A degree show is unavoidably contemporary. Students are expected to expand their practice by abandoning habits that would otherwise serve as a temporal buffer. Exposed and expected to produce, it’s hard to keep the present out. Beyond the singular pleasure of getting to hear artists describe their work in the frenzy of mid degree-climax, I was excited to see what kind of tactics and affects had emerged in a context of ever-heightening chaos and precarity. As I toured the studio I found myself returning again and again to a single descriptive image: Albrecht Durer’s 1514 engraving, Melencholia I.
For Agamben, Durer’s melancholy angel embodies art’s capacity to reestablish a connection to the future after traditional culture is no longer able to reproduce itself and guarantee transmission. In his description of the engraving in The Man Without Content he notes:
“The utensils of active life and the other objects scattered around the melancholy angel have lost the significance that their daily usefulness endowed them with and have become charged with a potential for alienation that transforms them into the cipher for something endlessly elusive.”
These inoperable fragments regain their meaning and value as the objects of collection and quotation. Reassembled beyond their original purpose of transmission, they serve as a last remaining link to the past, as well as a means of re-establishing the future after tradition fails. However, this new means of reproduction via shock has its costs:
“Suspended in the void between old and new, past and future, man is projected into time as into something alien that incessantly eludes him and still drags him forward, but without allowing him to find his ground in it”
Melancholic production is not the same as utopian fantasy. It does not allow a reprieve from the consequences of the past, nor does it promise a better future. This unease is most explicit in the work of Bodie Stanley and Edoardo Rito. Reimagining structures of social control and reproduction as sites of play and exploration, the dynamism of these works is not in their capacity to overwrite the past but to quote it in a new context. Stanley’s musical instrument no matter how joyfully played remains a possible barricade, while for Rito, the danger of the abandoned buildings and recovered sculptural materials is a purposeful guard against escapist fantasies.
Similar to Agamben’s description of the melancholy angel, AI operates via a process of cultural accumulation and alienation to produce new forms of seeing as well as new ways of compensating for the failures of cultural transmission. Though not explicitly mentioned or used in any work, traces of these products can be seen in Hollie Palmer's approach to the image. The rich tactility and over-spilling visuals of Palmer’ sculpture is a far cry from hyper-smooth surfaces of overtly digital aesthetics. The echo of AI comes in its production of the image via melancholic aggregation. Personal memory, fantasy, and ideal images are ripped from their context to be fused into home and garden contents as welcoming as they are uncanny.
As Kristeva notes: “The artist consumed by melancholia is at the same time the most relentless in his struggle against the symbolic abdication that blankets him … Until death strikes or suicide becomes imperative for those who view it as final triumph over the void of the lost object …”
The singular desire to be with the loss of The Thing forces the artist to find ways of tearing at or reorganizing language, so that it may express in its rupture or style what it never could contain explicitly. Em Doodles' sculpture and poetry links trans and decaying bodies by the resistance of their bubbling fullness to categorization. Found objects are returned to and reorganised by decay, both retreating from and transcending their original use. Meej Douglas’ films attempt to describe the experience of DRPD where both confessional and medical language have failed. The film’s explicit narrative is secondary to its semiotic cutting and reframing of the viewer’s experience. Though both of these artists seek to re-privilege the body, they smuggle it in though the stutters and slips of melancholic speech.
As useless as language is for describing the unnameable Thing, Kristeva reminds us that it still has some capacity to remedy our loss: “[L]iterary (and religious) representation possesses a real and imaginary effectiveness that comes closer to catharsis than to elaboration; it is a therapeutic device used in all societies throughout the ages.”
Hannah Kate Absalom seems to draw from this capacity in religious ritual, horror and camp. The aim of this seductive combination of gothic detail, meat-hooks, and LED candles is less to speak to or of these categories than to appropriate their ability to organise and direct affective flows of experience. There is a tension here between the exuberant fight towards catharsis, and the cannibalistic desire to hold the object tight through consumption. Even if art can provide a moment of relief or understanding in our grief it cannot protect us from its return.
I am relieved to see a return to melancholic moods in contemporary art after the manic exuberance of post-internet utopianism. Melancholia is associated with depression but also intellect and contemplation; a sign of great change as well as great crisis. I do not think it is impossible to look at the world honestly without some fear of what is to come. What melancholia teaches us is the power of continuing to speak regardless of the threat of collapse. No matter how incomprehensible the loss, or uncomfortable it is to listen, we must keep finding means of letting it talk or die with it.
Laura Nicholson