Seriousness and Fun

The binaries I encounter as an artist (form/line, depth/flatness, shape/color) recall the doubleness of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Chiasm and Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque, which, like my practice, is grounded in the body. Bakhtin's analysis of Rabelais articulates the grotesque as "a body becoming," the opposite of the Classical ideal of the body, much in the same way that Merleau-Ponty's theory of subjectivity is the opposite of the Cartesian "Cogito ergo sum". This "becoming" is not specifically in terms of consciousness, but in a broader physical exchange and overlap with the world. The body becoming is a universal body, a body without borders, in which functions of the lower stratum, the guts and the genitals, are emphasized. Bodily processes where inside and outside are mixed, as in eating, sneezing, farting, sex, defecation, are manifested and celebrated in the grotesque, and Bakhtin extrapolates a revolutionary and affirmative power in the Renaissance laughter that accompanies the grotesque in Rabelais. It is a laughter that withholds judgment, that acknowledges and diffuses fear, that acts as an equalizer between social classes, young and old, men and women, the ugly and the beautiful.

My own imagery is not quite as frank as Rabelais's, and my attraction to the grotesque is grounded in its contingency and evasiveness, the fact that the grotesque is in process and cannot be pinned down. I make drawings and objects that are appealing and pleasurable on the surface, like so many innocuous objects and products are, and I situate them in impossible or untenable positions. These are in-between, liminal positions; a carefully cut and stacked pile of foam on the ground may be sculpture, garbage, drawing and floor at the same time. I draw materials from common experience; things that we all know by sight and touch, like felt, glitter, fur, paper, and try to coax them into unfamiliarity.

Bakhtin and Rabelais are writers divided by a great deal of time, geography and culture, from me and each other. Rabelais and Bakhtin are concerned with social stratification in Renaissance France and the Soviet Union, respectively. The act of situating myself in terms of art history and theory always comes retrospectively for me; my gut instinct to deal with material and form. This excludes remediation and planning, and that is appropriate for me. When I do need to look for a context and language for the work I do, finding theorist, writers and artists who foreground bodily experience is important. Rabelais and Bakhtin do not address certain issues, such as gender, that are important to me, but their ideas are broad and flexible, and they acknowledge bodily specificity.

I also need to acknowledge the association between the decorative and the grotesque, which goes a long way to explain the repetitive nature of a lot of the work I do. Decoration is often thought of in opposition to form, as an attribute of form's less-important opposite, surface. I don't really see how either pole of this binary (which could be understood as inside/outside, too) can exist without the other. Like the grotesque body, it is a generative and self-defining exchange.

Beyond that, all my decoration and repetition is an excuse for me to bliss out (or space out) and inhabit my body in very literal, physical terms while making work. Because I do not have the steadiest hand in the world, the fact that a fallible, sometimes tired and inexact person made the work is obvious. But the patterning is there for other reasons, too, otherwise I could just weave or jog or something. The patterns are feminine, but not terribly ladylike. They are fun but I want them to be a little off. I guess I want people to wonder whether I'm crazy or having a ball. In addition the ideas of femininity and pleasure are not taken too seriously. Obviously, I think seriousness and fun are not and should not be mutually exclusive.