Event
Date
Presented at From Stars to Brains MCH conference in honor of Paul Davies Canberra, 20-21 June 2006
Introduction
Figure 1. Helen Chadwick Self Portrait 1991*
All images referred to in the text are accessible through Google Images
Helen Chadwick was a British photographic and installation artist who died prematurely in 1996. In this photographic portrait she shows a brain carefully cradled in her own hands. The work functions as a kind of collective self-portrait because all our brains look much the same. When we look at the work what we are aware of is the brain looking at itself. The portrait thus operates on different levels and is rather unsettling.
I should explain why I’m here to give this talk. I’m a research scientist – a palaeontologist - and an artist: I work now in both areas. In doing so I’m very conscious that at one level the two activities are closely linked. The motivation for each rests on a deeply felt need to respond to the natural world.
As a palaeontologist, I’ve spent a lot of time recreating the past, trying to understand evolving life forms and communities: its an engaging narrative. And it’s a field rich in imagery, demanding detailed observations, seeking out patterns in the data, using imaginative visualisation, testing and creating mental models, looking for the revelatory ‘aha’ point, and seeking the most appropriate way to present the story to a critical public, usually by publishing in a scientific journal.
I find that translating this view of the world into an art practice requires similar methods of working and thinking. There is the same process of observation, of collecting information, of testing ways of expression. Then there is the final phase of exposure to the public.
Figure 2. E Truswell - Lophophore 2004
This image is abstracted from nature, and depicts the lophophore, or feeding mechanism, of a brachiopod or lamp shell, drawn from the fossil record.
It is notable that the arts and the sciences generate similar aesthetic responses. Scientists, in fact are more comfortable with the word ‘beauty’ than are contemporary artists. So what is it that underlies this aesthetic response – this charge of pleasure, this sense of rightness - this frisson that we might experience when confronted with a work of art, or an ‘elegant’ solution to a scientific problem? And what aspects of human consciousness might it reflect?
A very substantial literature is currently being generated in relation to this issue. Some of it comes from neuroscientists, some from art historians, some from those wonderful polymath commentators on the world at large.
The kind of questions that are being asked are :
- are we hard-wired for these aesthetic responses?
- do they have some kind of adaptational value? Now or in the past?
- are there universal principles that underlie the making of art – principles that can be separated from an overlay of cultural learning?
- how can they be related to our current understanding of the nature of human consciousness?
This paper is entitled ‘Reviewing the Speculations’, because most of the current discourse is that – speculative – and what I wish to do here is to provide a brief overview of some of the current hypotheses. I want first to touch briefly on the early record of art, then look at some of the commentaries of visual scientists, then come back to what might be called the deeper issues of art and consciousness. I should stress that my comments are confined to the visual arts, simply because that is what I am familiar with, so my examples are very selective.
The evolution of mind
There can be little doubt that the human mind evolved under the selective pressures our human ancestors faced when they lived by hunting and gathering in during the Pleistocene – the last 2 million years or so. We must view the modern mind as a product of this evolution, and ask, are there some ways in which we are still adapted to that way of life? The mind does appear to carry some kinds of knowledge about the world that are intuitive. Language is obviously the best known of these. But we seem too to have a certain kind of intuitive biology. Children are aware at an early age that there is a difference between animate and inanimate objects, and all cultures seem to share basic ideas about the order of the natural world. And we seem too to have an intuitive physics, ideas about gravity, about inertia, about the images of distant objects. And then there may be an intuitive psychology, the ability to attribute mental states to other people. All of these seem to be developed to a degree in small children that cannot be explained by their experience of the world.
The archaeologist Steven Mithen, in his “Prehistory of the Mind” (Mithen, 1996), put forward a speculative thesis concerning ways in which mind might have evolved. Mithen’s approach is well-grounded in fossil history, and indeed, in stratigraphy, based as it is on a careful timeframe. Inevitably, however, the developmental story must remain speculative, because the fossil history is fragmentary, but also because behaviour is difficult to infer from artefacts. Mithen used as a metaphor the mind as a cathedral. The cathedral structure is one of a central nave, surrounded by a range of chapels with specific functions. In the earliest phase he visualised the nave as a seat of ‘general intelligence’, similar to the minds of very young children. The second phase equates the ‘chapels’ with a range of cognitive domains, each looking after a specialised range of behaviours. Hence there are domains of technical, language, and social intelligence. But there is, at first, no interaction between these domains, no flow between them. There is, however, the facility for complex thoughts about tool-making, about interactions between members of the group, and about navigating a way through the natural environment.
According to this thesis, these domains operated more or less independently until a critical point, perahsp datable to around 60 – 70,000 years ago, which is well after the appearance of modern man, Homo sapiens, at around 100,000 years. This point appears to have marked a ‘cultural explosion’, with the appearance of a number of important events. These include shifts in the patterns of tool-making, the colonisation of Australia, and, significantly, of art-making – in the form of wall paintings, body decoration, and burial rituals. Mithen speculates that this might have been the result of linkages occurring between earlier, specialised domains of the mind, domains that were formerly operating in isolation from each other.
This ‘cultural explosion’ was undoubtedly a complex process, and probably spread over time – a lack of hard data and dating the events remains a key problem. As to the causes of the ‘event’, Mithen speculates that it may have been sparked, or driven, by changes in the nature of language. A defining character of the change was increased self-awareness, and this is in part reflected in the making of art.
So, what do we mean by art?
Definitions are difficult and culturally influenced, but essentially we must be dealing with objects that have some kind of symbolic significance, something that refer to events outside the normal confines of time and space, that provides the ability to imagine other worlds. We are thinking of something that gives meaning to images not physically associated with the object, or the event, that are referred to. This can happen too in nature, in the meanings associated with animal footprints for instance. And we think of art as communicating information to others. And it is planned. There is some mental template that controls its execution, the way it is brought into being.
So perhaps the making, and the reading, of art might have been made possible by the bringing together of intelligences that formerly operated separately. What is particularly interesting is that much of the earliest art that we are aware of shows evidence of great technical skills There is no evidence for a gradual development of these skills, such as is seen in the artistic development of a small child. John Berger wrote of early cave art as ‘being born like a foal who can walk straight away’ (Berger, 2006,p.).
Of the known galleries of cave art, the Chauvet Caves in France may be among the earliest. The oldest dates in these, obtained from charcoal from the wall paintings, seem to be about 30 – 32 000 years, although there remains some argument about the accuracy of the dates (see for example Pettitt & Bahn, 2003). The images there are mostly representational (except for some more abstract images with red dots) and include lions, bison, horses, rhinoceros, sometimes aggregated together to form hunting packs. that they For the most part they are line drawings, and show technical skills that would be the envy of many a floundering art student (see for example images in Chauvet et al. 1996) And then there are the better known images from the Lascaux caves, probably some 17000 years old.
Figures 3 – 8. Images Chauvet Cave
Figures 9 – 11. Images Lascaux Cave
What we are seeing in both cases are stores of information about the natural world, information that would otherwise be stored only in the mind. But are they more than that: they almost certainly have spiritual associations, perhaps totemic relationships with the animals on which these hunter-gatherers depended. We can only guess at those. The images are based on visual perception, but they are endowed with meaning beyond that.
While Steven Mithen used these images to suggest the presence of essentially modern minds, this view was challenged by Nicholas Humphrey. Humphrey (1998) saw a great similarity between these cave drawings and those produced by an autistic child, with few language skills. On this basis he suggested that a different kind of mind might be reflected there, but his somewhat audacious view has largely been rejected, at least in part because of the extremely small comparative sample (one individual) of an autistic artist.
Artists as neuroscientists
It is possible to discuss art and aesthetic experience in strictly neurological terms. What can visual perception tell us of the workings of the human brain, and can art be explained on a strictly neural basis?
This approach – the development of a ‘science of art’ - has been taken up by the neuroscientist V.S.Ramachandran. He described his ideas in the BBC Reith lectures of 2003, one of which he called ‘The artful brain’. In that lecture he asked ‘Are there such things as artistic universals?’ Given that there a hundreds of types of art, from the classical Greeks through a range of eastern art forms, through all the isms of western art, are there aspects of art that we respond to irrespective of our cultural background, universals that cut across cultural boundaries. With a colleague, W.M.Hirstein (see Ramachandran & Hirstein, W.,1999) he set out what he considered to be universal laws of art, aspects which are necessary for us to respond to art forms. In these he is essentially seeking a biological basis in this response. He cites the example of the seagull chick who stimulates the red spot on its mother’s beak in order for her to regurgitate food, and which will thereafter respond to any red spot. He carries the principle there into our possible responses to say abstract art – did a successful artist like Picasso for instance, discover shapes that stimulate us – the equivalent of the ‘red spot’?
I do not wish to discuss Ramachandran’s 10 ‘laws’ in detail. But to cite a few examples, he refers for instance, in his first law, to a phenomenon he calls ‘peak shift’, by which he means an intensified focus on the key attributes of shape. When a rat is presented with a particular shape, say a rectangle, it receives a reward. If the shape is then exaggerated, made longer and thinner for instance, the response will be even stronger. The rat is responding to increased rectangularity. This move towards exaggeration is the sort of thing a cartoonist might do.
By isolation (Ramachandran’s Rule 4) he refers to the action singling out an object from its background, the sort of thing that a line drawing might do. Perceptual problem solving (Rule 5) might refer to elucidating meaningful shapes from a blurred image, an experience that may be accompanied by a jolt of pleasure, something for which we get a sensory reward.
Indeed, the solving of a perceptual conundrum brings this reward in a variety of circumstances. A specific instance of this is in facial recognition, which is an important social function, and for which a specific area of the cortex has evolved. We are motivated to seek out face shapes in the most abstract of patterns. This response underlies the work of the American artist Tony Oursler, whose work was shown in the Domain in Sydney last summer. There giant faces are projected onto moving grounds such as trees, and the viewer has to struggle to translate the resulting images into something recognizable. There is, however, eventual pleasure in the translation.
· Figure 13. Tony Oursler – The Influence Machine 2000
There is a link between symmetry and facial recognition, but at a more basic level, Ramachandran makes the point that symmetry (his Rule 6) is a characteristic of biological forms. Things that it may have been important for us to recognize in the past, like predators, or prey, or mates, reveal themselves to us in part through the symmetry of their design.
The vision scientist Patrick Cavanagh has reported ways in which aspects of the visual arts provide insights into the way the brain works. Indeed, he claimed that the whole history of painting and drawing reflects 40,000 years of experiments in visual neuroscience referring to a number of examples as ‘found science’ in the way that sculptors might use ‘found objects. He described these examples as ‘science that can be done by simply looking’ (Cavanagh, 2005).
His thesis is that, in many paintings, the brain appears to accept what might be physically impossible in the real world. We seem to act using a kind of simplified physics. Perhaps our inner physics has this tendency to find shortcuts as a way of enabling our rapid and efficient navigation through the world. He points out several phenomena that suggest this simplified physics when we look at paintings: For instance:
1. We are very uncritical of the way shadows are depicted. Consider the painting by the 15th century artist Fra Carnevale.
· Figure 14. Fra Carnevale Birth of the Virgin 1467
The perspective is accurate, but the lighting is questionable. The figures in the front cast deep shadows; those in the middle ground to the left hardly any at all, and the deep recess is brightly lit. From where? But in looking at the painting it doesn’t seem to trouble us.
2. Another aspect of artistic representation that sheds light on the action of the visual brain is in line drawings. Some of the earliest art we are aware of has the form of line drawings. Recall the images from Chauvet and Lascaux. But in the real world objects are not separated from their backgrounds by lines. We see one mass against another, so why do line drawings work? And they seem to across a range of cultures. So what do they represent to the brain? It seems that artists have found the knack of picking out key contours, those that identify the essential structure of the object. The brain tends to focus on edges, and automatically fills in the rest. Again, this is presumably a navigational device.
· Figure 15. Lascaux Cave
3. This capacity of the brain to fill in detail was exploited by the French impressionists, who frequently used minimal detail, and yet their paintings evoke a strong sense of place and mood. It has been suggested that through this mechanism they connect more directly to emotional centres of the brain.
· Figure 16. Claude Monet Impression. Sunrise 1872
· Figure 17. Claude Monet Autumn at Argenteuil 1873
4. Art shows us too the things we aren’t innately good at. We don’t understand, apparently, mirrors and reflection. Artists have been able to exploit this. Here in what is reputed to be the only nude painted by the Spanish court painter Velasquez, we see Venus looking into a mirror held by her son Cupid (known in Britain as the Rokeby Venus). She is supposedly looking at her own reflection and at that of the viewer. Is it physically possible that she can be doing this? But do we care when we view the painting?
Figure 18. Diego Velasquez Venus and Cupid 1648
These are the kind of responses that Cavanagh claims reflects this very long history of experiments in visual neuroscience.
But, we might ask, is this all that art is about?
It is easy to find behavioural, or selective origins for what we value in art. The simple pleasures of identifying pattern could well have had a biological function in the past, if we were hunter-gathers in the savannah for instance. Being able to identify patterns from background could well have provided food or saved us from threats.
And it’s easy to make an argument that art may have had a role in facilitating sexual selection. We are all too aware that particular human forms enjoyed popularity at different times in art; from the classical body shapes of ancient Greece, the goddesses of Hindu culture, or the sweetness of pre-Raphaelite heroines, they all create and favour certain attributes, usually, though not entirely, relating to the female form.
But these rather simplistic, reductive approaches concerning art have been challenged. The writer and commentator on art and science, Sian Ede, in her book Art and Science (2005), reviewed Ramachandran’s ‘rules’ and notes that while these aspects might be pleasing to us, in art we hope for greater profundity. We seek feelings of heightened intensity. The neurophysiological phenomena might best be viewed as a means to this end, perhaps leading to the deepening of emotional and perceptual experiences.
Structural intuition
Might there not be ways, she argues, in which artists are ‘tuned in’ to the deep structures of the universe? Might it not be in this area that we find universal values in art? It is difficult, of course, to disassociate them from culturally learned responses. But there are instances when aspects of art feel ‘right’ that might point us in this direction.
As an example, take the work of Piet Mondrian. He began as a painter of realism, but moved from that to what we most associate him with, his well-known paintings of grids and squares with bright blocks of primary colours. Mondrian was a theosophist, and much influenced by eastern spirituality. In his paintings, he openly sought what he referred to as ‘the deep order of the universe’. Responses to Mondrian’s paintings have been tested by a psychologist who took the paintings and slightly changed the patterns of verticals and horizontals (McManus et al., (1993). Viewers were then exposed to both the original and the newer versions in the form of a blind test. A majority of people in his experiment showed significant preference for the originals. There is, it appears, a ‘felt rightness’ about these. But we should be careful. Perhaps this is a learnt cultural preference. Have we, in Sian Ede’s words, grown to like “mondrian-ness’?
Figure 19. Piet Mondrian Tableau 1921 – 25
Figure 20. Piet Mondrian Composition with Red 1921
There are other, major movements in painting, which might point in the same direction, hinting at the uncovering of a relationship to deep structures in nature. There is the claimed relationship between the advent of cubism in the early 20th century, specifically by Picasso, and Einstein’s theory of relativity. Did Picasso know about Einstein? It has been suggested (Miller 2002) that Picasso came to know of Einstein through his group of Paris intellectuals, and that, in effect, they were working on a similar problem. In Einstein’s case it was temporal simultaneity; in Picasso’s spatial simultaneity. Personally I am not convinced by this argument, for a variety of reasons, both historical and theoretical. I feel that the cubism is more about spatial memory than relativity, about capturing three dimensions in two.
Figure 21. Pablo Picasso Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 1907
Figure 22. Georges Braque Violin and Candlestick 1910
Another case relates to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. The claim has been made, by a group of mathematicians, that patterns within Pollock’s painting ‘Alchemy’, are fractal (Taylor et al.2000), reflecting the ‘fingerprints of nature’. Further, they claim that the fractal character of his paintings increased during his career.
Figure 23. Jackson Pollock Alchemy 1947
So, in these few examples, if the view were correct that artists are tapping into deep structures in nature, it would seem that they have tapped into a wide range of these. Or, as Sian Ede speculates, have they tuned in to current scientific theories?
Structural intuitions
The idea that there is some kind of resonance between serious art and nature has been explored by a number of commentators. Martin Kemp, for instance, who is Professor of Art History at Oxford, and who writes regularly on art and science issues in the journal Nature refers to ‘structural intuitions’ that are shared by both scientists and artists. The ‘structures’ to which he refers are both structures in the external world about us, and inner intuitions, structures in the mind, if you like, that have evolved to perceive and to understand the world. And he says, that the evolution of the brain has equipped us ‘to ‘set the exterior structures and the inner constructs in ceaseless dialogue’ (Martin Kemp, 1999, quoted in Ede 2005). There is an interplay between intuitive imagination and conceptual understanding; we are constantly readjusting our view of the world, both from external perceptions and mental models.
Some of the factors that are involved in this process may well be cultural, but most human beings share the sensory experiences that are involved in laying down these intuitions.
Another commentator who has explored the way in which the structure of the universe has imprinted itself on our thinking is the astrophysicist John Barrow. In The Artful Universe he points to some of the ways in which we might have become adapted, in the past, to situations that no longer challenge us. Has the environment in which we have evolved affected our aesthetic preferences? One aspect of this is the art of landscape. Because our ancestors spent long periods in the habitats of tropical savannah, do we respond in an emotionally stronger way to this landscape than we do to others? Did it offer advantages that could have enhanced our survival prospects?
Such a landscape has many cues for safe and fruitful human habitation. The scattered tree cover offers shade and protection from predators; food sources are closer to the ground than they are in forested landscapes; long vistas make it easy for us to identify threats and to find a way forward. Did this latter attribute select for the more adventurous among us?
This style of landscape was the preferred ideal among painters in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Romantic landscapes of Claude Lorrain were held up as an ideal for the genre of landscape painting. And there were the manicured, carefully manipulated real landscapes of the likes of Capability Brown, which are still reflected in many of our public park spaces.
Figure 24. Claude Lorrain Pastoral Landscape 1646 - 47
Figures 25, 26. Capability Brown Stowe Chatswood Late 1700s
. Evaluating landscapes was a crucial instinct for our hunter-gatherer ancestors; their survival may have depended on it. But some things trouble me about his hypothesis. Isn’t it a very western view of what we prefer in landscapes? And our ancestors didn’t spend all their time in the African Savannah. If the ‘out of Africa’ thesis is real, then many generations lived in other, perhaps less hospitable environments.
Some recent views of consciousness
I want to look now at some recent views on the nature of consciousness, and to relate them to the work of some contemporary artists. The neuroscientist and physician Antonio Damasio devotes a great deal attention to the issue of emotions and their relationship to consciousness (Damasio 1999). He considers the two to be inextricably linked in fundamental ways. There is, he considers, a hierarchy of emotional categories. There are primary, or universal emotions such as happiness, fear, sadness, anger, disgust, and secondary emotions such as jealousy, guilt, and pride. And there are background emotions that we, or the organism, may be barely aware of – tension, feelings of malaise, or of calm. He refers to emotions as ‘complicated collections of chemical and neural responses’, that have a regulatory function. They are the result of a long history of evolutionary fine-tuning; part of a whole set of bioregulatory devices that equip us for survival.
In a series of arguments, backed up by reference to individual cases, to patients that have suffered some form of brain impairment, he explores the links between emotions and consciousness. When consciousness is suspended, or impaired, emotion is usually suspended as well. And emotion is integral to the processes of reasoning and decision-making. A selective reduction of emotion works against rationality as much as does an excess of it.
He describes consciousness as being not monolithic, and recognises different kinds of consciousness. The simplest is core consciousness, which provides an organism with a sense of itself that is very much about the here and now. It is a simple biological phenomenon. In contrast, extended consciousness has many orders and grades, and evolves across the lifetime of the organism.
Consciousness is often explained in terms of complex cognitive functions, such as language and memory. These are necessary for the top of the range of extended consciousness, but not for core consciousness. They are critical in the generation of the ‘autobiographical self’, which is linked to the sense of identity, and to building the history of the individual self.
Now a great deal of art has to do with emotions, and there are a number of contemporary artists who have made emotion their primary concern, and two in particular that I want to touch on.
Chris Ofili is a black Briton, of Nigerian descent. He is most famous, or notorious, for using elephant dung in his paintings. This he collects this from elephants in London zoos, exiles like himself. Ofili is a serious artist, and his works are usually vibrant and compelling. That which he calls ‘The Upper Room’ is essentially an installation. It has its own special space, and it consists of 13 large paintings. Each is an image of a stylised monkey, each with a jacket and turban, holding aloft a small goblet surmounted by the infamous dung. The paintings are monochrome – each a different colour – the one at the end of the room is the Golden Monkey. The lighting and reflections within the space are vibrant and intense.
Figures 27 – 29. Chris Ofili The Upper Room 2002
The monkey image comes in fact from an early Andy Warhol drawing. The monkeys, and the dung, can be read as a kind of racist taunt, a cheeky anti-colonial jibe if you like, but there is much more to it than that. There is a reference to Darwin’s monkeys, there is an ‘out of Africa’ element to it, and references to a lost Eden. And the room itself, the Upper Room, relates to the Last Supper. Ofili is a Catholic. So what we are being offered are fragments of his autobiographical self.
The communication with the viewer is significant. In us it might generate feelings of anger, awe, amusement, but it touches on a complexity of emotions that we experience in our own personal and cultural histories. We recognize the chapel and religious liturgies, the evolutionary element, the colonial stories, perhaps a collective unconscious in the savannah. Viewing it, we can fill the gaps with our own feelings and memories, many of which lie beyond the reach of rational explanation.
Bill Viola as an American artist who usually works with video. His exhibition, called The Passions was shown at the National Gallery in Canberra in November 2005. The theme of his work is the expression and exploration of emotions. While his subject matter is modern, drawn from contemporary life, it springs from his interest in devotional paintings of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He is interested in extremes of emotion and how to depict them. He is well versed in the Christian and other mystics.
The way he works is to shoot images on 35mm film at high speed, then slow them down dramatically, transfer them to digital images, and play them out on flat plasma screens, so that they can be hung on gallery walls like ordinary paintings, but they are full of actual, though infinitely slow, movement. He uses actors to make his ‘paintings’
Figure 30,31. Bill Viola The Quintet of the Astonished 2000
In this there is a rather careful spatial grouping of individuals. The imagery is hyper real. It depicts a range of emotions shown by the different figures, emotions that are shown by facial expressions and by body and hand movements. The emotions shift and have a fluidity about them (there is a reference in this to Bosch’s Christ Mocked). Viola says in his description of the work that there were ‘peak moments of alignment’ between the actors, moments of heightened intensity. These the old masters couldn’t paint.
Figure 32. Hieronymous Bosch Christ Mocked 1490 – 1500
In his video image Surrender, the use of water introduces a metaphorical element that gives both reflection and immersion. The actors dip into the water and emerge dripping from time to time - the surface shifts – the distortions created are as great as the emotional distortions of the figures.
Figure 33. Bill Viola Surrender 2001
Figure 34. Bill Viola Dolorosa 2000
The diptych Dolorosa is set up to mimic the folding altarpieces of the Middle Ages – or is it just the husband and wife family photographs that we see at home? But there is more than a passing resemblance to the figures of the Virgin Mary and Christ, and as we watch the figures weep and turn their heads ever so slowly from side to side. In commenting on the functions of his art, Viola says he regards art as no mere aesthetic matter. For him it has a healing function. His own work is not for decoration or diversion, but for transformation; for cultivating knowledge of ‘how to be in the world’ or ‘a deeper understanding of your own experience’ which might be translated into a more profound self-awareness, and a correspondingly greater awareness of consciousness in others.
References
Barrow, John, 1995. The Artful Universe. Oxford University Press.
Berger, John, 2006. Here is Where We Meet. Ch.6. Le Pont d’Arc. Bloomsbury, London
Cavanagh, Patrick, 2005. The artist as neuroscientist. Nature 434, 301 – 307.
Chauvet, J-M, Deschamps,E.B. & Hillaire, C., 1995. Dawn of Art:the Chauvet Cave. Harry N.Abrams, Inc. New York.
Damasio, Antonio, 2000. The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotions and the Making of Consciousness. Vintage, London.
Ede, Sian, 2005. Art and Science. I.B.Taurus, London and New York.
Humphrey, Nicholas, 1998. Cave art, autism and the evolution of the human mind. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 8, 165 - 191
Kemp, Martin, 2000. Visualizations: the Nature Book of Art and Science. Oxford University Press.
McManus, I.C, Cheema,B. & Stoker, J., 1993. The aesthetics of composition: A study of Mondrian. Empirical Studies of the Arts 11, 83 – 94.
Miller, Arthur I., 2002. Einstein, Picasso, Space, Time, and the Beauty that Causes Havoc. Basic Books, New York.
Mithen, Steven, 1996. The Prehistory of the Mind: the Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. Thames & Hudson, London.
Pettitt, Paul, & Bahn, Paul, 2003. Current problems in dating Palaeolithic cave art: Candamo and Chauvet. Antiquity 77, 134 – 141.
Ramachandran, V.S. 2003. The Emerging Mind. BBC Reith Lectures, 2003.
Ramachandran, V.S. & Hirstein, William, 1999. The “Science of Art”: a neurological theory of aesthetic experience. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, 15 – 51.
Sullivan, Eve, 2005. Interview with Bill Viola. Artonview 42. Australian National Gallery, Canberra.
Taylor, R.P., Micolich, A.P. & Jonas, D., 2000. Using science to investigate Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Journal of Consciousness Studies: Arts and the Brain, 7.8-9.
Biography
Dr Elizabeth Truswell is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Earth and Marine Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra. She was formerly a research scientist with the Australian Geological Survey Organisation (now Geoscience Australia), and was Chief Research Scientist in that organisation from 1992 – 97.
She has published more than 80 scientific papers, dealing with issues of the evolution of Australian climates and vegetation, and has undertaken extensive research in Antarctic geology, under the auspices of the international Ocean Drilling Program. In 1985 her work was recognised when she was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.
She has had a long-term interest in the visual arts, and in 2000 graduated with Honours in painting from the Canberra School of Art, winning the CRES award for emerging artists in that year. Since then her work has been exhibited in a number of group exhibitions, and hung in some major prize awards. In February 2005 she held her first solo exhibition, ‘Drawing on the Past’ at the ANCA Gallery in Canberra.