What's that hooting and groaning, as though distant Scottish pipers were sneaking up on you? It's a large tartan... a kind of kilted...a sort of person made of different clans, all scrambled up with screeching and skirling sounds, gliding up behind you with dark intention....

Carapace Burlesque is a 2 metre tall sculpture made from recycled kilts. It is remotely controlled by Stephanie Douet, and has a nasty bagpipe soundtrack by Tudor Lukies choking and gurgling under its crinoline. Mark Wrighton makes the radio-controlled part.







Sunday, 26 September 2010

Carnivalesque and the Grotesque Body

Are not these rather beautiful words?

When I thought of making CB I pictured it taking part in a carnival procession, part of some raucous tumult of dark and light, shrill clashing trumpets and stiff religious effigies carried shoulder-height in the flickering gloom by a crowd half off its head with drunken glee. The Russian literary critic Mikhail Bahktin picked over the writings of Rabelais to get at the carnival world he depicted.  'The carnivals that exist today pale in comparison to thr bunbridled lusting, crazed bingeing and even physical mutilation that occurred in the carnival environment of days past'.  It was a world of upsidedown chaos, anarchic extremes, where normally strict hierarchical barriers were ridiculed, inverted and ripped.

I would love to think I'd made something as raw as this, that would fit into a proper medieval rip-up but I haven't.  However I think I quantifiably subverted Health and Safety regulations at our last outing.

No comments:

Post a Comment