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Presented by Anagnorisis Fine Arts and Phantasmaphile
In conjunction with the exhibit ’Another Roadside Attraction: An Exploration of the Neo-Grotesque,’ Dr. Nancy Hightower will lead a discussion on the grotesque in art as it relates to the artwork currently on view at the ISE Cultural Foundation:
’Modern contemporary art, film, TV, and literature embrace the bizarre in a way never before seen. Many might term what they see and read as ’grotesque’—used pejoratively to mean that which is strange, unsightly, obscene; in some cases, even funny. The grotesque as a scholarly study, however, is something different. It’s not altogether different, mind you, for certainly the grotesque always includes elements of the bizarre. Yet many authors and artists have used the grotesque—this elusive intersection of humor and horror—to question the strongest rhetoric that holds our society together.
The grotesque has a rich and long history, beginning in antiquity. It was simply ornamental back in Nero’s time, as we see in the ’grottoes’ of his palace, the Domus Aurea. Human forms blended into plants and animals, with a playfulness that delighted the eye. That ornamental version of the grotesque turned darker when Bosch incorporated it into his Garden of Earthly Delights and Bruegel in The Triumph of Death. Both works give us insight into the paradoxes of the artists’ cultures Over time, the grotesque grew to include an aspect of horror along with a humor that moved beyond an intellectual sarcasm. The purpose of such transgressive humor and horror addresses the paradoxes, hypocrisies, and binaries seen in our post-modern society.’
Dr. Nancy Hightower is an instructor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she teaches courses on the Grotesque in Art and Literature.
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