For 25 years, carnival, the grotesque, ambivalence, transformation, paradox, sexuality and humour have been reoccurring themes. Central to these concerns is Rabelais and Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘Rabelais and His World’, and to a lesser extent, ‘Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious’ by Sigmund Freud. Critical realism and grotesque realism are terms that others have tended to use to contextualise my work since the 1980’s.

And over the years Dada has become very important to me, the ‘historic avant-garde’ (with the possible exception of Duchampian strategies) is the hidden and misunderstood root of contemporary art.

“In Zurich in 1915 losing interest in the slaughterhouses of the war we turned to the Fine Arts.”  Hans Arp

 

CARNIVAL

From medieval times the fair and carnival were the people’s expression of all that was not official. The carnival festivities and comic spectaculars had an important place in medieval life. Carnival has the same derivation as carnivore, carnis – flesh, carnivale – to put away flesh, the feast. These feasts and festivals offered a completely different, non-official, anti-dogma, anti-protocol, anti-serious spectacle. An extra political aspect of the world and human relations, Bakhtin described this as a ‘second world … a second life outside officialdom’ during which laughter reigned supreme. There was also a free, even egalitarian, spirit to Carnival when all hierarchical differences were suspended. The Fool became King; the King was uncrowned and became Fool. The fool appears in carnival as the ‘Lord of Misrule’, the elected King of Fools exercises the fools right of free speech, modelling himself on the court-fool and village idiot. He claims the privileges of the court jester. This traditional mock-king is also the ‘Abbot of Unreason’, the Prince of Fools ruling over the topsy-turvy world whose origins go back to the Saturnalia. The tradition of the Dionysian rite and the pagan Saturnalia of Rome remained unbroken and alive in the medieval world. This is the ‘world turned upside down’. Good natured abuse and familiarity ruled the day. [From ‘Laughter, a Peoples Culture- The Travails of Blind Bifford Jelly’ Catalogue. John Yeadon 1991]

Turning the world on its head is a recurring device to be found in the traditions of grotesque and critical realism. JY 1984

My intention is to subvert by destroying one’s sense of the orthodox. JY 1984

 

GROTESQUE, AMBIVALENCE AND TRANSFORMATION

“The grotesque image reflects a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming. The relation to time is one determining trait of the grotesque image. The other indispensable trait is ambivalence. For in this image we find both poles of transformation, the old and the new, the dying and the procreating, the beginning and the end of the metamorphosis.” Mikhail Bakhtin

For instance, a Sheela Na Gig is an old hag pregnant or a hag offering herself for sex, life and death in one, two opposing ideas in one, relating to the cyclic nature of the seasons. Or Joseph Merrick the Elephant Man, who was seen as transforming into an elephant, if you do not go along with this myth then he ceases to be grotesque and is simply a poor man with an unfathomable disease. The disease is ugly not the man. Bakhtin, in relation to transformation, refers to the decorations brought to light during the excavation of Titus’ baths and were called ‘grottesca’ from the Italian word grotta. They show plant, animal and human forms leaking into one another.

“These forms seemed to be interwoven as if giving birth to each other. The borderlines that divide the kingdoms of nature in the usual picture of the world were boldly infringed. Neither was there the usual static presentation of reality.” Mikhail Bakhtin

This also sees the ugly, the grotesque as ‘unfinished’, contingent, contradictory, containing the possibility of change. Possibly more ‘real’ than the beautiful ‘finished’ image.

 

THE UGLY, THE BASE AND THE HORRIBLE

In his book ‘Aesthetics’ the Soviet writer Yuri Bopev lists three categories: the Ugly, the Base and the Horrible….

The Ugly… The ancient Egyptians noted that through aging everything healthy and beautiful becomes ill and ugly, “that which is sound grows rotten, and the flavour is lost.” Aristotle noted that “though the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic representation of them in art, the forms for example of the lowest animals and of dead bodies.” Shakespeare said that “for if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion.”

On the ugly, Bopev concludes – “The ugly is an aesthetic characteristic of the objects whose natural properties have a negative significance for society at the present level of its development but do not seriously threaten it, as man is able to control the objects possessing this characteristic.”

Note the moralising in that last statement, still the author goes on –

The Base… Like the ugly the base is related to death, Bopev states that “the base is the extreme degree of the ugly and a highly negative quality. It is embodied in the negative forces which are a menace to humanity, as the people have not yet bent them to their will.” The base is perceived as menace or tyranny – nuclear war, the holocaust, Nazism, etc.

The Horrible… is seen as close to the tragic and at the same time the opposite to it. Tragedy is optimistic, while the horrible is pessimistic, hopeless and endless. In the tragic, the affliction is sublime, man asserts his rule over death. In the horrible, man is the slave of circumstances. The horrible he relates to the Middle Ages, the Inferno and Doomsday:

The category of the horrible includes those phenomena with which man does not feel at ease and which bring him disaster and death that cannot be put right even during the course of history.

Finally our author states that the ugly, the base and the horrible are negative values, negative aesthetic characteristics of the world, though he admits that in.. 20th century art, they occupy a place of importance, essential to understanding the horrors of Nazism.

However, Bakhtin would disagree; he saw the grotesque as positive and degradation as part of a process that leads to a rebirth, the Mediaeval cycle of nature which is life affirming and the unfinished object is prepared for change, not static like the perfect or beautiful.

“The central principal of grotesque realism is degradation; that is, the lowering of everything that is high, the bringing down to a material, bodily element everything spiritual, ideal and abstract.” Mikhail Bakhtin

“Degradation digs a grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one.” Mikhail Bakhtin

 

TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD/EXAGGERATION AND LIES

Exaggeration is essential Rabelais and a significant aspect of grotesque realism. An exaggeration is a falsehood, a lie, an essential part of artifice and any construct of reality.

Rabelais referred to the Romances of Alexander the Great, “The ‘Indian Wonders” as “some of the beautiful lies of antiquity”. These fantastic travellers’ tales did not stem from observation, [though Alexander would claim otherwise]. Romance and exaggeration was an essential part of memory and story telling. Lucian, the great writer on antiquity, ridiculed such stories of the miraculous; he criticized Ctesias, who “is capable of writing about the Indians and their country without either having seen them or heard of them from someone else”. Even Homer did not escape Lucian’s censure, because he had created Odysseus the arch boaster and past master of all tall stories and made him romance about one-eyed cannibals, creatures with many heads and about his companions being turned into beasts by magical spells.

Amongst the Indian travelogues we must include Sinbad’s voyages from the ‘Arabian Nights’ and those used by Al-Qazwini in his ‘Cosmography’ which was taken over by Sir John Mandeville in his description of the West Indies. Lucian though critical of ancient travelogues was himself responsible for some of the most sensational stories, though he openly admitted that they were deliberate lies. Lucian used Ctesias’ collection in his ‘True Stories’ which initiated the long series of extravagances which culminate in Rabelais’ 4th and 5th books ‘The Heroic Deeds and Sayings of Pantagruel’, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ and the arch boast Baron von Munchausen. [Swift’s book was put forward as a piece of fiction, though it might have been read in the tradition of fantastic tales by travellers. There is an account of an old gentleman who when lent the book, was alleged to have gone immediately to his map to search for Lilliput, and a Bishop was moved to declare that it was “full of impossible lies and for his part, he hardly believed a word of it”].

In these historical and fictional travelogues composite monsters appear, whether allegedly observed or specifically invented they play a large part in European literature and the visual arts. There is a continuous train of monsters stretching across five millennia, from their birth place in the Near East, in Egypt and in India, right up to the present day. These creatures link us with the very beginnings of our European culture and they still exert power on us, though their specific significance is now unintelligible. Human fears have taken plastic form and the span of our history is preserved in these strange shapes. These ancient equivalents of today’s monsters from outer-space are the imaginative creations of inner-space from the anxiety mankind has for the unknown.

The ‘Indian Wonders’ and carnival are the ‘historical other’.

The 20th century was typified by the myths on self expression, authenticity, authorship and essentially the myth of the individual. Walter Cronkite, the American journalist saw the proper relationship when he cynically said “Honesty – if you can fake that you’ve got it made…”

David Attenborough tells the story of the natural history film, which shows suicidal lemmings throwing themselves off a cliff. In fact this behaviour is a myth and only in extreme stress could these rodents be persuaded to perform in such a manner. Hundreds of Canadian lemmings were collected by the Disney film makers and herded off a cliff into a river demonstrating this ‘characteristic’ behaviour. Attenborough seemed to believe, as many have done before and since, this signified that ‘the camera lies’. This is a misunderstanding of John Heartfield – the photograph neither lies, nor tells the truth. Scientifically the camera is no mystery; a 12 year old child knows how it works. In terms of the natural sciences, the camera cannot lie. This is chemistry. A camera does what it does. How could it lie? A camera cannot think. But then again, as Heartfield ironically points out, the camera [photograph], also, does not tell the truth. Truth is ideological and therefore problematic. Truth will vary as to the individual and culture, according to the belief system. One could say that the artist lies in order to tell the truth [or ‘a truth’].

The relationship between, truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, is not straightforward.

Before ‘modern science’ and Descartes’ doubts, the distinction between imagination and fantasy seems totally blurred. Our material and rational world is not just founded on a rejection of the irrational – ancient fantasies, alchemy, travelogues et al, but on a questioning of a reality perceived – that all is false. Scepticism is the logical and scientific first principal.

Imagination is an essential part of thinking; they are one and the same thing. Perception is intentional.

Perception is not passive but active. This is the difference between looking and seeing, listening and hearing. Perception requires imagination.

And looking finishes the art.

 

PARADOX, CONTRADICTIONS AND AMBIVALENCE

Paradox is the dialectic of life, the play between truth and falsehood, reality and illusion, the art of fiction, contrivance and artifice. JY 1984

For a long time I have been fascinated with Norman Wilkinson’s Dazzle Camouflage of the First World War, an early form of abstract painting that did not hide the ships but mislead, ‘dazzled’ and confused the enemy as to what they were looking at.

>Part of a formal analysis of the Congeries Carnis [as opposed to content or context] is the ‘abstract v figurative’ interpretation, i.e. that of perception, e.g. ‘what am I looking at?’ On initial viewing the figurative digital image could appear abstract, even beautiful, until the penny drops. And like ‘getting’ a joke, this happens in the head of the viewer, it’s a personal experience. However once the figuration is recognised – there should be other sets of responses or reactions. And, then one could go back to a formal view of the work, although now this would be modified.

All ‘great art’ holds contradictions, this is possibly why it lasts.

“Paintings are aids to understanding reality and they will do different things at different times as the social conditions change.” JY 1984

For me ‘holding’ contradictions and ambivalence is the play between figurative and abstract, photography and painting, truth and falsehood, reality and illusion – artifice.

Some ‘ambivalent descriptives’ that suggest ways of ‘reading’ the work which in intention is both Serious – Comic:

Beautiful – Ugly
Innocent – Tendentious
Celebrating – Insulting
Profound – Trivial
Wonderful – Ridiculous
Glorious – Foolish
Awe – Awful
High – Popular
Mundane – Bizarre
Embryonic – Cosmic
Matter – Cosmic
Pleasing – Disquieting
Intriguing-Threatening
Familiar – Surprising
Sacred – Profane
Totemic – Taboo

[the word couples are not strictly opposites… ]

 

SEXUALITY

“Many people would like to disassociate their erotic behaviour from the rest of their life and treat sex as an unimportant part of their existence.” Dr Anthony Storr

“I paint no picture that won’t shock people’s castrated spirituality. I do this out of a positive belief that the phallus is a great sacred image, it represents a deep, deep life which has been denied in us and is still denied.”  D H Lawrence

“My sexual imagery is part of a serious enquiry, not jokey in a superficial sense. It is primordial research. They are powerful images that disturb, amuse or offend. To dismiss such potential would be ignorant.” JY 1984

“Nobody would be offended by a bunch of flowers, but what Georgia O’Keefe dismissed as a Freudian interpretation, is obvious and inevitable. Flowers are the sexual organs of plants. This is biology, not just psychology.” JY 2004

There is not a period in history where sexuality in art has not been significant – Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, even Medieval, Renaissance, Neo Classicism, Romanticism, the 20th century or Post Modernism. Or any artist – from Leonardo to Picasso, Michelangelo to Bacon, Rembrandt to Duchamp. An art history that ignores the role of sexuality is an incomplete history. Sexuality is not a marginal concern but mainstream and central to the history of western culture.

The historian and archaeologists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were very uncomfortable with the sexual realities of ancient religions. They admired these ancient cultures, the beginnings of civilization, but were disappointed by Egyptian, Greek and Roman morality. A great cover up ensued, disinformation and lies followed. Statues were attacked. The phallic Min of ancient Egypt, Greek and Roman discoveries were censored with the enthusiasm of a vandal. The British Museum has a ‘secret’ collection of marble disembodied penises in a draw, a gift of Victorian Puritanism and hypocrisy.

“…the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute and hypocritical sexuality.” Michel Foucault

Generally, Christianity is seen to have silenced sexual matters. Freud’s repressive hypothesis is Christianity’s legacy. Celibacy distinguishes Christianity from the religious practices of the Pagan religions, who were eventually persecuted by the early Christians. Christianity destroyed not just the phallic imagery of ancient religion, but temples were destroyed and pagan priests killed to intimidate believers.

“It is good for a man not to touch a woman…For I would that all men were even as myself.” St Paul, Corinthians.

Sexuality is denied and reduced to silence. Modern Puritanism has imposed its triple edict of taboo, non-existence and silence. However, Foucault denies this repressive hypothesis, rather, “a multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it”. [The Bayeux Tapestry, like much medieval art has vulgarities in its border, when the Victorians made a copy not only were these small incidents omitted but also the horses genitals were erased, which simply serves to emphasize their obsession with sexual things].

Sex is the subject of the law, religion, the political economist, educationalists, and medicine. Far from repressing sex, Foucault brilliantly observes that the Victorians went on about it all the time.

 

CENSORSHIP

Censorship attempts to produce non-existence or silence but it is born out of considerable dialogue. Examples are too many to mention, but here are some landmarks – drapery painted over body parts of Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’, the phallus is removed from the Celtic great turf-figure at Cerne Abbas in Dorset, the Victorians vandalize ancient Greek sculpture, Egon Scheile was imprisoned for 28 days and the court symbolically burns a drawing, D.H. Lawrence’s paintings are confiscated by the police at Warren Gallery in 1929, [‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ will not be vindicated until 1960], Eric Gill’s sculpture of ‘Prospero and Ariel’ on Broadcasting House, [this was concerning the size of Ariel’s penis, the BBC Governors requested a headmaster of a prep school to advise on a ‘normal’ size boy’s penis and John Reith, then Director General, ordered Gill to amend it], the OZ trial, Warhol’s films, Ronald Reagan cuts the NEA funding [National Endowment of Arts] as a punishment for Mapplethorpe.

The Obscene Publications Act of 1857 shifted the focus from heinous crimes, crimes against nature, minor indecencies, perversions and misdemeanours, from sex itself, to the act of looking at sex. Pornography starts when you have regulations that seek to control. The trouble comes when you start to say the problem is in the object or image itself and not in the person who is looking. [As Peter Webb put it, eroticism is in the ‘groin of the beholder’]. And as you cannot regulate how people think, their internal feelings or legislate against being sexually stimulated, the Victorians drew up a list of ‘things’ that were likely to, as they put it, ‘deprave and corrupt’.

The phallus is not just an image of arousal or a sacred image of antiquity but is the male figure in sexual display, like a peacock. Yet rather than celebrating this, the erection is censored. The erect penis is enshrined as the last taboo. Female frontal nudity is much more common than male nudity in the media and films today. Why do males need this extra protection? What is it that makes men so vulnerable, their bodily parts special, more sacred than female body parts? This is a familiar pattern and typical of our cultural canon, e.g. the difference that existed between the ages of male homosexual consent and lesbian and heterosexual consent, clearly it was felt that boys needed extra protection, more than girls, even today boys are regarded as more special.

 

IDENTITY

“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relations of women to themselves.” John Berger

This is the fundamental assumption on which the representation of the nude [female] in European painting is formed. Patriarchy has cast men as the creator, culture, owner and viewer. Women are objectified and are nature. Images of the male nude are subversive and somehow go against the grain. There is no essential male identity. Masculine and feminine are social and psychological constructs, not biologically determined. Under patriarchy women, lesbians, gay men and children have to struggle to retain a space for their identity, whereas the construct of the heterosexual man has been such that their identity is seen as unproblematic. It just is. It just exists. It is the norm from which everything else is measured, the balcony from which everything is viewed.

In the 1990’s our sense of what it means to be masculine seems to shift, with the media’s construction of the ‘new man’, a consumer of his own image, where female qualities have become a superior option. Yet, as Alan Sinfield points out, the fundamentally misogynist insult of ‘effeminacy’ is still the worst thing you can accuse a man of being, i.e. that he is like a woman. Perhaps nothing has changed and the new man is simply paralleled by the new chauvinists, new hooligans, new louts, new homophobes and the new sexual harassers. The new lads.

 

GAY ART

My work has been dismissed as ‘gay art‘. What would be the response if the author of this work was a woman? The work is no more gay art than the work of Leonardo, Michelangelo or Francis Bacon, and maybe no less.

” ‘Was Shakespeare gay?’ he couldn’t have been, because lesbian and gay identities are modern developments, the early-modern organization of sex and gender boundaries simply, was different from ours. However, by the same token, he couldn’t have been straight either, so present-day heterosexism has no stronger claim upon him than homosexuality.” Alan Sinfield

Homosexuality was invented by the Victorians in the 1890’s, as was the term heterosexual. So not only were there no homosexuals prior to this, there were not any heterosexuals either. There were homosexual acts, like buggery [which, of course, is also a heterosexual practice] and anybody could commit these offences. [Buggery carried the death penalty, famously Bishop Atherton was executed for buggery in 1640 and his supposed lover Proctor John Childe was also executed shortly afterwards]. There was no specific, identifiable same sex preference group or community with a set of political issues and social demands. Some individuals had a sexual preference and were creatures of their time, with names: Ganymede, pathic, cinaedus, catamite, bugger, ingle and sodomite. But generally, men fucked women and boys, because they could, women and youths being of lower status.

Obviously, ones sexuality will influence what you do, as do other psychological and personality traits, all art is a relationship with the personal and the public. But ‘gay’ is not an ideology and art should transcend mere personal concerns. My audience is not just gay, in fact, some gay men find the work problematic, some heterosexual men see it as obscene and are threatened by it and some women find the images hard to look at – then, others do not. The audience is broad and I do not see how sexual preference comes into it. The work should not be categorized on these lines.

[I once saw in ‘Gay Times’ an article on ‘Gay Pottery’, it might have been ‘Gay Ceramics’, still, there were these pots made by a gay bloke]. Clearly not all paintings by women are feminist or all paintings by black artists are ‘black art’. What does ‘gay art’ involve? The promotion of a gay life style? Propaganda on gay political issues? Homo-erotic images? Paintings on the pleasure of desire? My work is not especially erotic and does not arouse, nor does it tend to have a social aspect that refers to contemporary ‘gaydom‘.

 

PORNOGRAPHY

Pornography appears in an English medical dictionary of 1857, before the mid 19th century there was no concept of pornography. This ancient Greek term was neutral and described social and medical texts on prostitution, the literature of the prostitute. But by the 1860’s a new morally pejorative definition appeared in Webster’s dictionary. This is our modern definition, which refers to images and literature of sexual arousal.

The ultimate fear for the Victorians was that, as men masturbated over these images and that looking lead to self abuse and addiction, men would become enfeebled, effeminate and degenerate. [The Roman Empire was seen to have declined due to a masturbating fever and decadence towards sexuality]. Pornography relies on privacy and secrecy, Victorians produced regulations to control these centres of secrecy, without privacy and secrecy pornography is impossible. [The Romans had no word for ‘privacy’ and their ‘erotic’ murals where to be found in the hall or entrance to the house, not in the bedroom but in the most public part of the home.]

My work does not arouse and is not secret or private – it is not pornographic. It might be vulgar but it is not sexually stimulating. It might refer to sexual parts but it is not sexy. It might also be disturbing, but there is a difference between that which disturbs and obscenity.

Pornography is not illegal but obscenity is, where, ‘one is presumed innocent until proven guilty’, is suspended. If someone, anyone, says that this or that is obscene, then it is obscene and you are guilty if you made it or own it, publish or exhibit it. Innocence is not ‘presumed’, the burden of proof has shifted and the onus is on the defence to prove innocence and demonstrate that it is not obscene because – of its ‘artistic merit’, ‘educational’ or ‘cultural’ value. It is interesting to note that when it comes to sexual matters the British sense of ‘fair play’, justice and human rights are turn on their head.

 

HUMOUR

“Humour makes public the private. We share in laughter the paradoxes and contradictions of our existence. Laughter, which does justice to life’s injustices. This is the world turned upside-down where insult is praise and embarrassment becomes benediction.” JY 1986

“The fool is more than a social critic. He is purveyor of free speech. The fool knows the truth, being a social outcast. The fool emancipates. Carnival is lawlessness. Comedy is liberty.” JY 1984

“I said of laughter, It is mad; and of mirth, What doeth it?” Ecclesiastes 11v2

The first joke in the Bible was, of course, Cane who asked “Am I my brothers keeper?”, after killing his brother.

Laughter is an involuntary action, a nervous release, possibly related to the grimace or snarl in animals, fake aggression, a threat, a warning. Arthur Koestler regarded laughter as a luxury reflex “which could arise only in a creature whose reason has gained a degree of autonomy from the urges of emotion and enabled him to perceive his own emotions as redundant – to realize that he has been fooled“. Laughter, like language, is at the very centre of our human nature. In a sense we laugh at all the wrong things, the things that embarrass, that trouble us, the irrational and the taboo, specifically sexuality, racism, violence, failure, hardship, death and cruelty.

“The pleasure we derive from comedy corresponds to the fulfilment of a basic need – the need to overcome fear, even if only for a moment. Fear of all kinds: terror, superstition, vertigo, our fear of dying, our fear of the unknown, of the leap into the abyss – all the bogeymen which stalk us. The greatest fear is the fear of Death – an enduring and central feature of the comic tradition.” Antonio Fava

Something repressed, forbidden and hidden breaks through into the public arena. Humour makes public the private. It is a juxtaposition of these two separate worlds leaking into one another. Jonathan Miller described laughter as a “sabbatical leave from the serious aspects of life“.

There is a dearth of academic investigation into laughter, possibly because it is seen as the opposite of seriousness, a lowly activity not worth thoughtful attention. G. Wilson Knight said that it is an error of human judgment to regard humour as essentially trivial.

Sigmund Freud in his book ‘Jokes, and their Relation to the Unconscious‘ attempts to categorize jokes in a scientific manner. Freud’s investigation into jokes was related to essays on sexuality and the role humour plays in our mental life and its relationship with aesthetics. He referred to two essential categories, the ‘innocent’ or ‘abstract’ joke and the ‘tendentious’ joke. Innocent jokes are an end in themselves and serve no particular aim, jokes that have a purpose are tendentious run the risk of meeting with people who do not want to listen to them. These are Aggressive jokes; Cynical jokes; Obscene jokes; Sceptical jokes and Blasphemous jokes, that is, jokes with ‘meaning’. ‘Der Witz’ was originally translated as ‘wit’, then as ‘jokes’. Wit has a much wider usage in German and English than simply ‘a joke’, that of intelligence or ingenuity. For this reason, ‘wit’ seems more applicable to painting.

The jokes of carnival and the vulgar Mr Punch are jokes of change that debase, bring down in order for a rebirth, jokes that ‘turn the world upside down’. But in carnival we do not insult an individual, carnival is egalitarian, democratic, we insult the body of the people and everyone laughs, no-one is left out, there is no ‘fall guy’. Ben Elton the British ‘alternative’ comedian made a distinction between the jokes told by the prison guards and the jokes the inmates told. This is the political aspect of humour, where the context, of who is telling the joke, is so important. But in carnival there is one context and all hierarchical differences are suspended, there are no inmates no guards, everybody is an inmate everybody lives it and everybody is equal.

[Extracted from ‘Laughter, a Peoples Culture’ 1991 and ‘A Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy’ JY 1997]

 

CONGERIES CARNIS SERIES

“I believe that if you wish to paint today you have to have special reasons for doing so.” JY 1984

“A photograph is always historical, a past moment. Paint is affirmative of the present.” JY 1997

“The photograph neither lies, nor tells the truth.” John Heartfield

“Yeadon embarks on a visual Blitzkrieg…” Jeff Sawtell

The forms and means of production has changed over the years, however my concerns have remained remarkably consistent, CONGERIES CARNIS can be related to the ‘Totem Landscape’ series of the late 60’s and my early interest in Archetypes.

The photomontage CONGERIES CARNIS is an abstract expressionist landscape and CONGERIES CARNIS MAGNUS is a ‘colour field’ painting, an ‘all over’ painting, they are both comments on Modernism. The ejaculated white streaks on the pictures are a direct ‘blasphemous’ reference to Jackson Pollock’s ‘drip’ paintings, where an image of semen stands in for paint. These works also refer to medieval Doom painting, recently a Doom Painting was restored above the Chancel arch at Holy Trinity Church Coventry, described by Andrew Graham-Dixon as “one of the most important discoveries ever made in the field of medieval art.” Of formal importance to me is its visual complexity and the naked souls ‘amidst the red flames of the eternal fire’ in the mouth of hell. Michelangelo’s Doom Painting the Last Judgment, with its mass of naked figures writhing, and the Mosaic of the Cupola, Florence, are of great importance here. CONGERIES CARNIS is the depiction of the medieval landscape considered as a body with its mounds, protuberances and orifices, its gates to hell and sacred towers.

The cycle of legends in the ‘Indian Wonders’ was extremely popular in the middle ages, a kingdom of roads and orifices leading to paradise and hell reflects topographically the grotesque body of the earth peculiar to the artistic and ideological conception of space in the Middle Ages. The Indian Wonders are the most valuable source influencing Rabelais and Bosch with its free play of bodily parts anatomical fantasies transgressing the limits dividing the body from the world. Thus transforming the body and the world. Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ is probably a painting of India, where the fountain of eternal life, the entrance to hell and the garden of Eden were thought to be found, as in the Mappa Mundi where Eden is located at the top ‘above’ India.

“The unfinished and open body [dying, bringing forth and being born] is not separated from the world by defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with animals, with objects. It is cosmic, it represents the entire material bodily world in all its elements. It is an incarnation of this world at the absolute lower stratum, as the swallowing up and generating principle, as the bodily grave and bosom, as a field which has been sown and in which new shoots are preparing to sprout.” Mikhail Bakhtin

Along with the medieval concept of ‘body as landscape’ or ‘landscape as body’, there is also a reference relating to the random distribution of images, marks, objects in the work, to the cosmic in our ‘modern’ understanding – as in the ‘microwave background radiation’, the all over pattern of the ‘flat’ Universe. The edge of the ‘observable universe’. In this ‘cosmic’ sense, the CONGERIES CARNIS series could be regarded as images of the Universe, or ‘all the dicks of the World’. [I originally considered titling the work MAPPA PENIUM or MUNDUS TOTUS PENIUM]

The apocalyptic paintings of Brueghel and John Martin, Archimboldo, Goya’s ‘black paintings’, Rodin’s Gates of Hell, Richard Dadd, Jo Menell’s film ‘Dick’, Robert Gober’s ‘Male and Female Genital Wallpaper’ and Cynthia Plaster Caster’s collection have also been influential. However such references are usually in hindsight, discovered after the event. Everything has a history, you just need to find it, nothing is original. The earliest reference to this phallic subject matter is from the ancient Egyptian Temple of Ramses 3rd, at Medinet Habu, where the trophies of war are depicted, ‘priests measure the scale of human booty, the dismembered hands and genitals piled high of a defeated enemy in battle.’ And the 13th century Italian mural that depicts a tree with 25 phalluses in Massa Marittima, Tuscany. In recent times, both Sarah Lucas and Benetton have also produced montages of penises, the Benetton advertisement was banned.

The phallus was regarded differently in different times and lands. Ancient Romans had phallic talismans hanging from their belts to ward off the evil eye, today, during festivals in Japan giant phalluses are carried through the street as they were in Europe at carnival. Or consider the imagery of Tantra.

There is also a comic side to this imagery, for instance the early Punch and Judy show is a sexual fantasy centred in Punch’s libido. In the show we see the phallic imagery of his stick particularly his nose and the sausages. Exaggeration characterized all folk festivals of Europe and it is known that gigantic sausages were carried by dozens of men during the Nuremberg carnivals of the16th and17th centuries. Punch’s show is full of ambivalent sexual images, of his pot belly, of life and death of the belly pregnant and full of excrement and the gapping holes of the crocodiles mouth and the noose, images that swallow up from which Punch is saved.

In grotesque realist terms the penis is a powerful example of the ambivalence of the lower stratum, the dying and the procreation, its double function, that of pissing and ejaculation, the urine and the semen, death and birth in one.

But, in the end, it is what it is, the CONGERIES CARNIS Series are a collection of images of bodily fragments and bodily functions.

John Yeadon May 2005