How delightful to be Andrew Bryant’s choice blog! What a pity that it coincides with my website appearing to have a complete neurotic breakdown and disappear from view all together…… lets hope by Monday morning my designers can restore it to full health!
Andrew has brought up a couple of really interesting questions and in my eagerness I will think them through now (in a rudimental way) and maybe return to them in more detail later.
To Andrew’s flagging of the polarity between ‘outside’ and ‘inside,’ I would also add ‘pubic’ and ‘private’ as related concepts. Both sets of polarities refer to a tension between what is projected outwards and is taken by society as useful, acceptable and of inherent value and that which is marginalised or deemed insignificant. The lovely, wondrous Jeanette Winterson speaks at length not only about the intimate healing power of art, but also about it’s vital role in healing and sustaining an individual’s inner life.
“If you believe, as I do, that life has an inside as well as an outside, you will accept that the inner life needs nourishment too. If the inner life is not supported and sustained, then there is nothing between us and the daily repetition of what Wordsworth called ‘getting and spending.’” http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/journalism_…
That curating should act as a devise for augmenting the inner life and bringing it’s discourses toward a more public forum is not something I had previously considered (obvious as it may seem when I think about it now). Curating equals making public but also acts as a tool of validation for the artists who are ‘curated’. By curating around the topic of mental illness I offer to augment it’s discourse into the realms of public recognition and acceptance.
Before I get far to excited about this….most of the artists who I am thinking of inviting for the show are all established in some way and are in the process of successfully pursuing artistic careers. Often (as in the case of Kim Noble or Hans Bernhard) they find themselves interrupted by mental illness midway through a successful career where they already have permission to make their inner life public (esp Kim Noble!). It seems then, that there is an ethical question to be considered around which artists the curator validates toward a public forum and those that she ignores and therefore permits ongoing marginalistation. The mentally ill are a marginalised underclass who often collect on the edges of society and to glamorise the issue by only selecting established artists who already have a voice might be conceived as misrepresenting the core issues around mental health. I imagine that this might be the kind of argument that Andrew is moving toward when he says
“art never has the good or bad fortune to be tested in the world.”
I’ve been wrestling a little with the question of the body and interactivity over the past few days. It seems that the classic case of interactivity in art practice using new technology encourages the viewer outside of their body to achieve some kind of merging with a group of other participants or the external depiction of their body and it’s function. Classic examples could be something like Rafael Lozano Hemmer’s piece for the 2007 Venice Biennale http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/frequency_and_volume….. Although this piece draws the viewer’s attention toward their body by its depiction in shadow and frequency, I would argue that this experience is ultimately externalising and deals in a superficial surface level interactivity. I think what I like about George Khut’s Thinking Through the Body project is that it uses methods of body therapy to draw the viewer/user toward their own internal experience, heightening their awareness of their own body and it’s functions. This is still an experience of ‘interacting’ with the art work, but is also a way of becoming more body aware, more internalised and more centered from a different perspective.
Sid Volter sent me a link to this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej9nchHoZkU&feature… piece by Laura Colmenares Guerra. It sparked an interesting conversation where I argued that I felt the piece focused on augmenting the viewer to a more externalised state where they are engaged in interpreting information from outside of the body, rather than focusing on drawing the viewer inward toward their own physical experience. Sid came back with a pretty intelligent argument about how in fact the piece potentially does both. I’m hoping he won’t mind me quoting him:
“The Guerra video was biofeedback as it was supposed to make you more aware of your breathing and rhythm, and with the group make some kind of group symbiosis. Was it worth the feeling of having a mask / goggles strapped onto you? How effective it was I don’t know.
I suppose the idea of biofeedback, like the thinking-body group, is to use what is already there and work with it – rather than setting-upon things and demanding things & in false situations like technology tends to do – that’s when the separation happens.”
I think this is a really interesting point. The biorhythm of the viewer’s body (breathing) being used both to make the viewer more aware of their own body and to also integrate them with a group. I’d argue that the integration and ‘symbiosis’ that the piece seeks to encourage/demand is actually something quite unachievable and goes against conditioned social behavior norms for groups of strangers positioned together in a darkened room (sounds a bit cynical doesn’t it??). However I do think that the breath could be key as a means of centering and internalizing the bodily experience and I say this more from the position of someone who practices regular yoga than as a spectator for interactive art!!
I’m keen to draw out some of this thinking for the conference at the Bluecoat in December. At the moment I have an idea for a programming strand looking at “New Body Therapies” which I think as a title in itself has it’s own power in the context of a conference on aging!! Lets see……
There is an interesting survey doing the rounds at the moment http://ki.se/ki/jsp/polopoly.jsp?a=100727&d=2637&l… which links schizophrenia and creativity by arguing that both groups have ‘lower than expected density’ of their D2 receptors. In simple terms this means that these groups are less apt at filtering the most useful information from the least useful, leading them to make unconventional associations. Some people (like neurologist Tim Crow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Crow) think that schizophrenia is the result of physical abnormalities in the brain. Others (like Richard Bentall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bentall) think it is merely at the extreme end of a spectrum of behavioral traits that some individuals develop to cope with or withdraw from difficult and threatening circumstances. Some people also think its both…. and lets face it this is a mighty complex issue and unlikely to be answered by a simple psycological/ biological polarity. In this survey, Professor Fredrik Ullen appears to support the first theory, that levels of psychosis or creativity displayed originate from chemical rather than developmental processes.
I have the distinct feeling that there might be a multitude of different ways of proving this theory, both psychological and biological. I had somehow always thought that developmentally a child evolves a creative brain in order to problem solve or imagine alternative realities where the world was better, kinder or easier than the real world that they lived in. For example a child who was lonely might conjure a vivid imaginary friend in order to alleviate loneliness, thus developing the power for creative thinking that carries through into adulthood. I don’t think that it needs a tortured childhood to develop this capacity, more that creative thinking might be a strategy developed by the child to find ways of coping with the complicated world. Psychologists like Richard Bentall have argued that psychosis is an extreme from of a coping strategy or a way of dealing imaginatively with extreme hurts and disappointments in childhood. For example a child with an extreme persecutory farther may later in life develop a delusion where he is persecuted by imaginary voices.
What I think I am trying to say is that it seems a little simplistic to imagine that the creativity/mental health problem might be explained simply by the physical composition of the brain. There must be a combination of physical, circumstantial and psychological factors that impact on the development of creativity, no?
In other news….. here is my things to do lst for this week…….
1 – read & write to Gordana Novakovich
2- Check out all artists on Kim Noble’s list of artist suggestions
3 – look up Veronica’s suggestion Frank Wildman book on Feldenkrais
4- Write back to George and Maggie
5 – Somya’s suggestions?
6- John’s suggestions Sean Docherty and Nick Totton
7- Linda Hartley “Wisdom of the Boday Moving”
8- Read up on Welcome Collection and funding opportunities
9- contact New Media Curtating list for artist ideas
Still very much in research mode. Loads of really nice and interesting conversations happening with different artists…… I could spend entire days writing and hitting ideas back and forth…
Here is an extract of an email that I wrote to Hans from Ubermorgen this morning in reference to his work Psych|OS that he made after he experienced a 6 month manic breakdown:
“Its interesting that the Psych|OS work is based on real experience. I am kind of interested that all of the artists in the show might have somehow experienced a kind of breakdown and regurgitated it artistically. Although this wont be a definite selection criteria, its somehow valuable in giving the show a sense of authority on it’s own subject matter, if you see what I mean….?
Yes I agree with you about the impacts of technology on mental health. For me its more about what technology takes away: contactfulness, the body, core identity (as opposed to shifting and multiple identities) than its status as a mentally ill thing in itself. But I do see where you draw your metaphor between neural networks and online networks and am going to turn this over in my head over the next few days. If you have any ideas for more reading that I could do about this then please let me know. I am thinking more about writers than examples of artworks.
There are also lots of interesting examples (more none art) of therapists and scientists who are using the internet therapeutically to help assist with mental health issues. For example therapists are now using therapy via email to help with social anxiety. Also immersive virtual reality environments are being used to distract patients from physical pain during treatment for excessive physical burns. For me the impact is less about the technology itself and more in how you use it.”
I fully intend to write more here at some point about therapists who are using internet and virtual technology in their work. Although this is not directly relevant to the show it might be useful for the programming that I intend to propose to Bisakha, somehow…..
In other news, Sid Volter sent me a link to a really interesting artist called Gordana Novakovich who keeps a blog on the topic of Neuroplastic Arts. http://www.neuroplasticarts.org/ I need to make some serious time to look at this rather dense blog and website as I think it’s really interesting stuff that might tie in with the Thinking Through the Body project.
So much to think about……
A very beautiful train of thought about care by George Khut….
http://thinkingthroughthebody.net/2009/06/care/
