Final Paper: Interplay Between the Grotesque and the Sexual
Danielle O’Brien
For my semester long project I
chose to research the theme of the interplay or connection between what is seen
as grotesque, and how it plays a role with what is sexual and erotic. This
could mean something is grotesque or bizarre in medium, or in the actual imagery
created by the art. I researched several artists and narrowed it down to ten
that I felt fit within my theme the most. Here is what I discovered, learned,
and realized.
The first artist is Debi Oulu. Oulu
is a multimedia artist that works in sculpture, installations and videos. She
received her undergrad degree at University of California San Diego in
communications. She then moved to Israel and went to art school. She has
exhibited internationally in Israel, Italy, Australia, and the major cities in
the United States. Though a lot of her work pertains to the sexuality aspect of
my theme, there is one particular piece that I find especially interesting and
speaks to my theme of the intersection between bizarre and sexual.
“Hold on Tight”, 2011
“Hold on Tight” is the
that piece. A climbing wall is configured of various sexual body parts. In this installation, participants have
to simulate acts of foreplay. Essentially, the penises are being handled, the
breasts fondled, and the vagina’s entered. It’s all very crude. In order for
anyone to participate they have to emotionally put themselves the situation and
mindset of the act. At the same time, the body parts are literally being used
to get up and reach another place, which allows me to see this piece in another
way. If I knew nothing of the artist’s intent, I could read it as a commentary
about sexuality and sexual acts. It could be interpreted that the artist is
commenting that sex is used and abused for purposes that into original, pure
intent. Though, because I have seen the artist’s other works, and read her
artist’s statement, I know the first interpretation is more along the lines of
what she was trying to get across.
In a
critique of her Oulu’s work, an art critic by the name of Dr. Dalis Hakker-Orion
writes, “After what she calls, ‘the year of the teddy bears’, she began
to create art mainly of male genitalia and to represent the attraction between
the sexes, seduction through sculpture, video art and multimedia.” Her
application of erotic imagery to a very normal activity like rock climbing is
bizarre. It blurs the lines from the regular world to the sexual world. She
notes about her own work, “My story is all of our
stories because if there is one thing that we all have in common, cross gender,
cross race, cross world, it is our obsessive pre-occupation with our
sexuality.” I became very inspired by this quote, as I have always wondered
about how secretive sex is and how many people, especially women, are shamed or repressive of their
sexuality. The work I have created in response to this project and Oulu is to
bring to light sexuality so that it is not only viewed in the private sector, but
so my audience can find some sort of emotional release in seeing it outside of
the bedroom.
The next artist I will go into is Georg Herold, who is a very well
known international artist from Germany. Though not all of his work is related
to sexuality, some of it comes across as very provocative to me. He is known
for using caviar in his art work, and a lot of the work I have seen of his involves
very angular, large, and roughly designed sculptures of the human body.
His use of gross
materials and provocative imagery are what brings his work under the umbrella
of my theme.
Untitled, 2011
I found the
following in a review at a site called “Sculpture News”: “Georg Herold, who
belongs to the same generation as Sigmar Polke, offers two enormous colorful
nudes (one purple, the other an eye-scorching coral), like voluptuous paper
cut-outs by Matisse given volume and then stretched almost to snapping point.
In the manner of Expressionist art, the effect is strained, tense and somewhat
unsettling - but in a good way.” His work is described as both “voluptuous” and
“unsettling”. The image of the two forms I chose are angular women with their
legs spread in seemingly suggestedly erotic positions. The colors of his
figurative sculptures are afeminite as they are purple and red. They are also
both situated on the floor with their legs open. This review of herold’s work
backs up my interpretation by calling it unsettling, because that adds to my
correlation between the bizarre or unusal and the sexual.
I associate
or pair Georg Herold’s bold, linear and abstract figurative sculptures with Jim
Duvall’s sculpted bondage because they could not be more opposite with their
approached to representing the human body. I will now explain Jim Duvall and
his approach to human sexuality.
Jim Duvall is a photographer that
lives and works in the Seattle area. He is an interesting man, for he is both
an artist and a strong sexual activist. It amazes me that his work is very
disturbing, at least in my eyes, but he is in a lot of organizations for safe
and positive sex, for example he is the founder of the Center for Sex Positive
Culture. He also founded the Seattle Erotic Art Festival, and subsequently,
shown work at. I actually used the catalogs of work from that Festival to
explore a lot of new artists. Other information I found about him is that he
teaches classes in bondage and photography. Much of his work revolves around photographing
what he calls sculpted bondage, in which he contorts and restricts his models
and photographs them. I find it very disturbing in theme, but clearly overtly
sexual.
“Newton’s Cradle”, 2011
This image is by far the most disturbing image of all of the
pieces I have collected for this project. Duvall is known for his “sculpted
bondage”, though this image in particular transforms eroticism and fetishism
into a grotesque objectification of the female body. The way he treats the
female forms by hanging them up, upside down, with their sexual organs staring
at us straight in the face is nearly unbearable to look at. Not to mention, the
female subject to the right is swinging them like the balls of “Newton’s Cradle”,
hence the title. The arrangement and orientation of the women, deeming them
faceless and headless, dehumanizes them. The way their bodies are hung up side
by side, seeming very inanimate, also reminds me very much of the way meat are
hung up, strung together and side by side. The photograph is heavily correlated
with my theme because of the grotesque imagery created by Duvall due to the way
he treats the body. He is seemingly grotesque in how he handles the, leaving
them in pain and restricted by rope, then using his camera to capture such a
highly sexual and disturbing moment. 
Monica
Cook is the next artist I researched. Cook graduated from SCAD in 1996 with a
BA in painting. She is also trained in art therapy and has been a special education
substitute teacher. She started a mural business about ten years ago, and it is
that as well as through shows and selling her work that she obtains an
income. She currently lives and
works in New York.
“Succi”, 2009
She is primarily a painter, but also does photography, drawings and
animation. The work of hers that especially connects to my theme are her
paintings. The painting “Succi” particularly
embodies my theme of the relations between the grotesque and the sexual.
Denoted in this painting are many women’s legs, feet, hands and bottoms,
accompanied by one breast, octopus tentacles, and messy, slimy food. The women
look like they are tangled together, but their clenching hands and bare bodies elude
to a sexual acts. Cook captures the sheen and texture of the women’s skin
covered with food, as well as depicts their body parts very realistically. I
classify this painting as both grotesque and beautiful. Looking at the details irks me, but at
the same time pulls me in. It’s a very intriguing and provocative piece, so I
work to figure out what each body is doing, but it is hard to decipher because
everything moves together and there is a lot of ambiguity in the juxtaposition
of squids, food, and bodies. The parts of the bodies that are repeated through
out are hands, feet and nipples, all very sexual non reproductive parts of the
body. The women are in erotic positions covered in food, which makes their
bodies slippery and sexual. A
quote from a review oh her work is as follows: “Cook’s nude women engage with
gorgeously rendered erotic food in scenes that elicit a range of emotion in the
viewer from mesmerized hilarity to horror…”In another critique of her work I read, “Monica Cook paints
beautiful and disturbing portraits of women.” Her use of food as an erotic substance and accessory to the body
reminds me of another artist I am interested in, Victoria Gaitan, as she uses
food in a grotesque, messy manor with nudes in photography. I will now discuss
what I learned in my research of Gaitan.
Victoria
Gaitan is a local from my area in Northern Virginia. She is a photographer, but
not a traditional one by any means. Her photography is all very performance
oriented, because her images are captured moments of either herself or other
models in particularly bizarre and grotesque situations, role playing. There is
a strong theatricality in her work, and that becomes especially apparent if you
see her massive prints in person. I became exposed to her work by going to The
Greater Reston Arts Center to see a show celebrating women and femininity. Her
work was incredibly powerful as she printed up 8 photographs in a series and
printed them out to be about 4 feet high and hung them up in a closed in
rectangular room. It was a very effective way to force the viewer to notice her
work. I found the following from a review of a solo exhibition in D.C.:
“Gaitán’s work focuses on female subjects, and in the past several years, she
has created provocative images of women that evoke in us a sense of beauty,
chaos and at times, decay.” When I saw some of Gaitan’s work, I was surrounded
with images of a beautiful women smothered in food, maintaing a sense of beauty
and eroticism while looking dirty and smothered in a grotesque amount of
doughnuts. Her work is the perfect middle ground that I was working to unveil
through my theme: overwhelming disgust and intense eroticism.
The image below, “Sweet
Meat Part 5”, 2010, speaks to me about the idea of dehumanization. The
woman looks to be on her hands and knees which eludes to a sex position. We
also cannot really see her face, only the side of her body, which adds to her
objectivity. Because she is serving the other two food on her back She is no
longer a human, she is a table and a serving tray. Meanwhile, the other two
women are touching their breasts, have their eyes closed, and seem to be in a
state of ecstasy hinting at eroticism. The blue eye make up covering their entire eye lids enhances
their closed eyes and somehow makes it even more sexual. They are all wearing
fancy corsets and too too’s, yet
they are covered in chocolate and have brown dripping out of their mouths.
There is something beautiful in this harsh, dirty juxtaposition between very effeminate
wear and sloppy, messy indulgence.
Gaitan
seems to bring together a few different ideas or thoughts in this piece. She
seems to comment on the idea of eating, eating disorders perhaps, and in doing
so, the food she covers the models in is very erotic. She also seems to be
making a commentary about women in sex and society, how they are objectified.
She finally elicits to feminine ecstasy and captures a beautiful moment where
the two models are sensuously engaging with themselves in their own minds and
bodies.
Like I mentioned earlier, she often
will use food in a way similar to Monica cook’s painted imagery, wherein her
subjects are smothered in it, in a sickly manner. But, Gaitan takes it to the
next level because going back to the discussion of realism and different media,
we, as viewers do not know whether or not Monica Cook imagined her scenes,
while we know for sure that Victoria Gaitan actually has her models pose and
covered in slimy liquids and jellies, right in front of her.
Patrick
Veillet is the next artist I will unveil. I first discovered Veillet on a blog
when I was stumbling around and exploring online. Veillet is actually a designer
and perfume creator/ designer. Though, he did break away and create a few
sculptural body ornaments which have been featured in a few magazines. When I kept searching Patrick Veillet Sculpture on
google, I was just taken to other blogs that had reposted the same or similar
pieces of his. It turns out this is because he is French and so nothing was
coming up on google because almost all of the press on him was in French.
However, I finally found one interview in a scanned in magazine titled “The extreme
Beauty of the Inside”. In this
interview he talks about the concept of exomorphism. He says that his work,
“considers the hidden sensuality of living bodies.” He also says, “The
skeleton hidden within humans is frightening whereas the “exoskeleton” of
shellfish or insects is seen as beautiful.” I think these words were very
insightful and after reading this, I understand better what his aim was in
creating the bizarre skeletal like fashion jewelry.
Untitled,
2010
This image
of Veillet’s is not just about the sculpture, but also the photograph. The
woman is turning around and engaging the audience in a very suggestive manor,
her breast is very erect and we see it suddenly poking out from her arm. Her
back is then adorned with this vertebrae like sculpture. It looks as if it
could actually be a vertebrae taken from an animal and put directly on her, and
that in a way, is gross. The piece also seems to wrap around her neck which
suggests at some sort of restriction which is taboo, or grotesque. Through the
placement of this sculpture, he is emphasizing this woman’s bare back, which is
also seen as very sexual. Though it is animalistic, I find it very beautiful
and appreciate it for breaking the boundaries of traditional jewelry. Veillets
choice to pair the unusual, animalistic, skeletal imagery with this model is
both barbaric and erotic.
Marcos
Chin is the next artist on the list because I fell he actually has some ties
with Veillet. Marcos Chin currently lives in New York after having graduated from
the Ontario College of Art and Design. He is a very well known illustrator, one
of the most well known in North America. That is his primary medium, and his
work goes from wall designs to advertisements and CD and book covers. But, none
of that work was of much interest to me. Instead, I found one piece on his
website under “fine art”, which was an experimental piece he created that is a
soft sculpture titled, “Machoman”.
“Machoman”,
2007
Here is what he had to say
about that work: “My work explores issues related to gender and
sexuality through the re-presentation
of the male figure and the subversion of traditional male archetypes. The most
recent piece, "Machoman" (2007) is a wearable soft sculpture plate
that alludes to amour and creates a dialogue between forms traditionally
thought of as masculine and effeminate.” Chin explores gender roles and the
sexual roles of males. He uses traditional male and female colors of blue and
pink. The larger white form is
clearly phallic, which eludes to and essentially beautifies male orgasm. This
action would otherwise be seen as absurd or disgusting to represent in art, but
in this sculpture he makes it very playful. 
I
find that Marcos Chin’s work and Patrick Viellet’s work have a similar tie. I
think it is funny that neither of them hardly ever work in sculpture or three
dimensional art, and they both chose to create wearable art of some sort. They take completely different
approaches in their work, but have each created a couple of pieces that fit my
theme.
The next artist is actually the
first artist I came across that spurred my further interest in the sexually
oriented theme. Crystal Barbre
is an up and coming artist who is from the Washington (the state). She attended
the Mark
Kang O’Higgins atelier at the Gage Academy of Art, which focuses on drawing and
painting because she felt they were the only art school that understood
her interest in combining the fine art of painting with illustration. She was
one of the first artists I had found in search of work related to my previous
theme, animals and sexuality. That theme has since evolved into the idea of grotesque
and bizarre concepts linking to sexuality, inclusive of animals. All of Crystal
Barbre’s work fits within my theme, but I do not find all of it fascinating or successful.
I admire her and her ability to shock the audience and instill a certain idea
in their minds, but aesthetically, I find her paintings somewhat lacking, and
overly pornographic. In fact, I read that for a while she worked in a sex toy
shop and became very exposed to the porn industry. She found that the women
working in the industry were actually extremely powerful, admirable, and proud
women, despite how society views the effects of the pornography industry on
women. This background clearly shows in her work.
She used animals as a way to
connect the audience to the subjects in her paintings. Animals have always
played a role in her life, she says, “When I was growing up I didn’t go to
school and we lived in a completely isolated environment in the wilderness.
While most kids had other kids to hang out with growing up I only had my
younger brothers and the animals that lived on our property. Having a close
relationship with the deer, birds, cats, insects, chickens, and other animals
instilled in me the connection between the human world and the animal world.”
Untitled, from the Magnestisme
Animal Series, 2008
When I look at this painting, I see its highly pornographic
nature, depicting a woman on top of a man in the act of having sex, we seem to
have a view form below and we look up and are almost shocked to fully see the
penetration of the penis. The female body is in full sight; meanwhile the only
part of the males body that we see is his penis. This dehumanizes the man, and
makes him seem more like an object or a tool for the woman’s use. This in
addition to the fact that the woman is given the head of a wild animal, a lion
roaring in fact, adds to the idea that the woman is in complete domination and control
of the male. I think Barbre is celebrating femininity and sexual dominance.
Barbre’s work is very different
formally and even expressively, but still has a loose tie with the small-scale
ceramic pieces by Jilek. I connect the two of them because they both link human
sexuality to the sexuality of animals and plants, respectively.
Cj
Jilek is a young artist that is from the Chicago area. She got her BFA in
Ceramics at Southern Illinois University in 1995. She just completed her MFA at
Utah State University in 2010. Though I do not have a lot of information about her
from other sources, I did find a brief note about her artistic objectives:
“Through her work she questions ideas of beauty, attraction, eroticism,
adaptation and desire”. Furthermore, her artist statement provides the basis
for her works connection to my theme. About her own work she says, “Inspired
by the sensuality of the natural world, I utilize botanical forms with their
openly displayed reproductive elements as a metaphor for human sexuality.”
Also, “Eliminating the presence of stems, leaves, and roots removes the physical
context of the plants allowing the viewer to focus on the form specifically in
terms of its sexuality. The exaggerated form of the stamens and pistils creates
a visual language making direct correlations between the botanical forms and
characteristics of the human body. This mode of presentation is designed
to lead the viewer to a subconscious association between nature and human
instinct of attraction.”
Looking at her work, I feel that
connection to sexuality. Her pieces have a very biomorphic and organic
presence, but they are overtly sexual, without being “human”. Her ability to
push viewers to recognize sexuality and see it so clearly outside of the way humans
have sex was very intriguing and inspiring. Though her work is not necessarily
grotesque, it is very bizarre and unusual.
“Tart”, 2010
My interest in animals and non-human (in this case plant)
reproduction and its relationship to humans is beautifully connected here. I think
that as humans we make ourselves seem so much higher than any other animal, or
any species. But Cj Jilek works to simplify the process of plant reproduction
to its bare essentials and brings us beautiful vessel like pieces like the one
above. The imagery is grotesque in that the peach color so closely resembles that
of a vagina, and there is a clear male and female part. Voluptuous and silky
shapes and surfaces are reminiscent of bottoms and testicles. Her incredible
rendering of the materials makes the objects seductively slimy and sensuously
smooth. The next artist I will review works with a completely different medium,
but has some connections to Jilek.
Sri Whipple was born in Los
Angeles, raised in Utah and graduated from the University of Utah with a BFA in
fine art, with an emphasis in painting and drawing. He loves the masters like Caravaggio,
Vermeer, and VanDyke, but his work maintains a very graphic quality.
I
found the following notes from a review of Sri Whipple’s work in The Salt Lake
Tribune. “The truth is, little of Whipple's work shows graphic nudity. Hanging
on the walls, for instance, there's maybe one nipple and a phallic cartoon
garden hose. Still, there's no denying his colorful voluptuous figures seem
inspired by a demented balloon twister. Some of his hyper erotic canvases
appear to writhe with legs, thighs, rumps and high heels.” Whipple was quoted in a review in the newspaper, “ I get
labeled as they guy who paints penises and vaginas”.
His
elimination of all other parts and sole focus on forms that look like sexual
organs reminds me of the approach Cj Jilek takes. They both simplify or remove
parts to get at the core of the sexual reproductive system. Also, the way
Whipple paints the very vaginal like folds is reminiscent of how Jilek sculpts
and molds clay into those very similar folds.
Many
of these artists inspired me, while at the same time I understood my attraction
to some of the art I was discovering because it was much like my own. I will
start by discussing a couple of pieces I made last semester that I see a heavy
correlation with Patrick Veillet’s work. I created two very sculptural jewelry
pieces that were very non traditional and made to be worn directly on the body
much like a piece of armor. They relate to Veillet’s work in that they are very
sculptural and break away from traditional fashion accessories, as well as
contain some element of the grotesque. In his, he works with
anatomical, bone like structures, wherein I used actual pig intestine in my
pieces, which give the appearance of a translucent skin like material. I
thought it was interesting how I happened to create pieces last semester that I
believe fueled my interest and close connection with Patrick Veillet’s work
upon discovering him during this project.
In
addition to finding links between the research I did for this project and past
work I have done, the artists I came across for this theme project ended up
inspiring me tremendously in the studio. I will go on to explain a few pieces I
created in response to this project.
Crystal Barbre inspired me to the following triptych. I call
the three-piece series, “Embroidered Ecstasy”.
This next piece is untitled, and it
is a painting that is actually a continuation off of some paintings I did last
year when I began experimenting with wax in encaustic painting. I decided to
pick it back up and do a multimedia piece. I was definitely inspired by some of
Sri Whipple’s paintings that I looked at as the figures in them were overly
simplified. I overlaid drawings on tissue paper with wax, and used paint as
well as wax to physically paint and build up layers. This is similar to some of
Sri Whipple’s work because he concentrates in some areas on giving the painting
an appearance of texture, usually an allusion of a tactile, glossy and wet surface.
But, our styles are clearly different in that he works through an allusion of
texture, where I
physically built up textures. I enjoy
working with wax because it adds another dimension to the painting, a tactile
one as well as emits a light scent. I think this is important because all of
the senses are employed during physical contact and sexual intercourse, which
is something I really wanted to go after in this piece.
physically built up textures. I enjoy
working with wax because it adds another dimension to the painting, a tactile
one as well as emits a light scent. I think this is important because all of
the senses are employed during physical contact and sexual intercourse, which
is something I really wanted to go after in this piece.
I thoroughly enjoyed this
research project for I feel that I became exposed to a lot of new approaches to
art as well as very bizarre and “out-there” artists, which was both shocking
and inspiring. I think that will definitely affect my studio practice, as I will
not be so self-censoring. The research was on a topic that has always
interested me, and it really carried over into my work as well as into the way
I view art.
List of Sources:
Debi Oulu:
Jim Duvall:
Patrick Veillet:
Marcos Chin:
Monica Cook:
Victoria Gaitan:
CJ Jilek:
Sri Whipple:
Georg Herold:
Crystal Barbre:
