'What Are Feelingss For?' residency at Centre for Drawing, Wimbledon College of Art, concurrent with Paranoia at The Freud Museum
Paul Ryan - 'What are Feelings for? -Aristotle Frame: Iris Sketchbook / Diagram / Text'
Daniel Baker - 'Clear Sign'
Sagi Groner - 'Misshapen' (Video)
Dino Alfier - 'The Worst Things I've Ever Drawn'
More at Dino Alfier's homepage: www.dinoalfier.com
Paul Ryan - 'What are Feelings For? - Chrysippus Frame: Diagrams for War, and Judgement'
I
Only rarely does the psychoanalyst feel impelled to engage in aesthetic investigations, even when aesthetics is not restricted to the theory of beauty, but described as relating to the qualities of our feeling. He works in other strata of the psyche and has little to do with the emotional impulses that provide the usual subject matter of aesthetics, and then it is usually a marginal one that has been neglected in the specialist literature.
One such is the ‘uncanny’. There is no doubt that this belongs to the realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread. It is equally beyond doubt that the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, and so it commonly merges with what arouses fear in general. Yet one may presume that there exists a specific affective nucleus, which justifies the use of a special conceptual term. One would like to know the nature of this common nucleus, which allows us to distinguish the ‘uncanny’ within the field of the frightening.
On this topic we find virtually nothing in the detailed accounts of aesthetics, which on the whole prefer to concern themselves with our feelings for the beautiful, the grandiose and the attractive – that is to say, with feelings of a positive kind, their determinants and the objects that arouse them – rather than with their opposites, feelings of repulsion and distress. In the medico-psychological literature I know only one study on the subject, that of E. Jentsch; and this, while rich in content, is not exhaustive. True, I have to own that, for...
Freud - From 'The Uncanny'.