River Underground: Heather Goodchild and Margaux Smith

Myth, Mirror, Dream

Heather Goodchild and Margaux Smith: River Underground
(Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto: December 1 - 2022 to January 21 - 2023)

Boris STEIPE, University of Toronto (boris.steipe@utoronto.ca)

Yi CHEN, Toronto (yi.chen.acad@gmail.com)

Myth

The first step is to see the work. (1) You might think that's the easy part, but it is not. At first, we do not see the work at all, just scattered triggers, fields and curves and contours that set up the scene and in a blink the gaps fill with our own assumptions, formed from memory, conjecture and experience. Associations are retrieved, at first subdued, but then insisting: the styles we know, the artists we have seen, the -isms, they call for our attention, require names and labels, and then the transcendental author (2) - or artist, as it were - takes shape, assumes a gender, age, a motif and a voice. With that we step aside to seek a label that reports a date, materials and dimensions. A title. Then we return, or leave to see another. But it takes time. For all of that. To quiet down again. And see. Until then, what we see is not the work.

A landscape spreads before us, imagined, not remembered. A blue pond in the centre, cerulean blue is named for the reflected sky; teal streaks may locate shallows; in the foreground, where the waters leave the image, a deep indigo blue. Then more towards the right, a pool of cobalt blue, in which sgraffito traces legs and heads and gowns, a boat perhaps. The stream that feeds the pond arrives past marshy tufts, cascades along a canal, flows from rounded foothills that rise to shrouded peaks of crimson and maroon, with scarlet ridges, umber and carnelian. A leafy vine emerges from between, roofs huddle, tree-lines mark the dikes that separate the fields. Where triangles form mountains, and stems with leaves proclaim their role as woodland they are also freed from functional confines, then branches form mycelial weaves: here, dabs of red or white accentuate them, there demarcating coloured fields like stained glass lanterns.

Light enters from the left, but only vaguely so, a trace of passing time more than illumination - there are no shadows, only morning tints that turn to evening shades towards the right. The day spreads out on the horizon, suggested by the fading light; the fields segment a fertile plain, suggested by perspective scale; the midground cultivated, farmers' work, suggested by the well-kept edges; the foreground, untamed thicket, suggested by its tangled stems and leaves and tones of umber, olive, earth; and altogether vista of the mind, suggested by our floating vantage point. But what all those suggestions say is left to us: like in a dream nothing is compelled to neatly snap in place and fit. The more you focus on it, it will want to change. Yet we can read it after all. Who dwells there? A couple resting at the water's edge, below them sits a frog. And next to it, are these the splayed calves of another? Is there a mustached face hidden among the trees? What is that towering creature in the centre, swaying on bent legs just across the narrow bridge? A head, a hump concealed by massive veiny leafs, and on its crown a figure seems to ride it, standing in limber contrapposto, a confident charioteer; from further back a woman, giantess - tall as the hill in front of which she stands, observes him, dressed in a carmine frock she leans against the entrance of a cave, but is he even present in her world? He and his mount are shrouded in cascading zincs, a shimmering patch that sets them in a plane of has-been, will-be, or of could-be. And slowly, as we take our time, the landscape animates. We sense the busy hands that planted, cultivated, worked the soil. The sodden, marshy paddies lie past their harvest, yet well kept, and rivulets of solvent spread a lacework that reflects such care. Who dwells here has their purpose: be it the resting couple, or the pondering frog, the rider of the lumbering creature has somewhere to be, the giantess observes, and the nymphean contours in the cobalt pool pursue a story that remains concealed. All have their own time, reason, vantage point, and though these motifs do not intersect - just like the fields of colour tend to stay within their contours - we feel them as a single tale. A myth perhaps: the way mundane and supernatural are juxtaposed suggests this - though this is hardly the arena Joseph Campbell wrote of where the hero encounters his supreme ordeal, (3) nor the home and chambers of the heroine, the female inverse of the hero archetype, nor sacred grove. (4)  This scenery is personal, not epic, it is a neighborhood; recorded by Ovid perhaps, or retold by the Brothers Grimm. Carl Jung has sought the sources of the human mind in myths like those, in alchemy, in dreams and fairy tales - he writes of "fantasies [...] which cannot be reduced to experiences in the individual's past, and thus cannot be explained as something individually acquired." (5) But, not acquired means: innate. If such a story works for us, if we can feel our selves inhabit it, we tap into the very fabric of the mind. Such myth is not the story that we think about, it is the way we think.

Dream

A woman's body curves across the work. (6) She leans towards a pig that faces us. Her movement appears frozen: her body would be out of balance when it leans this far, but saying this presumes a physics that does not apply. The pig - a wild pig, not a domestic pig - has a shaggy coat, burgundy and cordovan, falu red, with grey and green streaks. Its head is broad; shades of cornflower blue, cool grey and lilac run from the back of the ears down the forehead to the nose. Two sharp, black tusks protrude, and with the pointed cloven hooves they give the pig an odd air of sophistication. Are the greying streaks a signal of old age? Are the patches of lavender and pink around the snout bare skin? But asking this presumes a representational intention that does not apply. The pig observes us, its head slightly tilted, its smiling eyes glinting; as its weight rests on the right hand and the left hand almost leaves the ground, it leans towards the woman. What is the black and white background? The sky? The forest? Is it even white on black? Or black on white? Impossible to tell, the contours refuse to be disambiguated, no association retrieves a familiar shape. We leave it unnamed. The light does not come from there anyway. Rather, the scene is illuminated by our own gaze, not from an external source and whatever we see comes with its own light. The sharp, teal shadows on the ground are not cast by light however, nor do their angles imply an actual floor, nor do their directions match the geometry of the woman's legs, but saying all this presumes a coherent space that does not apply. And if we wonder how the woman's feet are placed a body's length ahead of the pig, yet her body curves behind its head, we realize that this question presumes a depiction of anatomy that does not apply. That said, none of this seems off. Somehow, the scene has its own inherent logic of form, and balance, and complementary shapes.

Above we noted how a scene is induced by minimal cues, and that the mind fills in the blanks between them. If we observe for longer, those areas of visual filler material fade and are replaced with what is actually there. What we see here however is frozen in this very moment of mental construction: the nameless filler textures, the conceptual, inherent light, the non-spatial spaces do not resolve. This is how we perceive a dream. A dream - a scene that is involuntarily constructed from bits and pieces of mental contents - has no need to be coherent, and certainly no need to conform to the causal logic of reality. Disjunctive cognition is a hallmark of dreaming: the fact that we may dream of contradictory things; we even may recognize the contradiction but it does not matter. The bits and pieces are placed to play their role; what lies between them does not matter.

Take colour for example. Most of us perceive colour in our dreams, at least most of the time. But if you ask yourself exactly what colour you saw, the question becomes rather difficult: we can name the colour, but rarely analyze it. Was there bright cadmium, amber, or canary? A shade of fulvous? Or a tint of buff? When we try to discern such shades and hues from memory, we realize that our experience is conceptual, the actual quality of colour, does not materialize - it could be anything between and yet not anything particular at all. The colours in the picture are vivid, remarkably deep, and without any sheen. As you approach, the streaks and lines acquire a curiously regular texture; standing right before the image you realize that what you took for paint are actually loops of fabric, pulled through a supporting base. This is a hooked rug, one of the many ways to create a textile image. Contemplated from up close, the scintillating patches of yellows, of pinks, become distinct, no two are quite alike. Just like in a dream the hues resist to be named. Indeed, unexpected pieces of herringbone weaves, and textures are to be discovered, some dyed, some overdyed. Such rugs can be made from fabric offcuts, scraps and thrums, requiring only a hook, a base of burlap - and a lot of time. Time becomes material here, and we may feel the artist's meditative patience through days and months, every loop a gesture of commitment to the work, every twist of the hand, and dip of the hook, a pledge that reinforces the meaning that this vision has. Dreams do have meaning. Though not in such a way that we can decode the meaning from the contents that we dream about. Our current understanding goes back to the seminal ideas of Francis Crick and collaborators (7) who hypothesized that dreams function as a kind of "reverse learning", that crucial process in which the brain erases "parasitic memories", associations that are inappropriately formed as a side-effect of learning and experience. To rectify these, internal activations are triggered while we sleep, and the responding associations - that are not due to a perception - are actively erased. Thus our dreams are thought to have a similar relation to conscious and subconscious contents of our minds, as listening to a recording played in reverse has, to the original. Bits and pieces of our mental contents may appear, but never causally connected. Such visions are ours, and meaningfully so, but they defy interpretation and that exactly is the point. Then, what is this vision? A woman, nude, encounters a pig in an unspecified space, her movement toward it may seek protection or solace, the pig reciprocates. The woman's body is subtly out of proportion, her rump as long as her legs, a hint of dysmorphia, emphasized by her fleshy thighs - in contrast, the narrow shadow is much thinner, almost emaciated, and only perfunctorily attached to her feet. The head and hair of the woman dissolve into non-existence: they do not matter. The ground does not matter, nor does the sky. The only other thing that matters is the wise and friendly gaze of the pig that looks - not back at us - but at the dreamer who records her dream: it will be alright.

Mirror

Are dreams surreal? We consult the dictionary, it is not helpful. Surreal: "dreamlike" it says. But Andre Breton's 1924 surrealist manifesto defines surreal as "psychic automatism"; as a mode of expression that seeks direct access to "the actual functioning of thought". And this is where the ideas of myth and dream coincide: both are indeed representations of the "actual functioning of thought", if, and as long as, they are authentically felt and not constructed.

But the most intriguing part is this: as we spend time with the two images, a distinct sense of familiarity appears. We understand at a preverbal level what is happening here, despite all ambiguities and unknowables. How is a sense of what another person's vision feels like not a private thing? Because, it is not the overt semantic contents that feels meaningful to us, that which we have in common in a shared cultural context. Rather, the meaning derives from the moods, the hints, the evoked associations that we actually consider to be our own.

In a famous essay, Thomas Nagel (8) argues that being a conscious organism means that there is something it is like to be that organism, and that such subjective experience is private and not reducible to physical phenomena. He chooses the example of a bat to illustrate the impossibility to extrapolate from our own experience to that of another's consciousness. But are not the two images we have encountered here a counterexample? Is not the subjective experience of understanding mediated exactly by a sense of what it feels like to contemplate this myth or have that dream? We find the idea lacking that extrapolation were the only access to an other. As we see here, another access point is resonance; a resonance that really requires nothing more than to see the picture (though that might not be the easy part). Such resonance with the fabric of our mind becomes a mirror for the self, as long as we are ready to encounter its ambiguities, and let the image shift and change, and harmonize. This is the key - as Jan Zwicky wrote: after all "when meaning holds still long enough to get its picture taken, it is dead". (9)

1 Smith, Margaux (2022). Reservoir. Oil on canvas.

2 As we all have experienced, the mind complements the experience of any work with a sense of an author, a narrating presence, the source of the work's voice. This is not what we see, but how we see - and this is "transcendental" in Immanual Kant's sense: a condition of experience and not its contents.

3 cf. Campbell, Joseph (1949) The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Bollingen Foundation, Princeton.

4 e.g. Gottschall, Jonathan (2005) "The Heroine with a Thousand Faces: Universal Trends in the Characterization of Female Folk Tale Protagonists". Evolutionary Psychology 3: 85-103.

5 Jung, Carl G. (1968b [1959]). "The Psychology of the Child Archetype". In: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Collected Works, 9, pt. 1, 2nd ed., pp.151-181. Princeton University Press, p.155; quoted in Segal, Robert A. (2019) "Jung on Myth". In: Segal, Robert A; Mills, Jon. Jung and Philosophy, Vol.1, p.204-219; Routledge, Abingdon, p. 211.

6 Goodchild, Heather (2022). Mid-night encounter. Hooked rug.

7 Crick, Francis and Mitchison, Graeme (1983). "The function of dream sleep". Nature 304:111-114.

8 Nagel, Thomas (1974). "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?". The Philosophical Review 83(4): 435-450.
9 Zwicky, Jan (2008) Wisdom & Metaphor. Gaspareau Press, Kentville, §62.

Boris STEIPE, MD, PhD, is a Professor emeritus of the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Canada. He was an Associate Professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, Canada (2001-2022), prior to which he received a PhD and Habilitation, and held academic positions in Germany at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich and the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry. His specializations include Bioinformatics, Systems Biology, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. In his work, he aims to bridge the domains of the sciences and the arts.

https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=KDPsrbAAAAAJ

Yi CHEN, PhD, PhD, was a Senior Research Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies, Heidelberg University, Germany (2021-2022). She was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bond University in Australia (2017- 2020), and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2016-2017). She received her second PhD in Comparative Litera- ture from the University of Toronto, Canada (2015), and her first PhD was in Philosophy from Fudan University, China (2001). Her specializations include Comparative Philosophy, Classics, and Aesthetics.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NYwN0U4AAAAJ