Bubenik, Andrea. The Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Burns, Sarah. “’Better for Haunts’: Victorian Houses and the Modern Imagination.” American Art , Vol. 26, No. 3 (2012): 2-25.

Cheng, Anne. The Melancholy of Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Doody, John and Immerwahr, John. “The Persistence of the Four Temperaments.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 66, No. 3 (1983): 348-359.

Han, Shinhee and Eng. David. Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation. Duke University Press, 2019.

Holly, Michael Ann. The Melancholy Art. Princeton University Press, 2013.

“Learn How Filippo Brunelleschi, Leon Battista Alberti, and Donato Bramante Shaped Renaissance Architecture.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. Accessed April 26, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/video/140389/overview-Renaissance-architecture.

Merback, Mitchell B. Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I. New York: Zone Books, 2017.

And before I veer too far off track, the end of this “melancholic era” should be examined. What was happening in the time building up to the time Mourning and Melancholia was written in 1917? Impressionism was over. Cubism had begun. And World War I... to name a few.

Within painting there is a melancholic presence:

Van Gogh, Figure on a road, 1884, pen and ink

Edvard Munch, Melancholy, 1894, oil on canvas

Carl Fredrick Hill, sometime 1883-1911 during his “drawing period,” charcoal?

Marie Laurencin, Portraits (Marie Laurencin, Cecilia de Madrazo and the Dog Coco), 1915, oil on canvas

Kirchner, Women on the Street, 1915, oil on canvas

One thing I find rather interesting though that can be most clearly seen in Kirchner’s work here is the intertwining of melancholy and the bourgeois. A melancholic mood is conveyed through the color/lack of warms, lack of eye contact and lack facial expressions, while their upperclass status is suggested by the woman’s high-fashion hat.

The Victorian House and Chandeliers

I’ve recently been questioning why when I picture a melancholic scene oftentimes it’s accompanied with a Victorian-type house filled with ornate chandeliers dimly lit, which then gets into the whole “haunted” topic as well. Both the Victorian House and chandelier are material signs for wealth (and potential excess). The Victorian house within the U.S. at one time

“was the material symbol of affluence, elegance, and taste.”(1)

Victorian House as Surrogate for the Swallowed Object

At the same time though, the Victorian House is a signifier for British colonization/influence with the term originating from houses built in the era of Queen Victoria’s reign. Victorian houses in the U.S. were a “haunting” reminder of the attachment to decadence but also of how the U.S. did not mourn its loss with the British but rather devoured them whole. Han and Eng state “when faced with unresolved grief, the melancholic preserves the lost object or ideal by incorporating it into the ego and establishing and ambivalent identification with it.”(2)

This positions the U.S. once again as the melancholic, which brings us full circle to the beginning discussions from week 1.

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1. Sarah Burns, “Better for Haunts”: Victorian Houses and the Modern Imagination, (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 3.

This week I want to focus on the specific aesthetics that are associated with melancholia. The first place to begin will be Bubenik’s mentioned “era of melancholia” proposed by Giorgio Agamben as the time period beginning with Durer’s Melencholia I (1514) and ending with Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1917) and for Julia Schiesari is where melancholia was “inaugurated by the Renaissance, refined by the Enlightenment, flaunted by Romanticism, fetishized by the Dec[a]edents [sic], and theorized by Freud,” before its revival in postmodern critical theory.(1)

In Mitchell B. Merback’s Perfection’s Therapy he asserts that:

According to the theory put forward in this book, Dürer’s print is singularly equipped to perform a particular task: to stimulate a certain kind of receptive process in the beholder.

Overcoming the pernicious “beclouding” effects of saturnine gloom, restoring the mind’s equilibrium, and, with it, the health of the body, above all required moderate exercise, mental and physical. In providing such exercise, the print stands as a special and possibly unique remedy for a special malaise — Renaissance misery — and we will consider several kinds of evidence to show that Dürer, together with the intellectual aspirations he had for the print, conceived it as such. (2)

According to Merback, Durer’s Melencholia I was an act for the viewer with the intention to soothe the viewer.

what are therapeutic aesthetics?

actually... 

Okay but before trekking down that path, we can gather some information on the basic architecture and décor of the time period, the post-Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

architecture in the Middle Ages

“The rib vault, flying buttress, and pointed (Gothic) arch were used as solutions to the problem of building a very tall structure while preserving as much natural light as possible.”

“Late Gothic (15th-century) architecture reached its height in Germany’s vaulted hall churches.” (3)

One can’t seem not to think of cathedrals and ornate churches when they think of Gothic architecture, and its equivalence with knowledge, God and power.

rib vaults, gothic arches, flying buttresses oh my!

In my recent crit it was asked did I have a particular association with light in my works, specifically in the computer game. My answer in my crit dealt more with revealing parts and layers of oneself in regards to a relationship. I’m wondering if you just reveal bits and pieces of yourself or is it that we reveal the whole thing when we first meet someone? And if you do reveal the whole thing to everyone then how does that make any one relation more unique than the others? And even if we do try to reveal everything there is definitely still some curation happening whether conscious or not. Also, isn’t there still a lot buried deep inside our own unconscious even we don’t know about??

renaissance architecture/art

video regarding some important themes:

https://www.britannica.com/video/140389/overview-Renaissance-architecture 

At 00:30 it mentions:

Renaissance architects studied the theory and practice of their Roman predecessors. They read the treatise "On Architecture" by Roman architect Vitruvius and examined ancient ruins in Italy, France, and Spain to develop their style. Classical antiquity and Renaissance architecture used order, a system of traditional architectural elements, as the basis for design.(4)

Furthermore, it is stated in the Brittanica video:

Renaissance architects sought to achieve beauty through proportion, as Classical architects had before them. This characteristic differentiates the Renaissance style from the Gothic. Interest in proportion also led to the pictorial device of perspective, first formulated by the Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi.(4)

So we can clearly see a shift back to proportion, namely human proportion vs. God, and perspective.

Matteo di Giovanni, The Dream of Saint JeromeDate, 1476, Room 204 at AIC!

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1. Bubenik, The Persistence of Melancholy, 25

2. Mitchell B. Merback, Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, (New York, Zone Books, 2017), 28-30.

3. “Gothic architecture,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/art/Gothic-architecture. (accessed April 26, 2020).

In The Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture, Andrea Bubenik states that melancholia has a lasting presence on arts and culture, specifically outlasting the other three Classical personality types: sanguine, choleric and phlegmatic.(1)

four personality types? really just four?

1. Sanguine: joyful, courageous

2. Phlegmatic: insipid, cowardly

3. Choleric: irritable, angry

4. Melancholic: solitary, unsociable

(2)

melancholy DOES have an end and a beginning

Interestingly Bubenik also mentions, Durer’s Melancholia I and Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia are used as tidy bookends for the “era of melancholy” roughly dating from 14th c. to the end of modernism.(3) This is particularly interesting as it points to a very specific time period for the aesthetic of melancholia: post-middle ages/renaissance to post-industrial revolution/modernism. But it seems contemporary, critical discourse has brought it back from the dead.

Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514, Plate, 9 7/16 × 7 5/16 in. (24 × 18.5 cm)

the ungraspable

An interesting takeaway from Bubenik’s introduction essay is the continued compartmentalization of melancholy and the differing views on how to use it within critical contemporary discourse.

Michael Ann Holly in The Melancholy Art states the following:

Might we not consider melancholy as the central trope of art historical writing, the conceit that underwrites the deep structure of its texts? How might melancholy, not as a medieval or Renaissance “humor” but as both a metaphor and an explanatory concept in the twenty-first century, help us as practitioners to acknowledge the elegiac nature of our disciplinary transactions with the past? I take it as axiomatic that all written histories are narratives of desire, full of both latent and manifest needs that exceed the professional mandate to find out what happened and when. Given that the focus of the history of art’s labors is always toward recovering that which is almost gone, this primal desire must be labeled melancholic.(4)

Holly strives to use melancholy as a context to look back towards history, somewhat of a postmortem tool. On the other hand scholar Laurinda S. Dixon in The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art (2013) delves into melancholy as a humanist pathology viewing it from a historical lens and invokes pre-Enlightenment examples.(5)

Holly captures this amorphous nature of melancholia in the following:

Melancholy, that “noonday demon,” is a shape-shifter, depending on what historical period it is when “she” makes an appearance.(6)

game progress (TBD)

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1.  Andrea Bubenik, The Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture, (New York, Routledge, 2019), 23.

2. John Doody and John Immerwahr, The Persistence of the Four Temperaments, (Penn State University Press, 1983), 349.

3. Bubenik, The Persistence of Melancholia, 25

4. Michael Ann Holly, The Melancholy Art, (Princeton University Press, 2013), 6.

5. Bubenik, The Persistence of Melancholia, 28

It might be worth mentioning for posterity’s sake that right now we’re currently in the COVID-19 pandemic.

psychic somewheres

Anywho, in Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation psychotherapist Shinhee Han and critic David L. Eng coin the term “psychic nowhere” to describe “a condition often correlated with the absence of a clear geographic belonging or destination”(1) to describe specific case studies of first generation “parachute kids,” a term coined in the early 1990s to originally describe diasporic children from the upperclass “elites” of East and Southeast Asian that were sent oftentimes alone to the U.S. and other Western English-speaking nations for primary and secondary school for eventual admission into prestigious Western universities.(2) This uncomfortable, confusing but ambiguous feeling could be aptly described by what Sianne Ngai’s describes as a “meta-feeling” or a feeling “in which one feels confused about what one is feeling.”(3)

In this context, first generation Korean-American artist Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway, 1995 (below) can be viewed as a gesture in finding a “psychic somewhere” in the States, literally mapping out where to place roots down. Also perhaps finding refuge in a decentered, distributed network of the internet.

Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway, 1995 (first used the term “electronic superhighway” in 1970s though)

how to eat

Annnd for my game, I’ve completed some main themes such as the setting, main characters and general plot outline. I’m hoping it can express the video game medium in its own right and not just be candy coating to tell a narrative. So far, the player runs through various rooms in an ornate mansion that suggests delving into one’s psyche. Here’s a clip of the protagonist learning how to eat!

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1. Shinhee Han and David L. Eng, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation, (Duke University Press, 2019), 109. 

2. Han and Eng, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation, 105.

So I’ve decided I’ll combine my final project for art history (Post-Nature) with a game dev log on the current computer game I’m making, since it all seems kinda related (emphasis on kinda).

A game development log (dev log) is a journal of sorts that documents the process of creating a game. And the art history final project is also a journal of sorts to “map the important themes, histories, and aesthetics” of any subject of our choosing.

The topics I want to explore are themes of melancholy. At first when I tell people about this their initial reaction to this word alone is something along the lines of “oh PLEASE not again,” which speaks to the subject’s polarizing nature and how its related aesthetics have been over-romanticized to the point of disgust.  

Well... NOT SO FAST. 

The landscape of melancholy is actually quickly shifting, proving to be a complex subject characterized by an amorphous nature due to its various forms as artistic inspiration, psychological condition, seed for social/racial discourse and aesthetic tool.

good mourning

In Freud’s 1917 essay Mourning and Melancholia he states:

“mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on,”(1)

but the defining difference from melancholy is the subject’s ability to get over this loss. The melancholic subject instead establishes an “identification of the ego with the abandoned object” and “the ego wants to incorporate this object into itself”(2) and it does so by devouring it. Freud goes on to detail this uncomfortable swallowing and how the loss is secured in a double bind between incorporation and rejection.

This begs the question of who is the melancholic; who is doing the consuming and what are they consuming? Are we the subject or are we the object? In regards to racial discourses in the U.S. Anne Cheng states “the nature of the racial other is in fact quite assimilated into–or more accurately, most uneasily digested by–American nationality.” (3) Here Cheng places the U.S. as the melancholic who has lost its founding principles of freedom and liberty, and forms an ambivalent relationship with the “racial other” through the process of assimilation.

This ambivalent relationship can be seen acutely in the drawings of Yasuo Kuniyoshi created when the Department of Defense asked him to create propaganda war posters that were ultimately never made. Note in Clean Up This Mess (1942) the Japanese flag, samurai sword and what looks like to be an octopus that recalls woodblock prints. Kuniyoshi was a first-generation Japanese-American who immigrated to America in 1906.

Kuniyoshi, Sink Him in Pacific, 1942

Kuniyoshi, Clean Up This Mess, 1942

to eat or not to eat

So anyways, enter the realm of this melancholic but cute creature!

For my game, I wanted it to be based on a creature/beast that is anonymous, a silent protagonist. More to come next week!

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1. Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, (London, The Hogarth Press, 1917), 243.

2. Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, 249-250.