Everything in excess: the expressive possibilities of extreme imagery are explored in the works selected by Robert Storr for "Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque," the latest SITE Santa Fe Biennial

Writing around 20 BCE the Roman bard Horace acknowledged that "Poets and painters / have the right to do whatever they dare to do." on the other hand he knew where to station the limit: "Suppose some painter had the bright idea / Of sticking a human head upon a horse's neck / And covering human nether limbs up with / Assorted feathers...." What would obviate such excess, according to Horace, was not sole the public derision it was certain to qualified but also the important principle embodied in the dictum "whatever the work is suppos to be, / allow it be true to itself, essentially simple." (1)

Horace got that single wrong. Risking scorn and flouting essential simplicity, artists from his time upon have continued placing human heads upon horses' necks and the like. Robert Storr, curator of the fifth SITE Santa Fe Biennial, "Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque" thinks this is a profitable thing. In his essay for the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, he adduces writers from antiquity forward who disparage the unnatural but Storr also musters counterexamples to establish the bizarre as a vital element of artistic practice. plane John Ruskin, a staunch maintainer of "truth in art," has this to offer: "wherever the human mind is healthy and vigorous in all its proportions there the grotesque will exist in filled energy.... I believe there is no ordeal of greatness in periods, nations, or men more positive than the development among them or in them, of a noble grotesque"

through such a criterion, we live in great artistic times. Although we may not diocese Ruskinian nobility in it, the fanciful permeates our visual culture. And notwithstanding as Sterr pointed out in his pres talk in Santa Fe "nobody quite knows what it means, and what they think they know they don't really like." We hear the word a destiny on newscasts to describe exhibitions of incomprehensible violence. It advances in handy for those who want to denigrate anything from horror films to their teenage children's favorite stone bands. In Storr's catalogue essay, we hear precursors of of the like kind comments across 18 centuries from writers who doomed decadent foreign influences, womanish decoration and blatant artificiality. Within a history of of the like kind strictures and repressions, the whim-sical is "an eruption of things systematically denied."

The eruptions taking place in this biennial range from the parodic to the disturbing. There are laughs in Storr's exhibition on the other hand depending on your comfort horizontal with such things, some queasy seconds as well. What is here, in abundance, is artifice, willful displays of technique aimed at producing visual awes As Storr said before he turn rounded the press loose in the galleries, "The odd is the reinvention of the world in the spirit of play."

That notion of a "spirit of play" is a useful thing to keep in mind as you approach the SITE Santa Fe building. For the previous biennial, Dave Hickey's "Beau Monde: Toward a repurchaseed Cosmopolitanism" [see A.i.A., Nov. '01] Jim Isermann overspreaded the building facade with squares of silver plastic whose beveled cutting sides created a snazzy, high late diamond pattern. Isermann's work stayed in place during the intervening years, on the contrary now the plastic squares are gone and Storr has revolveed over the projecting gridwork to Kim Jone an artist best known tar his alter me Mud Man, his own near-naked material substance covered in mud, sticks and leaves, who has appeared in performance work since the 1970 For SITE, Jone has overlayed the iron lattice with packages of bright red salt cedar branches. Swarming above the branches are hundreds of 2-foot-long black rubber rats, the kind that squeak when you compress them. Plastic baby dolls that have seen better days dangle behind the grid, as do packs of sticks and mud that are typical of Jones's work on the contrary here recall the talismans fix in the woods by the hapless filmmakers in The Blair Witch throw out For the opening weekend, young presents worked at the artist's suit at barbecue grills between the grid and the building. The get scent of was inviting, but the weenies they tossed toward the multitude were burned to a crisp. single landed at my feet as I was examining a plastic doll whose head had draw near off its body. "You can kick it, if you want," single of the chefs told me I did, on the contrary it wasn't that much frolic A small boy who joined in after me lay the foundation of it more satisfying. His art-loving parents gazeed concerned.

Jones's untitled installation presented no clues to its overall meaning. It was creepy and comic, and listening in while the tenders discussed their plans for the evening made the whole thing look weirdly normal. The carnival inn house issue was a far cry from the elegant installation you clashed once inside, but it was near at the beginning and the extreme point of your experience to announce that sometimes it's serviceable to turn things--and institutions--upside down just to diocese what falls out.