also see:THE CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM, photos
Systema Nervosa Centrale: The Ghost in the Soft Machine
Catalogue essay by Mel Gooding
‘Everything is a tool for what I want to say, not interested in pure aesthetics or formal devices for no reason’ – a note from Madeleine Strindberg
There is a unnerving directness of address in Madeleine Strindberg's recent work. It is as if she has stripped away artifice and artiness to create images of a compelling and beautiful starkness. In fact Strindberg is one of those artists whose work is a continuous search for a means to speak truthfully; in Rimbaud's phrase, trouver une langue. Finding a language adequate to the discovery of new meanings, the revelation of poetic coherences in the world, entails experiment with diversities of expression; in short, art. And it is her commitment to art as art that distinguishes her work from that of others in our time whose urgency to engage with the real leads them into demonstrative literalness, the presentation of the merely actual. Strindberg's work works by virtue of poetic transformations rather than by ironic reference and polemical implication. Its determining devices are metaphorical; its modus is phenomenological.
Strindberg's subject might be described, at its most simple, as the condition of being alive in the body. It is not however, a simple matter. For the condition is complex, and the possibilities of its objective description are manifold but must tend to the schematic, entailing the separation of functions each of which is dependent upon the other. I am thinking of those encyclopaedia demonstrations in which each of the systems is described in diagrammatic form, derived from anatomical dissection, on a transparent page, and the complex whole represented by their overlay. X-rays, microscopic photography, sonic scanning and endoscopy (etc.) have enabled new disclosures to observation, but whatever their clinical uses these are all necessarily reductive procedures.
These extensions of the visible, whatever their form or medium, have, however, radically changed our consciousness of our habitation of the body, and provided new analogies for its component systems. In Strindberg's source material on the central nervous system, for example, it is likened to a telegraph network and to the electrical wiring in a house; both are admitted to be inadequate but useful.
Our objective knowledge of things depends upon the perception of similarities within differences and the making of such analogies. That in certain respects the heart is like a pump, the brain like a computer, has had important consequences for medical science, as well as for common understanding.
But art has other purposes than science, and it seeks to serve them by the discovery of resemblances of other kinds than those which facilitate rational and practical under- standings. If the schematics of modern anatomical science and the new technologies of perception have given us a different sense of our bodies than that of our predecessors, then art must address that reality, knowing that it brings with it complex problems of expression, difficulties in the translation of one form of knowledge into another. The revelation in art of realities beyond the reach of objective utterance has its basis in the known and acknowledged. The radiance of the transcendental begins in the light of common day, the metrical architectonics of music and poetry in the heartbeat and the footstep.
Strindberg's principal source for these recent paintings is a scientific textbook she found in a Rome bookshop and brought back to her studio in London. Systema Nervosa Centrale is a comprehensive academic study of the CNS, written in a highly specialized technical Italian. It is illustrated throughout by drawings of a refined and economic elegance, some of the brain pictured from the side with cut- away sections, others derived from microscopic cross-sections taken through the brain from above. (Whatever the advances in other visual technologies, drawing, computer-aided or not, will continue to be the most effective medium for the transmission of systematic knowledge.) They have provided for her imagination something similar (though in its outcomes utterly different) to the inspiration Francis Bacon famously found in the scientific photographs of Muybridge or in a medical textbook on diseases of the mouth.
For what Strindberg found in the textbook drawings was the basis for a metaphorical metamorphosis. In the ready-made schematic diagrams of the cerebral cortex she discovered apt and beautiful analogies with that very aspect of the mind and spirit that defies objective description; in the reductive rendering of the actual and typical she found an imagery that captures something of phenomenological reality. I make the distinction here between the observable and measurable generic properties of the brain as organ, which may be said to exist whether we know of them or not, and which may be reduced to diagrammatic demonstration, and the irreducible reality of our consciousness, which is in every case the unique function of our experience in the body.
The cross-section drawings are configured symmetrically with butterfly-shaped outlines; those of the cerebellum in profile section have the appearance of blossoms, clouds, parachutes, helmets. The discoveries in the paintings of these hidden resemblances are keys to their meaning: it is these metaphorical transformations of the factual to the imagined that give this art its power and significance. From other textbook sources, on the structures and relations of the spinal cord and its radiating nerves (each a complex of insulated fibres), Strindberg has taken, and similarly transformed, the imagery of the sculptures. We are confronted, and surprised, in these extraordinarily and utterly original works, by pictures of the invisible. The central nervous system is nothing more (or less!) than an electrochemical phenomenon; it is the processor of the sensorium, the controller of information necessary to physical survival. But from its mysterious operations issues (how else to say it?) something marvellous, and definitive of our humanity: the individual imagination that generates thoughts like butterflies, ideas like clouds.
