Reversals à la Rabelais
by Joe Fyfe, February 12, 2026
Rudolf Stingel, Untitled (After Sam), 2005–2006, Oil on canvas,139 1/2 × 188 in.© Rudolf Stingel. Courtesy the Artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Sometimes an artwork helps me understand it better if it unveils concrete links and echoes from the past, after a work of art or literature from the canon or from elsewhere. Vistas are opened out along the route: overlapping time and style, (contradicting the art-historical construction of influences that follow or react to one another), non-linearly, like roots that grow surreptitiously, underground, that travel distances then flourish, opening again at some unexpected juncture. It can help enormously, opening new potentialities and insights in the artist’s purpose, or the larger purposes of art.
Two examples from contemporary painting: Rudolph Stingel’s self-portrait done in a quasi-photo-realist style, Untitled (After Sam) 2005–2006, depicts the alluring artist in melancholy, slumped on a bed, with a view from the foot of it, undoubtedly referring to Mantegna’s foreshortened Dead Christ c.1480. A second example: Arthur Danto’s observation that Andy Warhol’s silkscreened and painted image of 112 elegantly bulbous Coca-Cola bottles in rows, Green Coca-Cola Bottles (1962) made him (Danto) think of a sculptural relief of a series of miniature Buddha images he saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It goes both ways. Contemporary work can show us the past in new ways too.
The historian and philosopher of art Thierry De Duve once said that one can compare anything with anything. This works if the comparison brings me closer to what is under scrutiny. One way to look at a lot of art is through aesthetics, which to use a kind of shorthand, you might say that art classicizes. Warhol again is the clearest example of making things from everyday life seem timelessly beautiful.
Last summer, on the Greek island of Hydra, once again attempting to move forward on my biography of the artist and critic John Coplans, I reread an article I had written on him for a California magazine. I had used the proper adjective “Rabelaisian” which seemed fitting: Coplans was earthy, was concerned with the body, was salacious, provocative and scatological in conversation and produced work (photos of his aging naked body) that might be considered grotesque.
François Rabelais (whom I only understood at that moment was that he wrote about outrageously monstrous doings), was a doctor as well as a lawyer, a writer, a monk, and a priest. Coplans was also a polymath: critic, curator, publisher, photographer, artist. I thought this was a good comparison. I still do. But as sometimes happens when writing an essay, one desires a thoroughness that is a cover for procrastination and then does research on something tangential that one pretends is necessary: I thought I should investigate what Rabelaisian really meant.
It made what for me were remarkable discoveries: Rabelais’ five-part literary masterpiece, Gargantua and Pantagruel, is considered the first modern novel, certainly the first in French and in some ways the first post-modern in its intertextuality and its antic blending of genres. Coming between 1532 and 1564, about fifty to seventy-five years before Don Quixote, the book was a recounting of the adventures of the namesakes of the book, a father and son who were giants. The book is purposely, exaggeratingly human.
In the thickly descriptive, loquacious and digressive text, the reader is pulled through a mire of comically hyperbolical and epic incidents. Breaks occur within its density where pages of lists appear and or there are exhaustingly thorough paragraphs of descriptive adjectives. Rabelais becomes one of the characters by the third book. Later, in another reflexive maneuver, some conversations appear frozen in ice only to be heard when they thaw out. The book itself, furthering its meta-novel, form-distorting quality, was bound and printed like a law book rather than how literary publications were made at that time.
Rabelais was known for his great erudition and he also invented a lot of words. Throughout are references to Classical literature in Latin and Greek phrases as well as other European languages alongside terminologies and stock phrases from the most vulgar market doggerel to the most learned vocabularies: philosophy and mathematics, theology, the sciences and occultism. His primary characters were taken from folktales. His purpose was social; what we might now call institutional criticism, but Rabelais’ method had a necessary guardedness under the continual burlesque of contradiction, mockery, obscenity and ironic reversals. Gargantua and Panatgruel are apparently tough going in the original old French. My English translation was from the mid-1600’s (by one Sir Thomas Urquhart) with later revisions, I could get the gist of it, but it was like reading through a scrim.
Making my way into it, as I still am, I needed additional books, guides and searches through academic papers, (and there are many) to at all understand what was going on and what any of it meant. One thing that all commentaries agree on was Rabelais’ ultimate benevolence for human foibles as his book sent up figures in law, the church, the scholastic establishment, authorities of all kinds. Perusing the text bore revelations and fruitful comparisons. Rabelais returns the reader to the base, the body, deflecting the author’s presence. Inheritors include Sterne’s meta-novel Tristram Shandy, Swift’s comical disgust. The intense wordplay of Joyce. Beckett’s constant resort to nose-picking, shitting, orifices, etc.
The Russian critical theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais’ most noted modern analyst, was indispensable. He locates Gargantua and Pantagruel as a literary production that straddles the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Derived from an ongoing idiom of folk culture that he calls the carnivalesque, “the sense of the gay relativity of the prevailing truths and authorities”. Carnival, he states, “marked the suspension of all hierarchical ranks, privileges, norms and prohibitions”; The dominance of what he calls “grotesque realism”, in this narrative of distortion, polyglossia, and bodily functions, with eating, drinking, shitting, pissing, fucking, and cursing, according to Bakhtin, being universal and cosmic, represents all the people.
For example, there is a chapter describing how Gargantua found the most satisfying way to wipe his ass. After a long experimentation with many objects, a ladies handbag, a velvet pillow, and on and on, he decides that the neck of a large goose is best. According to Bakhtin, “the language of excrement” folk culture was closely linked with fertility. Carnivalesque images are ‘Intimately related to life-birth-death…devoid of cynicism and coarseness”.
I thought of Picasso’s description of Cubism as being “base materialism”, so faithfully expanded upon in Krauss and Bois’ study of Bataille’s “Informe” and (again) Beckett’s insistent scatology. Beckett also came to mind when I considered his cast of grotesque characters, and, in a very different way, how he would break up & ridicule language.
In addition, reading Rabelais aided my understanding of the sacral element in the comic and the sexual as well as the disgusting and blasphemous in art. Rabelais wrote that, in his book, “you will find another kind of taste…a doctrine profound and abstruse…which will disclose …the most glorious Sacraments…in what concerneth your Religion…and life economical…”
Reconsiderations abounded the more I investigated: The chthonic facture of Dubuffet, with its clownish figures suspended in peat-like, diarrhetic humus, whom T.J Clark once commented that “the level on which they truly affect us …[is] the power of their lightness”, a new respect for the work of Paul McCarthy with his monumental butt plugs, his shit, paint and mayonnaise performances, his films of actors playing art collectors looking at his asshole, of Nikki de Saint Phalle, particularly her early work of white painted “Altars” of dolls, religious imagery and hunting trophies hung with bags of pigmented oil that would explode when she shot at them.
Niki de Saint Phalle, Autuel O.A.S, 1962-1992. © Niki Charitable Art Foundation.
Bakhtin contrasts this late-medieval parodistic attitude towards all that was holy or judicial with that of the modern parody, and that of all post-enlightenment times, is in comparison, negative and distanced while the carnivalesque is ambivalent and regenerating. (Maybe some modern visual art, I wondered, did, in fact, escape this distance, and attempted to speak to all the people?) In general, he wrote that “The medieval culture of laughter was the drama of bodily life (copulation, birth, growth, eating, drinking, defecation)”. And laughter was about destroying fear. “Laughter was seen as man’s highest spiritual privilege, inaccessible to other creatures”
Rabelais was both condemned and celebrated in his lifetime and down through the centuries. Though he is considered the founder of French literature, his reputation fluctuated over what is now 500 years since the first appearance of his novel. Voltaire, in his philosophical letters, wrote that “in his extravagant and unintelligible book, has spread extreme gaiety and greater impertinence; he has lavished erudition, filth, and boredom.” While Flaubert wrote in his “Study of Rabelais” that “to some, he appears as a drunken and cynical monk, a disorderly and fantastic mind, as obscene as it is ingenious, dangerous in idea, revolting in expression…[but] it is a whole practical philosophy, gentle, moderate, skeptical it is true, but which leads after all to living well and being an honest man…His work is a historical fact; It has such importance in itself that it is linked to each age and explains its thinking.”
Looking at contemporary works through the lens of Rabelais is a reminder of the timelessness of art as well as its timeless history of misreading and mistrust. I very often wonder about the general distrust of artists, even among art critics. Amazing the faith that’s still, by default, put in priests, politicians, news commentators, centers of power, official assemblies, spokespersons, influencers, judges and the police.
As mentioned earlier, I hadn’t thought much about McCarthy and Saint-Phalle before my Rabelais-led reconsiderations. I can imagine your average person, whoever that is, dismissing altogether artists that do seemingly inexplicable things. On the other hand, most people don’t understand that in another sense, artists are not to be held responsible for their work in the same way as these “guardians” of the populace, but they are trying to depict reality. The important ones are “reality-instructors”, a phrase used in Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog, to indicate figures that instruct one from a superior position with hard realities, lawyers, for example. But I am using it in exactly the opposite way. Artists attempt to reveal reality in a generous and ambivalent manner but often in an extremely roundabout, transgressive way and many imagine themselves as equals to all.
Reading Bakhtin, we begin to understand that from antiquity through the Middle Ages a “second world and a second life outside officialdom” existed, that is, a kind of artificial negativity, made of comic rituals and myths that through parody and mockery provided a necessary temporary leveling of hierarchies that challenged official truths.
One of the standout chapters in Gargantua and Pantagruel is about the Abbey of Theleme, a utopia where all the rules of a medieval abbey, a cloister known to house ugly repressed monks, with strict rules, timetables and dress are reversed, where the motto over the entrance is “Do what you wish” and attractive lords and ladies consort together and discuss philosophy. It’s an example of the carnivalesque literary device of “a world turned inside out.”
Actions and objects involving reversal, subtraction or transformation, perhaps begins to appear in present memory in visual art when the pictorial frame expanded to breaking and gave way to Pop Art: making everyday items very large, or soft, or both. Paintings that looked like big comic strips, or using commercial printing techniques, or billboard imagery. Most all these methods involved gigantism, as it happens. Bakhtin wrote that carnival celebrated “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and the established order” . This experience, “opposed to all that was readymade or completed…demanded ever changing, playful undefined forms.”
Closer to the present, David Hammons, for example, made a portrait of Jesse Jackson, How Ya Like Me Now? (1989) with white skin and blonde hair and he created an American flag made of black stars, black stripes, a red striped and a green field, African-American Flag (1990) the colors of Marcus Garvey’s pan-African union. The artist Glenn Ligon uses various turn-around devices, such as a series paintings printed from photographs of the crowds at Million-Man March in Washington, where he removed the text from every placard that was carried, indicating the silence of black men towards their gay brothers, Hands (1996) or his neon construction of the word America, America (2023) with letters partially reversed.
This device got me thinking about the comparably Rabelaisian, though hardly scatological, in fact, thoroughly fastidious artist Adam McEwen. Utilizing reversals in texts and objects, one of his earlier series of artworks are individual wall works that are large reproductions of what appear to be obituaries from London’s Daily Telegraph but are of well-known figures who are still alive. McEwen studied English literature at Oxford and then moved on to what he called the “language-based” art program at Cal Arts in Los Angeles. Later, after a job writing obituaries for the Daily Telegraph in London, he began the series. The text was written by McEwen in the lightly officious style of the newspaper.
I saw his first solo exhibition in the US at Nicole Klagsbrun in Chelsea and only remember the three large obituaries of Bill Clinton, Jeff Koons, and Macaulay Culkin. I had no idea what they were about and simply reacted with a dismissal that this was something I was not interested in having disturbed me. Only by chance I came across an interview with him with the illustrious writer Ian Penman, where he explained that he made them of people he admired and had respect for what they were doing.
“We all have more power over our lives than we realize” he explained to Penman, ‘everything around us says ‘there isn’t hope…that this is how it is and you must participate…you really have no option…I am going to remind you every time you see a billboard of a beautiful person you will be aware that you are not that beautiful person…you must buy something to become closer to it…The only way you can feel better is to pay and participate’…These people [in his obituaries] demonstrate that that’s not true…they are guides…that that prison you are in is just an illusion…[his obituaries are] all potential demonstrations of freedom.”
In the introduction to the first book, Rabelais writes that the following narratives are not just “mocqueries, folatrerie, & menteries ioyeuses” (“save jests, idiocies and amusing fictions”) but “stuffed with high conceptions” and the reader will be “well-advised and valiant by the reading of them”: These are instructive allegories, he says.
We should note here that Rabelais is known as a “Renaissance Humanist” , a category of thinker that was versed in newly discovered manuscripts from ancient Greece and Rome and represented an alternative to the strictures that had formed around Christianity by the medieval church. The logic here was that Jesus Christ was the Savior but also human thus everything that was human was divine, including bodily functions.
Like the late medieval moment of Rabelais, these are dark ages, a time when exterior forces, you name it, that saturate us with false values: the dominance of attainment measured by materialism, the endless propulsion of images brought into our personal space by commercial culture, by the monitoring of our responses and curiosity as we troll the internet, endless cycles of consumption and desire, as external definitions of our selves are overwhelming, McEwen’s work is saying that we are not simply products of the discourse, that personal agency exists, here are examples:
Similarly, McEwen in his obit reversals are allegories for this era. His Dolly Parton obituary, he explains, is about a person who comes from a poor obscure background then after great fame returns to her origins and provides education, both locally and nationwide, after finding out federal funding was cut for schoolbooks. Another is Greta Thalberg, who when barely into her teens caught the world’s attention in response to the climate crisis.
Prying an opening into the discourse seems no easier now than 500 years ago. Gargantua and Pantagruel is a literary work dominated by descriptive imagery, and this word and image mix is somewhere in all McEwen’s productions. Another series of his sculptures consists of everyday objects, some of them are his credit card, an ATM machine, a library stool, a rolltop gate, and air conditioner’s grill, that are accurately reproduced in graphite. The material gives these familiar objects a dull sheen and are somewhat mordant. All of his work is strangely funny, and he has said that he thinks that using humor gives us access to truths that can be gotten to in no other way.
“A lot of people have a problem with humor; there’s a contingency that says humor in art is a symptom of that art’s failure. I don’t agree; I think humor is part of the equation. I don’t go out of my way to make humorous art but I think humor is a glue that can hold together opposing ideas.”
In his interview with Penman, McEwen agrees that his work is optimistic. Bakhtin comments on Rabelais’ “peculiar optimism" and in another passage describes the medieval and Renaissance grotesque as “it liberates the world from all that is dark and terrifying…[it is] completely gay and bright. All that was frightening in ordinary life is turned into amusing or ludicrous monstrosities.” McEwen might agree that to be alive today is scary, as are the objects we are surrounded by, the loaded power of the credit card, the sentinel-like presence of the ATM, the forbiddingness of roll top protective barriers, all contain associations to violence, to financial ruin, to physical accident.
All the manufactured objects we are surrounded by also have a permanence that differs from our own bodies. Recasting many of these familiar objects, the public furniture in our common life, in graphite seems to give them a half-life, an ephemerality, or to utilize another definition of the grotesque, to indicate the body in a state of less than the ideal, to make note of its mortality. All his production makes use in some way of “a world inside out” including his attention to form. Paintings that are photo reproductions are printed on lengths of cellulose sponge. Another series of paintings, very pretty ones, are made from used chewing gum.
After his education in literature and then in conceptual art, it’s important that McEwen spent time as a journalist: it returned him to the perspective of a generalist: writing obituaries, he had to keep a wide readership in mind. Like Rabelais’ marriage of fine learning with folk culture, McEwen chose a range of well-known largely cross-cultural celebrities for the subjects of his fake obituaries. When they were shown in London, they were visible in the gallery windows at all hours and were legible to passersby.
I am somewhat aware that Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais when it appeared in English many years after its first publication in Russia was important. And it also appears that Gargantua and Pantagruel make a good marker for the beginning of modernism in its obvious artistic freedom. But it is interesting to me that in my first go-round with this material that the work of McEwen should seem to appear as such a strong example of what Rabelais artistic message was, that is, what an artist’s job is, that is, it seems to me, to make people less afraid. And to utilize the comic. And sincerity. And lightness to do so.
Rule-changers: Adam McEwen's hypothetical obituaries of Greta Thunberg, Sadhguru, Dolly Parton and David Hammons at Gagosian, Davies Street, London
© Adam McEwen. Photo: Lucy Dawkins. Courtesy Gagosian
1 The book was eventually published in Russian in 1965, under the title Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Its 1968 English translation by Hélène Iswolsky was given the title, Rabelais and His World.
2 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World p.11
3 Bakhtin, p. 149-50
4 François Rabelais, Gargantua & Pantagruel p. 5
5 Bakhtin, p. 88
6 “ p. 68
7 https://www.musee-rabelais.fr/2021/07/08/voltaire-critique-rabelais/
8 https://www.musee-rabelais.fr/2020/11/20/flaubert-influence-par-rabelais/
9 Saul Bellow, Herzog, p.125
10 Bakhtin, p. 6
11 Bakhtin, p 10
12 “ “ 11
13 The_upside_down_play_of_analogy_from_Bak (p. 14).
14 G & P p.4
15 “ p.5
16 Bakhtin p. 47