Death Wobbles: An Anxious Tableau - exploring images of the fragmented body with low humour through non-traditional self-portraiture

Abstract

The paper discusses how early satirically charged printed lithographs of politicians, and woodcuts of human bodies morphing into animals and plants, provided new possibilities for the depiction of the figure in the fine arts. This comic style of the grotesque in art, which probed the unconscious, fragmented the body, and employed low and incongruent humour as a strategy to disguise meaning, gave rise to a trope of non-traditional portraiture that put the world of objects on the same standing as humans, and has become today, a mainstay for contemporary practitioners who seek to explore the inner workings of the self, and the world around them, with both sincerity and irony.