The Paper Collagist, George Sakkal

cognitive unconscious visualism

It is time to re-examine the theory of art advanced by Marcel Duchamp and his followers. Duchamp’s theory replaced the theory of ‘modern’ art, most associated with Paul Cezanne, who advocated a methodology using the retina of the eye and the unconscious mind as the means to discover composition and create art. Duchamp’s theory, ideology-based and focused on the conscious mind, has come to dominate the direction of art for the past fifty years, ending the modernist approach to art creativity and introducing the postmodern era. New discoveries in neuroscientific, cognitive psychology, however, have implications for art creativity that call into question whether Duchamp’s theory accurately reflects the creative response.

The widespread influence of Duchamp’s theory of art on culture has led many art historians to believe Marcel Duchamp the most important artist of the twentieth century—replacing Pablo Picasso. During their lifetimes both artists found fault with one another. Duchamp was unimpressed with Picasso’s compositional approach to art creativity. Picasso had little respect for Duchamp’s conscious-mind theory of art. When Picasso learned of Duchamp’s death in 1968 he was heard to say simply, “He was wrong.”1

Could Picasso have been right in his assessment of what became Duchamp’s greatest legacy, the dramatic change the direction art has taken since the modern era ended? In which theory of art will we find the basis for human art creativity: the modern, of Paul Cezanne, embraced by Pablo Picasso, or the postmodern of Marcel Duchamp and his followers? Until the late 1950s the theory of art involved the use of the retina of the eye. This legacy is traceable back 150 years to Paul Cezanne, the father of modernism.

“There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other. It is necessary to work at their mutual development, in the eye by
looking at nature, in the mind by the logic of organized sensations which provide the means of expression”.3

Cezanne believed the unconscious mind to be ‘organized,’ offering the artist the best opportunity for creativity. Cezanne applied his notion of refining the mind’s organization by repeatedly painting a subject, each portrayal unlike the previous work. Each provided him the opportunity to stimulate the mind further, thus expanding the visual range and depth of composition. Look at the many, varied paintings of one of his most famous subjects: Mount Saint-Victoria. Cezanne believed relying on the unconscious mind, the eye, and the refinements that come with the repetition of subject matter were essential for creativity. His advice to the artist who strayed from this approach:

“If the artist dares to interfere deliberately with what he has to convey, then his own mediocrity filters through. The work produced is inferior.”4

Duchamp considered art creativity from an entirely different position. Foremost, he criticized using the retina. He held Gustave Courbet responsible for having introduced this method into art during the first half of the 19th century before Cezanne. “Since (the time of) Courbet it is believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone’s error . . . it is absolutely ridiculous.”5 The rituality of art and its physicality of sensuous retinal expression were, according to Duchamp, an aberration that resulted in the absence of intellectual content in the art produced. He described artists like Monet as “just house painters who painted for the pleasure of splashing greens and reds together.” This retinal approach, Duchamp believed, did not use the mind; it was not cerebral; “It is purely retinal.”6 He took exception to the work of Henri Matisse because it lacked intellectual content and set a disastrous course toward what he called, dismissively, “a new wave of physical painting in this century.”7 According to Duchamp, the painter who uses the retina to conceive and compose art and “just puts down what he sees is stupid.”8

Duchamp had strong objections to Cezanne’s notion that the unconscious mind had any role to play in the creation of art. Like the retina, he believed the unconscious should be avoided. It possessed ‘animal’ and ‘primitive’ instincts—a mind void of any potential for intellectual expression. Duchamp’s impression of the unconscious was in part influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud, whose popularity was spreading across Europe in the 1920s. Freud is recognized as one of the first psychologists who approached the mind scientifically. Much of Freud’s work focused on the unconscious mind as a storehouse of repressed emotion, buried memories, primordial drives and unthinkable desires. While Andre Breton and the surreal artists saw Freud’s attention to the unconscious as inviting more such attention in the arts, Duchamp understood it as justification to place it off limits for use.

After gathering a group of artists who came to share his beliefs, Breton, a friend and admirer of Duchamp, made numerous attempts to have Duchamp join his inner circle of artists and attend their gatherings. Duchamp kept his distance and stayed away from Breton’s surrealist group meetings. In 1967, the year after Breton died, Duchamp made his feelings about the unconscious known. “I myself have never had a part in any such group explorations of unknown lands, due to that something in my character which prohibits me from exchanging the most intimate things of my being with anyone else.”9

Duchamp would seek to dissociate himself from the unconscious, believing it had nothing intellectual to offer. He held to the conviction that it was by way of the conscious mind that the true pathway to artistic freedom could be achieved. Duchamp saved his most biting critique for Cezanne’s belief in the importance of repetition in an artist’s work. He referred to artists who followed this procedure, who devoted themselves to exploring the subtleties of painting by executing a series of works or who expressed a particular subject from a variety of viewpoints, as engaged in ‘masturbation.’ 10 Duchamp opposed “the repetition of something already accepted.” He regarded this practice as simply a vehicle for public recognition. He declared this approach to be all about ‘style’ and ‘taste’. It resulted in the artist sacrificing use of his intellectual capacities and imprisoning him instead to the ritual of ‘habit.’11 It was to avoid being identified as one who repeats his work, he claimed, that he ceased painting in 1923.

The ‘ready-mades,’ introduced by Duchamp as early as 1913, were meant to serve as a means to break with the tradition of repetition. According to Duchamp the ready-made was undefined, being a variety of manufactured objects chosen by the artist without pointing to one’s self, with no chance of repeating himself. There could be no association to the artist whose presence in a series of works could not be recognized by known elements of style. For Duchamp the ready-made meant a clean break from the condition of habit—repetition—an important prerequisite to separate the artist personally from the art object—to attain ‘indifference’ to the art object and thereby achieve complete personal, intellectual and artistic freedom.

For the same reason, he discarded dependence on the retina, believing its use prevented access to the cerebral cortex—the thinking part of the brain, he abandoned the unconscious. Duchamp’s turn to the ready-made, an instant form of ‘art’, required no method of composition. It was attained instantly by a simple act of selecting and signing. The conscious mind acting conceptually merely produced the ‘idea’ that the artist used to choose. According to Duchamp it was the conscious where the ‘concepts’ and ‘ideas’ were formed that the artist could use to create, thus avoiding the retina and along with it the visual ‘image’ of art. The concept approach that Duchamp initiated came to define art in the second half of the twentieth century as a mental act rather than a visual one. 12

Thus, Duchamp advanced a new theory of art; abandoned was Cézanne’s era of modern art where the art created was the result of a time-honored methodology, a search for composition using the retina and the unconscious mind. Beginning in the early 1960s this newly accepted theory of art promoted ideas, art formed conceptually in the conscious mind, its only source. And since his death in 1968, Duchamp’s anti-retinal, conscious-mind, concept theory of art has grown in acceptance, today providing the theoretical foundation to support and justify almost all movements of art. The avant-garde and the academies have joined together to champion, embrace, and steward this theory of art based on ideology and influenced a series of art movements that have collectively become known as ‘postmodernism.’ Duchamp, its father, has attained a more lasting and far-reaching effect on the art of our time than Cezanne or Picasso. 13

George Sakkal, Earthquake 9.0, Japan, 2011. Paper Collage, Courtesy of the artist.

Duchamp‘s attack on Cezanne’s art was—even more than anti-retinal—anti-human. Duchamp’s understanding of the unconscious—influenced largely by the information available at the time, Freud’s writings, and the position of the Surrealists—concluded that the unconscious was primitive, animalistic and unreliable. Even today, many regard the unconscious as a storehouse of repressed emotion. Freud himself gave little or no importance to whether the unconscious could make a positive contribution to cognition or to knowing. 14

In the light of what was known, Duchamp’s turning away from the unconscious to the conscious mind as the path to intellectual freedom seemed an obvious, some might say brilliant, decision. Duchamp reasoned that, by avoiding the dominance given to the retina and the unconscious functioning of the brain, the artist was now freed to directly access the thinking power of the cerebral cortex through conscious thought. Ideas formed knowingly by the mind—not visual objects limited by the retina or accidents in the course of repetition—could advance art to intellectual places hitherto unexplored and give new meaning to art and the direction(s) that art could take.
Duchamp brought the ‘mind’ center stage into art, exceeding even the involvement that it had in the surrealistic movement, and it is here that Duchamp exposed the weakness in his body of knowledge. His understanding of the significant differences in the operation of the two ‘minds’ of the human brain limits his credibility as an art theorist. Duchamp knew virtually nothing about the functionalities of either the unconscious or the retina of the human eye. He had it all wrong. Within the past forty years, scientific discoveries in the field of cognitive psychology and research in the various areas of neuroscience have advanced our understanding of the functionalities of the unconscious and conscious minds. There are those instances where scientific discoveries prove a theory to be factual. In other cases it can reveal a theory to be fictitious. Current science discoveries when applied to human creative functionalities contradict virtually every aspect of Duchamp’s theory of art, his pathway all artists should follow, and reduces it to the level of fiction.

Science reveals not the simplistic and primitive entity Duchamp and his followers conceived, but a complex, sophisticated unconscious mind, a colossus that controls nearly all the human functionalities, far beyond the status assigned to it by Freud. The unconscious can contain repressed emotions as Freud believed, but it also contains all the emotions and associated experiences of a lifetime, stored in billions of neurons (brain cells) responsible for the senses, memory, and most of the rest of our cerebral activity.

Our five senses—themselves brain functions—unconsciously process eleven million bits of information per second. 15 In combining this sensory information with previously stored patterns (the ‘experience’ drawn from memory), the brain generates perception, thought, and emotion: functions central to the act of artistic creativity. The processing of this information is regulated in several hundred different regions of the brain and involves countless microcircuit neuron organizations. Nearly one hundred billion neurons compose the brain. 16 The number of possible unconscious neuron interactions at any given moment exceeds the estimated number of particles of matter in the universe. 17 This vast, near infinite network of processing transactions is organized and regulated by our unconscious outside of the realm of our self-awareness. In stark contrast (it could not conceivably be otherwise), it has been estimated that the maximum capacity of the conscious mind to process bits of information is in a range of twelve to forty-five bits of information per second. The ‘simplistic’ unconscious mind Duchamp advised artists to avoid processes some eleven million bits more of information in a second more than does the conscious mind. Consciousness handles a minuscule fraction of a percentage of all incoming information. All the rest is processed unconsciously. 18

Duchamp believed that the conscious mind is where the artist should concentrate his efforts to form a ‘concept’ of art; to make art a mental act rather than a visual one. He theorized this to be an expression of free will and the true pathway to creative intellectual freedom. The question is whether such a pathway actually exists. Science explains that one of the reasons we find this notion so acceptable is that it is based on our beliefs as to conscious free will. We make a choice, form an intention or visualize an idea and then enact the decision. One might assume, as Duchamp did and his followers continue to assert, that the experience of consciously willing an action and the causation of the action by the person’s conscious mind are the same thing. As it turns out, they are entirely opposite. 19 The art world has found Duchamp’s position plausible because of our fundamental belief in our own free will, derived at least in part from our conscious subjective experience of possessing it. The subjective experience of will alone, however, is insufficient, even flawed, evidence of the existence of free will.

Recent discoveries reveal that our decision to act or form an ‘idea’ or the ‘concept,’ whether of art or of anything else, originates first unconsciously. The brain, outside our awareness, acts along separate pathways to form ideas and intentions. 20 In this sense the unconscious mind has been identified as cognitive where goals, ideas, and associated behavior form and function knowingly outside of awareness, with properties similar to those previously deemed fundamental and exclusive to conscious control. 21 Ideas that we assume originate in the conscious actually develop in the unconscious and are transferred to the conscious, making it appear that the conscious mind ‘willed’ the thought, when in fact we unconsciously decided to act well before we have made the decision to act. We now know that the existence of conscious ‘free will’ is an illusion.22

At best, we possess only the awareness of consciousness. The thoughts that we attach to our actions therefore cannot be the true ‘causes’ of the actions. Their causal connections are something we ascribe to them. Conscious will is an experience not a cause. It is essentially an unconscious phenomenon, conscious only when perceived. 23 If conscious thought exists at all, it is an overlay. 24 Duchamp was wrong. No pathway to intellectual creative freedom exists solely by way of the conscious mind. It may not even play a part in creative expression. The conscious mind may only be an illusion.

It is now understood that if one were to rely conceptually upon the conscious mind to serve as the generator of creative expression, the relative result would most certainly be drawn from an infinitesimally minute part of the human creative capacity—and reflect artistic results accordingly. Conscious-mind art conceptualization demonstrates the micro-idea of intelligence or awareness at its most simplistic level. Rather than brilliance, the resulting expression may border on the realm of ignorance. 25 Cezanne’s notion that creativity results from a search for composition, a search that involves and relies on the superior capacity provided to us by our unconscious, is now more than simply a belief. We know it to be true. Picasso, it turns out, was right: “He [Duchamp] was wrong.”

Recent neuroscience on repetition in the act of creativity supports Cezanne’s approach and contradicts Duchamp’s position that habitual creative activity serves as a detriment to intellectual development. People are creatures of habit and the more they resort to an activity the more the activation stimulates the neurons of the brain, 26 a fundamental principle involved in the act of learning. 27 Stimulation activates other neuron structures, including the gaps between neurons known as synapse, spaces that are the connecting links to other neurons across which stimulations travel. Expanding neuron and synapse structure builds brain capacity and size. We now know that repetitive acts of creativity result in changes in neural pathways and that the creation of new ones constitutes the basis for learning. Altering the physical structure of neurons stimulates and enhances memory retrieval. Neuroscience research has discovered that individuals involved in repetitive visual creative activity possess a larger hemispheric right side to their brain than those who are not. A thicker neuron structure and more mass to the right side of the brain represent capacities directly related to and influenced by repetitive acts of behavior.

Cezanne’s explorations of the subtleties of painting—by executing a series of works or in expressing a particular subject from a variety of viewpoints—was not simply about repeating the same thing over and over again, as Duchamp would have us believe. Rather, it concerned achieving higher levels of inherent unconscious control over every aspect of the methodology of art and its expressive result. The stimulation and expansion neurologically to the right side of the brain by repetitive acts of artistic endeavor contributes to enhanced acts of creativity.

What Duchamp dismissed as ‘style’ may have more to do with the inherent personal qualities of the artist as he interprets unconsciously his life’s experiences, which result in the art he produces. Since each artist has unique stored experience that is exclusive unto him it would seem that the expression in his acts of creativity would be distinctive: the basis of human individuality 27—a characteristic sorely lacking in much of today’s postmodern art.

Duchamp advised avoiding the retina of the eye entirely. He said it was simplistic, its use prevented access to the cerebral cortex of the brain, and artists who relied on it to create art were ‘stupid’. Ironically, the only thing ludicrous—and profoundly so—is continued adherence to Duchamp’s denigration of the role of the eye in the function of human visual creativity. To begin with, we do not see just with our eyes. We see with our brain where the act of vision engages over one billion neurons of the cerebral visual cortex. 28

The retina of the human eye is in a word, miraculous. Next to the human brain it is the most sophisticated and complex entity in the human body having evolved into its present form over the course of millions of years of evolution. The retina of the eye, no more than two millimeters thick, possesses one hundred twenty million photoreceptors. These retinal neurons—very much a part of the brain—catch the light, convert it into electrical signals and transfer this volume of sensory information by way of the optic disk via the optic nerve to the rest of the brain. The brain interprets this electrical information and provides us with visual awareness. The conversion and the transfer process within the brain takes place unconsciously and involves the transmission of ten million bits of electrical signals every fraction of a second, second per second. 29

George Sakkal, Nude Ascending a Staircase, 2010. Paper Collage, Courtesy of the artist.

In the region of the optic disk in the eye, retinal neurons carrying visual information gather together to begin their journey. Because of the location of the optic disk, there is no surface for photoreceptors to catch the light. The result is that blindness is experienced in each eye at a point fifteen degrees lateral to our central gaze: the ‘blind spot.’30 As signals are sent to the visual cortex, the brain detects the presence of these voids and performs an extraordinary act. Depending on what we are seeing at any given moment, the brain automatically draws on the vast neurological storehouse of life’s memory of experiences and perceptively and automatically fills in the voids—some might say, paints the picture that provides us with continuous vision.31 In an important sense we are afforded evidence of the unconscious mind’s creative capability; a capacity that is cognitive, instinctive, habitual and automatic; an embodiment of the human creative response. The unconscious, not the conscious mind, is the source for this constant portrayal of human creativity. It is the unconscious that is afforded access to the billions of neurons from which we draw the ‘memory’ of life’s experience and a near infinite neuron micro-circuitry network to facilitate processing this information. It may be said therefore, that art derives from a cognitive unconscious mind’s visual creative manifestation of human experience.

In the actions of ‘composition search,’ the true pathway to artistic freedom, the cognitive unconscious mind, is involved in many ways. It seeks to fill in visual gaps which it senses to be missing, it identifies parts that are incongruent or make no sense, and it distinguishes them from bits of visual information that make sense, which it perceptively retains. This visual rationalization process takes place automatically.32 Rather than to deny the use of the retina or the unconscious as Duchamp would have us do, we should respect the vast potential our unconscious mental automatic processes provide and fully relinquish ourselves to them to use, explore and develop the creative capacities within us. If we can allow for the limitless flow of the unconscious mind’s provisions and trust in their importance and in the contribution they make, we can truly achieve creative freedom. 33

Ideology and the theory of ‘concept-formed art’ have dominated art ‘appreciation’ for half a century. The postmodern contemporary artist believes his conscious mind provides conceptual, intellectual insight far superior to that offered by his unconscious mind and enables him to know the ‘absolute objective truth.’ 34 He believes his conscious mind’s ‘will’ can be called upon to set him free—cerebrally free, to travel on a creative pathway to select art instantly in the form of ready-mades or other similar instant manifestations. But we now know that travel down this ‘Duchampian’ pathway takes the artist away from himself—to nowhere. Today’s artist has foolishly abandoned his most precious creative attributes—the highly developed, inherent, creative characteristic features formed by millions of years of evolutionary development. Naively, the postmodern artist has decided these assets to be worthless and chooses to discard them. In pursuit of a theory he believes offers intellectual grandeur, he becomes a victim of a cruel ruse, a nowhere man trusting in a well-spoken guarantee that proves to be nothing more than an illusion.

The decisive turning points in the history of every art form are discoveries that bridge a widening chasm between our beliefs and our discoveries. These turning points are revolutionary in that they are both destructive and constructive. They compel us to reevaluate our values and impose a new set of rules. At such times we find ourselves at the edge of a new era, when the seemingly distant provinces of science and art collide and reconcile. 35 We may be at the dawn of such an era; we might call it cognitive unconscious visualism: CUVISM.

George Sakkal, who studied at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, is the father of CUVISM, Cognitive Unconscious Visualism. View his many cuvistic creations at www.georgejesakkal.com