The Fragmented and The Grotesque

Caviness, Madeline H. Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages, chap.3 “The De-Eroticised Body: Aesthetic codes, fragmentation and the problem of agency”, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (2001)

- Power of fragmentation that forms the grotesque. Seemingly ambiguous yet shows the gray area between the two approaches of the female body as artistic subject matter. St. Agatha alter panel by Francisco Zurbarán shows the saint holding a platter of her severed breasts that function as a fetish to displace unwanted attention to her body. Confronting the gaze? It is a general view that there was no medieval concept of the gaze. The artist seems to disprove this idea, especially with regards to the St. Agatha panal, which seems to illustrate a fantasy. The segregated body- also applied to male subjects but not the sexual organs/areas with exception to the foreskin of Christ. Furthermore the Passion of Christ is a sado-erotic example of the displacement, not the signification of sexual desire. However, their masculinity is not altered or decreased, whereas as women are de-feminized. However, a problem of the erotic male nude is that it seems to immediately assume a homoerotic quality.

- Decay, not an effective artistic tool to de-eroticise the female nude as risks a sublimation of fantasy. A more violent gesture is required. C.W. Bynum- Christian thought is relentlessly troubled with ‘deep anxieties about decay.’

Often looked at without arms and legs therefore no protection. ‘Structured by the absent voice’. –Fragmentation decreases the power of the grotesque body. What Is the Grotesque Body? Something that is both dead and alive- Jesus Christ interestingly fits that description.

Russo, Mary, The Female Grotesque: risk, excess and modernity, chap.2 “Female grotesquses: carnival and theory.”

-Introduces with examples and effects of the dangers of women’s behavior in society, and their subsequent perception. Cultural politics is an underpinning theme of this text. It aims to participate in the re-presentation of femininity, ‘Womanness’ and female experience that are determined by symbolic and cultural constructs, in order to form a revised, pro-active and fresh ideal for social subjectivity.

Exemplifies the taboos of the grotesque bodies as pregnant, irregular and ageing.

Carnival- a time where rules were abandoned. Includes extracts from an article by Natalie Davis, ‘Women on Top’, which describes how the carnivalesque woman was not only used to discriminate but also to broaden the social actions of females, in or outside of marriage. Furthermore, for women and men, as an implicit protest of communal restraints and traditional power hierarchies. On the other hand, this could have transgressive effects; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie shows evidence for women raped and executions of Jews in Carnival at Romans. Nonetheless, the carnival and the carnivalesque offer the possibility of a ‘redeployment or counter production of culture, knowledge, and pleasure.’ (p.62) Along with the category of the grotesque body, Russo proposes could be utilized for the undermining of the given concepts of female beauty, and to ‘realign the mechanism of desire’.










Above are some images I have collected for the presentation 'Modern-female Grotesque'


I visited a film showing this week of a series of woman artist interviews from the 1970s. The short documentary films were first created by Kate Horsfield, and have since been re-formated for DVD under the direction of Vanalyne Green, both of whom founded the Video Data Bank (V.D.B.) in 1976. V.D.B. is an invaluable resource for video archives, created at a time when this media began to be widely used by artists. The artist's interview is something I find particularly insightful in understanding and fully appreciating bodies of work. The compilation of video interviews, including Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, the Guerrilla Girls and Lucy Lippard, is an important and relevant resource in bringing seminal artists to the forefront of our socio-historical reading, in this case, of the 1970s.