The term ’emotional and psychological disturbance’ is taking me to interesting places.
I’ve been curled up with a vat of espresso and the latest edition of Mute magazine for the past half hour. I’ve stopped reading part way through an interview with artist Alexa Wright (interviewer Stefan Szczelkun) as there are a few passages in here which feel are worth documenting.
The interview touches on the theme of trauma and emotional affect, an area that I have been reading around quite extensively in the past week or so. There is discussion of Wright’s work Killers made in 2002, which situates it’s audience in solitary booths and plays back narratives of murders telling the real life stories of how they killed someone and how it made them feel. This is identified in the interview as a moment of transgression, where the viewer is forced to confront something beyond the normal experience of being human and to deal with their own hateful or empathetic response to these confessions.
There is a reference made to Kristeva here and her use of the term abject:
“According to Kristeva, what causes abjection is anything that disturbs our sense of identity, system or order. Anything, or perhaps anyone, that is in-between, ambiguous or composite.”
Alexa Wright
The interview then brings in the theme of trauma which the interviewer describes as:
“An experience that overwhelms one’s ordinary emotional abilities – something that is too difficult to process with the resources you have at that time.”
Stefan Szczelkun
Killers takes the transgression of an excepted social norm to territories that encounter emotional extremity or trauma. Of course what it might also highlight is the level of emotional and psychological disturbance that lead to the murderous acts and the level of such disturbance that is translated to the viewer during their encounter with the work. We are in the realm of deviation where shock can equal disturbance and emotions that are are almost too difficult to process.
While the piece does not deal overtly with ‘mental health’ it seems to ask the viewer to consider the extremity of what the disturbed mind can conjure. Yet by instigating the moment of an intimate encounter between artwork and audience it also emphasises the fact that such grotesque acts generate from everyday human minds that function just like our own.
In its way the above is only speculation as I have not seen the work and have only read this single interview with Alexa Wright. But it been a useful read in terms of exploring trauma in the emotive encounter and the reconciling psychological extremes into the everyday. Here’s a last quote from the artist:
“I am interested in exploring the fears and prejudices that set in when we are unable to establish a clear and tangible boundary between what we thing of as ‘us’, ‘really normal’ people and ‘others’. Alexa Wright
All quotes taken from Stefan Szczelkun’s interview with Alexa Wright in Mute Vol 2 Issue 16 http://www.metamute.org Listen to audio extracts from Alexa Wright’s work Killers here: http://www.alteregoinstallation.co.uk/main_site/ki…
