How do we avoid the uncanny becoming just another clichéd trope on the methodological menu? How might we revise ideas concerning the uncanny and explore what it means to us as Fine Art practitioners, keeping in mind ontological ambiguity?
Freud described the uncanny as the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar (Freud, 1919). Previously Jentsch concluded that the uncanny was a fear of the familiar based on intellectual uncertainty (Jentsch, 1906). The uncanny can be described as a semantic field of the opposing German words Heimlich and Unheimlich, addressing both of Jentsch’s prepositions. In the first instance Heimlich is defined as something belonging to the house, friendly, familiar; tame; something …show more content…
The Doll is used as a cliché representation of the uncanny because of the form eliciting a sense of anxiety due to its familiarity and its evident use from Jentsch and Freud as well as the dolls use in memorable media. The doll image is a particular structure, which resembles the human as inhuman. This structure is only successful when, in imitating the human form, aesthetic beauty is subjective, not inherent. Psychoanalytic aesthetics endeavours for the viewer to associate the doll image with the effect of anxiety, or the uncanny, upon the position of the viewer. Nonetheless, due to this repetition from the times of Freud, the doll and the seeing f the double simultaneously has become less prevailing in creating the uncanny moment within the viewer, as it not the embodiment of the uncanny which creates such a sensation but the sequential building to the moment of embodiment which creates the
Freud described the uncanny as the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar (Freud, 1919). Previously Jentsch concluded that the uncanny was a fear of the familiar based on intellectual uncertainty (Jentsch, 1906). The uncanny can be described as a semantic field of the opposing German words Heimlich and Unheimlich, addressing both of Jentsch’s prepositions. In the first instance Heimlich is defined as something belonging to the house, friendly, familiar; tame; something …show more content…
The Doll is used as a cliché representation of the uncanny because of the form eliciting a sense of anxiety due to its familiarity and its evident use from Jentsch and Freud as well as the dolls use in memorable media. The doll image is a particular structure, which resembles the human as inhuman. This structure is only successful when, in imitating the human form, aesthetic beauty is subjective, not inherent. Psychoanalytic aesthetics endeavours for the viewer to associate the doll image with the effect of anxiety, or the uncanny, upon the position of the viewer. Nonetheless, due to this repetition from the times of Freud, the doll and the seeing f the double simultaneously has become less prevailing in creating the uncanny moment within the viewer, as it not the embodiment of the uncanny which creates such a sensation but the sequential building to the moment of embodiment which creates the