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Transgression & the carnivalesque

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.

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Transgression & the carnivalesque

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  1. Transgression & the carnivalesque

  2. Key terms • Transgression • Carnivalesque • Desublimation (related to Freudian term sublimation) • Abjection (term associated with Julia Kristeva’s 1982 book The Powers of Horror)

  3. Notting Hill carnival 2011

  4. Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Battle between Carnival and Lent (1559)

  5. 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

  6. 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.

  7. 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

  8. Transgression means: to pass beyond a limit, to exceed, to infringe. To offend by violating a law. To sin.

  9. 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)

  10. Jenny Saville, Branded, 1992, oil on canvas

  11. 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

  12. Man Ray, Dancer Danger, 1917-20 (Pompidou Centre)

  13. Themes • World Turned Upside Down • Inversion: high & low • Inside - outside • A passing from one state to another; liminal spaces.

  14. 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

  15. Chapman Brothers, Tragic Anatomies, 1996 ICA London

  16. Themes • Laughter and humour • “vulgar” and “earthy” humour • Baktin suggests such laughter “degrades and materialises”

  17. Sarah Lucas, Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, 1992

  18. Symbolism A medieval trial of a pig • The pig • Dirt

  19. Paul McCarthy, Mechanical Pig, 2003-05

  20. Transgression: anti-art and the ‘ready-made’ “R. Mutt” aka Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

  21. Anti-art & the ready-made: appropriated images not originals Barbara Kruger, Untitled, 1994 Wall to Wall exhibition Serpentine Gallery

  22. Transgression in culture Andy Warhol, Blue Liz as Cleopatra, 1963

  23. Transgression and religion Andreas Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987

  24. Transgression and the body Marc Quinn, Self, 1991 One of a series of Blood Heads, first exhibited at Sensation, Royal Academy exhibition 1996

  25. Transgression and behaviour Sarah Lucas, various self-portraits

  26. Transgression: being vulgar & crude Sarah Lucas, Got a salmon on prawn, 1994

  27. Transgression through pleasure Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964

  28. Transgression through enjoyment and perversion Paul McCarthy, The Garden, 1991-92 In the influentual Post-Human exhibition, 1992

  29. Top left: Grand Pop, 1977 Top right: Spaghetti Man, 1993Bottom left: Daddies Big Head, 2003(Tate Modern) Bottom right: Pirates of the Caribbean, 2005

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