"The Language of Flowers" - Michael Taussig

Taussig, Michael. “The Language of Flowers”, Walter Benjamin's Grave, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp.189- 289. 

I was fascinated by the territory Michael Taussig's The Language of Flowers observes. From an anthropological perspective he discusses human symbols of art and gesture, ritual, myth and objects which symbolically speak for what is indescribable, the mystical, in a way that language can not necessarily articulate. He finds a commonality among the symbols he presents -- flowers, cartoons, the ascephales, the fresh corpse of a hanged man, the mandrake and its myth of the little gallows man -- they each sit in an undecided state between the living and non-living, simultaneously representing life and death, the known and the unknown human realms.

   It struck me how closely his discussion relates to the images, objects and experiences Freud poses in his psychoanalytical analysis of the effect of the uncanny, which I will try to briefly describe here as: the effect of things that appear familiar yet simultaneously foreign, resulting in an uncomfortably strange feeling for the observer and causing them to a momentarily reassess their relation to the world and it assumed natural order -- an instance of recognition of the mystical.

Freud declares “it is undoubtedly related to what is frightening -- to what arouses dread and horror” (pp.219) and among the things he identifies as causing the 'uncanny effect' are severed limbs which appear to have life, life-like or living dolls, zombies, the double, the ghost, the automaton and momentary states of madness. Each, in one one way or another reflect Taussig's figures – they sit on the boundary of the living and non living, the known and the unknown and seem to speak to the human psyche as potent symbols.

   These parallels suggest a sort of universal aesthetic language, and I find it interesting, from this perspective, how much contemporary art is concerned with The Uncanny, or perhaps the language of The Uncanny is used to rationalize artworks which seem to operate in it's aesthetic realm. I am thinking of artworks such as Francis Upritchard's model of a preserved head, Untitled Head: Peter Holmes or Rachel Whitbread's arresting full-size plaster impression of a Victorian sitting room, Ghost, in which Whitbread essentially mummifies a living space (Iverson, p. 409). They both refer simultaneously to life and death and their enigmatic shifting quality seems to lie in this. I would go so far as to say that they act as symbols just as Taussig and Freud's do in referring to something 'more', something which is not present to consciousness which is said, in an instant, in a way that words could possibly not do.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny” (1919), Art and Literature, Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 14, London: Penguin Books, 1990. pp. 363- 4.

Iverson, Margaret. “In the Blind Field: Hopper and The Uncanny”, Art History, Vol.21, no.3, 1998. pp. 409-29.

Taussig, Michael. “The Language of Flowers”, Walter Benjamin's Grave, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp.189- 289.