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June 21st, 2010
That Face
by Polly Stenham
Minutes before one particular Saturday afternoon matinee performance, a grey-haired woman collided with the corner of the stage on her way to her seat, sustaining bloody gashes on both shins. As she sat on the edge of the stage, others gathered around her, offering whatever assistance they could until the police and EMS workers arrived to tend to her wounds. When they wheeled her out, the audience applauded.
Then the curtain went up, revealing two boarding school girls tormenting a third they had bound to a chair. The audience entered an entirely different reality, one turned upside down by a mother’s alcoholism and prescription pill addiction, where family members fight for their own survival in ways that seem perfectly normal to them but bizarre to outsiders.
In a New York Times interview, Polly Stenham, who wrote That Face at 19, expressed her interest in “…seeing how things work when authority goes to bed, and natural order is established…in extreme situations when rules are off, and who wins, and who doesn’t win.” In the unsupervised privacy of their dorms, Izzy and her accomplice Mia could freely act out their sadistic impulses in their hazing of 13-year-old Alice.
Mia, in an attempt to make life easier for Izzy, had slipped Alice close to 50 milligrams of Valium pilfered from her mother’s stash, a dosage ten times the standard for an adult—more than enough to knock out a young teenager. The scheduled initiation continues as planned, Alice ends up hospitalized and both girls face expulsion.
The action then shifts to Martha’s bedroom, which exists in a state of suspended authority where boundaries have long ago dissolved. A woman wakes up in bed while a man remains asleep beside her. Clutter decorates the space, pictures are tacked haphazardly to the wall, and a wardrobe closet sports a large towel hanging down its front.
The woman lights a cigarette, wakes the man and attempts to secure his forgiveness for some unspecified behavior of the previous night, promising it won’t happen again. He questions her about a hangover and calls her Martha. Later, they are visited by a young woman, much to Martha’s annoyance.
As the story unfolds, the audience learns that Martha is mother to the man who shared her bed. He is 18-year-old Henry, college dropout, aspiring artist and Martha’s caretaker for the previous five years. The young woman that Martha complains always interrupts them is Henry’s sister, the Mia from the hazing scene. A father, Hugh, is on his way from Singapore to resolve the situation, having been contacted by someone at the school. Apparently when Martha had been called, she got nasty and hung up.
These classic family dynamics include an incestuous mother who cuts up her son’s clothing when he fails to return home one night, an absent businessman father who has remarried a younger woman and begun a second family overseas, an almost-adult son who never stops trying to keep his mother from drinking, and a younger adolescent daughter, aligned with her father, who has removed herself from the home front but desperately tries to rescue her brother.
The 90 minutes allotted to developing both plot and characters could have been used to better effect. Henry, especially, lacked dimension. His role in the family system must surely generate more inner conflict than was apparent. The playwright invested Henry with far more emotional energy in her dramatization of his attachment to Martha than in his attempt at separation and the anger that went with it. Perhaps Stenham lacked access to a model for the Henry role.
On the other hand, the mother seemed observed directly from life. In the same New York Times interview, Stenham spoke freely about her businessman father with whom she lived (along with her younger sister) after her parents divorced during her early teen years. When asked about her mother’s being a model for Martha, she denied any autobiographical content, insisting Martha is “…an archetypal British woman, women that my friends and I know well” who is wealthy and looks good enough to escape scrutiny for behavior associated with bipolar disorder. Nothing in the play suggested Martha was bipolar but even if she was, there would be no way to tell while she was still abusing alcohol and Valium.
In the end, when his father comes to take Martha away for treatment, Henry is revealed as the tragic hero. Because he cannot accept defeat after “all the blood” he’s “taken from his heart,” he resists letting someone else take over where he has failed. His hubris drives him to scream hysterically at Martha, “You piss on me and all I’ve done.” He begs her for another chance, ”so I would know I helped you.”
That Face
New York City Center, Stage I
131 West 55th Street
New York, NY 10019
(212)581-1212
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June 20th, 2010
Between Two Wars: The Masked Truths of Otto Dix
Following the music emanating from a nearby gallery brings one to a small room lined with etchings from two of Otto Dix’s print series. An award-winning dancer, Dix might have been amused by the selection of popular German tunes from the 30s and 40s that played continuously while viewers took in the 10 prints of The Circus and the five of Death and Resurrection.
The experience of contemplating subjects like Suicide, Sex Murder and Dead Soldier while feeling the urge to break into a Charleston reflects perfectly the times in which the artist lived. An artilleryman in World War I who spent three years in the trenches, the artist kept what sanity he could by drawing whenever possible.
After returning to Dresden, Dix pursued recognition for his art while at the same time enjoying the temptations of the Weimar years in Germany, seeking out “revue theaters, film palaces, and circus arenas, the red-light district and the bohemian cafés.” (p. 165) Everything he witnessed found its way into his art, where he exposed the dark side of the glitter.
The Neue Galerie, along with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, has organized a fine review of major works produced by the artist between 1919 and 1939 that includes the 50 etchings of War (Der Krieg), the above-mentioned Death and Resurrection and The Circus, an assortment of paintings in tempera, oil and watercolor, and a number of drawings.
Dix’s oeuvre suggests an unhappy man, one forever scarred by the revelations of trench warfare, which he captured in a disturbing, now lost, work, Trench (Der Schützengraben). A large painting (89⅜” x 98⅜”) that he began working on in 1920, not long after he returned to Dresden from military service, and completed in 1923, it depicts in gory detail the death and dismemberment of both soldiers and landscape. The black and white photograph that appears in the catalog (p. 64) barely hints at the power the life size images, particularly the partially shredded corpse carried aloft on fragments of steel beams, must have wielded in full color.
At least of equal impact are the war drawings and etchings displayed in a dimly lit gallery on the lower floor of the exhibit, tucked away in a corner that requires some sleuthing to discover. Undoubtedly an accidental addition, the large dead fly that stuck to the wall between the second and third images seemed remarkably appropriate, as though attracted by the rotting body parts depicted in some scenes.
One is tempted to categorize the prints of War as either studio elaborations of onsite drawings or riffs and/or exaggerations from the same sources. Transporting the Wounded in Houthustler Forest, illustrating two weary looking soldiers, each walking with the aid of a cane, carrying a man in an improvised sling of coat and log, could have been sketched onsite and later developed more fully with shading.
On the other hand, Mealtime in the Trench (Loretto Heights) begs to be interpreted as a compilation of two different sketches, one of a muddy and bedraggled soldier eating canned rations and another of a disarticulated skeleton strewn across an incline. Likewise, The Skull, with worms crawling in and out of the ocular orbits, nose cavity, mouth, and hole in the parietal (top) bone, must surely be more conceptual than actual. And yet, Dix may very well have seen heads that had reached just such a state of decomposition. Such is the terrible truth of battle.
After the war, in the cities of Germany, wounded veterans sold matches and begged on the street, prostitutes of all ages paraded their wares, and the upper classes ate, drank and danced in their restaurants and clubs. Inflation was rampant and poverty widespread. Somehow Dix managed to assimilate all of this into his drawings, prints and paintings.
Excelling at portraiture, accepting commissions only from figures that interested him, displeasing many a sitter, Dix also featured prostitutes in many of his works. While some of his subjects’ faces suggest likenesses, others resemble masks.
In two of the many female nudes exhibited, the bodies are described with realistic skin tones while their faces are portrayed as add-ons affixed to their heads and painted in a whitish tone. The subject of Reclining Woman on Leopard Skin (1927, oil on wood) appears to be holding a mask in front of her face instead of supporting her head on her hand. The woman in Seated Female Nude with Red Hair and Stockings in Front of Pink Cloth (1930, mixed media on wood) seems to grasp her mask by its forehead and affix it to her face.
In Still Life with Widow’s Veil (1925, tempera on wood), Dix depicts a (death?) mask hanging from a nail high on a wall over a still life of a glass pitcher of water containing two long-stemmed black flowers sitting on an unusually active white cloth covering a table in front of a pole supporting a section of thoracic spine, with attached ribs, draped with a veil.
Masks have traditionally been used as symbols of death, as in Michelangelo’s sculpture of Night in the Medici tombs in San Lorenzo, Florence. Associated with theater, masks hide one’s true visage and suggest a false one. As such, they represent dissembling, deception and duplicity.
The people in the circles Dix aspired to and ultimately joined acted oblivious to the suffering around them. The artist, with his terrible knowledge of combat, could not be expected to easily make peace with these disparities.
In his 1927-28 triptych, Metropolis (portions of which were displayed on screens in the stairwell), Dix highlighted the dissonance he must have experienced by juxtaposing the reality of maimed veterans begging on the street (side images) with the glamor of upper class revelers in a nightclub setting (center).
With the rise of the Third Reich and its confiscation of “degenerate art,” in 1933 Dix had to flee from Berlin (where he’d been living since 1925) for the relative safety of a friend’s country estate. There, among other works, he produced landscapes that stand out for both their subject matter and beauty.
In the best of those exhibited, the Elbsandstein Mountains (Schrammsteine) rise up in the background and meet the clouds in masterly rendered atmospheric perspective (1938, oil and tempera on board). Several houses occupy the middle distance, farmland recedes toward the mountains and also climbs up toward the foreground, where a meticulously rendered leafy tree on the right frames the scene.
Removed from the clamourous environment of Berlin, Dix produced carefully observed, tightly rendered works like these and others. Years later, in an attempt to recapture his earlier, freer style, he would repudiate these and other traditionally painted works with the comment, “I have been painting much too much with the tip of the brush for the last twenty years.” (p. 241)
Dix would continue to live in the country until his death from a second stroke at the age of 77 in 1969. He would work both there and in the studio he maintained in Dresden.
Otto Dix
The Neue Galerie
1048 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028
(212)628-8824
All page numbers referenced are from the catalog:
Otto Dix
Olaf Peters, editor.
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June 18th, 2010
Domestic Violence & Animal Abuse: A Vicious Cycle
In a violent home, the family pet can become one more target—threatened, beaten, killed or disappeared. One more way for abusers to exercise power and control over the household, animal abuse leaves its mark on not just the immediate victims but also on the children who witness it.
In a recent report in the Sunday Times Magazine, Charles Siebert gathered together some of the latest research and thinking on the subject of animal cruelty, describing a continuous loop that, once begun, cycles through domestic violence and animal abuse to children’s abuse of animals to criminality and back again to domestic violence.
Research sited in the article, The Animal-Cruelty Syndrome, revealed that households with child abuse, while containing far more pets than others in the same community, had very few pets older than two, the result of a high turnover rate; animals died, were discarded or ran away, not unlike what can happen to children in the same situation. Similarly, 90 percent of families with spouse and/or child abuse showed evidence of animal cruelty.
Of particular interest was the finding by a 1995 study that “…nearly a third of pet-owning victims of domestic abuse…reported that one or more of their children had killed or harmed a pet.” Literature on hard to place young children from abusive households has described youngsters who set fires, attack other children and harm animals, behaviors categorized as “abusive reactive” in the article.
Children do what they know, emulating the actions of those around them. When adults have carte blanche to rage, hit and murder, children learn to deal with their feelings in the same ways. To accomplish that, they often have to cancel their naturally occurring empathic feelings—to kill their empathy to survive emotionally.
Unable to rescue their beloved pets, children have to stop caring, which they do by disconnecting from their loving feelings. To gain some kind of control over the situation, and perhaps to get it over with for once and for all, they might even kill the animals they love. Or they behave cruelly to animals in an attempt to gain mastery over their own vulnerability, as if to prove their pets’ pain no longer affects them. Similar processes might be operating in the development of antisocial personality disorder, the hallmark of which is an absence of conscience. Brutalized children often grow up to become antisocial adults engaging in criminal behavior.
These children are also prone to self-injury, the motivation for which might be to test the limits of their sensitization, as suggested by one of the researchers interviewed for the article. But self-injury is also present in children who have been incested and has many other functions, including to feel something and/or not feel anything (dissociation).
In research that used brain imaging on older adolescents with “aggressive-conduct disorder” and an age and sex matched control group, videos were shown of accidentally experienced or intentionally inflicted pain. While fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging) of both groups showed similar activation of their empathic neural circuitry in response to the accidental pain (with some conduct-disordered boys showing more), the aggressive boys responded to watching intentionally inflicted pain with heightened activation of the reward center of the brain.
Studies have already determined that this reward center is activated when witnessing punishment of wrongdoers (see blog entry Brutality & the Brain). Perhaps these aggressive boys enjoyed identifying with the aggressor in the videos, preferring the role of power associated with hurting another person rather than that of victim.
The good news comes from the treatment sector, where other brain imaging studies reveal that empathy can be fostered, perhaps more readily in younger children but still possible later on because of the brain’s plasticity. Children open up to animals in ways they won’t with humans.
The opportunity to take care of horses, like in the increasingly used equine therapy, or to teach a dog tricks, provides an experience of a different kind of mastery. Rather than the immediate gratification of running after birds to make them scatter, these programs attempt to teach the participants a kinder way of relating to animals, which will hopefully, over time, translate into a kinder way of relating to their own pets and their own children.
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June 11th, 2010
The Evil in Us All: Human Morality & Violence
Experimentally increasing serotonin levels in the brain inhibits subjects’ propensities for violence. Watching or initiating punishment of someone believed to have done something wrong lights up the same part of the brain that eating ice cream does. A man with a tumor in his right orbital frontal cortex increasingly engages in pedophilic behaviors as the tumor grows, initially keeping it secret, then eventually turning himself in to the authorities.
Neuroscientific discoveries like these provided fodder for rumination by panelists exploring the ramifications of a growing body of evidence that suggests biology plays a major role in violent behavior. In particular, a much returned to theme was how might the fruits of research like this be applied to the practice of criminal and civil law.
As part of the 2010 program of the World Science Festival, an annual June event held in New York City, Walter Isaacson (a life-long journalist committed to fostering educational opportunities for all) moderated a spirited debate among Mark Hauser (an evolutionary biologist with a passion for cognitive neuroscience), Oliver Goodenough (an expert at the interface of neuroscience and law) and Stephen J. Morse (a psychologist and lawyer devoted to the concept of personal responsibility).
The discussion, Brutality and the Brain, described in the program as an exploration of the neurobiology of violence that promised to include renowned author and neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, ended up focusing primarily on how and whether recent discoveries should change ideas about responsibility, criminality and punishment/treatment.
After showing film clips of infamous violent events that included campus shootings, Columbine, armed conflict, Abu Ghraib and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, Isaacson challenged the panelists to explain the ubiquitousness of violence in human lives. Hauser declared that “to deny evil is to deny an important part of human nature” and that “the capacity for evil is as ancient as humanity.”
Later on, returning to the question of the evolutionary value of aggression as a committed strategy, Hauser suggested that it can influence others and Morse explained that punishing free riders is critical for insuring tribal cohesion and survival. Hauser elaborated that all species distinguish between their own and others’ groups, insiders and outsiders, giving preference to their own. Additionally, posited Goodenough, one sure way to rally the troops is to declare war; external threats increase respect for leaders.
But biology is not destiny and “causes are not excuses,” contended Morse, who had already made the point that although advances in neurochemistry and brain imagery now make it possible to get inside the skulls of those who commit violence, it is their brain states that are being assessed, not their mental states. Insisting that intent be included as part of the consideration of culpability, he pointed out that human beings make decisions about their actions and that not all brain states become mental states. “Brains don’t kill people; people kill people,” he quipped.
Goodenough contended that influencing the brain could lead to better behavior and later on when discussing genetic markers for psychopathy, made it clear that the expression of these genes was linked to violent upbringing. It’s the combination of having a gene that decreases serotonin production and being exposed to violence in childhood that adds up to becoming violent as an adult.
If giving serotonin-increasing drugs to children with the defective gene could prevent them from becoming violent adults, would that be better than early family intervention? Goodenough challenged the other panelists to consider such a choice while Morse leaped into the fray with the observation that no matter what tests were devised to determine which children should be drugged, there would always be false positives and false negatives; no biological test is ever perfect.
But even if such a course of action could be guaranteed safe and effective, Morse continued, the question remained: how much should moral behavior be enhanced? And then there’s the law of unintended consequences. An aggressive person is not necessarily a dangerous person; many such individuals make valuable contributions to society. Hauser lent support to the alternative—environmental intervention—where much more is known in terms of the impact of abuse and neglect on the developing child than about innate biology. He wanted to know why “biology [is] always…seen as deterministic when environment isn’t.”
Those who wonder whether understanding their perpetrators’ behaviors somehow relieves the people who hurt them of responsibility might consider Morse’s extended comments about free will and whether explanations undermine morality.
Believing that a society that doesn’t punish wrongdoers is unworkable, Morse repeatedly returned to the notion of intention—acting for a reason. If people are rational and responsive to reason then morality and responsibility are possible for them and they can be held accountable for their behavior, regardless of any biological constraints.
That the psychopath tries to prevent discovery to avoid being caught and punished, that pedophiles do things in secret, that violent spouses beat up their mates but not their bosses, all indicate a level of rationality and intention. Society needs to have in place consequences for such behaviors for the protection of its members regardless of underlying brain chemistry/structure. The nature of those consequences might, however, change over time, becoming more humane and therefore more effective as neuroscience delivers greater understanding of humanity’s aggressive and often violent nature.
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May 30th, 2010
Shades of Loss: Expressions of Grief in the Printmaking of Käthe Kollwitz
In 1938 at the age of 71, Käthe Kollwitz drew another one of the over one hundred self-portraits she would create in her lifetime. Self-Portrait in Profile, Facing Right depicts an aged woman in a dark shawl with her hair tucked under a white, skull-fitting cap. With the lid covering half her eye and her mouth turned down at the corner, she looks weary as she faces an uncertain future.
A resident of Berlin, by that time Kollwitz had witnessed the rise of Hitler’s National Socialist party (1933); and by 1938, the persecution of the Jews and others was a distressing reality. That year, for two days in November all across Germany, Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues had been attacked, an episode that came to be known as Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass). The march to yet another war was well underway.
Born in Königsberg, Germany on July 8, 1867, Kollwitz witnessed her one-year-old brother succumb to meningitis just as her mother, Katharina Schmidt, had seen her first-born do soon after birth; another son had also died before Kollwitz was born.
In a 1919 lightly-sketched lithograph, Killed in Action, a woman covers her face with her hands save for the mouth, which opens in a scream, while her three children look up at her, wide-eyed with fear at their mother’s grief; two of them tug at her skirt, the other holds his hands up near his face. The drawing, one among many dealing with the personal toll of war, followed five years after Kollwitz lost her younger son Peter at the beginning of World War I.
Killed in Action might also reflect Kollwitz’s childhood experience of her mother’s unexpressed grief. Katharina, who stoically suppressed her tears, focused instead on the tasks of raising four children (of which Kollwitz was the third), remaining out of reach for Käthe who ached to comfort her. Unable to soothe her mother’s pain, though exquisitely receptive to it, Käthe carried it, expressing it in hours-long crying jags, feeling it in recurring stomach aches, and replaying it in recurrent nightmares throughout her childhood. The three children startled by their mother’s wail in the lithograph could be Käthe and her two older siblings.
One can see these prints at The Galerie St. Etienne along with many others in Käthe Kollwitz: A Portrait of the Artist, a loan exhibition celebrating both the 25th anniversary of the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Cologne and the 70th anniversary of the affiliation of Hildegard Bachert (director, author and expert on Kollwitz) with the gallery.
The show included not just self-portraits but also images depicting motherhood, loss and death. The plight of workers and their struggle, another prominent theme especially in Kollwitz’s early work, was largely absent. The prints and drawings selected lend credence to the observation that from very early on the artist struggled against a tide of grief relieved only by the birth of each of her two sons and the joy that tending infants gave her.
On the subject of motherhood, in the lithograph Mother, Pressing Infant to Her Face (First Version), Kollwitz accentuates the closeness of mother and child by juxtaposing their profiles so that the curve of one nose fits into the curve of the other, foreheads and lips press together, and the visible eye of each completes the whole in an eloquent representation of their symbiotic relationship.
Attachment portends loss through separation or death. When war broke out in 1914, 18-year-old Peter enlisted, caught up in the patriotism that swept through Germany at the time. Kollwitz, deeply troubled by his departure, ruminated about how mothers could so readily offer up their progeny. In a diary entry dated August 27, 1914 (two months before Peter was killed), she wrote, “Where do all the women who have watched so carefully over the lives of their beloved ones get the heroism to send them to face the cannon?”
Her 1942 lithograph Seeds for Sowing Must Not be Ground admonishes all to refrain from sacrificing their children, the seeds for future harvests. In a triangular composition, a mother shelters her three children within the tent of her body and enfolds them in her arms, attempting to shield them, and perhaps herself, against the inevitable time when they outgrow her ability to keep them safe. In September 1942, Kollwitz lost her grandson Peter to yet another war.
Very early on, Kollwitz had acquired the terrible knowledge that parents sometimes outlive their children. She had witnessed her mother lose a son and later had lost her own son and grandson in two world wars. She represented in many works the agony a mother feels over the death of a child but perhaps in none so poignantly as in the 1903 etching and drypoint Woman with Dead Child.
One of many such images, this one captures best the desperate grief of a mother who sits cross legged and clutches her dead child, her nose pressed against his neck as his lifeless head hangs down beyond her arms, as if willing her spirit into him, to give of her life so he can live.
There are images, too, of grieving parents. After losing Peter in 1914, Kollwitz devoted herself to creating a memorial that became two monumental sculptures finally erected in 1932 at the gates of a military cemetery in Belgium. The 1921-22 woodcut The Parents, Third Version shows an early idea for a single monument with both parents on their knees, facing each other, forming a single, sculptural unit. The father rests his arm on the mother’s bent back and covers his head with his hand. The mother buries her head in the crook of the father’s arm. Their faces are hidden. Their grief is palpable.
As she aged, Kollwitz began to look toward death for relief from her suffering. Around the time she turned 70, she produced the self-portrait Call of Death. In this 1937 lithograph, the artist looks at a skeletal hand that enters the picture from the right and touches her shoulder. The orbits of her eyes are in deep shadow and she looks very tired.
Käthe Kollwitz lived another ten years, outliving her husband by five and dying several weeks before the armistice ended World War II. Her work remains a testament to the power of art to triumph over even the most profound despair for surely it was Kollwitz’s passion for art that kept her productive for so many years.
Käthe Kollwitz: A Portrait of the Artist
Galerie St. Etienne
24 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019
(212)245-6734
No catalog. Other books available include:
Kearns, Martha. Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist
Kollwitz, Hans, editor. The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz
Prelinger, Elizabeth. Käthe Kollwitz
Upcoming anniversary exhibition in Cologne will have a catalog.
Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln
www.kollwitz.de
October 29, 2010-January 16, 2011
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May 28th, 2010
Immutable Memory: Research Challenges Long-Held Beliefs
Most people believe in the permanence of long-term memory, especially recollections of significant events, personal or shared—the kind that usually begin with “I remember where I was when…” and include assassinations (Kennedy, King, Lennon), tragic accidents (the space shuttle explosion) and deliberate acts of destruction (the World Trade Center). Referred to as flashbulb memories, these have always seemed indelibly etched in the brain like a snapshot of a moment in time.
New research suggests otherwise. In the May 2010 issue of Smithsonian magazine, Greg Miller in his article “Making Memories,” describes the work of Karim Nader who, after discovering that his own memory of September 11, 2001 included television footage from the following day (of the first plane hitting the north tower), began to wonder whether recalling memories altered them. Support for his questions about the infallibility of flashbulb memories came in a 2003 study that found that 73 percent of the sample group (569 college students) had the same misperception about when they saw the first plane hit.
In the process of experimenting with memory (in rats, and later replicated in other species including humans), Nader found evidence that even a long-term memory could be disrupted by recall. The more frequently it was remembered and retold, the more vulnerable it was to alteration.
In the brain, communication between neurons (of which there are over 100 billion) is facilitated by neurotransmitters. These chemicals, produced by brain cells, are released into the synapse, the gap between the neurons, to be picked up by receptors on another neuron. In the creation of short-term memory, the changes to neurons and their connections are much simpler than for long-term memory, which requires far more neurotransmitter production and the generation of additional receptors.
When a long-term memory is thus encoded, it has been consolidated and long thought to then be permanent. Nader’s research (along with others’) suggests that reconsolidation of memories can occur under certain circumstances of recall.
Those who struggle to believe their often fragmented and dissociated memories of childhood sexual abuse might take this to mean now they really can’t trust those terrible feelings in their bodies and all their symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder–those reactivations of the original horrors. Although some details might have changed in the telling, the essential nature of the original event, that the first plane did crash into the north tower, remained immutable.
In fact, this new conceptualization of memory has led to some hopeful experiments with trauma survivors. Alain Brunet, a psychologist, had his own close enough experience of a life-threatening situation when a gunman killed 27 people before taking his own life on the campus where Brunet was studying (though he was not in the immediate vicinity). Inspired by it to study traumatic stress, he has been looking into whether traumatic memories, or at least the distress they cause, can be ameliorated chemically.
Using propranolol, a blood pressure medicine known to produce memory loss by interfering with the production of norepinephrine (a neurotransmitter active in memory consolidation), Brunet had subjects listen to their previously written scripts about incidents (sexual abuse, assaults and car accidents) that occurred ten years before the experiment. Those who took the medication as compared with those who took a placebo had measurably reduced levels of physiological arousal.
Those subjects who took propranolol and read their scripts weekly for the next six weeks experienced a 50% reduction in their PTSD symptoms. Long after the effect of the drug wore off, they continued to enjoy a reduction in flashbacks and nightmares. The memory remained but lost its disruptive impact on their lives. A traumatic memory seems to have been reconsolidated into an ordinary bad memory offering support for the hypothesis that “recalling memory opens it to manipulation.”
A technique like EMDR that often elicits a powerful reexperiencing of the traumatic event, albeit in a condensed form, might owe some of its effectiveness to memory reconsolidation. After telling their story, people often come to a different understanding about its meaning. Sometimes, several weeks later, they will describe how a related negative belief about themselves has been replaced by a positive one.
More research remains to be done, of course, to replicate the propranolol study with other subjects, especially those who suffered family-based trauma during the critical developmental years of childhood. But it does begins to offer hope for sexual abuse survivors that the very thing they fear about their memories, that they are unreliable and mutable, may end up being the source of relief from their distressing symptoms.
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May 16th, 2010
Multimedia Master William Kentridge
Animates the Museum of Modern Art
& the Metropolitan Opera
Those fortunate enough to secure tickets for the all-too-brief run at the Metropolitan Opera of Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich’s 1928 opera, The Nose, produced and designed by artist William Kentridge, could later carry their ticket stubs to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for a 50 percent discount off the admission price to see William Kentridge: Five Themes, though to digest the entire feast required a second trip.
Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1955, Kentridge grew up in the midst of apartheid. Early on he joined in the struggle to end it, cofounding at age 20 a theater company to stage works of resistance–writing, producing, designing and acting in many of the plays. Since 1978 when he created his first animated film, Kentridge has used theater, film and the graphic arts to address political, social, personal and artistic issues.
The extravaganza at MoMA presented a cornucopia of treats that started with the 1989, mostly charcoal and chalk, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris, first in the series, Drawings for Projection; continued on to the present with the artist’s visualizations of his own creative process featured in the studio scenes of 7 Fragments for George Méliès (2009); and encompassed the puppetry, staging and music for The Magic Flute (2003) and animation and dance films for The Nose (2010).
The man who has produced this huge, wide-ranging body of work has this to say about his work habits: “Walking, thinking, stalking the image. Many of the hours spent in the studio are hours of walking, pacing back and forth across the space gathering the energy, the clarity to make the first mark…It is as if before the work can begin (the visible finished work of the drawing, film or sculpture), a different, invisible work must be done” (exhibition wall text).
Aptly illustrating that description of his struggles, one of the 7 Fragments, depicts Kentridge wandering back and forth in front of a drawing of a hat tacked to his white studio wall while papers fly into his hands as if by magic. Projected in reverse, all of Fragments casts the artist as sorcerer, giving drawings a life of their own. In another of these endlessly looping short films, a torn, three-quarter length portrait of Kentridge reassembles, comes to life and walks away.
Much like writers who claim they don’t control their characters, Kentridge confronts a drawing that changes itself. In Movable Assets, another part of Fragments, trees fall off the page, the entire image morphs and ultimately dissolves completely as the artist tries in vain to catch it in the act. He redraws it with gestures of wiping it off, a trick made possible by running the film backwards.
Kentridge, a magician, makes things appear and disappear. A trickster, he plays loose with notions of reality and representation. A shape-shifter, he seamlessly transforms objects. Those skills are most evident in the animated films about Felix and Soho (1989-2003), composed of mostly charcoal drawings, erased and redrawn with pentimenti as witness to the process. In Thick Time: Soho and Felix, the Tide Table segment (2003), cattle waste away to skeletons and turn to rocks in the surf while Soho, the suited businessman, reclines in a beach chair and military types on a balcony survey the scene through binoculars.
Those who missed the show at MoMA can still see excerpts from the films online, listen to the artist discuss his work, and read a bit about his life. Unfortunately, no catalog accompanied the exhibit. The next time a Kentridge production comes to a theater or museum nearby, waste no time in buying tickets and scheduling a visit, the only way to truly savor this polymath’s work.
Catalog:
William Kentridge: Five Themes
Mark Rosenthal, editor.
(Includes a DVD created by Kentridge
for the book.)
Available at Amazon.com for $31.50.
Posted in Art Reviews |
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May 9th, 2010
After being exhibited at SAMHSA headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, going on to be part of the show at the annual meeting of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence in San Juan, Puerto Rico, being pictured for January in the 2009 Art and Addiction Calendar, the drawing “Toy Soldier” along with “The Annunciation” appear in the recently published Addiction and Art.
“Addiction and Art puts a human face on addiction through the creative work of individuals who have been touched by it. A panel of addiction scientists, artists, and professionals from the art world selected the 61 pieces included here from more than 1,000 submissions. Accompanied by a written statement from the artist, each creation is emblematic of the destructive power of addiction and the regenerative power of recovery.” (April 2010 Art in America advertisement)
Available at Amazon.com for $19.77.
Posted in Currently on View |
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March 29th, 2010
The Catholic Church as Non-Protecting Parent
Recent revelations about the Catholic church’s handling of reports of sexual abuse in Germany and the United States highlight its insensitivity to the welfare of children. Even when victims have had the courage to report the assault, and even when psychiatrists warned that the priest in question should not be allowed to work with children, the church chose to ignore the recommendations and reassigned the priest, enabling more harm to children.
The same dynamic operates in the incestuous family where one parent abuses the child(ren) and someone else, often another parent, ignores all indications of the danger to the child(ren).
Usually the motivation to turn a blind eye relates to the parent’s own experiences of abuse; not being able to touch one’s own pain makes it difficult if not impossible to see another’s. Pretending everything is fine means not having to take actions that would create conflict within the family. Denying the truth maintains a façade of normality, saves face, and avoids confrontation and even criminal charges.
When children are sexually abused, they manifest their distress in nonverbal ways. At one extreme, they become withdrawn, even mute (flight/freeze). At the other, they act out aggressively (fight). Or their behavior combines elements of both. Then, because of their reactions, they become the problem and are often targeted for additional abuse.
The reactions of the hierarchy of the Catholic church puts it in the role of the non-protecting parent; it refused to act on evidence of the grave harm to children perpetrated by its representatives, choosing instead to serve its own need to avoid scandal.
Frank Bruni summed it up well in a piece for the New York Times when he described how a priest in Ireland handling a report of abuse had the two victimized boys sign a pledge of silence: “It is doubtful that pledge helped them heal…It certainly did not safeguard other children…But it served a purpose and illustrated a priority: to insulate the church from outside interference and condemnation.”
Bruni goes on to explain how the church views the crime of sexually assaulting children as first and foremost a sin, to be atoned for and forgiven. By focusing on what to do with abusive priests in order to avoid scandal rather than on how to safeguard children, the church has continued to demonstrate its lack of concern for children. Not reporting to the authorities known sexual abusers also places the church outside the law of many lands.
What is scandalous for the church has been devastating for children and yet little has been written recently about the long-term effects on them. It’s way past time to consider the damage done, take responsibility for it and offer restitution. And since sexual abuse remains a danger for all children including in their churches, a system needs to be put in place that encourages them to come forward when a priest does something that troubles them. Children should be seen, heard, believed and protected.
Posted in Therapist Musings |
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March 24th, 2010
Knowing Beauty
Objects like Leonardo’s painting of the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s frescos on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and Degas’s sculpture of the Little Dancer seem to possess a universal appeal. Less famous pieces similarly work their magic on viewers. Could this be a brain thing? And if so, how did it evolve and in what ways does it (or did it) contribute to the survival of the human species?
In Is Beauty in the Brain of the Beholder (ARTnews, January 2010), Ann Landi described what she discovered when she looked into the burgeoning field of neuroesthetics. Her interviews with several researchers highlighted an assortment of ways to approach the question of how the brain decides something is beautiful.
First, sensory input streams in through the eyes to be processed by different parts of the brain as color, form, motion and other aspects of vision. An Impressionist painting by Monet fires up the color area of the brain, a kinetic sculpture like a Calder mobile activates the motion center, a portrait by Rembrandt speaks to the face recognition part. Color registers a nanosecond before motion. The perception of beauty activates similar parts of the brain as those involved in desire. This begins to have some meaning in terms of reproduction, continuing the species. But wait, love deactivates areas of the brain. Maybe not seeing things about one’s beloved has benefits.
The brain looks for and finds patterns everywhere. Having frames of reference makes its job easier. It looks for the familiar about which it already has knowledge and experience. Not surprisingly then, ambiguity contributes to the attraction art holds by engaging this propensity of the brain to solve visual puzzles. The unfinished sketch holds a special draw for the viewer perhaps because the brain gets to participate in a way it can’t when confronted with a highly finished piece. People project onto artwork (as well as everything else) from their own expectations and ideas. The more room there is for that, the more appealing the object.
Humans evolved successfully because of their ability to bond, form groups, act in concert with others. What the next person thinks about an object can influence another’s evaluation of it. Subjects responded more positively to a painting created in the laboratory when told it belonged to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
From an emotional perspective, an esthetic experience can entail something other than looking at an object of conventional beauty. In one experiment, subjects reported being moved by objects they labeled strange and ugly, not just beautiful. The parts of the brain activated during those times are associated with the default-mode network, an area that gets busy when attention turns inward. Apparently, a truly compelling object can catapult viewers into their own internal worlds.
Recent discoveries like these intrigue and entice, but the infant field of neuroesthetics has a long way to go before it can explain what happens when the brain is on art. While most of the current research focuses on individuals’ responses, to understand human’s perception of beauty, neuroesthetics will have to range further afield and tap into other disciplines’ discoveries. Art making is, after all, a communal activity that dates back at least 31,000 years to the earliest marks on cave walls. Figuring out why and how it evolved, and uncovering the neural mechanisms that enabled it to develop, pose exciting challenges, not unlike trying to wrap one’s brain around a truly great work of art.
Posted in Art Historical Musings |
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