FIN!
posted by maria edney at 3:24 PM
1 comments
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
The Real and The Unreal; Uncanny Aesthetics in Post-modern Art and Culture
In the following reflective essay I will attempt to summarise and conclude the research that I have gathered whilst analysing the cultural context of my drawing practice.
The guiding question that I asked was,
‘Is there a correlation between the prevalence of uncanny aesthetics in contemporary drawing (and art generally) and the defining facets of post-modern western culture?’
Chapter 1 - A Rise in Uncanny Aesthetics.
Strange New Art for A Strange New World
A recurring aesthetic tendency in contemporary drawing (and art in general) is that of ‘the uncanny’. In Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay entitled Das Unheimlich (The Uncanny) he identifies specific objects and situations which are likely to give rise to uncanny sensations in the viewer. Things such as automata, shadows, body parts, out of context placings, doppelgangers, inanimate objects that become animated, the previously homely now made unhomely, the familiar rendered unfamiliar, eerie or weird. The uncanny according to Freud is something frightening and fearful. The uncanny has become the subject of aesthetics because it is concerned with a certain kind of feeling or sensation or emotional impulses that can be provoked in the viewer. The era of Modernism marked a turn in aesthetics, especially following the Dada movement, where a fascination with the grotesque and ugly developed into a kind of negative aesthetic. There has been a recent resurgence in this sort of aesthetic (think of de-skilling and the popularity of Outsider Art for example) which I believe began to emerge prior to the millennium, at a time of great unease and uncertainty and when a fear of the future abounded. According to Adrian Forty the uncanny in art today is being used ‘as a metaphor to describe the more disturbing features of late twentieth (and now twenty-first) century life. In his introduction to the Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler states that, for the modernist avant-gardes the uncanny readily offered itself as an instrument of defamiliarisation, as if a world estranged and distanced from its own nature could only be recalled to itself by shock, by the effects of things made deliberately strange. Expressionist artists explored the less nostalgic conditions of the modern uncanny, pressing the themes of the double, the automat, and derealization into service as symptoms of post historical existence. Symbolists, futurists, Dadaists, and of course surrealists and metaphysical artists found in the uncanny a state between dream and awakening particularly susceptible to exploitation. In this way the uncanny was renewed as an aesthetic category, but now reconceived as the very sign of modernism's propensity for shock and disturbance. Vidler goes on to say that, the uncanny might be understood as a significant psychoanalytical and aesthetic response to the real shock of the modern trauma (ww1) that, compounded by it's unthinkable repetition on an even more terrible scale in world war two, has not been exorcised from the contemporary imaginary. Vidler also believes that the uncanny's re-emergence as an aesthetic sensibility seems at once a continuation of its privileged position in the negative dialectics of the modernist avant-garde - a role given double force by the self-conscious ionization of modernism by postmodernism - and a product of the new technological conditions of cultural representation. A statement with which I strongly agree. I have long held the view that the prevalence of so many seemingly uncanny elements in contemporary artworks are directly related to postmodern cultural beliefs and fears. In particular the fear of the future, the death of religion, the western culture of self-worship, post-911, The Iraq War and so many other catastrophic disasters (natural and manmade) that are graphically depicted in our living rooms on a daily basis. This is my view and personal theory; that the uncanny aesthetic, disturbing and unsettling, is the natural artistic by-product of a cultural response to postmodern living and dying.
Chapter 2. The Cultural Context
Setting the Scene for the Uncanny to Emerge.
I'm kind of fascinated by this global culture mixing with local culture and producing something that's neither.
David Byrne
A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.
Beverly Sills
The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism.
Carl Bernstein
Culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.
Katherine Dunn
I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it. Marshall McLuhan
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
Albert Einstein
Of all the quotes above, I find Einstein’s to be the most resonant and engaging. He died over fifty years ago and so I wonder what he would say about the state of humanity in our cultural climate today? Technology is erasing humanity, particularly in the West where Einstein’s prophecy rings truer than ever. Globalisation, brought about by rapid advances in digital media and communication technology, is constantly changing and re-shaping our ‘world’ at high speed. Our culture is increasingly becoming media driven at the expense of the human. Artists working at the forefront of artistic developments are responding with personal expressions of fear and unease to these anxiety-inducing cultural changes. One must assume that artists working to push the boundaries of art and to explore new territories must always find inspiration in a vision of the future based upon scholarly and astute observations of the present? How does that future look in our current cultural climate? And in response, how does our art look?
In my own arts practice I have observed this ever-changing cultural climate and the shifting values in society for both context, intent, and content. I am particularly interested in multi-media constructions of reality and my current practice is about exploring the space between those representations and my own lived experience within the cultural context of postmodernism generally. In terms of a cultural context I believe this to be a key area for exploitation; the post-modern ‘habitat’ if you like. A habitat with captive TV and mass media-consumers; with hyper-reality, virtual-reality and cyberspace creating global placelessness. In his essay Uncanny Eden, David Brittain observes that the key condition of placelessness is the dissolution of fixed categories and boundaries in the environment and culture generally. The ultimate ‘placeless’ post-modern habitat (apart from the Big Brother House) is Cyberia, the online civilization, a place that is both somewhere and nowhere. A placelessness further exemplified by the rapid mixing of peoples, races and foreign cultures; migrants, exiles, refugees. A ‘place’ where cultural identities become erased, blurred or melded into a de-placed, out-of–context melting-pot of havoc. This is also a culture of fear and anxiety, created by mass-media representations and the saturation of imagery of disasters both man-made and natural. Imagery captured on mobile phones and broadcast around the globe in seconds. This is our unreal world where boundaries no longer exist and where the real and the unreal merge. This is the basis for my cultural context.
Chapter 3 - Post-modern Art and Culture.
It’s Drawing Jim, But Not As We Know It.
Post-modernism is a rather general term but one useful for describing and referring to a broad range of cultural and critical movements that have been influencing contemporary society and the arts since the early 1970’s. Many of the ideas associated with post-modernism have been developed by cultural theorists, particularly those associated with Marxism, feminism and psychoanalytic theory. Other post-modern tendencies in the arts have been fuelled by issues such as war, the environment, power, consumerism and racism. As a consequence, much of this art contains elements of anxiety, uncertainty and a fear of the future.
As a facet of postmodernism in the visual arts, the exploration of this, our current cultural climate, is producing artworks with varied and pluralistic, yet often uncanny, aesthetic qualities. A merging of seemingly incompatible styles and a denial of purity of form are typical of post-modern art. This development of our visual art culture has formed historically from earlier avant-garde art movements and has produced the unique circumstances of post-modernism following-on from modernism. The very term post-modern implies a period where several styles coexist. (Woods 1999) This is an identifiable trend in contemporary drawing and can be seen in practices as diverse as Julien Celdran (fig 1) and Mark Pearson (fig 2).
Fig 1, Julien celdran, Numeric drawing 2004
Fig 2, Mark Pearson,The Glory of Gothic 2004
The uncanny nature in these works is created by the cultural mismatch and radical juxtapositions; a contemporary de-familiarisation of the familiar.
Our societal nuances which are often disturbing and unpleasant, are both relevant and prevalent in the context and practice of contemporary art. Strangely, this includes drawing as a re-emerging, once traditional, but now very contemporary, fine art process and medium.
Many contemporary artists inspired by post-modern culture create works that draw attention to the constructed nature of visual imagery and the values and ideas they communicate. This frequently involves strategies that encourage the viewer to find multiple, conflicting or alternative meanings in their work. Examples of this can be seen in the uncanny drawings of Daniel Johnson (fig 3) and Broquard and Aubry (fig 4).
Fig 3, Daniel Johnson, Sorry is the Saddest, Softest word, 2003
Fig 4, Broquard and Aubry, Untitled Series, 2004
Appropriation, collage, re-working images or creating layered and fragmented images are also frequently used. In Vitamin D; New Perspectives in Drawing by Emma Dexter, the following trends in contemporary drawing are noted; anecdotal and narrative potential, inherent subjectivity, popular and vernacular styles, expressions of emotion, experience and feeling. In Beginning Postmodernism, Woods also identifies a return of the vernacular in contemporary art, where high and low art mingle freely. Post-modern art also demonstrates a carelessness towards orthodox aesthetic conformity, it celebrates contradiction. Perhaps this is why such a seemingly traditional media and process as drawing has become the centre of focus in much contemporary art? It is an outstanding contradiction in this digital, new-media age and is ripe for bastardisation.
Our post-modern world is both real and unreal and I think the answer to my question, uncannily, is yes.
The guiding question that I asked was,
‘Is there a correlation between the prevalence of uncanny aesthetics in contemporary drawing (and art generally) and the defining facets of post-modern western culture?’
Chapter 1 - A Rise in Uncanny Aesthetics.
Strange New Art for A Strange New World
A recurring aesthetic tendency in contemporary drawing (and art in general) is that of ‘the uncanny’. In Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay entitled Das Unheimlich (The Uncanny) he identifies specific objects and situations which are likely to give rise to uncanny sensations in the viewer. Things such as automata, shadows, body parts, out of context placings, doppelgangers, inanimate objects that become animated, the previously homely now made unhomely, the familiar rendered unfamiliar, eerie or weird. The uncanny according to Freud is something frightening and fearful. The uncanny has become the subject of aesthetics because it is concerned with a certain kind of feeling or sensation or emotional impulses that can be provoked in the viewer. The era of Modernism marked a turn in aesthetics, especially following the Dada movement, where a fascination with the grotesque and ugly developed into a kind of negative aesthetic. There has been a recent resurgence in this sort of aesthetic (think of de-skilling and the popularity of Outsider Art for example) which I believe began to emerge prior to the millennium, at a time of great unease and uncertainty and when a fear of the future abounded. According to Adrian Forty the uncanny in art today is being used ‘as a metaphor to describe the more disturbing features of late twentieth (and now twenty-first) century life. In his introduction to the Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler states that, for the modernist avant-gardes the uncanny readily offered itself as an instrument of defamiliarisation, as if a world estranged and distanced from its own nature could only be recalled to itself by shock, by the effects of things made deliberately strange. Expressionist artists explored the less nostalgic conditions of the modern uncanny, pressing the themes of the double, the automat, and derealization into service as symptoms of post historical existence. Symbolists, futurists, Dadaists, and of course surrealists and metaphysical artists found in the uncanny a state between dream and awakening particularly susceptible to exploitation. In this way the uncanny was renewed as an aesthetic category, but now reconceived as the very sign of modernism's propensity for shock and disturbance. Vidler goes on to say that, the uncanny might be understood as a significant psychoanalytical and aesthetic response to the real shock of the modern trauma (ww1) that, compounded by it's unthinkable repetition on an even more terrible scale in world war two, has not been exorcised from the contemporary imaginary. Vidler also believes that the uncanny's re-emergence as an aesthetic sensibility seems at once a continuation of its privileged position in the negative dialectics of the modernist avant-garde - a role given double force by the self-conscious ionization of modernism by postmodernism - and a product of the new technological conditions of cultural representation. A statement with which I strongly agree. I have long held the view that the prevalence of so many seemingly uncanny elements in contemporary artworks are directly related to postmodern cultural beliefs and fears. In particular the fear of the future, the death of religion, the western culture of self-worship, post-911, The Iraq War and so many other catastrophic disasters (natural and manmade) that are graphically depicted in our living rooms on a daily basis. This is my view and personal theory; that the uncanny aesthetic, disturbing and unsettling, is the natural artistic by-product of a cultural response to postmodern living and dying.
Chapter 2. The Cultural Context
Setting the Scene for the Uncanny to Emerge.
I'm kind of fascinated by this global culture mixing with local culture and producing something that's neither.
David Byrne
A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.
Beverly Sills
The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism.
Carl Bernstein
Culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.
Katherine Dunn
I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it. Marshall McLuhan
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
Albert Einstein
Of all the quotes above, I find Einstein’s to be the most resonant and engaging. He died over fifty years ago and so I wonder what he would say about the state of humanity in our cultural climate today? Technology is erasing humanity, particularly in the West where Einstein’s prophecy rings truer than ever. Globalisation, brought about by rapid advances in digital media and communication technology, is constantly changing and re-shaping our ‘world’ at high speed. Our culture is increasingly becoming media driven at the expense of the human. Artists working at the forefront of artistic developments are responding with personal expressions of fear and unease to these anxiety-inducing cultural changes. One must assume that artists working to push the boundaries of art and to explore new territories must always find inspiration in a vision of the future based upon scholarly and astute observations of the present? How does that future look in our current cultural climate? And in response, how does our art look?
In my own arts practice I have observed this ever-changing cultural climate and the shifting values in society for both context, intent, and content. I am particularly interested in multi-media constructions of reality and my current practice is about exploring the space between those representations and my own lived experience within the cultural context of postmodernism generally. In terms of a cultural context I believe this to be a key area for exploitation; the post-modern ‘habitat’ if you like. A habitat with captive TV and mass media-consumers; with hyper-reality, virtual-reality and cyberspace creating global placelessness. In his essay Uncanny Eden, David Brittain observes that the key condition of placelessness is the dissolution of fixed categories and boundaries in the environment and culture generally. The ultimate ‘placeless’ post-modern habitat (apart from the Big Brother House) is Cyberia, the online civilization, a place that is both somewhere and nowhere. A placelessness further exemplified by the rapid mixing of peoples, races and foreign cultures; migrants, exiles, refugees. A ‘place’ where cultural identities become erased, blurred or melded into a de-placed, out-of–context melting-pot of havoc. This is also a culture of fear and anxiety, created by mass-media representations and the saturation of imagery of disasters both man-made and natural. Imagery captured on mobile phones and broadcast around the globe in seconds. This is our unreal world where boundaries no longer exist and where the real and the unreal merge. This is the basis for my cultural context.
Chapter 3 - Post-modern Art and Culture.
It’s Drawing Jim, But Not As We Know It.
Post-modernism is a rather general term but one useful for describing and referring to a broad range of cultural and critical movements that have been influencing contemporary society and the arts since the early 1970’s. Many of the ideas associated with post-modernism have been developed by cultural theorists, particularly those associated with Marxism, feminism and psychoanalytic theory. Other post-modern tendencies in the arts have been fuelled by issues such as war, the environment, power, consumerism and racism. As a consequence, much of this art contains elements of anxiety, uncertainty and a fear of the future.
As a facet of postmodernism in the visual arts, the exploration of this, our current cultural climate, is producing artworks with varied and pluralistic, yet often uncanny, aesthetic qualities. A merging of seemingly incompatible styles and a denial of purity of form are typical of post-modern art. This development of our visual art culture has formed historically from earlier avant-garde art movements and has produced the unique circumstances of post-modernism following-on from modernism. The very term post-modern implies a period where several styles coexist. (Woods 1999) This is an identifiable trend in contemporary drawing and can be seen in practices as diverse as Julien Celdran (fig 1) and Mark Pearson (fig 2).
Fig 1, Julien celdran, Numeric drawing 2004
Fig 2, Mark Pearson,The Glory of Gothic 2004The uncanny nature in these works is created by the cultural mismatch and radical juxtapositions; a contemporary de-familiarisation of the familiar.
Our societal nuances which are often disturbing and unpleasant, are both relevant and prevalent in the context and practice of contemporary art. Strangely, this includes drawing as a re-emerging, once traditional, but now very contemporary, fine art process and medium.
Many contemporary artists inspired by post-modern culture create works that draw attention to the constructed nature of visual imagery and the values and ideas they communicate. This frequently involves strategies that encourage the viewer to find multiple, conflicting or alternative meanings in their work. Examples of this can be seen in the uncanny drawings of Daniel Johnson (fig 3) and Broquard and Aubry (fig 4).
Fig 3, Daniel Johnson, Sorry is the Saddest, Softest word, 2003
Fig 4, Broquard and Aubry, Untitled Series, 2004Appropriation, collage, re-working images or creating layered and fragmented images are also frequently used. In Vitamin D; New Perspectives in Drawing by Emma Dexter, the following trends in contemporary drawing are noted; anecdotal and narrative potential, inherent subjectivity, popular and vernacular styles, expressions of emotion, experience and feeling. In Beginning Postmodernism, Woods also identifies a return of the vernacular in contemporary art, where high and low art mingle freely. Post-modern art also demonstrates a carelessness towards orthodox aesthetic conformity, it celebrates contradiction. Perhaps this is why such a seemingly traditional media and process as drawing has become the centre of focus in much contemporary art? It is an outstanding contradiction in this digital, new-media age and is ripe for bastardisation.
Our post-modern world is both real and unreal and I think the answer to my question, uncannily, is yes.
posted by maria edney at 2:51 PM
0 comments
Bibliography
Cultural Context of Drawing –
Texts, Journals and Exhibition Catalogues
Journals
Arnzen, m (Ed), Paradoxa, Studies in World Literary Genres, Vol 3.
no.3-4 1997 The Return of the Uncanny. (Special double issue)
Cixous, H. (1976) Fiction and it’s Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s
Das Unheimlich. New Literary History, spring (7), 1976 p.525-548
Dolar, M. I’ll Be With You On Your Wedding Night.
October magazine (Cambs, Mass,) N0.58 (Fall 1991) P.5-23
Iversen, M. (1998) In the Blind Field: Hopper and the Uncanny’.
Art History sept.1998, Vol21.No3. p.409-429
Jentsch, E. (1906) On the Psychology of the Uncanny,
with a forward by Roy Sellars.
The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 1995 Vol6 p.7-16
Jay, M. (1995), The Uncanny Nineties. Salmagundi, Fall 1995 no.108 p.20-29
Texts
Appignanesi, R. (1999) Introducing Postmodernism. Icon Books, Cambridge.
Benezra, N. (1996) Distemper; Dissonant themes in the Art of the 1990’s
Hirshorn museum, Washington.
Bird, J (1995), Dolce Domun in Rachel Whiteread: House,
Ed. James Lingwood. Phaidon, London 1995
Cotter, S. (2001) Out of Line. Drawings from the Arts Council Collection.
London 2001
Dexter, E ((2005) Vitamin D; New Perspectives in Drawing, Phaidon, london.
Foster, H. (1993) Compulsive Beauty, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Freud, S. (1990) Das Unheimlich in Art and Literature, Vol14.
The Penguin Freud Library, Ed. Albert Dickson, Penguin Books, UK
Gale, M. (2004) Dada and Surrealism, Phaidon, London.
Godfrey, T. (1990) Drawing Today. Phaidon, Oxford 1990.
Payne, M. (1993) Reading Theory. An Introduction to Lacan,
Derrida and Kristeva. Blackwell, Oxford, 1993
Vidler, A. (1996) The Architectural Uncanny. Essays in the Modern Unhomely,
MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Quistrebert, M. (2006) Armpit of the Mole, Fundacio Trenta, Barcelona.
Woods, T. (1999) Beginning Postmodernism, Manchester University press.
Exhibition Catalogues
Ades, D. (2006) Undercover Surrealism, Hayward Gallery,
MIT Press Cambridge, Mass
Engberg, J. (2002) , The Heimlich Unheimlich,
Melbourne Festival of Visual Arts.
Eyes, Lies and Illusions. Hayward gallery in association with
Lund Humphries, London 2004.
Jerwood Drawing Prize 2004, Introduction by Prof Rod Bugg.
Jerwood Drawing Prize, 2005, Introduction by Roanne Dods.
Peters, T and West, J. (Eds) The Uncanny Room, Luminous books, London.
Online
http://www.artic.edu/reynolds/essays/taylor.php
http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/aesthetics/bldef_uncanny.htm
http://www.german.leeds.ac.uk/RWI/2004_05project1/WWW/uon/uncanny/whatisit.htm
www.iath.virginia.edu/ pmc/text-only/issue.195/ziarek
http://www.art-architecture.co.uk/insideout/?location_id=7
www.pipsworks.com/crosswalk/prov04/c1dylan_2.html
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/exlinhis.html
http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/4/issue4.php?page=ultraRed
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2004_ronen01.shtml
http://www.susansontag.com/regardingpain.htm
http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/papers/journal3/acrobat_files/Endt_review.pdf
http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/gordon.html
http://www.regent.edu/acad/schcom/rojc/mdic/mcluhan.html
http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/poster.html
http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue10/alloa.pdf
http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/4/issue4.php?page=ultraRed
http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/aesthetics/bldef_uncanny.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan
http://www.geocities.com/soho/lofts/1430/thesis/thesis3.html
www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/papers/journal3/acrobat_files/PinUp.pdf -
Texts, Journals and Exhibition Catalogues
Journals
Arnzen, m (Ed), Paradoxa, Studies in World Literary Genres, Vol 3.
no.3-4 1997 The Return of the Uncanny. (Special double issue)
Cixous, H. (1976) Fiction and it’s Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s
Das Unheimlich. New Literary History, spring (7), 1976 p.525-548
Dolar, M. I’ll Be With You On Your Wedding Night.
October magazine (Cambs, Mass,) N0.58 (Fall 1991) P.5-23
Iversen, M. (1998) In the Blind Field: Hopper and the Uncanny’.
Art History sept.1998, Vol21.No3. p.409-429
Jentsch, E. (1906) On the Psychology of the Uncanny,
with a forward by Roy Sellars.
The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 1995 Vol6 p.7-16
Jay, M. (1995), The Uncanny Nineties. Salmagundi, Fall 1995 no.108 p.20-29
Texts
Appignanesi, R. (1999) Introducing Postmodernism. Icon Books, Cambridge.
Benezra, N. (1996) Distemper; Dissonant themes in the Art of the 1990’s
Hirshorn museum, Washington.
Bird, J (1995), Dolce Domun in Rachel Whiteread: House,
Ed. James Lingwood. Phaidon, London 1995
Cotter, S. (2001) Out of Line. Drawings from the Arts Council Collection.
London 2001
Dexter, E ((2005) Vitamin D; New Perspectives in Drawing, Phaidon, london.
Foster, H. (1993) Compulsive Beauty, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Freud, S. (1990) Das Unheimlich in Art and Literature, Vol14.
The Penguin Freud Library, Ed. Albert Dickson, Penguin Books, UK
Gale, M. (2004) Dada and Surrealism, Phaidon, London.
Godfrey, T. (1990) Drawing Today. Phaidon, Oxford 1990.
Payne, M. (1993) Reading Theory. An Introduction to Lacan,
Derrida and Kristeva. Blackwell, Oxford, 1993
Vidler, A. (1996) The Architectural Uncanny. Essays in the Modern Unhomely,
MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Quistrebert, M. (2006) Armpit of the Mole, Fundacio Trenta, Barcelona.
Woods, T. (1999) Beginning Postmodernism, Manchester University press.
Exhibition Catalogues
Ades, D. (2006) Undercover Surrealism, Hayward Gallery,
MIT Press Cambridge, Mass
Engberg, J. (2002) , The Heimlich Unheimlich,
Melbourne Festival of Visual Arts.
Eyes, Lies and Illusions. Hayward gallery in association with
Lund Humphries, London 2004.
Jerwood Drawing Prize 2004, Introduction by Prof Rod Bugg.
Jerwood Drawing Prize, 2005, Introduction by Roanne Dods.
Peters, T and West, J. (Eds) The Uncanny Room, Luminous books, London.
Online
http://www.artic.edu/reynolds/essays/taylor.php
http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/aesthetics/bldef_uncanny.htm
http://www.german.leeds.ac.uk/RWI/2004_05project1/WWW/uon/uncanny/whatisit.htm
www.iath.virginia.edu/ pmc/text-only/issue.195/ziarek
http://www.art-architecture.co.uk/insideout/?location_id=7
www.pipsworks.com/crosswalk/prov04/c1dylan_2.html
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/exlinhis.html
http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/4/issue4.php?page=ultraRed
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2004_ronen01.shtml
http://www.susansontag.com/regardingpain.htm
http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/papers/journal3/acrobat_files/Endt_review.pdf
http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/gordon.html
http://www.regent.edu/acad/schcom/rojc/mdic/mcluhan.html
http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/poster.html
http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/others/colloquy/issue10/alloa.pdf
http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/4/issue4.php?page=ultraRed
http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/aesthetics/bldef_uncanny.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan
http://www.geocities.com/soho/lofts/1430/thesis/thesis3.html
www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/papers/journal3/acrobat_files/PinUp.pdf -
posted by maria edney at 2:32 PM
0 comments
Monday, June 12, 2006
Contemporary Drawing from The Armpit of the Mole
All You Can Eat,Michelle Naismith
All the Way to Europa, Stephane Magnin
I Was Born And I Was Dead, Bevis Martin
Manoeuvres, Guillaume Pinard
Davia Sherry, Chopped Elephant
posted by maria edney at 10:04 AM
0 comments
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Dialogue on the postmodern uncanny continued,
Hi Dale,
I agree with you, Modernist art does signify and break with the past
> and with tradition.
>
> The interesting question is why did artists break with the past at that
> point in history? This is where the origins of Modernist art are; The
> notions of alienation in the new cities (new industries, the first
> skyscrapers, think of Metropolis and Eliot's Wasteland), fear of machines
> (second wave of industrial revolution, first mechanised war etc. which gave
> rise to Dada of course) and a general fear brought about by rapid changes
> and advances in medicine and science (Bleriot, motor car, the first Ford
> production line were machines made cars and not people, Freudian analysis,
> telegraph etc, etc. and loads of other stuff that I can't remember)
>
> I just wonder if something similar is happening today? Possibly linked to
> fears about terrorism, nuclear war or disasters brought about by global
> warming. This is where my thoughts about TV and the media playing a part
> come from. As artists how do we respond to these changes in our culture and
> society? What does our art look like? If it reflects the society and culture
> that made it then it is going to be a bit f*cked-up in my opinion!! I really
> do think there is a swing towards the unsettling, the unhomely, the
> de-skilled, the art of so called Outsiders, of black humour and irony, of
> spooky little drawings that depict adult content but look like they have
> been drawn by a child and so on. I find all of these styles and genres
> uncanny. Maybe there is no connection at all?
>
> Maria.
>hello
Do you think it was a move toward a global visual language and even
more so today(new technologies enabling world wide communication)?
especially after 9-11 artists all over the world would have seen the
images and responded to them - governments and moneymakers can spread
fear at a rapid rate - i am intrigued by this subject !!
dale
Hello Dale, I can't imagine a global visual language.
Different cultures, races and even classes have such radically varying ideas
and values. Although there will be some universal shared commonalities now
that I think about it more; it's an interesting idea. I do think there is a
very strong link with globalisation on a more general level though.
Especially the movements of peoples and the mass-transfer of information.
It's not just fear and anxiety that can be rapidly created by media
constructions either- the mind set, biases and convictions of the masses can
be shaped and manipulated at will. I find this quite scary. It is
particularly the layers of our society who do not have the ability or
opportunity to experience the wider world and develop their own opinions who
are most susceptible. This is most unfortunate and ultimately culture-
shapingly- buggered as this sector of our society are the ruling class so to
speak. I don't mean to be insulting or controversial at this point!
Incidently, I think 911 was a spectacularly uncanny disaster. I am still
really haunted and disturbed by it.
Maria.
>
I agree with you, Modernist art does signify and break with the past
> and with tradition.
>
> The interesting question is why did artists break with the past at that
> point in history? This is where the origins of Modernist art are; The
> notions of alienation in the new cities (new industries, the first
> skyscrapers, think of Metropolis and Eliot's Wasteland), fear of machines
> (second wave of industrial revolution, first mechanised war etc. which gave
> rise to Dada of course) and a general fear brought about by rapid changes
> and advances in medicine and science (Bleriot, motor car, the first Ford
> production line were machines made cars and not people, Freudian analysis,
> telegraph etc, etc. and loads of other stuff that I can't remember)
>
> I just wonder if something similar is happening today? Possibly linked to
> fears about terrorism, nuclear war or disasters brought about by global
> warming. This is where my thoughts about TV and the media playing a part
> come from. As artists how do we respond to these changes in our culture and
> society? What does our art look like? If it reflects the society and culture
> that made it then it is going to be a bit f*cked-up in my opinion!! I really
> do think there is a swing towards the unsettling, the unhomely, the
> de-skilled, the art of so called Outsiders, of black humour and irony, of
> spooky little drawings that depict adult content but look like they have
> been drawn by a child and so on. I find all of these styles and genres
> uncanny. Maybe there is no connection at all?
>
> Maria.
>hello
Do you think it was a move toward a global visual language and even
more so today(new technologies enabling world wide communication)?
especially after 9-11 artists all over the world would have seen the
images and responded to them - governments and moneymakers can spread
fear at a rapid rate - i am intrigued by this subject !!
dale
Hello Dale, I can't imagine a global visual language.
Different cultures, races and even classes have such radically varying ideas
and values. Although there will be some universal shared commonalities now
that I think about it more; it's an interesting idea. I do think there is a
very strong link with globalisation on a more general level though.
Especially the movements of peoples and the mass-transfer of information.
It's not just fear and anxiety that can be rapidly created by media
constructions either- the mind set, biases and convictions of the masses can
be shaped and manipulated at will. I find this quite scary. It is
particularly the layers of our society who do not have the ability or
opportunity to experience the wider world and develop their own opinions who
are most susceptible. This is most unfortunate and ultimately culture-
shapingly- buggered as this sector of our society are the ruling class so to
speak. I don't mean to be insulting or controversial at this point!
Incidently, I think 911 was a spectacularly uncanny disaster. I am still
really haunted and disturbed by it.
Maria.
>
posted by maria edney at 3:21 AM
1 comments
Dialogue on the postmodern uncanny
The following text is a section from an email dialogue between Dale Cochrane, my mentor and myself discussing the possible relationship between postmodern contemporary culture and the unanny;
----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dale Cochrane"
> >
> hi Maria
> yes I had a good weekend thanks - and you?
> I am very interested in your blog - I m not sure if you have seen
> Chris Cunningham’s work - would you consider it uncanny? - When I see
> the Rabbit heads they remind me of Donnie Darko - a memory of
> something familiar / frightening but almost comforting.. -
> "catastrophic disasters (natural and manmade) that are graphically
> depicted in our living rooms on a daily basis"- do you mean by this
> that these images that we view on television could be considered
> uncanny?
> dale
On 5/14/06, maria edney wrote:
> Hi Dale,
in response to your email;
>
> I was blissfully (and ignorantly!) unaware of Chris Cunningham's work. I
> have since watched his Bjork video, which is exceptional, and contains many
> key elements (according to Freud) necessary to induce an uncanny experience,
> i.e automata, doppelgangers etc. I am currently searching for a copy of his
> video for 'Come to Daddy' by The Aphex Twin (highly recommended by my ND
> students who now think I'm totally cool and hip!) Cunningham's work is
> definitely of the uncanny ilk and somehow reminded me of Bladerunner and The
> Matrix. I think it is the imagery relating to an uncertain and frightening
> (future) existence where the commonality lies. Thank you for this line of
> enquiry. I would welcome your thoughts on this.
>
> Thank you too for your comments on the rabbit heads. I especially like
> Donnie Darko (particularly the music which has so many goose-pimple inducing
> key changes, brilliant!) and I can see what you mean about the similarity. I
> had not thought about this at all when I was drawing but now wonder if there
> was something in my subconscious as the rabbit likeness now seems quite
> marked?
>
> As for your question regarding,
> "catastrophic disasters (natural and manmade) that are graphically
> depicted in our living rooms on a daily basis"- do you mean by this
> that these images that we view on television could be considered
> uncanny?
No, I did not mean this, although it is a very good point that you
> make and upon reflection I think some are. The unnaturalness of many images
> and the familiar made unfamiliar depicted in many news reports and in
> prophetic films can definitely have an uncanny effect in my opinion. They
> certainly create a climate of fear and add to our perception of a fragile
> world existence. The blurring of the real and the unreal.
>
> However, what I meant was, that we, as a culture and society in general, are
> exposed to a plethora of imagery that is presented in such a way as to be
> shocking, overwhelmingly detailed, voyeuristic and increasingly impersonal
> as we become desensitised and yet hungry to see more. Much of the media
> reportage today seems to stimulate a climate of fear and encourage a state
> of jouissance from viewing horror, cruelty and the misfortune of others
> generally. (A bit like the Romans throwing Christians to the lions, now
> there's an idea for a reality TV show!) I think there may be a link between
> this cultural state and the prevalence of bizarre, uncanny and deskilled
> aesthetics which abound at the moment. I wonder if there is a similarity
> between the primitive tendencies of the modernist artists in response to
> fear of the machine age and the deskilled and frequently child-like
> stylisation adopted today in post-modern times when there is a fear of the
> future generally. Is this aesthetic style (often reflecting black humour
> too) a device to express our fears about life and death in a technological
> age where there is no room for the comfort afforded by a religion? Could
> this tendency be contributing to the popularity of outsider art for
> instance? In terms of an uncanny aesthetic I can think of no better examples
> than the art made under the auspices of outsider art and so much of today’s
> edgy and contemporary art adopts this kind of aesthetic and style?
>
> Please let me know what you think.
> Kind regards, Maria.
----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dale Cochrane"
> >
> hi Maria
> yes I had a good weekend thanks - and you?
> I am very interested in your blog - I m not sure if you have seen
> Chris Cunningham’s work - would you consider it uncanny? - When I see
> the Rabbit heads they remind me of Donnie Darko - a memory of
> something familiar / frightening but almost comforting.. -
> "catastrophic disasters (natural and manmade) that are graphically
> depicted in our living rooms on a daily basis"- do you mean by this
> that these images that we view on television could be considered
> uncanny?
> dale
On 5/14/06, maria edney
> Hi Dale,
in response to your email;
>
> I was blissfully (and ignorantly!) unaware of Chris Cunningham's work. I
> have since watched his Bjork video, which is exceptional, and contains many
> key elements (according to Freud) necessary to induce an uncanny experience,
> i.e automata, doppelgangers etc. I am currently searching for a copy of his
> video for 'Come to Daddy' by The Aphex Twin (highly recommended by my ND
> students who now think I'm totally cool and hip!) Cunningham's work is
> definitely of the uncanny ilk and somehow reminded me of Bladerunner and The
> Matrix. I think it is the imagery relating to an uncertain and frightening
> (future) existence where the commonality lies. Thank you for this line of
> enquiry. I would welcome your thoughts on this.
>
> Thank you too for your comments on the rabbit heads. I especially like
> Donnie Darko (particularly the music which has so many goose-pimple inducing
> key changes, brilliant!) and I can see what you mean about the similarity. I
> had not thought about this at all when I was drawing but now wonder if there
> was something in my subconscious as the rabbit likeness now seems quite
> marked?
>
> As for your question regarding,
> "catastrophic disasters (natural and manmade) that are graphically
> depicted in our living rooms on a daily basis"- do you mean by this
> that these images that we view on television could be considered
> uncanny?
No, I did not mean this, although it is a very good point that you
> make and upon reflection I think some are. The unnaturalness of many images
> and the familiar made unfamiliar depicted in many news reports and in
> prophetic films can definitely have an uncanny effect in my opinion. They
> certainly create a climate of fear and add to our perception of a fragile
> world existence. The blurring of the real and the unreal.
>
> However, what I meant was, that we, as a culture and society in general, are
> exposed to a plethora of imagery that is presented in such a way as to be
> shocking, overwhelmingly detailed, voyeuristic and increasingly impersonal
> as we become desensitised and yet hungry to see more. Much of the media
> reportage today seems to stimulate a climate of fear and encourage a state
> of jouissance from viewing horror, cruelty and the misfortune of others
> generally. (A bit like the Romans throwing Christians to the lions, now
> there's an idea for a reality TV show!) I think there may be a link between
> this cultural state and the prevalence of bizarre, uncanny and deskilled
> aesthetics which abound at the moment. I wonder if there is a similarity
> between the primitive tendencies of the modernist artists in response to
> fear of the machine age and the deskilled and frequently child-like
> stylisation adopted today in post-modern times when there is a fear of the
> future generally. Is this aesthetic style (often reflecting black humour
> too) a device to express our fears about life and death in a technological
> age where there is no room for the comfort afforded by a religion? Could
> this tendency be contributing to the popularity of outsider art for
> instance? In terms of an uncanny aesthetic I can think of no better examples
> than the art made under the auspices of outsider art and so much of today’s
> edgy and contemporary art adopts this kind of aesthetic and style?
>
> Please let me know what you think.
> Kind regards, Maria.
posted by maria edney at 2:47 AM
0 comments
Postmodern Uncanny
I have put my penchant for Internet shopping to good use and purchased a back copy of the literary journal Paradoxa .
Volume 3 from 1997 was entirely dedicated to The Uncanny and contains over 20 academic papers on the relationship between postmodern culture, the arts and the uncanny.
Here is what Michael Arnzen (University of Oregon) says about the postmodern uncanny in his introduction to the journal;
Modernity and postmodernity share different, yet similar anxieties - the uncanny gives us a way of thinmking about the interrelationship of both; the doppelganger and the automaton haunted the moderns, for example, while clones and technohuman cyborgs haunt us today.
I am interested in this comment because it connects to, and echoes, my own theory concerning the relationship between postmodern cultural anxiety and the aesthetics of the uncanny in visual art. Arnzen goes on to say;
....the disruption which the uncanny signals (a disruption of time; a fracturing, splitting, ('cleaving' Stewart might say!)or doubling of subjectivity; a deconstructive repetition-with-a-difference) resonates deeply with contemporary philosophers....... Anthony Vidler believes that the 'self-conscious ironization of modernism by postmodernism' has construed a a 'postmodern uncanny'.
I firmly believe this too. Arnzens article was written 9 years ago before the turn of the millenium when levels of cultural anxiety were definitely heightened. However, I believe our (western) collective, and cultural anxiety, is continuing to rise; fuelled by issues such as terrorism, George Bush, global warming, new diseases, global epidemics and so on. Issues which are further inflamed by sensationalist media reporting and the rapid global distribution of footage and digital imagery on levels with explicit content as never seen before.
In my next posting I shall place edited exerpts from the dialogue between myself and my mentor Dale Cochrane concerning this cultural context.
Volume 3 from 1997 was entirely dedicated to The Uncanny and contains over 20 academic papers on the relationship between postmodern culture, the arts and the uncanny.
Here is what Michael Arnzen (University of Oregon) says about the postmodern uncanny in his introduction to the journal;
Modernity and postmodernity share different, yet similar anxieties - the uncanny gives us a way of thinmking about the interrelationship of both; the doppelganger and the automaton haunted the moderns, for example, while clones and technohuman cyborgs haunt us today.
I am interested in this comment because it connects to, and echoes, my own theory concerning the relationship between postmodern cultural anxiety and the aesthetics of the uncanny in visual art. Arnzen goes on to say;
....the disruption which the uncanny signals (a disruption of time; a fracturing, splitting, ('cleaving' Stewart might say!)or doubling of subjectivity; a deconstructive repetition-with-a-difference) resonates deeply with contemporary philosophers....... Anthony Vidler believes that the 'self-conscious ironization of modernism by postmodernism' has construed a a 'postmodern uncanny'.
I firmly believe this too. Arnzens article was written 9 years ago before the turn of the millenium when levels of cultural anxiety were definitely heightened. However, I believe our (western) collective, and cultural anxiety, is continuing to rise; fuelled by issues such as terrorism, George Bush, global warming, new diseases, global epidemics and so on. Issues which are further inflamed by sensationalist media reporting and the rapid global distribution of footage and digital imagery on levels with explicit content as never seen before.
In my next posting I shall place edited exerpts from the dialogue between myself and my mentor Dale Cochrane concerning this cultural context.
posted by maria edney at 1:36 AM
0 comments
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Uncanny thought for today by Hal Foster.
The most remarkable co-incidences of desire and fulfilment, the most mysterious recurrence of similar experiences in a particular place or on a particular date, the most deceptive sights and suspicious noises'. This sounds like the marvelous according to the surrealists; it is in fact the uncanny according to Freud.
posted by maria edney at 3:57 AM
2 comments
The Uncanny Room - Contemporary Art at Pitshanger Manor.
Ralph Ball,'T.4.4' 1997
Emma Woffenden, 'Contract' 1999
Caroline Broadhead, 'Ready to Tear', scorched silk dress and shadow in pencil. 1998.
In 2002, an exhibition entitiled The Uncanny Room was held at the Gallery, Pitshanger Manor, London. The works shown above are a small selection of the uncanny art objects installed into the gallery rooms of this former manor house. Writting about his arts practice, Ralph Ball states,'Rhetorically the work deliberately disregards the discrete categories of art, craft and design. It attempts to explore the expressive possibilities of the space in-between'. Describing his recent work Ball calls it,'strangely strange, oddly normal objects in a domestic environment'. Characteristically his objects retain familiar references but are rendered uncanny as they confront our assumptions about designed objects and the culture that surrounds them.
Emma Woffenden's 'Contract' is suggestive of a wall mounted hunting trophy and of arms waving through walls as in Jean Cocteau's Orphee` - on the one hand death, on the other some primordal life form. Such ambiguities add to the narrative possibilities of a work and amplify its uncanny content.
In Caroline Broadheads work an uncanny effect is often produced through the co-existence of elements; a tulle garment may be barely perceptable, yet its shadow painted on a wall is accentuated, '...to give emphasis to the hidden, non-existent and immaterial'.
In the accompanying exhibition catalogue there is an excellent essay on the uncanny called Magical Properties written by Esther Leslie. Discussing the uncanny, leslie writes,'Uncanny moments rupture the normal flow of events, disturbing participants' sense of things, corrupting rational categories of understanding. Such interruption of the quotidian, this breakage of continuity, is an attack on time as it is usually lived.' Also,'always at work in the uncanny is an ambiguous melding of fact and fiction. The uncanny can work on us whether we are subjected to it through direct experience or through fictional representations; in either case it relies on smudging the experiencer's sense of what is real and what is imagined. Uncertainty seeds the uncanny'. This is a crucial point in my own observations of the uncertainty of our times and of the uncanny art that is produced from our anxious, fearful culture.
posted by maria edney at 2:13 AM
0 comments
Monday, June 05, 2006
DEATH - The Ultimate Uncanny?
Forgive me this indulgence.............My father died one week ago.
I found (and am still finding, reflectively,) the experience of this to be sad beyond words,to be deeply disturbing and truly uncanny on a variety of levels.
I have never experienced a death like his; firstly to witness the death of the very same life force that gave life to me; to witness the death of a human being so closely related to me. We look alike, think alike, laugh alike. Am I still whole?
But also to touch, to feel, to see, to hear and to smell his death in an intimate and condensed physical experience. Death throes that took eight hours to conclude, all the while thinking that every laboured breath would be the last. Breaths that seemed to draw every last drop of energy from his very bones. And every sense in my own body immersed and overwhelmed. So strange and powerless to watch the life energy literally leave his body, to hear the final breath, that very moment, that very second, when all function ceases. Sat bolt upright, eyes wide open, mouth agape and lips bleeding, he squeezed my hand, noisy, laboured breath drawn-in so deeply it never came back out. Everything stopped. Then nothing, just nothing. Eyes still open, adopting the fixed expression that a face assumes in the instant of death, his hand still clutching mine. He felt warm to my touch for a long time after............
In a paper by Emanuel Alloa called, Bare Exteriority - Philosophy of the Image and the Image of Philosophy, the author discusses and compares theories put forward by Heidegger and Blanchot. Part of this discussion examines death and the uncanny. According to Alloa, Blanchot believes that seeing a corpse is an uncanny experience because literally, it is the suspension of the familiar. The dead person is there and at the same time neither down here nor up there, neither here nor anywhere else: Â The cadaveric presence establishes a relation between here and nowhere. While the sight of the corpse de-places the viewer, the corpse re-mains irrevocably here. Only grudgingly is the corpse moved somewhere else; the dead person monopolizes the space, and fills it with his absence. Although the corpse has approached the condition of a thing as much as possible it is spread out on the death bed, prepared and although the dead person has become pure passivity, he seems to have absolute free-dom of movement and the ability to paralyse the power of the living. At the site of death all everyday activities cease.
The corpse troubles the home, because to remain in the abode is no longer permitted. The corpse is uncanny since the dead has no place; the appearance of the dead is a visitation, and no here can be a home any longer. Blanchot writes: The cadaver may be peacefully laying in state, but it is still everywhere in the room and in the house.
In death, as in life there is placelessness.
I found (and am still finding, reflectively,) the experience of this to be sad beyond words,to be deeply disturbing and truly uncanny on a variety of levels.
I have never experienced a death like his; firstly to witness the death of the very same life force that gave life to me; to witness the death of a human being so closely related to me. We look alike, think alike, laugh alike. Am I still whole?
But also to touch, to feel, to see, to hear and to smell his death in an intimate and condensed physical experience. Death throes that took eight hours to conclude, all the while thinking that every laboured breath would be the last. Breaths that seemed to draw every last drop of energy from his very bones. And every sense in my own body immersed and overwhelmed. So strange and powerless to watch the life energy literally leave his body, to hear the final breath, that very moment, that very second, when all function ceases. Sat bolt upright, eyes wide open, mouth agape and lips bleeding, he squeezed my hand, noisy, laboured breath drawn-in so deeply it never came back out. Everything stopped. Then nothing, just nothing. Eyes still open, adopting the fixed expression that a face assumes in the instant of death, his hand still clutching mine. He felt warm to my touch for a long time after............
In a paper by Emanuel Alloa called, Bare Exteriority - Philosophy of the Image and the Image of Philosophy, the author discusses and compares theories put forward by Heidegger and Blanchot. Part of this discussion examines death and the uncanny. According to Alloa, Blanchot believes that seeing a corpse is an uncanny experience because literally, it is the suspension of the familiar. The dead person is there and at the same time neither down here nor up there, neither here nor anywhere else: Â The cadaveric presence establishes a relation between here and nowhere. While the sight of the corpse de-places the viewer, the corpse re-mains irrevocably here. Only grudgingly is the corpse moved somewhere else; the dead person monopolizes the space, and fills it with his absence. Although the corpse has approached the condition of a thing as much as possible it is spread out on the death bed, prepared and although the dead person has become pure passivity, he seems to have absolute free-dom of movement and the ability to paralyse the power of the living. At the site of death all everyday activities cease.
The corpse troubles the home, because to remain in the abode is no longer permitted. The corpse is uncanny since the dead has no place; the appearance of the dead is a visitation, and no here can be a home any longer. Blanchot writes: The cadaver may be peacefully laying in state, but it is still everywhere in the room and in the house.
In death, as in life there is placelessness.
posted by maria edney at 10:51 PM
3 comments
Saturday, June 03, 2006
Placelessness in our Postmodern Culture
Placelessness by Leslie Hill
The twentieth century was the first century without a frontier. A century of frontierlessness. Is the twenty-first century, then, the century of placelessness? The era when we lose our sense of place altogether – or transcend it? I grew up watching reruns of the original Star Trek and was,therefore, pretty sure that space was the final frontier, which suggested that we still had somewhere to go. But that project hasn’t really panned out like we thought it might – not a lot of us are homesteading outer space. Instead, we colonize cyberspace as if it is the only place left. Communication technology means that where you are geographically is now less important in many cases than what kind of material access you have to wireless technology. For many of us, being physically remote is less of an obstacle to our daily interactions than being without access to email and a cell phone would be. Does this, in turn, create a culture of placelessness? Cyberspace is perhaps the ultimate example of placelessness, a meeting place that is no place at all where
we spend ever increasing percentages of our time............. Very uncanny.
The twentieth century was the first century without a frontier. A century of frontierlessness. Is the twenty-first century, then, the century of placelessness? The era when we lose our sense of place altogether – or transcend it? I grew up watching reruns of the original Star Trek and was,therefore, pretty sure that space was the final frontier, which suggested that we still had somewhere to go. But that project hasn’t really panned out like we thought it might – not a lot of us are homesteading outer space. Instead, we colonize cyberspace as if it is the only place left. Communication technology means that where you are geographically is now less important in many cases than what kind of material access you have to wireless technology. For many of us, being physically remote is less of an obstacle to our daily interactions than being without access to email and a cell phone would be. Does this, in turn, create a culture of placelessness? Cyberspace is perhaps the ultimate example of placelessness, a meeting place that is no place at all where
we spend ever increasing percentages of our time............. Very uncanny.
posted by maria edney at 10:06 AM
0 comments
Uncanny thought for today
O the great God of theory, he's just a pencil stub, a chewed stub with a worn eraser at the end of a huge scribble. (Charles Simic)
The following passage about David Shrigley was written by Mel Gooding;
He (Shrigley) owns up to inducing anxiety. But, then, it's not his anxiety that we feel as we turn the pages: it's ours. It is there waiting to haunt us, before he confirms our worst nightmares. Shrigley makes visible the darkness we all inhabit.
'Better a dreadful doubt confronted, a fear outfaced, a weakness acknowledged' the therapists might say. But shrigley's not your therapist! He's not there to help you.
'But', we might be tempted to think, 'he confirms that we are not alone; we're all in it together!' That's the point of it all: Solidarity! But no. Shrigley isn't there to raise your spirits. Like every great satirist he's a firm moralist. He shows us where we are and how it is. How you feel about that is your problem, not his. He offers naught for your comfort............... there's no theory of everything, or of anything, that is remotely helpful when you are touching the void...........Apocalypse now! Only this time we can laugh. Sometimes, laughing at Shrigley, I feel that's the only thing we can do.
The following passage about David Shrigley was written by Mel Gooding;
He (Shrigley) owns up to inducing anxiety. But, then, it's not his anxiety that we feel as we turn the pages: it's ours. It is there waiting to haunt us, before he confirms our worst nightmares. Shrigley makes visible the darkness we all inhabit.
'Better a dreadful doubt confronted, a fear outfaced, a weakness acknowledged' the therapists might say. But shrigley's not your therapist! He's not there to help you.
'But', we might be tempted to think, 'he confirms that we are not alone; we're all in it together!' That's the point of it all: Solidarity! But no. Shrigley isn't there to raise your spirits. Like every great satirist he's a firm moralist. He shows us where we are and how it is. How you feel about that is your problem, not his. He offers naught for your comfort............... there's no theory of everything, or of anything, that is remotely helpful when you are touching the void...........Apocalypse now! Only this time we can laugh. Sometimes, laughing at Shrigley, I feel that's the only thing we can do.
posted by maria edney at 9:12 AM
0 comments
David Shrigley - King of Uncanny Drawing in a Postmodern Cultural Context!
posted by maria edney at 8:21 AM
0 comments
Friday, May 26, 2006
The Heimlich Unheimlich - Melbourne festival of Visual Arts 2002,
Kathleen Herbert 'Colony'
Callum Morton 'Cellar'
Gillian Wearing 'Trauma' (video still)
I have been very fortunate to obtain a back copy of the Melbourne Festival of Visual Arts exhibition catalogue for 2002 directly from the organisers. A major part of the festival explored the uncanny in contemporary art and was entitled The Heimlich Unheimlich. For the uninitiated, this title is borrowed from Freud's writings on the uncanny and translates as the homely unhomely. The exhibition contained a diverse range of work from European and Antipodean artists including well-known contemporaries like Robert Gober and Gillian Wearing. Juliana Engberg has written an interesting accompanying essay also called Heimlich Unheimlich, a passage of which follows;
...in this exhibition many uncanny encounters are created by artists whose works manifest those things that have been secret and hidden, and are now brought into light in ways that are unsettling and haunting. It is not only the uncanny that we encounter but a premise hidden within the larger concept of the uncanny.In almost all of the works in this exhibition the spaces and places of domesticity and presumed comfort produce a sense of unease, tension, even terror. The basement is one such location within the domestic zone that has long been the site of hidden things. Hollywood has exploited this under place in a variety of suspense, horror and psychological dramas.....a kind of hell but also a kind of grave: a place potentially containing all the neurosis of infantile anxiety including darkness,silence and abandonment......
The work shown above by Callum Morton depicts a detail from his installation 'Cellar'. The work is accompanied by an acoustmetre which is a voice or sound dislocated from it's original source and an area in which I am interested for my own practice. I have made a sound diary of the teenagers living in Cushendall, Northern Island which I intend to play alongside a 3D drawing for my SIPS presentation. Morton's soundtrack is of loud thumps and muffled sounds aswell as an eerie green light seeping through the gaps in the cellar doors. In many ways the rhetoric of Morton's work detracts from the uncanny but when sited within the context of the gallery the displacement of an unenterable cellar with sounds of thumping and heaving that the viewer cannot locate become deeply uncanny and unsettling.
Wearing's video installation 'Trauma' creates a kind of confessional space into which the audience enters, Wearing projects monologues spoken by adults whose faces are hidden by the masks of pre-pubescent children.
...Wearing's work is hard; at times unbelievably so. She has invited people to confess their previously unspoken, often unacknowledged memories and experiences, promising them anonymity by offering them the safety of disguise. And we cannot'see' them but the stories they tell reveal the children within and show the physical weight of personal history on the adult bodies that sit in haunched, protective positions inside the confessional recording booth.......... We are placed in the uncanny situation of recognising that once-upon-a-time it was the perpetrator who most often wore disguises rather than victims. At the same time we may register that in TV documentaries, confess-all exposes and crime re-enactments it is the victim whose identity is erased by the incident.
In Kathleen Herbert's work 'Colony'there is an unsettling atmosphere created by absence. The empty, naked, miniature metal beds sit in rows suggestive of an institution or hospital. The title,'Colony' suggests a settlement or group of people and in particular, a group that is separated from the mainstream perhaps? As Engberg states,' we feel a kind of bereavement looking at these skeletal pieces that should contain presences'.
posted by maria edney at 9:23 AM
0 comments
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Previous Posts
- FIN!
- The Real and The Unreal; Uncanny Aesthetics in Po...
- Bibliography
- Contemporary Drawing from The Armpit of the Mole
- Dialogue on the postmodern uncanny continued,
- Dialogue on the postmodern uncanny
- Postmodern Uncanny
- Uncanny thought for today by Hal Foster.
- The Uncanny Room - Contemporary Art at Pitshanger ...
- DEATH - The Ultimate Uncanny?
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