Carnivalesque and Grotesque
What Bakhtin’s Laughter Tells Us about Art and Culture
Laughter matters for all sorts of reasons, and, by way of beginning, I will try to identify three of them. Because it gives us pleasure, laughing is something we enjoy for its own sake: it really serves no useful purpose, and yet it has the power to change our feelings in an instant. When we say that good humor lightens our mood or lifts our spirits, we acknowledge the way pleasure mitigates anxiety. In the face of tensions that inevitably arise when one self encounters another, we might observe that humor breaks the ice—it lifts the tension in a way that loosens us from rigid bodily postures of fear or anxiety. This brings me to a second observation, which is that although we may laugh alone, laughing is an intrinsically sociable experience. Whatever its medium of expression—verbal, visual, literary, or theatrical—there is a communal aspect to laughter whereby the boundaries that separate one solitary individual from another are momentarily lifted as we become members of an audience, a crowd, an imagined community. As Henri Bergson suggested in 1899, “laughter appears to stand in need of an echo . . . our laughter is always the laughter of a group.”1 But if laughter is highly sociable, then this is also the very point at which humor and comedy reveal their antisocial side. Wherever “in-jokes” are performed at the expense of “out-groups” that find themselves on the receiving end of a punch line, laughter reveals its violently divisive potential. Laughter is thus essentially ambivalent as a phenomenon of social bonding that also brings to light the symbolic boundaries of group belonging.
Examining such artists as Betye Saar, Robert Colescott, and David Hammons—who each welcome laughter into the critical reception of contemporary works that address the legacy of blackface minstrelsy in American visual culture—the issue of ambivalence, and how to examine it, is one of my overarching themes of concern. Ordinarily we try to get at this ambivalence by asking whether an audience is being invited to “laugh at” or to “laugh with” a given comic situation. When we make this distinction we get a handle on the enunciative directionality of comic performance; but to the extent that we presuppose a grammar or syntax for laughter—with clear-cut distinctions among subject, object, and predicate, and neat separations between the sender and the receiver of a message—we risk losing sight of the paradoxical and contradictory relationship of laughter to language. It is often said that analyzing a joke succeeds only in killing it. Reflecting on this puzzle, we might well push it further: Is there something about laughter that actively resists language, something that disrupts cognition and confounds the intellect? And does not the pleasure we take in laughter arise precisely because we are being momentarily liberated from rational thinking?
Such thoughts suggest a third point of departure, namely that laughter matters, quite simply put, because it humanizes us: it brings our lofty ideals and our noble aspirations back down to earth, for it reveals us to be the creatures of a finite and contingent world, with little ultimate control over our material conditions. In slapstick this occurs quite literally when a comic performer slips on a banana skin and falls. For Bergson, we laugh because the action is a manifestation of a “mechanical inelasticity” that interrupts the vital flow of life. Insisting that the element of surprise that brings incongruous elements together in comedic performance is not just a matter of logical incompatibility, Bergson viewed laughter’s “social signification” as an ontological corrective to the willful rigidity with which humans often pursue their aims. For this reason Bergson argued that laughter “does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly: it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression.”2
Charles Baudelaire would seem to agree on this matter, for his 1855 essay “On the Essence of Laughter” begins by stressing the “shock effects” of comedic incongruity: “In fact, since laughter is essentially human, it is essentially contradictory, that is, it is at the same time a sign of infinite grandeur and infinite misery, infinitely miserable by comparison to the Supreme Being of which it possesses only the conception, and infinitely grand by comparison to the natural world. It is from out of the perpetual shock of these two infinities that laughter emanates.”3 Whereas Bergson addressed the sight of someone falling, Baudelaire raises the stakes by evoking laughter as a sign of humankind’s universally fallen condition. What both thinkers seem to be asking is, does laughter have a historicity? In the case of slapstick, originating in seventeenth-century commedia dell’arte in the loud noise or batacchio made whenever a performer was struck, the notion of “mechanical inelasticity” also fits with the deadpan physical comedy of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936), for example, for the world of industrial modernity provides innumerable opportunities for the mechanical and the organic to coincide with incongruity. Baudelaire’s use of the term “shock”—in the sense that modern life brings constant jolts or shocks to daily consciousness—similarly suggests a correlation between the disruptive effects of laughter and the interruptive logic of modern art as a questioning of received tradition. Arguing that “in the earthly paradise . . . joy was not expressed through laughter . . . man’s face was simple and all of a piece; his features were undistorted by the laughter that agitates all nations,” Baudelaire’s view took shape in the aftermath of Romanticism.4 Sensing something subversive in laughter, something with the potential to shock, agitate, and disturb the rules of convention and decorum, the idea that laughter originates in the demonic—that laughter is indeed satanic—led Baudelaire to a reappraisal of caricature and satirical cartoons as textual items worthy of attention, despite being dismissed as mere amusement within the bourgeois public sphere. Throughout his essay, Baudelaire quotes a maxim—“The Sage does not laugh without trembling”—which alludes to a proverbial saying that I recall hearing expressed more recently in a song by Kate Bush: “Did you ever see a picture of Jesus laughing?”5 This may be a roundabout way of saying that humans laugh and deities do not, but it nonetheless points up the foundational exclusion of laughter from the realm of official culture, in which laughing is regarded as “sinful” and is deemed to be antithetical to seriousness and hence incompatible with the solemnity of high art.
This is precisely where Mikhail Bakhtin comes in. On the face of it, Rabelais and His World is a scholarly study that identifies the primary sources of the Renaissance novel Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534). Documenting folk culture materials associated with end-of-winter festivals in late medieval Europe, where carnival rituals were absorbed into the Christian calendar as holidays, Bakhtin offers much more than a discrete literary study, however, for his analytical methods reveal how the hierarchical differentiation of “low” or “high” culture stems from historical struggles among competing worldviews. In Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting The Battle of Carnival and Lent (1559; fig. 1.1), the riotous and bawdy scene in the town square is polarized between the tavern and the cathedral. The composition dramatizes an antagonism that divides “the people” from “officialdom,” but Brueghel also shows us how struggles that bring opposing forces into a space of “battle” or agon are sites of mutual interdependence: the two sides form a motley procession of heterogeneous couplings, in the foreground, much like the human-animal hybrids found in Hieronymus Bosch.
FIGURE 1.1. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Battle of Carnival and Lent, 1559. Oil on panel, 118 × 164 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
For Bakhtin, laughter’s relationship to seriousness is one of antagonistic interdependence rather than logical incompatibility. Carnival’s etymology—the Latin carnem levare gives us “to lift meat from the diet”—reveals its symbiotic relation to Lent as a licensed time of merrymaking and excess prior to a period of sacrifice: the injunction to consume all fat before fasting on Ash Wednesday thus gives us Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras. As curator Timothy Hyman explains: “While Carnival is first recorded as a pre-Lenten feast only in the latter Middle Ages, most anthropologists locate its origins much earlier, in pre-Christian ritual and especially in the Saturnalia—the period of licence and excess, when inversion of rank was a central theme.”6 Describing how, in the Middle Ages, “laughter was eliminated from religious cult, from feudal and state ceremonials, etiquette, and . . . the genres of high speculation,”7 Bakhtin examines folk rituals such as the “feast of fools” and diagnoses carnival laughter as it is “linked to the overturning of authority”8 through a poetics of anarchic inversion and utopian reversal expressed in parody, mockery, and mimesis: “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 immortalised and complete.”9 Laughter matters for Bakhtin because it counteracts fear. Stressing the “earthy” quality of carnival laughter, he identifies emancipatory potential in its holistic dimensions as a socially regenerative experience: “It is, first of all, a festive laughter. Therefore it is not an individual reaction to some isolated ‘comic’ event. Carnival laughter is the laughter of all of the people. Second, it is universal in scope: it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants. Third, this laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. Such is the laughter of the carnival.”10 The cultural significance of laughter, however, was fundamentally transformed by the rise of Protestant modernity, and Bakhtin’s richest insights draw attention to the ways in which comedy was marginalized and pushed down into “low” genre status from the Renaissance through the Reformation to the Enlightenment. Arguing that “Rabelais, Cervantes and Shakespeare represent an important turning point in the history of laughter,” Bakhtin contrasts the “Renaissance conception of laughter”—which “has a deep, philosophical meaning, it is one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world. . . . Therefore laughter is just as admissible in great literature, posing universal problems, as seriousness”11—with subsequent periods in which the triumph of secular officialdom both subordinated laughter as the low “other” of high seriousness and also entailed a logic of specialization in which the regenerative and communal dimension of laughter was atomized and fragmented: “The attitude toward laughter of the seventeenth century and of the years that followed can be characterised thus. Laughter is not a universal, philosophical form. It can refer only to individual and individually typical phenomena of social life. That which is important and essential cannot be comical. Neither can history and persons representing it—kings, generals, heroes—be shown in a comic aspect. The sphere of the comic is narrow and specific . . . therefore, the place of laughter in literature belongs only to the low genres, showing the life of private individuals and the inferior social levels.”12 Where Protestant modernity, with its logic of rationalization, separates ambivalence into dichotomy, the dominance of classicism in the arts established a visual order of harmony and perfect bodily proportions that was constantly shadowed by the counter-modern image repertoire of grotesque realism, which lies at the heart of carnival.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines grotesque as “comically distorted figure or design” or else as “distorted, bizarre, ludicrous from incongruity, absurd”; but whereas the term originated in the fifteenth-century discovery of erotic drawings in excavated Roman grottoes, Bakhtin shows us that our modern usage—to mean something ugly and unsightly, “gross,” as it were—is an extreme foreshortening of the term’s multivalent connotations. Far from the moralistic associations assigned by the Protestant imagination, the grotesque for Bakhtin opens onto a regenerative cosmology that is underpinned by the iconography of “the lower bodily material principle” in which “grotesque realism imagines the human body as multiple, bulging, over- and under-sized, protuberant and incomplete. The openings and orifices of this carnival body are emphasised, not its closure or its finish. It is an image of impure corporeal bulk with its orifices (mouth, flared nostrils, anus) yawning wide and its lower regions (belly, legs, feet, buttocks and genitals) given priority over its upper regions (head, ‘spirit,’ reason).”13 The lower bodily material principle is indispensable to the grammatica jocosa of carnival because it performs “debasement.” Just as inversion of rank was expressed by coarse and vulgar speech in which insults were traded among carnival participants with irony, so carnival’s poetics of defilement, degradation, and humiliation aimed to bring down “low” all that was solemn, serious, and self-important. The importance of the recent Carnivalesque (2000) exhibition co-curated by Timothy Hyman and Roger Malbert is that it reveals the durability of grotesque realism as a counter-discourse of modernity in which—from the eighteenth-century cartoons of James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, through to Francisco Goya, James Ensor, and George Grosz—laughter signals an attitude of subversive dissent toward Western culture’s Apollonian ideals.
The lower bodily material principle does not always have to be visible to make itself felt. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1914) is today a canonical modernist work of the historical avant-garde: scholars take it very seriously indeed because, in presenting an upended porcelain urinal for gallery display, signed R. Mutt, the artist produced a “readymade” that invited us to question the institutional category of art and related concepts of authorship that had defined art as wholly autonomous from society. But why choose a urinal? Snow shovels and bicycle wheels served Duchamp equally well, but once his inverted urinal is connected to grotesque realism, the critical laughter it provokes is redolent of carnival laughter. Are we laughing “with” Duchamp, who is laughing “at” the institution of art? Or is this an all-inclusive and ambivalent laughter that momentarily detaches us from the solemnity invested in art so that we may look afresh at received “truths” that are now loosened out of static oppositions and shown to be neither immortal nor absolute, but contingent and open to change?
Coming up to date, the notion of the “avant-garde grotesque” as a distinctive strand in twentieth-century art would not only include works by Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, and Paul McCarthy, but would also include works that factor “race” and ethnicity into a contemporary aesthetics of the carnivalesque, such as Chris Ofili’s Blue Moon (2003; fig. 1.2). A defecating black pixie with a pointy beard and an Afro is certainly an incongruous “surprise” when encountered within the pristine white cube of a prestigious gallery setting. Ofili’s sculpture relates to recent works that portray the expulsion from Eden, but visit any souvenir shop in Barcelona around Christmastime and you will discover his source material: the Catalan figure of the caganer that appears alongside the three wise men in local nativity scenes. The caganer embodies the grotesque realism of carnivalesque because, while making a mockery of the sanctimonious and the sentimental, this scatological figure helps fertilize the earth and thus anticipates the renewal of agricultural life after the end of winter. As such the caganer is an anachronistic “survival” from the medieval practices Bakhtin described and could thus be taken as a sign of the counter-modern that subverts the authority of Protestant embodiment. Turning to the vernacular domain of blackface minstrelsy in nineteenth-century America, we encounter an entirely different cultural formation, in which the politics of “debasement” are placed in the service of cultural hegemony. In Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), the aesthetic strategy through which the “high” is brought “low”—the childish act of drawing a mustache on one of Western culture’s most revered icons—is readily intelligible as an act of carnivalesque debasement. But in blackface minstrelsy, the axes of debasement are radically reversed: that which is socially low is pushed even lower by acts of symbolic degradation whose outcome was to “deface” the enslaved black African subject as an object of derisive laughter.
FIGURE 1.2. Chris Ofili, Blue Moon, 2005. Bronze, 205 × 120 × 166 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin © Chris Ofili.
Minstrelsy and Modernity
Bakhtin’s tendency toward a utopian view of carnival has been widely criticized, and, in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), Peter Stallybrass and Allon White point out that “carnival often violently abuses and demonizes weaker, not stronger, social groups—women, ethnic and religious minorities, those who ‘don’t belong’—in a process of displaced abjection.”14 Because it dehumanizes difference, thus marking out the Other as all that is “not self,” the blackface image is grotesque in our received sense of ugly, comically distorted, ludicrous, and bizarre; however, Bakhtin’s conception of ambivalence allows us to explore alternative lines of inquiry into the enduring appeal of this icon in the visual culture of modernity, revealing the dilemmas it created for African American artists, who mostly avoided humor and comedy for the best part of the twentieth century in their struggle to be “taken seriously” and to win recognition among the institutions of high culture. Two important elements need to be taken into account once we approach the cultural analysis of “race” and representation from the point of view of Bakhtin’s insights into the ambivalence of carnival laughter.
Where the carnivalesque emerges as a literary and artistic trope against the background of its historical decline as an actual festive ritual, the study of the survival of numerous Africanisms transplanted into the New World as a result of slavery shows how carnival practices continue to thrive, especially in cultures where Catholicism is pervasive, such as Brazil, or in multi-faith societies, such as Trinidad. As a locus of hybridization, where black mockery subverts the prevailing order in parodic excess, the quality of the laughter found in the “folk humor” of black vernacular cultures—whether manifested in Br’er Rabbit stories in the American South or in Jamaican tales of Anansi the spider (adapted from Akan mythologies in Ghana)—warrants further investigation. In such historical contexts laughter was not merely a mode of survival but a manifestation of aliveness in the face of loss and dispossession. Where diasporic carnivals survive as a kind of “anachronism” within the culture of modernity, can we not conversely view the very institution of slavery as itself a political anachronism, fundamentally at odds with the rationalist models of Enlightenment philosophy? Viewing racial slavery as a structural anomaly within capitalist modernity, we can think of blackface minstrelsy as a cultural “retention” from the premodern realm, just as the public spectacle of violent punishment under slavery retained a premodern logic whereby power displayed itself openly, in contrast to forms of surveillance in which the modern operation of disciplinary power became increasingly “invisible.”
Discussing the origins of blackface, art historian Hugh Honour describes how the English actor Charles Matthews, when he toured the United States in 1822, was “struck by the dialect, songs and dances of the blacks he encountered and, blacking his face, he began to mimic them in his very successful one-man entertainment entitled A Trip to America.”15 Matthews was followed by other comic impersonators, such as Thomas Dartmouth Rice, but Honour’s account points toward a scene of double-mimesis in which ambivalence features prominently. At the level of the visual, the homogeneous sheen produced by burnt-cork maquillage indicates a social fantasy about appropriating “blackness” as an abstract or exchangeable property that is thereby seen to exist independently of black (African) bodies. A splitting emerges that is characteristic of fetishism: if blackness can be put on and taken off as an act of will, then the act of mimesis here is one in which white male comic impersonators confirm mastery over the Other’s body as a mainstay of supremacist constructions of “whiteness.” At the oral level of speech, however, and at the aural level of sound, tone, and timbre, as well as at the performative level of dance, the origin of blackface minstrelsy in the scene of cross-cultural mimesis also reveals a relationship with the Other that involves both identification and desire: acts of appropriation that Eric Lott refers to as complex and contradictory expressions of “love and theft.”16 If we think of the longevity of aural mimesis in popular music of the twentieth century, the constant copying of the black voice brings to mind the phrase that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Taken together, these two aspects of blackface minstrelsy—the performative emulation of the voice and the grotesque masquerade that hides the face—animated a contradictory libidinal economy of social “othering” and emotional attachment sharply illuminated by the Bakhtinian view that Stallybrass and White put forward in their insight that “repugnance and fascination are the twin poles of the process in which a political imperative to reject and eliminate the ‘low’ conflicts powerfully and unpredictably with the desire for the other.”17 Blackface iconicity enjoyed an enduring “afterlife” in the cultural imagination of modernity long after the concrete production of material artifacts—today eminently collectible—went into decline. Approaching the ambivalence of the stereotype from a dialogical perspective, we can draw out the implications of three important themes.
Bearing in mind Orlando Patterson’s view that slavery produces “social death” through ritual forms of humiliation and degradation that enact the loss of honor on the part of the enslaved, the blackface image unequivocally encouraged audiences to “laugh at” the lives of African Americans as rendered comic, ludicrous, and bizarre in minstrelsy.18 The mocking parodies of black vernacular speech, however, may also have had a significant resonance among nineteenth-century audiences that included European immigrants undergoing acculturation to Anglo-Saxon norms in northern cities, in which case we may speculate whether audiences were also “laughing with” comic impersonators, that is to say identifying with the minstrel figure as a troubadour whose stories addressed the travails of adaptation to modern urban life. Where political critiques of stereotypes often assume a realist epistemology that views representation as a distortion of social relations, the concept of ambivalence directs attention to the political agency of the unconscious as an element in the struggle for hegemony.
As the blackface stereotype crosses boundaries of social class and enters the realm of domestic genre painting in works such as Eastman Johnson’s Life at the Old South (1859), which features a banjo-playing minstrel at its center, or Winslow Homer’s Dressing for the Carnival (1895), its symbolic power is further naturalized. Art historian Michael Hatt observes how the prevailing visual culture of “race” and representation in mid-nineteenth-century America created a consensus across high and low culture on the basis of the stereotype that was only briefly challenged by abolitionist iconography, which sought to refute degrading images of black life by assimilating black bodies to the classical Greco-Roman ideal. Noting that “it is after emancipation that racism becomes most intense and virulent,” Hatt describes how commonplace images of “the black body in its extreme grotesque definition as a symbol of the coherence of white America”19 triumphed over the classical idealization of the black body whereby abolitionists sought to impart connotations of dignity and nobility to a newly emancipated social class. What is missing from his account of discursive struggle in competing constructions of the black body, however, is the critical moment of the countervailing “answer-word” as it is articulated from the side of a black Atlantic double-consciousness that questions dominant depictions of otherness.
Produced under conditions of self-chosen exile in Rome, the sculpture Forever Free (1867) by Mary Edmonia Lewis demonstrates how black artists of the nineteenth century struggled to find a voice in a visual language in which the image of blackness had been fixed as a sign of the Other. Repeating key tropes of abolitionist iconography—the slave kneeling in gratitude, hands raised to show broken manacles—Lewis nonetheless introduces a critical difference in terms of gender, suggesting that black emancipation is incomplete without female equality. Using white marble—associated with spiritual values in Western classicism—her neoclassical composition answers back to the grotesquery of the commonplace stereotype by producing an ideal type as alternative. Although such moments of black self-representation are scarce, we catch a glimpse of a nascent strategy of counter-appropriation whereby key signifying elements are disarticulated out of the dominant visual code and rearticulated by black artists to produce alternate meanings in social discourse on “race.” In The Banjo Lesson (1894), Henry Ossawa Tanner takes the banjo out of the dominant pictorial register where it acts as a signifier of minstrelsy, and re-accentuates it as a signifier of the inner life of a black family, portraying a scene of instruction in which African American traditions (the banjo is a hybrid mix of African drum and European guitar) are passed from one generation to the next.
When we consider how nineteenth-century black artists responded to stereotyping, we can think of the symbolic economy of “othering” as an obstacle that stood in the way of their artistic freedom; but once we factor in the stereotype’s twin poles of repugnance and fascination at the level of the collective unconscious, we may appreciate that it was not until the late twentieth century that such strategies of counter-appropriation were able to overturn the “stereotypical grotesque” into a source of critical laughter.
Contesting racial stereotypes through strategies of idealization and classicism featured prominently among artists of the “New Negro” era such as Meta Warrick Fuller and Richmond Barthe. While Harlem Renaissance artists such as Palmer Hayden and Archibald Motley turned toward vernacular sources, introducing wit and humor into their affectionate and intimate portrayals of family and community life, it is striking to observe that an outright appeal to laughter does not truly emerge until the breakthrough moment of the 1960s, when the “regime of truth” held in place by representations inherited from the previous century is finally ruptured and torn open. Considered as a distorted manifestation of carnivalesque “debasement” that retained archaic tropes of transgression as an anachronistic reserve within the popular culture of modernity, the power of blackface can be said to haunt the diasporic imagination like a ghost—Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) speaks eloquently to this predicament.
In the sense that the laughter of dominant social groups contributed to the ways in which black subjectivity was not just subordinated to blackface imagery but was actively terrorized by its mythological power—to the point where African Americans were forced to play along with it, applying burnt-cork makeup in vaudeville routines—it is highly significant that in opening up the ambivalence of the carnivalesque and the grotesque for artistic exploration, such post-1960s artists as Betye Saar, Robert Colescott, and David Hammons each turn to laughter as a key resource in strategies of counter-appropriation that were brought into artistic circulation as a result of the broader cultural critique of Eurocentric modernism that gave way to postmodernism.
The Return of the Grotesque in the Black Avant-Garde
At first glance, the incongruity that takes us by surprise in Betye Saar’s assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972) lies with the shotgun in the left arm of the ceramic figurine and the black power salute emblazoned on an antique postcard showing a crying baby being comforted by its domestic servant. But this is the least original aspect of Saar’s achievement, for the ironic reversal from servility to militancy at the level of the signified had already been performed by sculptor Joe Overstreet in The New Jemima (1964), in which the mammy stereotype breaks free from her packaging on an oversize box of pancake mix while firing a machine gun. Rather, what Saar created by proposing the stereotype as a readymade or found object, re-presented in a cabinet that functions as a vitrine—which has the distancing effect of showing an artifact of material culture as if it were an alien specimen collected from a distant and unknown civilization—was an act of counter-appropriation that liberated the mammy-as-signifier into an alternative discourse of black self-empowerment.
When Saar explains that “the boxes are coffins. They’re all coffins. They contain relics of the past,” we understand that Aunt Jemima is liberated by the very act that lays her to rest.20 The boxes and cabinets act as formal framing devices for an art of counter-fetishism: whereas they mostly contain familial materials, as though to protect the ancestral past from the threat of erasure, the embalming treatment of the stereotype along similar lines reveals a crucial insight—in a culture where the fear of being laughed at was synonymous with the fear of being looked at, reversing the subject/object relations of the gaze involves letting go of the trauma inflicted by the stereotype as an “internal foreign object.” Laughter here subverts the seriousness of racist stereotyping not with angry protest or rationalist refutation but with a homeopathic strategy that operates in-and-against the semantic capillaries of the symbolic order it critiques.
Such an alternative to the allopathic procedure associated with challenging the stereotype through idealization or so-called “positive images” is further highlighted by the painterly parodies of Robert Colescott, which enact counter-appropriation in the form that Henry Louis Gates calls “signifyin’.” In Gates’s theory, to signify upon another’s utterance is to use the verb in the manner of the African American vernacular, which is to express (often with caustic wit) an unremitting critique of the referential effects of racial discourse in Standard English by means of performative moves drawn from the rhetorical, lexical, and semantic resources of the dominant code itself.21 Colescott’s George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975) is a parody of Emanuel Leutze’s academic history painting of 1851, and its cartoon-like rendering solicits laughter on account of ironic substitutions that enact repetition with a sharply critical difference. One of America’s founding fathers is homonymously replaced by the nineteenth-century black agricultural chemist who taught at the Tuskegee Institute with Booker T. Washington. Colescott’s act of blackface substitution draws attention to what is excluded from the original painting; it lays bare the “low” that must be excluded from the “high” in order for “high art” to be taken seriously. We not only see a mooning mammy—showing one’s buttocks is a universal gesture of irreverence—but notice the banjo player at the rear: Colescott voices neither protest nor complaint, but insight into the miscegenated layers of cultural modernity buried beneath official narratives of national identity.
Extending into the canon of European art history, Colescott’s choice of targets for his blackface parodies—such as his Demoiselles d’Alabama (1985)—sets the lower bodily material principle to work in exposing the “race” and gender matrix of Western beauty standards. Partly inspired by Robert Crumb’s comic art, Colescott’s female figures are heavy-set, and their bodies often slump down toward formlessness. By the time we get to Colescott’s take on Van Gogh—Eat Dem Taters (1975)—we understand how his practice of “bad painting” was avant-garde in the sense of simply being ahead of its time (fig. 1.3). In 1978, curator Marcia Tucker defined “bad painting” as “figurative work that defies either deliberately or by virtue of disinterest, the classical canons of good taste, craftsmanship, acceptable source material, rendering or illusionist representation,”22 but because avant-garde strategies of appropriation were primarily theorized in relation to photo-based conceptualism, Colescott’s place in postmodernism is often misread as satire. This is misleading because, as Bakhtin shows, satire entails a subject-position of moral superiority over the target of one’s parody or irony, whereas carnival laughter is inclusively directed toward all the participants themselves: instead of rage or anger, Colescott’s laughter elicits a sense of levity that encourages critical detachment from his subject matter, allowing the viewer’s momentary liberation from the high seriousness surrounding the subject of “race” and history so as to create an opening for rereading the visual text of the past.
FIGURE 1.3. Robert Colescott, Eat Dem Taters, 1975. Courtesy of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.
Working with found objects such as half-eaten spare ribs, cuttings of nappy hair, and empty bottles of cheap wine, David Hammons acts upon waste materials that are expelled and separated from the social body in order for it to maintain equilibrium. By virtue of his specific choices, however, he links abject materials to perceptions of “race,” and yet what we find in works such as Elephant Dung Sculpture (1978)—a central point of reference for Chris Ofili—is a playful sense of humor that produces a poetics of visual punning in which degraded and devalued objects are transvaluated by acts of counter-appropriation. In the case of How Ya Like Me Now? (1988), initially presented to the public in the form of a billboard, the risks entailed by the ironic reversal of blackface reveal that Hammons’s mode of address is not confined to the demographic majority but is universal precisely because it is aimed at a dialogue with the inner fears and fantasies of his black audiences as well. The image of Jesse Jackson undergoes a topsy-turvy transformation of carnivalesque debasement, and as curator Ralph Rugoff explains: “[Hammons] continually pokes fun at stereotypes held by both white and black audiences. He will lampoon the black male’s obsession with street cool, and then turn around and challenge the racist double standards of white America. His billboard, How Ya Like Me Now?, which featured the title spray-painted across a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesse Jackson, confronted both audiences. When this work was first installed along a Washington DC commuter route, it mockingly taunted passing suburban drivers. At the same time, it so angered a group of young African-American men—who understood it as a disrespectful portrayal of Jesse Jackson—that they tore down the billboard with hammers.”23 Avant-garde acts that “carnivalize” social constructions of masculinity and femininity have a long-standing pedigree in twentieth-century art, as Duchamp’s crossed-dressed persona Rrose Sélavy attests: but what happens when gender masquerade intersects with critiques of the “stereotypical grotesque” on the grounds of “race” and ethnicity? Adrian Piper offers an answer. In works such as Catalysis IV (1970), where she presented herself in everyday situations as an “art object,” Piper risked being laughed at in her conceptualist inquiries into the social dynamics of the gaze. She undertook temporary plastic modifications to her body by donning sunglasses, an Afro wig, and a handlebar mustache and created a public persona as the Mythic Being. Works such as I Am the Locus (1975) show the Mythic Being crossing Harvard Square in Cambridge. Piper’s words in this image-text piece start in the impersonal tone of philosophical reasoning—“I am the locus of consciousness, surrounded and constrained, by animate physical objects, with moist, fleshy, pulsating surfaces”—only to switch in the final panel to the earthy idiom of the urban vernacular as the Mythic Being exclaims, “Get out of my way, asshole!” Piper’s practice as artist and philosopher—she had begun work on her PhD on Kant at Harvard University in 1974—is centrally addressed to the serious subject of human xenophobia—the fear of difference—and how to redress it in art and politics, yet critics seem to lose sight of this side of her wit, humor, and laughter for the very same reason, as if humor was incompatible with independent thinking. In Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady (1995), the hilarity of the title stems from the self-deprecating tone it intends, while the wording within the frame—“whut choo lookin at, mofo”—parodies the macho lingo of the streets, and does so with ironic affection as Piper returns to one of her central themes: an interrogation of the social relations of looking and being looked at (fig. 1.4).
FIGURE 1.4. Adrian Piper, Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady, 1995. Self-portrait, oil crayon on black-and-white photograph, 20.3 × 30.4 cm. Collection of the Studio Museum, New York. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation, Berlin.
Whereas novelists excavate the “unrepresentable” truth of slavery through an aesthetic strategy Paul Gilroy refers to as “the slave sublime,”24 the contemporary artist Kara Walker explores the queasy ambivalence of the stereotypical grotesque as a site of abjection. In her short film 8 Possible Beginnings, or the Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture (1997), what provokes laughter is the sheer incongruity that arises between the heavy dread of her chosen subject matter and the handmade modesty of its means of production. By showing the silhouettes being manipulated by hand to produce a shadow play, Walker encourages critical laughter to break with the stock-in-trade imagery that pervades representations of slavery, and thus her work opens up room for alternative approaches that recognize how the sheer scale of historical trauma renders the question of “truth” into an uncanny kind of fiction.
By way of an ending, consider the joker from an ordinary pack of playing cards, which, like tarot cards, have an archaic origin that was never finally obliterated by the onward march of modernity. The joker is special because it embodies indeterminacy, which is what Bakhtin values most in the ambivalence of the carnivalesque and the grotesque. Coming up to date, I wonder if I am alone in observing that much black popular culture today seems to have lost its sense of humor: the “bling” aesthetic is ironic and satirical, but rarely seems to welcome the wry ambiguities of carnival laughter. Public Enemy’s pairing between Chuck D, who took his role rather seriously, and Flavor Flav, who was the jester, the licensed fool, suggests the antagonistic interdependence of laughter and seriousness has always already featured as a significant aspect of cultural and artistic production in the modern black diaspora. Joining company with Bakhtin’s awareness of the double-sided character of humor, the joker in the pack suggests that laughter matters most when we know we are alive enough and human enough to also laugh at ourselves.
Notes
1. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1899; London: Macmillan, 1935), 4.
2. Ibid., 3.
3. Charles Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter,” in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 532, cited in Kevin Newmark, “Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of Laughter,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 241–242.
4. Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter,” 245.
5. Kate Bush, “Why Should I Love You?,” The Red Shoes, EMI, 1993.
6. Timothy Hyman, “A Carnival Sense of the World,” in Carnivalesque, exh. cat., ed. Timothy Hyman and Roger Malbert (London: South Bank Centre, 2000), 9.
7. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1968; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 73.
8. Hyman, “Carnival Sense of the World,” 14.
9. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 109.
10. Ibid., 11–12.
11. Ibid., 66.
12. Ibid., 67.
13. Ibid., 9.
14. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 19.
15. Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 4, pt. 2, From the American Revolution to World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Menil Foundation, 1989), 62.
16. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
17. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 4–5.
18. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
19. Michael Hatt, “‘Making a Man of Him’: Masculinity and the Black Body in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture” [1992], in Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History, ed. Kymberly Pinder (New York: Routledge, 2002), 202.
20. Betye Saar cited in Peter Clothier, “The Other Side of the Past,” in Betye Saar, Selected Assemblages/Oasis, ed. Peter Clothier (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 13.
21. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
22. Marcia Tucker cited in Irving Sandler, Art of the Post Modern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 198.
23. Ralph Rugoff, “David Hammons: Public Nuisance, Rubble Rouser, Hometown Artist,” in David Hammons: In the Hood, exh. cat. (Springfield: Illinois State Museum, 1994), 11.
24. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 187–223.