyes, a saint made of pylons. On an art that joins the comic to the monstrous and declines to choose.

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The word grotesque comes from a hole in the ground. Around 1480, workmen in Rome broke through into the buried rooms of an ancient palace and found the walls painted with a kind of decoration nobody had seen: human figures that turned into foliage at the waist, animals growing out of candlesticks, slender structures that could never have stood. The rooms were underground, so they were called grottoes, and the style was called grotesque.

It scandalized some who saw it and delighted others, for the same reason. It mixed what ought to be kept apart. Plant and animal, living and manufactured, the charming and the repellent were combined in one figure with no indication of how to take it.

That remains the mark of the mode. A grotesque image is not simply ugly or frightening. It produces two responses that will not settle into one: laughter and unease, attraction and recoil. The body is its usual subject, because the body is where we are most anxious about boundaries, and the grotesque body is one that has too many of something, or the wrong parts, or is turning into what it is not. The mode has a long history in exhibition, from the cabinet of curiosities described in The Cabinet Habit to the shock art surveyed in The Scandal Machine.

The six plates below are line reproductions prepared for the archive from the original works, with the permission of the artists. They are shown in the order in which they were cataloged.

Choir of MolarsThree concentric rings of teeth arranged inside an open mouth, with a small dark throat at the center.
Plate I Choir of Molars Ines Varga-Thorne, 2019. Ink and gouache on board. The mouth is the oldest grotesque subject: the opening where the outside becomes the inside. Varga-Thorne multiplies its contents until the image tips from anatomy into architecture. The three rings of teeth are ranked like singers, and the faint staff lines behind them suggest that this is a performance. What is being sung, into a throat that small, is left to the viewer.
Self-Portrait with Too Many EyesAn egg-shaped head covered in twenty-one open eyes looking in different directions; one eye is red.
Plate II Self-Portrait with Too Many Eyes Casimir Odell, 2021. Linocut, edition of 30. A face is legible because its features are few and fixed. Give it twenty-one eyes and it does not become more expressive; it becomes unreadable. Odell has said the work is about being watched, but the eyes look everywhere except at each other, and the single red one seems as lost as the rest. The mouth, a short straight line, has given up comment.
Ladder for Leaving the BodyA spine whose ribs straighten, rung by rung, into a ladder that climbs toward a small red sun.
Plate III Ladder for Leaving the Body Ines Varga-Thorne, 2020. Ink on paper. Read from the bottom, a ribcage. Read from the top, a ladder. Somewhere around the middle the ribs straighten into rungs, and it is not possible to point to the place. The grotesque specializes in this kind of transformation caught halfway. The title makes the image a joke about transcendence, and the fading rungs at the top make the joke uneasy.
Saint of the SubstationA transmission pylon drawn as a standing saint, with a red halo, insulators for hands and a lightning bolt at the chest.
Plate IV Saint of the Substation Bartholomew Achterkamp, 2018. Etching and aquatint. Achterkamp grew up beside a switching station and has drawn pylons all his life. Here he takes the conventions of the devotional image, the halo, the outstretched arms, the frontal pose, and applies them to a transmission tower. It is funny, and then it is not, because the fit is so close. The thing does stand over the town with its arms out. It does carry a power that would kill anyone who touched it.
Mass for a Dead Shopping CenterA shopping arcade drawn in deep perspective with every shutter down, a dry fountain in the foreground and a single red door at the far end.
Plate V Mass for a Dead Shopping Center Casimir Odell, 2022. Linocut, edition of 30. A response to R. Tamsin Voigt's notes on the abandoned mall, which Odell first read as a photocopy and which the library now holds. The grotesque here is not in a body but in a building: a place designed entirely around the vanishing point, with nothing at the end of it but a door. One light is still on, the fountain is dry, and the tree in its tub has stood bare for years because nobody thought to remove it.
Clock for a Town That Voted Against NoonA clock face with the hours around twelve removed and replaced by a red crack; the hands are two bones.
Plate VI Clock for a Town That Voted Against Noon Bartholomew Achterkamp, 2023. Etching. The hours either side of twelve have been taken out and a crack put in their place. The hands are bones, and the moths have come for whatever is left. Achterkamp made it after the town of Low Kessel first voted to keep a clock that runs the wrong way, a story the cabinet follows in its strange dispatches. He says it is the most cheerful thing he has done.

Why the grotesque now

Every period has an art for what it cannot digest. The grotesque flourishes when the categories people rely on are under strain: when it is unclear where a person ends and a machine begins, what counts as natural, or whether the systems that govern daily life are alive in any sense. Ours is such a period, and the mode is everywhere, from the gallery to the layered and distorted images discussed in After Irony.

It is sometimes dismissed as a taste for the ugly. That mistakes its purpose. The grotesque does not say that the world is hideous. It says that the lines we draw through it, between the funny and the terrible, the human and the other, are less secure than we would like, and it lets us look at that fact without being told how to feel. Laughter is one way through. Nobody has found a better.

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About Lucan Hartsell

Lucan Hartsell keeps the cabinet of curiosities: strange dispatches, conspiracy folklore and the grotesque gallery. He is interested in why odd stories travel, and treats a rumor as a document rather than a diagnosis. More from this contributor.