Hidden Mind
Bodo Korsig

essay by Kathleen Goncharov
curator and writer based in New York City
6.25 x 27.5 ", with seven installation images

Hidden Mind: An Exhibition of Recent Work by Bodo Korsig

What's Love Got to Do With It? Tina Turner asks this question in her celebrated song about the downside of romantic entanglement. So what does love have to do with the art of Bodo Korsig? Quite a lot, along with mortality, memory, brain science, and the vexing question of what constitutes consciousness. Korsig's subject is all of the above, made superbly manifest in idiosyncratic shapes of his own invention that resemble brain cells. He begins by making scores of meticulous drawings that are carved in wood and painted black. Sometimes Korsig casts these wood forms, which are destroyed in the process, to make one-of-a-kind aluminum or steel sculptures that he also paints black. This technique allows the metal to retain the irregularity of the chiseled line and the apparent fragility of the wood.

Korsig is fascinated with love, which he calls a "superpower" that can make us lose all objectivity and commit crazy and often self-destructive acts. He says, "Love makes our brain weak, like an infection. It is the most powerful destructive force." We know that love can lead to war, suicide, and murder from centuries of literature…from the jealous gods of Greek mythology, The Iliad and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, to the film noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice. From a 21st Century perspective, Korsig realizes that all this mayhem is the result of neurons releasing chemicals in the brain and questions whether we can identify the place where love resides in our head. When confronted with irrational thoughts, one can only hope to have the wherewithal of John Nash, the real life protagonist of A Beautiful Mind who knows enough about the subject to train his own defective brain to question the schizophrenic visions.

Are we our brains? Do the chemicals released in them completely control our emotions and actions? These are questions that Korsig began to explore in depth seven years ago at the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University. Korsig's earlier work was about memory and, like Proust in Remembrances of Things Past, explored how emotional associations are made through the minutia of our experience. This interest led him to seek out the Center's founder, Eric Kandel, another Nobel Laureate who is known for his research on the physiological basis of memory.

Korsig wryly asks the question of whether we can eliminate bad memories in his woodcut, Where Can I Buy a New Brain? now hanging in Kandel's office at Columbia. The idea that brains can be transferable and that mental processes are biological dates from the 19th Century and appears in the literature of the time, notably Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In another cautionary tale from the 21st Century, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jim Carrey does what Korsig suggests we should be able to do: erase those pesky recollections of love gone wrong from our brains. That these types of scenarios appear frequently in popular culture suggests a public fascination with recent scientific developments. Organ transplants and brain mapping as well as genetic manipulation, cloning, stem cell research, and psychotropic pharmaceuticals, have led to a re-evaluation of the traditional mind-body divide and bring up many ethical questions.

Investigating the science of emotion has proved to Korsig that the two subjects are not mutually exclusive. Art and science aren't either, although he does differentiate between practitioners in each field when he says, "Scientists want to prove and artists want to ask." Korsig draws no absolute conclusions from his research and resists defining what his work is about. He says, "I want to offer a message, but never an immutable statement. I want the experience to be more like life itself, full of signs and symbols that we encounter and interpret." He prefers his work to pose questions, leave a lasting imprint on the retina, or even function as a tool for meditation.

Korsig's shapes make up a visual vocabulary of his own invention. Although they recall images from CAT scans, synapses, ganglia, and biochemical receptors, they are carefully crafted images that function much like the abstract forms on a Rorschach test. For Korsig, shapes have real power, especially when rendered in stark black. His signs and symbols are graphic and visually striking like the wordless international sign language, developed for optimal visual and conceptual clarity. Instead of pointing out a fork in the road though, Korsig's signs are open to interpretation, and any number of things can be read in them from insects to common household objects. From his study of ancient cave painting and contemporary advertising, Korsig knows that scale makes all the difference in the viewer's reaction to a work, and that depending on size, the exact same form can take on a totally different meaning. Korsig says, "I am interested in how one can paint a bug, and then blow it up one hundred times and then it becomes a monster." He also plays with our preconceptions by using the same shape in a small sculpture, a medium associated with the monumental, or in a 15 ft. print, an art form that is usually intimate and hand held.

Although Korsig is trained as a sculptor, he paints, draws and is especially involved with the reproductive arts, particularly prints and books. He has a love of poetry and often works with writers; John Yau and John Ashbery are just two of his collaborators. He mixes his own black, the color he considers paramount, and uses it in all of his work. Painters, of course, and anyone who has ever tried to match items of black clothing, know that it is not the absence of color as we are often taught. Instead black contains subtle combinations of all the colors of the spectrum. Korsig also has an intense physical relationship to his materials, which he likes to take to their limits. His monumental print mentioned above was made when he drove a steamroller over canvas, and he often destroys wood when he sculpts. To create the shapes that comprise Hidden Mind, Korsig used a very thin micrometric saw to carve forms out of industrial pressed wood. The outlines that result can be as thin as a fraction of an inch and often break in the process of being made.

Fragile materials that, when coaxed, take on the appearance of strength, are indicative of Korsig's art and attitude to life. The uncertainty of existence is expressed in works such as Life Begins Every Second, Life Stops Every Second. We never know what will happen, what we will do, or how we will react to life's challenges. Each one of us is different and comes with the baggage of individual experience. Korsig acknowledges that we may be dealing with what he calls "a fascinating enemy called the brain."