Aufgabengebiet
Klassische Archäologie
Dissertationsprojekt
While the ideal nude male body has been the bread and butter, the flash point of much scholarly attention, the ugly, the Tom Thumb, the hunchback, the misshapen, the base, the squinter, the buffoon, and their co. have been habitually overlooked in the majority of the textbooks about Greek and Roman art. For one thing, Polyclitus’s star Doryphoros and his brothers had nothing to do with these malformed, liminal creatures.
My quirky body of material consists of a wide swath of small-sized terracotta and bronze figurines, which are dated loosely in the Hellenistic-cum-Roman periods; they were recovered from domestic spaces, sanctuaries or graves. Their overarching and most salient feature, though, is that through their horrifying deformity they cruelly violate, subvert, and hence respond to the Classical canon of the idealized body, the ancient body par excellence. They delight in blowing unabashedly raspberries at all the collective values, symbolic meanings, and ideologies that the Classical embodies tout court. We, as spectators, are overwhelmed by a farrago of protruding ears, enormous noses, big bellies, huge gaping mouths, exaggerated humps, and enlarged genitals. Their impact is shocking, mind-boggling, an offensive punctum to our vision.
Archaeologists have attributed to these objets d’art functions that cover a wide gamut: as effective talismans against the Evil Eye, representations of mimic actors, racist put-downs of those living on the fringes of the society, portrayals of the numerous beggars fed in a sympotic context and thus being an index of the affluence of the host, and more recently as scapegoats against the anxieties of the Hellenistic era. Albeit my project does not dismiss these debates as invalid and builds upon them, yet at the same time poses the following question: Is this the whole story? Was the function of this counter-prestige world the lampoon and degradation of the dregs of society as scholars have invariably advocated?
To my mind, these images will continually slip through the net of any all-encompassing theory. These were fluid signifiers; they conveyed and juggled multiple messages, which were played out with every act of viewing. Additionally, what is consistently downplayed in the aforementioned interpretations is the playfulness of the carnivalesque-cum-grotesque body. By applying the rubric grotesque in an untheorized and unproblematic way we lose sight of its intrinsic traits such as playfulness and laughter. In this respect, Mikhail Bakhtin’s »theory of carnival« in the Middles Ages and Renaissance proves to be particularly pertinent. It is worth stressing that the stakes are both aesthetic and societal. The techne of the carnivalesque grotesque is to turn the tables, to upend the norm, to bring low what is put high on a pedestal. This is what our images do by employing a number of sophisticated-cum- mischievous ways. Classical archaeologists have been long ago willing to recognize the ludic aspects of other »burlesque« scenes such as the ones on Phlyax vases and Cabiric ware, where social conventions are turned upside down; gods and heroes become the butt of the joke, they are deposed and transformed into bawdy, disfigured manikins with dangling phalli. Paradoxically, though, they appear reluctant to acknowledge any humorous element inherent in the statuettes under consideration. In my view, these stem from the same perception of a topsyturvy and turnabout world. Comparanda do not restrict themselves to visual arts. For our purpose at task rituals and festivals with their reversal character prove to be informative and rich resources.
Besides Bakhtin’s model of the carnivalesque, other theoretical concepts also partake my analysis such as Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection and Freud’s uncanny. Needless to say, the various strands of the grotesque intersect and the traumatic one is of immense importance in my discussion likewise. Not for nothing, the effect of some of the statuettes is spine-chilling and hair-rising.
Last but not least, the grotesque springs from a continuing tradition; it has both forerunners as well as descendants. With this in mind, one of my overriding goals is to probe into this phenomenon both in the socio-historical context of the Hellenistic period as well as diachronically. This is not to say that I am adopting a grand schema, an essentialist narrative that explains conveniently divergent phenomena such as the South Italian Phlyakes pottery, the Cabiric ware, the Roman mime, the Medieval feasts, Bosch’s and Elder Breughel’s paintings, Goya’s Los Caprichos etchings, Ionesco’s Theater of the Absurd, the penchant of authors such as Baudelaire, Celine, Beckett for the hideous and the gruesomeness, and Dada. To be sure, grotesque is culturally constituted and historically contingent. Nonetheless, there are a number of ligatures binding its protean manifestations. By such an analysis of zooming-in-cum-zooming-out, it is possible to tease out the mentalities that informed these ancient images.