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Eyes wide shut: in the film "The Science of Sleep" and a related installation, Michel Gondry played with scientific findings that have recently engaged other artists interested in dreams and unconscious behavior

Art in America, April, 2008 by Nancy Princenthal

In the groves of academe, at least those where art historians (and not a few artists) dally, the big trees in psychology are still Freud and Lacan. Unconscious processes, as reflected in the production, content and reception of visual art, are approached, in a weirdly high proportion of critical theory, through a system of analysis first developed a century ago. In much feminist theorizing particularly, psychosocial issues more relevant to late Victorian culture than our own still generate debate. On the other hand, in the world of neuroscience (where Freud, after all, first toiled), the study of unconscious mental activity has moved on. If that progress has been little noted in the art world until lately [see "Art & Science II" this issue]--and if a reciprocal conservatism affects neuroscientists when they address themselves to art, of which more below-there are strong signs of growing mutual interest.

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Among the more compelling are the adventures in post-Freudian psychology put on screen by French artist and filmmaker Michel Gondry. In The Science of Sleep (2006), a feature-length film that was accompanied, in New York, by an exhibition of movie-related work at Deitch Projects, Gondry envisioned dreams in a way that Breton, Bunuel and Bellmer would have a hard time recognizing. There is no sex and very little violence. Meaning surfs on the surging, curling surface of things, almost all of them familiar from the waking world. In the beginning of the movie, Gondry's young male protagonist, Stephane (played by Gael Garcia Bernal), acting as host to his own funky reality show (or is it a children's educational program?), explains that dreaming is a cooking project in which random thoughts and memories are tossed into a big pot, a process that he gamely demonstrates. It is all very gemutlich. No eyes are sliced, no psychedelic patterns swirl.

But Gondry, or at least Stephane, is fascinated by how our minds can be split, wander apart and invent parallel worlds. So, for instance, he is interested in perceptual games and optical tricks that reveal how our unconscious sensory processing systems can produce impressions at odds with reality. Stephane is momentarily enchanted by putting two of his fingers together tip to tip and looking beyond them, which seems to make them grow an extra joint, He also likes tactile illusions that create confusion about where his body ends, as when he puts his hand against the hand of Stephanie, his would-be girlfriend, and strokes their aligned fingers.... under which circumstances it's very hard to tell whose are whose. Most striking, none of these perceptual adventures evidently much matter. Dreaming isn't a royal road to anywhere for Stephane, but instead a spiraling MObius strip, because he has a hard time distinguishing waking from sleeping. There's nothing erotic in that tender finger stroking because he can hardly tell whether Stephanie (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) is a real or fictive friend--or, as her name suggests, a part of himself. At the movie's end, when there should be a consummatory love scene, Stephane abruptly humiliates her in a way that seems out of character, but evokes with painful credibility the special kinds of catastrophic self-humiliation that are the stock-in-trade of dreams.

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED]

There are, to be fair, also moments of pure dream pleasure, and plenty of flat-out silliness. Before he lays into Stephanie, Stephane has the gratification of humiliating his insufferable boss; equally liberating is a blissful gallop through the countryside with his provisionally willing beloved. A simple time machine Stephane rigs out of spare hardware allows for comically limited temporal manipulations, which don't accomplish much beyond the lovely illusion of control. Other handy gizmos include a fancy electric shaver that becomes a creepy crawly straight out of a fit of delirium tremens; in a nicely dreamy reversal of purpose, the retrofitted razor causes people it encounters (notably the bad boss) to become appallingly hirsute. But more often things operate in the service of perfect chaos. Indeed Stephane associates moments of profoundest wonderment with a principle he calls Parallel Synchronized Randomness.

Sometimes he games the chaos, as in creating the horse that, magically brought to full-scale life, he and Stephanie ride in dreamland; in their (dubious) waking world, this horse is a little cloth toy Stephane has mechanized with a program that causes three of its legs to respond randomly to one ordered motion. The toy horse was one of the handmade stuffed animals shown at Deitch, where it served as a talisman of childhood, reminding us that we're all susceptible to fairly primitive beliefs about what is real and what's not (or, what's alive and what isn't). Almost all traditional art, it could be argued, exploits the confusion.

One way Gondry made this point in the gallery was by providing opportunities to (imaginatively) enter into and (literally) muck around with the visual material. The simplest was a video camera that inserted live-feed imagery of viewers into a sequence from the movie. Trickier and more novel was a big and apparently static video image of Stephane with his eyes scrunched shut--a pair of ropes dangling from a pulley system allowed viewers to yank the eyes open one at a time; clever programming made it appear seamless. Best of all, an old upright piano--in the movie, it tumbles past Stephane on the stairs in a very funny bit of slapstick--was rigged with a video monitor set into the music stand, showing the falling-piano sequence. Pressing a single key split the screen in haft, allowing two portions of the sequence to run simultaneously; a three-note chord split the screen in quarters.

Eyes wide shut: in the film "The Science of Sleep" and a related installation, Michel Gondry played with scientific findings that have recently engaged other artists interested in dreams and unconscious behavior

Art in America, April, 2008 by Nancy Princenthal

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