Post on 06-Jan-2016
description
Transgression & the carnivalesque
Key terms
• Transgression• Carnivalesque
• Desublimation (related to Freudian term sublimation)
• Abjection (term associated with Julia Kristeva’s 1982 book The Powers of Horror)
Notting Hill carnival 2011
Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Battle between Carnival and Lent (1559)
Key texts
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 1968 (first publ.)
Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, 1981
Peter Stallybrass & Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 1986
Further reading
Anthony Julius, Transgressions: The Offences of Art (Thames & Hudson 2002).
Marsha Meskimmon, ‘The Monstrous and the Grotesque: On the Politics of Excess in Women's Self Portraiture’, make: the Magazine of Women's Art, Oct/Nov 1996, pp. 6-11.
Carnival described by Baktin
“As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrates temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order; it marks the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and complete”.
Rabelais and his World, p. 109
Transgression means: to pass beyond a limit, to exceed, to infringe. To offend by violating a law. To sin.
Themes
• The Grotesque Body (Baktin’s Grotesque Realism)
– Ambivalence: praise and abuse– Duality of the body:
• ‘low’ bodily ingestion/secretion• ‘high’ reason/piety• Incompletenes: nature always replacing old with new
(carnival - a festival of youthfulness)
Jenny Saville, Branded, 1992, oil on canvas
Themes
• Marketplace speech Baktin identified e.g. slang, curses, abuses, etc.
• According to Stallybrass & White these had another important dimension:
“…grammatical order is transgressed to reveal erotic and obscene or merely materially satisyfing counter-meanning”.e.g. punning
Man Ray, Dancer Danger, 1917-20 (Pompidou Centre)
Themes
• World Turned Upside Down
– Inversion: high & low– Inside - outside– A passing from one state to another;
liminal spaces.
What is stake at stake in such inversions?
“All symbolic inversions define a culture’s lineaments at the same time as they question the usefulness and the absoluteness of its ordering”.
Barbara Babcock, The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, 1978 cited by Stallybrass & White, p. 20
Chapman Brothers, Tragic Anatomies, 1996ICA London
Themes
• Laughter and humour
– “vulgar” and “earthy” humour– Baktin suggests such laughter “degrades and
materialises”
Sarah Lucas, Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, 1992
Symbolism
A medieval trial of a pig
• The pig• Dirt
Paul McCarthy, Mechanical Pig, 2003-05
Transgression: anti-art and the ‘ready-made’
“R. Mutt” aka Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917
Anti-art & the ready-made: appropriated images not originals
Barbara Kruger, Untitled, 1994Wall to Wall exhibition Serpentine Gallery
Transgression in culture
Andy Warhol, Blue Liz as Cleopatra, 1963
Transgression and religion
Andreas Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987
Transgression and the body
Marc Quinn, Self, 1991
One of a series of Blood Heads, first exhibited at Sensation, Royal Academy exhibition 1996
Transgression and behaviour
Sarah Lucas, various self-portraits
Transgression: being vulgar & crude
Sarah Lucas, Got a salmon on prawn, 1994
Transgression through pleasure
Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964
Transgression through enjoyment and perversion
Paul McCarthy, The Garden, 1991-92In the influentual Post-Human exhibition, 1992
Top left: Grand Pop, 1977 Top right: Spaghetti Man, 1993
Bottom left: Daddies Big Head, 2003(Tate Modern) Bottom right: Pirates of the
Caribbean, 2005