On Ugliness

It is Friday morning and I am on the bus. Sat at the back, as always. The sun is screaming through the window on my left. It is such a bright day, it almost annoys me. I am wearing sunglasses. I have a headache, I am tired, my outfit is ugly and I want to watch tv. I am in a bad mood! In my sunglasses, with my mean face, sat at the back of the bus. I turn to face the light.

I don’t like pretty pictures. I don’t like beautiful paintings. The lovelier the image, the more I hate it. Or worse, am bored by it. Niceness is irritating, unnatural, bogus. When I encounter niceness, I often feel frustrated and impatient, like the niceness is distracting me from something else, something more urgent. Niceness is pretty straightforward, so the distraction is actually not that interesting. It wears thin and becomes tiresome. Especially when I am in a bad mood, like I am now.

I want to see something not nice. Something weird, bizarre, confusing or surprising. I always enjoy weirdness, regardless of how I am feeling. I always want weirdness! At least once a month that Philip Guston line comes back to me: ‘I REALLY ONLY LOVE STRANGENESS’. I repeat it to myself like a mantra, to recalibrate, to remind me of what I am seeking. I think about the Middle Ages, how painters would paint a painting for the glory of god. And it would be a painting full of terror and dread and fear. Hieronymus Bosch and his visions of hell, exploding volcanos and crumbling castles, frogs hopping out of mouths and arseholes, demons with knives and noses and big black eyes. The horror of porcupines! Of a fish wearing a cape! Now that is a distraction! That is anything but straightforward!

Yes, yes, the grotesque! The ominous, the abysmal, the disgusting, rude, bad, wrong and horrible. The ugly. Where did it come from and what does it do? Why do artists make art that is grotesque? Why do we all kind of hate pretty pictures?

It’s Friday morning and now I am in Skarstedt, a West London commercial gallery. I’ve never been before. It is so exclusive and luxurious, I walk past twice before I figure out where the doorbell is. Now I’m in, I am still confused. The show is called On Ugliness: Medieval and Contemporary, taking its title from an Umberto Eco essay. I cannot lie, I am here for the Medieval bit: four limestone heads. All by unknown artists, all from Medieval times.

They’re scattered through the gallery. There’s an upright solitary head that looks like it’s hissing, brow furrowed and lips pulled back in a tight grimace. It is disembodied and furious. There’s another with tight lips and a stern blank face. Like it is holding on to a concentrated anger. Another head has its mouth open, tongue lolling out. The eyes are bulging and boggling, crazed. It is gross, confrontational.

The last head is the most interesting. It is a face wedged into a stone corner. The face is actually the shape of a tangerine. The eyes are cartoonishly round, the mouth is a hollow gash, so wide it splits the face open. The tongue is very thin and stuck out, like the creature is saying EUUURGHHHHH. The corner it’s wedged into looks like it could be its body, the snake-like carvings could be its arms and hands. If so, it is unusually cube-shaped. Squat and solid, bracing for some kind of action. It is actually a bit cute, a bit silly. It looks like a character, like a cartoon frog that goes bleurgh. I am looking at it, I am smiling.

The heads are grotesques. The kind of things you’d find carved into the side of a Medieval church. Lining the roof, guarding the door, hidden behind a spire or plonked on top of a flying buttress. Like a gargoyle, that’s a kind of grotesque. There are so many other kinds of carvings like these — fantastical mythical creatures, chimeras, weird beasts, hybrid combinations of lions, goats and snakes. Dramatic and funny and bizarre. We don’t know what grotesques are for, as in, what purpose their strangeness serves. Are they there to funnel water away from the sides of buildings, are they protective charms to ward off evil and scare away spirits, are they just the result of a stone mason’s whimsy? Is this decoration? No one knows! But the grotesque was everywhere in the Middle Ages. In the margins of illuminated manuscripts, bored monks would paint weird little mixed up hybrid creatures too. Cockerels with human heads, rabbits throwing fireballs, dogs with swords, fish with wings and legs, eggs with faces, whales with arms, giant snails big enough to swallow a knight. Were these things just whimsical doodles, were they a Medieval monks best guess at what an exotic animal (that they’d never seen) looked like? That’s the tradition Hieronymus Bosch was pulling on or from, isn’t it? It’s the same muscle. Art historians have fan theories about how Bosch was inspired by heretical beliefs, progressive religious ideas that were out of step with the church’s institutionally sanctioned beliefs. He could’ve been painting in allegory, to teach profound spiritual lessons or manifest an image as warning. But they don’t know — he could also just have been painting weird things to amuse himself and others. All of these things! Were they decoration, caricatures, cartoons, entertainment — were they for the pleasure of strangeness? Is there reasoning, or are they purely for enjoyment? Is enjoyment something without or beyond reason?

It is Friday morning. I’m stood in front of this Medieval stone cartoon frog person head, contemplating its grimace. And I don’t know! I don’t know what it’s for in the grand scheme of its own history. I am pleased by my inability to really comprehend the thing itself. I am pleased by my inability to write about these things completely. I am pleased that I am in front of something that defies comprehension, categorisation, reason.

It’s funny (to me). If I saw these four grimacing heads on the side of a Medieval church, I would probably still stop and stare. But I wouldn’t look like I am looking now. Seeing them out of context, in this very clean spacious gallery, it does feel like I am seeing them anew. Maybe I am looking at them now like they are shapes, form, objects rather than decoration. I am looking at them in isolation rather than in the grand scheme of their own history.

The rest of the gallery is full of artworks I can’t really say the same thing about. A portrait of King Louis XI of France in profile, painted sometime in the 15th Century. He is wearing a red cap under a brown hat, which is strange — but not the kind of strangeness I am interested in. There’s a George Condo painting of a woman with a deranged animal demon grin. Her arms are above her head, her nipples at the bottom of the frame, if it weren’t for her face, she’d be an enticing and seductive nude. But she grins maniacally out at me, face twisted with malice. A Nicole Eisenman statue of a reclining nude with cartoonish proportions. A Martin Kippenberger drawing, in ballpoint pen on hotel paper. A man with two nails up his nose contemplates a hammer. The caption and title read DO IT YOURSELF. A Pablo Picasso ink drawing of a mysterious form. A Barbara Kruger.

These other works are all interesting in their own right, they contain a similar kind of strangeness to some degree. But I am looking around and I am now grimacing. I am in a bad mood. I am irritated. I am in a commercial West London gallery and I am being asked to read the stone heads in the same context as the paintings, the George Condo, the Pablo Picasso, the Barbara Kruger. The Medieval stone and the strangeness is being used as a contextual or conceptual container, to sell paintings and drawings by blue chip artists. And ok, Martin Kippenberger and the aesthetic of shitness, failure, nihilism. It isn’t all wholly unrelated, strangeness is in the room with us, strangeness (and ugliness) is being explored as a concept. But now I am looking around and I am feeling restless. Impatient. Like I am being distracted from something else, something urgent. The gallery is too nice, too neat, too much like an establishment that provides very expensive microneedling services. The gallery wants to talk about ugliness and strangeness (the grotesque) because it has a critical conceptual value that communicates importance. And importance is expensive. The gallery put all this work together in the same room because it wants to facilitate a transaction.

I’m not saying that selling art is bad, it’s not that simple. I think in this moment, someone missed the point. Something has been lost or made small — the reason for that is not simple, but it is about commerce. These weird incomprehensible works are no longer incomprehensible, are they? They are actually extremely comprehensible. I am holding the press release, with a double sided A4 attempt at comprehension. But the comprehension is small! It is straightforward and in becoming so, it only skims the surface! I am not here because I am interested in smallness, in straightforwardness, in the kind of understanding that only works in passing! I want to behold something ugly and incomprehensible. I want to hold onto that incomprehensibility, for the pure love and pleasure of feeling the strangeness.

It is Friday morning and I am walking down Piccadilly, in my sunglasses, with my mean face. I am in a bad mood! I want to announce it to every tourist I nearly bump into. I AM IN A BAD MOOD! I REALLY ONLY LOVE STRANGENESS! DON’T YOU ALSO WANT TO FEEL THE PALPABLE ALIEN ENERGY OF SOMETHING WEIRD AND 800 YEARS OLD? WHY IS IT SO COMPLICATED, TO LET THINGS BE COMPLICATED? DON’T YOU ALL LOVE STRANGENESS TOO?