Well, since it is my week to manage the blog and we have no specific text to reference, I will find as much Freudian and psychology related art to view and discuss.
Check out this link: http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/art56844. The Leeds Met Gallery had an exhibition in 2008 called "Unheimlich". This is translated as "uncanny" and is a Freudian concept regarding something that is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. Unheimlich will inevitably conjure a strange feeling... cognitive dissonance! The images and the video will show you a bit of what was in the show. I can only imagine how awkward this opening was (especially with Pete Smith's squeaky beds).
How well do you think the artists dealt with the theme of the show? Who was more connected to Freud and who was more focused on the idea rather than he who thought it up?
Enjoy!
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I thought Pete Smith's art was kind of cool, and connected a lot with what we talked about with Civilization and Its Discontents:
ReplyDelete"Pete Smith has created complex, animated installations that recall his days in menial employment on the factory floor. Mechanical limbs and other automata take on a life of their own in his works..."
I thought this was interesting because we talked a bit in class about the idea that Freud had about a human's innate need to have power over nature. Why does man feel the need to have control? The Civilization book talks about the idea of a prosthetic God on page 44, and how all of our inventions are essentially prosthetics of our own bodies--which is one of the contributing factors to what actually makes a civilization.
Whether Smith intentionally decided to delve into this or not, I think he is declaring the same sort of statement about humankind--how man feels the need to have control, and whether or not mankind can handle this sort of technology.
I like that comparison to a mechanical God.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of the uncanny seems to me to be almost more about Jung than Freud, though I know this is a tangent. It seems that since everyone has an unsettled reaction to these images, it represents something more about the national or collective unconscious - that our culture or scripting seeks to repress things such as Girl with Foxes ('vildman') or Lot (which seemed to me to be exposing fears that woman's sexuality is less about subject and more about object..)
Just a personal reaction (aside from Lot, perhaps) is the first one, the fox caught in lights. Kind of reminds me of lamping:
(-"Lamping is the name of a hunting technique where hunters go into the forest at night, flood an area in light, then shoot or capture the animals as they panic and run from their hiding places." - wikipedia)
which is "as Freudian as" being brought up by the wild. Just how we generally distance ourselves from the idea of the man who submits to the call of the wild (not micurating) as well as the man who uses technology to outright dominate or devestate the wild.
Interesting comments, guys. I don't remember much from psych 101, so thanks for the Jung input, Mike. The fox caught in the lights really stuck out to me. This could be because it is the first image from the article, or just that it is particularly compelling. It really glows.. and glowing to me usually connotes something positive (despite that those appear to be nasty flourescent lights). Then you see the fox, stopped by death mid-action. It is really jarring.
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