WORDS OF ART: THE U

Department of Fine Arts, Okanagan University College

WORDS OF ART: THE U_LIST

Compiled by Robert J. Belton

If you would like to see something removed, added or corrected, please feel free to contact bbelton@klo1.ouc.bc.ca.

UNARY SUBJECT: Julia Kristeva's term for the erroneous notion that consciousness is some sort of unified whole. At best, she regards it as a momentary blockage of the disruptive (see disruption) drives characteristic of the real psyche, evident in the split subject.

UNBIDDEN: Under construction.

UNCANNY: Sigmund Freud (see Freudian) discussed E.T.A. Hoffmann's 1816 tale "The Sandman" in terms of a state of psychic estrangement or disquieting strangeness, to which he gave the name "the Uncanny." (The German source word, Unheimlichkeit, breaks down roughly into "un-home-like-ness.") The first artist to consciously cultivate this type of anxiety as an aesthetic thrill is said to be Giorgio de Chirico, who felt that the silence, solitude and obscurity of deserted Italian piazze gave rise to a curious amalgam of aesthetic sentiment and psychic distress. (See Jean Clair, "Metafisica et Unheimlichkeit," in Les Réalismes, 1919-39 [Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 17 December, 1980-20 April, 1981], pp. 26-34.) De Chirico preferred to use the word presentiment, but his confusion of animate and inanimate -- he described statues in public places as particularly evocative because they seemed to have the potential to rise and enter the world of men, especially at twilight -- is precisely what Freud had described as the primary criterion for the generation of the Uncanny. The supposed leader of the Surrealists, André Breton, developed the notion into his doctrine of convulsive beauty -- i.e., that beauty had to have a certain shock value to qualify as genuine. More recently, with the increasing influence of Freudian and related terminology (see jargon) in contemporary artwriting, the Uncanny pops up in descriptions of many works which are marginally disturbing. Specific examples include Mark Cheetham's comments on painter Alice Mansell in his Remembering Postmodernism and David Garneau's "Wyn Geleynse: Images on the Tip of the Tongue," in Wyn Geleynse (Calgary: Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Alberta College of Art, 1994), p. 13, and the term could easily be employed when discussing the works of Fuss, Lukacs, Serrano, and many others.

UNCONSCIOUS: Under construction.

UNDERGROUND: Under construction.

UNDERPAINTING: Under construction.

UNDERSTATEMENT: Under construction. See also litotes.

UNHEIMLICHKEIT: See Uncanny.

UNINTRUSIVE NARRATOR: Under construction.

UNIQUE AESTHETIC EMOTION: Clive Bell's vague conception of the rarefied sentiment experienced when examining a true work of art. The conception does not hold up well under close inspection. See begging the question, significant form.

UNITIES: Under construction.

UNITY: Under construction.

UNIVERSAL: Under construction.

UNIVERSAL HUMAN INTEREST: Many canons appear to have been constructed with the idea that certain things -- works of literature or art -- are of such great quality that they belong to no particular time and place or no specific ethnic group or culture. They are thus granted the status of timelessness, in which case they are supposed to be of universal human interest. The critique of institutions, multiculturalism, political correctness, and postmodernism in general all deny that such a state exists, apart from those political situations in which groups in power seek to control knowledge in order to suppress other groups. In such an instance, what appears to be timeless is actualy pseudotranshistorical.

UNIVERSALISM: Under construction.

UNLIMITED SEMIOSIS: A hypothetically infinite process by which one sign or set of signs can take the place of another sign or set of signs (see interpretant) which in turn can be replaced by yet another sign or set of signs, and so on. Without such polysemy, artists and poets would soon run out of figurative images like tropes. The inexhaustible production of new meanings that results is a key concept in the semiotics of Umberto Eco and in deconstruction.

UNPACK: Occasionally used as a synonym for "analyze" or "deconstruct" in the context of deconstruction . That is, to unpack something is to reveal its layers of hidden meaning.

UNRELIABLE NARRATOR: Under construction.

UTILITARIANISM: Under construction.

UTOPIA: A perfect, remote and almost unthinkably ideal "place" (construed as a location, an era, a political state, or even a state of mind) and therefore the opposite of dystopia. Pictorial instances of utopian scenes are fairly commonplace, ranging from Arcadian vistas of the golden age (Greco-Roman wall paintings, some of the landscapes of Poussin and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, etc.) to almost bizarre visions of an afterlife (Girodet's Ossian Receiving the Napoleonic Officers [1802] comes to mind). There are even picture cycles which show both ends of the spectrum, as in Thomas Cole's Course of Empire (1836), which moves from prehistory through a utopian phase towards inevitable, dystopian desolation.

UTTERANCE: Under construction.

Back to Words of Art Index
Back to Fine Arts Page
Back to OUC Arts and Education Home Page
Back to OUC Home Page