{"id":5985,"date":"2022-02-21T15:40:40","date_gmt":"2022-02-21T14:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.petrasterry.com\/text-rainer-metzger-petra-sterrys-art-of-defamiliarization\/"},"modified":"2022-04-05T01:29:25","modified_gmt":"2022-04-04T23:29:25","slug":"text-rainer-metzger-petra-sterrys-art-of-defamiliarization","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.petrasterry.com\/en\/text-rainer-metzger-petra-sterrys-art-of-defamiliarization\/","title":{"rendered":"TEXT Rainer Metzger &#8211; The Homey and the Uncanny"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<style type=\"text\/css\" data-created_by=\"avia_inline_auto\" id=\"style-css-av-dafz1-9576c520710cf465aeb78a0b5c1c6e0f\">\n#top .flex_column.av-dafz1-9576c520710cf465aeb78a0b5c1c6e0f{\nmargin-top:0px;\nmargin-bottom:30px;\n}\n.responsive #top #wrap_all .flex_column.av-dafz1-9576c520710cf465aeb78a0b5c1c6e0f{\nmargin-top:0px;\nmargin-bottom:30px;\n}\n<\/style>\n<div  class='flex_column av-dafz1-9576c520710cf465aeb78a0b5c1c6e0f av_three_fourth  avia-builder-el-0  el_before_av_one_fourth  avia-builder-el-first  first av-break-at-tablet flex_column_div  '     ><section  class='av_textblock_section av-kw4wg044-931af3639390cd08d361866e31d8f74c '   itemscope=\"itemscope\" itemtype=\"https:\/\/schema.org\/CreativeWork\" ><div class='avia_textblock'  itemprop=\"text\" ><h2>Rainer Metzger<\/h2>\n<h1>The Homey and the Uncanny<\/h1>\n<h2>Petra Sterry\u2019s Art of Defamiliarization<\/h2>\n<p>1. St. Aigenheim<sup>1<\/sup><\/p>\n<p>The camera\u2019s shaky picture records a most familiar afternoon idyll: a patch of woods, a path, a field in the sunshine, two girls playing, a little dog too. <em><span class=\"tm11\">Summer Tale<\/span><\/em> <span class=\"tm9\">is the title Petra Sterry has selected for her short film, and even though a thunderstorm seems to be brewing, the friendliness of everyday life has this summer tale fully under its sway. As is usual for the medium, there is a soundtrack, and its narrative is quite in accord with that of the images. That is, if it were not for the mention of a scene that remains off screen and involves a mother, a coat hanger, and a dog cowering in the corner with a bloody nose. This story within the story can only be followed acoustically, and yet it may have crept into the blurred sequence of images. Thus the message transmitted by the final sentence of the eight-minute minidrama very suddenly becomes plausible: \u201cThe afternoon had lost its innocence.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"tm9\">Ambiguity, such as that displayed by <em>Summer Tale<\/em>, is what makes Petra Sterry\u2019s work unmistakable. This is not a summer tale from Eric Rohmer, but from David Lynch. The surfaces of the artist\u2019s scenarios show dents and are marked by cracks and scratches, an inheritance that has injured the epidermis from below and from above, from within and without, psychically from the soul and physically from the surroundings. <\/span><\/p>\n        <div class=\"rmwr-wrapper\" \n             data-id=\"rmwr-6a0ac7db3d453\"\n             data-mode=\"normal\"\n             data-animation=\"fade\"\n             data-duration=\"300\"\n             data-smooth-scroll=\"true\"\n             data-scroll-offset=\"0\">\n            <button \n                type=\"button\"\n                class=\"read-link\" \n                id=\"readlinkrmwr-6a0ac7db3d453\"\n                data-open-text=\"Mehr lesen \/ Read more ...\"\n                data-close-text=\"\"\n                aria-expanded=\"false\"\n                aria-controls=\"readrmwr-6a0ac7db3d453\"\n                aria-label=\"Mehr lesen \/ Read more ...\"\n            >\n                <span class=\"rmwr-text\">Mehr lesen \/ Read more ...<\/span>\n            <\/button>\n            <div \n                class=\"read_div\" \n                id=\"readrmwr-6a0ac7db3d453\"\n                aria-hidden=\"true\"\n                data-animation=\"fade\"\n                data-duration=\"300\"\n                style=\"display: none;\"\n            >\n                <\/p>\n<p>Nothing is as it is, these surfaces seem to be trying to articulate, and precisely this evidence has its cryptic significance and its underlying message. In one of her paintings the artist makes it clear that \u201cSt. Aigenheim\u201d is a cold place; the one-family home is sacred, and yet under this St. Aigen one must reckon with sanctions at any time. Minute displacements, subtle fractures, a jumbled letter in a word or a shifted motif in the sequence of depicted objects is enough to expand homeyness (das <em>Heimelige<\/em>) into the dimension with which German etymology already has outfitted it, into das <em>Unheimliche<\/em>, i.e. the uncanny.<\/p>\n<p>At the beginning of his classic work on the subject, the 1919 essay \u201cThe Uncanny\u201d, Sigmund Freud places a long quotation from the dictionary. \u201cWhat interests us most,\u201d Freud concludes, \u201cis to find that among its different shades of meaning the word <em>heimlich<\/em> (homey) exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, <em>unheimlich<\/em> (uncanny).\u201d His following remarks are devoted to this synonymity, and it seems that Petra Sterry knows these remarks very well. It is only a small step from trusted familiarity to ghastly horror. Terror is there on the trottoir, and the more carefully one isolates oneself in one\u2019s little world, the closer the demons are at one\u2019s heels.<\/p>\n<p>During the last one and a half decades, the uncanny has been booming. The <em>Architectural Uncanny<\/em> was the title of Anthony Vidler\u2019s 1992 work on \u201cModern Architecture and Its Discontents\u201d, which pinned down the relationship perfectly in its subtitle: \u201cEssays in the Modern Unhomely\u201d. Then in 2004 Mike Kelley organized a touring exhibition on the theme of \u201c<em>The Uncanny<\/em>\u201d, making the split between the homey and the uncanny fit for the stage, as it were. And yet this was more or less a late bloomer. With a tip of the hat to Petra Sterry\u2019s penchant for creating inimitable Austro-Anglicisms, one could already long since have said: <em>An kenn i<\/em>.<sup>2<\/sup><\/p>\n<p>2. Our Nature Is a Dress Code of the Nada<\/p>\n<p>Sheet sixty-nine of Francisco Goya\u2019s <em>Desastres de la guerra <\/em>has the motto \u201cNada. Ello dir\u00e0\u201d, \u201cNothing. We shall see.\u201d This image, which is unusual for the series of war depictions because it goes beyond the comprehensibility of the visible, shows an already mummified corpse, which in a sort of posthumous exertion points toward the meaninglessness of being, of war, of its own existence by reaching for a writing instrument. The living cadaver is scrawling a solitary, highly readable and capitalized \u201cNada\u201d on a tablet that rests against his hip. Nothing, it is written there plain and clear. Here Goya brings into play the empty, naked evidence that everything is as it is, the pure sic, with nothing that can outstrip it. Nothing but the uncanny. It lives exclusively from suspicion, but it lives. A skeleton, like the one that Goya derives from the tradition of the Dance of Death, is to a certain extent the traditional form of depiction for it, familiar to every child and bringing together the unspeakable with the irreversible, a personification that has long since left behind everything personal.<\/p>\n<p>Petra Sterry also makes use of this tradition in the stick figures \u2013 zombie-like, undead, mummified \u2013 that she incorporates into her nine-part cycle of drawings <em>The So-called Nada<\/em>. Nothing, it is lurking everywhere, and it is the beacon of every terror that modernism has come to know: it is worse than hell, which used to be the most horrible thing there was. Worse than anything is now the fact that there is nothing. Nothing, not as a metaphysical concept but as a fact of everyday life, was to become the maladie du si\u00e8cle of the nineteenth century. Worse than hell is boredom. The discovery of \u201cennui\u201d found its future in the aesthetic of the sublime, as Goya had established it. Here the simultaneity of the homey and the uncanny had found its new locus, literally its home, since it was precisely within one\u2019s own four walls that the abyss had opened. Charles Baudelaire, the poet of ennui and translator of Edgar Allan Poe, was the programmaticist of this sort of complicity between the situated and the sinister. And from a culture-historical vantage point it rings true when Sterry combines the zombie-like figures of the <em>Nada<\/em> cycle with large-format letters written over the picture surface, which bring in their own layer of meaning and meaninglessness. The cycle functions as a palimpsest, as an overlapping of layers that are highly interrelated but nonetheless each maintain their own interpretive sovereignty. \u201cPalimpsestes\u201d was the title given by Baudelaire to a text that he included in his anthology of \u201c<em>Paradis artificiels<\/em>\u201d, of artificial paradises, which are all that remain for the individual in the Age of Boredom. Palimpsests, in their layering, their transparency and opaqueness, in their principle of sedimentation and of writing over, are, according to Baudelaire, nothing other than an analogue of one of the ways in which memory functions: the one in which the \u201cunavoidable\u201d occurs, since it is there that our \u201cmind turns its attention to those parts of ourselves that we can only face with terror.\u201d In the palimpsest the uncanny comes into its own, and this holds true in Petra Sterry\u2019s work.<\/p>\n<p>3. Poni om e Cent<\/p>\n<p>In his <em>Grammatology<\/em> Jacques Derrida cites a characteristic passage from the <em>Confessions<\/em> of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In it the modern founding father reminisces on an episode intended to illustrate his infatuation with his stepmother: \u201cOnce I cried out at the table, as she had just stuck a bite of food in her mouth, that I had seen a hair on it. Hardly had she returned the morsel to the plate, and I grabbed it and gulped it down.\u201d The story is characteristic of the \u201cclose reading\u201d of Derrida and his circle: taken literally, the little anecdote yields a special displacement of meaning. In French a <em>hair<\/em> is <em>un cheveu<\/em>, but for the psychoanalytically schooled method of deconstruction it is evident that it is just as much u<em>n je veux<\/em>, an <em>I want<\/em> in which desire is making itself known. Derrida\u2019s procedure is a school of the uncanny, and the abyss, as abyme, is one of its code words.<\/p>\n<p>Petra Sterry\u2019s approach to the displacement of meaning resembles this \u201cclose reading\u201d. In the many wordplays for which, one could say, she is famous, there is more at issue than merely the auxiliary reservoir of readings that arise when one reads \u201c<em>poni om e cent<\/em>\u201d as an anagram of \u201comnipotence\u201d or \u201c<em>TX nano is Ulli<\/em>\u201d as a palindrome of \u201cIllusion Anxt\u201d (<em>Angst<\/em>). Anagrams \u2013 one thinks of Andr\u00e9 Breton\u2019s telling transformation of the name Salvador Dali into \u201cAvida Dollars\u201d \u2013 and palindromes \u2013 Andr\u00e9 Thomkins based his life\u2019s work on them, dreaming up such gems as \u201cDogma I am God\u201d and \u201cNie Reime, da kann Akademie rein\u201d (Never rhymes, academy can get in there) \u2013 are nothing unusual in the art business. However, it is in the stretto of the uncanny that Petra Sterry\u2019s oeuvre comes into its own, in the tunnel vision of the gaze in its orientation toward the dangers and endangerments that are lurking everywhere, regardless of how much care is taken in setting them in comfortably cushioned homeyness.<\/p>\n<p>The uncanny has its effect because the familiar, as Freud formulates it in his essay, \u201chas become alienated through the process of repression.\u201d That is the way it is put by the psychologist, but in order to make an aesthetic out of it, a premise for creative work and an artistic method, one might do better to turn the statement around: not alienated through repression, but defamiliarized through the release the repressed. Petra Sterry\u2019s artworks function through defamiliarization. This is possible because sexuality is no longer repressed, but is omnipresent as <em>libertinage<\/em> and obsession, as the purpose of life and as suspicion, as a ubiquitous avowal and as a vitality program. The uncanny, which Sterry especially entwines with sexuality, can only develop because sexuality as a mass phenomenon has lost all of its former secrecy, mystery and aura.<\/p>\n<p>The uncanny arises here, in the detour via art, through defamiliarization. \u201cArt exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.\u201d These sentences were written in 1917 by Viktor Shklovsky, the influential theorist of Russian Constructivism. \u201cArt as Technique\u201d is the title of the text in which Shklovsky also proposes a strategy for creating an increased experience of a life that one sees and does not merely recognize. Shklovsky refers to this technique as <em>ostranenie<\/em> (defamiliarization). It should lead one to have a closer look, thus drawing things out from under the cloak of expectation that has caused them to serve nothing other than habit. Defamiliarization is a veristic technique: it seeks to unveil a truth hidden behind the haze of routine.<\/p>\n<p>Petra Sterry\u2019s art is at work on defamiliarization. And yet it goes one step further, because it is concerned not only with revealing things, but also with magnifying their presence. In the present day routines have become powerful, overpowering. The uncanny is the countervailing power.<\/p>\n<p>            <\/div>\n        <\/div>\n        \n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n\n<style type=\"text\/css\" data-created_by=\"avia_inline_auto\" id=\"style-css-av-9dxbx-93a8b5a86a3bb7c79f6f27b2c5d10bd8\">\n#top .flex_column.av-9dxbx-93a8b5a86a3bb7c79f6f27b2c5d10bd8{\nmargin-top:0px;\nmargin-bottom:30px;\n}\n.flex_column.av-9dxbx-93a8b5a86a3bb7c79f6f27b2c5d10bd8{\npadding:5px 5px 5px 5px;\nbackground-color:rgba(175,126,126,0.1);\n}\n.responsive #top #wrap_all .flex_column.av-9dxbx-93a8b5a86a3bb7c79f6f27b2c5d10bd8{\nmargin-top:0px;\nmargin-bottom:30px;\n}\n<\/style>\n<div  class='flex_column av-9dxbx-93a8b5a86a3bb7c79f6f27b2c5d10bd8 av_one_fourth  avia-builder-el-2  el_after_av_three_fourth  el_before_av_three_fourth  av-break-at-tablet flex_column_div  '     ><p>\n<style type=\"text\/css\" data-created_by=\"avia_inline_auto\" id=\"style-css-av-kx4x047u-fbcf287ef9fe4baeaf88a465dd7b57ed\">\n.av_font_icon.av-kx4x047u-fbcf287ef9fe4baeaf88a465dd7b57ed .av-icon-char{\nfont-size:20px;\nline-height:20px;\n}\n<\/style>\n<span  class='av_font_icon av-kx4x047u-fbcf287ef9fe4baeaf88a465dd7b57ed avia_animate_when_visible av-icon-style- avia-icon-pos-center avia-iconfont avia-font-entypo-fontello av-no-color avia-icon-animate'><a href='https:\/\/www.petrasterry.com\/downloads\/Metzger-The-Homey_Petra-Sterry_EN.pdf'  target=\"_blank\"  rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"  class='av-icon-char' data-av_icon='\ue82d' data-av_iconfont='entypo-fontello' aria-hidden=\"false\" ><\/a><\/span><br \/>\n\n<style type=\"text\/css\" data-created_by=\"avia_inline_auto\" id=\"style-css-av-kx4wzw2y-8fd181b6bad5c61ed655dc09eb83bb62\">\n#top .av_textblock_section.av-kx4wzw2y-8fd181b6bad5c61ed655dc09eb83bb62 .avia_textblock{\nfont-size:12px;\n}\n<\/style>\n<section  class='av_textblock_section av-kx4wzw2y-8fd181b6bad5c61ed655dc09eb83bb62 '   itemscope=\"itemscope\" itemtype=\"https:\/\/schema.org\/CreativeWork\" ><div class='avia_textblock'  itemprop=\"text\" ><h6 style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.petrasterry.com\/downloads\/Metzger-The-Homey_Petra-Sterry_EN.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>The Homey and the Uncanny<\/strong><br \/>\nRainer Metzger<br \/>\nabout<br \/>\nPetra Sterry<br \/>\npdf<\/a><\/h6>\n<\/div><\/section><\/p><\/div>\n\n<style type=\"text\/css\" data-created_by=\"avia_inline_auto\" id=\"style-css-av-bni25-21e035d88c5807f70e621ac96612fd24\">\n#top .flex_column.av-bni25-21e035d88c5807f70e621ac96612fd24{\nmargin-top:0px;\nmargin-bottom:0px;\n}\n.responsive #top #wrap_all .flex_column.av-bni25-21e035d88c5807f70e621ac96612fd24{\nmargin-top:0px;\nmargin-bottom:0px;\n}\n<\/style>\n<div  class='flex_column av-bni25-21e035d88c5807f70e621ac96612fd24 av_three_fourth  avia-builder-el-5  el_after_av_one_fourth  el_before_av_three_fourth  first flex_column_div  column-top-margin'     ><section  class='av_textblock_section av-kw4whe0s-c636ce0f8070240f811c8d68dfa4d8dd '   itemscope=\"itemscope\" itemtype=\"https:\/\/schema.org\/CreativeWork\" ><div class='avia_textblock'  itemprop=\"text\" ><p id=\"footnote\"><em>References:<\/em><\/p>\n<p id=\"footnote\"><em>Sigmund Freud, (1919) \u201cThe Uncanny\u201d in Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), vol. 17, p. 219-256.<\/em><\/p>\n<p id=\"footnote\"><em>Baudelaire on the palimpsest in Charles Baudelaire, \u201cLes paradis artificiels\u201d in \u0152uvres compl\u00e8tes (Paris: 1928) p. 179. 179.<\/em><\/p>\n<p id=\"footnote\"><em>Derrida\u2019s quotation of Rousseau in Jacques Derrida, Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: JHU Press, 1997), p. 152. Regarding the homophony of cheveu and je veux see also Jonathan Culler, Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 105. Derrida und die poststrukturalistische Literaturtheorie, Reinbek 1988, S. 117.<\/em><\/p>\n<p id=\"footnote\"><em>Shklovsky\u2019s theory of defamiliarization is cited from Viktor Shklovsky, \u201cArt as Technique\u201d (trans. L.T. Lemon and M.J. Reis) in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.) Art in Theory: 1900\u20131990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 277.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n\n<style type=\"text\/css\" data-created_by=\"avia_inline_auto\" id=\"style-css-av-av_three_fourth-730dc249c80f26a28ac11df92670522f\">\n#top .flex_column.av-av_three_fourth-730dc249c80f26a28ac11df92670522f{\nmargin-top:0px;\nmargin-bottom:0px;\n}\n.responsive #top #wrap_all .flex_column.av-av_three_fourth-730dc249c80f26a28ac11df92670522f{\nmargin-top:0px;\nmargin-bottom:0px;\n}\n<\/style>\n<div  class='flex_column av-av_three_fourth-730dc249c80f26a28ac11df92670522f av_three_fourth  avia-builder-el-7  el_after_av_three_fourth  avia-builder-el-last  first flex_column_div  column-top-margin'     ><section  class='av_textblock_section av-kzwxof7m-ea2ac2fc25cb520b942dbb7ce027af2e '   itemscope=\"itemscope\" itemtype=\"https:\/\/schema.org\/CreativeWork\" ><div class='avia_textblock'  itemprop=\"text\" ><p id=\"footnote\"><em>Translator\u2019s notes: <\/em><br \/>\n<em><sup>1<\/sup> Although it convincingly passes for a town name derived from an obscure Germanic saint of the Middle Ages, this invented name is a pun on Eigenheim, i.e. the one-family home with all of its implications of suburban dreams.<\/em><br \/>\n<em> <sup>2<\/sup> This is dialect for &#8220;Eine kenne ich&#8221; (I know someone), implying \u201cI know someone who\u2019s already been doing that for quite some time now\u201d and being a pun on the English word uncanny.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-5985","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petrasterry.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petrasterry.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petrasterry.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petrasterry.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.petrasterry.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5985"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.petrasterry.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7824,"href":"https:\/\/www.petrasterry.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5985\/revisions\/7824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.petrasterry.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}