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The Sublime and the Grotesque

The sublime is tricky to tie down to a visible shape. In Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog(1818), perhaps the most famous treatment of the subject, we have a man staring into the sublime rather than the sublime itself. While the young romantic gazes into the fog, we are forced to gaze at him, to behold the beholder. How does one go about representing that which lies past the language of excellence? The members of the Oxford Art Movement have been set a difficult task.

 

It’s not surprising, then, that there was more grotesque than sublime on offer at the show in Christ Church’s Blue Boar Exhibition Room. An installation of shimmering fabric and raw meat dangling from the ceiling didn’t show the combination of the two as much as the grotesque’s ability to subvert, transforming the cloth into something similarly fleshly. A lot of the display seemed to draw inspiration from the oppressive expressionism of Kirchner’s street scenes, in which the human form becomes a grotesque through the slightest facial expression or bodily distortion. Shadowy bundles of figures, their faces stark white, glare out into the foreground; bodies crawl out of the dusky darkness. Disfigured visages look into the viewer like an internal mirror of emotional torments that lie beneath the skin.

One of the show’s highlights, a Francis Bacon-esque triptych by Kate Lambert of segmented, dissected human bodies, reduces or rather magnifies mankind into a pound of flesh. Lambert comes closest here to expressing Schopenhauer’s conception of the sublime as a pleasure through fear, joying in an awareness of the nothingness of the human self: her pink and grey forms sit on a calm blue background, clearly recognisable and yet strangely horrifying. Her treatment of both the themes was welcome in a display that sometimes isolated one or the other, partitioning aesthetics into ‘ugly’ or ‘pretty’ and leaving it at that. Many of the more successful works escaped this dichotomy through the use of a fantastic realist style, exploring the sublime through dream-like combinations of the bizarre yet beautiful.

One such work was a highlight of the show: a piece of performance art by students from the Ruskin, led by Dan Udy. Four figures in skin-tight nude fabric emerged in the spotlit area outside the exhibition space and kneeled together on a white platform, remaining absolutely still as they were wrapped in transparent film. Their bodies were at once united and trapped by the horrifyinglysuffocatory material. The beautiful symmetry of their poses seemed to invite the spectator to appreciate them as a visual object – yet this aesthetic appeal was undercut by a gradually stronger sense of unease as the breath thickened in their smooth prison.

At last, another performer began to play shrill notes on a violin which ripped through the tension just as the figures suddenly became alive and struggled to break out of their film. At once they were transformed from objects of perfect stillness to irregular, uncoordinated bodies of an overwhelming fleshliness. Their limbs gradually broke through the plastic seal: the embryonic structure that had contained them began to collapse as they writhed to be free and emerged as limp bodies on the cold stone ground. Their previous perfection had been tarnished as they lay dishevelled, now smeared with pig’s blood, and with fragments of the film still sticking to them like a second skin.

Overall, the exhibition was an impressive display, collecting an array of Oxford’s amateur artists with an admirable variety of style. And while the sublime often proved elusive, there was enough of the beautiful and the grotesque to satisfy, gratify and sometimes even delight.

 

[The Oxford Art Movement is held on Saturdays in Christ Church Art Room as an opportunity for students of all abilities to make art in a convivial setting. Entry is £2 and includes all materials as well as tea and aesthetically appealing snacks. Occasional special sessions are also held, which have included life drawing and portrait painting. Contact the Society’s Presidents, [email protected] or [email protected], to be added to the mailing list.]

 

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