San Francisco Barbie: A Study in the Grotesque

Not long ago, some of my fellow film students and I embarked on an assignment. It forced us together to do a collaborative film project, so I came up with the idea that each of us could go to the Tenderloin district in San Francisco and video the neighborhood at different points during the day. Well, due to a mixture of what was probably laziness and time constraint, we decided to just walk through the neighborhood together and capture whatever we could capture. What resulted was an odd film…it painted a contested image of the Tenderloin, known of course for its crumbling architecture, prostitutes, and drug addicts. But it is actually so, so much more. It was a study of the grotesque of San Francisco; the grotesque being what could possibly be a model to interpret the city’s primal layers.

What is the grotesque? Originally, the term appeared in the 16^th century describing some odd statues surrounding a Roman villa. But since its rooms were below ground level, its Renaissance observers mistook them for grottos, along with the connotations which grottos often have: earthiness, darkness, and death¹. Even now, at least in terms of art history, the grotesque still exists on the periphery of the art systemic, mostly because it has never been defined with any solidity. Culture in many ways is imagistic, and because so often the grotesque is fundamentally imagistic, we may interpret the former through the latter. Of course this does not mean that the grotesque is simply confined to the visual. The image is only the end result, whether or not it is constructed through sound, text, the visual, etc. In the introduction to the text “Modern Art and the Grotesque,” Francis S. Connelly writes, “Grotesque…describes the aberration from ideal form or category, to create the misshapen, ugly, exaggerated, or even formless.” The Tenderloin is one body of the San Francisco grotesque.

So, elementally, in terms of the grotesque, one can postulate an ideal form and an aberrant form of that ideal. Aberration from ideal form is the modality of the grotesque. In the media culture of the west, we are often told that ideal feminine beauty is that of an anorexic, glamorous, and made up 21 year old woman pictured in perfect lighting. In the Tenderloin, one often finds instead a transgendered, 40 year old drug addicted prostitute, often absurdly made up, almost in parody of that ideal feminine beauty.  But can the latter image be an example of experiential, grotesque collage? Or perhaps the former? In either case…certainly. The grotesque tests and redefines boundaries, and it certainly does not prescribe a hierarchy of forms. The city and its inhabitants exist in layers of forms; it also exists in my role in constructing them. Certain artists seek to point this out, such as in Francis Bacon’s portrait at the beginning of this article, “Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X.” It is the subversion of ideal form. The image is the text of the grotesque.

Later on in “Modern Art and the Grotesque,” Mikhail Bakhtin writes that “the body that figures in all the expressions of the unofficial speech of the people is the body that…gives birth and is born, devours and is devoured, drinks, defecates, is sick and dying.” The city itself is like a living being, one covered with perfume and cosmetics. Strip away that layer, go to the poorer neighborhoods of the city, those contested spaces saturated with difference, and you’ll find places like the Tenderloin. Cultural collage: bits and pieces of urbanity assembled to form a horrifying new image.

The Tenderloin is a “poetic monster”¹, one where the surreal and aberrant aspects of culture blend into a physical space; a home to both beauty and decay.

But isn’t this true of all spaces? Yes, but it is an issue of occlusion. Think of it as if you are a tourist taking a walk around Coit Tower and maybe Russian Hill, both affluent areas of the city, and then suddenly you see a piece of human shit or a pool of blood on the sidewalk. To you, such an occurrence might be a shock, but to a resident? For one who is used to the grotesque, the grotesque is no longer grotesque. It’s everyday experience. The novel becomes normal, and the collage becomes reality. Perhaps the “monstrous body is pure culture.”¹ In the end, there is only the human collage.

As an aside, it is easy at points like these to make misanthropic or nihilist statements. It is easy to use the grotesque as a modality towards making political or ideological claims about the world, which is fine, though using it to make statements upon human nature is problematic. In his recent book entitled The Lucifer Principle, Howard Bloom argues that evil is an intrinsic part of nature, evolution, even part of our genes. Whether he does it self-reflexively or not, he essentially promotes the idea that a concept (evil), supposedly not created by human minds, has a material embodiment. This provides an opacity to a concept like nature, which cannot in itself be essentialized. Such a problem arises when one tries to say that the grotesque lies at the heart of human nature. Bakhtin writes that the grotesque is “a body in the act of becoming…never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body.” Grotesques could be better understood as “modalities; better described for what they do, rather than what they are.”¹ Hence, the grotesque and nature are processes, lived and constructed through thought. One can be used to interpret the other as one would experience a forest by walking through it. Both are beyond good and evil. I myself bring the grotesque to the grotesque.

San Francisco Barbie then became a video that was an experiment, especially in its editing and sound design, in how to construct an image of something like the Tenderloin. Barbie comes into it for two reasons. One, we were shooting some of the project with the new Barbie Video Girl camera (see below), a grotesque figure in herself. The grotesque is where “Griffins merge boundaries between lion and eagle….”¹ Barbie here is not only the embodiment of an ideal femininity, but she’s also a video camera, a chimera with a lens in her chest and a viewfinder in her back. The video image she records, as you will see in the film, resists pictorial boundaries almost by establishing them. The image limits its resolution, thus transforming contouring shapes into angular pixels. All of the color in the image is desaturated into a sickeningly bleak color scheme. The camera’s sensitivity to movement makes the image quiver like Jello. Conversely, she opposes the equipment of my collaborators, with their expensive SLR cameras that produce slick high definition video images that are technologically designed to reproduce reality in faith. Truly, it is ridiculous to give Barbie any sort of subjectivity, agency, or even gender, especially in light of this technological monstrosity. But, one uses the master’s tools to reconstruct his house so to speak.

In the end, the film is Barbie’s experience of horror, absurd awe, and hallucination at traveling through the Tenderloin. The film is a set of contradictions; an examination of cultural boundaries.¹ San Francisco Barbie: the embodiment of all that a girl can be…in San Francisco.

 ¹Connelly, Francis S. “Introduction,” Modern Art and the Grotesque. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Film:

San Francisco Barbie (Journey Through the Tenderloin) from charles chadwick on Vimeo.