The Victorian Freak Show

The Victorian Freak Show.

Beth:

Everyone's a freak. No two bodies are the same; we all have unpleasant, wonderful, shocking and extraordinary features; we are all unique. But for centuries the word 'freak' has been used cruelly to describe people born with 'abnormal' features, or those able perform extraordinary physical acts by contorting or misshaping their bodies.

Exhibitions of live human curiosities had appeared in travelling fairs, circuses and taverns in England since the 1600s. These included so-called giants, dwarves, fat people, the very thin, conjoined twins and even people from exotic climes. Freak shows were a particularly popular form of entertainment during the Victorian period, when people from all classes flocked to gawp at these unusual examples of human life.

　

　

　I think everyone is fascinated by the unusual, creating a frenzy of curiosity. We took an existing exhibition on the absurd, the Victorian freak show and created an art freak show. We attempted to fool the audience the show was a genuine freak show by not specifying either way, people turned up not knowing what to expect. Presented with a display of absurdities it was an attempt to speak to the uncanny and the curiosity in everybody’s mind.

　

　

The Uncanny

　

　

As a connection to the Victorian period, striped curtains were hung to display one of the pieces of work. The work was a gold frame with a blond hair piece hanging from the middle and was in eye view as you walked into the gallery space. It helped the piece be a focal point.

At first we had hung the large colourful portrait in the middle but as the curtains draped it covered corners of the piece, we felt we shouldn’t be changing the work and the piece was powerful enough without using extra props to draw attention to it. We felt the back wall was very bare so added the piece to this wall.

　

　

The gold frame was initially hung next to the two feminine poster designs which we felt looked like a series all together. Being a series made the work seem feminine and pretty, much less freaky and certainly not linked to the uncanny. Taking the gold frame away let both pieces of work shine in their own light.

The hanging teddy pieces were discussed and we were undecided as to how they would be shown as they were intended to be hung from the ceiling but there were no beams in the room. We thought it might be effective to lay them in the room as a floor piece but felt they would be much better hung.

I feel the pieces would have been much more powerful on the back wall to the exhibition where the desk was allowing them to have more focus just on them as they may have been slightly lost in the doorway as people walked past them to get into the space.

The teddies were chose because of their creepiness. Teddies are usually contected to children, warmth and happiness but these had been cut up, sewn together with other parts and hung, taking away any pleasantries connected with the objects.

　

　

One choice I think was fantastic for the exhibition was Kate Placketts mechanical bell structures which was used visually as sculptures and as a performance which help capture the attention of the exhibition viewers.

The mechanical structure gave a robotic futuristic feel to the theme. A connection to Mary Shellys Frankenstein and his monster and to the Futurists.

　

Marinetti of the Futurists expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. "We want no part of it, the past", he wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!" The Futurists admired

speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists. They repudiated the cult of the past and all imitation, praised originality, "however daring, however violent", bore proudly "the smear of madness", dismissed art critics as useless, rebelled against harmony and good taste, swept away all the themes and subjects of all previous art, and gloried in science. (Ger. Das Unheimliche -- literally, "un-home-ly", but idiomatically, "scary", "creepy") is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange.[1