The vast majority of the flood of books about what Eric Kandel calls “a new science of mind” (a science which he defines as the confluence of brain science and cognitive psychology) are based on the writers’ previously held positions in debates that are at least a century old, and in some cases two or three or four centuries old. (Heck, some of the positions date back to the pre-Socratics of very ancient Greece.)

This is what we would expect, of course, and it’s why it’s important to keep the influence of culture in mind when we are talking about mind in biological terms. But the book writers’ opinions also reflect their underlying emotional dispositions, especially when they are proudly declaring their rationality.

One way or another, when we talk about such matters, “The story is trying to tell the story,” as Beth Lilly’s photograph has it near the conclusion (or is it?) of “From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again.” We are part of the story, even when the story is about such seemingly objective and non-human matters as cosmology, chemical evolution, or the behavior of the world’s waters from the Antarctic ice shelf’s icebergs to the Japanese tsunami to the Pennsylvania aquifer (which is—or is not?—being shaken by hydrofracking).

Fortunately, we can change our minds (or something can change our minds—let’s not leave the hard-core determinists out of the debate), whether or not we can change our personality. Our minds actually modify the structure of our brains, to some degree, as our culture and our personal experience reshape the paths and quantity of neurons. (See: “neuroplasticity,” which I grossly oversimplify almost to the point of misrepresentation.)

“From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again” is my own effort at mind-changing, my own mind most of all.

I encountered some useful cultural and cognitive collisions on the first day of Barbara Maria Stafford’s Neuro Humanities Entanglement Conference back in the spring at Georgia Tech, and have encountered such collisions again (courtesy of Barbara Kaye’s gift of the book) in the past two weeks since the show opened: in Nobel-laureate neurologist Eric R. Kandel’s remarkable synthesis of science and art history, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and the Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present. (The proliferation of long, descriptive subtitles is a side effect of how we first encounter books these days in new media and in bookstores, but that’s another story.)

I would say more right now about both the conference and the book, but I’m trying to move slowly towards the art of someday writing the haiku we call tweets…as the long-ago politician Hubert Humphrey said once when asked to deliver a twenty-minute speech, “The last time I spoke for twenty minutes is when I said hello to my mother.”

By the way, would the great aphorists from Martial to Oscar Wilde have loved Twitter, or what? It isn’t just for haiku poets. As Ezra Pound wrote, “Dichten=condensare.”

still another note by Jerry Cullum on “From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again”

I have always been a big fan of wall texts, even though I critiqued them in one of my early conceptual-art pieces for Lisa Tuttle’s “Oh, Those Four White Walls” show. (“Before You Proceed Further, Please Read This” was a wall text exploring the pitfalls of and preconceptions behind wall texts.) In fact, I have often told artists that if viewers need to be put in a particular frame of mind by knowing some information about the art, that information had better be someplace where they can’t miss it, like on the wall.

There wasn’t time or budget to do that with “From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again,” so the show tries to provoke viewers into wanting to find out why they feel what they feel about it, regardless of whether they read the curator’s statement before looking at the art.

I tried to make viewers react to the show by wanting to go back through it again, or at least explore parts of it more than once. (All the juxtapositions are meant to elicit this reaction.) Some of the show’s visual metaphors and interconnections are too condensed to emerge into consciousness on first viewing, so there was a practical as well as conceptual reason for sending smartphone-wielding viewers in a complete circle by incorporating QR codes—Henry Detweiler’s concept and artwork, but my choice of QR codes—that lead to the webpage photographs on which Karley Sullivan’s drawings of moons of the solar system were based. (There was also the idea that some viewers still don’t carry smartphones, or wouldn’t perceive the framed artworks as real QR codes.)

On the purely conceptual level, this is an extremely abbreviated way of introducing the idea that our information technology interacts with our inbuilt mental habits to influence the way we respond to the world. Marcia Vaitsman’s image immediately adjacent to Henry Detweiler’s QR codes conveys the same notion, but it conveys it only if viewers know that it’s a picture of the Japanese tsunami constructed by piecing together successive video images. There is nothing self-evident about Vaitsman’s piece, any more than there is anything self-evident about Seana Reilly’s pieces incorporating information about fracking and, coincidentally, about the dynamics of tsunamis. (I knew Reilly’s works were very beautiful and they looked conceptually provocative, but I had no idea what the scientific allusions of the titles and internal elements of the pieces were until Reilly told me.)

“From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again” is more like a systematic allusion to a complex set of ideas than an exploration of them. Each individual wall of the show is an independent visual argument that is meant to intrigue and entice rather than demonstrate and explain. As I have said about conceptual art, if you don’t like looking at it in the first place, you won’t want to stop long enough to discover what it’s all about.

But I still wonder whether I should have stuck a couple of words on the wall to get viewers in the mood.

Maybe a line at the beginning saying “This is not an exhibition about cosmology.”  Then a line on the opposite wall saying “This is not an exhibition about neurology.” Then maybe in the next gallery, “This room is not about the politics and cultural meaning of water.” Then maybe by Beth Lilly’s photo, “And this is not an exhibition about exhibitions, either.”

I thought of a few more, but they would just be random punch lines without purpose.  Though one that says “Please notice which walls don’t have any wall text” might be to the point.

Whitespace artist, Tommy Taylor, guest blogs about his recent artist-in-residency experience at Artestudio Ginestrelle, which offers a residency program to literary, visual and performing artists worldwide and is located outside the beautiful town of Assisi in Italy.

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It feels like the quiet after the storm today at whitespace. The four Brazilian artists of “From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again” returned home last night after a very successful opening. However the show is still up and definitely a must-see exhibition.

Sissi Fonseca performing "Placebo" (photograph by Julie Sharpe)

Just last Friday, hundreds of visitors gathered for the opening reception of “From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again,” curated by Dr. Jerry Cullum and featuring Continue reading →

On June 30, 2012, Theresa Cole gave an artist talk at whitespace discussing her show titled Between Origin and Present. By discussing the origins of her own artistic point of view, describing her affinity for pattern and texture, and explaining the sources of her patterns in the show, Cole guided the audience through her series of prints, as well as the installation piece, Curling In On Itself. Cole’s attraction to pattern led her to India, where she was able to view a different system of patterns and imagery than the ones that provide the rhetoric of her own life. The direct sources of these Indian patterns included stone carvings and sari fabric patterns. Cole documented these found patterns, as well as images of indigenous flora and fauna, in photographs, and then by breaking down the patterns into basic curves and lines, the artist intended to contemporize the ancient and natural forms. The resulting series of printed works focuses on the repetition, balance, and order that systems of patterns provide.

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Dr. Jerry Cullum says of these two quotations, “These quotations may shed light on aspects of the exhibition. Does one quotation seem to correct the opinions of other, or do the two agree in substance? If you read them in reverse order, does one of them seem less convincing than it did before, or are they still the same?” Continue reading →

Reading List? We Don’t Need No Stinking Reading List is another curatorial note by art critic, Dr. Jerry Cullum, regarding From Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again, a show that he will be curating at whitespace featuring works by 22 artists including four artists from Sao Paulo, Brazil who will be contributing site-specific work. Hugo Fortes will present a video installation in whitespec project space. The piece titled “Evolution in Three Lessons,” include the lessons from the ravens at the Tower of London to the fauna and native inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego encountered by Darwin. Rachel Rosalen and Rafael Marchetti are constructing a device that they describe as follows: “A new living-kind of species mixing molecular properties and electronic prostheses simulates a new hybridization between water living systems and electric living systems. Having an electric sensorially capacity, Hydrophiletic-Z can absolve the gravity while not losing its own plasticity.” Sissi Fonseca will appear in a one-time-only live performance at 9 pm on Friday, July 6. “Placebo” will involve amulets, medicinal capsules, and buckets of water. All four artists will present at the opening reception on July 6 from 7-10 pm. Continue reading →