The mythology of the uncanny : as theory and practice in Australian contemporary art

Abstract

A sensation raw and primal, unwelcome yet not wholly alien but peculiarly familiar, neither a penetrating roar nor shriek from the depths but a more eerily pervasive murmuring, without being discredited as irrational but instead being elevated within academia - the mythology of the uncanny persists.

This inquiry focusses on the phenomenon of the uncanny and its exemplification in the visual arts. Whilst extant literature relates uncanniness to the broader field of aesthetics, especially enlarged upon in literature, film-studies and architecture, it is a comparatively neglected topic in the context of visual arts. It is occasionally touched upon in texts concerning an artist's work, but usually very synoptically. Yet much art aligns to readings of uncanniness. For example, Sally Smart's evocatively uncanny work attracts descriptive smatterings about it without adequate enunciation against a critical theoretical framework.

Such a framework, newly developed here, takes into account Sigmund Freud's pivotal essay of 1919 whilst providing new interpretations of it and its subsequent plethoric discourse. Furthermore, this framework incorporates entirely different viewpoints, including Existentialist versions of uncanniness centred upon Martin Heidegger's and Jean-Paul Sartre's theories. Whilst being an evolution of the extensive discourse, my framework assimilates otherwise disparate notions of the uncanny effect and its sensations, then applies it contemporaneously.

In writing from the secularised worlds of Freudian psychoanalysis and Existentialism, religion, spirituality and mysticism are areas not intentionally ignored nor sidelined as unworthy of consideration. Nevertheless the scope of this dissertation required curtailing thereby making the exclusion of the non-secular a necessity. Psychophysical, neural and cognitive characteristics of viewers' sensory perception of artwork (in relation to evoking uncanniness) are other exclusions, and whilst I touch on various socio-political aspects of the uncanny, it likewise requires greater regard than what is allowed for herein.

This is essentially an interpretative analysis which applies a more broadly developed framework to six Australian artists whose work is persuasively uncanny: Ron Mueck, Patricia Piccinini, Sally Smart, Lawrence Daws, Pat Brassington and Bill Henson. These case-studies are structured into three chapters: the first concentrates on three-dimensional, figurative sculpture (Mueck and Piccinini); the next section looks at siting the uncanny in two-dimensional landscapes, specifically the locale of Australia, a land where the uncanny is said to loom large (Smart and Daws); whilst the final section focuses on uncanny 'filmic' surfaces or photo-based media (Brassington and Henson}. This form of analysis is founded on either the artist's self-identification with the topic and/or is based on consistent commentary about their artwork eliciting uncanniness, except Henson, who receives little discussion in relation to uncanniness, but, as demonstrated, epitomises it nonetheless.

Examining their art against a contemporary theoretical framework thus addresses a lacuna of critical, academic insight into the uncanniness of visual art, before drawing conclusions about some conceptual, technical and formal differences and similarities. Show more