“Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.”

      Einstein 

Walter Lab is an artist who addresses social, psychological and political issues in his work.

He makes paintings, videos and writings using formalist conventions to pursue social dialogue about group experience through his individual perception. 

The majority of Lab's career has been in Los Angeles and Southern California. He has recently relocated to the upper Midwest. He has works in numerous collections in North America and Europe, both private and corporate.

The following essay, is Lab's most recent writing about his most recent Paintings titled "The Gods Have Animal Minds.".

The Gods Have Animal Minds

Incongruence as method in art making

“Great social challenges of today no longer come one by one. What makes them great is their ever greater entanglement in one another and across multiple levels, including landscapes, regimes and niches.’’

 (Mirek Dymitrow)

The term psychological incongruence addresses human feelings that are not aligned with actions and assumes a lack of connection between a person’s actions, statements and feelings. One simple example is the difference between how you feel and what you admit about your feelings. If you say that you feel fine when you truly feel bad, the disconnect between the actual self and the outward self-presentation is psychologically incongruous. The idea of continuity in our self-story is important in interpersonal human experiences but not necessarily in art.

In life meaning may be whole and joined or it may provide uncertainty, incongruence and fear. In art, meaning may be whole and joined to human experience or it may require meditations on the unlikeliness of elements that are intentionally put together by the artist, intentionally incongruent. In art and in life we try to resolve unexpected or peculiar juxtapositions. In this way we make and communicate meaning. In modern art formal concerns were changing almost continuously, one way of working being overtaken and pushed aside by the next new thing. Providing the unexpected is an old tenant of Modernism and continues now in Post Modernism, having become a formalist strategy in the history of art making. In other word creating incongruity in art remains a well-established working method.

As in the idea of the well-adjusted person who is skilled with the understanding of their examined life, psychological congruity is said to be present as psychological homogeneity, a connection within the self, a matching of experience and awareness. Sometimes, not always saying what we are thinking is a good thing, we hold back in a contentious conversation and let someone rant. This would be considered a form of politeness and emotional stability, a rational decision balancing personal autonomy while not escalating a problem or offending others, yet technically it is a form of incongruity because of the disengagement between feeling and action. Sometimes we consciously refuse the opportunity to match experience with awareness, remaining incongruent and choosing to escape a negative outcome or avoid hurting someone. Sometimes we choose irrational and disparate beliefs to live by; for instance, being part of a religious group believing that the earth is seven thousand years old, or that the political elite in liberal American politics participate in a secret rape cabal with movie stars using sex trafficked children operated from a pizza parlor. Incongruity can be profoundly disturbing. It is used by terrorists or during military campaigns to hit “soft targets” with no apparent military goal other than to create unpredictable fear and tragedy. Cults create belief from pathetic and incongruous assertions, like the Heavens Gate group whose leaders preached that suicide would allow them to leave their bodily “containers” and enter an alien spacecraft hidden behind the Hale-Bopp comet. Ironically, the photo of the dead members, covered with sheets showed them all wearing Nike shoes. Nike had recently come out with the slogan, “Just do it.” These are tiers of incongruity. Incongruity is a well-used method in every form of cultural production, poetry, fiction, dance, painting, performance etcetera. Comedy benefits greatly from The Incongruous Juxtaposition Theory. Shakespeare used it. Every form of parody and social criticism relies upon the realization that incongruity is present, whether observed or fabricated.

We can think of naturalistic representation as image congruence. Naturalism (realism in painting for instance) is a fully recognizable connecting opportunity for communication, all aspects in alignment, cognition smoothly stimulated, language without intended interference. However, incongruence in art opens opportunities to make meaning in less expected ways, to interfere with communication. Making meaning from an artwork involves a process of cultural and social recognition. We might assume that a viewer would have some experience of what is meant, a relation to the artwork through their human experience, and that without experience a disconnect happens or loss of interest sets in. On the other hand, interactions with unclear or uncertain images may draw in a viewer, delight them and open them to a meditation urging a relationship with the artwork and its potential for meaning. 

What do we do with the unexpected and the impossible when we are offered language that is not intended for full recognition? Partial recognition (what is this painting about?) is a hook, an entry, but is there a place to enter or only the entrance standing alone? If one were to view a painting of prisoners on a chain gang being guarded or ridiculed by an animal, one would likely recognize the prisoners and the animal but not the reason they are in the same painting. Partial recognition is a form of poetics. Suggestibility is an entrance that people will walk through. We can have fun with it, be enlivened by its potential for play, be torn by hypothetical associations, be offended or confused. After all, we live in a society of fraudulent conceit, a society of incongruent assertions that are cast out upon the population via social and mass media asserting and detailing layered beliefs that are not aligned with real events. American politics of the right-wing uses nonsensical, hallucination-like imagery to build incongruous beliefs which much of the population regards as real. People seek and contribute to this fantastic misrepresentation in order to interpret wacky allegation. Our society is both fraudulent and accusatory, increasingly militant and intolerant.

35,400 years ago on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, humans painted animals on cave walls. Much like the later versions of cave painting in Europe, the representations of horses, rhinos, mammoths, buffalo, pigs, lions, (pig-deer some are called) are accompanied by rudimentary renditions of humanoids hunting the animals they depended on, and it is believed, worshiped. Benjamin Smith, a rock art scholar at the University of Western Australia, says of these artists, “they believed that art, and ritual in relation to art, could affect those spiritual forces for their own benefit. They’re not just doing it to create pretty pictures. They’re doing it because they’re communicating with the spirits of the land.” (1.)

The idea that animals are Gods or spirits of the land who give sustenance and life to humans is a lovely and profound congruity, a wholeness of lifestyle and world view. Whether beckoning the herd or thanking the dead animal, acknowledging the sacrifice of the life-giving and now eaten animal, the psychological health implied in the artwork suggests the central and pervasive role that culture plays in defining all links between people and nature. Not that we fully understand this dimension of ancient human consciousness as we project upon it, but despite the elusiveness of ancient cultural meaning, we can see by the art that there was relation to an experience of meaning, perhaps an entry to imaginary realms, spirit worlds and a host of intellectual and emotional connections that infused lives with meaning beyond the basic impulse to survive.

Attempts to create a more functional and inclusive societal organization across the landscape of this country have been interfered with using fear as a manipulator and has led to the current weird incongruity of American social and political values. This change in much of our society’s perception was achieved through systematic subversion by an aggressor. Aggression has taken the form of “fear poetics” or a poetics of fear, like the assertion that Covid vaccines contain nano technology robots that will go to work altering your genes to turn you into a socialist. Well intended actions have unintended consequences. Attempts to aid a society in crises, a society in poor psychological, spiritual and economic health are met with artificial layering and pathological subversion. As long as we live within a hierarchical myth without really knowing it, our whole behavior will be conditioned beyond the point of resistance: a rebellion against one hierarchy will merely set up a second one (Northrup Frye).

It is my view that survival in our contemporary world calls for an appreciation of incongruity. Incongruity operates in multiple ways to enhance our lives or to burden us with current day superstition. While incongruity in cultural production has a value of celebrating the human psyche, incongruity in social manipulation and the politics of subjugation has a value of wicked exploitation. Converting a population through mass propaganda is a well understood tool of political control. There is a term known as Conversion Disorder which discusses current cognitive and neurobiologic models linking psychological stressors with conversion symptoms. Undermining the conditions that create safety in a population (fear of the other, open hostility, acceptable violence, acceptable racism, imposed economic insecurity) builds multiple stress points that change brain chemistry in some people and can result in cognitive alterations which can increase susceptibility to Conversion Disorder. Our society has a significant epidemic of this dysfunction. In the Handbook of Clinical Neurology, K. Roelofs and J. Pasman write, We propose a neurobiologic stress model integrating those cognitive models with neuroendocrine stress research and propose that stress and stress-induced changes in hypothalamus–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis function may result in cognitive alterations, that in turn contribute to experiencing conversion symptoms. The point then is that if you create enough stress in a person you can change their mind and reorganize their brain.

The Gods Have Animal Minds is a body of work that attempts to respond to the speculative concerns addressed briefly in this essay. Stress altered brain chemistry can create a change of attitude from acceptance, trust and faith, to disbelief and antagonism, inserting a new faith. It is probably fair for me to speculate that chemically induced fear can cause madcap inventions of reality to become truths. Rather than honoring the animals we hunt we honor those who in some sense hunt us. Thusly, the gods have animal minds.

Walter Lab

09/2021

First Draft