Ken Okiishi on “Human Brains: It Begins with an Idea” at Fondazione Prada

IF THINGS NAMED ARTWORKS exist primarily to stuff the void of being wealthy with interchangeable types of reactionary narcissism, then a few of us must look elsewhere if we need to expertise or make something resembling an exhibition. And by exhibition, I imply a sequence of fabric encounters or a set of sequential preparations that ignite questions in our brains about a number of prospects of affecting the prevailing state of issues—a class of encounter that issues named artworks appear unable to spark, given the present confluence of flimsy vested pursuits and our reliance on social media’s low cost dopamine hits. Because the “finish of the world” as perceived by people is made to look imminent, I’m reminded of the good but nonetheless undervalued phrases of sociologist Colette Guillaumin, writing at a special second when the reactionary Far Proper had made its chaotic practices appear inevitable:

There’s a terrifying mechanism by which obsessional imaginings and fantasies to do with evil, corruption, betrayal, illness, apocalypse . . . are foisted onto actual human beings with out their having any energy to stop it. A murderous type of collusion is thus produced which permits one group of individuals to switch their worst nightmares onto the our bodies of others. . . . Within the fragile minds of the dominators, the slightest sigh of impatience by a dominated individual triggers visions of probably the most apocalyptic turmoil—from castration to the tip of the earth’s rotation.

We are actually force-fed apocalypse from all angles, and consuming shit is getting previous. Making agile and daring but exact selections in opposition to the grain of countless chaos strikes me as oddly revolutionary. And whereas the posthuman leanings of a up to date Left result in some attention-grabbing studying, we’ll sadly must proceed coping with people till we turn into extinct. The choice by the people in command of the Fondazione Prada in Venice to commit the assets of an area devoted to the manufacturing, exhibition, and assortment of artwork to the event and exhibition of pondering—particularly because the establishment’s most important exhibition concurrent with the Biennale Arte—is a welcome antidote to a human mind that may not course of countless “feasts for the eyes” with out getting a migraine.

As a means of counteracting an infinite horizon of burnout generated by the distress of cognitive violence, in 2018 the Fondazione Prada started internet hosting a collection of conferences that counterposed scientific approaches to the mind—together with “neurobiology, philosophy, psychology, neurochemistry, linguistics, synthetic intelligence, and robotics”—in a cultural house, and for a cultural viewers that doesn’t usually encounter present scientific analysis within the second of its manufacturing however extra doubtless reads about it in filtered kind, years later, through no matter catches the best quantity of controversy, makes the very best metaphors, or develops sufficient consensus or sudden relevance to be popularized by the op-ed or science sections of the information. The establishment’s nonmetaphorical therapy of hard-science analysis within the second of its most experimental “prepublic” phases, although inevitably difficult for audiences, generated vital outcomes. The experimental processes put ahead in these 4 years proved, counterintuitively, a lot wilder, extra infused with rigor and care, than what’s ordinarily discovered within the art-world context, and, as such, they’ve conditioned some drained art-world brains to take better dangers.

The central horror will not be a human physique in strategy of dissection however scientific and political discourses present process formation and deformation.

“Human Brains: It Begins with an Concept” is the primary profitable try that I’ve seen at absolutely reconfiguring what turns into of the house of exhibition, together with its processes of formation, through a nexus of theories rooted in hard-science analysis. And whereas every contributor in what seems to be a really collective endeavor deserves equal acknowledgment, the event of the exhibition’s exquisitely intermeshed pathways could be credited to the particular collaboration between curator Udo Kittelmann and artist Taryn Simon. A sequence of enclaves performs host to a number of greater than 110 cultural artifacts spanning hundreds of years that chronicle efforts by human brains to know their very own functioning, destruction, and restore. These vary from a 3D copy of the 2120–2110 BCE terra-cotta Cylinders of Gudea to a 1772 e book of the “full notes on the dissection of a cadaver” by doctor and surgeon Shinnin Kawaguchi to histologist and neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s ethereal 1895–1921 drawings of nervous methods, accompanied by descriptions resembling “Large pyramidal cell of the human motor area” and “Granular neurons of the olfactory bulb of 20-days-old cat.” The exhibition’s show structure conjures an uncanny aesthetic overlap between the hospital and the natural-history museum: two websites the place we confront the emotional ache of dying and bodily trauma, the historical past of concepts of nature, and the psychologically shattering suggestion that the human physique, together with the mind, is concurrently completely mysterious and objectively no extra and at least an assemblage of cells and chemical reactions that may be minimize open, like a sausage.

All of that is allowed to circulation quite freely throughout the Venetian Baroque drama of Ca’ Nook della Regina, however a couple of objects specifically underscore the leitmotif of the exhibition’s architectonics: an eighteenth-century mannequin of the anatomical theater of the Archiginnasio in Bologna, the place, within the sixteenth century, public dissections of human our bodies throughout the context of scientific instructing and analysis grew to become widespread; and a 1932–33 scale mannequin of the anatomical theater of Padua, in-built 1595, the place most people gathered to observe such academic spectacles by candlelight. On this 2022 model of scientific analysis as spectacular theater, the general public, as on the dissections of 5 hundred years in the past, will not be meant to know in totality what’s being offered, and could also be meant to have a non secular expertise. The central horror will not be a human physique in strategy of dissection however scientific and political discourses present process formation and deformation. In one of many extra good, and profitable, curatorial selections I’ve witnessed lately, the hundred-plus objects that “encode centuries of makes an attempt to know the human mind” are usually not handled as one-to-one containers of which means that may flatly transmit data to the mind however as an alternative are mediated by literary texts. These texts, commissioned from authors as completely different as Katie Kitamura, Alexander Kluge, Ayòbámi Adébáyò, Maria Stepanova, and McKenzie Wark, are learn by the (subconsciously) acquainted star audiobook reader George Guidall, filmed by Simon as he stands at a microphone, the video enjoying adjoining to the objects of inquiry on a number of screens in every room. The impact is astonishing; the comforting grain of Guidall’s voice, together with the aleatory timing of clips from room to room, provides the sense that the viewer is absorbing in fragments a steady, collectively written epic textual content. The mind weaves these phrases collectively, and the objects resonate as questions.

The implicit suggestion that settlement and disagreement are simultaneous neurological processes in a world of discordant stimuli turns into specific within the central “theater” of the exhibition’s high ground. Thirty-two screens deliver thirty-six simultaneous neuroscientific and philosophical positions into one room. As if at a convention, every individual speaks individually, however, because of the care of modifying, timing, and spacing offerded by the art-exhibition context, we expertise a number of fragments of every speaker’s speak in speedy succession and get to observe the faces of the others in close-up whereas they assume in ceaselessly conflicted silence. The fragments of speech are edited to deliver out dissension and aporia, and the a number of and excessive variations amongst scientific positions push the viewer to assume each with and in opposition to this prismatic show of “dwell” pondering. A psychologist asks the philosophical query of how one reconciles the ache of listening to a human coping with the dying of a liked one with the register of language she is required to make use of, resembling “glucose metabolism”; a neuroscientist talks about how sure reminiscences stay encoded in a pure kind till they’re simplified by the retrieval strategy of speech; a neurobiologist means that her analysis exhibits that the results of social media on the mind are chemically just like drug dependancy and wonders find out how to deal with and restore these results on a large scale; a thinker gives that the mind’s radical plasticity is expounded to moments when it receives calls for for an excessive amount of plasticity and shuts down and that violence will need to have a organic, chemical relation to motion quite than a purely ontological one, since people don’t appear to be taught progressively or advance over time within the ways in which many philosophers have steered we do; a special neuroscientist asks what occurs when giant lots of individuals, resembling a nation, expertise stress on the similar time and the sources of assist that assist rewire or restore a mind, that create “countervailing forces of resilience, begin to put on skinny”; the psychologist chimes in once more and proposes that people who find themselves “metabolically encumbered” are inclined to gravitate in an authoritarian path as a result of “easy single causes, and even having any person else telling you what’s proper and flawed, reduces uncertainty at a time when your mind actually wants it”; the second neuroscientist breaks down in tears and may not proceed when relaying a battle case research through which a bomb explodes, a daughter’s cellphone is thrown within the air, and the daddy catches it and sees that his daughter is useless and he has survived; one other neuroscientist asserts that the scientific professions have a blind spot in terms of sure chemical results within the mind in relation to dependancy and proposes the experimental use of opioids on human topics; a psychologist who places moral worth on the reparative responsibility of her career to deal with sufferers who’re struggling walks out of the dialogue. It’s a fascinating—however, remarkably, not overwhelming—collection of conflicted discursive encounters.

Going through this constellation of screens, an oblong hole in a wall opens out to a cropped view of a fraction of a 1656 portray by Rembrandt. In keeping with the wall label, the portray, broken in 1723 by hearth, depicts a lecture-autopsy on the physique of a tailor “executed for robbing a textile retailer and threatening these current with a knife. . . . Dr. Deijman is portrayed as he lifts the falx cerebri, exhibiting the pineal gland. . . . thought-about the seat of the soul, and subsequently the occasion marked an important second within the public spectacle of the dissection.” As we view the scene by the aura of the broken portray’s complicated historic and materials patina, we’re requested to surprise critically about claims to enlightenment in relation to science as spectacle, each up to now and within the current, whereas additionally calling into query, following Catherine Malabou’s pondering, the inherited and protracted poststructural dogma that “science” is a priori concerned in legitimating disciplinary energy constructions in a society of management. We can’t assume critically if we refuse to contemplate that how the mind works would possibly have an effect on what is believed and achieved on the planet; the latest admission by many main essential theorists that they don’t have any framework for understanding modern crises suggests now we have been barking up the flawed tree for a really very long time. “Human Brains: It Begins with an Concept,” as an exhibition-making course of, uncovered individuals who act principally inside cultural establishments, in roles resembling curator, artist, and author, to extended contact with vanguard scientific-research strategies and presentation, and the result’s a outstanding mixture of readability and agility, with solely completely different paradigms held open to the opportunity of activation.

Ken Okiishi is an artist based mostly in New York.