State of Mind: The Exhibition

State of Mind: The Exhibition
29 April - 29 May 2005
Friday - Sunday, 2-6pm until 29 May
24 Kingsway, London WC2 (Entrance on Sardinia Street)
Curated by Ruth Maclennan and Simon Gould

State of Mind explores representations and interpretations of the mind within contemporary art, science and popular culture. Provoked initially by claims from neuroscientists that imaging techniques will at last enable us to see the mind when we look at the brain, this exhibition meditates on this most un-Cartesian of prophecies. State of Mind submits the human mind to cultural scrutiny whether as an object of political control, a tool for inner contemplation or a physical site of activity.

While the works in State of Mind can be experienced independently, this exhibition aims to situate them as a selection of the most interesting artistic critiques of the multiplicity of approaches to the mind.

The Works:

The Milgram Re-enactment is a real time reconstruction of one part of Stanley Milgram's 'Obedience to Authority' psychology experiment conducted at Yale University in 1961.

During the original experiment, subjects were asked to take part in a memory and learning test and give seemingly real electric shocks to another, unseen individual. The experiment was designed to test the limits to which subjects were prepared to follow the orders of an authority figure - a scientist. It aimed to establish to what degree an individual would be prepared to hurt a fellow human because they had been ordered to do so.

In reality no actual electric shocks were administered, and the scientist and victim were actors.

The Re-enactment was identical to the original experiment except that it took place in front of a live audience and all the participants were actors. No one was fooled into thinking they were administering electric shocks.

The Milgram Re-enactment continues Rod Dickinson's on going exploration into the structure and mechanisms that underpin systems of belief and social control.

For more information see http://www.milgramreenactment.org

The objects are placed in careful relationship to one another to map the manner in which individual terms are related. A term which appears to grow through or out of another, as described by the dictionary entry, is placed in such a way as to describe that relation. Hence, in the group, 'table manners' is placed so as to grow up out of 'table as furniture', gives rise to 'under the table' and has 'table dancer' resting beside and against it.

The OED is generally perceived as a fixed law-making authority, a guardian of a linguistic truth. The reality is a never-ending piece of research through the shifting terrain of written language. The apparent instability of the sculpture hints at this untenable nature of language. As the sculptural elements interpenetrate, reflect and illuminate one another, there is a tangible reminder of the puzzling and interdependent nature of words, which may seem straightforward, but on close examination remain elusive in their definition.

For more information see www.abigailreynolds.com

The artist wishes to thank the OUP, particularly the Director and Chief Etymologist of the OED, also to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Uriel Orlow's work for State of Mind explores the relationship between memory and the body, focusing on how memory is physically inscribed or embedded in habitual gestures. Music is a poignant example of this, as the rehearsal of a piece does not just result in it being memorised mentally but also corporeally. In Concert, a double-screen video installation specially conceived for the exhibition shows a cellist and a pianist playing the first movement of Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No 1 without their instruments. The music operates as a kind of ghostly mnemonic prompting their physically remembered gestures. Additionally, three drawings represent the first seventeen bars of the score employing a method inspired by an 11th century musical notation/memorization system which was devised by Guido d'Arezzo to conduct. It uses the hand, assigning each part of every finger a specific note.

For more information see www.urielorlow.net

The current version of the Bio Mapping system allows people to measure their Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. By sharing this information we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited.

Will other people's experiences allow us to engage differently with our environment?

The Bio Mapping film shown here records the recent workshop held with researchers from the BIOS Centre. The film marks a new stage of analysis and social critique in the Bio Mapping project, where previously more overtly political or technological aspects have been explored.

For more information see www.Biomapping.net

The protagonist speaks a language of the workplace, in which meanings are always deferred. His gestures and words seem to belong to a past or future moment from which he is irrevocably severed, but which he rehearses over and over again, blind to his surroundings. Meanwhile, each room, door, and corridor flickers with the shadows of past and future occupants and occupations.

Dialogue #4 (What is your culture?) is a new video installation made especially for State of Mind. It is the most recent development in Ruth Maclennan's series of video dialogues. These explore the performance through language and gesture of prescribed roles and situations, in particular in the workplace.

The double projection on to the wall of a room that also appears in the video, destabilises the distance between the time and space of the film and the time and space of watching. The piece shrinks, expands and folds time and space back on themselves, blurring the edges between interior built space, and interior mental space. Blindness and blinds are recurrent motifs. The blinds diffuse sunlight and shield from the outside world, heightening the sense of disorientation.

Due for total refurbishment in October of this year, 24 Kingsway, as we now view it, is on the verge of being hidden by the cleanliness and stealth of its new architects and designers. Pupil allows us to glimpse this and other slices through the building's physical, social and cultural self.

Thanks to the National Institute for Medical Research and the Citizens Theatre for Ms Benson's Costume.

"There is a good reason for having put my ideas into the mouth of a dreaming man. Sometimes, it is better to disguise wisdom as madness, to give wisdom a chance to be considered as wise. I would prefer it, if people said: 'But this isn't so insensible that we cannot believe it at all', rather than 'listen, here we have something very wise." Diderot on Le Rêve de D'Alembert in a letter to Sophie Volland, 11 September 1769.

The larger aim of this project is to produce a cinematographic adaptation of Denis Diderot's D'Alembert's Dream (1769), a seminal text of the French eighteenth century that revolutionised concepts of consciousness and creation from the point of view of materialist philosophy. The objective is to devise a rotoscoped animation which will bring to life the imagistic and science-fictional eccentricities of the original text. D'Alembert's Dream anticipated ideas such as the Darwinian theory of evolution, genetic engineering, cloning, eugenic experiments, ideas which even now appear controversial if not even unbelievable. In this project, scientists based at the National Institute for Medical Research have commented on the discussions conducted by the characters of the eighteenth-century text. Looking forward into the twentieth-first century whilst looking back into the eighteenth century, the idea has been to explore the continuities of an at times immaterial materialism in the context of today's biomedical research.

The Study

The Study is a place for contemplation, reading and absorbing the rest of the exhibition. It is also a place that contextualises the original starting point for State of Mind, with its affiliation to the BIOS Centre for Biosciences, Biotechnologies, Biomedicine and Society at the London School of Economics. The viewer is invited to browse through academic papers by Joseph Dumit, documents taken from the internet on the history of phrenology and even adverts for mail-order jelly-molds in the shape of the human brain. The artists have lent books which inspired their research. A collection of televised ads for mind-altering drugs, and a selection of posters for pills, potions and cure-alls, are also on show.

About the artists

Abigail Reynolds – “All my work is about a transference from abstract to physical (reification). I usually work with data output.” Reynolds’ current residency at the Oxford English Dictionary characterises her interests perfectly. At the OED Reynolds is examining the almost ridiculously optimistic and Romantic human attempt to visualise the entire English language.  The reasons why humans might want to do such a thing and the way in which this has been attempted by different societies at different times addresses some of the same questions as contemporary scientific imaging techniques.  Both science and art are here made to perform a leap between the physical brain and the abstract mind. See www.abigailreynolds.com for more information.

Rod Dickinson – Dickinson’s work encompasses live public situations and virtual and installation components to reconstruct real and imagined historical events. In the last few years he has made reconstructions/re-enactments of the Milgram Experiment (http://www.milgramreenactment.org), the Jonestown Massacre, and most recently the Waco Massacre http://www.wacoreenactment.org. His interest in each of these projects stems from group behaviour patterns and moments in history when our perception of what it is to be human is questioned.  The physical, linguistic, ritualistic, hysterical and political aspects of these incidents are all part of Dickinson’s practice amongst others. 

Uriel Orlow – Swiss born Uriel Orlow's work engages with the retrieval of histories; experimenting with and developing different strategies with regard to representation and language, it critically explores structures and narratives of knowledge and meaning. See www.urielorlow.net for more information.

Christian Nold – As Nold states of his work “Technology is not the neutral, rational instrument that it is portrayed as; instead it is a heady mixture of authoritarian control techniques and anarchic mischief. Softhook [Nold’s name for his various projects] takes the gap between these two opposites as its medium by combining the freedom offered by the art world with the agency obtainable through design and technology.” One example of Nold’s work is the ‘Bio Tags’ project in which he develops a tool to deliver real time feedback of one’s own Galvanic Skin Response and then uses this to stimulate discussion about the political and social implications of sharing bio data. See www.softhook.com for more information.

Richard Wentworth – Director of the Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford and originally trained with Henry Moore, Wentworth continues to be a crucial exponent of sculpture in its broadest sense. His has a uniquely sidelong view of the world. By transforming and manipulating found objects, people or even places (See his acclaimed Kings Cross project http://www.artangel.org.uk/pages/past/02/02_wentworth.htm) into works of art, Wentworth subverts their original function and extends our understanding of them by breaking conventional system of classification. Richard Wentworth recently had a major retrospective at Tate Liverpool.

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