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Unit 9 check list to help you gather evidence.

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Unit 9 check list to help you gather evidence.

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Tuesday and Thursday planning and reflection guidance

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Tuesday and Thursday planning and reflection guidance

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Week 8 Tuesday  thursday planning and reflection.docx

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Monday week 8 try something new and planning and reflection.docx

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and half way through review

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Chantal Joffe | Artist | Royal Academy of Arts

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Joffe took a foundation course at Camberwell College of Art (1987 - 1988) before studying at Glasgow School of Art (1988 - 1991) and later the Royal College of Art (1992 - 1994). She is known for her arrest...

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Help to over come procrastination

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How to Overcome Procrastination

Step 1: Recognize That You're Procrastinating

You might be putting off a task because you've had to re-prioritize your workload. If you're briefly delaying an important task for a genuinely good reason, then you aren't necessarily procrastinating. However, if you start to put things off indefinitely, or switch focus because you want to avoid doing something, then you probably are.

You may also be procrastinating if you:

Fill your day with low-priority tasks.

Leave an item on your To-Do list for a long time, even though it's important.

Read emails several times over without making a decision on what to do with them.

Start a high-priority task and then go off to make a coffee.

Fill your time with unimportant tasks that other people ask you to do, instead of getting on with the important tasks already on your list.

Wait to be in "right mood," or wait for the "right time" to tackle a task.

Step 2: Work Out WHY You're Procrastinating

You need to understand the reasons why you are procrastinating before you can begin to tackle it.

For instance, are you avoiding a particular task because you find it boring or unpleasant? If so, take steps to get it out of the way quickly, so that you can focus on the aspects of your job that you find more enjoyable.

Poor organization can lead to procrastination. Organized people successfully overcome it because they use prioritized To-Do Lists and create effective schedules. These tools help you to organize your tasks by priority and deadline.

Another major cause of procrastination is poor decision-making. If you can't decide what to do, you'll likely put off taking action in case you do the wrong thing.

Step 3: Adopt Anti-Procrastination Strategies

Procrastination is a habit - a deeply ingrained pattern of behavior. This means that you probably can't break it overnight. Habits only stop being habits when you avoid practicing them, so try as many of the strategies, below, as possible to give yourself the best possible chance of succeeding.

Forgive yourself for procrastinating in the past. Studies show that self-forgiveness can help you to feel more positive about yourself and reduce the likelihood of procrastination in the future.

Commit to the task. Focus on doing, not avoiding. Write down the tasks that you need to complete, and specify a time for doing them. This will help you to proactively tackle your work.

Promise yourself a reward. If you complete a difficult task on time, reward yourself with a treat, such as a slice of cake or a coffee from your favorite coffee shop. And make sure you notice how good it feels to finish things!

Ask someone to check up on you. Peer pressure works! This is the principle behind self-help groups. If you don't have anyone to ask, an online tool such as Procraster can help you to self-monitor.

Act as you go. Tackle tasks as soon as they arise, rather than letting them build up over another day.

Rephrase your internal dialog. The phrases "need to" and "have to," for example, imply that you have no choice in what you do. This can make you feel disempowered and might even result in self-sabotage. However, saying, "I choose to," implies that you own a project, and can make you feel more in control of your workload.

Minimize distractions. Turn off your email and social media, and avoid sitting anywhere near a television while you work!

Aim to "eat an elephant beetle" first thing, every day! Get those tasks that you find least pleasant out of the way early. This will give you the rest of the day to concentrate on work that you find more enjoyable.

Another way to make a task more enjoyable is to identify the unpleasant consequences of avoiding it. For instance, what will happen if you don't complete the work? How might it affect your personal, team or organizational goals?

If you procrastinate because you're disorganized, here are six strategies to help you get organized:

1. Keep a To-Do List. This will prevent you from "conveniently" forgetting about those unpleasant or overwhelming tasks.

2. Use task- and time-management apps. There are numerous apps designed to help you to be more organized, such as Trello and Toggl, for example.

If you're prone to delaying projects because you find them overwhelming, try breaking them down into more manageable chunks. Organize your projects into smaller tasks and focus on starting them, rather than on finishing them.

In his 2011 book, " The Procrastination Cure," Jeffery Combs suggests tackling tasks in 15-minute bursts of activity. Alternatively, you can create an Action Plan to organize your project. Start with quick and small tasks first. These "small wins" will give you a sense of achievement, and will make you feel more positive and less overwhelmed by the larger project or goal that you are working towards.

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How to Stop Procrastinating - Overcoming the Habit of Delaying Important Tasks

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Procrastination can damage your potential, your career, and your mood. Use these strategies to overcome it and take back control of your day!

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Chantal Joffe - Artist's Profile - The Saatchi Gallery

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Guidance for examining the parameters of your project.

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Guidance for examining the parameters of your project.

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Write a brief statement to show your understanding.

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Plans for learning and reflection guidance

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During the first two weeks you will be developing your understanding of the context for the Duality Project and will begin carrying out research. Please use the guidance in this column to help you.

During this period your work from the previous project will also be assessed.

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Week 1 and 2 timetable, planning and checklists.

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Week 1 and 2 timetable, planning and checklists.

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Use this to plan each session and check your progress.

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Plans for learning and reflection guidance.

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Use this guidance to help you write a brief statement explaining why you have chosen your duality.

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Duality Week 1, Presentation plans for learning and reflection guidance.

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Duality Week 1, Presentation plans for learning and reflection guidance.

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Reflection and checking your learning for week 3

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Reflection and checking your learning for week 3

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Duality Project initial research journal activities.

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Duality Project initial research journal activities.

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Fine Art photogrpahy  Duality Sketchbook Research Task

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Duality Drawing Task

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Sketchbook drawing investigations into dualities

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Image analysis task following in-depth research presentation.

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Image analysis task following in-depth research presentation.

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Fine Art Image Analysis following research pP

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Project Proposal Guidance - use this to help you decide what to write

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Project Proposal Guidance - use this to help you decide what to write

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Use this or the daily planner that you have been provided with, or both!

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Analysing and image as part of your research.

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Analysing and image as part of your research.

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This sheet gives you guidance about how to talk about other artists work.

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Extend your learning

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Presentation about doing in-depth research.

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Presentation about doing in-depth research.

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Extend your learning.

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I would have been eleven or twelve when I first saw the Jacobean double portrait known as The Cholmondeley Ladies c.1600-10. It hung just beyond the entrance hall of what is now Tate Britain, near the stairs to the loos - an enigmatic opener for the long march of the British School towards the glories of Turner and Constable. The two wintry revenants, propped elbow to elbow in bed with their glowing babies, made a deep impression. The blanched gorgeousness of their outfits, blooded by the hot royal red of the christening gowns, was part of it. So was the spooky incongruity of vivid faces looking out from the picture's steam-ironed one-dimensionality, as though two people were standing behind it, sticking their heads through holes in the board. Mainly, though, it was their doubleness.

This is what makes every encounter with the Cholmondeley portrait so sharply defined, memorable and incomplete. The wallpaper repetition of the figures insists on parity, yet the faces demand attention because of their individuality (a word that didn't enter English usage until the early seventeenth century, when this picture was painted). If you were to saw the panel in half, or if there were some kind of hierarchy - one figure larger, more central than the other, say - things would fall into place more easily. Instead, at the symmetrical centre, where the gaze wants to rest, there's just a whitish crack between the pillows. Look either woman in the eye and the other becomes a restless peripheral presence, like someone anxious to edge into a conversation. The whole presentation is rigidly static but also unsettling, as both becomes either, either merges into between. It promises the aesthetic satisfactions of equilibrium but stirs up the disorientating tensions of duality.

The concept of symmetry - literally 'commensurability' - includes various ways of expressing the relation of parts (of bodies, buildings, pictures) to each other and to the whole. Though the word carries some prescriptive, academic baggage, it has since antiquity been part of the basic toolkit for explaining why certain visual configurations work the way they do. Symmetry perception is, it turns out, hard-wired in the human brain. This means that we register the presence of symmetrical features in our field of vision before we realise what we're looking at. Since most living organisms and many natural objects are bilaterally symmetrical, symmetry perception probably has an evolutionary basis - you don't want to stare too long or hard to make out the tiger's eyes amid the tousled asymmetry of the foliage around them. Beyond the visual realm, symmetry shapes large areas of our experiential and cognitive universe. It translates into action and duration as pulse, mimesis, echo, rhythm. In cultural terms, symmetrical binaries structure almost every system of thought; they are often mythologised as twins - male and female, day and night, good and evil, life and death. All fields of intellectual analysis - philosophical, scientific, mathematical, political - make use of specialised notions of equilibrium and tension.

On the neuroscientific model, symmetry perception instantaneously triggers the recognition that something is there - something you need to respond to. But it's the perception of subtle modulations and asymmetries that reveals exactly what, or who, you're dealing with. 'No two leaves of a fig tree are exactly alike,' wrote Matisse in Jazz 1947, 'they are all shaped differently. Yet each one shouts "Fig tree".' The print that follows this passage shows two curvy, cut-out 'formes', one in blue on white, the other white on blue. These forms - as alike and as different as two fig leaves - could, individually and out of context, represent upended vases or tree stumps, but together what they shout is 'women'. Like Matisse's paired The Tree of Life windows in the chapel at Venice or the clasping figures in his small bronze, Two Women 1907, they have almost the opposite effect of the Jacobean portrait. Instead of oscillating, hallucinatory dichotomy, they speak of the sensually and poetically complex pleasures of symmetry.

So integral are these pleasures to most attempts to make sense of the world that their opposite evokes feelings of dislocation, even fear. Any strongly asymmetrical shape gets called 'strange', in other words foreign or unrecognisable. The striking asymmetries in Romantic art, with its cult of rocks, storms, 'unbalanced' states of mind and impulsive actions, embody this strangeness. These are things that make you feel strange to, or take you out of, yourself (precisely the effect that the Sublime was supposed to have). The border between strangeness and recognition is neatly illustrated by the Rorschach blot exercise, in which shapeless ink spillages on a sheet of paper promptly metamorphose into bilaterally symmetrical forms (insects, flowers, faces and so on) when you fold the sheet in half. Warhol's Rorschach experiments of the mid-1980s relate clearly to his obsession with copies and multiples, and the way in which these toy with the 'recognition response' as it applies to culturally constructed identity and commercial product recognition.

That so much twentieth-century avant-garde art lays heavy stress on symmetry - popularly considered a classical, conservative quality - partly has to do with the emphatic symmetries that prevail in industrial production, science and other non-fine art domains. The bilateral and rotational symmetries of Duchamp's readymades - the snow shovel, bicycle wheel, bottle rack, urinal - simultaneously indicate their industrial origin and their upstart but impeccable claim to classical aesthetic credentials. Modernist formalism and the pragmatic aesthetics of commercial art both, for different reasons, want to activate the subliminal recognition response. In post-war American art, symmetry took on a further dimension. Barnett Newman's absorption with the Genesis creation myth came to a head in his 1948 breakthrough painting Onement I. Behind the tightly channelled magma flow of the central cadmium red 'zip' lies biblical cosmology, in which, as the world is formed by God's actions of making and dividing, the powerful binaries of male and female, good and evil emerge. The title Onement, from atonement or at-one-ment, is a sonorous pun on the idea of spiritual reconciliation.

Authoritarian ritual, commercial art and other visually coercive genres love putting symmetry in the frame because the recognition response overrides all others. Recognition doesn't necessarily mean intellectual or moral acceptance, but it can feel guiltily like a step on the way. Images of atrocities are often a disquieting cocktail of alienation or horror and the mesmeric attractions of symmetry. The Isenheim Altarpiece, the Hiroshima mushroom cloud, the Twin Towers against a September blue sky - these universal signs for agony and carnage arouse aesthetic pleasure because they fit the way we're wired to greet the visual, as though symmetrical formal relations were in some irresistible sense redemptive. If the visual image often seems to win the struggle for epistemological dominance, however, it's important to remember that there are areas of experience impervious to visual codes. Pain, for example, or haptic pleasure; to the eye, the human body is bilaterally symmetrical, but to the blind touch it is something else.

Matisse carefully distinguished between the proportions that make a generic form recognisable and the uniqueness of a particular object, a quality that eludes all purely formal definitions: 'The character of a face that has been drawn depends not on its varied proportions, but on a spiritual light that it reflects. So, two drawings of the same face can show the same character, even though the facial proportions of these two drawings might differ.' If portraits are about the aura of identity, however, double portraits and figures often act, like the symmetrical sides of a doorway, to give entry to a situation, a story. You don't ask 'who is this?' so much as 'what is happening?' And there's hardly ever an answer that measures up to the visual effect of doubleness.

What's going on, for example, between Gabrielle d'Estrees and Her Sister, the Duchesse de Villars - one nonchalantly tweaking the other's nipple - painted in the late sixteenth century? Or in The Two Fridas, Kahlo's 1939 double self-portrait, where the blood of one squirts into the other's lacy lap? In Holbein's The Ambassadors 1533, Hockney's softly stagy 1970s portraits of gay couples, or the miniature of two Gujarati magnates kneeling on a flowery carpet in a kind of paradisiacal limbo, painted by Bishndas for the Mogul emperor Jahangir in around 1618, it is the situational atmosphere - puzzling and impossible to break into - rather than the sitters' individual identities, that vibrates with faintly uneasy energy. Then there's Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror 1932. In a cocoon of curving outlines, Marie-Thérèse Walter looks at herself in an oval cheval glass. This image is often discussed in terms of the middle-aged artist's erotic fulfilment with his new young partner. And it's true - you feel this. But the doodling double profiles, circles and hatchings also encode a dreamy inwardness that excludes the male gaze, as the woman and her reflected double reach out towards each other. Their duality belongs to a nocturnal mirror world in which the reflected image disperses, rather than reinforces, all sense of individuality or oneness, making self-absorption, self-scrutiny and the suave arrival of the alter ego hard to prise apart.

The word mirror is etymologically related to mirare (to gaze), and to miracle or wonder; behind these lies the Sanskrit smi, or smile. In this construction, reflection, wonderment and greeting are all components of the act of gazing. The self-containment of mirrored forms is given a different interpretation in Hepworth's large bronze Two Forms (Divided Circle) from 1969, which, as you walk round it, ceases to be either circular or divided, as though two dancers were performing the solution to an equation. The party-piece primitivism of Brancusi's various versions of his sculpture The Kiss echoes the cartoonish little fable of the origins of love recounted by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium. Humans, it seems, were once four-legged, two-headed spherical beings, who were sliced in half by Zeus. Our yearning for our severed halves is what causes 'the love which restores to us our ancient state by attempting to weld two beings into one'. The asexual, invisible interiority of Brancusi's stone kiss - like his idea of the dream within the sleeping head or the bird within the element of air - emphasises the inwardness or double nature of solid sculptural forms.

In his 'conceit' of lovers mirrored in each others' eyes, the Metaphysical poet John Donne captured a trancelike bedroom fusion of intimacy and narcissism: 'My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears/And true plain hearts doe in the faces rest.' At the time Donne was writing and an unrecorded artist in Cheshire was painting The Cholmondeley Ladies, conceits were a way of thinking outside the box - you had to push through the intellectual scrum of an elaborate simile to find (if you were lucky) naked truth waiting on the other side.

In Donne's poetry, sexual two-in-oneness takes the form of a pair of compasses, a hungry flea and the phoenix, among other things. The doubleness of the Cholmondeley portrait is, you realise, sexual too.

According to the story inscribed in its lower left-hand corner, the (otherwise unidentified) women were a living monument to coincidence - members of the same gentry family who shared the same birthday and wedding day, and gave birth at the same time. But coincidence is too abstract a basis for the image's graphic strength; this is powered, rather, by a conceit on the theme of reproduction. The women, almost images of each other, have given birth to images of themselves, reproducing the pedigree line in which they take their place. Their marmoreal stillness (maybe they aren't sitting up in bed but rising from a tomb?) recalls two cognate Shakespearean themes from the Sonnets: that having children is a means of 'braving' or confronting death, and that human experience can gain immortality by being mirrored in art.

The association of visual symmetry and sexuality or reproduction, the language of innumerable marriage portraits, has deep resonance beyond the purely formal. It resurfaces as a conceit - or what we now call a concept - in Damien Hirst's Mother and Child, Divided 1993, where the sliced-in-half cow and calf, with their punning title, are a literal 'anatomie' (or dissection) of the maternal relationship. Louise Bourgeois's 1994 print Birth from her Autobiographical Series is another example. The playing-card symmetry of the woman in labour and the child's head emerging like a rival self between her legs gives a raw heraldic formality to the biological fact. The estrangement that exists between the world of the Cholmondeley portrait and our own can be felt in the painful ambivalence both these works express about childbirth. As Philip Larkin drily mused on his former room-mate's fatherhood in Dockery and Son, reproduction can make you half, not twice, the person you were: 'Why did he think adding meant increase? / To me it was dilution. '

Where 'individuality' once meant inseparability - the Latin term individuus could be used to describe friends or lovers - it now connotes personal identity, inviolable oneness. It is what sets us apart, not holds us together. The resolution of duality within the individual provides the core motif for the vast psychoanalytical literature that stems from Freud's inference of conflicts between conscious and unconscious motivation and Jung's dramatisation of the psychic landscape in the figures of anima and animus, the self and the shadow. At the opposite pole from the mystical, consummatory sense of two-in-one is our fear of the divided self. In Dostoevsky's story The Double, the appearance of Mr Golyadkin's Doppelgänger marks a personality in the final stages of disintegration, as the psychic auto-immune system turns on itself. While Golyadkin struggles to preserve the modest routines on which his self-esteem rests, his double, like a fiendishly competitive twin brother, knocks away every prop.

Why is the appearance of the Doppelgänger so terrifying while biological twinness is not? It asserts that the copy can steal the identity of the original. And if copies can be perfectly cloned, does the idea of the unique, authentic individual have any meaning at all? These questions were addressed, apropos of art rather than human genetics, by Walter Benjamin in his 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which contains his haunting meditation on the 'decay of the aura' in modern mass culture. The aura, as Benjamin defines it, is a phenomenon associated with an original work's 'unique existence in the place where it happens to be'; it is, therefore, impossible to copy. For Benjamin the Marxist, photographic reproduction was good, because it 'emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual'. But Benjamin the lover of art felt an overwhelming nostalgia for the aura; in the modern world, he wrote presciently, 'the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology'.

This morning I'm looking at photographs of Brancusi's lovers, Picasso's girl, Newman's hypnotic zip - and this seems quite a normal way to make judgments and comparisons, so long as you think of photographs of objects as providing visual stimuli or data but as otherwise inert. Not, at any rate, caught in the act of identity theft. Officially, the idea that objects reciprocate the viewer's gaze is fanciful, although, as a child, this is exactly how I felt about the Cholmondeley foursome. Here, Leonardo da Vinci's theory of vision (which he thought he had proved by setting up facing pairs of mirrors) is nearer the mark: 'The air is full of an infinite number of images of the things which are distributed through it... I hold that the invisible powers of imagery in the eyes may project themselves to the objects as do the images of the objects to the eye.'

'The air is full of images.' Every work I've mentioned also exists as a digital image - a stream of units and zeros in cyberspace - whose infinitely self-replicating twins form and dissolve on my computer screen. They inhabit this medium entirely according to the conventions of visual display, including symmetry. But all conventions become wearisome, automatic, impossible to respond to, whereas uniqueness never does. In the technological context, the artistic use of multiple images becomes a classic framing device designed to rescue the unique individual from dispersion or sameness. Roni Horn's book This Is Me, This Is You consists of two separate sets of 48 paired images of the same girl's face, shot over a two-year period. You could get closer to a sense of the unique identity of a child you'll never meet (not least because she is already four years older than her This Is Me self), but not much. 'We're all two people' is the commonplace that the young Italian artist Alighiero e Boetti picked up and personalised in 1968 - like the cigarette filters, cardboard and bits of graph paper that went into his constructions - by adding 'e' ('and') between his first and second names. Wouldn't it be nice, fantasised Boetti with throwaway arte povera delight, 'to be two people - one all aware and real, the other all dreamy and unconscious - who go hand in hand, without ever mingling.' Horn's Dead Owl 1997 is two photographs of a stuffed snowy owl, hung side by side. Like The Cholmondeley Ladies, the dead owl and its double have a certain white imperious oddity - two brides at the same wedding, born, perhaps, the same day and trapped the same hour. Paradoxically, the Dead Owl 's duality is a token of its creaturely uniqueness, a reminder that it is the perception of difference, of the distance between things - the facing figures in the mirror or lovers' eyes - that precedes (but only just) the 'fearful symmetry' of recognition.

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I would have been eleven or twelve when I first saw the Jacobean double portrait known as The Cholmondeley Ladies c.1600-10. It hung just beyond the entrance hall of what is now Tate Britain, near the stairs to the loos - an enigmatic opener for the long march of the British School towards the glories of Turner and Constable.

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Tim Walker Duality Photography Image Analysis Task 1

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ARE YOU USING THIS?

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Week 7 Reflection Guidance week 7 reflection guidance.docx

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Extend your learning.

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In 1984, when the second, 1980-1 Dancers on a Plane (Tate T03242; fig.1) was exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City, the work's hatching-filled surface announced its kinship with its immediate predecessor, the 1979 version of Dancers on a Plane (private collection), as well as numerous earlier works Johns had based on the same motif. Yet nothing could have represented a more decisive break with the decorous abstraction of the hatchings than the new work's hairy 'balls': a scrotum-shaped cut-out piercing the bottom side of its heavy bronze frame, incised with lines suggesting pubic hair (fig.2).

Meanwhile, centred at the top of the frame, a kind of diagram constructed from flattened bronze shapes suggests the intersection of two figures: a positive form made up of paired, downward-pointing triangles and the negative form of a sunken vertical channel or shaft, which disappears into the cleft between the triangles (fig.3). 1 Top and bottom, diagram and cut-out are precisely aligned along the work's vertical axis, as if to emphasise the continuity of hollowed-out 'balls' with phallic 'shaft'. Finally, the lower part of the imaginary plumb line connecting testes to phallus is highlighted with daubs and dashes of white paint, underscoring the connection between them, as well as their separation by the canvas itself.

Frequently when Johns introduces a new motif, precedents can be found in earlier works by the artist. Commentators were quick to connect the relief elements of the frame in Dancers on a Plane to Johns's Painting with Two Balls 1960 (fig.4), in which two wooden spheres are tightly wedged into the suggestively shaped gap that separates conjoined canvases. 2 Yet the sexual imagery that literally brackets Dancers on a Plane lacks both the comedy and the literalness of the earlier work, with its punning reference to the macho studio talk of the abstract expressionists. From the bronze frame itself, to the finicky, hand-crafted appearance of the testicles, to the schematic treatment of the 'phallus' and pudendal cleft, everything about the 1980-1 work announces its complete lack of irony, its almost awkward earnestness. Even the frieze of knives, spoons and forks that adorns the frame cannot puncture this mood of artifice, so marked in its contrast to the sexual explicitness of the reliefs' subject matter.

In interviews Johns has identified the source of this imagery as a seventeenth-century painting from Nepal that pictures the sexual union of the northern Buddhist god Samvara with his divine consort Vajrayogini (or Vajravarahi) (fig.5). 3 He discovered this painting, he told curators Nan Rosenthal and Ruth Fine, when looking at a book on Tantric art. 4 Commentaries on this source material often content themselves with quoting Johns's own, highly elliptical explanation of the work's subject - 'Seeing a thing can sometimes trigger the mind to make another thing' 5 - rather than brave the quagmires of art historical interpretation. While this might be attributed to his critics' lack of familiarity with Tantric art and iconography, by 1984 the quotation of esoteric Buddhist philosophy by an American artist was already a familiar gesture. In effect, Johns's work posed anew the question asked some twenty years earlier by his friend John Cage - 'What nowadays, America mid-twentieth century, is Zen?' 6 - only of Tantra, rather than Zen; and in the changed context of an internationally connected, late-twentieth century art world, marked by the increasingly global ambitions of contemporary artists and their dealers.
One and many Tantras
What is Tantra? A number of scholarly authorities on Tantra deny that any such thing actually exists. That is to say, the characteristics commonly associated with Tantrism do not belong to a single, unified body of religious tradition, but permeate the doctrines and practices of many different schools and sects of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism from the medieval period onward. 7 As used in the sacred scriptures of the Vedas and other ancient Sanskrit texts, the word tantra broadly means 'treatise', 'doctrine' or 'system'. The word became more specifically associated with a body of doctrines and religious traditions based upon texts known variously as agamas or tantras, a class of non-Vedic (or non-revealed) scriptures that encompass a wide variety of topics, from statecraft, to shamanic and yogic practices, to cosmology and metaphysics. 8 These texts, the tantras proper, are attested from the seventh and eighth centuries onwards (although many of them assert a far greater antiquity, pre-dating even the Vedas themselves); meanwhile a number of the practices closely identified with Tantrism, including goddess worship (Saktism), blood sacrifice, ritualised sexual intercourse and magico-yogic techniques, have been traced back to sources in indigenous, pre-Vedic religious traditions. 9 During the medieval period Tantric practitioners often dwelt on the margins of society, their transgressive ceremonies shrouded in secrecy: ascetic sects like the Kapalikas ('skull-men'), who used cranium begging bowls and inhabited cremation grounds, inspired fear and awe by violating taboos against contact with dead bodies. But with the breakdown of the Gupta Empire in the sixth century and the decentralisation of power in feudal India, Tantric practices became more widespread throughout the subcontinent, as competition among local religious movements increased. 10 During the same period, Tantric doctrines and rituals influenced the development of esoteric schools of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism that were exported abroad, contributing to the dissemination of Tantrism throughout Southeast and East Asia. 11 Eventually Tantrism came to imbue many different strands of these religions with its characteristic philosophies and forms of worship, complicating the effort to disentangle Tantra from mainstream Hinduism or Buddhism.

Conversely, some postcolonial critics have asserted that the phenomenon known as 'Tantra' is a purely Western invention, an attempt on the part of orientalist scholars and colonial authorities to excise those aspects of Hinduism that struck them as scandalous deviations from the rarefied spirituality of the Vedas, which they regarded as closer in spirit to their own deistic monotheism. 12 Within colonial-era histories of Hinduism, Tantra was often characterised in distinctly orientalising terms, as a corruption of a supposedly earlier (and therefore, according to the racial theories of the time, a more purely Aryan) Vedantic Hinduism. 13 Consequently, Tantra would come to represent what one scholar has termed the 'extreme Orient', a domain of secret cults, forbidden rites and perverse and excessive sensuality. 14 This interpretation influenced even the intellectuals of the Bengal renaissance: socio-religious reformers like Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833), founder of the monotheistic religious movement known as Brahmoism, campaigned vociferously against Tantra, which he associated with the Saktism (worship of the Divine Mother) that dominated the religious practices of his own class, the upper-caste Brahmins of Bengal. 15

In the West in the early twentieth century, it was precisely the promise of emancipation from the strictures of dogmatic Christianity and utilitarian rationality that rendered Tantra so attractive to Romantic orientalists like Sir John Woodroffe (author of the earliest popularising treatments of Tantra in English, under the pseudonym 'Arthur Avalon') and Heinrich Zimmer, as well as charismatic cult leaders like Aleister Crowley, who credited Tantra as a source of inspiration for his own brand of 'sex magick'. 16 Subsequently, in the 1960s and 1970s, Tantra was actively exported to the West by gurus and teachers from a variety of religious and spiritual traditions. The failed 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese communist authorities, which drove the Dalai Lama and other religious leaders into exile in India and the West, afforded Westerners unprecedented access to the esoteric traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, which includes many Tantric elements. 17 In subsequent decades, the Tantric teachings of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and other Tibetan Buddhists in exile found an especially receptive audience among avant-garde artists and Beat poets, many of whom already had long-standing interests in Hinduism, Zen Buddhism and other Asian spiritual and philosophical traditions. 18 Meanwhile the popular reception of Tantra in the West linked it with both sexual liberation and mysticism, resonating with the countercultural embrace of the occult, 'free love' and goddess-centred neo-paganism. 19

The European and American reception of Tantric art is inseparable from these developments, yet it followed its own unique trajectory. Contemporary artists in India and the West were introduced to Tantric art thanks largely to the collaboration of four individuals: an Indian curator, a British pop music impresario and two art dealers, one based in London and the other in New Delhi. As will be shown below, their collective efforts launched an Indian art movement, opened new markets for Tantric art in India and the West, and created a new field of academic specialisation. At the same time, they helped expel the mists of esoteric speculation and rumour surrounding Tantra by securing its newfound visibility on the world stage.
Tantric art in the twentieth century: Nodes and networks
In 1967 London gallerist and pop art dealer Robert ('Groovy Bob') Fraser and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones were arrested for drug possession at a party at Keith Richards's country house, Redlands. Reacting to sensationalist media coverage of the case, British pop artist Richard Hamilton created a collage of press clippings that he then made into a lithograph titled Swingeing London 67 - poster 1967-8 (Tate P01855; fig.6). Special prominence is given to the headline, 'Stones: "A Strong, Sweet, Smell of Incense"' and its correlation of fashionable orientalism with the use of illicit drugs. Yet in the following years, Fraser would become involved with a series of projects that aimed to promote an entirely different linkage of Asian culture with the avant-garde, emphasising the continuities between Tantric art, abstract painting and experimental film.

Nik Douglas was a onetime manager and producer of English rhythm and blues groups (and distant descendent of the Duke of Buckingham) who in the 1960s and 1970s travelled extensively in India and South Asia, researching Tantra and studying Ayurvedic medicine. 20 In or around 1967, he spent a year working as unpaid assistant to Ajit Mookerjee, a curator at the National Handicrafts and Handlooms Museum in New Delhi. Douglas helped Mookerjee organise the artworks in his private collection, many of which were included in Mookerjee's 1967 book Tantra Art: Its Philosophy and Physics, and they partnered on the planning of a film that would document the 1968 Kumbh Mela festival in Haridwar. Mookerjee offered to procure access to important religious sites, including the cremation grounds where Tantric ascetics lived, if Douglas could find a sponsor for the film. Returning to London with Mookerjee's just-published monograph in hand, Douglas met Fraser and invited him to join the venture. Together, they were able to persuade Mick Jagger to provide financial backing, in exchange for hiring Jagger's friend, underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger, to direct the film. 21

Fraser later introduced Douglas to Hugh Shaw, Secretary-General of the Arts Council of Great Britain, launching a collaboration that led to the first major exhibition of Tantric art in the West. Held in 1971 at London's Hayward Gallery, the exhibition mainly featured works from Mookerjee's collection. Meanwhile, Mookerjee continued to publish additional volumes on Tantra, including (with Madhu Khanna) The Tantric Way: Art, Science, Ritual (1977). The Tantric Way highlights the parallels between Tantric art and the early twentieth-century modernist abstractions of Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Constantin Brancusi and Robert Delaunay, as well as the affinities between the post-war American painters Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman and the work of Indian artist Biren De. 22 The latter was one of the leading members of a group of 'neo-Tantric' artists newly promoted by New Delhi gallerist Virendra Kumar Jain, the older brother of Tantra Art's publisher, Ravi Kumar. 23

Johns has affirmed that works illustrated in Mookerjee's books on Tantric art provided the source for most of the Tantric motifs in his 1979 watercolour Cicada (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) and his 1980-1 Dancers on a Plane (fig.3). He has acknowledged that a number of the shapes and patterns sketched in crayon, graphite and watercolour along the bottom edge of Cicada, as well as the relief element in the top part of the frame of Dancers on a Plane, were derived from Tantric depictions of the lingam (a phallus symbolising the god Shiva) set in the yoni (a stylised vulva, symbolic of the goddess Shakti), representing the mystical union of Shiva and his consort in sexual intercourse (fig.7). Cicada draws upon at least two further images of works from Mookerjee's collection, including a Kali yantra (a mystical diagram of the bindu or cosmic seed centred in an inverted triangle or trikona, representing Shakti; fig.8), and a drawing captioned 'The Principle of Fire'. 24

Meanwhile Johns has stated that the 'balls' framing the bottom of Dancers on a Plane were inspired by the pendulant testicles of Samvara in the seventeenth-century Nepalese painting Mystical Form of Samvara with Seventy-Four Arms Embracing His Sakti with Twelve Arms (fig.5), illustrated in Mookerjee's Tantra Art. 25 The testicles at the bottom and the lingam at the top of the frame of Dancers on a Plane are connected by the vertical axis of the painting, whose lower reaches are punctuated with drops of white paint that could represent the beaded necklaces or girdles of Samvara and his consort, 26 but also the upward flow of semen. 27 An intriguing parallel may be drawn between the painting's heavy bronze frame and a nineteenth-century sculpture in Mookerjee's collection figuring 'the supreme Goddess as the Void' (fig.9), which could have inspired or at least influenced Johns's conception of the work. 28 Finally, Johns has linked the rows of cutlery that line either side of the painting's frame to the manifold attributes held by Samvara's seventy-four arms: these range from the Tantric symbols of the vajra (thunderbolt) and bell, representing skilful means and wisdom, to the weapons he wields in his conquest of ignorance. 29 In fact, although Johns's identification of Samvara and his consort as 'dancers on a plane' plays upon their resemblance to images of the dancing Shiva, Samvara's pose is alidha asana, the lunging 'warrior stance'. Embraced by his consort, he stands astride the two defeated Brahmanical deities, Bhairava and Kalaratri, who represent the (vanquished) illusory distinction between worldly existence and nirvana. 30

Johns has not described how or when he first became interested in Tantra, or the circumstances under which he discovered Mookerjee's work, but in the late 1960s he and Fraser travelled in the same social circles: both attended dinners hosted by New York society hostess Panna Grady, and the pop artists in Fraser's stable included a number of Johns's close friends and acquaintances, including Jim Dine and Richard Hamilton. 31 It may be that Johns succumbed to the fascination Tantra inspired in so many other Western observers, for whom it represented the ultimate object of forbidden knowledge, a paradoxical fusion of the Romantic myth of 'spiritual Asia' and orientalist fantasies of sexual transgression. Conversely, his engagement with Tantric art could be considered a product of the philosophical and scholastic interpretation of Tantra advanced by Mookerjee and the writer and curator Philip S. Rawson, which aimed to reclaim Tantra from its popular associations with sex orgies and drug use. 32 Yet Johns's quotation of these images performs a series of gestures - appropriation, decontextualisation, fetishisation - that are all too familiar from the history of colonialist and orientalist representations of Asia as Western civilisation's 'other'.

But what if such colonial structures of power and representation could be subverted in the very process of cultural translation? What if Tantra could be mined for a metaphorics that subverted orientalism's own structuring oppositions between iconicity and mobility, fetishisation and exchange? The next section will show how Tantric imagery gave metaphorical expression to a competition over the artistic leadership of Cunningham's dance company, and how Johns drew upon this conceptual map or mandala to formulate his own, divergent conception of the relationship between sexual and cultural difference in his 1980-1 Dancers on a Plane.
Geographies of the readymade
In the late 1970s, even as Johns curtailed his involvement with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, he might have taken special note of the set Robert Rauschenberg designed for Cunningham's dance Travelogue 1977, a sculptural installation that Rauschenberg titled Tantric Geography (fig.10). 33 The set design was related to a series of works Rauschenberg created in 1975 and 1976 entitled Jammers, which also made use of fabric panels reminiscent of flags or sails, and whose brightly coloured skeins of cotton, muslin and silk drew inspiration from the artist's 1975 visit to Ahmedabad in India to research textiles and printmaking. The resemblance to flags of the fabric panels in both Tantric Geography and the Jammers series was probably not lost on Johns, who might have seen a winking reference in these works to his own iconic paintings of the American flag.

Beyond swathing the stage in curtains, one of the most striking features of Rauschenberg's décor for Travelogue was the frieze of alternating chairs and bicycle wheels installed along the wall at the rear of the stage. Suggesting the arrangement of a chair before a spinning wheel, the frieze extends the metaphorical connotations of the fabric to incorporate iconographic associations with textile production. 34 At the same time, the pairing of bicycle wheel and chair inescapably evokes Duchamp's famous 'assisted readymade' of 1913, constructed from a bicycle wheel mounted upside-down on the seat of a wooden stool ( Bicycle Wheel remade 1951, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Meanwhile, the wheels recalled an earlier set Rauschenberg had designed for the dance company's tour of India in 1964, which featured a bicycle suspended above the stage; 35 for their part, the chairs could be seen as a nod to Cunningham's celebrated choreography for Antic Meet 1958, in which he danced with a chair strapped to his back. The chairs also call to mind Rauschenberg's iconic 1960 painting Pilgrim (private collection), which features a real wooden chair affixed to its surface, as well as two important 1964 works by Johns, Watchman (The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles) and According to What (private collection).

Both chair and bicycle wheel, then, might be said to belong to a shared iconography of the Duchampian readymade, a tradition to which Johns, Rauschenberg and Cunningham were all equally bound. In this sense, these objects represent a point of convergence between the artists' individual oeuvres. At the same time, Rauschenberg's negation or reversal of Duchamp's foundational act in constructing Bicycle Wheel in 1913 - separating the two components, chair and wheel, that Duchamp had originally fused in order to produce the first readymade - suggests a very different possibility: namely, that the frieze enframing Tantric Geography, with its alternating elements that face sometimes towards, sometimes away from one another, represents two incompatible or opposed interpretations of Duchamp's foundational work. The bicycle wheel interprets the readymade as a literal 'vehicle' for the frictionless circulation of artworks and artists across geographic and political borders, suggesting the mobility of the post-studio artist whose materials, being found or shop-bought, are always ready at hand: it links the readymade to Duchamp's Boite-en-valise 1935-41, a suitcase he designed to house a collection of miniaturised reproductions of his major works (editions of the Boite-en-valise are held in various collections). 36 This was indeed the interpretation of Duchamp's work that guided Rauschenberg's own artistic practice, characterised by its multiple, transnational sites of production and the affirmation of spatial mobility as an aesthetic value in its own right. 37 Rauschenberg's 'combines', hybrid assemblages of painting, collage and sculpture of which Pilgrim is an example, have their origin in the moveable sets Rauschenberg constructed for Cunningham's dances, such as Minutiae 1954; other works, such as Monogram 1955-9 (Moderna Museet, Stockholm), are themselves mounted on casters or incorporate moving, mechanical parts. Of equal significance is Rauschenberg's embrace of mobility in his personal and professional life, such as when he joined Cunningham's company as set designer and occasional performer on their 1964 world tour, simultaneously taking advantage of the opportunity to raise the international stature of his art. 38

In contrast to this Rauschenbergian reception of the readymade, there is the interpretation advanced by Johns, for whom the readymade embodied the paradox of a work of art that is simultaneously reduced to the mute passivity of the everyday object, and elevated to the purely ideational condition of the emblem or sign. 39 This is the readymade as icon, partaking of both materiality and transcendence. Brought down from its pedestal or cantilevered out from the wall, the work of art is made tactile, embodied and concrete; at the same time, reduced to its purely conceptual, linguistic or imagistic essence, the material object is transformed into a hieratic symbol, unchanging and immutable. 40 In Tantric Geography this Johnsian interpretation of the readymade might be succinctly symbolised by the chair, which ever since Plato has served as a privileged example of the distinction between the material object (the chair on which the philosopher sits and thinks) and the pure Idea (the ideal image or unchanging 'essence' of chairness, in relation to which every actual chair is merely an imperfect and impermanent copy).

Even as the chair encapsulates a reading of the readymade-as-icon, it also attests to another aspect of Johns's difference from Rauschenberg. In contrast to the latter artist's wheeled and mechanised constructions, even the moveable and interactive components of Johns's paintings - hinged, hooked and swinging elements - suggest immobilisation and storage, as of an object removed from use and fixed in place. To this corresponds an image of the artist as hermit or recluse, confined to making art out of whatever lies at hand, most saliently the accoutrements of the studio (paint cans, rulers, brooms and cups) and the furnishings of his home (cutlery, cabinets, clotheshangers - and, of course, chairs). Meanwhile, aside from an extended visit to Japan in 1964, Johns did not seem to share Rauschenberg's enthusiasm for travel: during the 1970s, he largely divided his time between his Houston Street studio in New York City, acquired in 1967, and residences in upstate New York, on Edisto Island in South Carolina, and on the Caribbean Island of Saint Martin.

This division between the two artists' lives and works neatly recapitulates the polarity suggested by the title of Rauschenberg's set design, with its opposition of the bodily and the spatial, immanence and transcendence. A work designed for interaction with human bodies moving through space, Tantric Geography evokes one of the key principles of Tantra: the analogical relationship between the microcosm of the human organism and the macrocosm of the cosmos, with its sacred geography of temples and pilgrimage sites, each keyed to a particular body part of the Great Goddess. 41 Insofar as the all-embracing Divine Mother participates in the limitations of the geographic and the corporeal, Tantra both recognises and resolves the contradiction between the multiplicity of bodies and the unity of the purely transcendent reality or Idea. This characteristically Tantric solution to the opposition between oneness and multiplicity might have appealed to Rauschenberg as a way of describing the relationship between the work of the two artists, reconciling while respecting their individual differences. Moreover, this was a reconciliation peculiarly tuned to the multiple spaces - geographic, theatrical and sexual - inhabited by Cunningham's globe-trotting 'dancers on a plane'.

Might the Tantric content of the 1980-1 Dancers on a Plane be read as Johns's response to his interpellation within Rauschenberg's set design? To answer this question it is necessary to go back to the painting from which Johns's imagery derived. Although the earlier watercolour Cicada featured Tantric imagery taken from a variety of sources, interspersed with found images taken from newspaper photographs and entomological illustrations, Johns has related the various Tantric elements of Dancers on a Plane to one single source, as mentioned above: a seventeenth-century Nepalese painting depicting Samvara joined in sexual union with his divine consort, Vajrayogini. The specificity of the references in Dancers on a Plane - the reflections of Samvara's testicles and the act of sexual penetration in the frame's bronze reliefs; the translation of the beaded tassel hanging from Samvara's girdle into the dotted white line dividing the painting along its axis; and the cutlery's evocation of the weapons borne in Samvara's out-fanned arms - frames Johns's engagement with Tantra as a direct, one-to-one relationship between his own painting and the anonymous Nepalese painter's work, a face-to-face rapport across a gulf of centuries and a distance of thousands of miles. This creative conjunction, spanning a divide of almost cosmic proportions, precisely mirrors the iconography of Samvara's world-engendering union with Vajrayogini. It is tempting, therefore, to interpret the Tantric theme of Dancers on a Plane as a commentary on, or condensation of, Johns's multiple engagements with other cultural traditions, as in prior works like Usuyuki 1977-8 (Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland). In the Tate Dancers on a Plane, cross-cultural exchange is represented not as a function of the mobility of artists or artworks across borders, but as a product of intersubjective encounter, framed by erotic and ideological investments in cultural difference. 42

Such an interpretation is supported by what we know of Johns's actual relationships with people and institutions outside the United States. If the rivalry between Johns and Rauschenberg had partly to do with competition for international exposure and engagement, then the peripatetic Rauschenberg could indeed claim a wider scope of activity than Johns; and yet Johns's foreign engagements, while few in number, tended to be deep and long-lasting. In his relatively rare travels outside the United States, he frequently visited places he had already seen in order to reconnect with people he knew, such as the Japanese critic Tono Yoshiaki, his long-time friend and supporter, or Swiss-born curator and art historian Christian Geelhaar.

Finally, we might note that the encircling girdle of spoons, knives and forks in the bronze frame of Johns's painting parallels the frieze of alternating chairs and bicycle wheels in Rauschenberg's Tantric Geography, while simultaneously recalling fork-and-spoon pairings found in a number of the artist's earlier works. The motif makes its first appearance in Johns's painting In Memory of My Feelings - Frank O' Hara 1961 (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago), a work that art historians Fred Orton and Kenneth Silver have both linked to the break-up of Johns's romantic relationship with Rauschenberg in that year, 43 suggesting that the mismatched pairing of spoon and fork could serve as a symbolic portrait of Johns and Rauschenberg themselves - two 'opposites' joined by elective affinity, their differences irreducible to the fixed binary oppositions prescribed by gender.

Perhaps, then, Johns's resurrection of this motif in the Tate Dancers on a Plane represents a response to the chair-and-wheel motif framing Rauschenberg's set, which it formally echoes. Significantly, however, the frame of Johns's work features not two elements, but three: the spoon, the fork and the knife. Who or what, in this triangulation of metaphors, would be represented by the knife? Is the knife simply the cut, the division, that separates their respective interpretations of the readymade? Or does this 'cut' in fact stand for something more immediately concrete, a channel of communication as well as an object of rivalry: for example, the dance company for which both artists designed costumes and sets?

Irreducible to the binary structure of sexual difference that regulates Tantric ritual, these knives could stand for many things, including sexual difference itself, or the violence that accompanies differentials of power and position in every situation of exchange, whether sexual, artistic or political. Meanwhile, the paired emblems of vagina above and testicles below unceasingly pose the question of who is the active and creative partner, and who the passive participant, in the work's ever-expanding circuits of exchange.

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Incarnating Duality: Jasper Johns and Tantric Art

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In 1984, when the second, 1980-1 Dancers on a Plane (Tate T03242; fig.1) was exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City, the work's hatching-filled surface announced its kinship with its immediate predecessor, the 1979 version of Dancers on a Plane (private collection), as well as numerous earlier works Johns had based on the same motif.

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Extend your learning.

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How the artist Roger Hiorns works with duality

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How the artist Roger Hiorns works with duality

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Extend your learning

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Roger Hiorns is probably best known for (2008), an Artangel commission for which he covered the interior of a condemned flat in South London with copper sulphate.

Dense layers of blue crystals grew from ceiling to floor and Hiorns has said how errors in the crystallisation process enhanced the work's dazzling effect. In turn, Seizure had a powerful effect on many who visited it, provoking a range of responses from inducing people to pray to making them want to have sex.

The work saw Hiorns nominated for the Turner Prize the following year and it has since been permanently reinstalled at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

In 2015 Hiorns was part of a group exhibiton at the Hayward Gallery, London, where he presented work exploring BSE, more commonly known as 'mad cow disease', and its human variant vCJD.

Hiorns, 41, has returned to his hometown for his latest exhibition at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Here he presents sculptural works in which young men 'merge' with inanimate objects and materials.

Meanwhile, his recent 'brain' paintings revisit themes around disease and contamination, as well as the duality of the mind/body.

This year, if all goes well, Hiorns will be burying a decommissioned Boeing 737 near the outskirts of the city. He is also one of five artists shortlisted for the Birmingham Big Art Project, which plans to site a new £2 million permanent public artwork to the east of the city centre.

Your exhibition at Birmingham's Ikon Gallery features three naked young men positioning themselves on various objects. What ideas are you exploring in the work?
You've got an oppositional thing going on: you've got these dominant objects and you've got these beings, the 'youths', who come with a certain amount of ambiguity - they're a kind of trajectory into the future. And the idea is something to do with trying to slip through time. The objects are part of the history of the world, but the youths that will occupy the works will always be youths.

In this show there's an altar stone which I showed at the Venice Biennale (in 2013), or at least a version of the one I showed at Venice. It's an altar stone from a Church of England church that's been crushed into dust. I had this idea about taking something authoritative and reducing it to a non-authoritative form. We think about the altar as a focus of devotional thought, and I thought, actually there's an authority kind of relationship that was always played with by artists such as Donald Judd and the minimalists to some degree. But I wanted to atomise that devotional object, to render it into a kind of powder. And so you have a naked youth in the presence of a crushed Church of England altar stone, while another youth is sitting on a hospital X-Ray machine.

What drew you to this idea of the 'youths'?
There is this idea that youth is idealised, but youths themselves aren't. I think there is a paradoxical reflection on that which I find quite interesting. I think that as you get older the value of youth becomes higher. There is a virility that people miss. There's that's Martin Kippenberger quote, "Passing from the bonus of youth", that I find interesting to address.

That these young men appear to merge with, for instance, defunct technology suggests a strong sci-fi narrative running through this show. Is science fiction something you're interested in?
I think the science fiction aspect is something I'm obviously interested in, and if you're going to aestheticise the future, you have two possibilities: you have a dystopia, a situation that's against the human, who is surrounded by things that have gone wrong; and then you have the romantic, for example, having spacemen colonising a new planet and that being a kind of utopian idea. But what I think comes through in my work is the idea of the future and of the present co-existing at the same time.

When you first showed a variation of this work, at your 2013 exhibition at the Hepworth Gallery, there was a lot of, 'Look, there's nudity,' and very little attention to anything else. This must have irritated you a bit.
Yes, some people did focus on the thrill of male nudity. It's been fascinating to see how people deal with it. But what really interests me is that these works are essentially sculptures and are essentially about materials. And the humans become part of the material of the work. I think maybe 10 or even five years ago, it was a problematic type of thinking to suggest that we were just material in the world, rather anything more substantive or meaningful. The work itself describes this kind of philosophical predicament.

Tell us about the 'brain' paintings in this show.
I wanted to take the idea of painting to its literal end, so essentially they're the presentation of the brain on either a canvas or a piece of plastic or an object. I wanted to display the idea of cognitive ability rather than actually use cognitive ability to suggest a symbol, or landscape, or some other synthetic idea of painting. I wanted to find the material that was most 'present' in the world and brain-matter seemed to be the most interesting. And the idea that the material came from a calf, a creature that has ideas about its mother or of walking to the cowshed - all of that information, all of that cognitive ability is still present on the surface of the canvas. You walk along the street and you see people and you don't imagine that they have a few kilos of jelly in their head. It seemed interesting to take that and present it as a kind of brutish material.

Seizure is still your best known work. You've said that there were some really interesting responses when people visited it, that some visitors wanted to pray, some to have sex.
Yeah, it was really interesting that people wanted to have sex in it. In fact, when people talk about Seizure they talk about the intensity of colour, but then they start talking about the intensity of their experience. I think the intensity of colour really resonated and did something to people's psychology. I think that there was some moment when people's thought patterns somehow became heightened. For me, there's something really fascinating about the idea that there's art that really intensifies your relationship to the world and it's intensified because the materiality of the work itself is intensified.

And there were lots of conversations about beauty around Seizure that I skirted around at the time because I thought that the idea of beauty was a really problematic conversation to have. But now I think the idea of beauty puts the human back into the centre of the experience of an art work. I think we've had quite a long period of time where the human has been excluded from the art work. So, yes, Seizure was enjoyed and liked a lot by people who thought that here was a generous work for once. It wasn't cynical and it wasn't misanthropic. I mean, I see lots of art and sometimes find that I'm being squeezed out as a human.
Roger Hiorns' exhibition continues at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, until 5 March 2017. The artist will be in conversation with the writer and curator Tom Morton on Wednesday 8 February, 6-7.30pm. ikon-gallery.org

1. Roger Hiorns. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
2-6. Roger Hiorns, 2016, installation view at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Ikon

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