Psychoanalysis and Humour – Staging the Supernatural by Ronald Kodritsch
The painted bodies glow brightly in the nightly darkness. At the centre of each painting in the series Ghosts violet (2009-2010) are figures that the artist Ronald Kodritsch puts on canvas in an almost stereotypical form. Dressed in white, with dark empty eye sockets, no visible nose or mouth, the always identical physiognomy is characterised by a conical body without extremities. Only in singular works does the Austrian provide his ghosts with rudimentary limbs, with a single arm stretched upwards as if in silent salute. The surroundings also remain diffuse and, indicated by a wall, allow us to draw conclusions about urban structures and, moreover, about near-natural settings through the placement of isolated tree trunks.
The ghosts that Kodritsch called oscillate between almost childlike harmlessness, reminiscent of the illustration of the classic children’s book “Das kleine Gespenst” (The Little Ghost) by Otfried Preußler, published in 1966, and ominous intermediate creatures whose behaviour is left to the viewer’s imagination. All the works, however, are united by the suggestion of a nocturnal scene, evoked by the colouring, which varies between bluish purple and almost complete blackness. Intertwined with the ghostly apparitions, the artist creates a link between ‘events’ and ‘night’ that opens up an imaginative space for dreams, hallucinations, fears and desires. The alluring darkness of the night becomes a mental free space and at the same time awakens a diffuse feeling of fear.
According to literary scholar Elisabeth Bronfen, “[…] twilight […] brings not only the threat of dangerous disorder and, intertwined with this, the desire to establish social control in nocturnal settings, but also the promise of liberation from the laws of the day. […] The protection of darkness offers an alternative to the day, a chance to override its laws. In the process, transgression also proves to be ambivalent. Sometimes the nocturnal scene is idealised as a place of liberating subsidy, sometimes demonised as a scene of ominous threat. […] Rather, what is crucial is that nocturnal settings fluidify the boundary between external and internal experience.”¹
By using as a stylistic device the inner-image ambivalence from harmless-childlike to sinister-threatening, reinforced by the lack of (day)light, Kodritsch evokes a visual and mental transformation of the pictorial contents. “The darkness of the night holds places that allow us to test the escape from everyday constraints as well as a revolutionary reversal of conventional orders. Their insufficient visibility gives rise to a world of twilight, a counterpart to the world of reason and obedience: a setting for violence, horror, crime as well as fatal lures.”²
The shift from what is clearly visible to what is vaguely outlined causes uncertainty in classification and opens up the space for the realm of fantasy and dream to the same extent. There is a shift from external to internal images that are shaped by cultural as well as individual experiences. The reference to an out-of-control sphere of possibilities to surrealist strategies and the potential of the unconscious propagated there. With the first manifesto of surrealism, the group of surrealists formed around André Breton in 1924. In an article in the magazine Littérature (1919), André Breton formulated his goal of turning away from the conscious and towards the unconscious, the expression of which was expanded and clarified in his first surrealist manifesto on 15 October 1924. For the spokesman of the Surrealists,
rationalism, civilisation and progress, with its compulsion to utility, suppress the more primal part of the human being, the subconscious and thus the capacity for imagination. Breton’s intention is to activate
the hidden in the human mind through artistic means. For him, the inclusion of the subconscious and the dream forms an essential part of surrealism.
The combination of different elements, as it occurs in dreams, is a stylistic characteristic of surrealism. Ronald Kodritsch also uses the technique in part when he adds beards to his ghostly self-portraits (I’m getting old, 2014) and strings together portraits of famous people or in the manner of a gallery of ancestors. The result is as funny as it is visually exaggerated. Moreover, an equally humorously broken, sexual component flashes up again and again in the paintings. In the work Ghosts violet e (2009/2010), for example, a second ghost literally erects itself phallus-shaped in the womb area of the ghost’s appearance. Also in the painting the painter and his wife (year), an oversized male erection protrudes into the hole of a painter’s palette where the ‘creator’s’ thumb is usually located and seems like an ironic insignia of the artist. This exaggerated staging of masculinity evokes a proximity to the ‘logic’ of the dream or dream language, which irritates and disappoints familiar patterns of perception.
Works of Kodritsch fulfill characteristics of dreamlike states, including unstable identity, suspension of space and time as well as causal laws, logical breaks, discontinuities, lack of coherence, unreliable narration and multiperspectivity. These are reminiscent of Freud’s dream formation mechanisms. Coupled with the theme of the supernatural, usually withdrawn from the eyes, this allows an arc to Freud’s theory of the unearthly.
The meaning of the uncanny is etymologised by the linguist Daniel (Hendel) Sanders (1819-1897) and the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) in the Dictionary of the German Language (1860–65). According to Sanders, the word ‘unheimlich’ derives as an antonym of ‘heimlich’, in the meaning of homely, homelike, familiar, which Schelling follows up with his extended description of the heimlich by defining: “Un-[heimlich] is the name given to everything that should remain in secret, in concealment, and has come out.”⁴
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), on the other hand, also evaluates the prefix ‘un’ “as a mark of repression”⁵. For him, ‘the uncanny’ is primarily constituted by the process of repressed desires that force themselves into human consciousness in transformed and encapsulated (inner) images and often present themselves in a dichotomy of knowledge and non-knowledge, the familiar and the unfamiliar, or the known and the unknown.
Ernst Anton Jentsch (1867–1919), another mastermind in the early days of psychology, man harbours doubts as to whether inanimate objects such as wax figures, elaborate dolls and atomata cannot be animate and, conversely, develops doubts about the animate nature of a (seemingly) living being. The uncanny thus arises⁶ from the reader’s uncertainty as to whether the protagonist of the narrative is a ‘real’ person or an automaton. This feeling must remain subtle, without any direct suggestions of clarification, otherwise the uncanny fades with the realisation.⁷
Ronald Kodritsch skilfully interweaves his ghosts with this and other hypotheses of psychoanalysis. The relentless repetition of the artist’s motif – Freud sees unintentional repetition as a source of the uncanny – as well as the exaggerated male genitalia (phallic envy) in Kodritsch’s paintings can be interpreted as a play on Freudian recurrence. Freud states that in the subconscious of the soul there is a libidinal compulsion to repeat, which points the ‘I’ to infantile complexes and expresses itself in the act of eating, drinking and coitus. All that which one encounters outside one’s drive world as a repetition compulsion makes the objects or surroundings uncanny and gives them a ‘demonic’ character. Instead of an unintentional repetition, Kodritsch consciously controls the motivic recurrence and thus, to a certain extent, slips into the role of the psychiatrist.
The series of works Ghost on Couch (2022) also allows for a psychoanalytical reading. In a multitude of variations, he paints ghosts stretched out relaxed on a chaise longue – the furniture of psychoanalysis par excellence – with one ‘arm’ casually draped over the edge of the furniture, their gaze turned directly towards the viewer. The empty sockets stare blankly at the viewers and seem to be waiting for an action from the other person.
By looking out of the picture frame, the viewers slip inevitably into the role of psychiatrists who have to investigate the mental suffering of the spirits. Not infrequently, a pendant lamp burns above the furniture, which can be read as an auspicious symbol of enlightening knowledge. The outlandish setting intertwined with the definitional concept of spirit manifests a conceptual paradox that extends to the motifs. For on the one hand, Geist denotes the cognitive abilities of man as a rational being, the ratio that distinguishes homo sapiens from the animal. On the other hand, it means the power of imagination, perception, remembering and the power of fantasy. The spirit, which Kodritsch thematises in his work, humorously symbolises the opposite poles and expands the spirit genre by a rare facet of art – humour.
Nadia Ismail
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6 Vgl. Freud [1970], S. 250.
7 Vgl. Freud [1970], S. 250.