Alan Gilbert

Go Figure: The Cultural Politics of the Grotesque

If the revolution ain’t going to be televised, then fuck . . . I’ll probably miss it.
—Aesop Rock

In many ways, 2004 might be considered the year of the documentary. With Michael
Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 leading the charge, the year saw the release of numerous documentary
films: from Control Room, which details al-Jazeera’s coverage of the current Iraq war, to the Yes
Men’s self-titled film depicting their subversive impersonations of WTO officials. Some, such as
Robert Greenwald’s suite of films Unprecedented, Uncovered, and Unconstitutional (concerning,
respectively, the 2000 U.S. presidential election, the war on Iraq, and the curtailing of civil
liberties in the United States), were primarily released straight to DVD. It also seemed that one
couldn’t walk into a bookstore each week without seeing a new political non-fiction title on the
recent release shelves. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s (Suskind 2004) exposé of
his tenure working for the second Bush administration received plenty of media attention, but it
was just the tiniest tip of an iceberg that spanned books including Richard Clarke’s Against All
Enemies and David Ray Griffin’s attempt to prove that 9/11 was an inside job in The New Pearl
Harbor. As these examples show, it’s not a coincidence that this plethora of documentaries and
non-fictional accounts appeared during an election year, or that many of them were meant to
illuminate the machinations and mendacities of the Bush administration.
It’s also not to ignore right-wing so-called non-fictional work such as Ann Coulter’s How
to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must). (Given her increasing shrillness, Coulter’s only apparent
option for further pushing a reactionary rhetorical and ideological envelope is to write a book
called Hitler Was a Liberal.) Yet despite this veritable avalanche of films and books, perhaps the
most famous documentary images of all were the digital photographs of the torture, debasement,
and humiliation by U.S. military and intelligence personnel of Iraqi and other Arab prisoners held
at Abu Ghraib prison. It’s also quite possible, although I’m hesitant to quantify these types of
cultural phenomena, that the “documentary” materials with the most impact on the 2004
presidential election weren’t any of the ones I’ve listed—including Fahrenheit 9/11, the biggest
money-making documentary film ever—but instead were the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth
television ads, with their misrepresentations of John Kerry’s military service in Vietnam. Given
such famous and infamous bodies of evidence, one might be tempted to also describe 2004 as the
year of the grotesque. But the grotesque already has its own particular history.
Another definition is needed, one more deeply embedded within current historical
circumstances. What does it mean that one of the people tortured at Abu Ghraib was a reporter for
al-Jazeera? That Michael Moore considered his film larger than the Oscar’s documentary film
category, and tried to get it nominated for a Best Picture award? Or going back a few years, that a
predominant response of those who witnessed the attack on and collapse of the World Trade
Center’s Twin Towers was that it reminded them of a movie? Thus, it might be more accurate to
say—given Abu Ghraib, given Swift Boat Veterans, given media representations of 9/11 and the
fact that it was conceived by al-Qaeda first and foremost as a spectacular media event—that the
present era is one of disfigurement. Yet every historical period disfigures, at the same time that
each disfigures differently. What distinguishes the current period is the mass media component
underlying this disfiguration, and the related way in which the social is disfigured within
information societies. Nevertheless, despite periods of classical representation in art, the human
subject has always suffered disfiguration, both literally and, well, figuratively. Within the
histories of art and literature—and not simply Western art and literature—classical representation
is the exception, not the rule.
The grotesque, on the other hand, is a subterranean tide stretching from what is
provincially called the beginnings of Western civilization through to now. The half-human half-
animal figures populating an ancient Greek and Roman art and literature full of mythological

1
 Alan Gilbert

shifts from human to animal or human to plant (and between human, beast, and deity) are part of
an alternative cultural tradition of the grotesque, especially if the prevailing aesthetic tendencies
in Greece and Rome are thought of in terms of Aristotle’s definition of the beautiful as the
proportional (1967: 30), Vitruvius’ notion of architecture as symmetrical (1960: 13-16), and
Nietzsche’s theory of ancient Greek tragedy as the struggle between the rational Apollonian and
the ecstatic Dionysian (in this sense, Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy is partially a theory of the
grotesque [1956]). At the heart of these early conceptualizations of the grotesque—pro or con—
was a wrestling with otherness, both external and internal, that took specific form in the idea of
the barbarian as representing the irrational. Yet however much Greece and Rome posited the
other as barbarian, the grotesque frequently undermined dismissals of otherness (again, whether
external or internal); instead, it was an attempt to understand and depict the interrelations—
however disconcerting or decentering—between self and other.
With Christianity’s stranglehold on medieval Europe, this other was no longer a
barbarian but a devil (think of pogroms and witches, and their accompanying iconography, as the
explicit demonization of Jews and women). But here, too, the grotesque complicates relations
between self and other, and can work to acknowledge the social presence and cultural influence
of a demonized other. In curator Robert Storr’s catalogue essay for his SITE Santa Fe Biennial
Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque exhibition, he writes of the late medieval and
Renaissance periods:

Overlapping categories that would often be used as synonyms for the grotesque include
“arabesque” and “moresque,” in recognition of the increasing influence on Europe of
Islamic cultures where decoration of extraordinary graphic and mathematical complexity
played a dominant rather than subordinate role in the visual arts. But whereas arabesques
and moresques were generally abstract, in keeping with the Muslim prohibition against
representational imagery, grotesques were exuberantly, though not exclusively, pictorial.
(2004: 16)

In turn, these practices deemed grotesque indirectly shelter an awareness that until the fifteenth
century medieval Europe in many ways lagged behind Asia and the Middle East’s flourishing
civilizations. Within Europe, the grotesque was a repository for strategies of resistance and
symbolic overturnings of rigid feudal and urban dynastic orders: from Dante’s Inferno to the
novels of Rabelais, the latter brilliantly theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin as associated with the
inverting of hierarchical orders during festivals and carnivals (1984).
It’s this latter, more overtly political dimension to the grotesque that moves it closer to
the present, where it becomes interwoven into relationships between power and dispossession.
Here again, the grotesque can be framed both positively and negatively, both critically and as a
means of confirming stereotypes. In other words, what makes the grotesque provocative and
engaging is that it puts into contest a wide range of competing discourses and ideologies (more so
than stock, and by now mostly depleted, avant-garde concepts such as estrangement, alienation
effect, non-referentiality, etc.). During the modern era, the grotesque is shaped by the relations of
marginalized groups and individuals to dominant economic and social structures; internally, it’s
the relationship of the unconscious to the individual human psyche. But even within modernity
and conflictual encounters with modernity, the inversion of symbolic orders remains central, as
Coco Fusco asserts in describing opposition to colonial rule: “Yet, resistance within a colonial
context is rarely direct, overt, or literal; rather, it articulates itself through semantic reversals, and
through the process of infusing icons, objects, and symbols with different meanings” (1995: 35).
Without intending to collapse significant historical and cultural differences, it should be pointed
out that these strategies are similar to the countercultural methods of the 1960s and since in the
United States, Europe, and other parts of the globe.

2
 Alan Gilbert

Should we make this personal? Here’s the visual artist Mike Kelley quoting Albert
Boime on Jacques-Louis David: “On the other hand, the political caricature permits the displaced
manifestation of the repressed aggressive desire to oust the father. The political enemy, or the
subject of distortion, becomes the projection of the hated parent and through caricature can be
struck down” (2003: 26). Of course, this isn’t necessarily a real father, my father, but the father—
according to Lacanian psychoanalysis—as the one (both literally and metaphorically) who ushers
the child into language (both literally and metaphorically) as the repository of societal rule and
authority (both literally and metaphorically). Those who’ve spent time around children know this
process doesn’t function quite so neatly, and that Lacan’s theory is in danger of relegating the
mother to a pre-symbolic, prelapsarian position, which is hardly a progressive viewpoint. The
mother is just as likely, if not more so, to help usher the child into language. But as an analysis of
patriarchal culture, Lacan’s schema makes some sense allegorically. As Kelley presents it, the
element of hatred and anger in the grotesque as sublimated into the aesthetic realm creates
laughter (25). It’s important to keep the humorous dimension to the grotesque in view, while
remembering that disillusionment is crucial to its strategies, especially in more recent forms.
Two examples might help clarify some of this discussion. The first is a song by the indie
hip hop artist Buck 65. It’s called “The Centaur,” and appears in a couple different versions (2004
& 2002). From its references to one of the most famous human-animal hybrids in ancient
mythology, to its tongue-in-cheek back and forth mocking and affirmation of the law of the father
as represented by the phallus, to its complex response to the monetary and sexual hyperbole in
mainstream hip hop, “The Centaur” tells of the pursuit of true love and the obstacles stereotypes
erect for this quest. Or maybe not, since the grotesque has always called the authentic into
question. Nonchalantly boasting about the size of his member—“Sure it’s larger than yours; I’m a
centaur, for Christ sakes” (2002)—the centaur in Buck 65’s song yearns to shift the focus away
from sex and toward romance and sophistication: “I like to eat rice cakes and listen to classical
music” (2002). In spite of alternative hip hop’s aversion to some of the materialistic and
misogynistic aspects of mainstream rap, this isn’t so far from the sentiment expressed in
Ludacris’ guest vocals on Usher’s song “Yeah!”—namely that “we want a lady in the street and a
freak in the bed” (2004).
Because it relies on disproportion, it’s difficult for the grotesque to resolve itself. This
differentiates it from comedy, if the conventional definition of comedy as the genre in which
conflicts find resolution holds true. Buck 65’s “The Centaur” is obviously all about
disproportionately sized things, while it seeks to draw attention away from the obvious: “You
don’t care about my next life, just my ex-wife, and the intimate details of our sex life” (2002).
But there’s another layer to “The Centaur’s” self-portrait in its ambivalent foregrounding of
mainstream hip hop’s masculinist codes, codes it imaginatively both rejects and outdoes. This, in
turn, is not unrelated to the broader social issues commercialized hip hop inevitably invokes,
which might be proposed as: How does one reconcile the material excesses—the bling bling—in
hip hop with the economic impoverishment of vast segments of not only the African American
population in North American society? It’s not irrelevant that white, Nova Scotian Buck 65’s
work repeatedly references poverty, and that hip hop of all kinds is about semiotically loosening
capitalism’s increasingly concentrated grip on power and status, even if this only means
extending it to a lucky few artists and producers.
Another example of the grotesque that doesn’t resolve itself, even if it ends on a note of
resolve, is a Richard Pryor skit entitled “Bicentennial Nigger” (1976). In this performance, which
Pryor introduces by saying that African American humor has its roots in inversion (of free people
into slaves), Pryor imitates a sobbing African American “with Stars and Stripes on his forehead”
who expresses appreciation for racist violence and indignities perpetuated during and since the
slave era. The incongruity of an emotionally extreme gratitude for centuries of murder and
debasement overwhelms a rationalized memory of forgetting. When Pryor pauses at the
conclusion of the piece to calmly say, “But I ain’t gonna never forget it,” is the audience to

3
 Alan Gilbert

assume it was all an act? A performance within a performance? Has disillusionment been
replaced by anger? Or is a split consciousness being portrayed, somewhat along the lines of Greg
Tate’s comment in a Village Voice review of 50 Cent’s The Massacre: “If the creators of The
Matrix had read Ralph Ellison they wouldn’t have romanticized Black people as too worldly to
fall for a virtual reality” (2005). Or perhaps Pryor’s blubbering thanks is a more effective way of
illuminating systematic racism than passionate speeches or objective statistics? (The New York
City borough in which I live—Brooklyn—recorded approximately 2,000 instances of police
brutality in 2004, the vast majority of them directed against minority populations.) If it’s not more
effective, Pryor’s approach may be more startling, precisely because of its potent mixture of
abject humor and focused rage.
Humor and anger were primary components in the range of responses to the Abu Ghraib
torture images. Right-wing commentators such as Rush Limbaugh emphasized the prankster
quality to them, going so far as to say that the actions depicted in the photos weren’t all that
different from the shenanigans that occur in an average frat house. Another response was disgust,
though there’s something passively visceral about this reaction. In a challenging declaration at the
end of an essay published in Artforum’s September 2004 special section on “the art of politics,”
Arthur Danto writes:

My sense is that, hideous as the conduct they depict is, the Abu Ghraib photographs are
powerful examples of how images can change what we are, and from that perspective
they must from now on act as standards against which we can judge the political efficacy
of art. That measure, when applied to American art today, seems to me to imply that
American artists are on balance satisfied with the existing political structure. (209)

The question as to what degree an image can substantially alter anything is left unanswered here,
however notably raised by a thinker such as Susan Sontag (2003 & 1977). In the introduction to
his comprehensive study Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, Mark
Danner argues it’s precisely because the images of Abu Ghraib were widely disseminated in the
mainstream media that they ultimately hindered “a full public understanding of how the scandal
arose” (2004: xiii). This raises another question concerning the extent to which the Abu Ghraib
photographs changed anything. Or the images of 9/11 for that matter, with their corresponding
rhetoric of the world being an irrevocably different place now. To this list one might add that all
the images of George Bush looking foolish weren’t enough to convince the U.S. electorate in
November 2004 that he’s much worse than simply foolish.
Danto’s call is worth heeding for its emphasis on art as critique and its reminder that facts
and force always walk hand in hand. Yet when the example he proposes as a model for change is
shown to have not been all that effective itself, the issue of art’s “political efficacy” is thrown into
confusion. And that’s not such a bad thing. Too often, the political in art and literature operate
according to the same politics of belief that conservatives—and not just religious conservatives—
are ridiculed for adopting. “If,” as Tom Junod wrote in a piece for Esquire magazine entitled “52
True Things about the Future of American Culture,” “conservatives seek redress for their cultural
estrangement in political partisanship and liberals seek redress for their electoral estrangement in
cultural sophistication, who are the dupes?” (2005: 95) A politics of belief with its blind lock on
right-thinking becomes exaggerated the more an art form or movement is removed from and
irrelevant to the larger culture (an unfortunate legacy, for instance, of various 20th-century avant-
gardes). Within a politics of belief, an artist or writer only needs to vaguely gesture at a political
phenomenon, current event, or socio-economic trend for a whole set of presumed (and
presumedly progressive) responses to come into effect. But to look at something isn’t to know it,
and if there’s one thing art should never do is affirm presumptions. When it comes to
recommending a political role for art, that’s the least it can aspire to.

4
 Alan Gilbert

Language produces ideology; images tend to buttress or oppose it. This isn’t to deny the
role of images in the production of ideology, but to argue that every image awaits its caption.
Perhaps this is why the image-oriented present has been called “post-ideological,” even if this
phrase was originally intended to signify the end of the struggle between capitalism and
communism and the supposed triumph of an economic liberalism misleadingly made
synonymous with democracy. When words begin to function like images, language is delimited
to romance as status quo. In any case, language functions according to a more deeply ingrained
set of expectations than images do. Does this imply that words have the potential to be more
shocking than images? It’s precisely this set of expectations that creates room for language to
maneuver, to carve out spaces for resistance, and to detail historical meaning. Chantal Mouffe
states that “every form of artistic practice either contributes to the reproduction of the given
common sense—and in that sense is political—or contributes to the deconstruction or critique of
it. Every form of art has a political dimension” (2001: 100). Obviously it can do both, even the
most politically progressive art. Sometimes, acknowledging complicity can be as incisive a
political gesture as rebelling against it. And sometimes the battle is better waged against common
sense than against dogma.
This is connected to an ethics that tries not to blame individuals but to transform
institutions, environments, and material conditions on the ground. Which isn’t to excuse anything.
And I’m not against art as healing, provided, as David Levi Strauss has written, it takes a
homeopathic approach, i.e., one in which the disease is introduced as part of the cure (1999).
Homeopathy approximates how the grotesque functions. Poet Joe Elliot’s 101 Designs for the
World Trade Center (2004) range from the practical to the impossible, from the amusing to the
mournful. Published online as an e-chapbook, Elliot’s proposals for rebuilding (or not),
reconceiving, and reimagining the World Trade Center site look perfectly reasonable from one
angle and ridiculous from another. But as a mode of critique and an attempt at healing, they’re
reasonable and ridiculous only from the point of view of what will actually be done with the site:
a combination of drum-rolling patriotic architecture (the original “Freedom Tower” absurdly
jutting 1,776 feet high), superfluous downtown office space, more chain stores, and a memorial
chosen without serious input from either the victims’ families or the general public. Elliot’s
project illustrates one way of intervening in discourses that begin by taking everything for
granted.
New York City did issue an open call for World Trade Center site designs, and it held a
series of town hall meetings for the public to discuss the finalists. Although one can chuckle or
even gasp when envisioning Elliot’s suggestions as part of this public debate, their desire to be
included within it gives them an additional resonance, one that cuts against the grain of a personal
hermeticism pervading much of today’s art and poetry worlds (for Danto, it’s a hermeticism
specifically represented by the 2004 Whitney Biennial as a barometer of contemporary art in the
United States). Here’s a selection from Elliot’s proposals:

The world’s largest mosque.

Leave it. Don’t touch it. Don’t move a single

piece.

An exhibition hall for designs for the World Trade Center

such as these that will revolve and as our understanding
evolves and remains elastic
and compassionate so that
no single response becomes
instituted, ossified and turned
into a hammer.

5
 Alan Gilbert

Exact replicas of the first two, only

hollow.

A building whose sides are painted with

sky and clouds and much smaller
buildings so that it blends in falsely with
the city scape and cannot be located.

A Scribatorium where people can come and

write their own ideas for the World Trade
Center (none of which will ever be
implemented, of course) and extend this poem.
Here are the lines. You fill it out.

Terrorist Catcher. One building is a towering blow up

doll of Jesus Christ with widespread arms. This time,
when the airplane comes, it will crash into his en-
enthroned and bleeding heart, and, instead of exploding,
will be wrapped up by his endless puffy limbs and
cushioned by the cotton candy that permeates the
monument’s superstructure. The other tower, the
Virgin Mary, will have a decidedly Disneyfied figure for extra
shock absorption.

The Wailing Wall. A

reconstruction of the jagged

concrete and steel wall that was left standing. Our temple, the center of our way of
life, the American Dream, has been destroyed. We will kneel before it and put folded
dollar bills in its cracks. (2004: n.p.)

Despite the satirical edge, the consistent tone of Elliot’s 101 Designs is regret combined with an
economic subtext. It’s a regret not only for the lives lost in the Twin Towers but also for the
imperial conflicts that helped provoke the attacks. Yet nowhere in Elliot’s piece is there a
portrayal of 9/11 as blowback; his sense of disgrace is too deep and his imagination too resilient
for that kind of realpolitik. In the end, there was little possibility that the actual designs chosen for
the World Trade Center site would deviate much from the developers’ and politicians’
preconceived ideas of what should be built there; this is another form of hermeticism, albeit a
much more pernicious one.
In Elliot’s 101 Designs, truth and reality are found in the excesses of truth and reality.
This excess can manifest itself as cracks in the foundation wall or billowing cotton candy. And
it’s an excess to what were once known as art and life. If early generations of the avant-garde saw
art as an alternative to life, and if artists in the sixties were interested in exploring the gap
between art and life, and if a generation of artists following them sought to collapse the
distinctions between art and life, then perhaps now the challenge is to work toward what is other
than art and life (for what it’s worth, this has been the arc of my own intellectual trajectory during
the past fifteen or so years, which I only recently realized). Invariably art or life or both get taken
for granted when they’re put into dialectical relation. In other words, you can’t pin and mount me
like an insect, though you can break me into a thousand pieces. Which itself may be another way
of expressing the need to propose something other than ourselves. The grotesque may be a

6
 Alan Gilbert

preliminary figure for this alternative proposal. Because if we don’t make a proposal, it’ll be
made for us, where it hasn’t been already.
Constructed out of the tension between disproportion and proportion, the grotesque
highlights the next to, as well as the knowledge that in a world in which democracy is frequently
invoked though rarely enacted, all relations are in some way disproportionate. The question of
next to thus becomes one of the primary political, social, ethical—and aesthetic, if it’s still
possible to speak of aesthetics (as opposed to something like cultural politics)—concerns of the
present. After the occasion of postmodernity (however non-universal a phenomenon it’s turned
out to be), there’s no regaining of time and space—there’s only relation. As a result, the emphasis
shifts to critical decision making, not as the authoritarian gesture some postmodernists presume it
to be, but as the ethical-political gesture of what gets put next to what. Here, the postmodern play
of difference is superseded by the empowerment of difference. For the languages of poetry, this is
to “explain not merely what, at a minimum, is meant by the words we employ but to set forth all
or most of what can be meant by them. This strategy of positive exhaustion promises to restore
their full significance while it challenges independent and inquisitive minds to draw their own
connections and conclusions from a clearly articulated diversity” (Storr 2004: 11; emphasis in
original). “A clearly articulated diversity” suggests that this isn’t the reader filling in the blanks of
elliptical and willfully opaque texts, but making critical decisions within overdetermined ones.
An example of next to can be found in the work of Mutamassik. On her mix CDs she
blends and fractures U.S. and Middle Eastern hip hop, traditional and contemporary Arab music
(especially Egyptian), and noisy post-jungle breakbeats. In a passage featured on her recordings
Shotgun Wedding (2004) and Bidoun (2002), she combines each of these elements to striking
effect. The Algerian rap group MBS spills onto a background track by hip hop producer
Timbaland, which segues into the U.S. underground hip hop group Anti-Pop Consortium
bumping up against a selection of “classical” music from Egyptian composer Mohamed Abdel
Wahab. In this particular segment from Mutamassik’s larger mixes, cultural politics take the form
of a sophisticated amalgamation of hybridity and difference. Specifically, all four of the musical
components she incorporates utilize elements from other cultures both to expand and to defend
their own: MBS draws on U.S. hip hop, and raps in Arabic and English, in order to critique post-
colonial conditions in Algeria and neo-colonial endeavors abroad; Timbaland borrows from
traditional Middle Eastern and Indian music in order to revitalize mainstream hip hop beats; Anti-
Pop Consortium takes inspiration from experimental electronic music in an effort to find new
modes of hip hop expression; and Mohamed Abdel Wahab integrated Western styles into
Egyptian music so as to engage the latter with modernist musical developments, both “high” and
“low.” In Mutamassik’s mix, cultural influences move back and forth between tradition and
innovation, and they range freely between Western, Middle Eastern, and Asian sources.
Though Mutamassik’s work clearly emphasizes cultural hybridity and a notion of
resistance shared across boundaries, it’s also important to stress its confirmation of differences
and what can’t be translated. The latter is a crucial component of the idea of next to, and also
differentiates it from primarily formal-aesthetic gestures of collage and sampling that are heavily
reliant upon appropriation, however sensitively and knowledgeably performed. A recent New
York Times overview of current world music releases began: “Would that the state of world music
were the state of the world. In the music, boundaries are wide open, curiosity leads to
cooperation, memories are long but the lessons of history are positive ones. In the world, well . .
.” (Pareles 2005: E1). No doubt “cooperation” is a good thing, but are cultural and social
relations—i.e., power relations—always this equitable? In 50 Cent’s “Just a Lil Bit” (2005),
Timbaland’s groundbreaking musical approaches become a kind of Pop Orientalism or
Orientalism lite, as 50 Cent raps over what could be a sample used to score a Disney animated
film version of Arabian Nights. In her perceptive response to art critic and curator Nicolas
Bourriaud’s theory of “relational aesthetics,” whereby viewers and audiences are active and
physical participants in a work of art’s production and meaning, Claire Bishop writes:

7
 Alan Gilbert

The quality of the relationships in “relational aesthetics” are never examined or called
into question. . . . All relations that permit “dialogue” are automatically assumed to be
democratic and therefore good. But what does “democracy” really mean in this context?
If relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what
types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why? (2004: 65; emphasis in
original)

The rhetoric—enthusiastic or skeptical—surrounding globalization’s collapse of borders threatens

to overshadow the necessary role a critical awareness of differences has in the healthy functioning
of social relations. Conversely, putting everything or everybody in unthinking relation may prove
to be a detriment to democracy, not a spur to it.
Does the grotesque have a bit part in all of this? It’s possible that the interaction of
disproportion and proportion foregrounds a next to that facilitates critical decision making in a
way that encourages independent thinking. This occurs in art and writing when, to quote Bishop
again, “the viewer is no longer coerced into fulfilling the artist’s interactive requirements, but is
presupposed as a subject of independent thought, which is the essential prerequisite for political
action” (77). At the same time, there are a variety of potential troubles lodged in these
propositions, including threats of appropriation and the eradication of differences that can occur
when dissimilar elements are forced into relation, as well as the illusion of ideological freedom
and the ignoring of complicity that can be found in models of independent thinking. No subject
and no thinking are ever completely independent. Similarly, the grotesque represents a contorting
of the social, while seeking to preserve it. The grotesque isn’t a condition, but an activity. The
grotesque is reflective without being mimetic. It’s obviously not a realism, though it’s a type of
realism.
The grotesque means: stitching one’s arm into a curtain one thought to pull back.
The grotesque means: being willing to sit beneath a shitting king.
Or, beware of the rainmakers.
By exaggerating the fact that the normal and the abnormal are mostly artificial
constructions, the grotesque seeks to undermine the process by which ruling ideologies are made
to appear as common sense. Fallacious consensus-making and the creation of fictitious
communities are also called into question by the inevitable contradictions inherent within the next
to and its persistent awareness of the exclusions that go into the formation of any community. A
consciousness of these exclusions may aid in a partial undoing of them—certainly more so than
disregarding them, wishing them away, or imagining they don’t always exist. Rethinking
difference in this way entails rethinking democracy and populism, all of which are themselves
inseparable from the issue of “cultural translation”: “Will that which remains untranslatable
summon a critique of the very language of art and culture?” asks Nikos Papastergiadis (2004:
343). But the grotesque and next to aren’t entirely negative critique. In Mutamassik’s selection
from their work, Anti-Pop Consortium reminded listeners four years before 9/11 and six years
before the second U.S. war on Iraq to: “Remember Iraq, remember Iran, remember dismembered
bodies and MCs and SPs melting at ground zero.” Here, the inversion of cultural memory isn’t
prophecy, but a difficult attachment. The present is simultaneity. Relation is cohabitation.

8
 Alan Gilbert

Bibliography

50 Cent (2005) “Just a Lil Bit.” On The Massacre. Shady/Aftermath/Interscope.

Aesop Rock (2001) “Coma.” On Labor Days. Def Jux.
Aristotle (1967) Poetics. Trans. Gerald F. Else. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984) Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Indiana University
Press, Bloomington.
Bishop, Claire (2004) “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” In October, No. 110 (Fall 2004):
51-79.
Buck 65 (2004) “Centaur.” On This Right Here Is Buck 65. Warner Music Canada.
------ (2002) “The Centaur.” On Vertex. Warner Music Canada.
Clarke, Richard (2004) Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror. Free Press, New
York.
Coulter, Ann (2004) How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann
Coulter. Crown Publishers, New York.
Danner, Mark (2004) Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror. New
York Review Books, New York.
Danto, Arthur (2004) “American Self-Consciousness in Politics and Art.” In Artforum. Vol. 43,
No. 1 (September 2004): 206-209.
Elliot, Joe (2004) 101 Designs for the World Trade Center. Fauxpress/e.
Fusco, Coco (1995) English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. New
Press, New York.
Griffin, David Ray (2004) The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush
Administration and 9/11. Olive Branch Press, Northampton, MA.
Greenwald, Robert (2004) Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties. Directed by Nonny
de la Peña. Produced by Robert Greenwald. The Disinformation Company.
Greenwald, Robert (2004) Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War. Directed by Robert
Greenwald. Produced by Robert Greenwald. The Disinformation Company.
Greenwald, Robert (2004) Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election (2004 Campaign
Edition). Directed by Joan Sekler and Richard Ray Pérez. Produced by Robert
Greenwald. L.A. Independent Media Center.
Junod, Tom (2005) “52 True Things about the Future of American Culture.” In Esquire, Vol. 143,
No. 2 (February 2005): 94-95.
Kelley, Mike (2003) “Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature.” In Foul Perfection: Essays and
Criticism, ed. John C. Welchman. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London. 20-38.
Moore, Michael (2004) Fahrenheit 9/11. Directed by Michael Moore. Produced by Michael
Moore. Dog Eat Dog Films.
Mouffe, Chantal (2001) “Every Form of Art Has a Political Dimension.” Interview with Rosalyn
Deutsche, Branden W. Joseph, and Thomas Keenan. In Grey Room, No. 2 (Winter 2001):
98-125.
Mutamassik (2004) Shotgun Wedding Vol. 1: DJ /rupture vs Mutamassik: The Bidoun Sessions.
Violent Turd.
------ (2002) Bidoun. Mis.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1956) The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Francis
Golffing. Doubleday, New York.
Noujaim, Jehane (2004) Control Room. Directed by Jehane Noujaim. Produced by Rosadel
Varela and Hani Salama. Noujaim Films.
Papastergiadis, Nikos (2004) “The Limits of Cultural Translation.” In Over Here: International
Perspectives on Art and Culture, eds. Gerardo Mosquera and Jean Fisher. New Museum
of Contemporary Art, New York. 330-347.

9
 Alan Gilbert

Pareles, Jon (2005) “This Is the Sound of Globalization.” In The New York Times. April 15, 2005:
E1, E8.
Pryor, Richard (1976) “Bicentennial Nigger.” On Bicentennial Nigger. Warner Bros. Records.
Sontag, Susan (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.
------ (1977) On Photography. Dell Publishing, New York.
Storr, Robert (2004) “Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque.” In Disparities and
Deformations: Our Grotesque. SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM. 8-33.
Strauss, David Levi (1999) “Take As Needed: Therapeutic Art and Images in Context.” In
Between Dog and Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics in the Twilight of the Millennium.
Autonomedia, Brooklyn. 13-23
Suskind, Ron (2004) The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education
of Paul O’Neill. Simon and Schuster, New York.
Tate, Greg (2005) “Married to the Hook.” In The Village Voice, Vol. 50, No. 11 (March 16-22,
2005): 81.
Usher (2004) “Yeah!” On Confessions. LaFace.
Vitruvius (1960) The Ten Books on Architecture. Trans. Morris Hicky Morgan. Dover
Publications, New York.
The Yes Men (2004) The Yes Men. Directed by Sarah Price and Dan Ollman. Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer.

10