EVENT DETAILS

"Desire Lines in the Mind" with Jonathan Fineberg

Co-sponsored by the UCI School of Medicine, the Claire Trevor School of the Arts, and the UCI School of Humanities

please join us for

The Language of the Enigmatic Object: Modern Art at the Border of Mind and Brain
FALL 2013 LECTURE SERIES AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE - OCTOBER 8, 9, 15, 16

featuring

Jonathan Fineberg
Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of Art History Emeritus University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

LECTURE 4:
"Desire Lines in the Mind"
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
5:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. Reception to Follow
Location: School of Humanities
1030 Humanities Gateway Building (Bldg 611)
First come - first serve.

To RSVP for this lecture series, please go to http://www1.icts.uci.edu/fineberg/

LECTURES ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

The fourth and final lecture, “Desire Lines in the Mind,” speculates on the effects of art on the brain and sets out an argument for the evolutionary necessity of art. In a 2001 article in Science, the neuroanatomist Semir Zeki, points out that “variability, one of the chief determinants of evolution, is greatest in structures that evolve fastest. In humans, the brain is the most variable and fastest evolving organ. We cannot at present ascribe this variability to any well-defined structure or component in the brain. Rather, we infer it through the wide differences in, for example, intelligence, sensitivities, creative abilities, and skills. Art is one expression of this variability. Its neurological study will therefore elucidate not only the source of one of the richest subjective experiences of which we are capable but also the determinants of the variability in its creation and appreciation, and hence elucidate one of the most important characteristics of the human brain.”

The function of the visual brain, Zeki argued, is to seek knowledge of the constant and essential properties of things in the world and yet the input of information through the senses constantly changes. Thus the brain has to hypothesize the defining qualities of objects. Each individual is inherently creative in making sense of visual experience. “The idea of being can no longer be held as constant; it is relative, nothing more than a projection of the mind,” Jean Dubuffet explained in a letter to Arnold Glimcher. He wrote extensively about his own mental processes while in the act of painting and lecture four will draw on his account and on his last paintings to examine the implied mental structures. Though we don’t yet have the technology to map these functions finely enough, we can use what is known about neuroanatomy to speculate on how works of art may alter neural pathways and change the structure of the brain, enhance creativity, and play a central role in the creation of new knowledge.

These four lectures on The Language of the Enigmatic Object: Modern Art at the Border of Mind and Brain are an effort to make an evolutionary argument for why we need images and to theorize a life’s work dealing with images. The lectures examine how the language of visual thinking works, in what way it is “closer to the structure of the human mind” than verbal thinking, and how it may indeed enhance the creative capacities of the brain. Grounded in the specifics of the daily practice of certain paradigmatic artists, these four lectures frame an understanding of visual thinking and creativity. Professor Fineberg attempts to delineate the language, then parse the grammar of visual thinking in the unconscious, then illuminate the political implications of art on the basis of a deeper understanding of how art affects us, and then finally to speculate on how aesthetic experience may impact the structure of the brain and serve evolutionary and social necessity. In Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, he argued that artists use their art to bring coherence to their experience. These lectures propose an underlying theory of how the language of art enables artists to do this.

Jonathan Fineberg is Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of Art History Emeritus at the university of Illinois and a Trustee Emeritus of The Phillips collection in Washington where he was founding Director of the center for the Study of Modern Art. He earned his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard university, an M.A. from the courtauld Institute in London, and studied psychoanalysis at the Boston and Western New England Psychoanalytic Institutes. He has taught at Yale, Harvard, and columbia universities and among his awards are: the Pulitzer Fellowship in critical Writing, the NEA Art critic’s Fellowship, Senior Fellowships from the Dedalus Foundation and the Japan Foundation, and the college Art Association’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in the History of Art.