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

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

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

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.

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

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

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)

Jenny Saville, Branded, 1992, oil on canvas

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

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

Themes

• World Turned Upside Down

– Inversion: high & low– Inside - outside– A passing from one state to another;

liminal spaces.

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

Chapman Brothers, Tragic Anatomies, 1996ICA London

Themes

• Laughter and humour

– “vulgar” and “earthy” humour– Baktin suggests such laughter “degrades and

materialises”

Sarah Lucas, Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, 1992

Symbolism

A medieval trial of a pig

• The pig• Dirt

Paul McCarthy, Mechanical Pig, 2003-05

Transgression: anti-art and the ‘ready-made’

“R. Mutt” aka Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

Anti-art & the ready-made: appropriated images not originals

Barbara Kruger, Untitled, 1994Wall to Wall exhibition Serpentine Gallery

Transgression in culture

Andy Warhol, Blue Liz as Cleopatra, 1963

Transgression and religion

Andreas Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987

Transgression and the body

Marc Quinn, Self, 1991

One of a series of Blood Heads, first exhibited at Sensation, Royal Academy exhibition 1996

Transgression and behaviour

Sarah Lucas, various self-portraits

Transgression: being vulgar & crude

Sarah Lucas, Got a salmon on prawn, 1994

Transgression through pleasure

Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964

Transgression through enjoyment and perversion

Paul McCarthy, The Garden, 1991-92In the influentual Post-Human exhibition, 1992

Top left: Grand Pop, 1977 Top right: Spaghetti Man, 1993

Bottom left: Daddies Big Head, 2003(Tate Modern) Bottom right: Pirates of the

Caribbean, 2005