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| Art by Norman Kelly copyright 2008 |
Context for the Art-ifacts
Sat., Sept. 15, 2012
Patti asked me to offer some
context for the art and objects placed in the auditorium and the atrium area. So,
a little background about 3 things: the artifacts, the cubes, and the
phrenology heads.
The artifacts. Early in 2008, Tom asked me about commissioning a
collage that would riff on his brain scan films, which he found to be very cool
and very interesting. Which I found to be creepy and overly scientific.
We kept talking and more material
surfaced: in addition to the films showing lateral and vertical slices of his brain
on grids, we had dark spots in the brain, MRI beeps that sound like Steve Reich
or John Cage, the book A Journey Round My
Skull by a Hungarian writer describing his own brain surgery, holiday
seizures, books by Oliver Sachs, a horror movie poster, zipperhead scars, 16th
and 17th century wonder cabinets, the man with the face tattoo, Tom and Patti’s
collection of phrenology heads and brains in various media, and a lot more.
It began to feel like this story
called for something bigger than a two-dimensional collage—something that spoke
to the brain function and illness, but also to family, community, and adaptability,
and that would illustrate an irreverent sense of humor and quirky aesthetic. So,
to our idea palette we added a shipment of plastic “fourth quality” medical teaching
skulls, then contacted a slew of artists and family members, and, stirred. In
the end, we created a sort of walk-in Wonder Cabinet of curiosities and named
it Cranial Vault—a multisensory, mixed-up media, intergenerational, very
alternative, multiple artist exhibit that we installed in the gallery upstairs
and later at a
café in Silver Spring.
We’ve brought in some of these
items today as remembrances and reminders—a set of beautiful and odd souvenirs
to surprise and amaze you.
The phrenology heads. Phrenology
was a Victorian-era psuedoscience that involved measuring the skull and mapping
sections of the brain to correlate with specific character traits. Tom’s cancer
was in the left parietal lobe, which is strongly associated with disorders related
to language processing and speech. For our exhibit in 2008, Tom and Patti’s
friend Norman Kelly created a coloring book image and we made a zillion copies of it
for visitors to Cranial Vault to fill in. These pages were later bound into a
handmade book.
Norman has created a new Memorial
PhrenHead—there are copies in your programs and in the atrium area afterwards—and
we invite you to fill in these brains today with memories, thoughts, ideas and
leave them in the baskets.
So, here I want to close with just one
of the many passages Tom and I marked together in Frigyes Karinthy’s book and then a
reflection. The passage is about the life-affirming connection between science
and art and it feels like a fit for our creative partnership:
While
I am a great admirer of science, I claim the respect of its representatives for
what I must call my ‘artistic’ conception of life. Art is a complimentary
source of truth, for it enlists the help of the imagination to carry mankind
beyond a mere observation of facts. Real achievement is possible only when both
work in association.”
After the service, I invite you to
rediscover some of the “artifacts” and hope they might serve as conversation
and connection points. As I reflect on the items we’ve collected and made over
the years, I feel like they stand in for the weird and wonderful, cool and
terrible, surprises we each can discover in the journey around our own lives. Our
challenge is to greet them with an open
mind and with flexibility, quiet
courage, humility, and a willingness to embrace changing circumstances and a
dynamic cycle of life’s new normals. Tom showed me that.
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