The Sedimentation of the Social: Spiral Jetty and the Ruins of the Death Drive
- Submitting institution
-
York St John University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 473
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
-
10.3828/sj.2017.26.2.5
- Title of journal
- The Sculpture Journal
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 193
- Volume
- 26
- Issue
- 2
- ISSN
- 1366-2724
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
- October
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
-
http://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/2293/
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This extended peer review article proposes a significant corrective to the theorisation of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, the paradigm case for the appearance of the Freudian death drive in art. Written over five years, this 8000-word transdisciplinary text established a new art historical method that mapped Smithson’s complex synthesis of psychoanalysis and early-mid 20th century Egyptology for the first time. The paper’s critique was grounded in contemporary Egyptology’s post-colonial scholarship and anthropology, enabling it to destabilise this paradigm case and highlight the redundancy of Freud’s thesis, which until now has remained current in the theory, history and practice of art.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This extended peer review article takes up and develops Corby’s critique of the role of psychoanalysis in art history, first explored in her monograph on the work of American German Jewish artist Eva Hesse (I B Tauris, 2010). In that book Corby revealed the way in which an emphasis on the details of the artist’s Freudian psychotherapy led art historians to pathologize Hesse’s practice and its representation of her mother, Ruth Marcus Hesse. Instead, Corby offered a counter argument that placed this mother-daughter relationship in the context of the Holocaust and the artist’s ethnicity as a German Jewish refugee, hitherto had been excluded by Hesse’s standing as a woman artist.
Smithson was a contemporary of Hesse’s and also an adherent of Freudian psychoanalysis. His work Spiral Jetty (1970) is one of the most well-trodden examples of twentieth century art and the paradigm case for the performance of Freud’s death drive. Sedimentation of the Social proposes a significant corrective to the discourse written for this work by mapping Smithson’s complex synthesis of psychoanalysis and early-mid 20th century Egyptology for the first time. The paper creatively draws on contemporary Egyptology’s post-colonial scholarship and anthropology to reveal the ideological underpinnings of the empty ruins that informed the conception of Spiral Jetty. It performs a close reading of the photographs that document the earthwork’s construction to foreground the cooperation and knowledge exchange necessary to its realisation. This body of evidence is then used to illuminate the occlusions of the psychoanalytic readings of this work, destabilising this paradigm case to highlight the redundancy of Freud’s thesis for the theory, history and practice of art more broadly.
Prior to its publication in the Sculpture Journal this research was presented at the biannual European Conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts in Basel (2017).
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
