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| ART AS PSYCHOLOGY Artis Svece The allure of physiognomy | |
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When I was at school, our textbook on the history of the USSR had a portrait of a Russian aristocrat, with a caption that went something like this: no matter how this landowner might strive at pretence and posturing, the artist has succeeded in revealing his real face, i.e., look at the features - cruelty and greed is clearly written in them. Unfortunately, I no longer have the book, so I can't be sure what painting was being referred to. Most probably, it was the portrait of Prokofy Demidov by 18th century Russian painter Dmitry Levitsky. A well-known painting from the Tretyakov Gallery. But in fact, it doesn't matter what the particular work was, since in the Soviet era art historians credited many "progressive" artists with the ability to unmask the true nature of aristocrats and the rich. And in most cases these were "parade portraits" commissioned by members of the élite for public relations purposes, so that the artist appeared as something of a cunning underground figure, unmasking class enemies right under their noses. "All shades of cynicism, hypocrisy and lust for power are concentrated in the slightly puffed face of this court lady, which in the first instance may seem even somewhat sleepy," is the note to a portrait by the same artist of Protasova, a favourite of Catherine II.1 "In portraits of cultural figures and ordinary people, the artist has revealed their richness of spirit and beauty. (..) On the other hand, portraits of courtiers and nobles show an increasingly critical attitude. Goya revealed the shallowness of these titled personages, seen very clearly in his group portrait "The Family of Charles IV"."2
The portrait illustrated in the school textbook has remained in my mind because I spent a long time studying the face in the painting and remained unconvinced that I really could perceive that which was asserted with such conviction by the author. This does not mean that I doubted his judgement. Rather, it gave me a feeling of inadequacy, since (and this is so even today) I cannot see in a work of art that which is obvious to the experts. Neither did the person in the picture appear to be an incarnation of goodness. It was simply that his features seemed ambivalent, and it was not clear exactly in what way the artist had revealed his corrupt character. The idea that the form of the head, the height of the forehead and the facial features are indications of human intellectual capacity and consciousness is so ancient that its origins are untraceable. In the Western world, the earliest text on this subject is regarded as being "Physiognomy", traditionally attributed to Aristotle.3 The author asserts that there is a similarity between the appearance of people and certain animals, and that there are also corresponding analogies in their psychic characteristics. Physiognomy flourished particularly in the 19th century, while in the 20th century the attitude to it, at least among scientists, has changed radically. This is so in the first place because the success of physiognomy in predicting human behaviour turned out to be quite limited. Thus, no agreement could be achieved on the bodily expressions of a "criminal mind". Secondly, physiognomy had long been associated with attempts to arrange people hierarchically, which many in the 20th century have regarded as a racist or prejudiced practice. For example, the founder of modern racism Joseph Arthur Gobineau described in "An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races" the anatomical and physiological differences between people of the black, yellow and white races, while the doctor John Langdon Down, describing the well-known syndrome, perceived in his patients a resemblance to Orientals, so Down's syndrome was still quite recently known as "mongolism", which, of course, was no compliment to the Mongolians.4 Artists often have the wish to visually represent character and mental experiences. And often they make use of the same approaches that we use on an everyday basis when we strive to perceive the state of consciousness of another person. Namely, they identify these through anatomical properties, facial expressions and behaviour. This is seen most clearly in caricatures.5 In order to characterise a situation, a caricaturist utilises the appearance of the body and facial expressions as a sign with a certain meaning, which we can pick up if we know the code the artist is using. However, there is a great difference between the connection between the sign and its meaning, and a causal relationship between the state of mind and the body. Thus, we rarely err in the first case, but commonly in the second. We are easily deceived even by a person who has never attended a drama course. We project our prejudices onto other people's skin or body. We fail to identify among our contemporaries geniuses, friends or serial killers ("He was such a quiet and polite person"). A classic example of such a mistaken causal interpretation is the picture of the chimpanzee Ham that appeared in the press after his space flight in 1961. Ham's face had a broad, human smile, which was interpreted accordingly, and animal behaviour experts were the only ones to object, pointing out that such an expression in chimpanzees indicates fear.6 It is clear that attempts to understand human nature by observing people's physical appearance are not absurd, but it is equally clear that they may be mistaken. The deficiencies of physiognomy are not specific to art, and a mistranslation of facial expression can occur in any situation. Psychologists, for example, have found that our previous knowledge determines what we see in another person's expression. I was once surprised at a caption under a picture in another history book, which read as follows: "Ivan the Terrible. This historic engraving shows that the ruler's nickname was most apposite."7 In the first place, there was no indication of particular "terribleness" - it was just a bearded man. But there was the subtle difference that the ruler depicted in the engraving is usually identified as Ivan III, by no means the same as Ivan IV the Terrible.8 We may be quite confident that the author's mistake affected his interpretation of the picture. Although it is possible in visual art to depict Cruelty, Gentleness or, say, Anger, art as psychology is hopeless, at least if considered as a form of physiognomy. The question is whether the interpreter of a work of art stays at the level of the sign and the code or else attempts to interpret the work as evidence of a causal relationship. In the first case, the interpretation would most likely also involve the question of the artist's intention. Namely, did the artist consciously employ a physiognomic code, for example, narrow eyes as an indication of suspiciousness or cunning, or a low forehead as a sign of imbecility. The more realistic or photographic the portrait, the less secure seem the assertions by interpreters that they detect cunning, arrogance or goodness. This is because the signs are not demonstratively present, and also because realism frequently requires (often quite unwittingly) a shift to the interpretation of a causal relationship and the wish to perceive the person depicted in the painting or sculpture. There are very common attempts to perceive the soul of emperors, businessmen or writers in their portraits, and perhaps there is some basis for seeking it in those crooked mirrors‑- the eyes, the face and the lips. But in my view, as soon as a work of art is interpreted as evidence of a causal relationship between the life of the mind and the body, we can only reach one conclusion: another person is always a mystery to us. Private consciousness The cause of this mystery is that consciousness is not perceptible from outside, so philosophers tend to say that consciousness is inaccessible. This, in turn, creates a host of fundamental problems in psychology and in the philosophy of mind. We can look at a person and see the shape of their skull, their facial expression and their gestures, but the feelings or thoughts themselves are apparently not observable. We may listen to their words, but we cannot test whether the words accurately describe their states of mind. If consciousness is accessible only to one person and observable only through introspection, then how can we have any reliable knowledge of it? The problem becomes more unusual because, in spite of the inaccessibility of another's consciousness, it appears that people can understand one another, or "read one another's mind". How do they manage it? One of the traditional explanations for this power of comprehension is the assertion that people draw their conclusions on the basis of analogy: if I'm sad, then the corners of my mouth will droop, and if another person has twisted their mouth in the same manner as I do when I'm sad, then he or she must be sad too. Or: how would I act if I were a criminal - which heir to the fortune would I attack next? The defenders of physiognomy also follow a similar argument: Pierre has a low forehead and he is cruel, and so if Michel too has a low forehead, he too must be cruel. Those who do not believe that we draw such conclusions every time we contemplate another person's feelings or mood, tend to invoke empathy or an intuitive ability to understand another person, which could be congenital. Unfortunately, none of these approaches gives us security in the correctness of our interpretation. Empathy and intuition are useful tools for finding our way in ordinary life, but misunderstandings and mistakes are sufficiently common for us not to be able to rely wholeheartedly on these abilities. A conclusion based on analogy is not a deductive conclusion, and there is no guarantee that the conclusion is correct. When I'm in a bad mood, I listen to GabberTechno; those people are listening to GabberTechno, so they must be in a bad mood too - this example seems to reveal the problem with conclusions drawn by analogy. It may be that these particular people are all depressive, but there's no guarantee. Possibly, the demand for security and the relinquishment of the principles of folk psychology can hinder communication ("He's smiling, but does it really mean he's happy, or is he simply afraid"), however such an approach frees one from naïvety and permits detection of the aspect of instability, insecurity and mystery present in any contact with the Other, who in the end can always turn out to be the Alien Other. In certain cases, this isolation from another's consciousness is manifested with particular force. Thomas Nagel has given us an example from the philosophy of mind in his paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?": "[We cannot understand or even imagine the states of consciousness of a bat.] It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task."9 Nagel concludes in his paper that contemporary science is unable to describe subjective states of consciousness in a way that is universally comprehensible and approach the life of mind of a bat, for example. He urges a search for such approaches, but does not say how one could go about it. It is clear in any case that approaching another's consciousness, its privacy, requires a new kind of thinking and new means of expression, which would differ from the paradigmatic understanding of contemporary science regarding legitimate forms of describing experience. Philosophers have attempted to reduce consciousness to bodily states or behaviour, and have queried the inaccessibility of states of consciousness, and the existence of consciousness itself, but at present there are many indications that there are only two possibilities: either we have to be content with the idea of another person's consciousness as a mystery, coming to view consciousness as such as a mystery, or else we have to seek new ways of thinking about consciousness. To represent that which cannot be represented At least since the age of Modernism, the art world has been regarded as one of the first and foremost social spheres for the search after new ways of thinking. Although I sometimes get the feeling that art may be overrated in this regard, there is no doubt that it could be an alternative to the way that science or philosophy discuss consciousness. How may we think differently? How may we think differently about others' consciousness, about the private life of mind? For me personally, several works of art have seemed stimulating, although they act more to show up points of tension in our understanding of consciousness, rather than to indicate alternatives. One such work is Bill Viola's video "I do Not Know what It Is I am Like", a line from the Rigveda open to various interpretations. Although the reference is to the Rigveda, I have the wish, just like the expert on Ivan the Terrible, to recognise here the title of the paper by Nagel "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?". Viola's video is hard to describe as a film, since it is hard to perceive it as having a plot, although the work is by no means an improvisation. It consists of five different parts: long, almost meditative fragments alternate with seemingly accidental shots. Most likely, the title of the work states fairly precisely what is happening here: it is essentially a kind of self-reflection, which may be reduced to the banal questions: what am I, what is life, what is death, etc. The work seemed interesting to me because Viola had devoted a large section of it to animals, so the associations with Nagel are more than just a whim. The second "chapter" of the video, entitled "The Language of the Birds", shows close-ups of the eyes of various animals, occasionally reflecting the artist himself. However, no matter how Viola may project himself literally and metaphorically onto birds and fish, these shots seem to me only a testimony to the impressive boundary separating humans from the private life of animals. In the case of animals, the impression is particularly vivid, since there is no such thing as bird or animal language. The secret of animal consciousness is radical precisely because animals remain silent and, no matter how intelligent their look may seem, it always remains a mystery. It doesn't matter whether there is or isn't consciousness hiding there. The reaction is the same as in the case where we encounter a mute stare by a person. In such situations we perceive most clearly an inability to enter another's private world and read their mind. For this reason, more interesting to me seemed the first chapter of Viola's work, Il Corpo Scuro ("The Dark Body"), with fragments of what he had filmed in the space of two weeks, trailing along with a herd of bisons in South Dakota. There was nothing "special" to be seen here. The biggest event was a half-minute scene of one of the bison urinating. There was no background music, the animals didn't talk, didn't run from lions and didn't give birth. They were simply grazing and grazing. Although animals appear very commonly in contemporary art,10 artists very rarely consider their consciousness. To be honest, I have never come across any literary work either presenting a serious attempt to approach the issue of what it is like to be an animal. Instead, there are more talking and dancing animals. But Viola's film also differs conspicuously from so-called "wildlife films", which cater for the perceptual characteristics of contemporary television viewers and whose main feature is bavardage, or uninterrupted chatter, alternating with symphonic music. Initially at least, Viola's video was hard to watch, precisely because "there's nothing happening", but, if you stick it out, it does break something in your perception. It's not as if you succeed in "becoming an animal", but there is a sense of protracted experience revealed to perception, which can only be experienced. It has not been created by the imagination, so critically regarded by Nagel, but rather it is a synchronisation of my sense of time with that of the animal, and in this way a kind of approach to what it is like to be an animal. Such experience would probably be possible even without the intervention of video, but in my view the very natural association with (and difference from) wildlife films contributes to this "break" in consciousness, since there isn't that sense of adventure that one might have when encountering bison in the wild or in a zoo. This distancing of ourselves from the everyday models of human perception of an animal brings the person perceiving a work of art at least in some way closer to the world of consciousness of the animal. A second work I would like to mention is Sophie Calle's installation or series of photographs entitled "The Blind". "I met people who were born blind. Who had never seen. I asked them what their image of beauty was." These are Calle's words of introduction to works showing black-and-white portraits of blind people, with their replies to the question framed next to them. There are two versions of each answer: as text and as a colour photograph of the item mentioned. For example, a child's portrait has next to it the text: "Green is beautiful. Since, every time I like something, others tell me it's green. The grass is green, the trees, the leaves and nature... I like wearing green clothes."11 And next to this is a photo of green grass. Of course, such pictures cannot but evoke an emotional response and sympathy. We look at the face of the blind child and at the bright green grass that he likes so much and has never seen. He has never seen anything colourful, at least not in the sense that we can look at a colour photo. The work is also sentimental: the question that Calle asks the blind is sentimental. How do you imagine beauty? It brings tears to the eyes of the likes of us, consumers of the visual arts. "They've never seen beauty!" Can there be anything more tragic than not to see beauty? The work also contains something optimistic and life-affirming - all except one of them know what seems beautiful to them; they have their pleasures, from which they do not shy away. But do we know what it is like to be blind? This description of beauty suggests that we might be able to imagine. We can shut our eyes and imagine what the world would seem like if we couldn't see. But we can imagine only what it would be like not to see it. Can we imagine what it is like to be blind from birth? And several of the answers to Calle's question do not fit into a simplistic view of how blind people might perceive the world. "The most beautiful thing I have ever seen is the sea. The sea that stretches so far it disappears from view."12 Is this person really blind? "I'm fascinated by fish. I don't know why. They cause no sound, they're not really anything, and in fact I don't care very much about them. I'm excited by the idea of their developing in water, by the idea that they're not attached to anything. Sometimes I stand in front of an aquarium for several minutes. Like an idiot. Just because it's beautiful."13 Do the words they say mean the same to them as they do to us? If so, then how can a blind person imagine a three-dimensional space with fish moving in it? What does "imagining" or "image" mean to a blind person anyway, and what does "image of beauty" mean to them? Sophie Calle's work does not provide any answers. And that's not because she hasn't turned it into a psychological study and continued asking questions. Her work too reveals the limits of the inaccessibility of consciousness. The three clues - portrait, text and picture - do not lead anywhere in themselves. We can study the face of the blind person, but we cannot see what it is like to be blind. We hear his words, but their meaning either leads us back to our own concepts or else to a dead end. The grass, sea or fish in the picture only testify to our ability to see, rather than to their blindness. At the same time, there is a feeling that these clues have a meaning: they define negatively, marking the boundary of what we cannot imagine and cannot understand. As is known, there are things we define negatively ("God is not this, that or the other"), but we can nevertheless allot them a clear and stable place in our life. Likewise, science too will most likely learn to control consciousness to a greater or lesser extent without learning its secret ("You're feeling sad. Take a pill and you'll be happier"). However, the idea that there are other states of consciousness presently inaccessible to us is romantic and optimistic at the same time. It testifies to an ability to think differently and entices us to seek that which is not perceptible in any of the clues mentioned. It is not possible to study another's consciousness, but perhaps it can be drawn, remembered or dreamed. "I saw my son in a dream. He was ten years old. He was dressed in pyjamas. He looked at me and smiled."14n 1 Dolgopolovs I. Stāsti par māksliniekiem (Stories about artists). Rīga, 1984, p. 136. 2 Cittautu mākslas vésture /Ed. V. Razdoļska. Rīga, 1974, vol. 3, p. 118. 3 "Physiognomy" // Encyclopaedia Britannica CD 98. 4 Gould S. J. The Panda's Thumb. New York, 1992, p. 161. 5 On the relationship between physiognomy and art, see further Gombrich E. Meditations on a Hobby Horse. London, 1963. 6 See, for example Fudge E. Animal. London, 2002, pp. 25-27. 7 Dunn, R. S. The Age of Religious Wars: 1559-1715. New York, 1979, p. 77. 8 The same image is also shown in: Latvijas padomju enciklopēdija. Rīga, 1983, vol. 4, p. 371. 9 Nagel T. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? In: The Nature of Mind / Ed. D. M. Rosenthal. Oxford, 1991, p. 423. 10 See: Baker S. The Postmodern Animal. London, 2000. 11 Sophie Calle. Hanover, 2002, p. 49. 12 Ibid., p. 43. 13 Ibid., p. 53. 14 Ibid., p. 81. | |
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