by Scott Lambridis
This is not an article intended to convince you to buy more art, but the tale of my recent purchase of a fifth artwork. This purchase completes a collection of one artwork from five of my favorite living artists: Dave Senecal, Lui Liu, Saré, Shelly Corbett, and Randall LaGro, all of whom are represented by A Muse Gallery. I am not an expert on art in any sense. I am merely someone who spends a lot of time thinking about his own mind and examining the way our internal reactions constitute our conscious and unconscious selves. While another collector might hang the last of his five pieces and walk away contented, I stand and stare at them in confusion, scratching my bald head. I wonder how the color, texture, medium, style, and even subject of these pieces can be so diverse while still communicating to me in what feels like identical dialects, a genre of my own design. Scratching alone does not suffice for me, so I pull a notepad and pen from my pocket and sit down to sort through my confusion by reducing this experience into its components.
No, calling me a dork would not be unfair.
I write “in the head” on the paper, underline it, and beneath it note the following: “The senses gather raw data and pass it up the hierarchy of neurons, which analyze it by parsing the sensory data into as many recognizable patterns as it can, and then by predicting new thought patterns through feedback.” Feel free to laugh aloud at me here since you know this is simply called learning. After drawing a small arrow I write, “These new patterns are fed back out as imagination and behavior, leading me to continue pondering the pieces, though someone else might have just walked away.” I next write “in the heart” on the paper, underline it, and beneath it note, “The brain sends out the appropriate hormones to carry out the pattern of behavior it just engaged, the hormone’s presence itself invoking a new set of mental sensations.” In this case, these physical aspects of my emotions are the spine-tingling and pupil-dilating sense of awe and curiosity. I etch the words “buzz in the brain” and “heat in the heart” on the page, circle them together, and pause to marvel at how pattern recognition and chemical response can seem so intermingled in experiences to make me misconstrue them as unified.
Below these entries I write “novelty” along with a question mark, pause, and then continue by writing “Mental leapfrog: The mind jumps to a brand new thought by vaulting over something it already knows.” I look up at the art on the wall and then back down to the page and continue writing. New artworks must have a degree of familiarity, a matched neural pattern as a basis of comparison, to trigger a pleasant response like hope. When the stimuli have no pattern to follow and the neurons are unable to access any remembered path, we cannot sense a connection. This results in confusion, a feeling paired chemically with a faint version of the unconscious “fight-or-flight” response. Conversely, some originality is biologically imperative to catch our attention. Without nuances that expand upon these patterns artworks become boring and derivative, the visual information zipping through the pattern recognition system unchallenged. I stab the period onto the page and pull my body from the chair, comfortable that the framework for my next analysis is well established.
“I AM my subjective biases,” I announce. “Neither my neural organization nor the environmental stimuli that have helped shape exist in anyone else. Both are learned, unique, and mine (for better or worse).” My black cat, Azathoth, creeps around the corner and eyes me. I take a step closer to the pieces, eyes searching for the commonality that speaks to my biases, and to the balance between familiarity and abstraction. The abstract pseudo-scientific landscape of Senecal’s piece’s hyper-real detail reflects possible places and times that physics often neglects. The dreamy monochrome of unplaceable cultures, at once angelic and demonic, is etched in LaGro’s monotypes. The vibrant underwater photography of Corbett features figures drenched in a somber nymph-like sensuality. Lui Liu’s women play adjacent to Corbett’s, rendered in quiet paints. The porcelain actresses explore a world of Chinese folklore while treading mathematically impossible spaces. The simple pencil strokes of Saré depict Renaissance characters contorted like Seussian poems or Python animations.
My mind, caught in a wave of nostalgia, pulls the curtains on the world outside itself. Books and movies flash through my head too quickly to catch. Excitement spreads through my chest in a wave of nervous tension that I recognize as a feeling of unspecific possibility – of something epic. I open my eyes to see the rich swaths of childhood passions depicted in these pieces, drawing out remembered patterns of mythologies and the friction in-between the impossibility of fantasy and the surety of science. I am again in the limbo of knowing, peering just beyond the mundane of this world where distortion turns childhood reptiles into dragons and the pretty girls of the schoolyard into fairies. I remember the storybooks my mother read to me, stories which mixed the real with the unknown and the possible with the unexplainable.
I jerk my pen-holding hand into position and write, “The possibilities of a pliable reality are what ride the neural patterns of these pieces down to the chemical messengers that excite my heart and stomach with a complex mingling of joy and apprehension that is altogether inspiring.” This pattern that my mind recognizes is specific only to me as another’s is specific to him and the artists’ own are to them. I hold the page out and reread what was just written and then walk over to my desk to finish this article which, as I said, is not about why you should buy more art.
We each, in essence, define our own genres, from our own internal histories of art and life. Older memories and imaginations mix with new sensations and predictions to create a complex palette of emotions which accent your rewarding experience with the slightest tang of the exciting unknown. This is what it means to appreciate a new piece of art, or one that is new to you with every viewing. And in doing so, it feeds back into you, expanding the universe inside your own memories, creating even more complex predictive imaginings. There has only been one art-related quote that’s stuck with me and it goes “I don’t know what art is, but I know what I like.” The next time you walk into the A Muse Gallery and find a piece on the wall that resonates with you, ask yourself why. By recalling the path your mind takes in experiencing art, splitting subjectivity and objectivity as well as the general qualities from a plastic personal nostalgia, you will be able to better decipher why you feel a certain way about the piece you are confronted with. This is what it means to be an expert at understanding art. Even more importantly, this is the path to understanding ourselves.
