Chris DAZE Ellis
“Coney Island Freak Show Museum,” oil on linen.
Tallest man in the world. Fattest woman. Bearded ladies. Living skeletons. A man suffering from phocomelia, or flipper-like limbs. Another suffering from frontonasal dysplasia, or cleft face syndrome. The deformed. Contortionists. “Eubangi” women with discs in their lips giving them “monster mouths” big as plates.
All these are in Side Show, the fascinating and disturbing new exhibition surveying Coney Island-style freak shows across genres and time periods that just opened at the Yale School of Art’s Edgewood Gallery. Running until Mar. 20, the show has 70 pieces by 29 artists, ranging from sculpture to photographs, from daguerrotypes of 19th-century sword swallowers to a two-headed taxidermied sheep.
Diane Arbus
“This is Eddie Carmel, a Jewish giant with his parents in the living room of their home in the Bronx,” gelatin silver print, 1970.
They’re images that, in the flesh, people pay money to gawk at. The success of Side Show is that you well might leave staring at yourself, and what it means to be human.
That’s because the subject matter — “outsiders” of the normal — allow you to stare at them for money, as in “Olympia (Betty Lou Williams),” featuring a performer billed as “the four-legged, three-armed wonder.”
James G. Mundie
Williams’s deformity, caused by a birth defect, earned her so much cash over a career of being gawked at in side shows that she could put 11 siblings through college and buy a 260-acre farm for her family, according to Lisa Kereszi, the show’s curator.
In James G. Mundie’s 1999 drawing of her, she is very much staring back at you, revealing the other side of Side Show. Her gaze is gentle, but she’s returning ours. It’s as if she’s challenging our voyeurism. If the mediation of the money is removed, why do we spend time this way, staring at her?
David Carbone
“A Contortionist in Red,”oil on canvas, 2000.
Then there’s David Carbone‘s quietly disturbing contribution to the show (pictured). His attractive contortionist draws you in, as if she were a Betty Grable pin-up. But check out the eyes. Who’s looking more intently at whom?
As Kereszi quotes Carbone in her curatorial notes: “I turn viewers into voyeurs, provoking them to feel implicated and confused, the way we are as children when we first look into a mirror.”
Among the pleasures of the show is the large number of banners made to hawk side shows to the “normal” people walking a fair’s midway.
While these large and colorful works were born as straight advertisements, in the most interesting of them, such as Johnny Meah’s “Them,” (pictured), we see the freaks from behind the stage, with the tables turned on the uncomfortable viewers. Who’s normal here, and who’s outside of the norm?
Riva Lehrer‘s daring charcoal drawing of a frontally nude Mat Fraser, displaying everything including his shortened arms, ups the ante even further.
It asks: What is the beautiful? The ideal? What are you used to looking at? Like several others in the show, Lehrer’s piece reminds us that yesterday’s Coney Island freaks earning a living from impairments may also be accurately described as today’s disability activists and performers — as Mat Fraser in fact is.
The contemporary artists in the show, such as Lehrer, Chris “DAZE” Ellis (pictured with his photo of today’s Coney Island), and Carbone, use their compositions to raise questions about disfigurement, disability, and race. Their subjects look at us. The figures in the work of older artists, such as photographers Diane Arbus and Weegee, rarely stare out at the viewer, and when they do, their gaze doesn’t rivet.
With the artists of three or four decades ago you seem to get more gawk, and less discomfort, for your time and money.
It’s also interesting to compare how the images from the historical material in the show — such as John Kay’s “Mr. Obrien the Irish Giant” of 1803 — is positively innocent, almost endearing compared to Arbus’s Jewish giant.
Cushing/Whitney Medical Library
Likewise the ladies in great English caricaturist Robert Cruikshank‘s 1825 etching “The Living Skeleton” (pictured) are having a fine old time viewing the “prodigious” parts of Mr. Skeleton, wondering if he’s married and what his wife might be like. These kinds of humor and irony seem to be missing from the harsher, more bruising contemporary stuff.
One of my favorite pieces in the show is one of the most modest, and I think provocative: “Tent,” an anonymous photo from 1940, which is from Kereszi’s own collection. Over a dozen men, all similarly dressed in dark trousers and white hats, are leaning in to gawk at someone or something inside the tent. And I mean really gawk; these guys are bent over in the enthusiasm of looking.
Naturally the hawker is pleased, arms raised in a gesture of victory at the crowd he’s assembled. The men’s behinds, not very attractively aimed at the viewer, seem to be the center of the composition and, intended or not, they make their statement.
You don’t know what the target of their gaze inside the tent is. It doesn’t matter. Whatever is inside is exercising great power. At the moment, the men crowded at the opening give the impression of a herd of sheep, though hardly as cute.
What will these men do, having gawked and stared sufficiently, when they depart and go home? Will they act or think differently? Will they treat the one-armed or no-legged veterans they might meet differently? Will their side show jaunt affect how they vote? What’s your guess?
Side Show runs from now until Mar. 20, and will host a series of panel discussions and performances accompanying the exhibition.
