The Monster Seminar #2: The Thing
Last time we spoke about the incomplete and the unfinished; to think about process as something that never leaves the moment of presentation or exhibition; but rather, that haunts the work. This was founded by reflecting on subjectivity, as a state of fragmentation: how the self is shaped by a negotiation with absence, withdrawal, loss; leading to a range of methods, practices, which help us recreate the world around us:
So creativity emerges as key to working through this fundamental state of fragmentation and incompleteness – we are in a way driven to reorder the world around us.
Incompleteness opens the question of the monster as well: again, if we understand the monster as a projection of what we fear, fear being often related to what we do not understand or recognize: the other that seems to threaten the fragile order around us. The monster is precisely what disrupts categorization, the order of language; it sits between or comes out of the dark; it is often related to the materiality of the body, in terms of what we often do not want to see: our own insides. These are pushed to the side, kept out of view, and the monster forces them back out – the monster is often grotesque, inhuman.