Reviews
States of Mind: Tracing the edges of consciousness
Rachel Giles
Wellcome Collection, London
Until October 16, 2016
'What is consciousness?', asks the opening panel in this
exhibition. 'Scientists still struggle to describe how the
subjective experience of consciousness arises out of the objective
tissue of a human brain.' So, indeed, does the Wellcome Collection.
Rather than try to define consciousness, or current theories of it,
it claims to look at 'the intriguing areas around its edges: those
moments or states of being between wakefulness and sleep, feeling
and anaesthesia, awareness and oblivion.' It might well have been a
challenge to explore what consciousness is through a display, but
what we're left with is so much 'around the edges' that it really
leaves us none the wiser.
The first room, 'Science and Soul', examines 'the mind/body
problem': is mind separate from the brain, from the body that the
brain inhabits? We learn that Rene Descartes' dualism, which
described the mind as a separate entity from the body, 'is embraced
by most major religions in the world.' Displaying a dualistic view
of its own, the Wellcome seems to be suggesting that religious
people just believe in the soul - scientists and rational people
believe in consciousness.
There are few exhibits in this first room, placed in a gigantic,
queasily pink cabinet structure, (with a rippled, brain-like
texture). I was hopeful that here we'd learn something about the
brain itself. But this room is part history, part iconography of
neuroscience: there are 'thought photographs' by Louis Darget from
the late nineteenth century (he attempted to capture images of
thought by pressing photographic plates up against participant's
heads). There are fascinating drawings by Santiago Ramón y Cajal,
hailed as 'the founder of modern neuroscience', showing the
intricate tree-like structures of brain cells which he viewed under
a microscope. We also have the writings of Francis Crick, who
pioneered a neuroscientific basis for consciousness.
Fair enough in terms of scene setting. But next we're led down a
rabbit-hole into the world of synaesthaesia, with Kandinsky's
experiments with the connection between music and art, and the way
Nabokov experienced words as having particular colours (re-created
in an artwork by Jean Holabrad showing Nabokov's entire alphabet in
colour). What we perceive via the senses are of course
manifestations of consciousness. But before going off on such
tangents, the show should really have defined a few parameters of
how consciousness can be understood.
Things get more disorientating from here. You now enter a room
called 'Sleep and Awake'. The display vacillates between populist
sensationalism - news reports about murders committed by
sleepwalkers, extracts from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, incubuses,
alien abduction - and 'serious' art installation, such as a pillar
emitting recordings of those who suffer from sleep paralysis. It's
crass juxtaposition. The cultural artefacts in this section, many
from Wellcome's own collection are not uninteresting - they just
seem randomly selected.
In the next section, we're told 'the particular experience of
being you - is a key aspect of human consciousness' - well, yes.
Language and memory are tools of this experience. Interesting stuff
- but how to show this? Mary Kelly's Post Partum Document is here,
but it doesn't illustrate this point. Kelly's series of inscribed
stone tablets, chronicling her anxiety about her child's
development and whether she's a good enough mother, make
uncomfortable reading, but don't explore the show's premise
clearly. Nor does a sound installation, which contrasts a young
boy's acquisition of language with the utterances of a stroke
patient with aphasia. Behind a hospital curtain we hear disembodied
voices responding to Jules Verne's A Journey to the Centre of the
Earth. This, apparently, 'explores concepts of language, meaning
and identity.'
In the last section, 'Being/Not Being', the show explores coma,
brain injury, anaesthesia and locked-in syndrome through various
films and artistic works. Some way of bringing all this together is
missing. Finally, in the most stunningly unimaginative piece of
curation I've ever seen, there is a copy of an NHS report, in a
glossy ring binder, entitled Accidental Awareness under General
Anaesthesia in the UK and Ireland, for us to peruse.
This show was a great idea, in theory. Consciousness is a hot
topic. The Wellcome is well-placed to lead the interested enquirer
through it, surely. But it has fallen into the trap of rummaging
through its collections, seeing what it can find, and assembling
them under a few key headings - rather than really trying to
address 'the hard question' of consciousness. Worse, it's relied
too much on disparate art installations, quite incapable of pulling
some, any kind of narrative thread out of this knotted mess. There
are no answers, but there are also no questions. There is neither
the appropriate art, nor the appropriate science, (let alone the
philosophy or religion) that would help someone explore this
subject; just a mixed bag of popular cultural references. I left in
an irritated, befuddled brain-fog.