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.