"Rage for Order"

Here's a documentary called Rage for Order featuring artist Jessica Park, presented by Oliver Sacks.

In this film we see the brain and, in particular, the cerebellum (the little brain) as an object. The relationship between the cerebellum and the rest of the brain, the big puffy lobes above the cerebellum, is like the physical, limited, corporeal body as it exists within the unpredictable atmosphere of weather systems and the cosmos.

I'm reminded of the paintings and writings of Henry Darger (known for his epic scrolls of the Vivian Girls saga) who was obsessed by weather conditions and cloud formations. Brain activity and weather are one and the same. We seem to take cover from the weather but we are involved in it. Thinking is a kind of electrical storm.

We are at the mercy of our chosen overlords. Who is your overlord? One of mine is Money. I just got a bill in the mail that was unexpected and an electrical storm ensued - then I noticed the bill was to someone else, it came to the wrong address, and I am still in the throes of a subsiding electrical storm of panic.

What about public opinion? What other people think. When, for example, you find out a friend doesn't like something you did - does that set off an electrical storm? All those big puffy lobes are crashing down on the cerebellum.

As much as I adore Oliver Sacks I feel the torturous probing of intuition a kind of autopsy on the living. I don't think I should be privy to the secrets of other people's private worlds, but still I am curious. I think this odd hang up about inner privacy and outward expression is why William Burroughs believed words to be a kind of virus and Jacques Derrida spoke of an inner tormenting voice that came to him before sleep, telling him to destroy his writing. (Derrida's Archive Fever is a fascinating account of the roots of psychoanalysis.)

In this film, Jessica Park's mother, essayist Clara Clairborne, tells us about the popular theories of autism when she was a young parent. Her agitation is palpable. An eminent psychiatrist, holocaust survivor, wrote an influential book on the subject of autism that, you can see, caused a lot of distress in this woman. It is her documentation of Jessica's early development that allows for any kind of window onto the art of Jessica Park.

In an essay by John Mays - a Fiction about John Brown (which accompanies the current show at Olga Korper Gallery) the artist says that trying to understand the source of art is an idle pursuit.

Still, this is an electrical problem.