LONDON CITY NIGHTS: Sigmund Freud

Thursday, October 31, 2019

Review: 'The Uncanny' at the Freud Museum, 30th October 2019

Thursday, October 31, 2019 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Sigmund Freud's 1919 paper Das Unheimliche / The Uncanny seeks to define that stomach-churning feeling when you encounter something that's just not quite right. His prime examples are dolls and waxworks: objects that have a human form yet lack an animated spark.

It's an argument that's found new relevance in the modern world with the concept of the 'uncanny valley'. I experienced this recently in Tokyo's Miraikan technology museum, where I encountered a disturbingly realistic 'gynoid'. It (she?) has realistic latex flesh over a metal endoskeleton, with every skin pore and eyelash precisely placed to create the illusion of life. But our brains are too well-trained, and staring into her glassy eyes made me feel like I was looking at an animated corpse. It gave me the willies.

Said willies are at the heart of the Freud Museum's new exhibition, The Uncanny: A Centenary. Within the famous psychoanalyst's former London home a group of artists and writers have created a number of new artworks that attempt to get under the skin of the uncanny. The goal is to pin down precisely what feeling 'uncanny' is, and how to differentiate it from simply being afraid.

Something Looming Large (Yet Not Quite Here)

Artists and writers Martha Todd, Lili Spain, Karolina Urbaniak & Martin Bladh and Elizabeth Dearnley* have thrown themselves at the question. My favourite piece was in the centre of the gallery: Lili Spain's Something Looming Large (Yet Not Quite Here). This was a waxy bust sat in the middle of what looked like chewed up bits of dried meat. The caption reads:

"He sat in a corner hunched over a tiny antique sewing machine, unaware that she had woken to find him feeding it with his spindly fingers. As she watched out of sigh, a stream of human hair, cat fur and wax spilled out of the machine forming an arch in the wall. It occurred to her that the machine was familiar. It had been a gift from her mother, which had sat proudly on her bedroom mantlepiece. "Save me", it whispered, "and I'll save you"."

Paging Doctor Fr.. oh wait, no need. There's something about the not-quite-fleshiness of the materials that captures the uncanny - a body horror queasiness of malleable, oozing human that resists any single form. It's awesome. And disgusting.

But the best thing about the exhibition is Elizabeth Dearnley's The Sandman: an audio trail that leads you around the Freud Museum as you hear the disturbing and sad story of a boy called Nathaniel. He grew up in this house, with every ornament, photograph and fitting pregnant with memories - not all of them happy ones.

I love audio pieces like this as they make you into a silent participant in the story. Rather than simply absorbing a narrative it's as if the character is whispering it directly to you. The Sandman makes you feel connected with both character and place, with the trail placing you in his shoes.

Nathaniel's memories become your own, and ordinary actions like peering into a mirror take on an unnerving new feeling. Ordinarily, you wouldn't sense the uncanny quite so strongly when examining your own reflection, but the vivid writing and performance can't help but send a shiver up your spine.

Dearnley also successfully fights an uphill battle with these surroundings. Despite the Freud Museum being full of objectively creepy things like ancient relics, old masks and photos of children now long dead of old age, it's an open, warm and homely environment.

So it's to her credit that she zeroes in on ways to make you uncomfortable within it: asking you to examine the cruel curled lip of an Egyptian mask or stare on at a gallery of former lovers while picturing a battlefield corpse with pecked out eyes.

I won't spoil the particulars, but the finale is an 'immersive' room that fully draws you into the story, bringing Nathaniel's buried past rushing back up to the surface. It's bathed in the cool glow of ultraviolet light, giving white furnishings a supernatural quality.

There are also a series of two-way mirrors designed to transform the observers face into a blank mask and a Matryoshka doll style miniature-room-within-a-room diorama. It's creepy stuff, especially if you're lucky enough to spend time in here on your own.

The Freud Museum is worth a visit any time of year but this particular exhibition really knocks it out of the park. Full credit to all the artists involved.

The Uncanny: A Centenary runs until 9th February 2020. Information here.

*(Full disclosure: I know Elizabeth Dearnley personally, but am being objective!)

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Review: 'Love, Genius & A Walk' at the Drayton Arms Theatre, 8th October 2018

Tuesday, October 9, 2018 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James
Rating: 2 Stars

On the 26th of August 1910 in Leiden, Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler met for four hours. Love, Genius and a Walk imagines what they might have said. For classical music buffs, their chat is a tantalising opportunity to get under Mahler's skin in the year before he died. We know he was having marital problems relating to his young wife Alma, we know he was working hard on his (never completed) Symphony No. 10, and we know that afterwards, he was quite a different man.

This conversation is at the core of Gay Walley's play and comprises much of the final act. The rest of the play tries to get under the skin of Gustav's marriage with Alma, which includes a passionate affair with Walter Gropius (who would go on to found the hugely influential Bauhaus school).

All that is bookended by the marital problems of a contemporary couple in New York. He's a Wall Street risk manager / she's an unsuccessful but well-regarded author who is currently researching Mahler.

Writing a play about geniuses is never easy (for obvious reasons), and Love, Genius and a Walk struggles to convince. The act of Mahler's composition - which to me seems like one of his core elements - is reduced to him hunched over a desk occasionally. A little more egregiously we're constantly told but not shown how great his music is. There are frequent scenes in which it's breathlessly communicated how he plumbs the depths of human emotion, but we only actually get to hear a very short excerpt as the play finishes.

Freud doesn't fare much better - feeling like an aphorism-machine rather than a three-dimensional character. It's a bit weird when the Freud in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is a more believable version of the man, but heyo.

Despite all that, Lloyd Morris and Brendan Wyer are decent enough actors and the conversation the play centres on works well enough. Their moments together are easily the best bits of the play. If the play had 'just' dramatised their conversation that might have been enough.

And then there are the scenes set in the modern day. Hot tip playwrights: if you want me to care about your characters' woes do not make them two of the most egregiously awful arseholes you can conjure. Now, Benjamin Murray's Steve being a prick is fine, sure he fails at being wryly unpleasant and lands at just-plain-unpleasant, but at least he's supposed to be awful. Helen Cunningham's 'The Writer' however - boy fuckin' howdy...

What theatre really doesn't need right now is privileged white women ennui-ing all over their fancy Manhattan apartments about how they're torn between their arsehole husband and some floppy-haired drip. Maybe its Cunningham's affected *yawn* seen it all before line delivery, maybe it's the way she and her husband casually shit all over what they consider 'low' culture, maybe it's just because for all their her supposed intelligence and culture she clearly has nothing to say about the world...

Let's just say it's difficult to care about characters' problems when you're imagining them blindfolded, stood against a concrete wall and being offered a last cigarette.

While the core idea of imagining what Mahler and Freud discussed is fine, I simply didn't enjoy Love, Genius & A Walk. It's over-long, pretty damn boring and, as a singer-who-now-shall-not-be-named once wailed: "it says nothing to me about my life." I suspect it won't say much to you either.

Love, Genius & A Walk was at the Drayton Arms Theatre on 7-8 October 2018.

Monday, December 1, 2014

'The Institute of Sexology' at the Wellcome Collection

Monday, December 1, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

With its dull grey decor and formal atmosphere The Institute of Sexology is the epitome of 'just-the-facts-ma'am' seriousness. This soberness makes for an interesting contrast with the subject matter; galleries of knobs, tits and fannies in various states of erotic arousal, most of them owned by people wrapped up in psycho-sexual knots.

What the Wellcome Collection wants to emphasise is that sexology is a serious-minded, rigorous and important academic discipline. They're absolutely right, but it's difficult to suppress a childish giggle when you're confronted by a Greco-Roman winged boner. It's this tug of war between high-minded academia and puerile sniggering that runs right through this exhibition, the snooty air almost daring you to make some immature joke.

Masked man in pink tutu, from collection of Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902).

Covering just two and a bit rooms, the exhibition spans 150 years of sexological research. We begin with Victorian pioneers who stuck their toes into what they considered perversion, inversion and moral decay. Perhaps the best example of this early work is Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing's textbook Psychopathia Sexualis (a potentially truly great band name). This work, famous for popularising the terms masochism and sadism, is one of the first to catalogue fetishes and the spectrum of eroticism. Krafft-Ebbing feared his work could be used for cheap titillation, so gave it a scientific sounding title and wrote parts in Latin, efforts that are neatly mirrored in this exhibitions efforts to remain respectable and educational.

From here we spiral up through the late Victorian and arrive in 'The Consulting Room', where we see the duelling philosophies of Sigmund Freud and Marie Stopes. There's a simulated version of Freud's desk, populated by his totemic figurines and, my favourite, a bronze porcupine. As far as analogies go I've always enjoyed 'The Porcupine's Dilemma'; to keep warm they must huddle together, but in doing so they risk jabbed by each other's spines - a neat summary of interpersonal relationships. Freud's "the talking cure", involved solving a patient's sexual issues through a comprehensive mapping of their pasts, dreams and mind.

Marie Stopes birth control clinic in caravan, with nurse, late 1920s.

This couldn't be further from his contemporary Marie Stopes, who indignantly warned her patients to not “think about your subconscious mind ...as all the filthiness of this psychoanalysis does unspeakable harm.” Stopes is a fascinating character; described as an "feminist, eugenicist and paleobotanist". Her mission in life was to lower birthrate among "undesirables" (i.e. the poor), which is, well, a bit disturbing. But, from the worrying soil of class snobbery grew green shoots of contraception and unprudish sex advice for couples.

It's characters like Stopes that shine through in this exhibition; the idea of a fossil-hunting, feminist, eugenicist fastidiously recording her arousal levels appeals to me on some basic level. Just past Stopes is a similarly magnificent project; a catalogue of all the men that a New York based artist, Carolee Schneemann, slept with over the course of a few years. The men are rated for their skill, masochism, tenderness and the sounds they made when they came. This reducing of something as chaotic, fuzzy and sticky as sex into cold hard data is somehow intrinsically absurd: can you bake love into a pie chart?

Alfred Kinsey interviewing a woman.

The pinnacle of this was the exhaustive research undertaken by Dr Alfred Kinsey. After a long period categorising millions of wasps (he eventually concluded that no two are exactly alike) he moved onto sex. You can leaf through Kinsey's questionnaire and quickly understand just how he got thousands upon thousands of people to reveal the most personal details of their sex lives. His method was like the famous example of boiling a frog i.e. to gradually raise the temperature so it cooks alive. One moment a Kinsey interviewee is talking about their first memory of a birthday, the next they're being asked whether they're had a dildo jammed up their arse (and if so what colour, size and make it was).

This compartmentalisation of sexuality into strictly defined categories is fascinating from a scientific point of view, but at some point you've got to ask: where's the love? I had hoped this would come from the exploration into the work of Wilhelm Reich. He's one of my favourite loopy countercultural figures, becoming convinced in the 1940s that he has discovered a cosmic source of energy; orgone. Famously summarised as a mystical sexual energy, Reich built 'orgone accumulators'. Here you get to sit in one.

I'd wanted to sit inside an orgone accumulator for years - particularly after watching the ace film W.R. Mysteries of the Organism. Now the time finally came and, to be honest it was an anticlimax. The accumulator is a foam-covered plywood box lined inside with sheet metal, the design supposedly able to draw down this aetheric energy and concentrate it in my body. Instead it felt much like being sat in a photobooth at a train station. Oh well, maybe this stolid environment isn't a natural place for funky sex magic.

It'd be a lie to say that The Institute of Sexology isn't interesting. It's carefully and rigorously designed to pack as much key information into this small gallery. That said it's a cold and distant exhibition, one that all but demands you surrender your emotions at the door. This absence of playfulness works against the eccentric aspects of characters like Reich, Stopes and Kinsey that populate the display cabinets.

It all adds up to an interesting but not particularly passionate (and certainly not sexy) experience. But I suspect that's exactly what they were shooting for.

The Institute of Sexology is at the Wellcome Collection until 20 September 2015. Free entry.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

'Totemic Festival Third Day' at the Freud Museum, 7th July 2013

Wednesday, July 10, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

By the third day of the Totemic Festival, Sigmund Freud’s house was beginning to feel disarmingly familiar. When I’d first walked in on Friday evening everything seemed slightly saintly and hallowed, but by Sunday it felt like the artists owned the place. A pleasant avant-garde infection had spread through the timbers. The visitors to the museum had no choice but to breathe in this shifted atmosphere, having to contend with densely symbolic performance art taking place all around them. Quizzical looks flashed between these visitors, who were either amused or annoyed at the disturbances to their sunny afternoon out.

'Totemic Festival Second Day' at the Freud Museum, 6th July 2013

Monday, July 8, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

It's another beautifully sunny day down in the beautiful garden of the Freud Museum in Finchley. There are worse places to be in the world. I had a fantastically fun time at the opening night so immediately resolved to fit in as many artists as I could into what was becoming a pretty busy weekend. I couldn’t see everyone I wanted to, but those that I did were well worth the trip.

'Totemic Festival Opening Night' at the Freud Museum, 5th July 2013

Saturday, July 6, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Sigmund Freud was a odd chap with a lot of very strange ideas. Last night I was standing in his lounge peering at his desk. The room is carefully constructed to give the impression that the man himself has just stood up and left the room for a contemplative walk around his garden. The chair was pushed away with papers scattered across the desk and resting on top of them was a pair of small, thin round-rimmed glasses. It's rather poignant: the room is haunted by his absence.

LONDON CITY NIGHTS