Image - Freya Tripp 'Mbantua 24HR'  Digital Photograph 2014

Uncanny Australia

Since 2014 I have been working within the arts sector in Central Australia and spending extended periods of time in Arrernte country, Mbantua/Alice Springs. Colonial forces constitute horrifying aspects of Alice Springs and the way in which these forces shape the conditions of life and death is disturbingly apparent. Questions inevitably arise of identity and belonging, but furthermore about mechanisms of power, territorialisation, national narratives, and Australia’s derisive history. In response to colonial violence, massacre and dispossession, lingering ‘bad faith’ started to occupy a strange place in my own psyche. This revealed for me, a disturbing liminal space of experience where what was homely and known suddenly became incomprehensible, unhomely and discomforting.

Experiences of Australia can be complex and unexpected or uncertain, often creating the feeling of the familiar transposed into unfamiliar space. Freud identified the experience of a familiar/unfamiliarity as the condition of the ‘Uncanny’ ‘where the home is unhomely - where the heimlich becomes unheimlich - and yet remains sufficiently familiar to disorient and disempower.’ The Freudian Uncanny marks shifts in perception, experience, power balances and discourse, which signals unsettlement.

Mbantua/Alice Springs, with its aboriginal and non-aboriginal heritage, is a place where Australia’s derisive history, and present segregation, is visible and affecting. Its location, its history, its current community combine to highlight tension and nuances built into concepts of home, and belonging but furthermore ‘territory’. It is a cultural melting pot of people who live and work there; claiming of territory manifests itself on the body (through dress, movement and language) and the physical space that those bodies then inhabit (houses, sacred sites, towns, communities).

The territory claimed or occupied by the individual or group is then marked at a critical distance to others. Questions arise about the spaces and critical distances that we mark around ourselves and /or that people mark around us. In the process of classifying distinctions between boundaries, levels of visibility are attained, new affiliations made, amplification occurs, and the boundaries dividing minorities from majorities are often unsettled all the more.

From this perspective I observed Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians in a predicament where ‘all of us’ can even feel that we are disempowered and precariously placed. This is another understanding of the word ‘Uncanny’; something can suddenly become less settled by the entanglement with something less familiar.

‘All of us’, in many ways seem to have become a minority, which can only then imagine itself (as minorities often do) as embattled. In 2017 the utopian dream of a ‘united nation’ appears not only distant but the question lingers, what exactly constitutes this ‘fantasised’ Australian identity?

                                                                   Image - Odd Nerdrum 'White Hermaphrodite' oil paint on linen 1992

Odd and Kitsch

While dichotomies are not representative of truths they do effect our perception, action and history - i think this is very much the case with the origins of the dichotomy of Art and Kitsch. These terms shift and evolve with time - are redefined according to politics, philosophy, economics, fashion -and are malleable because they are simply abstract ideals. The question "what is Art?" - is not something i'm interested in interrogating here... this is a question that is both far too infinite and far too subjective. Kitsch on the other hand seems to be far more identifiable - to the point of common assertion "oh its so Kitsch!". 

So Kitsch... just what is it? when did it begin? and why? As a descriptive term, Kitsch originated in the art markets of Munich in the 1860s and the 1870s - describing cheap, popular and marketable pictures and sketches. Kitsch is a derisive word that was put into use by the modernist elite and became associated with artefacts of mass culture, which were seen as sentimental, illegitimate and inferior.  In the 19th century, painting as well as the other arts held a much more influential role in society then we can imagine today. Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1862), which met universal hostility from the likes of Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Taine, who derided it for being sentimental, vulgar, artificial, and containing “neither truth nor greatness” - nevertheless became so popular with the public that the issues raised were soon on the agenda of the French national assembly.

Kitsch criticism is born from Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of aesthetics. Kant had an enormous influence on the concept of ‘Fine Art’ as it came into being in the mid to late 18th century, he described the Kitsch appeal to the senses as “barbaric”. The presence of sentimentality, pathos and a lack of originality were the main accusations against it. Kant identified genius with originality and one could say that he was implicitly rejecting kitsch.  Another influential philosopher writing on fine art was Hegel, who emphasised the idea of the artist belonging to the spirit of his time, or zeitgeist. As an effect - working with emotional and 'un-modern' or archetypal motifs was referred to as kitsch from the second half of the 19th century onward. Kitsch is thus seen as ‘false’. Tomas Kulka (kitsch and art) asserts that the term was originally applied exclusively to paintings and soon spread to other disciples, such as music and composers such as Tchaikovsky, whom Hermann Brock refers to as “genialischer kitsch”, or kitsch of genius.

The word became popularised in the 1930s by Theodor Adorno, Hermann Broch, and Clement Greenberg, all of whom attempted to define Kitsch and Avant Garde as polar opposites. As with the origin of the term, this redefinition took place during a turbulent and violent era. Hitler was rising to power in Germany, Stalin held Russia in an iron grip and their propaganda was filled with illusionistic depictions of nude, athletic youths. Their films depicted beauty and sincerity with a sickening sweetness and so it was an easy task for Adorno, Broch and Greenberg to twist the popular definition of Kitsch into a deceitful tool of totalitarianism. Kitsch unlike Camp is tinged with negativity and a sense of alienation, even degradation. This has much to do with how 20th century modernist critics have dealt with the category of Kitsch. Hermann Broch, for example called it “the element of evil in the value system of art”, Theodor Adorno called it “poison” and clement Greenberg in is famous ‘Avant Garde and kitsch’ determined Kitsch to be “criminal”, “parasitic,” “mechanical” and even “pornographic”. All of these critics agreed that it was a “paradigm of aesthetic failure”.

For half a century or more Greenberg’s view was orthodoxy. To be a modern artist you had to turn your back on the literal image. Then in the 1980s the lines separating kitsch and art became blurred (think of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami).   Early in my career I developed an interest in the Nordic painter Odd Nerdrum - and his school of ‘Kitsch Painters’. Founded in 1998 upon a philosophy proposed by Odd Nerdrum, Kitsch painters embrace Kitsch as a positive term, not in opposition to art but its own structure of values and philosophy, which are separate to ‘Art’. Odd Nerdrums definition, introduced in his book ‘On Kitsch' (2001) suggests that Kitsch is synonymous with Humanism - the same conceptual framework employed during the Renaissance - and up until the beginning of the 19th century.  

Whatever we think of the history of modern art since Greenberg, we have to admit that the kitsch question is still with us. Just what is Kitsch? And if it is awful, why is it awful? The thing that strikes me is the strange fact that Kitsch is a modern phenomenon. No art, music or literature before the end of the 18th century seems to display it. Those medieval frescoes of sinners being forked into hell or wafted to heaven are primitive, even absurd. But somehow the feeling is real. What made the difference and what kind of difference was it? Mass production? The Enlightenment? The loss of religious faith? Or is it just that taste is a fragile thing, and not every age of civilisation can really provide it? and... where do we go from here?

                                                               Image - Shaun Gladwell 'Interceptor Surf Sequence'  Still - Video Work 2009

Australian Gothic

We live in an age of monsters and the body panics they excite, where zombies and vampires have taken centre stage, where monsters have colonised much of mass culture. The insidiousness of colonisation creates a system in which monstrosity becomes normalised and naturalised via the essential fabric of the everyday, trivialising what is genuinely monstrous about the existential structures of modern day life.

Terra Australis Incognita was the name first given to Australia by European explorers, literally translating to ‘unknown southern land’. Gerry Turcotte (Australian Gothic 1998) asserts that long before the fact of Australia was ever even confirmed by explorers and cartographers it had already been imagined as a ‘Grotesque’ unhomely space. The antipodes, a dungenous world of reversals and a land peopled by monsters. Turcotte further asserts that Gothic tropes applied to narratives surrounding the bush have created a Gothic effect that is ‘distinctively Australian’.  Gothic tropes seem to lend themselves the Australian interior and were most notably described in the 19th century by the Melbourne novelist and journalist Marcus Clarke (Australian Scenery 1876. Clarke wrote of “the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write” and also drew on Edgar Allan Poe to transfer a melancholic condition onto the Australian landscape.

Experiences of Australia are complex and unexpected or uncertain, often creating the feeling of the familiar transposed into unfamiliar space. Freud identified the experience of a familiar/unfamiliarity as the condition of the ‘Uncanny’ ‘where the home is unhomely - where the heimlich becomes unheimlich - and yet remains sufficiently familiar to disorient and disempower (The uncanny 1919). The Freudian Uncanny marks shifts in perception, experience, power balances and discourse, which signals unsettlement.

The Gothic Mode has endured for over 2 centuries, engaged by a diversity of authors including Horace Walpole (1717-1797) Mary Shelley (1797-1851) Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) and featured heavily in Australian colonial fiction, most notably Marcus Clarke (1846-1881). The Traditions original author Horace Walpole was in many ways rebelling against the structures of order, reason and rationalism of the 18th century, reinventing and re-imaging the human experience through the creation of what he termed a ‘Gothic’ novel.

Recent decades have given rise to a 'Contemporary Gothic' - a subculture of cults and fashions that seem far removed from the conventions literary origins. Furthermore popular TV series and films have developed followings that support a plethora of internet sites for devotes to stories of horror and terror. The Gothic term seems to have been taken up as a general descriptor. Tropes of the Gothic conjured up in the popular imagination might include haunted houses, family madness, sinister outsiders, gloomy landscapes and a pervasive sense of menace and terror.

This Gothic term has shifted and evolved with time and is redefined according to cultural, economic, political and social circumstances. However, it does consist of recognisable tropes; darkness, isolation, duality, horror, confusion, eroticism, madness and death. The Gothic mode emphasises the uncertainty and desperation of the human experience. That experience is often depicted through enclosure and entrapment, a solitary hostile environment, with an unspecified, unidentifiable danger. This feeling of isolation and a fear of the unknown is paradoxical in that it also suggests transformation, a light in the darkness. Gothic darkness is metaphorical, this contrast of light/dark, this duality, speaks to the very nature of the human experience. What arises out of the Gothic shadow world is a metaphorical web of inter-related themes that when combined create a particular ‘effect’. 

Straightforward narrative structures regularly fail to register the reality of monstrous dislocation and unseen structures between bodies and the powers that govern them - and so we need an armoury of de-familiarising techniques. In its most radical version the Gothic is compelled to dramatise, using a metaphorical language and imagery to shock the modern mind, operating by way of estrangement effects, via procedures that make the everyday appear as it truly is - bizarre, shocking and monstrous.