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"Ahhhhhhhhh!" they screamed, three voices as one.
Mildly startled by this collective shriek reverberating up the stairwell, I was not scared by the noise, followed by laughter, from the lower gallery. Only moments earlier I emitted my own eructation, albeit an octave lower and followed by limbic profanity along the lines of "What the f---?!"
Urs Fischer's Noisette, 2009 featured at a recent retrospective at New York's The New Museum, elicited in viewers split-second experiences of startle, fear, relief and laughter in one fell swoop.
We have long known viewing art brings out feelings and emotions. I have discovered through my own interactions with art as well as those of friends and patients, that art created by others can help to stimulate psychological insight and catalyze emotional healing. I provide this example at the New Museum, as well as two others, to illustrate how interactions with visual art can be psychological useful, a process that I call art seeking.
Although Noisette might be considered a kind of practical joke, the interaction with this artwork can be reframed as a tool for addressing anxiety. A museum patron notices a round hole in the gallery wall. Curious to peer inside, he approaches it. Not long after standing in front of the dark opening a mechanized human tongue sticks out rapidly. It is unexpected, creepy, and both frightening and delightful nearly at once. As with any startle response there is for a moment a lack of recognition of what is happening and thus the potential to trip a ‘fear' switch in a viewer, particularly in someone so vulnerable.
Imagine an anxious viewer of this work. Perhaps she maintains a tendency for fear; recurrent traumatic nightmares involving adults putting things in places they don't belong; or gnawing generalized worry involving children falling down stairs, blind pedestrians navigating wide boulevards, unwashed hands touching telephones, or minor bumps of turbulence signifying imminent death.
We know from cognitive-behavioral therapy research that facing one's fears, consciously and within a therapeutic framework may yield results potentially more effective than any pill. This work presents an opportunity to experience, for the chronically anxious, how familiarity with an unanticipated stimulus has a natural physiological and emotional curve. Put another way, once you know or feel how something works it's not so scary or surprising anymore.
Worry is all about anticipation. And by definition no one can fully anticipate the unanticipated. So maybe, the vibrating rubber tongue means to say that you should stop trying. With deep consideration Fischer's artistic scherzo may become for you a tongue stuck out at fear.
Anxiety can be satisfying to treat in that one may become proficient in it by dint of experience alone. You might achieve a kind of mastery when you've been exposed to it, provided you have tools to reframe the feeling and permit its natural dissipation. If in the case of Noisette you had only a miniscule amount of fear to begin with, still, what little there was disappears with the recognition of a ‘joke'.
I'm not suggesting that this small experience can be extrapolated directly and immediately to contravene overwhelming and debilitating fear of flying, for instance, at least not at first blush. Instead, this is the beginning of what could be a life long therapeutic process of re-imagining fear, anxiety, and other concerns with the aid of visual art.
Interactions with artwork, even those as seemingly trivial and lighthearted as Noisette, can provide novel and compelling jumping off points for exploration of psychological conflicts. Recovering quickly with a laugh while viewing this one work may not solve the problem of chronic panic attacks, but can be a first step to recognizing, addressing, and modifying one's response to and resolve to the unanticipated.
Another contemporary work of art offers a different kind of emotional salve. Prior to viewing the surprisingly psychologically useful work, Paul McCarthy's Tokyo Santa, Santa's Trees, 1999, currently on exhibit at Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), viewers encounter a museum guard seeming to take it upon himself to warn about--if not implicitly apologize for--what they are about to experience. While what some might find offensive or frankly sacrilegious, others, perhaps prone to anniversary reactions in anticipation of Christmas have the potential for recalibrating their sensitivity to pre-holiday dysphoria.
One person I have worked with finds this time so hard for her she had half-jokingly suggested holding the holiday every other year because of the grief it causes.
Yet the guard's apology misses the point. A more specific disclaimer (if there needs to be one) might suggest the work requires some comfort with scatology and seemingly grotesquely distorted symbols of American life.
Yet a seasonally dysphoric art seeker's focus on grotesquerie and the bizarre may permit one's own reparative mess-making with the potential to recognize in art an oblique reflection of his own emotional sloppiness. The artist's infantile or perhaps crazed use of paint, chocolate syrup, plastic monkey ‘assistant', and disfiguring masks, prosthetic penis, and turd-like objects cordons off art as a deranged play space permissive of unfettered if anally expulsive expression.
With nothing to hide and by exposing the darker surfaces of truth--for one art seeker his inner pains and hurts--art such as this contributes its greatest potential for healing.
If this seems too radical a notion, just ask any therapist how they might effect or stimulate the healing of others. Chances are their answers will relate to a need for elicitation of unencumbered inner truths unsparing of warts, filth and all.
For so many people merely uttering a disagreeable word or unexpurgated description about a major figure in their life, no matter how accurate the flaws, causes tremendous distress. Sadly, though, maintaining an unrealistic and idealized image of someone such as a mother, father, or grandparent takes a chronic toll on one's psyche and thwarts any potential for coming to terms with enduring hurts.
Artists becomes ersatz therapists as you absorb a work's profoundly personal resonances. Bizarre and aesthetically revolting images, as from a funhouse mirror pointed in an art seeker's direction, give way to feelings of deep liberation and possibility not unlike a therapist's incisive interpretations jar and so expand your perspective.
The McCarthy installation's rawness touches a nerve prompting an art seeker to hold up to the light for examination old wounds crusted over and buried despite our best intentions, or owing to inadequate or unfocused psychotherapy.
As you let any work touch a raw nerve, do not fight it. Take it in as an experience. At MOCA you might examine this work physically from different angles in the gallery space: turn your head, walk out and in, stop at one angle amid the trees or stand in front of one particular image on the wall.
Then, in a parallel process, do the same thing within your psyche. You might consider a relevant and bothersome issue from different perspectives picturing the physical elements of the work before you as stand-ins for corresponding pieces of your mind. In McCarthy's work, for example, trees sag in a way similar to your mood state around December 19th as you anticipate the annual let-down and become consumed with memories of family arguments: fruitcake projectiles, Mom's black eye, and Dad's skid marks.
A young person unable to make sense of cryptic and crass behavior bears the enduring legacy of intense bitter pain like tainted eggnog poisoning hope and possibility, good sense and joviality--core ideas within any major holiday. Art healing may be employed for healing by re-visioning the past.
If you find it difficult to hit upon a core issue, the work you are standing before may not be one that will be useful to you for art seeking purposes. It is often helpful to momentarily close your eyes so you can more closely experience the feeling the work engenders. By briefly escaping the details of the image, structure, sculpture, or material the central issues may emerge through an undistracted conversation with yourself.
Contemporary works are well suited for art seeking, but are by no means required. Older works, such as The Doctor's Visit by 17th century artist Frans Van Mieris the Elder at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Brentwood, California might be the focus of an art seeker seeking to remedy indecision. Even though the title and subject suggests a healer this element may or may not factor into its psychological usefulness to you.
Uncertainty of the drama playing itself out may be a theme sufficient for ameliorative purposes.The wall text suggests that the woman who has fainted, with a doctor behind her holding a convex flash containing urine, might be suffering from either lovesickness or pregnancy. But perhaps the true cause is neither of these. A bare bones assessment of the woman echoes a memorable line from a campy television commercial: she's fallen and she can't get up!
Much as Noisette might serve as a small window opening up to vulnerability, and McCarthy's Santa a funhouse mirror reflecting your dysfunctional world, The Doctor's Visit may be an anodyne to the very thing that insidiously ails you: the inscrutability of what actually does ail you.
Your task is and hopefully will become increasingly facile at this process the more you art heal--to study the image and discover how it works, what it touches inside of you. If you are not sure how best to characterize your problem, allow yourself to begin to identify with certain figures in the scene. By losing yourself in the drama perhaps you identify with either the patient, the doctor, the crying woman, or the mother figure.
You might, for example, take refuge in the fainting woman who you decide to view as a kindly double, a stand-in for your weary mind. By letting her suffer pain, this frees you to decide what to do with: your own early pregnancy, an inability to get pregnant, or some other gnawingly stultifying condition such as pathological levels of ambivalence, or self-doubt.
When you envision painted characters as avatars representing distinct emotions or perhaps even cordoned off parts of yourself, your back-and-forth dialogue with the work might offer up benefits superior to primal scream or group therapy. Again, reading the wall text could be helpful to your art healing, but is not required. You could find, however, benefits to knowing that the doctor is likely a charlatan, a quack, as indicated by his frilly outfit. Indeed, this information may or may not hold particular salience for you and your healing practice.
While the three works described in this post give a taste for the process of art seeking, they are by no means meant to represent the vast possibilities that visual art--in museums, galleries, sculpture parks, cyberspace, the foyer of your office building--can have to allow you to heal very specific wounds and provide a kind of visual angle onto emotional insight.
For updates on the forthcoming book Art Healing: Visual Art for Emotional Insight and Well-being, please visit www.thearthealing.com.
