Fellow Observer Pam Grossman presents a talk on the grotesque that sounds rad:

The Grotesque In Art: A Discussion With Dr. Nancy Hightower

*Please note, this event will be taking place at the ISE Cultural Center in Manhattan: 555 Broadway between Prince and Spring.  Press buzzer for entrance and proceed to basement gallery.

Date:  Saturday, November 20
Time:  5–7 PM
Admission:  FREE

Presented by Anagnorisis Fine Arts and Phantasmaphile. In conjunction with the exhibit “Another Roadside Attraction: An Exploration of the Neo-Grotesque,” Dr. Nancy Hightower will lead a discussion on the grotesque in art as it relates to the artwork currently on view at the ISE Cultural Foundation:

“Modern contemporary art, film, TV, and literature embrace the bizarre in a way never before seen. Many might term what they see and read as ‘grotesque’—used pejoratively to mean that which is strange, unsightly, obscene; in some cases, even funny. The grotesque as a scholarly study, however, is something different. It’s not altogether different, mind you, for certainly the grotesque always includes elements of the bizarre. Yet many authors and artists have used the grotesque—this elusive intersection of humor and horror—to question the strongest rhetoric that holds our society together.

“The grotesque has a rich and long history, beginning in antiquity. It was simply ornamental back in Nero’s time, as we see in the “grottoes” of his palace, the Domus Aurea. Human forms blended into plants and animals, with a playfulness that delighted the eye. That ornamental version of the grotesque turned darker when Bosch incorporated it into his Garden of Earthly Delights and Bruegel in The Triumph of Death. Both works give us insight into the paradoxes of the artists’ cultures Over time, the grotesque grew to include an aspect of horror along with a humor that moved beyond an intellectual sarcasm. The purpose of such transgressive humor and horror addresses the paradoxes, hypocrisies, and binaries seen in our post-modern society.”

Dr. Nancy Hightower is an instructor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she teaches courses on the Grotesque in Art and Literature.

I have recently been wondering: Is the body grotesque because it is profane (not divine, not the spirit)?

…The mortal body is gradually assimilated to the mass of things. Insofar as it is spirit, the human reality is holy, but it is profane insofar as it is real. Animals, plants, tools, and other controllable things form a real world with the bodies that control them, a world subject to and traversed by divine forces, but fallen.

In theory the body is a strictly subordinate element which is of no consequence for itself—a utility of the same nature as canvas, iron, or lumber.

—Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion.

The phone books are here! The phone books are here! Er, uh, I mean—the Suspicious Anatomy book launch is here! My first book! Check it:

Not since Galen’s De Elementis has been set in ink a single compendium of medicological knowledge so extensive & practicably useful as SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY Workbook No. 15: The Human Cranius. Having intrinsic value to all persons—piratical, mysterious, upright, or otherwise—The Human Cranius is a PEERLESS GEM of uncanny truth. If you are a living human, you should make frequent, unabashed forays into this field guide to your hideous secondary body—the cranius, an organ-matrix & carnival of fangs which is trying to destroy you even as you read this sentence…

From the genre-chainsawing minds of the Hollow Earth Society (Ethan Gould and, moi, Wythe Marschall) comes “the definitive guide to the horrifying world inside you”—finally available in lush, illustrated paperback!

In the tradition of John Hodgman, David Cronenberg, and H. P. Lovecraft, The Human Cranius explores an alternative anatomy at once mesmerizing and deeply unsettling. Gould and Marschall ask: What do we know about our own bodies? The answer: Very little…

In many ways, the art and human studies of modernity have given us the keys to our unconscious minds, but have left entirely to dry science (fixing plumbing, testing drugs) the workings of our bodies. What does it feel like to have guts? To face disease, age, mutation—in short, a self that is not only not whole but not even on its own side?

The SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY series seeks to address these physio–psychomological imbalances by producing, for your benefit, the entire unconscious of the body, the shadow-self, in words and elaborate images.

The official Human Cranius book launch, at Observatory Room in Brooklyn, will feature a lecture, medicological film snippets, and a live human dissection. Join us!

I love storms. I write about them sometimes, and recently I’ve been reading the innumerable horror stories of Rudyard Kipling*, whose loud, hot, ceaseless summer storms are as terrifying as ghosts.

Weather makes for fine and often surprising metaphor. Rain isn’t always sad**, and even being struck by lightning, as in Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, isn’t always horrible, or its horror—the pain and scarring—has the potential (forgive my electrical pun) to make its victim all the more human.

My friend Stephen Aubrey (who edited Suspicious Anatomy) delves not only into what the weather can mean but also into the dangers of its interpretation in his acclaimed Dark Heart of Meteorology, which is soon going up for two more nights in New York.

If you haven’t seen Dark Heart, you should. And even if you caught the last run, I am assured by Mr. Aubrey that his play is now 50% different and 100% better***.

The relevant deetz:

June 21 & 28 • 8 p.m. • $10
Workshop Mainstage Theater • 312 W. 36th St. • 4th floor
Email assembly.theater@gmail.com for reservations

Directed by Jess Chayes • starring Richard Lovejoy
Produced by The Assembly**** & Theater of the Expendable

A précis:

Franklin Elijah White is traveling across the country on an increasingly quixotic and personal journey. Aided only by a slide projector and assorted meteorological equipment, he has a simple message: The weather is going to kill us all… Featuring a tour-de-force performance by Richard Lovejoy, The Dark Heart of Meteorology investigates the tensions between chaos and control and the intersection of the personal and the meteorological. [The Author adds—and the intersection of the romantic-ideal and the romantic-actual. Like the weather, love changes unpredictably and can set tall trees on fire...]

The show’s postcard, drawn by Suspicious Anatomy cocreator Ethan Gould:

Addenda:

*A storm of a different type hangs perpetually over Kipling’s oeuvre. But to hound the long-dead reporter for his Victorian chauvinism and occasional lack of spiritual generosity is only to miss out on so many truly lovely, harshly insightful stories—stories of spectral horses, clairvoyant Irish soldiers’ wives, midnight trips up sleepy, hundred-degree minarets, leper–temples, fated train rides, sociopathic kings, spent morphine needles, bedeviled hands of whist, and skin-tingling rains—rains that induce parasthesia, or “creepy causeless skin feeling” (thanks to my friend David for the definition of parasthesia)…

**Some are only happy when it rains. Some even choose to leave important items such as cakes out in the rain. Bizarre culinary practices aside, I love a good downpour, esp. when going to sleep.

***I made up the second number. But Mr. Aubrey did change the play significantly from its last run, and I’m an optimist.

****The Assembly = Stephen Aubrey, Edward Bauer, Ben Beckley, Jess Chayes, Nick Benacerraf and Emily Perkins.