On the threshold between art and science: A dialogue. The artist as the medium and the beholder share.

Part I

The Artist-Scientist Dialogue

This is a brief premise on how an artist and a scientist met, resonated with each other’s ideas and begun their collaboration.

S.W. Few years ago I attended a psychoanalytic conference in New York where Inna delivered a speech on Erik Kandel’s notion of the Beholder’s share, referencing Ernst Gombrich’s research on what the viewer brings to the pictures in order to make sense of them and Alis Kriegl’s idea that art is incomplete without the perception and emotional involvement of the viewer.

Her words felt familiar and resonated with me, as in my art practice I explore the mental and physical point of view of the viewer and invite him/her to be an active part in the perception and experience of the image, so that their interaction makes me wonder whether the work would even exist devoid of the beholder’s presence.

One year later Inna enrolled in my SVA class Seeing is Thinking in NY, where we continued our conversations, and we have been learning from each other ever since.

Questions: Inna, one thing that came to my attention since we began our collaboration is how radically different are the ways in which an artist and a scientist look at Reality: the entity which I consider to be the source of our enquiry and inspiration. Our points of view, perspectives and means at times are very different, yet the aim of our research can point to the same direction: a quest for meanings and truths at a higher level.

I would like to suggest few key words that are central to my research: knowledge, meaning and complexity. Do you think that Art increases complexity and accesses multiplicity, whereas Science methodologically tends to reduce and narrow down the complexity, to better define the boundaries of its knowledge?

I.R. Great questions, Silvio! First, I would offer to explore what was said on this topic by experts from different educational and professional backgrounds. Let’s start with the following quotes:

There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists…

The artist is more likely to see what he/she paints, rather than paint what he/she sees. (Ernst Gombrich, art historian)

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. (Anaïs Nin, novelist and writer; H. M. Tomlinson, writer; Steven Covey, educator and businessman – said at different times, and referencing Talmudic tractate Berakhot)

[P]ainting is not complete until the viewer responds to it…  (Eric Kandel, neuroscientist)

In other words, all of the above points to the opinion that the viewer creates the image, because of his/her “beholder share,” and not the artist. Although our minds are the meaning-making machines, science is not about searching for meaning, but more about finding the building blocks of every process, and about presenting those building blocks as the data first, and not the interpretation (based on personal likings or opinions) first. As it pertains to visual art, vision is just “simple” information processing (through the visual pathways, which are the same in every member of human species – see the image below), and not the image transmission.

Image 1: Visual Pathways

In the meantime, each of us makes his/her own meaning of what we see/experience. E.g., looking at Picasso’s “Weeping Woman” (see below), some of us will “see” a woman at the time of her (personal) sorrow, but others will “see” weeping Spain, torn apart by Nazis and communists during Spanish Civil War…

Image 2: Weeping Woman, by P. Picasso (1937)

So, for the science researcher, the key words would be: information processing, decoding the visual information, reductionistic approach to art, beholder share, and neuroaesthetics.

As you’ve mentioned earlier, the “beholder’s share” (originally “beholder’s involvement”) concept was developed by art historian Alois Riegl, and his great disciples Ernst Gombrich and Ernst Kris.

They described the workings of the mind of the viewer (the beholder), including decoding the visual information, determining its meaning, understanding it, and interpreting it – depending on one’s prior life experiences, emotional memories, and idiosyncrasies. Nobel laureate Eric Kandel summarized brilliantly the modern understanding of the beholder share, with examples from neuroscience and art (of the contemporaries Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele) – in his book The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain. Kandel’s book represents an exciting psycho-historical endeavor. He remembers pre-war Vienna, when physicians were meeting with writers and painters in salons, and where the minds were cross-pollinated just because of “immersion” in the spirit and culture of pre-Nazi/pre-racist society. Kandel remembers an intellectually charged time when an anatomist gave lectures to artists, explaining that with “a drop of blood, a little bit of brain substance, you will be transported to a fairy-tale world.” All this had colored the mind’s eye of those who lived in that era that I call the era of cross-pollination and of healthy crossing of the boundaries (between various disciplines and ideas).

In general, every personal experience, every scientific discovery, and every artistic creation can be thought of as an expression of one’s beholder share. For ex., there is an opinion that Michelangelo (who was a great anatomist, besides being a brilliant artist) concealed some sophisticated neuroanatomic renderings of the brain structures within the image of God (see below) (Suk & Tamargo, 2010). So, despite that Michelangelo was a deeply religious man, his knowledge of human anatomy affected his beholder share to the point of putting brain on the equal grounds with God.

Image 3: Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” (1508-1512) and renderings of brain anatomy

S.W. As an artist, I am constantly drawn to explore further levels of enquiries of the mystery I am part of and surrounded by, for lack of better words. The deeper my life’s experiential journey goes, the more I’m aware of my extraordinary ignorance. In spite of being a visual artist (or may be exactly for this reason), the more I see, the more I know that I can only see so little, and that there’s so much more to be known and discovered. We are finite beings, and the time we are offered is so limited yet, I wonder, are we constantly alluding to a further frontier, an unattainable higher reach?

I.R. René Magritte comes to mind here, and his exhibition at MoMA a few years ago, “The Mystery of the Ordinary.” This exhibition showed that there is no much difference between “real” and “dreamt of” things, between fiction and truth, between “natural” and “artificial” phenomena, and between the “ordinary” and the “mystery.” But no one can say it better than Magritte did:

…If one looks at a thing with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer seeing the thing itself, but thinking of the question that has been raised. The mind sees in two different senses: (1) sees, as with the eyes; and (2) sees a question (no eyes).

…We are surrounded by curtains. We only perceive the world behind a curtain of semblance. At the same time, an object needs to be covered in order to be recognized at all.

S.W. Falling more specifically into your field of research in connection to Kandel’s, Gombrich’s and Kriegl’s, the idea that you often underline is that “The image is inherently ambiguous.” In this respect, the visual language that I’m more familiar with is Photography, whose specific characteristics are its umbilical cord with Reality and life-likeness of the image; paradoxically the use of this medium has led me to develop an ambiguous and often unclear vision, that allows me to access what normally cannot be seen directly: the allusions to Reality and its multiple levels of perception, otherwise “retinally” unattainable.

One sentence I often pronounce regarding the manifold nature of the image is: “It is not about the way things are, it is about how we see them” and later, as you also quoted, I discovered that the Talmud maintains that “We don’t see the way things are, we see them as we are”.

Can you expand the idea of ambiguity and illusion from you point of view and personal experience?

I.R. My response here will be short, as I’ve talked about it earlier, when answering your first question. The “ambiguity” of the image which you are mentioning here is not our colloquial ambiguity, but it is more about our different interpretations of the processed information. If there is no “supporting information” in our brain/mind to evaluate the visual information that comes from eyes/retina and visual pathways – we cannot “see” and appreciate the object in front of us. The old stories about “invisible ships” could illustrate this phenomenon. These stories tell us that the Aboriginal people of Australia, South America, and Cuba did not “see” (did not pay attention to) the 100-plus feet long ships of Captain Cook, Columbus, or Magellan – only because they had no prior experience with ships and what they can bring to their world. So, they did not react to them, which means they did not “see” the ships (aka they could not construct the image of ships).

S.W. In my understanding, Photography can only address the first and literal level of Reality: the very appearance of existing things. Yet what we ‘see’ is very complex and in many ways not knowable. From the literal and visible level of Reality we start our investigation along an exegetic process that can offer access to further levels of perception and interpretation, even if we may never reach the end of our quest.

Inna, what is it that a scientist ultimately searches, what constantly pushes you forward to look into the unknown: the not yet known?

I.R. Every scientist is different, and what he/she searches for – is not the “truth” about the “reality,” but rather the “basic data,” using the scientific method, which is the empirical method of acquiring knowledge. The scientific method involves very careful observation and scepticism about what is “seen”/ observed. The scepticism should (hopefully) prevent one of misjudging/misinterpreting the data. Here I would like to mention another book by Eric Kandel, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging Two Cultures. In this book, Kandel illustrates how reductionism, the distillation of larger scientific or aesthetic concepts into smaller, more tractable components, has been used by scientists and artists to pursue their respective truths. Kandel illustrates how this reductionistic approach is applied to the brain, and how it has been employed by modern artists who distill their subjective world into color, form, and light. Kandel describes the bottom-up sensory and top-down cognitive modulations of brain/mind functions, which help scientists to explore the complexities of human perception, and help us to perceive, appreciate, and understand great works of art.

S.W. I often wonder: Is there a way to know Who We Are through What We See and were does the image stand in the relationship between the visible external world and our light-less internal world? Can we only see what we are prepared to think, to make sense of? Ultimately: why do we see so little? Can you comment on this possibly unanswerable question?

I.R. This is essentially an “unanswerable” question, Silvio, but I hope that my previous answers had incorporated some explanation to it. Another point: it is not really the visible external world versus our light-less internal world we are discussing here, as one can become visually blind, but “see” more than those with intact eyes and intact visual pathways. The story of the “blind architect” Chris Downey could serve as illustration. Downey became unstoppable in his architectural pursuits after becoming legally blind, and he explained this phenomenon in his 2012 TED Talk “New Vision in Architecture,” telling us that architecture/architectural design is not just a visual, but a multi-sensory experience that also involves sounds and touch, feeling of the air that get warmed up by sun rays (through the window design) and moving through/being in the spaces. Downey (who admittedly was “obsessed” with vision before he became blind) realized that our ability to quickly get all needed information through vision makes us detached from other senses, and we loose on the whole experience of being in spaces.

Research related to our mind “seeing” / constructing images even better while not being able to use typical visual sensory information is extensive (Cattaneo et al., 2008; Thinus-Blanc & Gaunet, 1997). Chris Downey just took this phenomenon to a different level.

S.W. From my point of view images result from the connection of two worlds: the visible and manifold external world and our inner one. These separate worlds are very close, yet enormously distant and their connection is what I’m most interested to explore.

I see the Image as a Threshold that connects and separates inside and outside, present and past, here and elsewhere, so that one would not exist without the other one. The notion of the Threshold has revealed to be, in many different forms, the focal point of my artistic practice, as much as I see the photograph as the special plane of coincidence that dramatically stands between what is visible and what is not visible.

I’m aware that scientists look at the Threshold from a different perspective and use it in their researches from a less symbolic and more operational standpoint. Would you like to expand this idea through your experience?

I.R. Well, your understanding of a threshold is more philosophical and symbolic, as it comes from your life and professional experience of being a visual artist. But what is a threshold? As per Macmillan Dictionary, it is “a limit at which an arrangement changes; …a level at which something happens…” Since my professional experience is of a clinical neurologist first, then – of a clinical researcher, then – of a psychoanalyst/ neuropsychoanalyst, for me, all the visual information is “just” information that is channelled through the very material visual pathways, some of which cross, uncross, get relayed in hubs of different levels of processing, and delivered to the primary visual cortex, which does not hold the image per se, but records the colors, shapes, and contrasts. The image is constructed by the brain/mind dyad only after (although quick, but extensive) “consultations” with our associative visual centers, as well as the speech areas (as labelling station); hippocampus (as memory station), limbic system (as feeling station), frontal loves, insula and other areas (of decision and meaning making), etc. – through the workings of so called connectomes, the special maps of brain connections (see below) (Jerath et al, 2015; Leming et al., 2019; Osmanlıoğlu et al., 2019).

Image 4: Scanning the Connectome

So, “thresholds” for me are the mind constructs, which have some meaning attached to them – and for each of us, that meaning is different.

To support my “materialistic” point on the topic of the thresholds and the one of the image, I could add here that visualization during mental imagery and meditation practice, as well as during the dreaming states, happen without actual activation of visual pathways by light (without visual experience), but we still are able to elicit the images and to appreciate the thresholds then. And, opposite happens in cortical blindness syndromes, when the eyes/ retina and visual pathways are intact, but the analyser/synthesizer of the visual information is not functioning (because of the stroke or the tumor pressing, or any surgery that disrupts the gentle architecture of the primary and associative cortical visual areas). In addition, some of those patients with cortical blindness deny having any visual deficit (Anton-Babinski syndrome), and they often have visual confabulations to support “existence” of their sight.

In general, clinicians learn about the norms from examining “pathology,” which is something functioning unusual or something lacking “normal” characteristics. And, because our visual life is pervasive, and it feels “normal” to have visual imagery, on demand/voluntary and involuntary (during sleep) – we can learn a lot from cases that deviate from this norm (Dutton & Bax, 2010; Roman-Lantzy, 2007). For ex., condition called aphantasia (which can be congenital too!) leaves people unable to voluntary visualize any image (of a relative, a rising sun, a family dog, etc.), while they have no problems with dreaming and visualizing. As one of the aphantasiacs, ex-Pixar chief Ed Catmull, said, “My mind’s eye is blind.”

Part II

Seeing Photography as a Threshold

I would like to introduce the following 3 series of works that epitomize my idea of Photography as a Threshold, and the beholder’s role as an active participant in the experience of these ambiguous phenomenological objects.

01) Mirror Thresholds
2009-2018
cm 125×84; cm 200×125
Layered UV cured ink-jet prints on reflective aluminium

In these works the reflected image appears where a traditional photograph would normally be white. This absence of information, or in a way its excess, simultaneously represents what lies inside and outside the work: precisely where the surface is imageless, it embraces the phenomenological world as much as the inner one of the image.

Mirror Thresholds expand the idea of the capture from where they were taken to the place where they are seen. Their exposures span from the time of the shot to the present when viewed, embodying the fundamental hic et nunc of the beholder: his/her sight, experience and time.

I’m shifting attention away from the referent, reduced to a distant background noise of retinal vision, towards the actual Subject, he/she who questions the actuality of the image, activating it at every new glance.

The image presents and represents, developing an active relationship where the Subject, the observer who glimpses himself in the act of looking, is directly part of the visible and its interpretation. Mirror Thresholds are about the Who and not only the what, and the present time-place of viewing reveals the meaning of the gaze.

02) Shivà
2014
One series in 10 parts.
cm 50×34 each. Famed cm 54x38x8 each.
UV cured ink-jet prints on reflective aluminium, black velvet cloth.

These works hang on walls covered by black velvet cloth. They depict traces of the passage of time: imprints left on a black leather couch where museum visitors sit and contemplate art works.

Like for ancient daguerreotypes that need to be preserved in darkness by the action of light and can be best seen by one person at a time, the gaze of the beholder is partially reflected while these works are viewed. Seeking a direct and participatory relationship with the observer, they reveal their reflective image from multiple points of view when uncovered.

The idea of this series is metaphorically related to the Jewish tradition to cover pictures and mirrors during the mourning period that follows a close relative’s death, and also the Tibetan tradition of uncovering images during the time of pray.

These works are symbolic places of query, reflection and identity: thresholds of perception to investigate the ambiguous and secretive nature of the images. Relating to different times and places inside and outside the picture, they address the Subject’s present time of experience: the choice of being in their presence grants them meaning.

3) Meditations
2009-2013
cm 90x90x25 cm and 100x100x25cm
Black photograph face mounted to plexiglas, back mounted to a back-lighting light box.

A photographic paper that has been exposed to an exaggerated number of negatives no longer retains the information of the individual pictures, so that their excessive exposure blackens the photo-sensitive surface, making the images retinally invisible.

This image of all the images reflects the observer in the moment he stands in front of it. The work is backlit, producing light in the opposite direction from the one of observation, towards the wall behind the black mirror: it is this aura to reveal the presence of the viewer.

Each Meditation is a metaphor for our overexposure to the images of the world and their constant, bulimic consumption. What is left nowadays to be photographed, still untouched by the presence of an already existing image?

Meditation is a blind gaze and a chance to see, a light negated and revealed, the absence from which a presence is born. These abstract, atemporal, achromatic black-mirrored photographs are meditations on Photography, the Subject and Reality at the same time. The image emerges from the ashes of the visible, from the end of any possible photographic representation.