IMAGE/OBJECT/THING

Blog Post 7

image-object-thing

For The essay THE UNCANNY to have its full effect, I suggest that any person, but especially one who is teaching an advanced contemporary sculpture class, save all their curiosities or re-readings of the texts until the week before Halloween.

I suggest this because that is the time of year in which you may receive the undivided attention of your class. The majority of undergraduate population embrace the holiday fully, especially those Greek-affiliated students.

As Dan Savage (the Samuel of my internet) prophesizes:

Halloween is being coopted as the Straight Pride parade.

If the majority of your students are Cissies or Straight Identified (which is statistically likely) by the time Halloween rolls around, they are so pent up with repressed abnormativity that they can hardly think about anything except for how wild the upcoming Carnival will be.

In this ripe time in their young intellectual lives, it is tempting get your blanket as wet as possible before laying it down in the syllabus by making them read Society of the Spectacle, thus forcing them to analyze and then drain any Jungian Joy from the experience. I will warn against this, because it breeds resentment, and you still have 5 weeks left alone in a classroom with these creatures. Their attention-spans will Mutiny.

            But the subject of The uncanny, in this anticipatory week, already sweeps through their unconscious like a deep fog, the kind which makes a hand invisible, creating a stump in the greyness, with the disembodied fingers still touching damp air.

THIS IS THE PERFECT TIME TO TEACH THEM ABOUT THAT.

            They won’t think Clown Torture is “creepy” or at least is not as creepy as IT, or Paul McCarthy’s ketchup stained Nixon is any more “gross” than the fake blood in Psycho, or that Louise Bourgeois is any more “morbid” than their own sexy-zombie-bride costume.

What they will think it is natural because it is Halloween.

It is like watching Baby Ickie goes to Burning Man. The spectacle is the new norm. It is opposite week, and so in spirit of opposite week, instead of texting, they are listening, taking copious notes, and thinking about how they are going to make the most abject possible costume out of what they have learned from the life-casting demo (that I strongly suggest you work in to this lesson plan).

Next I will offer some conversational points to aim towards while you are discussing the uncanny, I think of them in my mind as small, predominantly catholic tourist villages scattered along the main road through the Uncanny Valley.

The Segmented Body

            This is where the Addams Family keep a summer-home.  The major landmarks are: Reliquaries, Breasts on a Plate, Victorian stuff, Bruce Nauman’s hands, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Gober, and the Woodman’s Family Estate.

Mechanimorph

            Futurism, DADA, Metropolis, Robocop, BladeRunner

Ghosts

            Japanese woodcut prints of object-based Ozu, Holy Ghost, Hamlet sees his father’s ghost, Mr. Marley, Beetleguice, That woman who put a spell on a pedestal and called it a sculpture.

Undead (Different from ghosts because they are physical/visible)

Christ, Lazarus, Night of the Living Dead, The Last of Us

Dead Animals zoo

            Dead Dinosaurs: Jurassic Park.

Dead Birds: Jury of Her Peers/Petah Coyne/Annette Massager

Dead Deer: Bambi’s mom/Kiki Smith

Dead Cow: Goya bullfighting, Picasso, Damien Hirst

Sexual Depravity

            Drive-in Double feature: Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising before Rocky Horror Picture Show. If the students are really serious, you get to show HASU!

These are some suggestions, but you can basically figure out how any primary text in the space of culture embraces or denies the uncanny, that feeling of discomfort in our bodies when we realize that we are not sure about whether other bodies work like our bodies do and what that might mean for our survival.