In 1993 and 2004
Mike Kelley presented an exhibition titled The Uncanny, consisting
of sculptures, objects and images that he found “creepy”, with
“an ‘uncanny’ aura about them”2.
The majority were life-sized polychrome models of the human body in whole
or part. This accorded with ‘scary’ experiences of my own involving
figurative sculptures, particularly one winter in my early teens when I was
repeatedly surprised and slightly unnerved by a deshevelled Guy Fawkes that
we had propped in a living room chair awaiting the evening’s bonfire.
Kelley’s exhibition centred on Sigmund Freud’s essay The Uncanny
(1919), which draws on Ernst Jentsch’s The Psychology of the
Uncanny (1906), in which the uncanny is exemplified by “doubts
whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether
a lifeless object might not be in fact animate”3.
It is this ambiguity that I have attempted to give my own sculptures in Attic
Basement Garage, which this essay accompanies.
ART AND OBJECTHOOD
Michael Fried’s
criticism of minimalist sculpture’s “degeneration” into
“theatricality” highlights how objects with very little resemblance
to actual figures can still give an impression of human presence:
“...being distanced by such objects is not, I suggest, entirely unlike
being distanced, or crowded, by the silent presence of another person; the
experience of coming upon literalist objects unexpectedly – for example
in somewhat darkened rooms – can be strongly, if momentarily, disquieting
in just this way”4.
I believe that this disquieting effect can unite people in pleasurable excitement;
either when experienced simultaneously by two or more people, or experienced
alone, which might be unpleasant at the time, but can provide a cathartic
pleasure when subsequently described to others. It is this aspect, the joy
of sharing gratuitous fear, that drives my interest in the uncanny5.
NOT SCARY ENOUGH
If gratuitous scares
are the aim then Attic Basement Garage could be alot scarier. The
figures could be hidden behind corners, the room darkened, blacked out even,
visitors provided with dim torches, animatronics occasionally launching the
figures into grotesque movement. In short, all the strategies of the ghost
train or carnival haunted house could be mobilised to provoke the greatest
shocks possible, short of cardiac arrest, and why not?
Firstly, an out and out sensory traumatisation of the viewer is not an exercise
in the uncanny as I understand it; secondly, the more up-front the author
is about his intention to create an uncanny effect, the harder he is likely
to fall into the trap that Freud describes thus:
“...by the time we have seen through his trick it is already too late
and the author has achieved his object. But it must be added that his success
is not unalloyed. We retain a feeling of dissatisfaction, a kind of grudge
against the attempted deceit.”6
Hence, when the uncanny aura is understood as the author’s intention,
it is often superseded by an aura of pathetic redundancy. The initial effect
passes and continued exposure incurs the law of diminishing returns. Knowing
that the intensity of our experience is testament to the author’s ability
to manipulate us can, in itself, take the edge off.
Therefore, it may be that certain uncanny effects are best experienced as
un-authored; a difficulty for works displayed in the context of Western art’s
attributive tradition. This is also a question for Nicolas Bourriaud’s
theory of relational aesthetics: what is the nature of an authored social
relation?
STATUES AND CORPSES
In his essay Playing
With Dead Things, Kelley writes, “The aura of death surrounds statues.
The origin of sculpture is said to be in the grave; the first corpse was the
first statue. And early statues were the first objects to which the aura of
life clung.”7
This association is made explicit in Dennis Nilsen’s description of
the body of a young man he had murdered:
“...I gently undressed him and carried him naked into the bathroom.
I washed him carefully all over in the bath and sitting his limp body on the
edge I towelled him dry. I laid him on my bed and put talc on him to make
him look cleaner. I just sat there and watched him. He looked really beautiful
like one of those Michelangelo sculptures.”8
However, the similarities between statues and corpses (their cold inanimacy),
as opposed to living bodies, are not a source of uncanny feeling in themselves.
Rather, it is precisely the obvious lifelessness of most statues that forecloses
uncanny ambiguity. The marginal status of moving statuary attests to the fact
that viewers prefer their statues this way: patently dead.
Where performance offers a display of the living body, statuary allows contemplation
of a well-kept corpse; the body as a passive object of scrutiny; a face that
will never return our gaze. It is this pleasure that the uncanny disturbs.
STANDING SILENTLY
If a statue is posed seated or standing in a comfortable upright position then its stillness no longer guarantees its lifelessness; a living person could easily sit or stand still in the same pose. For me, a still silent upright figure, whether dead, alive, or somewhere inbetween, is the exemplary form of uncanny human presence.
For example, photographs purportedly showing ‘ghosts’ rarely feature spectral figures in motion. For many, the prospect that the figure was there, unknown to those present, is menace enough. This is especially true when the ‘ghost’ is pictured among oblivious living persons, the implication being: these people were in the presence of a figure they could not see, therefore you might be in the presence of a figure that you cannot see – though it might see you.
This, in turn, is a prompt to that heightened attentiveness to one’s environment that characterises gratuitous fear.
THREE MEN AND A GHOST
An urban legend of the early 90s claimed that the ghost of a young boy could be seen standing in the background of a scene in the comedy movie Three Men and a Baby 9 (1987) . The rumours picked up after the film’s video release, allowing people to replay and assess the footage for themselves.
As the camera pans across a room, following two actors in the foreground, a small figure with dark hair is clearly visible between the curtains of a large window. This figure was subsequently revealed by the filmmakers to be a cardboard cut-out image of actor Ted Danson, propped arbitrarily on the floor by the window, and not intended to create an illusion.
A similar effect
was deliberately created by the makers of BBC’s Ghostwatch
(1992)10. Imitating live-broadcast factual
television techniques, a handheld camera panned quickly around a child’s
bedroom, affording a brief glimpse of a tall figure stood infront of the curtains.
The camera panned back past the same spot in the opposite direction and the
figure had gone. There was no indication in the camera work that the camera
operator was aware of the figure.
Unseen figures also populate urban legends. For example, the story of a young
woman who returns a borrowed item to a friend’s bedroom at night without
switching the light on, so as to avoid waking her; the following morning the
same friend is discovered murdered in her bed beside a note that reads “Aren’t
you glad you didn’t turn on the light?”
Here, we are invited to identify with the heroine’s narrow escape, and
therefore to become hyper-vigilent ourselves. In other words, to ‘get
scared’.
THE LIVING DEAD
Jentsch lists examples
of things that produce uncanny feelings, including “wax-work figures,
artificial dolls and automatons,” but also, “epileptic seizures
and the manifestations of insanity.”11
This reminds me of an uncle of mine who, as a child, would frighten his siblings
by “doing the stick-man”. This involved moving through the corridors
of their home with his arms and legs held straight and rigid, walking in a
fast, jerky, exaggerated manner, his face held in a manic rictus grin.
ZOMBIES
The awkward movements
and facial contortions of George Romero’s zombies in Night of the
Living Dead (1968) perhaps also exemplify this aspect of the uncanny.
However, I have a misgiving about the genre’s convention of zombie ‘death’.
For example, in Night of the Living Dead the living characters are
able to ‘kill’ the zombies by shooting them in the head. Clearly,
as a plot device this resolves the undecideability inherant in the idea of
the living-dead. The problem is that it also suggests that the zombie formula
not only plays on the audience’s fear of bodies that are both dead and
alive, but that it also satisfies a repressed desire to watch lunatics and
the diseased, that is living people, being executed by the sane and healthy.
My least favourite zombie films are those that exhibit this characteristic most blatantly, descending into a thinly veiled form of war movie in which one side (the zombies) are depicted as categorically mindless and abhorent, therefore justifying a lack of empathy for them on the audience’s part when our side (the living) attempt to exterminate them en masse.
Resident Evil12 (a series of zombie ‘shoot em up’ computer games) literalises this tendency by arming the player with a gun and presenting a succession of zombies that must be killed in order to win the game. Though grotesque, the imagery is barely given time to be experienced as ‘creepy’, and the frenzied action shares little in common with the uncanny figures offered by Jentsch, Freud, and Kelley.
By comparison, a scene from Bryan Forbes’ The Stepford Wives (1975) conforms closely to Jentsch’s formulation. A woman preparing coffee is stabbed but does not bleed or show pain. Instead, she begins to repeat a series of physical gestures robotically, spilling coffee beans and breaking crockery, like a malfunctioning animatronic statue. Here, according to the narrative, what initially appears to be a living person in seizure proves to be a mechanised object.
In other instances, covering the face of a performer with a mask can invoke the dehumanised uncanny air of a statue brought to life. This can be seen in ‘slasher’ movies The Texas Chainsaw Massacre13 (1974) , Halloween14 (1978) and Friday the 13th Part III 15(1982) , and also in the art of Paul McCarthy16 whose work includes performances involving masks, and masked (sometimes animatronic) sculptures.
‘POLITICAL’ INFERENCE
It is a short step
from the horror-movie ‘zombie’ to the alternative meaning of the
word, describing people who are apathetic, or lacking in independent judgment.
The Stepford wives are zombies in the latter sense, and the double-meaning
of ‘zombie’ is used as an overt satirical device in Romero’s
Dawn of the Dead (1978), with zombies depicted wondering aimlessly
around a shopping mall.
In relation to Attic Basement Garage, this association could lead
to a reading of the figures as an allegorical critique of certain supposedly
apathetic, homogenised human activities (eg. consumerism): this is not my
intention. Neither do I see them as a comment on the politics of international
production and distribution of consumer goods.
Also, viewers familiar
with works by Santiago Sierra, involving living people inside cardboard boxes17,
might assume common intentions from the superficial similarities of the works.
To interpret Attic Basement Garage as a socio-political critique
of this sort strikes me as a super-ego directed response; one that attempts
to fulfill an assumed obligation to be considerate of the welfare of others,
and of the consequences of our actions, in order to be ‘good’
people - including when we’re looking at art.
Viewed from outside this logic of responsibility and apathy (good and evil),
it seems to me self-deceiving to legitimise Attic Basement Garage
on moral grounds. I don’t see that a cogent claim can be made for its
moral or artistic value on the basis of ultimately serving ‘the good’
because, as a tool of socio-political agency, or even simply as an expression
of a politicised view point, for better or worse, I find it inarticulate and
impotent.
RESISTING THE OTHER
This issue arose
when I came to dress the figures. No shoes are simply shoes. I felt that every
item of clothing available was loaded with social signifiers that I feared
viewers would decode to form an idea of the owner’s age, gender, taste,
social and financial status, etc., speculating on the meaning of my choices.
My concern was to avoid the privileging of difference. I was trying to resist
a liberal pluralist embrace of the Other and to recoil into the amoral comfort
zone of the neutral.
THE IMPOSSIBLE NEUTRAL
My own impression
of the neutral was constituted during childhood via mass distributed music,
novels, television and movies set in unspecified North American white-picket-fence
suburban streets largely populated by white nuclear families, depicted in
movies like Uncle Buck18 (1989)
, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids19 (1989)
, The ‘burbs20 (1989) , Home
Alone21 (1990) and Edward Scissorhands22
(1990) .
Ironically this setting was, and continues to be, frequently invoked as a
parody of conformity. Functioning as a signifier of (attempted) neutrality
itself, it is set up as a foil to all manner of disruptive elements, from
badly behaved dogs and children (Beethoven23
(1992) , Problem Child24 (1990)
) to supernatural horror (Poltergeist II25
(1986) ), burgeoning adolescent sexuality (American Pie26
(1999) ), lust, murder, and despair (Serial Mom27
(1994) , Scream28 (1996) , The
Ice Storm29 (1997) , American Beauty30
(1999) , The Stepford Wives31 (2004)
, Desperate Housewives32 (2004)
).
Of course, my sense of this milieu as neutral is subjective. Since the neutral
is a feeling, between subject and object, it is impossible to locate or present
solely in object form.
With Attic Basement Garage I was attempting to invoke an uncanny
sense of human presence while paradoxically creating a group of people who
were immanently neutral – that is, anonymous, non-specific, and essentially
absent.
THE MASSES
This presence/absence
is exemplified by the idea of the masses in twentieth-century ‘left’
(for want of a better pigeonhole) cultural criticism. Also known as ‘the
people’, ‘the proletariate’, ‘the public’, etc.,
this nebulous entity, ‘the masses’, has performed a crucial role,
serving as a fulcrum on which impassioned arguments turn, while remaining
remarkably indistinct in itself.
The masses are always referred to in the third person, as if the author is
having a conversation with the reader about a group of people who are always
just out of ear-shot. For example, in 1945, Fernand Léger wrote that,
“One of the most damaging charges that can be made against contemporary
modern artists is that the masses cannot understand them.”33
Likewise, up to the present, much of current British government arts policy
is founded on the idea that getting ‘the masses’ through the door
of high culture is an inherently good and valuable exercise. Increasingly,
for privatised museums and galleries, it is also a matter of survival.
However, when the masses are successfully transformed into triumphal statistics
of attendance, they cease to function as a magnetically positive referent
for critical thought.
It is as if the event of specific individuals stepping into the role and making
‘the masses’ present is enough to strip the idea of its charm.
This is what interests me, and reminds me of the present but anonymous, silent
figures in Attic Basement Garage: critically, the essential attribute
of the masses is their absence.
SERIAL KILLERS
According to Mark
Seltzer, there is a particular type of individual who embodies, “the
mass in person”34: the serial killer.
This connection seems relevant to me because, apart from pondering the present-absence
of the masses, I thought a lot about serial killers during the making of Attic
Basement Garage. Drilling and sawing the internal frames of the figures,
with their clothed ‘legs’ hanging off the edge of the workshop
bench, often felt like a bloodless simulation of the crimes of serial killers
like Ed Gein (body snatcher, murderer, and famously the inspiration for the
movies Psycho35 (1960) , The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre13 (1974), and
The Silence of the Lambs36 (1991)
).
I was also interested in the way that ‘True-Crime’ literature
on serial killers presents dull photographs of shabby bathtubs, black bin
bags in wardrobes, stacks of boxes in filthy kitchens, which are brought to
life by captions describing the human remains that were discovered inside
by police.
These captioned photographs lend an aura to the banality of utilitarian domestic storage in a way that recalls, for me, the aura lent to readymade sculptures by the context of the gallery and the authorship of the artist.
IDENTIFICATION
In most horror
movie depictions of serial killers the audience are invited to identify with
the victims. By contrast, the ‘True-Crime’ genre more often focuses
on psychological profiling of the killers, leaving more room to identify with
the killer.
For some, myself included, feelings of social inadequacy, failure, despair,
alienation, or simply of being a ‘misfit’ or ‘loser’
in an intangible sense, can lead to a sympathy for serial killers and an identification
with them.
Their behaviour marks an extremity, beyond the ‘outside’ of the
outsider artist or the political outlaw. They appear to be truly outside,
and the violence of their crimes resonates with the pain and resentment that
can accompany feelings of social alienation and failure.
Convicted serial killers, particularly dead ones, are figures of social dysfunction
that (unlike cultural ‘rebels’) are guaranteed not to sell-out
or emerge as more ‘inside’ than ‘outside’. This is
their appeal as objects of identification for people who are otherwise opposed
to violence.
I see implications of serial-killer type dysfunctionality in Attic Basement
Garage, and I accept that this aspect might appeal most to people struggling
with difficult, alienating or sad times in their lives.
IDENTIFYING WITH THE UNCANNY OBJECT
There is a temptation
to banalise an appetite for the macabre by concealing it with campy excess
and ironic humour (common amongst suburban teenaged ‘Goths’),
thereby repressing the anxieties on which the appetite is founded. This is
a tacit apology to the surrounding community for (indirectly) expressing sadness,
anger, and resentment against it.
Unfortunately, this apology devalues the ‘loser’s’ taste
for the macabre, distracting attention from the shift of view point that it
affords: in this case, an identification with the psychopathology of an irrational
indiscriminately predatory outsider.
Returning to the example of fear games, this shift can be seen as a movement
from the social pleasure of shared gratuitous fear to an identification with
the object of fear. This is precisely what would have been unthinkable to
my friends and I during our fear games: to identify with the uncanny figure,
alien to the group, standing silently, alone in the shadows.
1 Specifically, King's novels Carrie (1974), Salem's Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), Cujo (1981), and Misery (1987).
2 Mike Kelley, A New Introduction to The Uncanny (2004) in The Uncanny (2004) p.9
3 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919) in An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (1955) Hogarth Press: Vintage p.226
4 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (1967), in Art and Theory: 1900-1990 (1992) p.826
5 I am yet to find analysis of the pleasurable social relations that can be generated via fear games. Email me if you have: mattlippiatt@hotmail.com
6 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919) in An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (1955) p.251
7 Mike Kelley, Playing With Dead Things (1993), in The Uncanny (2004) p.34
8 Dennis Nilsen quoted by Brian Masters, Killing For Company (1985) p.130
9 Three Men and a Baby (1987) dir. Leonard Nimoy
10 Ghostwatch (1992) dir. Lesley Manning
11 Mike Kelley, Playing With Dead Things (1993), in The Uncanny (2004) p.26
12 Resident Evil (1996) designed by Shinji Mikami
13 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) dir. Tobe Hooper
14 Halloween (1978) dir. John Carpenter
15 Friday the 13th Part III (1982) dir. Steve Miner
16 McCarthy has used face masks and facial prosthetics in many performances, including Political Disturbance (1976), Grand Pop (1977), Hollywood Halloween (1977), My Doctor (1978), Monkey Man (1980), Pig Man (1980), Baby Boy, Baby Magic (1982), Mother Pig (1983), Bossy Burger (1991), Heidi (with Mike Kelley) (1992), Santa Chocolate Shop (1997), Sod and Sodie Sock Comp O.S.O. (with Mike Kelley) (1998), and sculptures, including Carter Replacement Mannequin (1980), Dead Viking (1992), The Sick Girl (from Heidi, with Mike Kelley) (1992), and Mutant (1994).
17 Eight people paid to remain inside cardboard boxes (1999), and Six people who cannot be remunerated for staying in the interior of cardboard boxes (2000) by Santiago Sierra
18 Uncle Buck (1989) dir. John Hughes
19 Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) dir. Joe Johnston
20 The 'burbs (1989) dir. Joe Dante
21 Home Alone (1990) dir. Chris Columbus
22 Edward Scissorhands (1990) dir. Tim Burton
23 Beethoven (1992) dir. Brian Levant
24 Problem Child (1990) dir. Dennis Dugan
25 Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986) dir. Brian Gibson
26 American Pie (1999) dir. Paul Weitz
27 Serial Mom (1994) dir. John Waters
28 Scream (1996) dir. Wes Craven
29 The Ice Storm (1997) dir. Ang Lee
30 American Beauty (1999) dir. Sam Mendes
31 The Stepford Wives (2004) dir. Frank Oz
32 Desperate Housewives (2004) series creator Marc Cherry
33 Fernand Leger, The Human Body Considered as an Object (1945), in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (1996) p.176
34 Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers (1998) p.103
35 Psycho (1960) dir. Alfred Hitchcock
36 The Silence of the Lambs (1991) dir. Jonathan Demme