Sunday, October 23, 2011

Facing the Abject With Justin Novak


The human body has been an age-old subject in the art world for centuries, but artists such as Justin Novak have taken the human form and used it in a contemporary way to further the study of us. Novak is a ceramic artist best known for his series Disfigurines, which is a body of work he developed from 1997 to 2006. The series is made up of small-scale porcelain and raku-fired figurines that play on the traditional porcelain figures of the Rococo period, which is considered the golden age of European porcelain. 
Novak says, “the ceramic figurine has historically embodied a mainstream, bourgeois ideology, and for this reason, I have employed it in the presentation of an alternative vision, an ironic anti-figurine or disfigurine” (JustinNovak.com, pg. 1) The figurine has historically represented the ideals and norms of our dominate culture, but Novak’s savage and visceral figures are expressly for the opposite purpose. “ The graphic physical wounds of his Disfigurine series are a metaphor for the psychological damage inflicted by a dominant ideology that stifles difference” (Breaking the Mould, pg. 84)
In Terry Barrett’s article Approaches to Postmodern Artmaking he talks about the principle of Facing the Abject.  The abject refers to unsavory aspects in life; it is a concept that accounts for many “ugly” representations in art (Barrett, pg. 8). Novak’s grotesque Disfigurines fit right into this principle, his figurines are hauntingly beautiful, the starkness of them both intrigue the viewer and also makes them want to look away in distaste.
“ If beauty is truth, then it may dare to be grotesque too, for truth may be harsh or horrific. Beauty does not suggest something beautiful in the actual sense of the term, but that, which comes closer to the true expressions of the self and the vision of a generation's psyche, that is fragmented, kitsch-like, complex and beyond the metanarratives of a suffocating conformity.”(Keats, pg. 1). 



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