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.