Understanding Freud's idea of the uncanny, insights into aesthetics and fear. Applicable in that haunting is often associated with a certain fear, and the haunting of a mundane familiar object such as the art gallery will therefore apply a certain uncanny-ness.
The Uncanny - Sigmund Frued (1919)
- Uncanny meaning
‘Uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated (or estranged) from it only through the process of repression.’ & ‘…that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.’
‘The prefix “un” is a token of repression’, all which is now unfamiliar was once familiar.
Inspires a reflection on what specific sounds could be said to be ones which haunt.
The concept of the Numinous in philosophy, as meaning 'a strong spiritual experience as suggesting the presence of a divine entity' can be referenced when understanding what it means to be haunted.
The Numinous is often described throughout the following device:
"Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told 'There is a ghost in the next room', and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost."
The ghost therefore haunts your experience in this device. For something to haunt simultaneously be present and not present. The ghost in this device is not in the roomy are in, however by believing it is in the next room, you are haunted by the effect it might have on you.
If you stop and listen, you may hear the wind outside, brushing through the trees. This is a sound which is both present and 'unpresent' however it does not haunt, I believe this is because it would not have an unknown effect on you. Say however that this wind gradually got louder and louder as if approaching you. Then, perhaps, the sound of the wind would haunt your experience. As its significance consistently evolves and it becomes both incongruous and implicit to your experience.
Where a haunting presence is something that is unfamiliar, the uncanny is something familiar that has become unfamiliar: therefore I would say that the uncanny is a type of haunting.
- The uncanniness of Time in the Art Gallery.
Time is something that is familiar. However, the art gallery takes steps to remove a sense of time from the space and so it becomes unfamiliar and therefore haunting.
- Windows are removed from the space
- A brilliant white light is used consistently and unchanging (relation to casinos wanting customers to believe that it is always daytime.)
- silence is encouraged, as language exists in time through the aural, this is another way that time becomes unfamiliar.
- Works are presented as timeless and out of time
- There are usually no clocks within the contemporary gallery space
- Etymology - Traces German Etymology to discover the meaning of the uncanny or unheimlich and how we come to fear things that we were once familiar with. One such association is that with the connotations of Heimlichkeit meaning secrecy. (-keit = -hood) or ‘die Heimlich kunst’ (the secret art) meaning magic, where magic is equated to unfamiliar practice.
- Contrasting Contexts – ‘it is not unambiguous, it belongs to two sets of ideas which, without being contradictory are yet very different: on the one hand, it means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which is concealed…’
- Ocularcentric Sandman – ‘no bodily injury is so much dreaded by them as an injury to the eye.’ As in the story the threat of the sandman is that he steals the eyes of children.
- Immortality through duality – (pg.9) – ‘…the immortal soul was probably the first “double” of the body.’
- The ‘invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has a counterpart in the language of dreams’
- ‘From having been an assurance of immortality, he becomes the ghastly harbinger of death’. – Associations of Immortal entities being associated more so with death/ bringing death link with the white cube's immortal aesthetic and O'Doherty's claim that to enter the white cube one must have already died.
- Double as terror – ‘The “double” has become a vision of terror, just as after the fall of their religion the gods took on their daemonic shapes.’
Double as representing observable change, encapsulating concurrent contrasting concepts i.e. both good and evil, animate and inanimate, imaginary and real etc. Because there is comfort in the familiar, there is therefore fear in the unfamiliar, this idea of fearful duality are entities which do not fit within our understanding of reality, they are ‘Incongruous heteroclites’ as Foucault would say. ((Heine, Die Götter im Exil)).
There is also association between terror and the concept of haunting. Therefore this intermingling of contrasting Bodies could be another form of haunting. Or perhaps it is through this duality that something familiar becomes unfamiliar.
- Silence, Solitude, Darkness and Freedom -
‘Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of that infantile morbid anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.’
Link between silence and time, solitude and relationality, darkness and context. Each is the antithesis of each of the three tenets of art experience. - Just as we are haunted by the primal fear of the unknown, so too is the rigid conformity of the white cube
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