:
© Photo: AlexDaCorte "SlowGraffiti", 2017

The Artist As Frankenstein

Lecture by Elliott Mickleburgh

A public lecture by the artist and writer Elliott Mickleburgh at the Art and Science department of die Angewandte.

https://zoom.us/j/97894700461?pwd=a0Vhb3ZySEsvV1Q5RmQ3N0xCSUp5UT09
Meeting ID: 978 9470 0461
Passcode: 132996
 
"The abundance of monsters in circulation now proves that the collective imagination is in a strange and disorienting state, at once fearful of what can be done to the body through technology or trauma and fascinated by the possibilities those changes represent."

Charlie Fox in This Young Monster
According to the writer and curator Charlie Fox, art history contains a panoply of horror narratives from which one can gain novel insight into the machinations of collective ingenuity. As in Goya’s etching 'The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters', acute horror is the antidote to a rationality that suffocates creative thinking. In this understanding of horror, to grapple with a fear of the unknown and unknowable is to unlock the powers of invention that push human thought to its limits.
 
In recent centuries, however, the propagation of horror across sequels, textual adaptations, video games, action figures, rollercoasters, and other forms of licensed merchandise has extracted a stockpile of rigid formulae from these once-fantastic reveries of the reasonable mind. If an essential operation of the horror narrative has been to chart insurrections towards the mysterious zones that rest along the margins of human thinking, how can this enterprise even be realized when horror has been distilled into a uniform genre? And what exactly is it that these stories then communicate when they routinely fall back on an aesthetic repertoire that renders them immobile and predictable?
 
The Artist as Frankenstein is a discourse that implements speculative philosophy to explore the aesthetic and conceptual trappings of the horror genre. By applying the work of thinkers such as Quentin Meillassoux and Gilles Deleuze to an analysis of cinematic and literary works, we will see how the genre of horror has fashioned itself as a deterrent to immoral behavior and how contemporary art might assume the mantle of a horror once again capable of generating unrestrained ingenuity through the philosophical circuitry of contingency.

Elliott Mickleburgh is an artist and writer based in London. His academic writing has been included in online journals and print publications such as THE SEEN, Notes on Metamodernism, and Art in Print. His fiction has been included in the New York-based journal Storyfile as well as most recently in the exhibition catalog 'Fall Into Place', published on the occasion of the group exhibition 'With fists, it kicks, it bites…' in London. Recent exhibitions of Mickleburgh’s visual work include the aforementioned group exhibition in London at TJ Boulting; 'Everything the same, Everything a little different' at The Art Academy in London; and 'Rulers' at Coco Hunday in Tampa. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a minor in Visual Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Master of Arts in Photography from the Royal College of Art.
 

The Artist As Frankenstein
December 03, 2020, 18:00h
Location
Zoom: link in article