Feeding the Trolls: The Bait and Switch in Zoë Schneider’s Grotesque in the Grotto

As the fat body continues to face public reprobation, the gustatory work of Zoë Schneider offers an immersive portal into the aesthetics of fatness. Employing visual metaphors and surrogates to refigure the maligned fat form, Schneider’s new work, Grotesque in the Grotto (The Grotesque Thing is How We Treat Fat People) (2022), first lures us in, then unabashedly lets it all hang out. Grotesque in the Grotto is confrontational, and tactically so, as it refuses the regular ways the fat body is dressed up—made palatable—for public consumption. Schneider’s full-monty exposure chews the anti-fat approach with gusto, then spits it right back in our face, embodying a disruptive fat aesthetic of excess that normally ignites public ridicule.

Zoë Schneider, a multidisciplinary artist based in Regina on Treaty 4 Lands, labours through her practice to dismantle the social framework that makes fatness unapproachable. She achieves this by reorienting how the fat body is apprehended in space. For example, her works use enticingly familiar objects—plush bread loaves, creamy blobs, soft denim pillows—as stand-ins for fat figures, a means to preempt the common response of retreat from fatness. Schneider‘s whimsical, phantastic forms and sumptuous colours further undermine collective repulsion by connecting viewing fatness with visual pleasure. This trickery works to arouse curiosity and draw you into the orbit of her heavenly bodies. Often you are none the wiser to Schneider’s game until it’s too late—through this visual play, she’s attracted you to fatness.

We are offered a nibble of this methodology in Grotesque in the Grotto. The work features a purple wall—more evocative of a favour than a colour—that provides the backdrop for three (un)monumental sculptures rising from a purple platform. Their organic shapes, conglomerates of bread loaves and buns, are stuffed to the brim as they teeter on brick pedestals. They bulge with an excess that threatens to burst the material binding them together. With this figuration, which appears to hold up shape itself for our delectation, Schneider covertly brings the sidelined fat form into the gallery through a coy approximation of modernist vocabulary. Yet she overfeeds this aesthetic lexicon, fattening it up to humorously denigrate its exclusionary austerity and transgress the stronghold minimalism has on representation, value, and taste.

This first glimpse at Grotesque in the Grotto seems to poke fun at how calcified views on fatness limit the fat body, reducing it to other and positioning it as an object that can be either consumed or surveilled. Schneider’s installation frames its strange bounty of accretions as both bakery window display and warped diorama. It could almost be said to parody the collective’s stale imagining of what a natural-history exhibit on the fat body might look like. Are fat fgures best apprehended as vestiges of snacks past?

This tantalizing introduction simply acts as an amuse-bouche to whet our appetites. Schneider knows these glutinous busts won’t satiate, and we excitedly follow her breadcrumb trail to see what treats await on the reverse side of the wall. It’s oddly similar to a Hansel and Gretel expedition, and as we round the corner we are met with the big reveal. Schneider’s baiting has led us to a Candyland. Against the purple-favored wall are two cutouts reminiscent of gingerbread houses—both the confection and the architectural style. Bread loaves and buns stud their white surfaces in a haphazard design. Syrupy colours gel over the icing-stucco-smeared frames with a few glinting gilt potato chips tucked under the mounds. These wavy-edged backdrops, like a flipped version of the roofing borders on Gothic houses, direct our eyes to the centrepiece—a new shape in Schneider’s practice.

As opposed to the appetizing forms seen through the entrance, this embodied shape is a visual affront. Its striking full figure similarly features rolls and buns, but these are not like the easily abstracted ones presented on the exhibit’s flipside. The figure has curves that exceed those celebrated in contemporary body-positive media— this is no BBW, thick bitch, or Rubenesque woman. She is ruinous. The body is culled from a trio of Halloween costumes that try (and fail) to approximate the fat form. Their inability to accurately reflect this embodiment is ripped apart, quite literally, as Schneider uses the shredded get-ups for her own defiant purposes. She constructs a monstrous remix that boasts six breasts and three bellies, with arms that are fused together at the wrist. Above this body sit three doughy heads. Below, six spindly legs are balanced on bricks.

With this alien form, Schneider inserts a radical fatness into the gallery space, in defiance of the status quo that represses such bodies in the social realm and designates them as outsider, or unnatural. Grotesque in the Grotto further articulates the fat body’s social position by including three exaggerated, yeasty facial expressions, malleable heads that sprout gourds, and small animalesque feet that protrude from buckling legs. If the frst objects we encounter in the show anthropomorphize nonhuman forms, this aspect of the installation moves in the opposite direction. This fgure embodies the monster that fatness is expected to be.

Schneider acknowledges the social disruption of stitching the grotesque to the fat body. A reallocation of the Renaissance ideal, which identifies fatness with a sort of mystical beauty, drives her research and functions as a means to confront modern definitions that foreground abjection. She achieves this by borrowing the visual language of art history and utilizing ornamentation that charms the viewer to embrace a fat aura. In part, the installation underscores this approach, but as a foil for a deeper engagement with the grotesque and its connection to laughter, which I argue is used here for resistive purposes.

Frequently, representations of the fat body attempt to curb the kind of negative and unwanted (and unwarranted) attention typically directed at this body. Fat identities are often oriented around laughter, or pushed into unwanted disorientation through a laughter that attempts to disavow the attention the body receives. The labour to keep these bodies hidden, to not visualize or manifest their existence in spaces in order to uphold thin figurations, is confronted here as Schneider refuses to omit the fat form. The appearance of this disorderly body commands our gaze—the form occupies the spotlight from which it is usually shunned. Grotesque in the Grotto conjures a theatricality unafforded to fatness, and sets the stage for a disturbance Schneider has yet to realize in her other works.

Using a strongly materialist approach, Schneider visualizes the real-time process of how a fat body is apprehended in space: it is visually arresting. Caught in a stasis, this body projects our anxieties back at us. The yeasty facial expressions capture these fears, figuratively (will that extra roll turn us into doughy-faced loafs too?) and literally (lips and brows curl in terror, anger, and joy that, to me, can also be read as laughter). These are representative of the multiplicity of responses to fatness. There is, however, a counter-reversal of affect. The figure exposes the fat body’s own reaction to these responses. This interchange reflects the process of both bearing witness and being witnessed. This is a body horror that also captures the horror this body faces.

I want to conclude by concentrating on a joyous fat affect, a funny response to continued deprecation. By this I am not referencing fat’s relation to the figure of the clown, but alluding to an intra-community delight that spreads from embodying a disturbance. In Grotesque in the Grotto, Schneider exalts fatness. She centralizes this body, strips it down. Though her figure stands in for the continued rejections the fat body endures, it also stands out for its deft embodiment of the grotesque that lays bare all social nightmares. We are not treated to the kind of beautification processes that strive to unmark the fat body as a site of mockery. Schneider’s work denies these motives and dishes out heaping spoonfuls of her fat aesthetic to hungry critics. The work offers a mouthful to onlookers through a challenging dare of EAT ME that she happily knows will leave a lingering bad taste. This is critique served up with an unashamedly doughy, saccharine joy.

Christine Negus is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and recipient of the NFB’s Best Emerging Canadian Video/Filmmaker award. Negus’ work examines the potential of feminist, queer, and disability praxis through dis/embodied modes of resistance. Moving between installation and media projects, community programming, grassroots pedagogy, and critical writing, her practice embodies the generative possibilities of disobedience performed through minoritarian action.

This article is published in issue 39.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue