through the looking glass

On the Universality of the Visceral

Editor’s note: This piece is guest written by Arif Khan, one of Kennel ‘s regular pilgrims.  He never fails to bring considered thought, gentle controversy and benign sarcasm to our gatherings.

Author’s Note:
Ren and I met Lynn for an evening conversation at Mount Sophia in Singapore, towards the end of 2011, December. She kindly agreed to us transcribing this conversation for the readers of Karavan.

My impression of Lynn after the spell binding conversation was only elevated by both her humility and humanity.  I had seen her presentation at Kennel two nights before and was already captivated, but this time I gained a far more sophisticated insight into an internationally acclaimed artist who also happens to have her art rooted in the very human theme of empathy.

She is in my opinion a lot like her art: Vulnerable but unbroken, provocative yet demure, enchanting and because of it, all the more enraging to others who don’t empathise with her sense of risqué incitement.

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Q: Lynn, tell us your story. Why are you where you are today?

Well, I didn’t succeed in the traditional academic route in Singapore and thankfully, decided to go to art school at 19. I was fortunate to get a placement in the U.S. I recall bartering my art work for services like haircuts and the sort when I first began. Most of my work was physical bulky art and that created logistical problems because I couldn’t carry that around as I travelled.

So that informed my perspective on my attachment to things and baggage in general. From there I began to explore installation art and more temporal work.

I then moved to Japan where I had no studio. The room I stayed in was smaller than half the room we are sitting in (Author’s note: very small space indeed). It was in this space, that I started to work with experiences. In essence, I became interested in art that justified its own existence. I would therefore say that my art or the way I approach it is juxtaposed against the situations I found myself in. It is a consequence of the context I found myself in.

In Japan, I then began to study Zen Buddhism and as I started applying what I learnt through experimentation, I came to understand the human body’s role in understanding knowledge. From a philosophical standpoint, I became interested in experiential knowledge, both as a branch of epistemological inquiry and as a medium to express my installation art.

Q: Your current work is rooted in an academic body of knowledge. Tell us more.

Think of knowledge. How do we know something? That’s a philosophical question and largely, the philosophers understand there to be four categories of knowing:

1. Receiving knowledge (Intuition/Inspiration/Revelation)
2. Deducing Knowledge (Reason/Logic)
3. Authority (Wisdom, elders, Tradition, etc)
4. Experiential Knowledge i.e. Sensory Perception/Observance (Empiricism)

And it’s the last category that most fascinates me. It was Adam Smith who wrote about knowledge by acquaintance and so this isn’t a really new idea, but what I do is that in my PhD thesis, “Punch in the Gut: Experiential knowledge and performance art”, I look at performance art from this framework of knowledge.  I also reinforce this philosophical framework with some modern day scientific discoveries that show how the brain processes information and what the sensory experience looks like in the neural circuitry of the brain.

One of the most compelling recent scientific discoveries was when scientists began observing macaque monkeys. The discovery of Mirror Neurons essentially opened up a whole portal into understanding social behaviours and empathy. In monkeys, Mirror neurons somehow regulate and mediate behaviours in large groups. Conversely, autistic children have shown a demonstrated dysfunction in their mirror neuron circuitry and that consequently creates social deficits and awkwardness (Author’s note: There is a correlation, but research into causality is still in its infancy). They cannot adjudge human behaviours and cannot attune themselves to the broader human environment.

So I decided to bring this recent discovery into my work and I realized that empathy has this deep rooted base in human neurology, which was only discovered recently.

My ‘Gutty’ Art performances resonate with the audience because they evoke this visceral reaction deeply rooted in empathy and therefor neural circuitry. So if I do an art piece on heartbreak, you can expect a universal reaction, because it is a universal experience. That’s not to say that the reaction doesn’t shift from culture to culture, because it does. But largely, it’s the recognition of a shared experience (in this case heartbreak), that creates that reaction.

What is also interesting is that some neural pathways are never broken. The act of falling in love, is so deeply entrenched in the neural circuitry that even after heartbreak, a new love falls within the same sort of brain circuitry. The same areas of the brain fire up when a new love is found, and when an old heartbreak is experienced.

(Author’s note: Analogously, it’s like a glass of wine, a template for addiction that constantly fills and empties itself, once someone falls in love and later experiences heartbreak, and so it continues. The glass remains the same, only the wine changes)

Q: What garners the biggest reaction, empathy or otherwise from your audiences all over the world?

I think anything that is painful is very universal (Author’s note: Lynn is talking about physical pain) There was this Japanese artist that would perform for various audiences all over the world and he would get these reactions that were so shocking and intense.

All he did was he sat in front of them, and he began eating paper. Bit by bit, he chewed on paper till he would choke because he was so full of pulp. It would probably take a tome of paper for him to choke, but he’ll reach a point where he couldn’t stuff himself with paper any more, and he would be salivating and gulping for breath. And at that breaking point, or even sooner, you would have this ‘gutty’ stomach churning responses from the audience.

For example, in Hong Kong, the people watching him had to literally jump out of their seats because they couldn’t take it. They held him down and forced him to stop. And this was huge tussle that carried on for a while as he still forced the paper down his throat.

In Indonesia, however, people just began laughing and found it funny.  His audience was largely desensitized because of empathy fatigue. People who live in poverty have been desensitized to this form of gutty art, because their lives are already very difficult.  They don’t empathize with pain as much as we do, because we are sheltered, especially in Singapore.

So when his pieces are done in front of a cocooned audience from developed nations with higher standards of living and quality of life, you can expect some very powerful reactions like people screaming for him to stop and some even walk out because that disgust is so overpowering that people would rather leave than witness his self-flagellation.

Then there is also empathy, which is my focus. Empathy also resonates, universally.

Q: What are the limits to empathy?

I think there are three, Imagination, memory (one’s own subjective experience) and also autism. If you don’t have the capacity to imagine, you won’t be able to empathize because the neural circuitry is non-existent. If your memory is highly selective and subjective, you would choose only certain experiences and that would create this incomplete sense of empathy. And of course, autism, which itself is very telling because it shows how difficult it can be if we are not born or are unable to acquire the ability to empathize.

Q: What role does trauma (childhood or otherwise) play in creating empathy?

It plays an important role because it can reduce and eliminate or even severely sensitize you to certain experiences.

Q: Lynn, what motivates you deeply to do this art? Why do you do it?

I want to tap into the inherent connection between people, the stuff that makes us treat each other like human beings.  My art is directed towards seeing those connections. I want to create a relational experience and there is tremendous potential to make a community with a temporal experience and in that vacuum of time and space, you can create a potential utopian community.

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Lynn Lu received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University with a major in Sculpture and a minor in Graphic Design in 1999. In 1998, she studied with Christian Boltanski at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and at the École Marchutz in Aix-en-Provence. She earned her MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002, and completed a PhD program (ABD) at Musashino Art University in Tokyo in 2008, on a full scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2010 she was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Newcastle in Australia. Lynn Lu is an installation/performance artist and a professor at Southampton Solent University. Read more about her at http://www.lynnlu.info/cv.html

Lynn’s present research looks at the connection between experiential knowledge and the innate human capacity for empathy (underpinned scientifically by the recent discovery of Mirror Neurons), in relation to a genre performance art she calls “gutty”.

In essence Lynn’s work focuses on performances that go beyond the airy domain of imagination but rather reside deep within the body temple i.e. the gut. Any performance piece that evokes a gutted visceral reaction begs for her academic and artistic scrutiny and she displays a tremendous verve in this particular field of performance art.

Two striking examples of Lynn’s work:

In one public performance piece Lynn marshals her audience and passer-by’s to swap clothes with her. Sweaty brassieres are removed and unfettered clogs are worn by men, women and people of all colours and creeds.  Some leave confused, others enlightened at the insight they received in their moment of vulnerable clothes swopping.
The piece is provocative because it is human. Lynn carries on wearing each additional piece of cloth with a functionality that is unnerving as it is casual. To her, the clothes make no difference.  Nor does her occasional nudity. She is as comfortable naked as she is when she wears another’s loin cloth.

 In another piece, she gets her audience to confide in her their deepest darkest and most painful memories. She chews a lemon at the same time. She then recites these stories to them, as if they were her wounds and gets them to chew on the lemons.

Unsurprisingly, half her audience feels manipulated and cajoled into a trivialization of their most sacred imprints of sorrow and grief. The other half understands her point immaculately. “You are not alone in your wound. Sacred as it may be, it is all the more Universal. You do not suffer in isolation.”