Uncanny: A Dimension in Contemporary Art

According to the sociologist Frank Furedi, “the growing use of the term ‘at risk’ expresses cultural attitudes towards everyday life. It is ­symptomatic of a tendency to regard a growing range of phenomena as threatening and dangerous.”1 1  - Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear: Risk Taking and the Morality of Low Expectations (London, UK: Continuum, 2002), 9.  Increasingly, fear is theorised as a technology and symptom of contemporary western societies. Though an emotion that is ­recognisable as predominant in other historical periods, the cultural recognition conferred to fear today is betrayed by definitions such as “risk society,” “age of anxiety” and “culture of fear.”2 2  - See Sarah Dunant and Roy Porter eds., Age of Anxiety (London,UK: Virago Press, 1996); Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London,UK: Sage Publications, 1992); Furedi, Culture of Fear.  The arts’ response to this climate concerns both the private and social spheres. It voices the ­experience of political threat and violence, and the sense of individual and collective anxieties. Paradigmatic are artworks that comment directly on the current political situation, engaging with issues such as terrorism. Yet, also significant are those works that explore the impinging anxieties that reverberates in everyday life, turning the domestic into menacing landscapes. My endeavour is to consider the fear of the ordinary, the menace that inhabits the quotidian, as contemporary figurations of the uncanny by artists as diverse as Gregor Schneider, Mona Hatoum, Marko Mäetamm and Shona Illingworth. The aim is to investigate the pervasiveness of fear and locate the visual arts engagement with this emotion to unravel the broader socio-cultural implications of the unheimlich as the currency of contemporary experience. 

At the beginning of his seminal essay, Freud refers to the uncanny as an aesthetic category, as “the theory of the qualities of feeling.”³ 3 - Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” (1919) in Collected Works, vol. 14 (London, UK: Penguin, 1990), 339. Freud draws attention to the etymological ambiguity of the term unheimlich. Heimlich, which refers to what is familiar and well known, also means what is secret and mysterious thus ambiguously hinting at its ­opposite, ­unheimlich—what is occult, eerie, and unknown. Related to “what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror” and to “what excites fear in general,” Freud suggests that “The uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.”⁴ 4 - Ibid., 339 and 340. This ­inherent ­tension between known and unknown is played out as a ­disturbing ­experience of repressed material of the mind that represents itself in an alien and frightening form. Freud describes the uncanny effect “as when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it ­symbolizes.”⁵ 5 - Ibid., 367. The uncanny happens as a blurring of reality at the erosion of the boundaries between the real and imagination. Examples in Freud include tales by the German romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffman, and artefacts, such as wax models, suggesting a convergence between the psychoanalytical dimension of the uncanny and the imaginary, whether fictional or visual. Hence, Jean-Luc Nancy recognises the uncanny as a trait of landscape painting, as the representation of space that “opens to the unknown,” as a depiction of “dislocation,” of strangeness and ­estrangement.⁶ 6 - Jean-Luc Nancy, “Uncanny Landscape,” in The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 51-62, 59-60.