Phineas's Followers

Artists and their divided selves.

Phineas P. Gage (1823-1860)

As a pre-teen, one of the first novels I  ever read was Italo Calvino’s The Cloven Viscount, about the fictional Viscount Medardo of Terralba who is hit by a cannonball in battle and his body is divided in two perfect halves.  Both survive and effectively become two people, leading separate lives: Buono, who is good, and Gramo, who  is bad. While Buono tries to do good deeds in the world, Gramo goes through it causing chaos and pain.

The story is of course fiction, but what it says about the human condition is just as interesting as the famous, real-life medical case of Phineas Gage (1823-1860). Gage was a railroad foreman in New Hampshire, who in 1849 worked on railway projects overseeing blasting construction. One day, working on one of those projects near Vermont, an accidental blast pushed a metal rod through Gage’s head, entering through his mouth and exiting through his cranium, pretty much obliterating his left frontal lobe. Incredibly, Gage survived the injury, even being able to speak and walk a few minutes after the accident. Gage’s survival and ability to go back to lead a somewhat regular life (he even traveled to Chile at some point) was accompanied by a drastic change in his personality, which included completely losing any social inhibition.

Gage’s case has been for a long time an important reference for neuroscience and in particular the study of left/right hemispheres. The essentialist views of the 1960s and 70s (the left side of the brain mainly rational and the right side intuitive) have been largely acknowledged as superficial, although there have been authors who have taken these ideas onto a more philosophical realm, such as the British psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist, who in his book “The Master and His Emissary” uses that relationship to make the case about how Western civilization has become a left-brain-dominated culture, to the detriment of the right hemisphere.

Gilchrist’s argument, as applied to our cultural moment is to that intuitive-based, creative practices have been displaced by the technocratic thinking, producing a predominantly left-brained society that is highly trained in mechanically doing things but without fully understanding why it is doing them. The humanities, which are disciplines that helps us appreciate the big picture, often take a second seat to science and disciplines that are about objectivity, but when applied without the critical assistance of the right hemisphere to help us give meaning to them we go adrift. To quote Gilchrist:

[…] These gifts of the left hemisphere have helped us achieve nothing less than civilization itself, with all that that means. Even if we could abandon them, which of course we can't, we would be fools to do so, and would come off infinitely the poorer. There are siren voices that call us to do exactly that, certainly to abandon clarity and precision (which, in any case, importantly depend on both hemispheres), and I want to emphasize that I am passionately opposed to them. We need the ability to make fine discriminations, and to use reason appropriately. But these contributions need to be made in the service of something else, that only the right hemisphere can bring. Alone they are destructive. And right now they may be bringing us close to forfeiting the civilization they helped to create.

 He often quotes a phrase that has been widely attributed to Einstein:

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten about the gift.

In much more modest ways (i.e. no brain injuries involved) over the years I have encountered many examples of artists lacking certain attributes that allow me to appreciate their presence in others. Some artists are extremely intuitive, and yet are unable to have great critical distance or understanding of what they do in order to advance it. Similarly, many of us know artists how are deeply intelligent and knowledgeable but are unable to operate in experimental ways by using intuition. We know artists, curators, and critics who are masters at operating socially, but are either afraid or unable to exert much introspection, and we also know those who are deeply introverted and experience rich and complex ideas but struggle to externalize them.

But what is interesting to think about in the case of artists is that these character traits that might have seemed at some point  as obstacles in some cases were turned around as constraints against which a creative language could be developed. I wrote recently about Stanley Brouwn, who might have suffered from extreme shyness and yet turned it into a conceptual strategy. Others, like Bob Flanagan, embraced their health struggles (his with cystic fibrosis) and made them the open subject of their work. And similarly there are many cases of neurodivergent artists who, even if they were not acknowledged as such at the time, drew from their ability to hyperfocus in their activities and use art to productively engage with the conditions that ail like extreme repetition, multiple personalities, or forms of anxiety. This is to mean that instead of succumbing to the identity imposed to them by an impairment, they embrace it to alchemically transform it into art.

Matt Mullican performing under hypnosis at The Kitchen, New York, 1981

But the case that I keep always most in mind when I think of the divided self is, of course, Matt Mullican, who is known for making art under hypnosis, creating work that is made by who Mullican describes as “That person”, a scary and seemingly unpredictable individual who is obsessed with coffee and the idea of waking up, but who is motivated by a powerful desire to create and map his incredibly complex cosmogony. Mullican has now arrived at a stage in his work where the boundaries between “That person” and himself are eroding, and sometimes he becomes “that person” for a few seconds, now without the help of hypnosis.

In “The Divided Self”, R.D. Laing wrote: “This last possibility [of developing psychosis] is aways present if the individual begins to identify himself too exclusively with that part of him which feels unembodied.” But this observation, which of course I am in no way able to speak to its validity in contemporary scientific research today, does make me think that a measure by which we become great artists is by how we are able to artistically embody those other selves of ours, hiding somewhere in our brain, in our memories, our obsessions, our weaknesses, and our deepest fears, and use them instead as a motivation for making.