MIND the BRAIN! An experimental exhibition
It is not clear which kind of prejudice is leading us to imagine the scientific vision as the opposite of the artistic one. On the one hand, the rational and analytic process, calculation and verification, equations and solutions; on the other, the creative and sensitive approach, imagination and suspension. Two methods of investigation into the nature of reality that too often, superficially, have been considered unrelated. But both the scientists and the artists have always been attempting to discover and to depict worlds, to reveal truths and to investigate the mysteries of nature. If Sigmund Freud wanted to glance beyond the veil analyzing the unconscious, Paul Klee was concerned with ”enabling the invisible to become visible”. Sharing these desires of omnipotence/legitimate aspirations, both artists and scientists have always been falling into the sin of hubris, having in common a certain positive “Faust complex” able to generate revolutions and evolutions, changes of human consciousness and of history. Avant-gardes, corps ready to sacrifice themselves in order to add a page to the Galileian “Book of Nature”, these are men prepared for the stake and for misery, confident about their will to follow the dangerous road of awareness.
The gesture which the XXIII Conference of the European Health Psychology Society is making toward the opening of a dialogue between art and science is therefore an important and significant one.
Even more so if we consider that the relationship between such a unique science, like the one concerned with the human brain, and the arts has sometimes been very delicate. A dramatic example to remember is the one of Antonin Artaud.
These are the words that he wrote in 1947.
“One can speak of the good mental health of Van Gogh who, in his whole adult life, cooked only one of his hands and did nothing else except once to cut off his left ear, in a world in which every day one eats vagina cooked in green sauce or penis of newborn child whipped and beaten to a pulp, just as it is when plucked from the sex of its mother. And this is not an image, but a fact abundantly and daily repeated and cultivated throughout the world. And this, however delirious this statement may seem, is how modern life maintains its old atmosphere of debauchery, anarchy, disorder, delirium, derangement, chronic insanity, bourgeois inertia, psychic anomaly (for it is not man but the world which has become abnormal), deliberate dishonesty and notorious hypocrisy, stingy contempt for everything that shows breeding. insistence on an entire order based on the fulfilment of a primitive injustice, in short, of organized crime. Things are going badly because sick consciousness has a vested interest right now in not recovering from its sickness. This is why a tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.¹”
It is not clear which kind of prejudice is leading us to imagine the scientific vision as the opposite of the artistic one. On the one hand, the rational and analytic process, calculation and verification, equations and solutions; on the other, the creative and sensitive approach, imagination and suspension. Two methods of investigation into the nature of reality that too often, superficially, have been considered unrelated. But both the scientists and the artists have always been attempting to discover and to depict worlds, to reveal truths and to investigate the mysteries of nature. If Sigmund Freud wanted to glance beyond the veil analyzing the unconscious, Paul Klee was concerned with ”enabling the invisible to become visible”. Sharing these desires of omnipotence/legitimate aspirations, both artists and scientists have always been falling into the sin of hubris, having in common a certain positive “Faust complex” able to generate revolutions and evolutions, changes of human consciousness and of history. Avant-gardes, corps ready to sacrifice themselves in order to add a page to the Galileian “Book of Nature”, these are men prepared for the stake and for misery, confident about their will to follow the dangerous road of awareness.
The gesture which the XXIII Conference of the European Health Psychology Society is making toward the opening of a dialogue between art and science is therefore an important and significant one.
Even more so if we consider that the relationship between such a unique science, like the one concerned with the human brain, and the arts has sometimes been very delicate. A dramatic example to remember is the one of Antonin Artaud.
These are the words that he wrote in 1947.
“One can speak of the good mental health of Van Gogh who, in his whole adult life, cooked only one of his hands and did nothing else except once to cut off his left ear, in a world in which every day one eats vagina cooked in green sauce or penis of newborn child whipped and beaten to a pulp, just as it is when plucked from the sex of its mother. And this is not an image, but a fact abundantly and daily repeated and cultivated throughout the world. And this, however delirious this statement may seem, is how modern life maintains its old atmosphere of debauchery, anarchy, disorder, delirium, derangement, chronic insanity, bourgeois inertia, psychic anomaly (for it is not man but the world which has become abnormal), deliberate dishonesty and notorious hypocrisy, stingy contempt for everything that shows breeding. insistence on an entire order based on the fulfilment of a primitive injustice, in short, of organized crime. Things are going badly because sick consciousness has a vested interest right now in not recovering from its sickness. This is why a tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.¹”
¹ An excerpt from Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society, originally published in Paris in 1947.
In this context the quotation is not intended to sound as if it openly accuses the world of medical research on mental studies. Artaud’s anger, the force behind the theatre of cruelty, should merely be accepted and understood because of the terrible biography of this genius. Arrested and put in a straitjacket in 1937, he was kept in a mental asylum for more than 9 years and subjected to more than 50 electroshocks.
The studies in human psyche at that time were very different from those of nowadays, which rather are able to be intertwined and are open to stimuli from the most varied fields. Advanced research on the mind, the brain and human behaviour – that carried out by psychology and psychoanalysis, by dynamic psychiatry, neuropsychiatry and the neurosciences – is now so avant-garde that it really is capable of giving us the hope of reaching a deeper insight about the conditio humana. New perspectives are being open, now that we have arrived at understanding to what degree the human brain actively participates in the creation of the world, and that it is not, as we believed, a passive chronicler of reality.
Being aware of the possibilities available today and of the range of goals to reach in the near future is fundamental. But, at the same time, while driven by this cognitive enthusiasm, we should never disregard the inflexible words of Artaud. The dangers in dealing with such a fragile and vulnerable complexity cannot and should never be underestimated, not only in the world of empirical neurosciences, but also in the more speculative one of the research on the mind and consciousness.
The risk of agreeing with The anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is, after all, constantly lying in ambush.
In calling upon the artists to give a statement about the theme of human mind and brain, the message could not be other than that of openness and alternatives. The experiment of mixing the scientific point of view with a different – and sometimes dangerous – perspective such as that of art, which never fears suspending judgement, is a great challenge.
And at the same time, the privilege of being able to express a vision in such an important context and in front of such a specialist public is a rare opportunity, not to say a significant test for the artists themselves.
More than ever before the possibilities of researching into the mysteries of nature are at the horizon of art. And more than ever the lens of science could help us to see a little bit further.
The question this experiment raises is: how fertile could the exchange between artists and scientists be for the evolution of the thought process and the philosophical debate, and how much stimulation can they offer to each others?
Paolo Bottarelli, a young Italian artist, Reynold Reynolds, an established artist born in Alaska and José Rufino, an active Brasilian one, have tried to play the game.
The result is a poignant exhibition. Mind the Brain! is an invitation to reflection.
This is why Bottarelli is presenting a personal remark on his Diplophobia, on the psychological pressure which humans feel when facing the intrinsic impossibility of the dualistic system of the western school to cross the threshold of the “middle road”: a monadic room where the subject is forced to face himself, and deal with his perception.
And Reynolds is showing his Secret Machine, a film installation where a woman is submitted to various medical experiments and treated as a mere object of study, but where the observer, activating his mirror neuron system, cannot avoid participating in the sensations of the protagonist and feeling empathy with her humanness.
Rufino, instead, is exhibiting an installation of ink blots entitled Rorschach mind test for barbaric subversion, where hundreds of sheets representing the Brasilian bureaucracy, those recording the political purges and the crimes of dictatorship, are stained with tempera ink designing different shapes of the projective Rorschach test.
The subject, the observer and society are all summoned up to debate on the most human of all sciences, that is, art.
E.A.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
In Diplophobia all that sets the interconnection between mind and the world, reveals itself to be a sort of a never-ending spiral where everything circles back to the self. A soothing room, where meditation is a cathartic and heroic introspection on one’s own mortal caducity.
It is the space where circumstances are only what the mind sees in the loop of its incessant self-definition.
Here, in the cube of the autopoiesis, a mental environment is recreated. To be perceived, the mental environment needs a self-defining temporal and spatial movement which never rests.
As in a never ending party, we are constantly asked to introduce ourselves to ourselves, always changing from our previous presentation and rediscovering in every step, the inevitable double.
The match between mind and world, in this room of phobias, appears as a perpetual tension leading towards a horizon always increasing knowledge and in front of an increasing set of decisions.
But there seem to be no more crossroads, no way out in front of the numerical incommensurability of the unspeakable aut-aut.
Here, therefore, the tight teeth of the sculpture, pressed by the infinite possibilities of choice of the mind, impose their gnashing as a mute sound to observe, emotionless and defenceless.
But this is not the only way out. There is still another possibility -- playing chess in the room of thoughts. It is then that the observers become pawns and empathetically move the mechanisms and create the synergy.
There is a certain unarmed paralysis, in the monadic room, that as in a paradoxical game, places us in front of the annihilation of the two icons in the moment when they face each other.
The two paintings, one in front of the other, destroy each other, recalling the murdering will of going beyond, what Borges called the “illusion of the mirror and the copula”
The fragments of time, eternally reassembled, are saved. The world and the mind live again below the same roof.
The studies in human psyche at that time were very different from those of nowadays, which rather are able to be intertwined and are open to stimuli from the most varied fields. Advanced research on the mind, the brain and human behaviour – that carried out by psychology and psychoanalysis, by dynamic psychiatry, neuropsychiatry and the neurosciences – is now so avant-garde that it really is capable of giving us the hope of reaching a deeper insight about the conditio humana. New perspectives are being open, now that we have arrived at understanding to what degree the human brain actively participates in the creation of the world, and that it is not, as we believed, a passive chronicler of reality.
Being aware of the possibilities available today and of the range of goals to reach in the near future is fundamental. But, at the same time, while driven by this cognitive enthusiasm, we should never disregard the inflexible words of Artaud. The dangers in dealing with such a fragile and vulnerable complexity cannot and should never be underestimated, not only in the world of empirical neurosciences, but also in the more speculative one of the research on the mind and consciousness.
The risk of agreeing with The anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is, after all, constantly lying in ambush.
In calling upon the artists to give a statement about the theme of human mind and brain, the message could not be other than that of openness and alternatives. The experiment of mixing the scientific point of view with a different – and sometimes dangerous – perspective such as that of art, which never fears suspending judgement, is a great challenge.
And at the same time, the privilege of being able to express a vision in such an important context and in front of such a specialist public is a rare opportunity, not to say a significant test for the artists themselves.
More than ever before the possibilities of researching into the mysteries of nature are at the horizon of art. And more than ever the lens of science could help us to see a little bit further.
The question this experiment raises is: how fertile could the exchange between artists and scientists be for the evolution of the thought process and the philosophical debate, and how much stimulation can they offer to each others?
Paolo Bottarelli, a young Italian artist, Reynold Reynolds, an established artist born in Alaska and José Rufino, an active Brasilian one, have tried to play the game.
The result is a poignant exhibition. Mind the Brain! is an invitation to reflection.
This is why Bottarelli is presenting a personal remark on his Diplophobia, on the psychological pressure which humans feel when facing the intrinsic impossibility of the dualistic system of the western school to cross the threshold of the “middle road”: a monadic room where the subject is forced to face himself, and deal with his perception.
And Reynolds is showing his Secret Machine, a film installation where a woman is submitted to various medical experiments and treated as a mere object of study, but where the observer, activating his mirror neuron system, cannot avoid participating in the sensations of the protagonist and feeling empathy with her humanness.
Rufino, instead, is exhibiting an installation of ink blots entitled Rorschach mind test for barbaric subversion, where hundreds of sheets representing the Brasilian bureaucracy, those recording the political purges and the crimes of dictatorship, are stained with tempera ink designing different shapes of the projective Rorschach test.
The subject, the observer and society are all summoned up to debate on the most human of all sciences, that is, art.
E.A.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
In Diplophobia all that sets the interconnection between mind and the world, reveals itself to be a sort of a never-ending spiral where everything circles back to the self. A soothing room, where meditation is a cathartic and heroic introspection on one’s own mortal caducity.
It is the space where circumstances are only what the mind sees in the loop of its incessant self-definition.
Here, in the cube of the autopoiesis, a mental environment is recreated. To be perceived, the mental environment needs a self-defining temporal and spatial movement which never rests.
As in a never ending party, we are constantly asked to introduce ourselves to ourselves, always changing from our previous presentation and rediscovering in every step, the inevitable double.
The match between mind and world, in this room of phobias, appears as a perpetual tension leading towards a horizon always increasing knowledge and in front of an increasing set of decisions.
But there seem to be no more crossroads, no way out in front of the numerical incommensurability of the unspeakable aut-aut.
Here, therefore, the tight teeth of the sculpture, pressed by the infinite possibilities of choice of the mind, impose their gnashing as a mute sound to observe, emotionless and defenceless.
But this is not the only way out. There is still another possibility -- playing chess in the room of thoughts. It is then that the observers become pawns and empathetically move the mechanisms and create the synergy.
There is a certain unarmed paralysis, in the monadic room, that as in a paradoxical game, places us in front of the annihilation of the two icons in the moment when they face each other.
The two paintings, one in front of the other, destroy each other, recalling the murdering will of going beyond, what Borges called the “illusion of the mirror and the copula”
The fragments of time, eternally reassembled, are saved. The world and the mind live again below the same roof.
title: diplophobia 1x
2 x cm. 180x140, acrylic and oil on canvas, 2009
title: diplophobia x1
