Play Versus Power

The cartoonish “Grotesques” of the Uffizi Gallery ceiling countlessly configure super-beasts with person-beasts and joyous quatrefoil fill-in-the-blanks. After a waltz through the Illuminations exhibition in the basement level it is easy to see the connection between this decorative style and the even earlier monastic book illustrations, where there is freedom to ‘doodle’ within the regulating logic of symmetry. Following the fire of 1762 the West Wing corridor was restored according to the tastes of that moment, which suggest that the shift from playful explorations of a bestial self to moralized representations of specific elite historical figures was synchronous by degrees with the entrenchment of illusionistic devices, while the mythological motifs that continued with the most vigor did so as appropriated vehicles of state virility. As a result of the fact that play did not benefit from the support of the state and was at worst usurped by it, the generational enrichment of a mythic self was largely abandoned in comparison to the resounding climax that emblems of power such as the story of David did reach.
Perhaps it is this dropping off point that explains the contemporary interest in gothic awkwardness. The project of inventing a history that ‘continued’ to metaphorically reorganize the human form invigorates the production of mythologies that were not stunted by and do not bear the weight of religious or political epochs and are thereby free to simply play.