George Condo's Mental State

The Take Away from Art that Horrifies in Equal Measures as it Fascinates

           

            It’s all about the maniacal grins in George Condo’s exhibit down at the New Museum. These ghoulish smirks stare down from all angles, from all sorts of warped creatures ranging from those more-or-less realistic to the chillingly inhuman. Condo, a figurative artist who specializes in odd, warped portraits, decks his characters with oversized rodent ears, bared Bugs Bunny buck teeth, circular clown noses, and bulging cheeks. His tendency to fuse the absurd with the mundane, the tragic with the comical, and the tame with the horrifying has led to his work being described as Picasso meets Looney Tunes (with a good measure of Goya’s ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’ thrown in).

            It’s a bit disorienting to come face to face with such grotesque work that gives arise to so many contradictory emotions. How is the viewer supposed to feel when gazing upon a painting aimed to capture a demonic, maimed Elliot Spitzer enjoying a call girl in a graphically explicit manner? Horrified? Sympathetic? Affronted by the invasion of privacy shamelessly splayed on the canvas? This viewer couldn’t help but find himself in a suspended state of discomfort while viewing many of these works, though I must admit I felt an intense attraction to them. It was very difficult to turn away. These incongruous reactions of revulsion in almost the same measure as fascination bewildered me. If something is disturbing and ostensibly harmful, shouldn’t it be avoided rather than studied?

            I guess I don’t really think the above question carries that much weight. Some of the more alluring components of art are those that secretly horrify and repel us. I’ve enjoyed my fair share of gory horror films that have disgusted me while being totally entertaining. I love roller coasters, a prime example of the marriage between the queasy and ecstatically enjoyable. And I am totally going through a Kanye phase right now, even though I was convinced upon firstlisten that his shamelessly explicit lyrics were doing irreparable damage to mysoul. There’s definitely a strong appeal to that kind of artistic exploration that explores the shocking and potentially uncomfortable in order to reach expressive avenues that lead to some sort of elusive understanding. But there’s got to be a line. I remember trying to watch the violent abuse Ellen Page was battered with in the nauseating An American Crime only to find myself sick to my stomach, unable to sleep.  The line between grotesquely appealing and downright revolting can be a tricky one to navigate.

            But back to Condo’s maniacal grins. While wandering through the two floors of the exhibit (connected by an awesome, semi-hidden narrow set of side stairs), I couldn’t help but wonder how to react to his work. My friend pointed out the difference in her appreciation of his work depending on whether she’d choose to read it as lightly poking fun at stale societal stereotypes or as a virulent attack highlighting ills within the general populace. I found her distinction fascinating, but what I think I found more striking was her expressed option to choose how to interpret his work. Thinking more about it, I realized that at the beginning of the exhibit I was totally preoccupied with trying to understand what Condo was communicating to me via his abstract, swirling charcoal and ink sketches, rather than allowing myself to just get swept away by the molded images in front of me. I think the painting that finally broke through to me in this way was a mesmerizing portrait called ‘The Chinese Woman.’ While viewing this odd representation of an inhibited-looking, cartoon-eyed woman with a bulldog’s mouth and extra rows of bared teeth, I found myself completely absorbed, incapable of escape. It might have been that it reminded me of Munch’s ‘Madonna’ (a favorite of mine), but I like to think the reason this particular painting resonated with me so was because I became less focused on what I thought the artist might have been trying to communicate and more drawn to what it meant to me, what it did for me.

            And through this newfound ability to let the art come and speak to me (rather than digging through it in a desperate search for meaning), I found myself peering through the grotesqueness of the portraits to the underlying emotions captured beneath. And suddenly the paintings were no longer grotesque, but rather raw and vulnerable, presented in a shocking manner to create a distance between the artist and his audience, to keep something hidden. Here I saw anger, there I saw confusion. I watched the inability to communicate unfold before me in one portrait. I observed the sad, inevitable collapse of a marriage in another. I came to understand that art deemed terrifying or upsetting when viewed in a certain light need not be shunned or discarded, but rather just approached differently. What I saw in Condo’s work as being unsettlingly awkward from one angle I found to be quietly beautiful from another. It’s an old idea, yes, but I discovered that art has less to do with what’s actually presented to you and more with how you choose to perceive it.