Gabriel Gandolfo
University Côte d'Azur - neurosciences
Introduction :
Art ensures a form of immortality; it is a permanent questioning of the models of reality; it is a material construction structuring the external space of the creator and his mental space.
"Architects, sculptors, painters, we all have to go back to the manual craft! ... There is no fundamental difference between the artist and the craftsman." (Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Program 1919).
I. How did the ability to create come about?
II. How do the brain sciences owe artists?
A/ Anatomophysiological approach :
Recommendations of Leo Battista Alberti (painter, sculptor, musician and architect of the Quatrocento):
"To make images very natural and similar to the real bodies made by nature" (De Statua, 1435)
"To explore all the degrees of the lesson of nature and to show the movements of souls by the movements of the limbs" (De Pictura, 1436).
Léonard de Vinci : "My own representation of the human body will be as clear as if a man were standing before you" (Notebook).
André Vésale : De humani corporis fabrica (1543)
La céroplastie : Gaetano Zumbo & Guillaume Desnoues (XVIIe siècle), André-Pierre Pinson et Honoré de Fragonard (XVIIIe siècle), Gunther von Hagens (XXIe siècle).
B/ Psychological and psychiatric approaches:
Charles Le Brun (XVIIe siècle), pionnier de la physiognomonie (Lavater) ; expressionism (Messerschmidt in sculpture ; Murnau & Fritz Lang in cinema) ; la caricature (Daumier); criminology (Lombroso) ; symbolism (Géricault ; Schwabe)
C/ The contemporary marriage of art and neuroscience
Helen Chadwick
Marta de Menezes
III. CEREBRAL PROCESS OFF CREATION
"Science and art are almost indistinguishable in the period of observation and meditation, only to separate in expression, come together in order, and divide definitively in results" (Paul Valéry, Cahiers, 1894).
Process common to creation (artistic, literary, scientific, technological...): 4 factors (creator; process; product; impact on the public): "Creativity is the capacity of a person to achieve something new and meaningful within a given social context" (Thys, 2014).
1/ conception
It relates to the processing of information in the brain
A/ Preliminary intention
"Art is the sensible appearance of the idea" (Plato, 4th century BC) Determination of the idea :
- Simultaneous perception is creation - seeing, feeling and thinking in coordination and not as a series of isolated phenomena. It integrates and instantaneously transforms the dispersed elements into a coherent whole" (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, The Dynamics of Vision, 1947)
- (concept, dream, motivation, memory)
Transformation of the abstract (ill-defined, subconscious) idea into a "mental image" = conscious brain representation.Prior intention originates in the prefrontal cortex.
B/ Intention in action
It comes from the motor cortex: motor imagery (mental representation of the action to be performed), motor preparation selecting the effectors concerned.
2/ concrete realisation
"The most skilful hand is only ever the servant of thought" (Auguste Renoir): from "roughing in" to finishing, a permanent back and forth between hands and brain.
3/ Creativity and psychological disorders
Melancholic creators (Aristotle); the link between genius and madness (Romanticism) led to the figures of the cursed artist (e.g. Baudelaire) and the neurotic genius (e.g. Van Gogh).
Increased frequency of disorders among poets and fiction writers compared to prose and non-fiction writers (Nettle, 2006); most common disorders among creators: schizotypal (29%) and bipolar (17%) (Thys et al., 2014).
IV. NEUROESTHETIC
A neuroscientific approach to aesthetic perceptions and experiences (Semir Zeki, Art and the brain, 1999).
"Although beauty is visible to all eyes, and everyone feels its effects to a greater or lesser extent, it is known that all the pains taken to date to define it have been fruitless" (William Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, intended to fix the vague ideas we have of taste, 1753).
1/ The Beautiful as an emotion
Interaction between artist and viewer: "Art is the form of the picture that has come into being through the nerves, the heart, the brain and the eye of man" (Edvard Munch)
Sensory perception is twofold: cognitive and emotional.
2/ The Beautiful as a feeling
"Sensations are not primary data of our consciousness, but the result of an elaboration of the mind which offers something to be understood" (Maurice Pradines, Philosophy of Sensation, 1932).
The sense of beauty is a cultural feeling: e.g. the colour blue
The sense of beauty is a subjective feeling: Stendhal's syndrome; the art of portraiture
3/ The Beautiful as a judgment
Aesthetic evaluation is a matter of culture: a survey by the magazine Beaux Arts (n°300, 23 May 2009)
Max Dessoir (Histoire de la psychologie, 1911): "Under the influence of religious representations, of the observation of nature and of the experience of life gathered in art, three objects and ways of seeing have been constituted":
-real life experience through phenomenology and clinical psychology
-behavioural behaviour through behaviourism
-the structure of the objective mind by the cognitive sciences
A/ How to define the Beautiful?
"What is beautiful is what pleases" (Theognis of Megara, 6th century BC), i.e. what gives aesthetic pleasure:
- Natural beauty (e.g. landscape, coloured wings of a butterfly...) associated with the power of nature = art-nature.
- Artistic beauty; pure production of the human mind representing
the real or the imaginary = art-myth. Originally sacred art (Pygmalion, Daedalus)
Classical conception of Beauty based on 2 criteria:
-perfection = getting closer to the ideal form (e.g. Greek statuary)
-harmony = gives an impression of unity
18th century: "beauty is not a quality inherent in things themselves; it exists only in the mind that contemplates it, and each mind perceives a different beauty" (David Hume) = art-science.
Other feelings: the sublime (= awe + exaltation), the elegant, the graceful, but also discomfort, repulsion, disgust and...fascination for the ugly!
"From the art of taste, we have passed to the art of disgust. The anguish and enjoyment of evil can only exist if we believe in evil. There is nothing of the sort in the most outrageous representations of current art, which intends to plunge the individual back into the fecal bath from which he or she had escaped" (Jean Clair, La responsabilité de l'artiste: les avant-gardes entre terreur et raison, 1997).
He denounces artistic nullity (Manzoni), invasive monumentality (Koons), pornographic (McCarthy; Steven Cohen) or scatological (Jan Fabre; Wim Delvoye) monomania.
B/ neuro-imagery
Right hemisphere = 'artistic', creative brain
Left hemisphere = "conservative" brain, logical and interpretative reasoning
Zones activated when looking at a work of art:
-visual cortex (image perception)
-orbitofrontal cortex (emotions, memories, pleasure, control of the receptive and creative aesthetic process)
-parietal cortex (attention)
-Cingulate cortex (emotions)
-motor cortex (tendency to be attracted to an object judged "beautiful" or to move away from it if it is judged "ugly", "repulsive")
Cultural impact of the classical canons of beauty: one can dislike a work of art while judging it to be "beautiful", because there are 2 cerebral "roads":
- "top road": cortex → insula (empathy), for objective beauty ("it's beautiful")
- "lower road": amygdala (subjective judgment) → limbic brain (emotions), for subjective beauty ("I like it")
Paradoxical pleasure experienced in front of a repulsive work: due to emotional plasticity = "that delicious thrill of dread" which is "the product of a very ancient psychological and traditional heritage, as old as religious feeling, as rooted in the cerebral universe as many other manifestations of the human subconscious" (H.P. Lovecraft, Dread and the Supernatural in Literature, 1927). Hence the fascination with the ugly, the disgusting, the repulsive, the horrific...
V. L’ART-THERAPY
1/ Ancestral beliefs and theories of the Ancients :
-rock art and its "magical" virtues
-Ancient medicine:
Hippocrates: "Nature, in man as well as outside of him, is harmony, balance. The disturbance of this balance, of this harmony, is disease".
Galen: "Health implies beauty".
Chromatotherapy by Asclepiades of Bithynia (1st century BC) uses coloured lights to soothe = ancestor of modern light therapy (Finsen, Nobel Prize 1903)
-Among the Navajo, the word "hozho" means health, beauty, balance, harmony, order and goodness → "sand paintings" transferring their "powers" to the body of the sick. Same ceremony with 'mandalas' in Tibet, etc.
2/ The pioneers of modern art therapy
= "bringing into harmony a suffering being who, through transmutation into a work, opens up to surpassing himself" (Jean-Pierre Klein, L'Art-thérapie, 1997)
-The Charenton Asylum (early 18th century): balls and concerts to externalise internal suffering and exorcise it
-Adrian Hill (Art versus illness, 1945), a painter suffering from tuberculosis, from his sanatorium: "When satisfied, the creative spirit will promote healing in the heart of the patient".
3/ VariantIions :
-mascotherapy (Henri Saigre), make-up, disguise
-bibliotherapy (guided readings to verbalise emotions)
-dance therapy (Marian Chace, 1930)
-Museotherapy (MoMA in New York, Artz Association)
Therapeutic virtue explained by aesthetic empathy.
CONCLUSION
It explains the extraordinary diversity of attitudes and feelings towards works of art, which makes aesthetic judgement beyond the reach of any scientific systematization: a confusion of emotions, intermingled feelings, variable cultural values, subjective plasticity.