preview

Psychology Of The Uncanny

Better Essays
Open Document

4. Discuss how visual artists and/or filmmakers interpret psychoanalytic theories such as the monstrous-feminine or the uncanny within their practices. Discuss these contexts in relation to three artists, and to your art making process. Please choose at least 3 artworks.

The idea of the uncanny was first discussed during 1906 by Ernst Jentsch in his essay of “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”, and was further explored by Sigmund Freud’s essay, ”The Uncanny”, in 1919. In Freud’s essay, this psychological phenomenon is further explained through aesthetic investigation. Since his publication, the essays have brought considerable influence on many visual artworks, especially surrealist works. In Freud’s essay, he had mention “…the word (uncanny) …show more content…

Born in 1910, Tanning is well known as an American surrealist painter. Her earlier works are mainly inspired by childhood fantasies and nightmares. In her earlier painting, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik portrays a setting of a corridor in a hotel lobby. With a decaying sunflower rested in the middle of the corridor, a girl with her hair on end and a remarkably life-like doll is placed in front of the first door. The doll status as a toy is revealed by her hairline and the regularly moulded contours of her torso. In pointing out a particular characteristic of uncertainty, E. Jentsch suggested that sensation of uncanny “namely, doubt as to whether an apparently living being is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate.” , linking how the sensation of uncanny is arouse when a life-less object is ingeniously life-like. Also, with the doll wearing identical clothing with the girl, the two figures has a impression of looking similar to another, hence bringing up the criteria of how uncanny that arises from double of a living person. The sensation of uncanny is provoked because“…a person may identity himself with another and so become unsure of his true self; or he may substitute the other’s self for his own.” “From an early stage, Tanning’s work utilizes the visual imagery found in the gothic novels she read in her youth, particularly the motif of the haunted house with its potential for both …show more content…

In discussing these points in the context of three artworks, we can see that the uncanny, “… in its aesthetic dimension, a representation of mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming.” All three of these paintings have a common trait of a dreamlike presence, and it is because of these unsure presences it gave the painting a complete sense of uncanny. Uncanny in visual arts have produced powerful emotion for their audience, capturing strangeness in

Get Access