Madness & Modernity

‘Madness & Modernity: Mental illness and the visual arts in Vienna 1900’ is an exhibition curated by Leslie Topp and Gemma Blackshaw at the Wellcome Collection in London.

It is not your usual art gallery, but has several exhibition spaces concentrating on matters medical and mental.

‘Portrait of Heinrich Mann’ by Max Oppenheimer, 1910.

Max Oppenheimer seriously rivalled Kokoschka as a portrait-painter. In 1911, rows erupted between the two artists over who could lay claim to the invention of the ‘psychological portrait’. Oppenheimer’s depiction of the German novelist Heinrich Mann in a state of nervous enervation, with flickering eyelids, rigid limbs and splayed fingers, was declared a ‘Kokoschka-copy’. Heinrich was Thomas Mann’s brother, who continually engaged with themes of mental illness, incarceration and freedom in his fiction.

There is an interesting video discussion with the curators on the website.

Narcissus in the bathroom

You know when people look at pictures of themselves and say “that doesn’t look like me”? Well…

In a report titled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in Self-Recognition,” which appears online in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch described experiments in which people were asked to identify pictures of themselves amid a lineup of distracter faces. Participants identified their personal portraits significantly quicker when their faces were computer enhanced to be 20 percent more attractive. They were also likelier, when presented with images of themselves made prettier, homelier or left untouched, to call the enhanced image their genuine, unairbrushed face. Such internalized photoshoppery is not simply the result of an all-purpose preference for prettiness: when asked to identify images of strangers in subsequent rounds of testing, participants were best at spotting the unenhanced faces.

How can we be so self-delusional when the truth stares back at us? “Although we do indeed see ourselves in the mirror every day, we don’t look exactly the same every time,” explained Dr. Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. There is the scruffy-morning you, the assembled-for-work you, the dressed-for-an-elegant-dinner you. “Which image is you?” he said. “Our research shows that people, on average, resolve that ambiguity in their favor, forming a representation of their image that is more attractive than they actually are.”

So I’m even less good-looking than I think I am. Great. I hated mirrors already, I just never suspected that they were lying to me.

This is from an article by Natalie Angier in the New York Times.

Phantasm

This is shamelessly self-serving, but an extremely interesting exhibition will open soon at Lab X Gallery in St Kilda, entitled ‘Phantasm’.

It’s self-serving not because I am in it – I’m not – but I have written the catalogue introduction at the invitation of the exhibitors who I have known for many years. Greg Wayn and Greg Neville had the dubious pleasure of teaching me, and George Alamidis was also strongly associated with the school where I studied photography, ACPAC, whose star burned brightly in Melbourne for a few years in the eighties and nineties.

The theme of the show is the human face – not as it is in itself, nor as conventionally reflected in portraiture, but as it occupies the mind, whether in memory, in hallucination, or in the darker spaces of consciousness. The faces in ‘Phantasm’ bridge the apparent contradiction between our belief in the dependibility of faces on the one hand, and the more fragile residence they may take up in recollection.

Update: The website for the show is no longer operational, so in lieu, here is the text, for posteriy’s sake, of the catalogue introduction:

PHANTASM

There is a strange double aspect to the human face. On the one hand, it is the most certain, the most concrete of visual forms; a form to which our brains give priority above all others.

Indeed, we seem to have an innate ability to recognise faces, since the face is a form to which infants only nine minutes old, who have never seen one, give special attention [Goren, 1975]. Brain imaging studies show heightened activity in an area of the temporal lobe called the fusiform gyrus when we look at faces, a feature of brain function that is evident by two months of age [Nelson, 2001].

On the other hand, faces have a fragile residence in the mind. The longer we consider them, especially in memory, the less substantial they become. Despite the assumptions of the criminal law, eyewitnesses often prove unreliable, so willing are we to confabulate past experience through the filters of desire and unconscious motivation.

Faces are like this, simultaneously concrete and yet often at the edge of perception and account, for which we struggle to find appropriate metaphor.

The faces in Phantasm bridge this apparent contradiction, appearing not as they are in themselves (whatever that might be), but as they occupy the mind, whether in consciousness, in memory, in hallucination, or in the dark places.

Greg Neville’s faces can be categorised by simple emotions: angry, happy, surprised, frightened; like characters from children’s books, with emotions more powerful for their simplicity. Looming out of a psychically impenetrable murk, radically simplified like tribal masks, whose animistic and magical qualities they suggest, his images emerge out of a longheld interest in collective and institutional images of identity, in this case, children’s toys possessing hyper-inflated masculinity.

Toys are a societal spirit-level, and often reflect our most obscure motivations in extreme form; never more so than when toys are overtly gendered. Like miniaturised classical statuary, absurdly stylised renditions of terrible physical power, they manifest the fears and desires of society in cheap plastic, a society seemingly obsessed with physical force even on the international stage. By simplifying masculine images for children, we universalise and distil and refine what was unnameable before, reflecting ourselves back in caricature. An artifact of public spectacle is here transformed by an accident of digital photographic process into an image from a private nightmare, and presented back to us as an entirely different kind of spectacle.

The brain sees a mouth and eyes where there is only a line with two circles. We are face-builders, neurologically set for the task. We come into the world seemingly knowing what faces look like, prepared to see them in everything from the moon to cheese sandwiches that look like Jesus. Greg Wayn sees faces where none exist. His pictures operate just above the neurological threshold for facial recognition, lighting up the inanimate world with consciousness. We see eyes where there are holes, mouths in smiling bedsprings, broken skin in the peeling paint of a car’s fender. We look, and a seemingly conscious object, animus mundi, stares back. We attribute agency and fellow feeling to junk, not simply because we are superstitious, but because we emerge ready to attribute mind to whatever looks like it has one, which is perhaps the source of empathy. In the rot and the rust, everything is alive, looking back at us, animated by our willingness to recognise it.

George Alamidis strips his faces of their institutional particulars, the singularity that underpins their uniqueness. They become universal, subverting the sole condition of their usefulness to institutions, governments and tyrants.

I say ‘his faces’ because they are all George’s face at some remove, having their origin in his elaborate self-portrait project; a portrait of the artist as an immigrant, a transgressor of institutional boundaries, whether of national and cultural borders, age, gender, class. A universal humanising gesture, which soaks up to the surface of an official document as if from some psychic depth. These faces are vessels, transistors of memory and common cultural experience, and vessels too because they come to us from the across the ocean, the universal boundary and the symbol of the loss of home.

Like no other object, faces indicate the contents of the soul and character. They guide us and shape our futures. They are showcases for the self, containers of social and sexual data which we recognise in the fraction of a second, the most important thing in our embodied universe. No wonder they haunt us.

We have only to consider the face of someone we have lost to become aware of the face’s double aspect. It seems simple enough at first, the image rising up in us with reassuring familiarity, as if they were still here, until we try to name the particulars: the shape and colour of the eyes, the angle of a chin, the distinctive slope of a nose. A whole album of sense memory can be within easy reach, smells, the sound of a voice, but the specifics hover in front of us like a name we can’t quite remember until we almost doubt that we ever knew them at all. The harder we look, the faster the remembered face atomises and fades away. We calm ourselves with the certainty of photographs until the face comes again, effortlessly, in dreams.

For the poet Ezra Pound, the memory of faces emerging from a Metro station was like an apparition, a ghostly image from the unconscious, “petals on a wet, black bough” [Pound, 1972]. There is no more symbolically potent, metaphorically fertile or more infinitely possible thing for us than a face conjured in the mind.

References

Goren, Sarty & Wu (1975) Visual following and pattern discrimination of face-like stimuli by newborn infants, Pediatrics, v. 40, no. 4, p. 547.

Nelson, C. A. (2001) The development and neural bases of face recognition, Infant and Child Development, 10. p. 3-18

Pound, Ezra (1972) In a Station of the Metro, Imagist Poetry, ed. Peter Jones. London: Penguin Books, p. 95.

Those Melbourne artists are crazy!

Whenever I commit a murder, I often think of it as an artistic enterprise. Blood looks exactly like Deep Cadmium Red and it’s easy to get palette knives and carving knives confused. Whenever I’m burying a body in my back yard or weighing another one down with cinder blocks, I think that I’m ridding the world of undesirable details, to better achieve purity and balance in the overall composition of the world.

These thoughts came back to me the other day when I read a report of a study by Karen Hendricks of Melbourne University who examined 40 artists and a similar number of non-artists to test the links between personality disorders and creativity.

Apparently, while all creative people have a tendency to schizo-type personalities, she found distinct differences between the three groups. Well, ‘der’ Karen, I or one of the voices in my head could have told you that!

Apparently, writers are the craziest and the most neurotic. Painters, photographers and sculptors are the closest to ‘normal’, although they were more deviant than normal personalities. She obviously hasn’t met the man who painted my bathroom.

Apparently the report declines to say whether these results were the affected by the study having taken place in Melbourne. A not-unimportant detail, I would have thought.

One way she tested the groups was to give them problems to solve and examine whether the answers were conventional or divergent. Participants might have been shown a brick and asked to suggest possible uses for it. “The non-artists would say it could be used for building and things like that, while the artists were more likely to say it could be thrown through a window,” she said.

She did not say anything about weighing down bodies, but that might just be me sounding divergent again.