A fall into grace

Not just an optical illusion

Last week I went to Tate Britain to the see the Turners, but ended up being waylaid—much to my surprise—by Bridget Riley’s Fall, which she made in 1963.

You look at it here and you think something like: Cool. She made a really intense optical illusion. But seeing it with my own eyes, I thought, or felt, or experienced, something that can’t be put into words.

As I stood in front of it, it shimmered. Arrows of energy flew across it. I was falling into the painting while something else, something unknowable—maybe me?—was falling down under the weight of gravity, but the fall didn’t stop, which reminded me of one of my favorite song lyrics, from “Gravity’s Gone” by the Drive-By Truckers: “I’ve been falling so long it’s like gravity’s gone and I’m just floating.” (Listen to it here.)

It was hard work to pull my eyes away from this feeling of inhabiting infinity in three dimensions. The perfection of the repetition and the mathematical variation and the immaculate edges blew me away. I was astounded that human hands were able to create this. The human mind, too.

But what if the image had been thought up by the human mind but made by computer? Would I have been as intellectually astounded, as emotionally magnetized? I don’t think so. It would have been merely a brilliant, intense optical illusion. Basically, an intellectual toy. The metaphysical resonance wouldn’t be there—as it wasn’t there until I stood in front of the actual painting, rather than seeing a reproduction.

And then: What if the image had been made by computer and I DIDN’T KNOW IT? Would I have somehow intuited—in other words known, using my imaginative intelligence, by perhaps seeing some deviation so minuscule that it didn’t register in my conscious mind—that human hands hadn’t made it? Or would I then have had Response A rather than Response B?

If I’d had Response A, the response evoked by the image plus the information that it had been made by hand (not a piece of information that was relevant in 1963, when Riley made it), and then learned the truth, I would have been more than disappointed. I would have felt terribly betrayed.

What’s the difference? Same image. Same museum scenario. (Would a museum hang a computer-created version of the same image, even if it was something new in the world? A question that’s at the heart of the debate over much contemporary art.) Same viewer—intrigued and delighted by the image, both times. Awed, only once—when the experience was underpinned by the knowledge that the image was imagined by the human mind AND made by human hands.

If Bridget Riley were working today, would she have had a computer realize her ideas, even just the black-and-white ones? The result would be more time-efficient, certainly, and even more mathematically and executionally perfect. Weirdly, the digitized image shows the image as more handmade, more gray-scale, than it looked in reality—perhaps because it magnifies imperfections, or perhaps because pixels are cruder than the analog atoms of paint. Were the departures from perfection—which must be there, whether I was aware of them or not—intentional or simply unavoidable? If Riley were working now, would she have tried less hard to avoid them?

I’m currently reading Ian McGilchrist’s book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. It’s thrilling to see how tightly my thinking about imaginative intelligence maps onto the functions of the right brain, especially because McGilchrist sees the right brain, as I see imaginative intelligence, as not simply a collection of abilities but as a way of responding to lived experience. The second half of his book (which I haven’t reached yet) traces the left-brain takeover of culture and society—which is, he believes, at the root of what’s wrong with the world we’ve made.

One of the many fascinating points he makes is: the right brain, which is where empathy and human connection reside, as well as creativity, doesn’t fire in the same way when whatever it’s interfacing with is a computer and not a human—even though everything else is the same. The knowledge of “computer not human” or “human not computer” is left-brain knowledge; the knowing of why it matters is right-brain knowing. (The distinction between knowledge and knowing is my way of differentiating rational-intelligence/left-brain from imaginative-intelligence/right-brain.) So there is interplay between left and right, rational and imaginative; but the emotional and spiritual quality of the experience resides on the right, in the imaginative intelligence.

So, as my imaginative intelligence responded to it, Bridget Riley’s Fall threw a thread across the (maybe illusory) abyss between mortality and infinity.

Why should this be? Why should the left-brain knowledge matter? Because, I think, our imaginative intelligence, our right-brain knowing, is what makes us uniquely human. It’s what AI cannot have. (At least I hope it can’t, though the tech bros are seduced by the idea of becoming man-making gods.) The imaginative intelligence holds life precious, and so it holds the achievements of living beings precious in a way that the achievements of a machine can never be—even a machine made by humans.

Funny, that. We can be entranced by hands making something, even a machine; then, amazed by the power of the machine making something; but the result of what the machine makes is merely entertaining or useful. Both valuable qualities—but valuable is not the same as precious.

Value can be quantified and explained. Preciousness cannot, because the knowing of imaginative intelligence can’t be put into words.

McGilchrist says that the right brain has access to language but not speech; it understands concepts but doesn’t articulate its understanding. Its knowing doesn’t come by argument or teasing out a thought; it comes as an intuition or a flash of insight. You can articulate the intuition or the insight, but not how it arrived, beyond saying something like “It just came to me”—as if it came from outside “me.” Which, in fact, it did. We habitually think of ourselves as our consciousness (even though that “me/you” is underlain by a deeper sense of self); so this is a way of saying that “it,” the knowing, came from outside our consciousness—the mental talk that occupies our minds.

Words are too unwieldy, too stiff and limiting, to convey the flowing experiences of imaginative intelligence. McGilchrist argues convincingly that this is one of the reasons why its functions have been dismissed and devalued, why it’s been habitually referred to as the “minor hemisphere” by left-brain thinking.

When, consciously, you open yourself up to an experience only comprehensible by your imaginative intelligence, you experience “transcendence”—the sensation of transcending your usual, rational, conscious connection with the everyday. I expected that from Turner, with his numinous light and indefinable colors—not from the now-almost-hackneyed geometries of Bridget Riley. But weirdly, the Turners engaged my left brain—I was peering at the canvases and wondering how he did that—whereas I stood in front of Fall in a state of simple wonder. Occasionally I’d think “How did she do that?”, but the thought didn’t stick; it wasn’t strong enough to pull me down from the transcendence. I couldn’t peer at the painting for clues; I just reached a point of satiety and moved away.

According to McGilchrist, the right brain responds to the new; familiarity moves the processing of an experience from the right brain to the left. Riley’s Op-Art style is very familiar by now, as have the stylistic innovations of The Matrix, so I was further overwhelmed by the intensity of my reaction to Fall. So, evidently, something about seeing the actual painting with my own eyes shocked me out of familiarity.

The image was now a Thing, not an idea or a picture of a thing. It had a bodily presence. Perhaps the fact that it is unique, as every handmade thing is, adds to its metaphysical value, not just its monetary value. Perhaps my imaginative intelligence responded to some vestige of its maker’s living energy embedded in the paint.

The left brain categorizes, analyzes, reverse-engineers, breaks things into bits. It’s all about utility, personal agency, ego power. In its view, the non-utilitarian is trivial, even contemptible if it pretends to importance. Emotion is “soft”; art is airy-fairy and pointless; metaphysical/spiritual experience is New Age twaddle or religious mumbo-jumbo. It operates like a machine and venerates machine thinking, and makes AI in its own idealized image: disembodied and therefore immortal.

But, at least for now, we have bodies, and they’re mortal—which is what gives unarticulable meaning and preciousness to the experiences of imaginative intelligence. And Riley’s Fall is an expression of the time Riley took to make it, which, completed, now stands outside time. Which makes it, in a paradoxically fragile way, an immortalization of the mortal.

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