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Empathetic
by Elizabeth Thomas, Exhibition
Curator
What does it mean to truly understand another person? Empathy is
the process by which we take the place of another, near or far, known or
unknown. Empathy bridges the distance between human experiences, binding us to
another in deeply personal ways that reflect our potential for shared
experience, compassion, action—even manipulation. For a concept so fundamentally
important to human relations, it is strange to realize that the term empathy
entered the English lexicon less than 100 years ago. Before we applied the term
to interpersonal relations, the word came to us as a translation of the German
Einfühlung, used to theorize an unconscious physiological reaction to viewing
art.1
Translated literally as “feeling into,” in this context empathy reflected the
human capacity to project oneself into the situation conjured by a work of art,
an act of transference of one’s own experiences to form a complete comprehension
of the work, whether voluntary or involuntary. This process relies on visual
cues that trigger our attempts to apply a theory of mind to the depiction, so we
recognize the outward expression of love, or joy, or sorrow in the face and body
of a subject, and through this comprehension are able to channel our own
simulation of those emotions. From these origins in phenomenological aesthetics,
empathy has broadened its scope into the realms of ethics and epistemology, as a
way of framing the uses and abuses of deeply understanding another person’s
mental, emotional, and physical experiences.
Mapping another’s experience through the frame of our own internal
understanding is a complex human operation that supersedes the limits of related
interpersonal responses like pity or sympathy. Social psychologists make the
distinction thusly: “In empathy one substitutes oneself for the other person; in
sympathy one substitutes others for oneself. In sum, empathy is a way of
knowing; sympathy is a way of relating.”2
Edmund Husserl provides the early bridge from aesthetics to interpersonal
relations through the phenomenological experience of intersubjectivity.3
But our contemporary understanding of empathy accounts not only for the
phenomenological and physiological aspects of affect and emotion, but emphasizes
the cognitive aspects of our responses through analogical processing. It allows
for comprehension of much more complicated situations—it is one thing to feel
bad and share the sorrow of someone who is suffering, it is another thing
entirely to put yourself in the place of another and attempt to map a broader
matrix of emotion and experience. Empathy is the only human superpower—it can
shrink distance, cut through social and power hierarchies, transcend difference,
and provoke political and social change. It connects us not only in sadness and
despair but in love and happiness too. Of course, like any human act, it is
fallible. Emotion and intellect are socially conditioned; we can fail to map
accurately the motivations and emotions of another person, especially as the
objects of our empathy are increasingly distant from us, in experience,
geography, or culture. The artists in Empathetic traverse this entire terrain of
empathic comprehension—exploring the physical, social, and personal dimensions
of empathy, interrogating human intention, and uncovering the cultural
constructions that underlie our attempts to truly comprehend another’s internal
situation.
Jesper Just’s work bring us closest
to the initial conceptions of empathy in aesthetics, as we read, translate, and
channel the intense emotions of his subjects. Our senses are heightened in his
intricately constructed, self-contained worlds, as through his lens we
experience slower action, deeper passion, moodier lighting, and stranger
scenarios than could possibly exist in reality. His lush films enact desires for
connection, liberation, and ultimately of men for other men. Inside ambiguous
narratives, syrupy love songs are repurposed as soliloquies, telegraphing the
beauty of unabashed emotion and willing vulnerability. Just’s films counter the
societal repression of emotion between men as friends, family, and more
pointedly, lovers, as the characters attempt to traverse the psychic distance
that separates them from true intimacy and empathy. Beyond interrogating gender
conventions and the politics of homosexuality, if we acquiesce to the mood and
music, we are brought along in this rapturous embrace of amplified feelings.
Rachel Owens also deploys the
phenomenological punch of emotion to awaken our capacity for empathy. Her
sculptural tableaux vivants situate animals in relation to humankind as parables
of human dominance over the natural world, but operate more broadly as
metaphorical transpositions of power relations between persons. Falls, 2006
draws inspiration from the real-life capture of coyotes in New York City’s
Central Park. Against all odds they make it through the urban jungle to
Manhattan’s only wilderness, surviving in a world that is completely
inhospitable, only to arrive weak and vulnerable to trapping by park personnel,
who subsequently cage them or release them back from whence they came. Although
absent from the scene, humankind’s effects are implicated through the accretions
of trash and detritus or the more pointed references to war, cruelty, and hubris
chronicled in scattered newspapers. But humans aren’t really absent from the
scene at all--the hired guides that lead illegal immigrants across the US-Mexico
border are called “coyotes,” and they meet similar, if not even worse fates when
found by authorities where they don’t belong.
Through a practice based in exchange,
Jennifer Allora &Guillermo Calzadilla
have enacted for themselves and provoked in others the process of “seeing with
the wisdom of, or being wise to, the other.”4
Acknowledging the contingent interpersonal relations inherent to the
construction of meaning in the shared experience of art and life, Amphibious
(Login-Logout), 2006 implicates this human interdependence on a global scale. It
tracks a group of turtles as the log they ride drifts past commercial
import-export activities on the Pearl River in China, passive witnesses to a
global economy that carries them along with “the flow of capital and labor.”5
The turtle is a symbolic human
cipher: as an amphibious being that exists in more than one realm, it signals
the increasing complexity of social relations that exist now in both local and
global domains. Inescapably bound to one another by increasingly complex
political, economic, and social relations, we are compelled to move beyond our
interactions in daily life to recognize our interrelationships and practice
empathy long distance with others across the globe.
With participatory projects that span the fields of psychology,
anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and aesthetics,
Pedro Lasch creates performative situations that explore our codependent
formation of identity. The Naturalizations series of actions (ongoing since
2002) begins with the premise that we define ourselves contingent on our
relation to others, in name and speech, in skin and body, in gender and age, in
nationality and religion. By deploying a series of mirror masks in interactive
group performance, Lasch engenders varied instantiations of self-projection—from
the endless loop of non-identification when all participants wear mirrored masks
to the direct projection of self onto another when only some participants wear
masks, to the commingling of physical identities that occurs when participants
wearing partially mirrored masks face off against each other. For the
participants, these constructed situations produce a destabilization of fixed
identity, as one simultaneously inhabits his/her own internal experience and
watches his/her experience projected onto another.
Trisha Donnelly harnesses this
human capacity to conjure the experiences of others through the power of
suggestion. In text, performance, and video Donnelly’s work takes a declarative
tone to implant ideas and invoke consonant experiences. The tricky thing about
empathy is that it represents a kind of philosophical double bind—while we can’t
empirically know that we understand another’s experiences, by the same logic we
also can’t know that we don’t understand it perfectly. Donnelly’s work slips
into this space of uncertainty, as with her suggestion we internalize the
directive to “Let ’em”. Let whom? Do what? Why? How? And what does this have to
do with us? Of course none of these questions have answers, other than within
us, as we try to make sense of it by projecting our own experiences and
intentions into the situation. For Donnelly, the titular character of “El Cid,
2000, represents the body as vessel, recipient of the ideological projection of
others.”6
In the work, she transposed the eponymous Opera into a silent light composition,
reducing the experience to a rhythmic pattern of flashes, leaving us to project
the sound. The flashes of light also mimic flashes of knowledge—the blink of
time in which we might experience a rush of elusive interpersonal comprehension.
As two selves who share the same physical body, Cariana and Carianne
recognize a natural
knowledge of their “twoness” in a single skin for as long as they can remember.
CarianaCarianne have negotiated shared use of their body and its functions, from
the physical aspects of movement and sight to the mental aspects of
consciousness and speech. Witness to a Social Drawing contains a “Collaborative
Accord” drafted by the artists to define their relations to each other,
poetically recording their territorial conflicts and psychological disputes.
Their action gestures to the larger issues of international relations, as their
agreement is modeled after the Oslo Accord for peace signed by the Israeli
government and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Seeing themselves as
“woven” together, not divided, as collaborators in life and art, CarianaCarianne
have nevertheless attempted to pursue recognition of their dual status through
external channels to outline their bifurcated identities. The indissoluble
togetherness of the duo condenses the condition of empathy as both an expression
of intellectual and emotional understanding, and as an instance of experiential
synchronicity.
Pia Lindman’s New York Times
Project, 09/02–09/03, also considers the international applications of empathic
relations. Lindman culled images from a year of newspaper coverage of persons
grieving as a result of international conflicts and political turmoil. First
tracing, then reenacting the subjects’ anguished gestures, Lindman physically
mimicked the portrayed emotion. The specific mourning—for Americans, Russians,
Chechnyans, Israelis, Palestinians, Iraqis, among others—was broadened to a
study of collective emotional response in the wake of war and terrorism, a
“gestural repertoire of grief” concerned with the social constructions of
emotion surrounding traumas. Theories of human development suggest emotions are
discursive, not intuitive—we read physical and social cues and reenact their
physical manifestations in our faces and our bodies. We learn to project emotion
by watching and reproducing the outward expression of affect as social
convention; similarly, we empathize by recognizing and processing these
emotional triggers projected by others. Lindman’s project of systematic
re-performance problematizes the political and social dimensions of emotion,
affect, and empathy as they can be manipulated by the media and larger forces.
Kalup Linzy employs all the tricks
of the soap opera trade to craft sly serials that blend emotional crisis,
over-the-top antics, and cliffhanging storylines. In All My Churen Linzy plays
most of the characters, in full or through voice work lip-synched by other
actors. To suit the genre, and his simultaneous spoof/homage, he inhabits a
panoply of stereotypes—from race and gender to class and profession, the broad
strokes of which are filled in with surprising sensitivity and subtlety, his
attempt to capture the essence of a person. Each persona involves something of a
personal understanding, aspects of family, friends, and neighbors, or even Linzy
himself that he projects into their portrayals. Drama is one arena where artists
practice empathy with their roles, and if convincingly played, we as an audience
join them in identifying with a character’s circumstances. But Linzy’s work also
rides the limits of that potential for dramatic empathy. Fiction and drama are
often our foil—it is all to easy to believe we know another’s experiences
because we have seen those experiences acted out before and we recognize the
shapes that those emotions take. But in reality the operation is much more
nuanced, and requires that we look beyond the surface to ascribe intention and
shared experience from within.
Paul Chan’s work evinces an interest
in both complementary and competing sets of knowledge, from history to
philosophy to pop culture to literature to religion. The resulting collision of
symbolism and ideologies in his work produces ambiguity and hallucination that
forces him (and, by extension, us) into a position of “empathetic estrangement”7
in relation to ideas that may not resonate with our own worldviews. The
beginning of love the end of law, engages a system of belief that conjures
complex relationships to present-day politics, American culture, and world
history. In Chan’s view, Christianity is inextricably woven into the fabric of
our culture, our sense of ethics, and our conception of justice. Depicting the
infamous “Judas Kiss,” a moment of ultimate betrayal, Chan reminds us of the
darker side of empathic relations. Recent discoveries of the “Gospel of Judas,”
which claim Jesus himself planned the betrayal, cloud the event even more. No
matter what we believe, it is clear that there is nothing simple about the
kiss—all manner of ambiguous provocations swirl around it, from its potential
homoeroticism, to the fear of betrayal, to the intensity of love and
understanding.
In this wide-ranging exhibition, the works do not always directly
present or depict empathetic situations, but offer means of exploring our own
physical, intellectual, and sentient responses to involving narratives, iconic
images, and emotional situations. From the transmission of affective sensations
to the ethics of interdependence8
to the intimacy of interpersonal synchroncity, empathy emerges as a foundational
operation in human relations. The artworks in Empathetic explore ways in which
self-projection, personal identification, and mutual comprehension are provoked,
and reveal aesthetics, social constructions, and politics to be both the
settings for and products of complex human relations.
1. Early discussions of the
term are found in Robert Vischer, Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German
Aesthetics 1873-1893. Transl. Harry Francis Mailgrove and Eletheros Ikonomou
(Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the Arts and Humanities, 1994); Theodor
Lipps, Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (Leipzig, 1897); and
idem, Ästhetik, 2 vols. (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1903–06; 2nd ed. 1914–20).
2. Lauren Wispe, “The Distinction between Sympathy and Empathy: To Call Forth a
Concept, a Word Is Needed,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50/2,
1986, pp. 314–321.
3. See, in particular, A. D. Smith’s close reading of Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian
Meditation for discussions of intersubjectivity and empathy, in A. D. Smith,
Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations, (London
and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 212-251.
4. The artists quoted by Yasmin Ramirez, “Puerto Rican Light to Allora &
Calzadilla,” in Allora & Calzadilla, by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy (New York:
Americas Society, 2005), p. 53.
5. Email correspondence with the author, September 2006.
6. Statement by the artist, unpublished.
7. The artist quoted in Nell McClister, "Paul Chan," Bomb, Summer 2005, p. 23.
8. For the most relevant discussion of ethics and empathy, see Emanuel Levinas,
Humanism of the Other. Trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana and Chicago, IL: Illinois
University Press), 2003.
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