Mike Kelley: The Uncanny
Conference: The Uncanny Day

Friday 5 March 2004
10.00– 16.30
£30, £15 concessions (price includes lunch)

This conference brings together leading scholars and critics to explore the phenomenon, notion and sensation of the Uncanny, Freud’s Unheimliche, its sources, resources, its past and present significance, as well as its threats and thrills when surfacing in the arts, whether visual, literary, poetic and sonorous. How are we affected, or consumed, by the Uncanny today, in everyday life as well as the arts?

An informal study day to complement the exhibition Mike Kelley:The Uncanny in collaboration with the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Cambridge, the University of Liverpool and Tate Liverpool.

The Programme

09.00 – 10.00
Registration

10.00 – 10.15
Welcome by Beate Perrey and introduction by Christoph Grunenberg, Director of Tate Liverpool

10.15 – 10.45
Malcolm Bowie Revisiting Freud's Unheimliche: have we been looking for the Uncanny in the right places?
In this talk, Bowie will be rereading Freud's celebrated paper of 1919 and asking whether his concept of Das Unheimliche is not overdue for release from the straitjacket in which much psychoanalytic criticism has confined it. Bowie will suggest a much wider and stranger range of applications for this semi-technical term.

Malcolm Bowie, previously Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature and Fellow of All Souls College in the University of Oxford, is now Master of Christ's College Cambridge.

10.45 – 11.15
Beate Perrey Sounds of the Uncanny
What does the uncanny sound like? And what is it good for? Robert Schumann’s compositional investment in masques, doubles and revenants, mobilized by a taste for secrets and a curiosity for ever-changing alternatives shows that the essential pleasures to be gained from the uncanny lies in the creation of movement itself – the very stuff of which music is made.

Beate Perrey is currently Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and Senior Lecturer in Critical Musicology at the University of Liverpool.

11.15 – 11.45
Morning tea

11.45– 12.15
Penny Florence Purgatory, the Uncanny and Why Women need not Beware Women
A fearless exploration between real and imaginary, in which the (im)possibility of embodiment in the (S)symbolic fails to manifest.

Penny Florence works in cultural analysis and contemporary art. She is Head of Research Programmes at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.

12.15 – 13.00
Tour of Exhibition

13.00 – 14.00
Lunch

14.00 – 14.30
Alyce Mahon Uncanny Boundaries in the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition
This paper will address the role of the International Surrealist Exhibition in the history of the Surrealist movement, presenting it as a collective enterprise which challenged the boundaries of the viewing experience, and attempted to liberate sexual, social and political inhibitions, through a radically new approach to the exhibition space. Mahon argues that the Surrealists’ aim to recover ‘psychic force’ and erotic desire in the exhibition was founded upon a radical and subversive celebration of the feminine as a locus for the uncanny.

Alyce Mahon is University Lecturer in Modern Art and a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.

14.30 – 15.00
Stephen Clark Moments of Truth?
Clark will explore the uncanny via a selection of Plotinian quotes, such as: ‘When we look outside that on which we depend we do not know that we are one, like faces which are many on the outside but have one head inside. But if someone is able to turn around, either by himself or having the good luck to have his hair pulled by Athena herself, he will see God and himself and the all.’

Stephen Clark specializes in Greek Philosophical Thought. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool.

15.00 – 15.30
Afternoon tea

15.30 –16.00
Gillian Beer Recognising What's Uncanny
How do we distinguish the uncanny from the ordinary, especially in fiction, where anything is possible because everything is absent? Taking the theme of return in Thomas Hardy's poem The Voice, Viriginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and W G Sebald’s Austerlitz, this lecture explores the power of recognition and the rituals of memory in uncanny encounter, and asks how the reader is implicated in such scenes.

Dame Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge.

16.00 – 16.30
Closing Discussion

To book call 0151 702 7400