Melancholic Cryptonymy and the Aesthetic Threshold of Detectability- The Blue Conceptualists, The Haunted Painter and The Existential Crisis of the Cadaver. [Talk]
Broadcast on:
Sep 20, 2020
Where the melancholic is resistant to mourn what is understood in psychoanalysis as the lost object, which instead of being replaced by the process of ‘introjection’ is ‘incorporated’ or ‘internally vomited’ into the subject forging a psychic crypt of which the phantom is harboured, I propose that due to the failed promises of modernity, hauntological practices resist to mourn the loss of the future it’s movement is denied by ‘incorporating’ it; signalled by visceral, linguistic disjecture and encrypted transmissions that are looped, relayed and brought back in coded ways, the operation of the psychic crypt, generated and sustained by repetition, is symptomatic of the function hauntological practices aestheticise by way of regurgitating and renewing un-activated potentials of the past for future constructs.
If repetition is at the heart of hauntological practices providing an aesthetic threshold of detectability into melancholic cryptonymy, then the representation of this neurosis as a cultural movement can only respond to the ontological and temporal displacement of the present Colin Davis describes as ‘the figure of the ghost at that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive’, (Davis, 2005, p. 373) by bequeathing the slow cancellation of the future: ‘Repetition’ as understood by Blanchot in the context of trauma is ‘neither mournful nor nostalgic, the undesired return, repetition, the ultimate over and over, general collapse, destruction of the present’. (Blanchot, 1995, p9).
Incorporating the loss of the future, on the side of the pathology, not the cure, re-acting, repeating and escalating the symptom of the psychoanalytical dream, The Blue Conceptualists of Ryan Gander, the practice of the haunted painter Vanessa Disler and the existential crisis of Ed Atkins’ cadavers are emblems my research investigates through the gauze of Vico’s eternal recurrence; contextualising the model of history as an auto- cannibalistic feedback loop which reiterates and sustains itself by endlessly living out its own death.