In Conversation by Sally Taylor

I visited the Otter Gallery in Chichester yesterday and saw the exhibition In Conversation by Sally Taylor. The paintings were rather uninspiring (like the title of the show!) but this little drawing of a spooky head caught my attention. It may seem as if I am developing an obsession for decapitated heads but it is the eyelessness of this head that I really like. Eyes were a great uncanny theme for the surrealists but removing or omitting any eyes at all is really uncanny! Thinking about this has reminded me of the work of Matt Bryans who erases images from newspaper. He erases all of the face except the eyes. I myself have created disquieting and uncanny work where I have crossed out the eyes as part of the denial/destruction theme that I often employ. The results can be really uncanny I will publish some examples in the next posting.

Uncanny Photography

Uncanny Photographs by Patrick Shanahan

Is this uncanny?

This experimental photo is part of my SIP assignment but I thought it may be uncanny because it is a photograph of a broadcast image (tv) and the person concerned did not know I was photographing them. That is all very postmodern in my opinion but does it constitute uncanny. Certainly a photograph is a mirror image.This first image is un-enhanced and in its raw state which I really quite like.



This image is enhanced and could be described as an uncanny double of itself maybe? I have been reading an essay by David Brittain called Uncanny Eden; the photography of Patrick Shanahan. It is interesting to note that Shanahan's work has developed from an interest in placelessness. Theorists have argued that the key condition of placelessness is the dissolution of fixed categories and boundaries in the environment and in culture generally. This clains Brittain, causes anxiety. Stemming from this notion Shanahan produced a series of photographs where he deliberately tried to provoke sensations of uncanniness. Brittain goes on to say,'At the beginning of the 20th century the uncanny was psychologized as one of a number of diseases associated with the effects of modernity. More recently theorists have returned to the uncanny to formulate aesthetic experience. (I am not as daft as I thought.)Freud theorized that mirrors, shadows and Doppelgangers were all likely to trigger uncanny sensations. He wrote that the child's invention of a double (like primitive man's animism) was a self-protective gesture, an assurance of immortality. Shanahan made a body of work called 'Personal Geography' which contains three images which evoke uncanny sensations. Two are of conventional beach scenes with the beach representing a liminal space somewhere between nature and culture. They have unnatural colours and black skies which would suggest nightime and yet they seem defined by a strange light. This effect has been caused by 'reciprocity failure' which often happens on long exposures. It is an uncanny effect whereby the negative chemically produces an unfamiliar double of itself. Blogger is not letting me upload any more images (?)but hopefully I can illustrate this in the next posting.

Uncanny at the Jerwood

This drawing is called The Uncanny Circus (2) by Charles Napier and was selected for the 2004 Jerwood Drawing Prize. I stumbled across this work whilst researching on the net. As I have a copy of the 2004 Jerwood catalogue I thought I would have a thumb through it. I was amazed at how many other drawings have uncanny elements. Here are a couple more that I really like for their humour as well as their uncanny qualities. What a lovely combination!

Paul Newman, The two of Us, 2004

Edward Allington, I was a Teenage Cave Woman, 2004

On reflection, this combination of aesthetic tendencies definately adds to the emotional and psychological experience for the viewer. I find this aesthetic juxtaposition fascinating and enjoy the conflicting emotional responses that viewing this kind of work provokes. Several of the works I have been studying seem to just exhibit uncanny aesthetics or have uncanny elements as part of larger composition. Whereas others, (particularly late modernist works) are both uncanny and absurd.

It seems to me that much of the very contemporary and postmodern drawings in my research are both humorous (usually black, satirical or ironic)and uncanny creating a pluralistic and ambiguous set of meanings and messages. What do you think dear reader? Please leave a comment.............................................

heads

Disseminated Primatemaia

This image is the uncannily uncanny cover of Straw Dogs by John Gray. This book was recommended by Caroline (thank you)I assume because the philosophical content refers to the shaping of mans destiny and his place on earth which is linked to my ideas about 'fear of the future' and a rise in uncanny art.

I have read the first chapter and in it Gray quotes James Lovelock who writes:

Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic organism, or like the cells of a tumour or neoplasm. We have grown in numbers and disturbance to Gaia, to the point where our presence is perceptibly disturbing ... the human species is now so numerous as to constitute a serious planetary malady. Gaia is suffering from Disseminated Primatemaia, a plague of people.

I like the phrase, 'our presence is perceptibly disturbing'.

Agot also recommended a good book (thank you) called 'Regarding the Pain of Others' by Susan Sontag. I have only read an excerpt from this text but essentially Sontag poses some interesting questions about contemporary media reportage such as 'are viewers inured -- or incited -- to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer's perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? The notion regarding perceptions of reality are particularly pertinent to the cultural context of my work.

Does anyone have any views on uncanny aesthetics?

Dolls, heads and other bits.

Hans Bellmer. Illustration for Oeillades ciselées en branche (Glances Cut on the Branch). Paris: Editions Jeanne Bucher, 1939. Heliogravure; 13.5 x 10.8 cm.




Hans Bellmer. The Articulated Hands, 1954. Color lithograph, ed. 32/59; 27.5 x 37.5 cm. Denoël 29. The Art Institute of Chicago, Stanley Field Fund (1972.32).




Hans Bellmer. Untitled, 1951. Graphite on cream wove paper; 38.1 x 28.1 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Lindy and Edwin A. Bergman Collection (101.1991).




Hans Bellmer. "Poupée, variations sur le montage d'une mineure articulée," Minotaure 6 (Winter, 1934–35), pp. 30–31.

In December 1934, there appeared in the Surrealist journal Minotaure a two-page spread introducing French readers to the erotic imagination of the German artist Hans Bellmer. Eighteen photographs Bellmer had taken of a life-size, female mannequin are grouped symmetrically around the title "Doll: Variations on the Montage of an Articulated Minor."

The images show Bellmer's assemblage, made of wood, flax fiber, plaster, and glue, under construction in his studio or arrayed on a bare mattress or lacy cloth. Seductive props sometimes accompany the doll—a black veil, eyelet undergarments, an artificial rose. Naked or, in one case, wearing only a cotton undershirt, the armless doll is variously presented as a skeletal automaton, a coy adolescent, or an abject pile of discombobulated parts. In one unusual image, the artist himself poses next to his standing sculpture, his human presence rendered ghostly through double exposure. Here Bellmer's own body seems to dematerialize as his mechanical girl, wigged, with glass eyes, wool beret, sagging hose, and a single shoe, takes on a disturbing reality.

The Surrealist fascination with automata, especially the uncanny dread produced by their dubious animate/inanimate status, is exemplified by Bellmer's doll and his equally uncanny drawings.

Tony Oursler - I cant hear you

my dead heads

The Rites of Dionysus

Subjective responses and an image. (see blog above)

Thursday, April 13, 2006

In the next blog (above) is a digital photo that I have been trying to upload for the last 24 hours. It is a detail from Shaw's Rites of Dionysus installed at the Eden Project. I think the ambiguous nature of this work fires the imagination and the cruelty is curiously unsettling which is a key characteristic of the Freudian uncanny. I appreciate that an uncanny experience is essentially a subjective response however certain things and situations seem especially potent in their ability to give rise to a feeling, or an appearance of, uncanniness. For example in Freuds 1919 essay 'Das Unheimlich'(The Uncanny)Freud identifies specific objects and situations likely to produce feelings of the uncanny in the viewer. Things such as shadows, doppelgangers (the double), automata, normally inanimate objects animated, dolls, body parts, (dismembered or out of context placings especially), the previously homely now made unhomely, unfamiliar, eerie or weird. The uncanny is the subject of aesthetics because it is concerned with a certain kind of feeling or sensation, with emotional impulses. In general, aesthetics has neglected to study the uncanny, preferring instead to concentrate on beauty and associated positive emotions; the attractive, the sublime and so on. The uncanny is something fearful, frightening and not necessarily beautiful in the traditional art sense. 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 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. As adrian Forty writes,'...in the late twentieth century (the uncanny)is a concept that has been applied to nearly every form of art, as well as serving as a metaphor to describe the more disturbing features of late twentieth century life'.At the begining of the twenty first century this is now even more evident than before. In his introduction to the Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler states, for the modernist avant-gardes, the uncanny readily offered itself as an instrument of 'defamiliarization', 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 posthistorical existence. Symbolists, futurists, dadaists, and of course surrealists and metaphysical artists found in the uncanny a state between dream and awakening particularly susceptable 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 reemergence as an aesthetic sensibility seems at once a continuation of its priviledged position in the negative dialectics of the modernist avant-garde - a role given double force by the self-conscious ironization of modernism by postmodernism - and a product of the new technological conditions of cultural representation. A postmodern uncanny has been construed.

Les Piques (The Pikes)

The images above are those referred to in the blog entitled Dead Heads. I am not a great fan of Barry Flanagan's work but the mythical figure of the Hare is a mysterious and eerie element so reminiscent in a symbolic sense of the work by Tim Shaw at Eden. Similarly I can see parallels with Shaw's work to the disturbingly uncanny elements of Messager's work, particularly the cruelty of Les Piques.

Dead Heads

Thursday, April 13, 2006

I have just got back from a holiday to the Westcountry and whilst there I visited the Eden Project in Cornwall. I was not expecting to find any art nor inspiration but to my amazement found that the Eden Project is a great supporter of the arts as well as plants. In the temperate biome there is a fabulous sculptural assemblage by Tim Shaw called The Rites of Dionysus. Part of this work is comprised of pikes or stakes with rabbit or possibly hares heads on them. (Not real ones, they are made of copper) I was mesmerised by this totally uncanny juxtaposition and felt the need to draw!! (Not happened for a long while.) It was like Barry Flannagan meets Annette Messager. You can read about Tim Shaw and the Eden Project here, http://www.edenproject.com/3499_243.htm
posted by maria edney at 7:48 AM 0 comments