A Reading of the Grotesque Art’s Visual Elements in Jenny Saville’s Works Based on the Views of Mikhail Bakhtin

Jenny Saville, the Scottish contemporary artist found immediate success in the 1990s due to the depiction of corpulent women on a large scale; depictions that were considered to be a rebellion against the long-lasting historical practice of drawing women according to the ideal constructs of beauty and slim female body. Saville’s works were considered as bold measures in contemporary art, and the updated historical context which was brought by the oversized depiction of the figures linked Saville to keywords such as atypical, inconsistent, and exaggerated. Saville’s figures fall under the category of grotesque art due to the depiction of suspended, amorphous, transplanted, and transgendered limbs. The human body and its vital and physical behaviors play a significant role in Saville’s imagination. The bodies created through grotesque realism are positive entities that delineate a world’s population regardless of their class and have the potential to inject instability in the accepted societal, political, and aesthetic norms. The essence of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notable views on carnival-grotesque disassociates itself from all the monotonous and invariable conventions, arrangements, stable truths, and cliches and provides an opportunity for revision and creation of novel worldviews. This theory provides a fresh outlook through which the works of Jenny Saville can be studied. The main objective of this study is to analyze the latent layers of meaning in Jenny Saville’s paintings which contain the implicit definitions and implications of criticizing the contemporary political, societal, cultural, and aesthetic landscape. Due to their authenticity, these features are studied according to Bakhtin’s views in order to provide an answer for the following question: “How can the elements of grotesque art in Jenny Saville’s works be studied according to Bakhtin’s views?” In terms of type, methodology, and developmental features, the present study is of qualitative and descriptive-analytical type. The findings of the present study reveal Saville’s attempt to pull apart and decentralize all the sumptuous and elegant features of contemporary society through her art. Saville expresses her dissatisfaction with the injustice and inequality in the society through overwhelming hierarchical orders and all that is considered to be dignified. Saville is drawn to expressions such as “mutation”, “transformation”, and “ambiguity”, and seeks the extravagant and bulky depictions of human figures that are comparable to Bakhtin’s interpretation of grotesque body with unique affinity and understanding of the material world. Saville’s recent works feature multilayered and overlapping masses of bodies and distorted limbs, that point to the notion of multiple truths and abundance of signifiers. The figures in her works – which often have elusive dimensions along with transplanted and transitional bodies – are arranged in a way to eliminate the line between creation and annihilation, and to demonstrate the cyclicity of time in grotesque imagination.  For Bakhtin, the Grotesque is against the hierarchiacal order, destroying all forms of social and racial classifications, like large figures of Saville, which provokes the audience to question the "policies of beauty standardization" and the "disgust caused by bodies not complying with the standards."