Art Glossary: The “Uncanny”
The word “uncanny” has been used throughout history to describe a certain unsettling feeling one may feel upon encountering something. What may it refer to, both now and in the past?
Since being coined somewhere around the late 16th century in Scots to mean “relating to the occult, malicious,”[1] the word “uncanny” has taken up many meanings, many of which include a kind of strange, creepy feeling. In the early 20th century, the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, wrote a very influential piece of text (“The Uncanny”) that attempted to analyze what exactly constituted uncanniness.
In particular, his view is that a situation or encounter is uncanny due to an inherent familiarity of it — that one has encountered this situation before, albeit possibly under wildly different circumstances. Uncanniness is hence an unsettling, or “frightening” feeling of having been revisited by something of the past — something that looks familiar but is so buried away in memory that one can’t quite pinpoint what it is, only that it seems to be back for revenge for having been forgotten, like a traumatic memory. Perhaps this ability to deeply provoke and unsettle the psyche was what was so “occult” or “malicious” about objects described as “uncanny”.
“Uncanny” continues to be used today to describe artworks, including, for example, Cadeau, 1921, by Man Ray, which appears to be a domestic iron adorned with sinister looking nails at the bottom. I definitely understand the uncanniness here — the potential for any domestic object to be dangerous, and similarly, the insecurity one could have felt in the supposed safe haven of the home when they were younger.
The same could be said for works by Mona Hatoum, like Interior Landscapes, 2008. Would you call this uncanny? Why or why not?
References:
[1] Oxford Dictionary of English, s.v. “Uncanny,” ed. Angus Stevenson, 3rd ed., accessed June 1, 2020, https://www-oxfordreference-com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/view/10.1093/acref/9780199571123.001.0001/m_en_gb0897400.
