Técnicas utilizadas

De Bruyckere’s death-like figures are hyper-realistic and impossibly contrived at the same time. They are composed of absences. Heads, innards and bones are missing, but as we have seen in chapter three, they refer to the ‘real’ body through form and the casting process. The transformation of the ‘familiar’ and recognisable body into a fragmented, ‘unfamiliar’ and distorted object, may trigger uncanny sensations in the viewer, provoking a suppressed primordial fear and causing intellectual uncertainty, repulsion and distress (Freud, S. 2003:

152, 153). De Bruyckere’s figures are indeed often introduced and described as “disturbing and uncannily lifelike”¹, or “creepy, uncanny sculptures”² that inspire “horror and pity in the

2 Russeth, A. (2012). Berlinde De Bruyckere Will Represent Belgium at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Observer Culture, 15 November 2012. Available from http://galleristny.com/2012/11/berlinde-de-bruyckere-will-represent-belgium-at-the-2013-venice-biennale/ [Accessed 22 September 2013].

http://www.hanstheys.be/artists/berlinde_de_bruyckere/ [Accessed 23 September 2013].

viewer”. ³ Created with extreme care and attention to detail, in painted wax designed to mimic the human skin, her sculptures intensify the Freudian sense of the uncanny through the

deformation of the body, the absence of body parts and the presence of extra flesh where there should be none.

Viewers are drawn in by the seeming familiarity of her human and animal figures before finding themselves repulsed as deformity reveals itself and the creatures become suddenly monstrous, (Coghlan, A. 2012).

It is when the familiar world stops making sense that the uncanny appears and uncovers unfamiliar features in the ordinary and everyday. This disappearance of the known world makes new facets of it more visible, forcing the subjects to question what they know and hence, causing anxiety. Although the uncanny is not clearly definable, as it is always a personal experience (Freud, S. 2003: 124), the definition of the German word ‘unheimlich’, allows Freud to highlight and connect disparate events that could be considered uncanny, such as animism, magic and sorcery, the omnipotence of unintended repetition of thoughts, the double (ibid: 141), the castration complex, and instantaneous wish-fulfilment (ibid: 149).

In De Bruyckere’s sculptures wax and pigments are combined to give an unhealthy pallor and corpse-like quality to the figures, which accentuates the fragility and impermanence of the corporeal. These particular features produce strong emotional responses in the viewer who engages with her work. The transparency and thinness of the skin in Marthe 2008 (image 5-1) draws attention to the weak and unstable relationship between the interior and exterior

boundaries of our body. The skin in Marthe (2008), although translucent and dead like, still carries signs of life such as veins and blood. Marthe’s aliveness contains the potential to create a connection with the ‘being alive’ of the viewer, rendering the relationship between Marthe’s body in the sculpture and the body of the viewer a shared feature rather than one of difference.

Praising the sculpted body for the illusion of representing ‘life’ has long been part of the art debate (Smith, R. 2010: 181; Walsh, M, 2013: 74).⁴ Marthe (2008), could be seen as supporting this discourse, not only for the qualities of its ‘life-like’ skin tones, but also

3For instance Thea Costantino writes: “The uncanny effect of De Bruyckere’s waxes is considerable; they inspire horror and pity in the viewer, who is confronted by an object that suggests the disquieting presence of a corpse”. (Costantino, T. (2013).

Cripplewood at the Venice Biennale. Dailyserving, An International Publication For Contemporary Art, 20 August 2013.

Available from http://dailyserving.com/2013/08/cripplewood-at-the-venice-biennale/ [Accessed 23 September 2013].

4Contemporary artists such as Duane Hanson, Ron Mueck, Jamie Salmon, Evan Penny, Adam Beane and Sam Jinks create sculptures that appear alive. The details of the body are reproduced exactly down to the veins and the imperfections on the skin.

because it has been cast from a human being. The use of wax as material together with indexical nature of casting, with its physical connection between the sculptural body part, the trace, and its mode of inscription, may add to the uncanny feelings felt by the spectator when presented with De Bruyckere’s work.⁵ Her fragmented human figures have the potential to unsettle our sense of whether something is real or fictional and maybe even, dead or alive.

This similarity with the ‘biological’ body, as Robert Smith contends, “only intensifies its uncanny presence” (Smith, R. R. 2010: 181).

Freud's concept of the uncanny, which has fascinated both artists and art critics since the publication of his paper in 1919, has definitely maintained its significance for contemporary artists. In 2004, Mike Kelley curated the exhibition “The Uncanny”, at the Tate Liverpool, where sculptural artifacts were presented in an extensive historical overview extending from ancient Egyptian funeral pieces to works of contemporary art.⁶ Each artist gave his/her personal formulation of the concept of ‘the uncanny’, through the use of different techniques like scale, materials, and colour.⁷

In his 1919 essay, Freud elaborated Ernst Jentsch’s definition of the uncanny as being a product of “intellectual uncertainty” (Freud, S. 2003: 139), through aesthetic investigations, (ibid: 125). He contended that the uncanny confuses the real and imagined, the animate and inanimate, the subject and the other. As a consequence, one responds strongly to an uncanny experience. According to him, “the uncanny is … everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden and has come into the open” (ibid: 132).

Of particular relevance for De Bruyckere’s artwork, is Freud’s observation that, amid the many meanings of ‘heimlich’; from homelike and intimate, some of them come incredibly close to its antonym ‘unheimlich’; defined as strange and frightening (ibid: 132).⁸ “Secret places on the human body, the pudenda: Those who did not die were smitten in secret places,

5 Casting and materiality of De Bruyckere’s sculptures have been discussed in chapter three.

6 The exhibition is considered an updated version of Mike Kelley’s exhibition at the ICA in 1992. Kelley, M. (2004a). The Uncanny. Tate Liverpool. Available from http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/mike-kelley-uncanny [Accessed 5 November 2013]. The show featured contemporary artists such as Ron Mueck, Paul McCarthy, Paul Thek, Judy Fox, Mike Kelley, Tony Matelli, Tony Oursler, Christo, Nayland Blake, Sarah Lucas, Keith Edmier, Hans Bellmer, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Gober, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Allen Jones, and many others.

7 In this exhibition however, as Kelley notes, the uncanny is not limited to sculptures that provoke uncanny “bodily association”, but expand on the theme including the urge to collect. The disparate collection of works presented besides figurative art comprised Kelley personal ‘collections’, as well as non-art objects such as medical models, taxidermy, preserved human parts and a large collection of historical photographs. In his essay "Playing with Dead Things: On the Uncanny”, the curator points out how “figurative sculptures of body parts from the early 1990s are excellent examples of the uncanny as they induce “a physical sensation... an unsettling evocation of the ‘real’” (Kelley, M. and Welchman, J. 2003: 71).

8 Although in modern German ‘heimlich’ always assumes the meaning of secretive, Freud in his book The Uncanny reproduces all definitions of ‘heimlich’ found in Daniel Sanders’ dictionary, where the first meaning of ‘heimilich’ is:

“belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, dear and intimate, homely, etc” (Freud, S. 2003: 126).

[Samuel 5,12]” (Ibid: 133). De Bruyckere’s sculptures, like this shift from ‘heimlich’, meaning homelike and domestic, towards the idea of hidden body parts, creates ambivalent and conflicting feelings in the spectators through the fragmentation and reassembling of the well-known body into an unattainable proposition. Indeed, one of the artist’s aims is to convey doubt, “perhaps because of [her] aversion to so-called certainties that, in [her] opinion, are no longer applicable to our times. We are searching for rules and habits to survive, but we keep on doubting” (De Bruyckere, B. in Gnyp, M. 2010). Undeniably, these fragmented,

misshapen, tortured bodies, an antithesis of the heroic ones, are too familiar to be dismissed as just aesthetic abstractions. De Bruyckere’s death-like figures refer to the ‘real body’, through form and colour, but also signal unfeasibility and absence, as the human body is presented as impossibly deformed and heads, innards and bones, are missing. De Bruyckere‘s

transformation of the ‘familiar’ body into an ‘unfamiliar’ fragmented and distorted object, may trigger uncanny sensations and cause intellectual doubts in the audience (Ibid: 152, 153).

Yet for artists, this uncertainty is what gives rise to creation, as Berlinde de Bruyckere notes: “doubt is an integral part of making sculptures or works of art in general, whereas certainty gives you nothing to say” (Theys H. and De Bruyckere, B. (2011). Louise Bourgeois, as well, believed that the need to produce art could be seen as a way to maintain sanity and that this need would disappear with certainty (Larratt-Smith, P. 2012: 7). De Bruyckere, consequently, can be seen as a cultural ‘researcher’ who takes the body apart and rebuilds it into new combinations of fragments, taking advantage of the spectator’s propensity to react strongly when the body is damaged and the skin is opened. Although the body piece, in the sculptural representation, may keep its primary significance in its new configuration, it may also be encoded with many different functions, which will potentially be positioned at odds with the whole and, therefore, threaten the stable identity of the viewer.