'Buried Alive' by Anthony Vidler

I have recently read the essay 'Buried Alive' by Anthony Vidler, one of those published in his book ' The Architectural Uncanny ' (1992). I would firstly outline the parts that I particularly found interesting, which will help me gain clearer understanding of the work.

The study on the concept of the 'uncanny' here is centred around Vidler's observation of Pompeii, with references to many figures who were also struck by the 'site of death', namely Chateaubriand, Gautier, Schelling and Sigmund Freud. He starts the essay with defining Pompeii's distinguishable character, in comparison to that of Rome and Herculaneum; that is its "homely nature".

"The circumstances of its burial has allowed the traces of everyday life to survive with startling immediacy. Its streets, shops, and houses seemed to the traveler from the north at once intimate and private." (p. 45)

And yet, Pompeii seemed to represent "the conditions of unhomeliness to the most extreme degree". This is the effect of the juxtapositional co-presence of domestic homely ruins and skeletons next to each other.

"For behind the quotidian semblance there lurked a horror, equally present to view: skeletons abounded." (p. 46)

He had made the various observations and studies thought the archaeological, historical, literal and aesthetic eyes. The lines about his sensitive examination of the close relationship between the story of Pygmalion and that of Pompeii, are remarkable.
(the lines following the mention of an impression of a young woman's breast found beneath a portico, that is now kept in the museum of Portici.)

"The sculptor whose creation was so lifelike that she seemed to blush at his embrace, who fell in love with and "married" his ivory statuette, was now replaced by nature, or even better, history, which had moulded its own work of art from the life, turning, in a reversal that caught the romantic imagination, living beauty into dead trace. And, following the hardly subdued erotic subtext of the buried city, this trace was not simply a mummified body or skeleton but the ghost of a breast, a fragment that, in an age preoccupied with the restoration and completion of broken statues, demanded to be reconstituted, in imagination at least." (p. 49)

Important references:
Théophile Gautier 'Arria Marcella'
Sigmund Freud's essay 'Uncanny'
Wilhelm Jensen 'Gradiva'

(to be continued...)

'October'

The journal 'october' is published quarterly (winter, spring, summer and autumn) by MIT press (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), one of the largest American university presses. The MIT Journals was developed in 1969 as a division of MIT press and now publishes over thirty titles in diverse subject areas including Arts and Humanities, Science and Technology, International Affairs, History and Political Science and Economics. The journal is published in print and electronic formats where articles can be purchased by subscription or Pay-Per-Article contract.

The 'october' focuses on theoretical and critical analysis on the various areas in contemporary art such as film, music, sculpture and performing art. It uniquely draws attentions to the relationships between art and its effect and position in social, political and historical contexts.

It is managed with ten editors including Rosalina Krauss and Annette Michelson, fourteen advice board including Molly Nesbit and Anthony Vidler.

Here are some links relating to Molly Nesbit:

profile:
http://art.vassar.edu/nesbit.html

books by the author:
http://books.google.com/books?q=molly+nesbit&hl=en

the author in conversation at a Tate broadcast event:
http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/matisse_picasso_nesbit_and_garb/default.jsp

articles by the author:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n2_v33/ai_16315398/pg_1

Hauser & Wirth

The art gallery, Hauser & Wirth,was founded by Ursula Hauser, Manuela Wirth and Iwan Wirth in Zurich in 1992. It is now constituted with four sites over three countries:

• Hauser & Wirth Zurich
• Hauser & Wirth London, Piccadilly, opened in 2003
• Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi, Old Bond Street, London, opened in 2006
• Zwirner & Wirth New York, opened in 2006 (by the gallery's strong partnership with the New York dealer, David Zwirner)

The gallery represents over thirty contemporary artists. The London gallery has shown many emerging international artists, many of which displayed their first solo exhibitions in the UK. It has become one of the most interesting and original galleries in London where inspiring works from the artists can be discovered and experienced.

The gallery also works closely with the estates of Eva Hesse, Allan Kaprow, Lee Lozano, Jason Rhoades, and André Thomkins.

The galleries are located in several historical buildings. In particular, the London gallery in Piccadilly is situated in a former bank building where the space creates a distinguishably grand and historical atmosphere. It is formed in three levels: basement, main ground floor and upper floor.

The publishing partnership Hauser & Wirth Steidi creates a number of monographs every season.

A Summary on Sigmund Freud's essay "The Uncanny" (1919) (3)

III

In the last chapter of the essay, Freud looks at the 'uncanny' effects which would fall out of the conditions we laid out so far, which constitute the 'uncanny'. With some examples of the effects created by figures, places and narratives he has found in literature and fairy tales, he follows with the necessity to "distinguish between the 'uncanny' one knows from experience and the 'uncanny' one only fancies or reads about."

He only allowed a brief analysis on the 'uncanny' experienced in the real life and concluded; "...the 'uncanny' elements we know from experience arises either when repressed childhood complexes are revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs that have been 'surmounted' appear to be once again confirmed."
Much deeper and more sensitive observations were done on the other species of the 'uncanny' throughout the chapter, with careful studies and analysis on various literature.

He suggests that; "The variety that derives from repressed complexes is more resistant: with one exception, it remains as 'uncanny' in literature as it is in real life. The other species of the 'uncanny', deriving from superannuated modes of thought, retains its character in real-life experience and in writings that are grounded in material reality, but it may be lost where the setting is a fictive reality invented by the writer."

My research on 'the uncanny'

Recently the term 'uncanny' was used by someone to describe my sculptural work of faceless bodies, however, I had no knowledge on this concept. Having understood it as his direct response to my work, which is what I value, the subject of 'the uncanny' took my interest and I started by researching studies made on the subject, hoping to come up with some ideas of how my work relates to the experience of this complex, yet intense feeling. My work takes the form of the human body, usually either as a model or cast of my own body, and my experiences are the foundation of their existence. They are the results of my challenge to embody the sensations that I feel in response and relationship to the external world; my experience of 'being' in the world.

to view my work, visit my website...

As I tried to deal with the 'core' of experience, I needed to remove our physical traits.
The sensation that the 'core' of my existence was separate from, yet within, the physicality of my body has always been the starting point in my working processes.

To me the concept of 'body' is very important and personal, yet a complicated and tricky one to grasp. It is the most familiar form to our eyes and senses since this is the only form in which we physically exist. It is the form through which we perceive, experience and feel, however, there is a sense of separation which I experience between the physicality of my body and the inner space within the body; in other words, the external and internal self. This sense of separation can result in a disconnection where the body feels to be something foreign and alien. I feel that there might be a point in investigating this sense of unfamiliarity of one's own body in connection to the concept of 'uncanny'.

I am also exploring the effects of 'the uncanny' that I find in the work of the artist, Belinde De Bruyckere, among other artists' work and films which I will list here and update as I come to meet more new material;

Visual artists:
Films:
' Even Dwarfs Started Small ' (1969) by Werner Herzog
' House of Usher ' (1960) by Roger Corman
Films and animations by Jan Svankmajer
' The Sixth Sense ' (1999) by Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan

A Summary on Sigmund Freud's essay "The Uncanny" (1919) (2)

II

In the second chapter of the essay, he moves on to the investigation of 'the uncanny' in persons, things, impressions, processes and situations. He begins with a reference to one of E.T.A. Hoffmann's story 'The Sand-Man', in which the Sand-Man tears out children's eyes, and he later relates the fear of losing eyes to that of castration. This lead him to search for the connections which the motifs that produce the 'uncanny' effect have with infantile sources.
He follows ;

"They (those motifs) involve the idea of the 'double', in all its nuances and manifestations - that is to say, the appearance of persons who have to be regarded as identical because they look alike. This relationship is intensified by the spontaneous transmission of mental processes from one of these persons to the other...a person may intensify himself with another and so become unsure of his true self ; or he may substitute the other's self for his own. The self may thus be duplicated, divided and interchanged."
(here he leaves the further exploration on the concept of 'double' to a study by O.Rank.)

Next, Freud brings up the examples, through his own or others' experiences, of the situations, in recurrences of the same thing, that evokes 'the uncanny';

• unintended returns to same place,

• encounters with same number over and over in a day,

• receiving the letters from two people with same name although one had no previous dealings with anyone of that name.

He relates those to 'a compulsion to repeat' (which "proceeds from instinctual impulses and clearly is manifest in the impulses of small children and dominates part of the course taken by the psychoanalysis of victims of neurosis.") and suggest, as a fact that,

"anything that can remind us of this inner compulsion to repeat is perceived as uncanny."

He continues the collection of examples ;

• fear of 'evil eyes', which is defined by "anyone who possesses something precious, but fragile, is afraid of the envy of others, to the extent that he projects the envy he would have felt in their place." He relates this to a term 'the omnipotence of thoughts', in which he explains in depth in the following paragraph.

• (to many people) anything to do with death; dead bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts. He briefly touches upon the periphrasis 'a haunted house', however, he wishes not to begin an investigation on this here.

• a living person, the effects of madness or epilepsy, when one sees "a manifestation of forces that he did not suspect in a fellow human being, but whose stirrings he can dimly perceive in remote corners of his own personality."

He presents his two observations, in connection to 'repression', in this study of 'uncanny';

1. "...if psychoanalytic theory is right in asserting that every affect arising from an emotional impulse -of whatever kind- is converted into fear by being repressed, it follows that among those things that are felt to be frightening there must be one group in which it can be shown that the frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns. This species of the frightening would then constitute 'the uncanny'."
2. "...we can understand why German usage allows the familiar 'heimliche' to switch to its opposite, the uncanny 'unheimliche', for this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only thorough being repressed."

A Summary on Sigmund Freud's essay "The Uncanny" (1919) (1)

I

Freud starts the essay with investigation of the definitions of the concept 'The Uncanny', with the only previous studies ever done on this subject by the German psychologist, Ernst Jentsh, as the starting point for his own examination. Although the sense of 'uncanny' was never an easy state to identify, Jentsh concluded that it belongs to the area of the frightening which relates to the novel and the unfamiliar. Freud, with some objections to Jentsh's analysis, took it further beyond where Jentsh ended, at first by looking at how German language defines 'unheimlich' ('unhomely', 'uncanny'). Among many different resources Freud referred to there were two points that particularly interested him ;

"... among the various shades of meaning that are recorded for the word heimlich there is one in which it merges with its formal antonym, unheimlich, so that what is called heimlich becomes unheimlich. (the passage is by Gutzkow.) ...this remind us that this word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which are not mutually contradictory, but very different from each other - the one relating to what is familiar and comfortable, the other to what is concealed and kept hidden."

"...our attention is seized by Schelling's remark, which says, something quite new - something we certainly did not expect - about the meaning of unhemilich, namely, that the term 'uncanny' (unheimlich) applies to everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open."