Published 27/08/09

Walking In My Mind

Hayward Gallery, London
23 June–6 September 2009

by JAMES WILKES

In 1959, the physicist C.P. Snow delivered a famous Rede lecture in which he denounced the gulf separating the “two cultures” of the sciences and the humanities. In the intervening years, this intellectual gulf has had a various fate, with bridges built and bridges burnt.

In the 1990s, Snow’s cold war mentality gave way to a hot war in the shape of the so-called ‘Science Wars’, as postmodernists and realists took up swords in polemical books and hoaxed articles, fighting it out over the nature of reality and the contested objectivity of the scientific method.

Today, however, rapprochement is in the air. Earlier this year, a three-day conference in London held jointly at the Science Museum, Birkeck College and Tate Modern brought together a range of scholars and intellectuals from both sides of the fence to discuss the situation¹. The absence of rancour and the corresponding flourishing of interesting interdisciplinary initiatives was heartening, suggesting that conflicting methodologies and ways of seeing can provide stimulating, rather than belligerent, challenges.

Exhibitions such as Walking In My Mind, however, are a reminder that the happy marriage of art and science is still a long way off. As a one-time student of cognitive science, I was expecting more from the “expedition into the mysterious mental processes of creativity” that the exhibition leaflet promised, and hoping for some engagement at least with contemporary scientific understandings of mental life.

Perhaps that word “mysterious” should have been a warning. Creativity, like a whole host of things that people do, may be awe-inspiringly complex and poorly understood. It is not, however, any more intrinsically mysterious than the ability to remember what you had for breakfast, or indeed the ability to digest that breakfast. What’s more, the most brilliantly creative thoughts and actions are often perfectly lucid, as the best works in this exhibition show. Take, for example, one of Bo Christian Larsson’s sculptures: a pair of old boots filled with gleaming kitchen knives, blades upwards, placed on a spreading pile of sugar. A simple conjunction of three contrasting textures, of three objects with deep cultural, emotional and experiential significance. It says little about Larsson’s creative mental process, but it performs a poetic, metaphorical gesture with delightful economy.

Within the ten large, immersive installations of which this show consists, there are a good number of such moments of delight, if the works are taken on their own merits. Where this exhibition fails is in providing any connection to the parallel understandings of the mind that have emerged from the biological sciences in the past hundred years. The closest approximation would be a second-hand Freudianism, as given material form by Jason Rhoades’s The Creation Myth, with its literal instantiation of three levels of consciousness and its pornographic imagery. Even when a more anatomical approach to the brain is apparently suggested, as in Thomas Hirschhorn’s Cavemanman, interpreting the four chambers of this installation as four lobes of the brain seems to be a shoe-horning of the work’s meaning into the curatorial concept.

Another curatorial quirk of this show is the prominence given to immersive environments. Large-scale, immersive works in fact suit the Hayward’s severe gallery spaces very well, as last summer’s Psycho Buildings exhibition demonstrated, and this fact alone is justification enough for their commissioning and installation. But to suggest that the experience of these “mindscapes” is somehow closer to the reality of mental life than the conventional, frontal experience of wall-mounted artwork is a misconception.

All artworks are experienced psychologically and perceptually, whether one walks within them or stands in front of them; all are experienced in time, by an embodied subject. To suggest otherwise perpetuates a dualism founded on an image of the conscious self as a ghost wandering around the interior of a machine, to adapt Gilbert Ryle’s famous phrase.

The emphasis placed on walking through the artwork gropes towards the point, well made by the phenomenologists, that each individual psychological reality is subjective, and resists the objectivity that science would bring to its study. But rather than thinking about thought as an internal landscape that has to be made concrete, a far more interesting proposition is to imagine thought as already exteriorised, as something that inheres in language or objects and the relations between them rather than – or as well as – in the grey matter between our ears.

From this perspective, making art about one’s mind comes to seem like a tautological process, as all artworks operate within this field anyway, as part of the vast extended body of things through which and with which we think. What then becomes crucial in tying the various momentary experiences of consciousness together are the stories we make of these things, and the narratives with which we bind them into our lives. Any purely visual representation of mental life, no matter how immersive, risks eliding this vital dimension, most obviously achieved by language, whereby subjects represent thought to themselves.

Reference
1. This conference, Art and Science Now, was organised by the London Consortium: http://www.londonconsortium.com/2008/12/25/art-and-science-now-the-two-cultures-in-question/