Psychoanalysis.
2017 Jul;28(3):69-75. 10.18529/psychoanal.2017.28.3.69.
Uncanny as Aesthetic Experience
- Affiliations
-
- 1Department of Digital Culture Contents, College of Liberal Arts, Konkuk University, Seoul, Korea. myjoolee@konkuk.ac.kr
- KMID: 2391397
- DOI: http://doi.org/10.18529/psychoanal.2017.28.3.69
Abstract
- This paper interprets the work of Hans Bellmer, who took pictures after making a doll and distorting its form, and Diane Arbus, who took documentary photographs of unusual and marginalized people, as uncanny anxiety referred to by Freud. Through these two photographers' works, this paper examined how anxiety was used as an aesthetic strategy, and discussed the uncanny as an aesthetic experience. Uncanny refers to the phenomenon of familiar things being repressed and returning to their original place, or the phenomenon of familiarity being alienated due to repression. The aesthetic strategy of uncanny is used to bring a blind spot in reality that can be easily missed with an ordinary vision into the fore, by allowing for the slight shock to an appreciator. The ultimate goal of uncanny aesthetics is to promote both inner and external changes as well as to expand the scope of imagination, through freely crossing the borders between consciousness and unconsciousness, sympathy and antipathy, and reality and fiction.
