In Central Europe, the Gothic also had to do with the changing political landscape, where power was shifting from the nobility to the bourgeoisie. Elites were no longer granted their place via parentage, but rather by socioeconomic success. As a result, power rested not in the bloodlines of a certain family, but with a group of individuals who came to be identified with the nation-state. This change provoked a popular obsession with bloodlines and with blood itself as a signifier of identity, as evidenced in folktales and Gothic novels such as Dracula. See Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
See Leckey’s YouTube video “Proposal for a Show,” December 17, 2010, which was made before the exhibition opened at Nottingham Contemporary: →.
See Alexandra Keller and Frazer Ward, “Matthew Barney and the Paradox of the Neo-Avant-Garde Blockbuster,” Cinema Journal 45, no. 2 (Winter 2006).
In an essay on Mike Kelley’s show The Uncanny, Christoph Grunenberg notes that the public museum arose at the same time as the Gothic novel, and since then, “public enlightenment and the darkness of supernatural horror have been engaged in a tug of war.” He also remarks upon the “spectacles” of the “animation of dead matter through the illumination of sculpture galleries with flickering candlelight and the staging of elaborate illusionary tableaux,” a setup that was once common in museums. See C. Grunenberg, “Life in a Dead Circus: The Spectacle of the Real,” in The Uncanny (Liverpool and Vienna: Tate Liverpool and MMK, 2004), 59. Exhibition catalog. Mike Kelley’s The Uncanny is a clear precursor of Leckey’s Universal Accessibility of Dumb Things.
Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Ed Atkins, Kaleidoscope 13 (January 2012), →.
Maeve Connolly, “Televisual Objects: Props, Relics and Prosthetics,” Afterall 33 (Summer 2013): 77.
Francesco Casetti, “The Relocation of Cinema,” NECSUS 2 (Autumn 2012).
See Introduction, The Victorian Supernatural, eds. Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1.
Maeve Connolly, “Televisual Objects,” 77.