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You’re being chased. You’re being attacked. You’re falling. You’re drowning

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To mark the centenary of Surrealism, this article in the Telegraph

A hundred years ago, a 28-year-old French poet, art collector and contrarian called André Breton published a manifesto that called time on reason.

Eight years before, in 1916, Breton was a medical trainee stationed at a neuro-psychiatric army clinic in Saint-Dizier. He cared for soldiers who were shell-shocked, psychotic, hysterical and worse, and fell in love with the mind, and the lengths it would go to survive the impossible present.

Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism was, then, an inquiry into how, “under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy.”

For Breton, surrealism’s sincerest experiments involved a sort of “psychic automatism” – using the processes of dreaming to express “the actual functioning of thought… in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” He asked: “Can’t the dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life?”

Many strange pictures appeared over the following century, as Breton’s fellow surrealists answered his challenge, and plumbed the depths of the unconscious mind. Their efforts – part of a long history of humans’ attempts to document and decode the dream world – can be seen in a raft of new exhibitions marking surrealism’s centenary, from the hybrid beasts of Leonora Carrington (on view at the Hepworth Wakefield’s Forbidden Territories), to the astral fantasies of Remedios Varo (included in the Centre Pompidou’s blockbuster Surrealism show.)
Yet, just as often, such images illustrate the gap between the dreamer’s experience and their later interpretation of it. Some of the most popular surrealist pictures – Dalí’s melting clocks, say, or Magritte’s apple-headed businessman – are not remotely dreamlike. Looking at such easy-to-read canvases is like having a dream explained, and that’s not at all the same thing.
The chief characteristic of dreams is that they don’t surprise or shock or alienate the person who’s dreaming – the dreamer, on the contrary, feels that their dream is inevitable. “The mind of the man who dreams,” Breton writes, “is fully satisfied by what happens to him. The agonizing question of possibility is no longer pertinent. Kill, fly faster, love to your heart’s content… Let yourself be carried along, events will not tolerate your interference. You are nameless. The ease of everything is priceless.”

Most physiologists and psychologists of the early 20th century would have agreed with him, right up until his last sentence. While the surrealists looked to dreams to reveal a mind beyond conciousness, scientists of the day considered them insignificant, because you can’t experiment on a dreamer, and you can’t repeat a dream.

Since then, others have joined the battle over the meaning – or lack of meaning – of our dreams. In 1977, Harvard psychiatrists John Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley proposed “random activation theory” ‘activation-synthesis theory’, in a rebuff to the psychoanalysts and their claim that dreams had meanings only accessible via (surprise, surprise) psychonalysis. Less an explanation, more an expression of exasperation, their theory held that certain parts of our brains concoct crazy fictions out of the random neural firings of the sleeping pons (a part of the brainstem).

It is not a bad theory. It might go some way to explaining the kind of hypnagogic imagery we experience when we doze, and that so delighted the surrealists. It might even bring us closer to actually reconstructing our dreams. For instance, we can capture the brain activity of a sleeper, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, hand that data to artificial intelligence software that’s been trained on about a million images, and the system will take a stab at what the dreamer is seeing in their dream. The Japanese neuroscientist Yukiyasu Kamitani made quite a name for himself when he tried this in 2012.

Six years later, at the Serpentine Gallery in London, artist Pierre Huyghe integrated some of this material into his show UUmwelt — and what an astonishing show it was, its wall screens full of bottles becoming elephants becoming screaming pigs becoming geese, skyscrapers, mixer taps, dogs, moles, bat’s wings…

But modelling an idea doesn’t make it true. Activation-synthesis theory has inspired some fantastic art, but it fails to explain one of the most important physiological characteristics of dreaming – the fact that dreams paralyse the dreamer.

***

Brains have an alarming tendency to treat dreams as absolutely real and to respond appropriately — to jump and punch when the dream says jump! and punch! Dreams, for the dreamer, can be very dangerous indeed.

The simplest evolutionary way to mitigate the risk of injury would have been to stop the dreamer from dreaming. Instead, we evolved a complex mechanism to paralyse ourselves while in the throes of our night-time adventures. 520 million years of brain evolution say that dreams are important and need protecting.

This, rather than the actual content of dreams, has driven research into the sleeping brain. We know now that dreaming involves many more brain areas, including the parietal lobes (involved in the representation of space) and the frontal lobes (responsible for decision-making, problem-solving, self-control, attention, speech production, language comprehension – oh, and working memory). Mice dream. Dogs dream. Platypuses, beluga whales and ostriches dream; so do penguins, chameleons, iguanas and cuttlefish.[

We’re not sure about turtles. Octopuses? Marine biologist David Scheel caught his snoozing pet octopus Heidi on camera, and through careful interpretation of her dramatic colour-shifts he came to the ingenious conclusion that she was enjoying an imaginary crab supper. The clip, from PBS’s 2019 documentary Octopus: Making Contact is on YouTube.

Heidi’s brain structure is nothing like our own. Still, we’re both dreamers. Studies of wildly different sleeping brains throw up startling convergences. Dreaming is just something that brains of all sorts have to do.

We’ve recently learned why.

The first clues emerged from sleep deprivation studies conducted in the late 1960s. Both Allan Rechtschaffen and William Dement showed that sleep deprivation leads to memory deficits in rodents. A generation later, and researchers including the Brazilian neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro were spending the 1990s unpicking the genetic basis of memory function. Ribiero himself found the first molecular evidence of Freud’s “day residue” hypothesis, which has it that the content of our dreams is often influenced by the events, thoughts, and feelings we experience during the day.

Ribeiro had his own fairly shocking first-hand experience of the utility of dreaming. In February 1995 he arrived in New York to start at doctorate at Rockefeller University. Shortly after arriving, he woke up unable to speak English. He fell in and out of a narcoleptic trance, and then, in April, woke refreshed and energised and able to speak English better than ever before. His work can’t absolutely confirm that his dreams saved him, but he and other researchers have most certainly established the link between dreams and memory. To cut a long story very short indeed: dreams are what memories get up to when there’s no waking self to arrange them.

Well, conscious thought alone is not fast enough or reliable enough to keep us safe in the blooming, buzzing confusion of the world. We also need fast, intuitive responses to critical situations, and we rehearse these responses, continually, when we dream. Collect dream narratives from around the world, and you will quickly discover (as literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall points out in his 2012 book The Storytelling Animal) that the commonest dreams have everything to do with life and death and have very little time for anything else. You’re being chased. You’re being attacked. You’re falling. You’re drowning. You’re lost, trapped, naked, hurt…

When lives were socially simple and threats immediate, the relevance of dreams was not just apparent; it was impelling. And let’s face it: a stopped clock is right at least twice a day. Living in a relatively simple social structure, afforded only a limited palette of dream materials to draw from, was it really so surprising that (according to the historian Suetonius) Rome’s first emperor Augustus found his rise to power predicted by dreams?

Even now, Malaysia’s indigenous Orang Asli people believe that by sharing their dreams, they are passing on healing communications from their ancestors. Recently the British artist Adam Chodzko used their practice as the foundation for a now web-based project called Dreamshare Seer, which uses generative AI to visualise and animate people’s descriptions of their dreams. (Predictably, his AI outputs are rather Dali-like.)

But humanity’s mission to interpret dreams has been eroded by a revolution in our style of living. Our great-grandparents could remember a world without artificial light. Now we play on our phones until bedtime, then get up early, already focused on a day that is, when push comes to shove, more or less identical to yesterday. We neither plan our days before we sleep, nor do we interrogate our dreams when we wake. Is it any wonder, then, that our dreams are no longer able to inspire us?

Growing social complexity enriches our dream lives, but it also fragments them. Last night I dreamt of selecting desserts from a wedding buffet; later I cuddled a white chicken while negotiating for a plumbing contract. Dreams evolved to help us negotiate the big stuff. Having conquered the big stuff (humans have been apex predators for around 2 million years), it is possible that we have evolved past the point where dreaming is useful, but not past the point where dreaming is dangerous.

Here’s a film you won’t have seen. Petrov’s Flu, directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, was due for limited UK release in 2022, even as Vladimir Putin’s forces were bumbling towards Kiev.

The film opens on our hero Petrov (Semyon Serzin), riding a trolleybus home across a snowbound Yekaterinburg. He overhears a fellow passenger muttering to a neighbour that the rich in this town all deserve to be shot.

Seconds later the bus stops, Petrov is pulled off the bus and a rifle is pressed into his hands. Street executions follow, shocking him out of his febrile doze…

And Petrov’s back on the bus again.

Whatever the director’s intentions were here, I reckon this is a document for our times. You see, Andre Breton wrote his manifesto in the wreckage of a world that had turned its machine tools into weapons, the better to slaughter itself — and did all this under the flag of the Enlightenment and reason.

Today we’re manufacturing new kinds of machine tools, to serve a world that’s much more psychologically adept. Our digital devices, for example, exploit our capacity for focused attention (all too well, in many cases).

So what of those devices that exist to make our sleeping lives better, sounder, and more enjoyable?

SleepScore Labs is using electroencephalography data to analyse the content of dreams. BrainCo has a headband interface that influences dreams through auditory and visual cues. Researchers at MIT have used a sleep-tracking glove called Dormio to much the same end. iWinks’s headband increases the likelihood of lucid dreaming.

It’s hard to imagine light installations, ambient music and scented pillows ever being turned against us. Then again, we remember the world the Surrealists grew up in, laid waste by a war that had turned its ploughshares into swords. Is it so very outlandish to suggest that tomorrow, we will be weaponising our dreams?

Slightly fleshy, slightly scabby, cast adrift

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Exploring Matthew Day Jackson’s show Pathetic Fallacy at Hauser & Wirth Somerset for the Times Literary Supplement, 26 February 2019

The New York-based artist Matthew Day Jackson takes mixed media seriously. Behind the techniques and materials, the molten lead and the axe handles, the T-shirts and laser-etched Formica, Jackson’s aesthetic sees the world not as a continuum but as a mass of odd juxtapositions. Since his first big solo show in 2004, he has intertwined the grotesque and the beautiful. Every ten years, he paints a picture of himself as a corpse, but the majority of his work is mischievous, holding the autobiographical and the cerebral in an uneasy balance.

Hauser and Wirth, an international gallery with a strong educational remit, regularly brings its spikier artists to its property in Bruton, Somerset, to stay, work and reflect. The residencies come without strings, there are no prescribed outcomes, and one suspects there’s a certain mischief in who gets chosen. First to arrive, in 2014, was the (intermittently scary) video artist Pipilotti Rist. Seduced by her surroundings, she came up with sensuously observed close-ups of bodies and leaves in intimate proximity. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But it’s a risk for the gallery, and a challenge for the artists who stay here, that the landscape round about is so ridiculously seductive.

Showing next door to Matthew Day Jackson, Eve, an exhibition of paintings by the Somerset-based artist Catherine Goodman, is unashamedly paradisal. Even its edge of Freudian melancholy proves heartwarming in the end.

What on earth will Jackson, a cerebral city-dwelling proponent of an aesthetic he dubs the “horriful”, do with all this serried loveliness? He says that at first he found the landscape hard to read. “It’s more like urban space”, he says. “Everywhere you look, you can trace how humans have engaged with this place.” He can’t get over the time-worn depth of the lanes here. There’s no equivalent back home: “Maybe in Oregon and Wyoming, you can find tracks still rutted by wagon wheels”.

Predictably, for an artist who’s spent his career mapping the failures of American utopianism, Jackson has responded to the beauty around him by mourning its passing. His Solipsist collage-paintings of silk-screened Formica zoom out to encompass large swathes of the planet. Seen from various orbital viewpoints (the images are based on photographs taken by NASA astronauts) four elements emerge. Mine workings strip the Earth back to, well, its earth. The hopelessly polluted Ganges and the virtually vanished Ural Sea stand for water. Smoke plumes from forest fires give a shape to air. Yellowstone Lake inhabits a caldera that, if it erupted, would consume most life on Earth.

Each landscape, weirdly colourized (“Formica limits your colour palette”), laser etched with precise contours and subtle, uninterpretable boundary lines, resembles a computer-readable map. “Over” it (or, to be literal about this, embedded in it) is the flattened image of a satellite, made of cast lead.

The fact that the satellite observing the view is itself melted into the picture suggests a colossal foreshortening. There’s something suggestive of Jean Dubuffet, too, in the way the texture of the satellite is employed to convey a radical flatness. There’s no shade here, no occlusion, no hint of curvature. Human activity and human destiny are being measured and metricized to the point where even the planet has nowhere to turn.

Jackson’s flower paintings in the next room continue the theme: vases of hallucinatory Formica and fabric blooms, backlit by unearthly aurorae that may reference the tie-dye fad of the early 1970s but are more likely – given the way this show is going – something ghastly to do with nuclear testing.

The paintings work with the Astroturf floor and Jackson’s experimental, sculptural furniture to explore the idea that we only ever see things through their use. This isn’t a human foible: living things generally only sense what is relevant to their survival. So if Jackson is holding humanity to account here, it is a gentle and considered judgement. “What we most want is to feel that we exist”, he says, as we contemplate vanished seas and shredded mountain ranges. “We want not be lonely. Hence the appeal of metrics: they give us a sense of accomplishment.”

It can be a nuisance, having the artist around when you’re viewing a show. I was initially thinking about our greed and rapacity, and now, looking at these spoiled and garishly mapped earths, all I can see is our pathos: how we are polishing our rock down to the granite, just so we can glimpse ourselves in it.

Pathetic Fallacy is a well-chosen title for this show. John Ruskin coined the phrase to have a dig at the emotional falsity of poets who made clouds weep and trees groan. Jackson’s show is more in the spirit of Wordsworth’s defence of the practice, arguing that “objects . . . derive their influence not from properties inherent in them . . . but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected by these objects”.

In other words, we impose ourselves on the world because we feel we are the only meaning makers. On the way out, I pass more pictures: flattened lead satellites, cast in moulds made of corrugated cardboard, twine, sawdust, glue. This close, they appear slightly fleshy, slightly scabby, cast adrift, and travelling out into space.

David Jane: Inner visions

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A virus that robbed David Jane of his language and memory left him struggling to understand what had happened to him. His salvation was to recreate his condition on canvas. For New Scientist, 10 January 1998

 

DAVID JANE’s studio in south London is falling to pieces. Plaster has come
off the walls, revealing the wattling and brick beneath. Felt sags from a hole
in the roof. Every fractured surface frames another deeper, broken layer. It is
easy at first—and painful—to see parallels between the dereliction
of Jane’s studio and his paintings, which are based on magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) scans of his own, damaged brain. “It can be a very heavy
experience to be drawing things that you know are inside you,” muses Jane. “They
look like animals—like they have separate lives.”

Jane calls his work self-portraiture, albeit of a unique, and at first
disturbing, kind. Wax surfaces bleed away to reveal other surfaces beneath.
These frames within frames reflect the way the medical scanner slices his brain
into a sequence of flat, two-dimensional images. But Jane’s fusion of art
and science is not about deterioration. It is about understanding—and more
than that, it is about recovery and regeneration.

Until 1989, Jane enjoyed a growing reputation as a painter. But that year,
while on holiday in Rio de Janeiro, he collapsed. When he woke up in London some
weeks later, he could not speak, write or recognise his family or himself. At
first he had no memory, and no awareness of the passage of time. Days, minutes,
months all seemed of equal duration, so that even when some memories did return,
he could make little sense of them. On one occasion he left the hospital in his
dressing gown and boarded a bus to visit his mother, who was dead. Much of his
recovery since then has been spent organising his experience into some kind of
sensible order.

What Jane didn’t know during his stay in hospital—what nobody could
tell him—was that he had contracted herpes simplex encephalitis. For
reasons that are still unknown, the virus has a predilection for certain areas
of the brain in some people. The body’s response is to dispatch immune cells to
the site of infection. This causes swelling which, together with the virus, can
kill off neurons and literally leave holes in the brain. In Jane, the virus
targeted the left temporal lobe, which is responsible for memory and
language.

Jane’s basic faculties began to return within a few weeks and he was able to
leave hospital. But it was not until June 1990—when new MRI scans were
taken—that he began to understand what had happened to him. Because he had
lost his language skills to the virus, Pat, his wife, realised that pictures
would be the easiest, most direct way of explaining to him what had happened. It
was she who first showed him the brain scans.

“The doctors were reluctant to show me them,” he remembers. “But the fact is,
I found them beautiful.” Jane could also see from the scans that the left-hand
side of his brain was different from the right. “So I began to understand what
had happened inside my brain.”

Jane began to use his skills as an artist to make simple ink and pencil
copies of the pictures he was shown. The copies were crude and amorphous,
literal reflections of the scans. But in the eight years since the virus struck,
Jane has made a remarkable recovery—and it’s all there in his work. His
drawings of tissue have given way to paintings that depict images of the mind
and then to full-scale exhibitions. Visceral and urgent, Jane’s images are an
amalgam of abstract style and biography, combined in ways which he could never
have imagined before his illness. And his originality is attracting attention:
the canvases have fired the enthusiasm of critics and collectors.

Jane’s growth as an artist has coincided with a burgeoning ability to face
hard truths. “I’ve been using a computer lately to manipulate some recent
scans,” he says. “It’s been depressing, seeing so clearly how much brain I’m
missing.”

The herpes infection left Jane inhabiting a very strange world. Just how
strange can be gleaned from the fact that he had to relearn many things from
scratch, such as the names of different parts of the body. His regained mastery
of speech is something he can largely credit to his son, Frank, who was born in
1991. The child’s appetite for bedtime stories gave Jane a perfect
reintroduction to words. Reading to his son, he acquired the language by easy
stages, as a child might.

Jane’s recovery is not total. Names still elude him, and reading is difficult
and slow. “Even manipulating images on a computer is taking me ages,” he laughs.
“I can’t follow the bloody menus.” Nevertheless, it is staggering how much he
has relearnt—and how he relearnt it. His damaged brain’s appetite for
learning continues to amaze him. “I remember I wanted to learn English,” he
says, “but what I ended up with at first was something completely different. The
spellings were all wrong, but they had this weird internal consistency. It was
as though my brain knew better than I did how to learn. It was rewiring itself
into a shape that suited itself. Me, I was just along for the ride.”

That sense of alienation—of surfing a healing wave over which he has no
control—has never entirely gone away. “I feel I have a relationship with
what’s inside of me,” he says. “Obviously I can’t actually separate `it’ from
`me’, but there is some sort of dialogue there.” Jane has learnt to harness that
dialogue in his work. “The distance I feel between my self and the brain I see
in the scans—I try to turn that into the distance that an artist has to
their subject,” he says.

Over the past eight years he has continued to succeed at his task. As he got
better, the images from which he works—the scans
themselves—underwent remarkable technical improvement. Unlike the earliest
images of his brain, MRI today generates high-resolution colour pictures. These
advances have helped to fuel Jane’s imagination. “Over time, my paintings get
less and less like illustrations,” he explains. “These days you won’t find
literal correspondences between the paintings and the scans. On the other hand,
thanks to those scans, my understanding of what happened, and what each part of
the brain does, gets more and more precise.”

In 1994, Jane began to add solidity and texture to his works by painting in
wax. For a long time he has wanted to get rid of the signatures in his
work—the array of distinct brush strokes. “You don’t necessarily want to
put your emotion into every stroke,” he says. “The emotion belongs to the piece
as a whole.”

He has found a way to “draw with heat”, often burning holes in a painting
with a blowtorch. By putting several such sheets together, Jane mimics the
effect of looking at the scanned slices of his brain. Behind one layer of tissue
lies another. He turns the canvases as he works, forcing the wax to run in all
directions, creating images that echo the destruction of his own brain. “Looking
at the scans,” he says, “it’s clear my disease wasn’t very interested in
gravity. It moved freely in three dimensions. The damaged shape has a weightless
quality.”

In cultural terms, Jane sees his brand of portraiture, with its scientific
foundations, as a completely natural part of a continuing tradition. “I don’t
think there’s a clear distinction between art and science,” he says. “They
change at the same time.” This progressive partnership has been in evidence
since at least the 16th century, he says. He speaks with authority, although it
is a curious consequence of his condition that he cannot give the names of the
artists who would prove his point. Those memories are no longer there.

But he remains undeterred. His latest venture is also his most ambitious: a
collaborative exhibition with his neurologist, Michael Kopelman of St Thomas’
Hospital in London. Kopelman, together with Alan Colchester’s image-processing
team at the University of Kent in Canterbury, has taken a new series of scans of
Jane’s brain and created three-dimensional images of it. Jane intends to enlarge
these pictures to about 2 metres square and then work wax, pigment oil, charcoal
and other materials into the images to enhance their 3D appearance. Then he will
overlay pages of text taken from reports by doctors, critics and scientific
commentators, so the pictures become a palimpsest of experience and
interpretation.

“We can meld science and art together,” says Jane. “And we’ll do that not to
obscure what’s going on, or prettify it, but to make it clear. Dr Kopelman and I
want to open the doors of understanding into the scientific interpretation and
artistic vision of brain scan images, so that people can see them as things of
beauty as well as knowledge.”

For many critics, however, Jane’s work far exceeds these stated ambitions.
“When you look at David Jane’s work,” says Denna Jones, curator at the
London-based Wellcome Centre for Medical Science, “your reactions aren’t
anything to do with disease. It’s not even to do with that interest in
body-mapping you see so much of these days. It’s simply a continuation of
self-portraiture—part of a tradition five centuries old.” If the
18th-century painter William Hogarth had had access to the technology Jane uses,
“he’d probably have done the same thing”, says Jones.

Jane doesn’t disagree. “I was always considered an abstract artist and I
never felt happy with that,” he reflects. “I certainly can’t be called
`abstract’ now, at any rate. You can’t get more visceral than to paint your own
brain.”