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July 7, 2008
The Australian National University's School of Art has a n exhibition gallery entitled the Photospace Gallery. It will show some work by Alison Bennett entitled To Occupy: panoramic interiors of concrete fortifications from the 4th -14th August. Bennett says that:
This series of images is an investigation into the notion of inhabitation as a negotiated process. Through practice-based research, the series has become focused on the interiors of concrete fortifications along the east and south coasts of Australia. I am interested in the ‘shudder’ one experiences when encountering a room that has resonance; that has duration; where past, present and future collapse.”
I understand 'shudder' as an aesthetic concept that refers to the experience of the historical sublime.I take this understanding from Adorno, and it is shorthand for Adorno's aesthetic fear that elicits "responses like real anxiety, a violent drawing back, an almost physical revulsion.
Alison Bennett, Malabar, from the To Occupy series
Bennett explores this shudder by referencing to interiority in architecture and psychology. She says that in architecture 'shudder' is used to describe the experience of being in an interior space; it is used in psychology to describe one’s interior life, what it feels like inside your head.
Alison Bennett, Middle Head, Blueroom, from the series To Occupy
In AestheticTheory Adorno claims that works of modernist art can, in virtue of their characteristic autonomy,successfully capture and impart the shudder. Here the shudder is not just a response to primal amorphousness and undifferentiation; it is the appropriate response to the abstract nature of modern life. The shudder is the involuntary and immediate reaction of revulsion which discloses the modern administered world as radically evil.
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