In conception, Echo Objects is easily the most exciting demonstration yet of how a neuroaesthetics might shape up. Crucially, this is a thrilling book to look into: reaching for an astonishing range of often recherché visual material, Stafford thinks with an artist’s eye about the cross-cultural affinities that indicate patterns of thought common to the whole human species. As her subtitle promises, images are shown to perform cognitive work: attention-capturing structures, such as nets and knots, portraits and maps, emblems and intarsias, become the drivers of her discussion, suggesting ways that brain activities themselves might be organised. Among the resulting profusion of intriguing linkages and aperçus (a delirious profusion, it’s true), Stafford lays hold of the most intriguing of all neurological discoveries. In the brains of monkeys, it was shown in 1992, there are cells that fire identically, whether the animal itself is performing an action, or whether it observes the action being performed by another agent. We may assume that such ‘mirror neurons’ play a role in human brains also. I do, because here at last lab research overlaps with the flavour of the studio: as I concentrate on drawing a certain gesture or expression, I find my whole body involuntarily clenching to approximate the attitude I am after. Here we have one of the fairly few points to date on which one might construct a hypothesis of wide application to artistic practice, building from the ground upwards. Stafford explores the way mirror neurons might bear on the art-theoretical issues of imitation and empathy once foregrounded by Gombrich, but since eclipsed: ‘Mimesis Again!’ she entitles one chapter.
Chicago |
281 pp. |ISBN:
9780226770529
