Festival of the Unconscious
The Unconscious Revisited at the Freud Museum
24th June - 4th October 2015
Art practice in art therapy is given shape by its simultaneous involvement of artist, viewer and curator and its boundaries of time, space and materials. The drama takes place within contexts such as hospitals, schools, prisons and hospices; the players are positioned in relationships of power and unconscious and conscious processes can be explored. Tutors on the MA Art Psychotherapy, Goldsmiths, University of London, have used aspects of an art therapy practice to explore their individual and collective understanding of the ‘unconscious’. This exhibition, created in response to the centenary of Freud’s essays on the unconscious, is part of an on-going research project, which uses art-making and writing to explore the theme. Freud's essays were in part written as a rejoinder to scepticism of the concept; our research explores its contested relevance to contemporary art therapy practice.
Christopher Brown, Kristen Catchpole, Annamaria Cavaliero, Diana Kagiafa, Jon Martyn, Lesley Morris, Lisa Rimmer, Susan Rudnik, Sally Skaife, Robin Tipple, Diana Velada, Jill Westwood.
SOMEUNCONSCIOUSTHINGS
The photographs opposite were taken by Karolina Urbaniak from the Freud Museum and used to illustrate the booklet they produced for visitors about someunconsciousthings. The booklet contains texts by members of The Unconscious Project about their work and appears below.
Copyrights @ The Freud Museum London, photos by K. Urbaniak
This text, which supports our exhibition, was written as a chain letter. Each person wrote a paragraph on their contribution to the exhibition and passed it on to the next. We were all allowed an edit of our own piece after reading all the other inserts; lastly two people were charged with the edit of the final piece. The idea was to replicate the process of making and curating the art in which the final representation was from the group as a whole, whilst each unique individuality was kept visible. We decided, though, to hide the named identity of the individuals to celebrate collaboration, collectivity and intersubjectivity – notions that are undervalued in the contemporary emphasis on celebrity and the individual.
The artist Louise Bourgeois referred to Freud’s collection of antiquities as ‘Freud’s Toys’. 1 Using basic art materials and ordinary objects connected to my art therapy practice with children, I considered my associations with The Freud Museum’s artefacts and Bourgeois’ response. I explored the metaphor of archaeology in conjunction with my experience and understanding of children’s art practice and the relics of childhood and, as my collection developed, I became increasingly aware that relationships between my objects were adding previously unacknowledged dimensions to my making. When members of the unconscious project group came together to install our work in Freud’s bedroom, I was struck how our discussions, interactions with staff at The Freud Museum, as well as the process of curating, seemed to reveal fascinating glimpses into our own group dynamics and illuminated how current Art Psychotherapy thinking relates to Sigmund and Anna Freud and their legacy.
1 Bourgeois, L. (2012) Freud’s Toys. Freud Museum London
Freud’s collection of objects and figurines struck me as having a kind of reverential significance and made me think about the power that human beings can invest in material objects. I had in my possession a religious relic, a fragment of cloth from the garment of a saint, encased in a silver reliquary brooch. The idea that this object could be endowed with miraculous powers seemed to relate to Freud’s ideas on the subject of wish fulfilment. As an art psychotherapist working with adults, I note the many types of painful losses that my clients face and find ways of living with. In making the work as a new member of the unconscious project I slowly became aware of how my religious upbringing and my own adult experiences of loss were being worked through. The relic was the starting point for the very personal hand-made piece of work that emerged.
Amidst ‘the unconscious project’, in the context of the museum’s appreciation of and dedication to the life of Freud and his family, my autobiographical response was evoked, or perhaps, ‘freely associated’. In the enlarged fuzzy photograph my parents are behind me (I am aged three) and the Great Pyramid is behind us all. Freud was keenly engaged with Egyptian history and mythology and I am intrigued by the symbolism of the pyramid, with its portal to the womb-tomb within the phallic monument. Sloterdijk describes the edifice as having the same appearance that it would have when de-constructed. ‘It stands in its place, unshakeable for all time, because its form is nothing other than the undeconstructible remainder of a construction that, following the plan of its architect, is built to look as it would after its own collapse’.1 My other work references Freud when he speculated that, ‘If Moses gave the Jews not only a new religion, but also the law of circumcision, he was no Jew but an Egyptian...’.2
1 Sloterdijk, P. Derrida, An Egyptian: On the Problem of the Jewish Pyramid (Hoban, W., Trans.). UK: Polity Press, 2009.
2 Freud, S. Moses and Monotheism The Hogarth Press 1939
I contributed three pieces using found objects and containers. The process was that each piece followed on from the other in relation to the theme of the unconscious. It started with the flea-market photograph of the hare. This was followed by finding the Brownie 127 camera. Once I had the black archive box the first piece came together quickly with the juxtaposition of the Centurian tank. The second piece utilizes rusty objects from the foreshore of the river Thames. The container this time is a blank book. The third piece is a small circular box, which like the other two containers is covered in black cloth. The tiny baby appears to float. The embossed Dymo tape references text from a film installation in a previous exhibition ‘a group unconscious’. I see these art objects as representations of object relations that function both intrapersonally within my own internal world and interpersonally through the dynamic relationships between group members, as reflected in the curating process and the finished piece as a whole.
My work began with the atavistic pleasure of knotting string to paper packaging material. This became a hanging to which I added nets which represented layers of ‘the conscious’ and ‘the unconscious’. During the recent UK election, I was thinking about the ease with which the influence of the privileged and powerful on our way of experiencing and understanding the world, slips from our consciousness. Similarly, as the history of thought has mainly been written by men, women are likely to translate their own experiences through the male gaze. In the exhibition I wanted to represent something of this ‘conscious’ thinking about what gets lost from consciousness whilst also letting the curating unconsciously influence the way the material appeared. Crows, a reference to a previous symbol of our group work, appeared again.
The human-female-crow-donkey creature is in a state of pupation. She is a crucible of the imagination, holding secrets, memories and feelings that cannot be spoken. Pregnant, she is gestating complex emotional associations to my personal experience from childhood to adulthood and now middle age. This figure is also a coalescence of my roles as an artist-art psychotherapist-educator-researcher. Made from both abject detritus and significant, charged materials, she oscillates like a ghost haunting and hovering at the foot of the psychoanalytic couch. Containing the forces of both Eros and Thanatos, she looks back at the observer in a process of witnessing and reverence.
I dreamt of a bell jar filled with the void of the last breath. The estuary offers consolation for the unuttered words and unfulfilled intentions of an ordinary life. It is going to rain. The heavily laden, petrol-blue sky bears down on the deep brown mud, a tiny strip of grey water between. The silent osmosis of sea water and sea air, of intimate and undetermined space, soothes me into sleep on the soft muddy bed of my dreams …’the weather is beautiful so far, but with a chilly wind. Love Mum’.
My interest in flight, of the mechanical and natural kind, recalls a shift or movement in adolescence, a sublimation. I have a little card which came from a packet of tea, a card that told me about the emperor moth. I remember finding these cards in tea when a child, my mother encouraging me to search in the packet between the silver paper and the card of the box – maybe I was getting to her secrets, her secret babies. I like Schopenhauer’s idea of the will as something that is in us and outside of us, and more than us. I noticed that Anna Freud has Schopenhauer on her bookshelf. Freud’s diagram referring to id (it) suddenly looked to me like the body of the moth. Reflecting on the body of the moth when looking at illustrations, I noticed how like a brown stool it looked. Putting Freud at the top of this must represent some oedipal difficulties of mine!
The concept of the dynamic unconscious, the shadow and the Ancient Greek comedy “Nephelai” (=Clouds) by Aristophane inspired my contribution to this project. Nephelai (played by the female Chorus) are flirting with our aesthetics and acting as a resistance to revealing unconscious material, as is the embellishment on my artwork. My conscious attempt to portray the story of Nephelai on canvas was overpowered by an alluring mechanism, which led to me covering up the former with shapeless figures that held layers of elusive meaning. Among my other “unconscious things” there is evidence of fire, with some things left intact and others half-burnt. Different aspects of the Shadow showed up and I reluctantly welcomed them: a spectrum from what looked like a Beast to what looked like Gold material.
I can't tell you - but you feel it - Nor can you tell me - As darkness comes I wrestle the sleep, my head buzzes with all that I have borne witness to. "Anyway, only 8 babies died in the six weeks I was there, that's not even that many". I hold the pain, is it real. I carry him in my dream, through doors and on trains. Faster, faster I must go. I stop, he's gone, is he gone. I search and search inside, nothing is there but black feathers floating into the air. Is it real? I hold my breath as I leave the hospital and pass the mortuary, I know it's there. I gasp in the air outside feeling it fill my lungs fresh and cold, not like the stale air inside. I'm free to run, I run, faster, faster. I hear my breath, I feel the ground, I see the sky.
I can't tell you - but I feel it.
My battle-wearied grandfather’s eye gazes upon the viewer from its entwined and ensnared chamber. My memory of this powerfully immobilizing non-seeing eye, came at a time in childhood when I was feeling as if I was part of a dreamscape, disconnected from others and in a transitioning potential space. I was then, and am now, encountering and discovering the newness of relationship, lineage, gender and culture. The breast, manifest in glassy domes, here recreated in resin form, captures the mummified heart, cooked off over weeks. The hair is a created fabrication of Freud’s ‘pubic foliage’. The seven specimens contrive to catalogue the years within this stage of a childhood process, where I felt like a product of another’s dream.
In 2012, Islamist group, Ansar Dine, went about the destruction of the Mali Temples in Timbuktu. A spokesman for the group was quoted as saying “The destruction is a divine order.” 1 Iconoclasm is not limited to Islamist thought.2 I have been thinking about the relationship between this form of cultural violence and the appropriation of artefacts for collections and museums. The Mali temples have since been rebuilt and are now under the protection of the UN. 'And there were no doors to your temple...' in part came out of these thoughts; it was a way of exploring the relationship between the sacred and the hostility that can arise from exclusion.
1. http://world.time.com/2012/07/02/timbuktus-destruction-why-islamists-are-wrecking-malis-cultural-heritage/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconoclasm
SOMEUNCONSCIOUSTHINGS - TEXTS