Article: And Therefore I Am

Painting, sculpture, video take visitors inside artists' heads at Tang Museum

(Reprinted from the Sunday Gazette, May 14, 2006)

By Karen Bjornland

"The chariot of the mind is drawn by wild horses, and those wild horses have to be tamed," says the Svetasvatara Upanishad, a sacred book of Hinduism.

We all know the power of the brain, the endless challenge of "quieting the mind." At colleges across the country, students are crazy for courses in neuroscience, the study of brain matters, from genetics and biochemistry to behavior and learning.

So it's no surprise that the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, a cerebral kind of place that's always ahead of the curve, is probing the mysteries of the mind with "And Therefore I Am," an exhibit with a title borrowed from philosopher Rene Descartes, who said "I think, therefore I am."

It's the first show curated by museum director John Weber, who came to the Tang in 2004 from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Visitors will find the downstairs Wachenheim Gallery transformed into a sight-and-sound laboratory, arranged in a labyrinth of walls and cubbyholes.

Through drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and video works, nine artists explore dreams, the subconscious and the senses. There's even a painting created while the artist was under hypnosis.

The exhibit opens with Brain of the Artist, a silicon model of a human brain. German artist Jochem Hendricks made this exact replica of his own gray matter with the help of an MRI and a neuroscientist.

Then it's time for The Paradise Institute, an unnerving and unforgettable installation by Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, which in 2001 was shown at the Corcoran Gallery and won two awards at the Venice Biennale.

From the outside, it looks like a plain wooden hut, and viewers are only allowed to enter at appointed show times, every half hour, for the 13-minute film-noir experience. Inside, there are 16 seats, a miniature movie theater and headphones that offer the most crisp, high-quality sounds you've ever heard. It's called binaural audio, and the hyper-real sounds seem like they are from inside your own head.

Alone in the dark, your mind plays tricks. You may get goosebumps. The hairs on your neck may tingle. To tell any more would change your experience.

And that's only the beginning of the head games.

In a far corner of the gallery, in a walledoff space, there's I Was Thinking by American artist Beth Campbell. The installation looks like a mini living room. You're invited to sit in the cozy chair while you listen to a babble of voices, all Campbell's, like a stream of consciousness, the thoughts she "hears" in her brain on a regular day. A separate work, My Potential Future Based on Present Circumstances, is a drawing in which she plots in pencil the possibilities of what could happen to her, beginning with a single thought. Like tree branches, the words and lines spread and grow, as they become more complex.

Sean Landers, another American, works with the subconscious mind. Quickly and as spontaneously as possible, he paints the words and phrases that the pop into his head. Like Woody Allen's neurotic film characters, Landers bares his insecurities, titling the four pieces I'm Not, Why So Panicky, This Is Never Just This and I'm Not Cool and I Know It.

On Feb. 6, one week before the exhibit opened, artist Matt Mullican was hypnotized in the gallery by a local hypnotherapist. We see not only the wall-sized, black-and-white painting he made while in that state for more than an hour, but a video of how he behaved under hypnosis.

Mullican prances, sings to himself and makes a sputtering noise that seems to mirror his obsessive and industrious efforts. He calls the painting That Person's Work: How to Make Something from Nothing.

Another artist, Shana Lutker, offers Dream Paper, her real dreams that appear as stories and headlines on the front page of faux newspapers, placed on a table with lamps, as if in a library.

Hendricks, the artist who made the brain model, also studied the eye-brain connection. For two weeks, he tracked the movements of his retina while reading Eye, the weekend entertainment tabloid of the San Jose Mercury News. He then fed the data into a computer and printed out papers covered with lines that represent his vision. Hendricks calls it "drawing by the eyes."

Because it's tucked at the end of a short, dark passageway built into the gallery, it's easy to miss 30 Seconds by Douglas Gordon. Revealing too much would spoil the fun. So let's just say that it's a video work about a French doctor and a human head severed by a guillotine.

More About the Brain

Psyched to learn more about the brain? Before you exit, go upstairs and take a seat at a computer station on the mezzanine. With a mouse and headphones, you can choose from 26 short videos on brain-related subjects, from Alzheimer's and schizophrenia to the effects of hormones and stress on the brain.

©2006 the Daily Gazette