When Tod Browning directed his seminal film, Freaks, in 1932, there wasn't the notion that it would become one of the most notorious and influential early American horror films. In the film, Browning reframes the idea of the circus “freak” as a close-knit, moral community, juxtaposed with the conventionally beautiful characters (the trapeze woman Cleopatra and the strongman) as selfish, cruel, and venal. The film argues that outward “normality” does not equal moral superiority. The film upends who counts as “normal” or “monstrous,” critiques social and moral hypocrisy, and forces viewers to confront their own appetite for spectacle.
Oh what a time to reconnect with this. GR gallery is pleased to announce FREAKS, an exhibition featuring artists Kazy Chan, Satoru Koizumi and Suanjaya Kencut. The show will present a total of 15 artworks, including paintings and sculptures, that bring together three artists whose practices are rooted in storytelling, emotional depth and quirky imagination. This event marks GR gallery’s first exhibition in its new Tribeca location at 116 Chambers Street 2F (between Church & W. Broadway). In this show, the audience can imbed themselves on the side of the monsters.
FREAKS highlights the resonance of memory in a context of liminality. It offers a gentle reminder that art can be joyful and introspective, easy, but also layered, a moment to pause, and perhaps, to begin again with renewed curiosity and playfulness.
In the film’s final sequence — the wedding banquet, the communal “We accept her!” chant, and the troupe’s punitive violence — functions as a concentrated moral and ideological pronouncement. By collapsing the movie’s central motifs into a single ritualized outburst of collective judgment, Browning forces the spectator into an ethical impasse: to read the scene as vindictive justice, as monstrous mob vengeance, or as an unsettling fusion of both.
Thinking about how this show functions, and the work in it, and to the program GR has created over the years, is to look at monsters or new characters as not foes but something deeper and something to be appreciated. A new frontier, and their on our side. —Evan Pricco