Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman by Dennis M. Weiss

Author:Dennis M. Weiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

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The historic design pattern known as grottesche illustrates the extent to which an organic or inorganic context for disfigurement can make the difference between perceiving such forms as horrific or chic. Linguistically, organic disfigurement is “grotesque,” which implies an abomination of nature; inorganic disfigurement is “grottesche,” or ornamental. The grottesche pattern illustrates the extent to which perceptions of stylishness can reform the way people interact with, experience, and think about their own bodies and those of other people when they do not comply with the conventions of normalcy.

The term grottesche, which is the etymological origin of grotesque, originates in the Italian Renaissance and is the name of a tile pattern combining human, animal, vegetable, and mineral forms into single protracted bodies (Harpham 2007). The pattern, which can be found in Paleolithic cave drawings and medieval designs, entered Western modernity in the hands of the felicitously named Roman decorator, Fabullus. Fabullus used the images as the prototype for the ornamental décor of Nero’s Domus Aurea. When Nero’s palace was excavated in 1480, its imaginatively patterned walls found their way into the Neoclassical decorative vernacular. The pattern was wildly popular among artisans and craftsmen, at the same time that it was celebrated and even performed by visitors to the archaeological site. Renaissance archaeology was less reverent than the contemporary science. Visitors to the dig site were lowered into its grottos, ate al fresco dinners near and within them, and engaged in carnivalesque efforts to be “more bizarre than the grotesques themselves” (Zamperini 2008, 95). Grottesche came in time to comprehend more than merely the recovered walls of Roman ruins. The pattern design became a property of human minds and bodies.

Late nineteenth-century artists embraced a Classical resurgence, which included returning to Renaissance forms that valorized ancient values and techniques. The term “renaissance” is, in fact, a product of the nineteenth-century, coined by French art historians in 1840 and making its way into general usage by 1872. William Morris introduced the concept to artisanal culture by advocating that Victorians follow the example of domestic design set by “mediaeval or Elizabethan builders” (Morris 1911). Numerous nineteenth-century fine artists and art historians collectively advocated some version of a return to practices common within Quattrocento Italian art. The Victorian return to Renaissance conventions in color, detail, and compositional complexity included a resurrection of the grottesche, the design technique perhaps most associated with vibrant color, intricate detail, and complicated formal networks. The nineteenth-century artisanal revival of the form, like the original Renaissance manifestation, valorized figural monstrosities as stylish ornaments rather than as horrifying monsters. As ornaments, grotesques were invited into homes and bodies, not banished from them.

Victorian grottesche often incorporated all kinds of organic creatures, setting the stage for a new biological paradigm inspired by ornamental design. Inseparably entwined swans, eagles, snails, squirrels, rodents, snakes, flowers, and fruits were common motifs in the patterns. Naturalistic representations of these plants and animals were integrated into a design lexicon teeming with stylish “mutations.” In the pattern, the organic world is compressed: bodies are “disfigured” by their transformation into others.

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