ZACH PEARL

Ornamentally Bare:
Deployment of the Grotesque in the Work of Ed Pien

This essay examines the immersive cut-paper installations of Ed Pien, positioning them as utopian spaces that are created through the deployment of a grotesque aesthetic. Using historical evidence and elements of queer theory, an argument is made that the blur between plant and animal, organic and mechanical, pattern and figure, etc. in Pien's work produces a liminality that removes the viewer from any sense of conventional space.

This essay is written in an unconventional style that reflects the sensuous nature of the artworks in question. The form is sometimes discursive, sometimes poetic, but is ultimately demanded by a relationship to the work and the desire to acknowledge the importance of subjectivity in art criticism.

April, 2012

A conjuring, a swallowing, a psychotic theatre. [1]I am using this word in the sense of a space that is disconnected from an external reality.

The deepest part of night.
The map of a knife
made visible
in the belly of a darkness.

A time of possibility.
The silhouette of another dimension.
A pathway.
A moat.
An oasis
of frenzied elegance.

The work of Ed Pien can be concisely described as chimeric beauty; the kind of intensive and ornate detail that both beguiles the eye and unsettles the stomach. His immersive cut-paper installations—which have often filled entire galleries, utterly commanding the space—whisper to their viewers with regality. They tempt and entice them with their visual dichotomies:

• visceral/ethereal
• pithy/verbose
• massive/fragile
• mechanical/organic
• decorative/sparse
• fantastic/horrific

: The shadow of a worm writhing just beneath the skin, but in a choreographed procession of impeccably proportioned figures.

There are many analogies for this sum of dichotomies. But, the one that best encapsulates Pien's installations (and, in fact, the totality of his work) is that of the Grotesque. "Its appearance, however, is not sudden, but insidious. The familiar world is never wholly absent, but always on notice of dismissal." (Harpham, 1976: 462) For, the grotesque is the most dubious of signs, whose existence is dependent upon its slipperiness and unapologetic periphery—the fluid slope of a paradoxical aesthetic.

Pien's 2006 installation Witching Hour, a one-room installation held at Off the Map Gallery in Toronto, is exemplary of this elusive behaviour. (Figure A) It is an abundant nowhere. A utopian space. Ornamentally bare. Like a gothic caesura held indefinitely by the conductor of a baroque orchestra.

A synopsis of the room might go: A glowing, sinewy temple standing in a technicolor forest, floating in the black abyss of surreality. The edges of the room seeming to disappear in the darkness of a vignette or a memory. Two projectors on opposite walls are the only light sources. Images of trees diffuse over three cut-paper sculptures suspended from the ceiling. They paint the walls with fuzzy shadows and pixelated branches. In the center of the room is the largest of the sculptures; a cylindrical 'tapestry' made of layers of interlacing cut-paper. There is a remarkable iridescence on the surface of the tapestry from the projections, and it only becomes apparent why as the viewer gets closer; a thin layer of ice coats the entire structure and reimagines the materiality of paper in a supernatural light.

These traits combined with its craftsmanship make for an exquisite object: Delicate. Sharp. Complex. Yet, it is also disturbing; the intricacy of its web pattern resembling a kind of animal-plant, its vascularity creating such an optical richness that its surface reads somatically. The juxtaposition of ice on paper transforming its structurally fluid properties into a definitive armature.

: A kind of sensory wormhole is here, and a benevolent deceit: the dichotomy reveals itself to be a duplicity! An attractive discomfort. Or, a sublime decoration that thwacks your medulla oblongata with its manicured pinky finger, and then smirks to gently chide you.

: An unsettling visual dichotomy that escapes the realm of being purely material or purely physical. It evokes a kind of body-knowledge—ideas that are 'felt', or that empathy that arises when we identify with the signification of Body.

Why would this somatic reading disturb us? Surely, as possessors of bodies we are all familiar with bodily traits, their processes, their visual elements. And it cannot only be the duplicity of the image that elicits the grotesque—this is indeed a catalyst, but not the root. It must be the deployment of particular signifiers that form a brief, precarious coherence between analytic perception and sensory experience. What then is connoted by Pien's work that moves the body from the territory of abstract representation into the territory of the grotesque, and how might this be mapped?

: Body-knowledge signifier + identification (Duplicity signified) = The Grotesque

Unfortunately, I'm no semiotician and little is written to assist me in this endeavor. However, "The Grotesque in Art and Literature," by Wolfgang Kayser, is certainly a comprehensive text on the subject to date, and provides insight here. (Harpham, 1976: 462) Essentially an iconography, Kayser's text offers a laundry list of historical grotesque imagery, some of which directly pertains to Pien's work. In particular, Kayser mentions, "…jungle vegetation, with its ominous vitality, in which nature itself seems to have erased the difference between plants and animals, the mechanical object brought to life." (462) Kayser reinforces that it is the uncertain and in-between-ness of the object that disturbs our senses. The inability to define the object as either plant or animal, in tandem with our extended gaze upon it, becomes self-reflexive, and forces us to question our own objectivities. Witching Hour's tapestries, with their iconic hybridity of flora and fauna, connote a mutational and unstable organism that challenges the stability of our own body-image with its grotesque aesthetic.

I believe (And stop me if I'm wrong, Ed) that this aesthetic is deliberate; a strategy; that Pien is fully aware of the 'mutation' that he conjures, and that, further to his credit, he employs the grotesque to elicit a liminal and genderless space.

: Gender is a societal construction. Judith Butler was rather firm, and warranted as such, when she elucidated this. But we continue to limit ourselves by applying this concept exclusively in compliment to sex; the physiological differences between man and woman. Gender is actually the psychic space (of sex primarily, but of other identity aspects as well)…the amorphous part that connects to Ego and to Desire. It is malleable, changeable…even cybernetic (thank you Donna Haraway). A gendered space is then one that forces us to identify—to 'stabilize' our position along an imbricated terrain—to recognize the signifiers of sex and psyche, body and mind. In contrast, the genderless space forces us to recognize the propositional (and mostly arbitrary) space that lies between these categories—upon which we 'apply' difference and principles of normalcy.

For Pien, the grotesque, like installation, is another medium in which to work ; it is a conceptual material that performs concomitantly with the physical materials. The flurry of cross-sensory metaphors that this creates is heightened by the way Pien 'detaches' his installations from their venues. Since 2001, Pien's structures have consistently implemented a tactic of interior/exterior, wherein viewers must traverse or view content via a single opening or 'portal'. Clear examples of this can be seen in Tracing Night (2006), Haven (2007-08) and Memento (2009).
(Figures B, C & D, respectively)

In these instances, the viewer must enter the piece only after entering the space of the gallery—twice down the rabbit-hole. In doing so, Pien's installations 'function' first as a disembarkment from familiar signifiers (a de-gendering), and secondly as a journey into a suspended space, or "topos". (Rosen, 1990: 127) The topos is that place which is categorically outside of Place and arrived at by the Grotesque.

Witching Hour is an exception to this direct visualization of an interior/exterior. There is no portal or orifice for the viewer to negotiate. However, there is still a sense of topos achieved through a delineation of space within the area of the installation. Again the ice comes into play, this time as piles of brick surrounding the central tapestry and lining the walls.

(Figure E)

Frozen within the bricks are single, blank sheets of paper—in and of itself a grotesque gesture, in the mechanical perfection of the manufactured paper contained within a unique and irregular chunk of nature. The piles are short and uncommanding, but they glisten from the light of the projectors, the orderly structure of their stacking juxtaposed with the softness of the other elements. They are not a forceful gesture, but they do impose, drawing a 'moat' of space around the tapestry—a cortical, transparent barrier, a captured water's edge. The effect of this is a bit religious (or, I suppose, I should say "spiritual", given the Pagan roots of the work's title). This is a fitting connotation considering that the grotesque has its history in Catholic illuminations. Its aesthetic began in a tradition of artistic subversion of religious imagery and Roman Catholic totalitarianism during the early Renaissance. The inspiration for this can be traced to the excavation of cave frescoes (grotto) by Italian painters in the fifteenth century who appropriated elements from these into their own work, which was largely commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church or its prominent patronage. "These excavations unearthed murals dating from the Roman Decadence in which human and animal figures are intertwined with foliage in ways which violate not only the laws of statics and gravity, but common sense and plain observation as well." (Harpham, 1976: 461) Therefore, historically, the grotesque has operated as protest incognito, an alternative to the rigidity of Christian hegemony under the guise of ornament. The fascination of this paradoxical relationship is the necessity of conformist religious beliefs about bodies, sexuality and gender providing the platform for artists to invent an oppositional vocabulary in the aesthetic of the grotesque.

This tradition surfaces again in the 'alternative' space of Witching Hour (interiority made visible), constructed with ornate and sensory-saturating elements. It exaggerates this tradition by conjuring pagan concepts of witchcraft, of covenants meeting in forest clearings, of the womb and the Mother, and most importantly of a mystical hour—the deepest part of night in which the natural blurs with the supernatural, rules of reality become moot, spells may be cast and spirits may be summoned. The living leans forward over the edge of Death. In this way, the 'moat' of space in Witching Hour implicates the central tapestry in the role of a sacred object. It sits in a safe haven of liminal space. Simultaneously open and closed, a force field of nothingness protecting it. The viewer sees the topos illustrated, and must contemplate its threshold.

: If we accept Mikhail Bahktin's idea of the chronotope (its application to the carnivalesque, in which "there is a refusal of the official world," (Storey, 2001: 109) producing suspensions of time and reality), then the topos generated by the presence of the grotesque in Pien's work is really a threshold to its progenitor, chronotopos…

: Chronotopography–The practice of creating carnivalesque space that supposes the antecedent to the rupture of binary opposition, or a pressing against signified reality.

: What is attained in constructing such a dramaturgy of the psyche?

Before going further, it will be helpful to examine the motivations behind creating topos.

: (What are the symptoms of chronotopography?!)

Pien basically has two bodies of work, or a conjoined body of seemingly disparate investigations; what David Balzer has referred to as a Yin/Yang artistic practice. (Eyeweekly.com, 2010) Pien's "Yin" persona manifests itself in the delicate craft of his cut-paper works; their material frailty and yet lavish, visceral texture suggest femininity, growth and grace. His "Yang" practice, which typically takes the form of ink and watercolor drawings that feature violent and disfigured scenes (yet are equally graceful in their gestural qualities), are evocative of masculinity, aggression and decay. It would be logical then to suppose that Pien's motivation to create no-space symbolizes idyllic aesthetic neutrality, or a desire for closure between the two. However, the closure is never obtained (internally). It is epitomized instead by the production of the work itself. The lack that fuels both bodies of work attains in each what it cannot accomplish by a fusion of the two.

: What is it about the Two contained in the One that so fascinates society? —There is, of course, wholeness in the surrender or the consumption of the Other, but then why is the precipice of this union so caked with the uncanny? Should it not feel natural, comforting, cathartic? The satisfaction of the snake eating its tail? Is Lacan laughing in the background?
(Lack and Desire are wrestling in the corner of the page.)

I would like to posit then that the aesthetic of the grotesque (through which we reach the topos) that pervades Pien's work is an indicator, or 'symptom', of the desire for closure (ideally encompassed within the topos). This would position Pien's work as both personal and political, addressing a politics of the body—those societal impositions of physicality on identity with which we must all contend. Once more, we are faced with a coherent dichotomy within the work: the Personal occupying the same plane as the Political (a dichotomy that still resembles a fluid and inverse relationship of interior/exterior).

Again, it would seem that Pien is fully cognizant of this dynamic:
In a brief statement issued to summarize a selection of his 3-Minute Drawings: Spectacle of the Body (Figure F) a series of visceral and abject figurative ink drawings made between 1998 and 2005, Pien himself actually uses the term grotesque to describe how the works allow for an exploration of the "normative anxiety [that] we experience". (Dehuman.com, 2005)

: What is normative anxiety? The de facto syndrome of existing within Society? There can be no such relative value as 'normal' without a majority and an institutional discourse to enforce it. The inevitable sickness of an attempt to establish sameness, and thereby enforcing difference.

: The lens of queer theory would see normative anxiety as a component of dominant sexual ideologies (the heterosexual matrix ) in which the grotesque is a subversive response to the pressures of orthodox gender signifiers. The grotesque as the production of queer signifiers?

: If we run with this notion, then the grotesque becomes a mutualistic invasion and deterritorialization (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) of heterosexual signification—the process of, "cultural inscription of homosexual possibilities." (Tepper, 2006: 2) In other words, the grotesque visually links heterosexuality to its homosexual potential and makes them continuous. It, "effectively disrupts the cognitive stability that the visual perception of 'sameness' and 'difference' would otherwise serve to anchor." (2) A semiological grenade, thrown into the trenches of binary opposition!

In 3-Minute Drawings, stylized and anamorphic figures overtly impale and devour one another. Spartan and quickly made, the figures are counterforms to the precision and mastery of Pien's cut-paper works. But there is an ebullience in the blunt, and jagged brushstrokes. The indexical qualities of the work provide 'evidence' of Pien's normative anxiety, testifying through their visible physicality. However, I am unconvinced that these drawings (or Pien's chronotopographic installations) illustrate a pressure to "normalize" as much as they do a pressure to signify.

: And perhaps, these are sides of the same coin—to represent the complex and fragmented nature of beings in a sum, or a whole. The encapsulation of the two-dimensional image proposes this, and the finality of the structure (for Pien, the installation) does the same…is this why the grotesque becomes so important to the artist? Because it is antithetical to that end? Antithetical to the possibility of representing separation without acknowledging continuity? Its elements offering an unstable territory in which to escape the mainstream aesthetic, and thereby the conventions of signification?

Rather than an evasive maneuver to normalcy, the grotesque is a remedy to an unending anxiety towards signification. In Ed Pien's case, the grotesque is more of an expectorant or, in its largest scale, an exorcism. His work, "seeks to exorcise the distortions and self-distortions forced upon [us] by a culture that aims to control the individual." (Irvin, 2000) This would explain Pien's fascination with those in-between, hybridized signifiers—their ability to move the institutionalized discourse of the Image into a libidinal lexicon where Society no longer has power; where there is no logic to sustain an interior/exterior model.

: And, on that note, I would like to collapse the two. The interior into the exterior, the animal into the plant, and the end back upon the beginning. Back to the concept of chimeric beauty!

However, this libidinal lexicon is masked in Pien's installations. What is the effect of this exorcism through benign deception? What are its implications as Art? Normally we do not associate trickery with art, but it has always been a component of art. The traditions of illusionism, trompe l'oeil, romanticism and even Modernist aspirations of transcendence all suppose visual pleasure as a ploy. The representation of the world is a contract with the viewer—that he or she accepts the 'play at being real' that the artwork is proposing. But, past this initial agreement, there is no need to determine whether the work presents itself as truthful or deceitful.

Pien's work is once again an exception. His work proposes synesthetic dichotomies that make its grotesque agenda present but not apparent. It is a unique deployment of the grotesque in its attractiveness (Beauty as a fishhook). It is also disguised and then revealed as art, which positions beauty as the vehicle for problematizing concepts of gender, identity and normalcy (Beauty as the double-agent), and not as a relaxing, comforting or recreational sensation

: Beauty—an artistic vicar that seduces its audience into a more complex and philosophical engagement— a plateau for psychosomatic deterritorialization.

With this in mind, what moral dimension of Aesthetics could we diagram from Pien's work? What ethical stance of the work is demonstrated by its grotesqueness, its infinite phasing in and out of signification? What is its virtue?

: I am not saying this to be difficult, to be a culture-cop or even an eccentric art critic. No artworks can be right. None can be wrong. Virtue, as I am using here is about the 'legs' of the work. It is about the breadth and significance of its larger implications upon the human condition, and the way in which that becomes visible.

These questions are warranted by the way in which works like Witching Hour register beyond experiences of visual and spatial negotiation and enter into territories of visual ontological work. They are welcoming, visually seductive stages for the study of ubiquitous anxiety-inducing factors. This suggests an exhibition-based practice of existential research more so than an aesthetic experience.

Also, there is Pien's assertion that his works provide avenues into the "exploration," of normative anxiety. It would seem that Pien is trying to deliver the opportunity to study one's own existential crisis through his personal undertaking of the same process. He does not promise the viewer will discover a 'cure', but rather an investigation into curative possibilities. His statement intimates agency, in that the viewer must take on the responsibilities to find his/her own curative trajectory. Pien's work implies that the viewer must adopt a degree of integrity and endurance when faced with the unraveling candor of the grotesque and its queering of signifiers. Or, as David Bowie so effectively summed it up: Turn and face the strange.

In this way, Pien's work can be interpreted as making both an academic and sociological contribution to society; that there is an altruism in his duplicitous chronotopography. This is a detour from the Postmodernist penchant to make art that is either completely irreverent of institutional mechanisms or polemic social commentary. Pien's work addresses a societal phenomenon of anxiety, but it is not attacking it—it side steps (and does a mocking series of pirouettes in the meantime). It creates an alternative to Society, metaphysically turning the other cheek. Colorful dispersions of tree branches across crystalline paper structures are hardly a critique of society's normativity. But, they can be an intrepid fractal of that dimension—a step beyond critique and into action. Although the analysis of artistic practice in an ethical 'body' of criteria imposes upon it some sort of neo-Modernist heroism—Art will save us from destruction!—it also posits the work as active, not passive. It has become increasingly hard to consider art in its active stance (or art, in general, as a form of activism) in our commodity-driven culture, which hollows out the experiential relationship with the object and takes only the 'value of the artwork' as its distinguishing factor. However, with works such as Witching Hour, there is no experiential 'value' of its grotesque features that can be exchanged or franchised. Even photographic documentation of it as an installation removes the unabashed nature of it alterity by returning it to an institutionalized space and discourse. The virtue of such work is then found in its unrelenting stance as Nowhere. And, while it fails to escape being a place of one kind or another (Nowhere, by naming it as such, still comprises a 'place'), its resistance to encapsulation—to identification and historical reference—succeeds in removing it from specificity and the terms of an established discourse. The virtue of constructing such a space lies in this commitment to resistance, in its mandate to be outside (the pinnacle of Inside) and the (as of yet) undetermined; the expansion of societal bounds to make new space for new identities, or rather, for the process of signification to take on new parameters that are less restrictive, more fluid and more mutable.

: Now, doesn't that sound nice? Despite the total uncertainty of what that would look like... How unstable. How grotesque!

Works Cited


Balzer, David. "Scream: Ed Pien and Samonie Toono." 21 July 2010. Eyeweekly.com 15 March 2011 http://www.eyeweekly.com/arts/galleries/article/97517

Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari. "How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs?" A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizorphrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Continuum: London, UK. 1987.

Harpham, Geoffrey. "The Grotesque: First Principles". The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Summer, 1976), pp. 461-468.

Irvin, Sherri. "Wound/One of Many" 2 March 2000. Gallery101.org 16 March 2011. http://www.gallery101.org/content.phplan=en&col=6&sub=wound&act=exhibitions&lev=1

Pien, Ed. "Statement." 2005. Dehuman.com 16 March 2011 http://www.dehuman.com/pien.html

Rosen, Elisheva. "Innovation and Its Reception: The Grotesque in Aesthetic Thought." SubStance, Vol. 19, No. 2/3, Issue 62/63: Special Issue: Thought and Novation (1990), pp. 125-135

Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. 3rd Edition. Essex, UK: Pearson Education Limited. 2001.

Tepper, Rowan G. "Closure, Foreclosed: No More Opiates for Anxious Sexualities". 14 March 2006. Scribd.com. 8 April 2011. http://www.scribd.com/doc/31123926/Signification-Anxiety-An-Essay-on-Heterophobia-and-Cognitive-Closure