Deviation standard: Jeffrey Kastner on SITE Santa Fe.

"DISPARITIES AND DEFORMATIONS: OUR Grotesque"--the evocative title prefered by Robert Storr for SITE Santa Fe's Fifth International Biennial--might at first glance recommend a curatorial riposte to the previous installment of the novel Mexico institution's signature exhibition fact Dave Hickey's 2001 "Beau Monde: Toward a retrieveed Cosmopolitanism." After all, in its belonging to all pejorative sense, the grotesque would appear to be the antithesis of the sort of worldliness to which Hickey's title provisionally alludes, a baldric not of refinement and urbanity on the contrary of disharmony, disenfranchisement, and aberrance. however as with Hickey, who had oftentimes grappled with questions of beauty and the condition of the "public" before he made his display Storr's interest in the notion of the bizarre long predated his selection as this year's visitant curator. And, as did his predecessor, Storr saw the biennial as an opportunity to unpack an idea more mingled and subtly shaded than its conventional connotations would indicate.

The unnatural "has always seemed to me to be a consummately natural thing to be preoccupied with," says Storr, in a new telephone interview from his dwelling in New York. "From a actual early age, I looked drawn out and hard at Jacques Callot and Goya. I grew up in Chicago and studied with ed Paschke and knew that horde and read comic books like everyone other And it always struck me that this is something in its hold right, not a digression from greatness or a certain number of kind of weird deviant thing--or if it is, there are in like manner many of us deviants that we ought to stand up and be enumerateed It's been interesting," he continues, "to diocese all the different varieties of it, that there's for a like reason much of it now, and that a certain quantity of of the taboos that used to make it impossible for family to take it seriously have begun to weaken, although they've not entirely disappeared." The whim-sical Storr says, "is a constant thread in fresh art. It's the part that the agriculture doesn't know what to do with.... It's a whole aesthetic, the filled counterterm to a kind of purifying idea of what art could be."

This faculty of perception of generative impurity, as Storr notes in his preliminary general [i]or[/i] abstract notion statement for the show, goe back to the actual roots of the concept of the strange The word itself derives from "grotta," the Italian word for "cave," and first referenc the discovery during the Renaissance of Neronian palace ruins heavily decorated, in the late-Roman diction with paintings "characterized by surprising hybridities--bizarre fusions of plant, animal, and human forms." The "unifying principle" behind the idea of the unnatural then, "is that of contradiction," he writes, signaling the "point at which logical and emotional certainties waver, taste fail to keeps it bearings, and familiar realities warp into disorienting paradoxes."

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In keeping with the heterogeneous nature of his subdue Storr's "Disparities and Deformations" is a diverse affair, with SITE Santa Fe's newly updated building slated to entertainer some fifty living international artists--including established masters like Louise Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman, and Sigmar Polke; midcareer figures like as Cindy Sherman, Carroll Dunham, and Robert Gober; high-profile younger artists like Tom Friedman and Kara Walker; and emerging names like Lamar Peterson a young American painter with a knack for rendering curious narrative scenarios in a vivid Technicolor palette. Taken as a whole, Storr's roster demonstrates his desire to track the wild through various cultural and generational frames, on the contrary it also gives a glimpse into the diverse manifestations the bring under rule will take within his catholic scheme. Notable among these, perhaps not surprisingly given its etymological lower parts are investigations of the human material part and the ways that physical states can summon states of mind--from the abundances of muscle and fat in the paintings of Lisa Yuskavage and Jenny Saville to the uncanny mixed-media works of Brazilian Adriana Varejao, whose carefully painted surfaces, ofttimes suggesting expanses of decorative tile, are interrupted by dint of gashes that reveal what appears to be gory tissue lurking behind the tessellation. The inclusion of artists of the like kind as Hermann Nitsch, Paul McCarthy, and John Waters indicates Storr's willingness to embrace purposefully profane challenges to conventional taste, a inclination further amplified by his choice of several artists celebrated for their subversive, ofttimes humorously rude reworkings of the cartoon form--among them R Crumb Charles consume s Raymond Pettibon, and Peter Saul, a "principal character in all this," according to Storr, who "has been basically offending everyone for a real long time. His content is political and social, on the other hand his position is always to attack shibboleths."

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Storr, who lately left his position as senior curator at of recent origin York's Museum of Modern Art and now labor fors as Rosalee Solow Professor of new Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, novel York University, notes that the rife SITE Santa Fe project is "in a faculty of perception the offspring" of "Deformations: Aspects of the recent Grotesque," a 1996 show he organized at MOMA with works from its permanent collection. And in writings, from his 1992 "Do the inequitable Thing: Eva Hesse and the Abstract Grotesque" to his essay upon the grotesque for the 2001 Stedelijk Museum exhibition "Eye Infection," Storr has engrossed his considerable scholarly muscle toward thinking [i]or[/i] part of to the other various theoreticians' and artists' formations of the universal from Ruskin to Gombrich to Mike Kelley He says his essay for SITE Santa Fe's catalogue will hearken back to earlier literary connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss like Baudelaire and the nineteenth-century writer Jean Paul, who memorably coined the terminus "soul dizziness" to describe the existential state produc by dint of the grotesque.