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Bohn, Cassie

English

2007

MA

Plato's form of truth ensured attempts, many failings and makings of new chairs, spindles legging to transcend chair to chairness, to discard embodiment for essence. Sartre's chair required sitting flesh-bottoms, engrained in wood, existed to essence. Kierltegaard's chair demanded singular design, fit solely for one. Plato's truth meant flux, the breaking of molding, no holding longer than to measure for the next seeing, looking to see if fit or progressing. Anderson placed truth in grotesque hands failing to let go and deforming the holding body contorting to the many failings that were to have been new beginnings. Plato's truths were never enough in human hands to be essential form. Truth in Anderson's hands is removed to words; written, twice removed from reality, further more from ideality. In the paper flesh of pulped dust bound and printed, the grotesques were to construct new livings after the first and following failings showed them perfectly unsatisfying forms of being. But they did not. The grotesques sat in the forms experienced and warped to experience's bending. Unlilte Plato's truth by broken molds, movement, and searching, the grotesques did not break the castings sculpturing their lives; they became busts of a single truth warped out of time and place. Anderson's grotesques could have been more, had they been. Simply, had they been. Had they lived, had they moved, had they done themselves, by action, into alternate forms, alternate embodiments, alternate beings. But they did not. Anderson's grotesques were the bastardized beings of possibility and embodiment. As grotesques, they pose bodies challenging cultural, political, aesthetic, and personal structures - they are both extant and latent potential, transgressing the boundaries of normative existence, but still reaching to become the full thing, the achieved form of the successful existential individual. Desire drives the grotesque to reach for more, for singularity, for being outside of constricted socio-historical definition, but this driving desire screens itself, manifested consciously in other forms: the desire for love, the desire for acceptance, the desire for commuinication. What the grotesque does, however, reveals her tnle desire, defining her by her incarnated existence and not by her unlived professions. The grotesque's desire for celebratory, full, singular being is never satisfied, never fulfilled; the grotesque remains objet petit a, or the not-quite, of existential embodiment. Most important, however, is that despite her shortfalling, her not-quiteness, the grotesque is a body figuring possibility and challenging dictating hegemonies. The grotesque, though never embodying in existence its full potential, is still the body conduiting possibility from intangible ideality to flesh-and-boned existence - a body always, and crucially, relevant to every moment of personal and cultural self-knowing and the expansion to other ways of knowing and being.