Helen Fisher, Love Expert

"For over three decades, Dr. Helen Fisher has been instrumental in shaping what we know about the evolutionary origins of human behaviour and romantic love. A prominent public intellectual and active interdisciplinary scholar, her work has changed the way social and behavioural scientists think about the nuclear family and the reasons why humans form pair-bond relationships. By combining a variety of methodologies, her research on romantic relationships has continued to challenge conventional wisdom and shed new light on the intense human experiences of moving in, and out, of love."

https://www.elsevier.com/connect/anthropologist-and-love-expert-helen-fisher-on-the-mysteries-of-love

Holding the Paradox of Love and Pain

A friend recently introduced me to the idea of 'holding' the paradox of love and pain. 'It's like day and night' she said, 'they go together'.

I started to think about this from the perspective of the notion of a blueprint to life/art I'd developed through my creative research projects: This involves a dynamical oscillation between any oppositional tension that keeps the pot a-stir, leading to a 'becoming' through which an outcome or 'knowing' can emerge. In other words, this oscillation between tensions (that might be seen as between subjectivity-objectivity, intuitive-rational, inner-outer, self-other) drives a flow of action that leads something from the unknown into the known (or perhaps in love's case, from confusion to compromise) ... and ultimately towards the emergence of novel thinking or outcomes.

As for us two-legged emotional creatures, what more powerful oppositional tension is there to cause confusion and chaos, than being catapulted between love and pain. All those tragic romantic love stories written and passed down through the ages promulgate the immense power behind one of life's most viscerally 'felt' paradoxes. Paradoxical because with love, pain comes pre-wrapped as part of the package. Pain is inevitable, either through the chaotic dissolution of a relationship or in the end, a death. And this is true for all kinds of love, romantic, familial, or more broadly, the universal love of humanity. 

Dissolution or death is not always determined by a progressive, entropic decline towards an inevitable ending, but often there is a flash-point through which a shift of some kind takes place, and a rupture occurs that changes everything so significantly that you can't recognise the relationship as it was in its original form. This is the point of paradox, where novelty arises from those oppositional tensions central to the love-pain spectrum. Some part of us is transformed. One might say then, that any love-pain experience helps us to grow.

Those perennial, mythical love stories teach us this, even the lives and loves of real characters (such as Soloman and Sheba or John and Yoko) are a testament to the transformational, destructive/creative power of love. And I plan to investigate some of these. 

SO WHAT DOES ALL THIS LOVE STUFF HAVE TO DO WITH MY ART PRACTICE? 

Within my usual process of 'art-making', I start with an insight, a pointer. It's not always clear why I'm being beckoned to head down a particular path but I've learnt to trust in the process and to follow the breadcrumbs. Something in the timing of what my friend said deeply resonated. But why 'love and pain' and why the need to hold the paradox? What did it have to do with notions of empathy, unbound consciousness and the merging of subject-object/self-other, which underpinned my practice?

If however, all is interconnected in the Life-field (a term I use speculating there is an unseen ocean of unbound consciousnesses, or Jung's 'collective unconscious') and to empathise is to 'merge' albeit partly with an-Other for a shared subjective experience, what is at risk? Where do I end ... and you start, my love? Where is the boundary between us; is it the skin or is it beyond the boundary of the skin? In Wuthering Heights, Catherine had fully merged with her Other when she exclaimed: "I don't love Heathcliff, I am Heathcliff". Can true love ever be broken? What is at play in the ether during physical separation through both time and space that keeps us connected. Is there a red thread like the one Ariadne tied to Theseus' ankle that helps us find our way back to our significant Other?

And following from this, why do we have significant Others? How do we recognise them and what is the purpose of the attraction/connection? Is there something generated from a particular coupling that is useful either to a self or to a society?

Considering whatever I research follows me like a shadow into my own experiences, as I write I am thinking, "Do I really want to bring this on?" Would I embark Zombie-style, on a hero's journey looking for something I'd lost ... my own lost love perhaps? If I were to stay true to my methods, using Karen Barad's notion of onto-epistemology, there is an oscillation between subjective and objective experiential tensions that is necessary for any real 'knowing'. I must be prepared to have an ontological foot in the door so to speak, for some novel thinking to emerge, rendering my creative research fruitful ... and with some 'Strange Little Attractors' all bunched and bulging in readiness to enter the gates of consciousness !!

As I embark on this journey some initial questions arise:

"Could love, otherwise doomed, last if we learn to hold the paradox and simply accept that love hurts, nicely?"

"Why are some romantic connections more powerful than others? Is there unfinished business from other lives or times"? "Why do we keep returning to, or circling prior loves (e.g. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton)?"

"What do stories and myths tell us about powerful romantic connections (Tristan and Iseult, Romeo and Juliet) and love sacrifices made in the service of other commitments (Jesus and Mary Magdelene)? Is there anything in the field that might uncover such archetypes, either mythologically or historically, as a phenomenon?"

"Are there any culturally significant motifs that point to how tragic-romantic connections are transformative and therefore useful to partners or society at large?" "What do we learn from them?" "And why do such love stories remain so deeply embedded in our cultural consciousness and personal psyches?"

WISH ME LUCK AND STAND BY FOR UPDATES AND OUTCOMES!



APPENDIX: A few tragically romantic entanglements to explore (recommended by friends), for when you think you've got it tough! Feel free to add to the collection by leaving a comment.

A Million Little Pieces, James Frey 
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Birds without Wings, Louis de Bernières
Candy, Luke Davies
Delicatessen, Gilles Adrien, Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Dr Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
Elvira Madigan, Bo Widerberg
Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
Love Story, Erich Segal
My Friend Leonard, James Frey
Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austin
The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Swept Away, Kamery Solomon
Tess of the D'urbevilles, Thomas Hardy
The Fiery Angel, Valery Bryusov
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
The Prophet, Kahil Gibran
The Slave, Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Virgin and the Gypsy, D. H. Lawrence
Tristan and Iseult, a Medieval legend

Yinka Shonibare – the mythic/fantastical as a turn from global violence

Yinka ShonibareResponding to global conflict and violence through a turn to the mythical or fantastical of childhood...

Posted by Susie Marcroft on Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Belinda de Bruyckere collaborates with friend and dancer Romeu Runa

Belinda de Bruyckere collaborates with dancer, Romeu Runa, on themes of 'suffering and lust' ....

http://hauserwirth.cmail20.com/t/ViewEmail/r/B4D58A66A6A7CE162540EF23F30FEDED/D2EAF0DEE68253E11A01488700E2614F
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Sunday, January 24, 2016

My end thought for the year that 2015 has been for all of us.

This theory can affirm that like those stunningly...

Posted by Susie Marcroft on Saturday, December 19, 2015

Chopping Board and Colander Come Full Circle

Long after making this piece, I realised it responded to feelings of discomfort around having to fell a camphor laurel...
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Saturday, December 12, 2015

Hickman on Harman

FOR THOSE INTERESTED IN OBJECT ORIENTED ONTOLOGY OR SPECULATIVE REALISM... THIS WAS WORTH SHARING.Hickman on GRAHAM...
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Friday, December 11, 2015

Pablo Neruda and Ben Okri's 'A Way of Being Free'

Below are some of Ben Okri's quotes on the artistic compulsion that resonated for me. I wanted to capture them, to revisit them whenever I needed confirmation ... or consolation? These words struck a chord in me and I linked the artist's ability to creatively and mythically transform 'reality' to Neruda's passionate love poems, particularly my favourite, Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines (see transcript below). 


Excerpts from Chapter One: 'While the World Sleeps'

"The poet needs to be up at night, when the world sleeps; needs to be up at dawn, before the world wakes; needs to dwell in odd corners, where Tao is said to reside; needs to exist in dark places, where spiders forge their webs in silence; near the gutters, where the underside of our dreams fester. Poets need to live where others don't care to look, and they need to do this because if they don't they can't sing to us of all the secret and public domains of our lives. They need to be multiple witnesses around the central masquerades of reality in order to convey fully the unimaginable dimensions of the deity's terrible and enchanting dance.

"The poet turns the earth into mother, the sky becomes a shelter, the sun an inscrutable god, and the pragmatists are irritated. They want the world to come with only one name, one form. The antagonists of poets and other transformers are those who refuse to see the fluid nature of reality, who cannot perceive that each individual reality is different. Laws do not bind our perceptions. There are as many worlds as there are lives. 

"Poets are set against the world because they cannot accept that what there seems to be is all there is. Elias Canetti wrote once that: "The inklings of poets are the forgotten adventures of God." Poets are not the unacknowledged legislators of the world. They come with no tablets of stone, and they do not speak with God. They speak to us. Creation speaks to them. They listen. They remake the world in words [or pictures] from dreams. Intuitions which could only come from the secret mouths of gods whisper to them through all of life, of nature, of visible and invisible agencies. Storms speak to them. Thunder speaks to them. Flowers move their pens. Words [or pictures] themselves speak to them and bring forth more words. The poet is the widener of consciousness.

"... Politicians, heads of state, kings, religious leaders, soldiers, the rich, the powerful – they all fancy themselves the masters of this earthly kingdom. They speak to us of facts, policies, statistics, programmes, abstract and severe moralities. But the dreams of the people are beyond them, and would trouble them. It is they who have to curb the poet's vision of reality. It is they who invoke the infamous 'poetic licence' whenever they do not want to face the inescapable tragedy contained in, for example, Okigbo's words: "I have lived the oracle dry on the cradle of a new generation". It is they who demand that poetry be partisan, that it take sides, usually their side; that it rides on the back of causes and issues, their causes, their issues, whoever they may be.

"... If the poet begins to speak only of narrow things, of things that we can effortlessly digest and recognise, of things that do not disturb, frighten, stir, or annoy us, or make us restless for more, make us cry for greater justice, make us want to set sail and explore inklings murdered in our youths, if the poet sings only of our restricted angles and in restricted terms and in restricted language, then what hope is there for any of us in this world?

"Those of us who want this are cowards, in flesh and in spirit. We fear heroic heights. We dread the recombining of the world, dread a greater harvest of being. We sit lazily and demand that our poets draw the horizon closer. We therefore become separated from our true selves. Then even beauty can seem repugnant. Then, we no longer recognise who we are, and we forget what we used to be, what states we sometimes inhabited, what extended moments of awareness. It is those who are scared of reality, of their own truths, of their own histories, those who are secretly sickened by what they have become, who are alarmed by the strange mask-like faces that peer back at them from the mirrors of time, it is they who resist the poetic. They resist the poetic with all their hidden might because if they don't, the power of words speaking in their own heads would burst open their inner doors, and all the monsters breeding within would come bounding out and crashing on the floor of their consciousness. What would hold their inner frames together then? They have to suppress the poetic, or accept it only on blurred terms, or promote its cruder imitations, for the simple reason that they have long ago begun suppressing eruptive life and all its irreconcilable shadings, its natural paradoxes.

Okri, B 1997, 'While the world sleeps' in A Way of Being Free, London, UK: Phoenix House, pp. 1–15.




(In memory of my mother)

Tonight I can write the saddest lines

Write, for example,"The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance."

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her void. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. 
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

– Pablo Neruda

What I term the 'life-field', Levi Bryant describes as vortices.

Artists and writers - those who leave a 'novel' mark - might find this interesting.

The interconnection of the 'life-field' not as separate 'objects' but as a dyad, or vortices as viewed by speculative realist Levi Bryant. 

Artists and writers - those who leave a 'novel' mark - might find this interesting.The interconnection of the '...
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Monday, October 26, 2015

The Real Princess (Princess and the Pea)

I can see a new work in this with many themes around the feminine, so I'm saving the story here.
It's worth another 'adult' read for although it was first published in 1835, it has a very pertinent message for today.

Story by Hans Christian Andersen

THE REAL PRINCESS

There was once a Prince who wished to marry a Princess; but then she must be a real Princess. He travelled all over the world in hopes of finding such a lady; but there was always something wrong. Princesses he found in plenty; but whether they were real Princesses it was impossible for him to decide, for now one thing, now another, seemed to him not quite right about the ladies. At last he returned to his palace quite cast down, because he wished so much to have a real Princess for his wife.

One evening a fearful tempest arose, it thundered and lightened, and the rain poured down from the sky in torrents: besides, it was as dark as pitch. All at once there was heard a violent knocking at the door, and the old King, the Prince's father, went out himself to open it.

It was a Princess who was standing outside the door. What with the rain and the wind, she was in a sad condition; the water trickled down from her hair, and her clothes clung to her body. She said she was a real Princess.

"Ah! we shall soon see that!" thought the old Queen-mother; however, she said not a word of what she was going to do; but went quietly into the bedroom, took all the bed-clothes off the bed, and put three little peas on the bedstead. She then laid twenty mattresses one upon another over the three peas, and put twenty feather beds over the mattresses.

Upon this bed the Princess was to pass the night.

The next morning she was asked how she had slept. "Oh, very badly indeed!" she replied. "I have scarcely closed my eyes the whole night through. I do not know what was in my bed, but I had something hard under me, and am all over black and blue. It has hurt me so much!"

Now it was plain that the lady must be a real Princess, since she had been able to feel the three little peas through the twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds. None but a real Princess could have had such a delicate sense of feeling.

The Prince accordingly made her his wife; being now convinced that he had found a real Princess. The three peas were however put into the cabinet of curiosities, where they are still to be seen, provided they are not lost.

Wasn't this a lady of real delicacy?

Source: (viewed 21 June, 2015)

The 'Provincialism Problem' simply neoliberalised in the form of today's globalised art world

Following on from Australian critic Terry Smith’s classic 1974 essay “The Provincialism Problem”, this article discloses...
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Saturday, June 20, 2015

Can a child have 'agency'?

There is an interesting connection in this discussion between the notion of 'neoteny' (as a specie's evolutionary...
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Collapsed divide between plant and human

"It’s just that at a certain moment in the interactions between the world and my involuntary nervous system, I enter the...
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Artists and the Future: Art, Technology and Empathy by Kelly Dobson

This video of a conference titled: "Artists and the Future: Art, Technology and Empathy by Kelly Dobson" highlights where my own work is...
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Sunday, June 14, 2015

One artist's response to FRACKING

An artists response to FRACKING ... well said!"The idea that cement can perpetually keep apart the geospheres throws...
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Wednesday, June 10, 2015

An interconnected globe with interconnected levels of affect.

An interconnected globe with interconnected levels of affect."Today, the colonial frontier between the known and the...
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Monday, June 1, 2015

Personage for animals

Can animals be afforded rights as a legal person and not just a legal thing?http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_wise_chimps_have_feelings_and_thoughts_they_should_also_have_rights
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Halmos - open library resource

This looks like a worthwhile art reference source ... "Halmos is pleased to announce the public launch of Library...
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Tuesday, May 26, 2015

On show until June 14: Toorak Village Sculpture Prize

The Toorak Village Sculpture Prize will continue running until June 14. My work is on show at Nina Leon's Shoe Boutique...
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Sunday, May 24, 2015

Puppy Love IV: mastering 'second position'

'Puppy Love IV: mastering second position'Another Strange Attractor emerged yesterday. Instead of experiencing the...
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Sunday, May 24, 2015

A 'multinatural' perspective

Loads of mythopoetic imagery in this piece (and something here rings 'true' ... and if so, what are we extracting from...
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Sunday, May 24, 2015

More on DENISE GREEN ... (and Chaos Theory)

From the 1980s chaos was seen as an enemy by determinists,  randomness a force to be overcome or denied... For them, chaos was death and disorder, entropy and waste. The opposing faction however experienced chaos as so benevolent, the necessary matrix out of which arises spontaneously an infinity of variegated forms — a pleroma rather than an abyss — a principle of continual creation, unstructured, fecund, beautiful, spirit of wildness. These
scientists saw chaos theory as vindication of Quantum indeterminacy and Godel’s Proof, promise of an open-ended universe, Cantorian infinities of potential... chaos as health."
(from Ong’s Hat – The Beginning)

I've linked this positive view of Chaos Theory with Green's view of her artistic practice:

Metonymy, a term coined by the ethnologist Claude Levi-Strauss "... assigns no specific meaning to signs, as opposed to symbolism, which sets up a direct one-to-one correspondence between a sign and its referent, as in medieval iconography. Rather, it allows meaning to spread 'in all directions, absorbing and conjoining ever new aspects of reality (near and far, conscious and unconscious, present and past …)'. For Green, Aboriginal sand paintings—and, by association, her paintings—are less about form than about meaning; they are not about duality, but fusion and wholeness—an argument that emanates from traditional Eastern aesthetics. If [Clement] Greenberg’s formalism held that all signs point inward, namely, to the medium itself (i.e. that painting is essentially about painting and sculpture is about sculpture), Green affirms abstract painting’s capacity to evoke personal feelings from the unconscious."

Denise Green's 'Metonymy in Contemporary Art: a new paradigm'

(Denise Green is showing at Venice Biennale).

Definitely on my 'to read' list:

'Metonymy in Contemporary Art: a new paradigm'

In this book Denise Green develops an original approach to art criticism and modes of creativity which is inspired by aspects of Australian Aboriginal and Indian thought that are relevant to contemporary painting and current aesthetic sensibilities. The book interweaves her own evolution as an artist, a critique of Clement Greenberg and Walter Benjamin, and commentary on other artists.

Denise Green introduces the concept of metonymic thinking, as developed by the late poet and linguist, A. K. Ramanujan, one that is often different from what is present in Western art critical writing. In Ramanujan's formulation of metonymic thinking, the human and natural worlds are intrinsically related to one another as are the transcendent and mundane worlds. Metonymic thinking in contemporary art implies that one must take into account the inner world of the artist. When artists create metonymically there is a fusion between an inner state of mind and outer material world.

Denise Green had first discovered this mode of thinking in her own work and shows how it has been present in the evolution of her work. It is also applicable to the work of other contemporary artists, such as Agnes Martin, Joseph Beuys, and Brice Marden, among others. This different aesthetic and cognitive mode is often missing in the critical discourse on contemporary art. Denise Green's argument allows contemporary art to be interpreted from a broader, more global and pluralist perspective. (www.denisegreen.net/pages/writings01.html)

Image: Denise Green 2014, 'Appease'
watercolour and charcoal on paper
44.75 x 36.25 inches

Bobby Calves

The calf I've been making is in response to this:

"Most people aren't aware that in order to produce milk, dairy cows are kept almost continually pregnant. Unwanted male calves (known as 'bobby calves') are sent to slaughter in their first week of life so that their mothers' milk can be harvested for human consumption".

For more information on this practice see: http://www.animalsaustralia.org/issues/dairy.php