Points of Penetration: The Grotesque Body and Humor in Art

Kobena Mercer The Cross-Cultural and The Counter-Modern



Jan Van Eyck Website
http://www.janvaneyck.nl/0_1_1_news/news_current.html

Call for Applications

Artists, designers and theoreticians are invited to submit proposals for individual or collective research projects for a one-year, two-year or variable research period in the departments of Fine Art, Design and Theory.
Deadline for submissions is 15 April 2009.

— research project

The striking feature of modern art is that it has ceased to recognise the categories of tragic or comic, or the dramatic classifications, tragedy and comedy. It sees life as tragicomic, with the result that the grotesque is its most genuine style.

– Thomas Mann

Whatever happened to hybridity? The concept seemed to promise immense critical potential in the early phases of post-colonial studies, but fell out of favour as a result of numerous critiques. Developing a frame for the study of cross-cultural interactions in the relationship between modernism and colonialism, my seminar at the Jan van Eyck will review the hybridity concept alongside a range of cognate terms that have been put forward as alternatives, including syncretism, creolisation and transculturation. By working with the notion of ‘multiple modernities’, developed within the sociology of globalisation, the aim is to examine a variety of artistic, curatorial and writing practices that evoke a combinatory logic of heterogeneity and mixture in antagonism with the logic of purification that was supported by the normative tradition of formalist universalism in modernist art criticism. To the extent that such normative formalism saw itself as the inheritor of a classicist outlook in post-Enlightenment aesthetics, the method of approach in this research project focuses on the contra-classical drive associated with a cluster of aesthetic categories, namely the gothic, the grotesque and the ornamental. These can be viewed as portals or gateways that facilitate the travel of cross-cultural elements brought into contact in pre-modern periods of globalisation and migration.

To the extent that the cross-cultural antagonises the classical tradition of formal purity, the modern is produced as a heterotopia of mixtures. The aim is to explore the historical, philosophical and archival issues that confront the ‘centrist’ logic of an assimilative logic of cultural universalism with various translations or transculturations that pose instead the question of the modern as the art and culture that is produced by the open-ended encounter among unassimilable differences.

The Cross-Cultural and The Counter-Modern is an initiative of Kobena Mercer, advising researcher in the Theory department of the Jan van Eyck Academie.