The grotesque, the bad, and the ugly

Jamian Juliano-Villani, Artist, New York
Diego Marcon, Artist, Milan
Moderator: Paul Clinton, Writer, London

One of the aesthetic turning points of Modernism is crystallized in Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (1873): ‘One evening I sat Beauty on my lap – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.’ In the wake of these words, the grotesque, the bad, and the ugly have become the seeds of an artistic revolution which, from Marcel Duchamp to Isa Genzken, has overturned our relationship to art by rejecting the idea of good taste. This discussion brings together some of the contemporary artists who have made Rimbaud’s phrase their own, pushing art to its formal limits.

Jamian Juliano-Villani was born in 1987 in Newark, New Jersey, and lives and works in New York. Her work is represented in international public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; and Groeninghe Art Collection, Bruges. In 2021, Juliano-Villani opened the East Village gallery and project space O’Flaherty’s. Recent exhibitions include ‘The Milk of Dreams’ at the Venice Biennale (2022) and ‘Jamian Juliano-Villani: It’ at Gagosian, New York (2024).

Diego Marcon’s practice primarily focuses on the moving image, centered on the investigation of cinematic archetypes in a process combining theoretical and structural approaches to filmmaking. Throughout his work – spanning film, video, and installation – empathy and vulnerability are deployed with intentional ambiguity, such that the instrumental use of their forms and figures constitute a blurred morality. This ambiguity is viewed by Marcon first and foremost as a political weapon of defiance.

Paul Clinton is a writer based in London. He has been the senior editor at Frieze magazine; the Royal Academy Fellow in Criticism; guest curator at EVA International; and is currently a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. His writing has appeared in Art Review, Frieze, Numéro, Mousse, London Review of Books, and catalogues for Tate Modern, Hayward Gallery, Barbican, and Mudam, among others. Curated projects include ‘duh? Art & Stupidity’, ‘Forbidden to Forbid’, ‘LIMP’, and ‘Militant Desire’.

The Art Basel Paris 2024 Conversations program is curated by Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou.
#grotesque #bad #ugly