DOVA Temporary

Over the course of the spring term students wrestled with what constitutes a ghost, the ghostly, and hauntings, in the fields of literature, theory, art and history. A question soon arose around Sigmund Freud’s authoritative essay “The Uncanny,” in which Freud makes a distinction between lived experience of the uncanny and artistic representations of it. Namely, that after Allan Kaprow’s blurring of art and life, might it be possible to work with the lived experience of the uncanny as an artistic material? Put otherwise, has an artistic experience of ghosts moved into life and we, the living and contemporary speculators of the aesthetic, joined the land of dead through works of art?