Philosophy

Halloween is not quite over… Need a little unsettling in good company, then step into Scary Stories: The High Road/ Strange Mirrors for its opening event in Pannell Gallery on the Upper Quad. 

Themed light refreshment will be served, and curator Prof. Joe Stakseder will briefly introduce the show. 

“A novel is a mirror carried along a high road”—Stendhal, 1870
“If art reflects life, it does so with strange mirrors”—Bertolt Brecht, 1949

Horror, as a genre, along with the tremors it provokes—revulsion, relief, humor, uncanniness, and the sublime—already constitutes a ripple in the mirror. The symptoms of its alienations, however, are myriad. 

For Scary Stories: The High Road / Strange Mirrors, more figurative works of art have been installed on the western wall of Pannell Gallery, more abstract works on the eastern wall. Dolls, devils, spiders, skeletons, cat-rabbits, hazmat suits, and a meat grinder on one side; on the other, ineffable sources of unease that perhaps demand greater participation from the viewer. For the former, traditional contextualizing panels have been provided, while language has been largely absented from mediation with the abstract work, coaxing viewers to lose themselves in Joan Mitchell’s black trees, Jon Schueler’s red heaven, Jules Olitski’s yellow hell. Such decisions were not made to suggest any essential relationship between language and figuration but rather just to create a unique experience. Even more important is the show’s hope that the arrangement subverts simplistic binaries—particularly between the figurative and the abstract.

This exhibition coincides with Professor Joe Sacksteder’s English and Creative Writing elective Scary Stories: Tradition and Innovation, and several pieces in this show are translations of works of literature and mythology into visual mediums: Peter Milton’s etching illustrations of Henry James’s ghost story “The Jolly Corner,” Hans Richter’s Faust, Ana Maria Pacheco’s Tales of Transformation, and multiple artists’ ekphrastic explorations of Carole Oles’s poem “For Evelyn,” including Sweet Briar’s own Professor Laura Pharis. In many of the narratives studied by Professor Sacksteder’s class, characters—and even the form of the stories themselves—attempt to impose order on forces that refute comprehension. Such is the case in “Permanent Collection,” a new story published by Professor Sacksteder in Bard College’s magazine, Conjunctions, which fictionalizes the context of this very exhibition and imagines a vast, mirrored web stretched over Pannell’s colonnade.

Situated between the figurative and the abstract walls, the altar of Amy Sacksteder’s gruesome ceramics—suggesting organs, surgical trays, and malignant masses—show the bridging of the spaces to, itself, be a zone not of clarity but of hemorrhage. Pocket galleries display work by the children of Sweet Briar’s faculty and staff, banished to cramped sub-staircase chambers for bad behavior (very bad behavior). As all of these different modalities of monstrosity stare each other down across the gladiatorial pit of Pannell, let’s not hesitate to shake the exhibition’s cages to see what new connections and antipathies arise.
 

Image credit: Sue Coe’s Second Millenium, 1997