Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

by Eric R. Kandel

In their attempt to abandon European influences, the American artists created Abstract Expressionism, the first American art movement to gain international acclaim. In moving from figurative art to abstract art, the New York School of painters—notably, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko—and their colleague Morris Louis were taking a reductionist approach. That is, rather than depicting an object or image in all of its richness, they often deconstructed it, focusing on one or, at most, a few components and finding richness by exploring those components in a new way.

The impact of the modernist movement was enhanced by the presence in New York of a contemporaneous school of art critics, particularly Harold Rosenberg of The New Yorker and Clement Greenberg of the Partisan Review and The Nation. These critics responded to the new art by developing a novel way of thinking about it. They focused almost exclusively on form and gesture, finding in the space, color, and structure of a painting the basis for a complex and satisfying critical perspective (Lipsey 1988, 298).

Schapiro (fig. 1.3), unlike Greenberg and Rosenberg, did not identify with a particular school or painter, but brought his rich knowledge of art history and theory to bear on the contemporary art scene. As a result, he exerted a dramatic influence on contemporary artists, notably de Kooning. In the 1950s and 1960s, the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, Schapiro, Rosenberg, and Greenberg were leading voices on art in the United States.

In 1957 the pioneering work of Brenda Milner and her colleagues revealed that certain forms of long-term memory are acquired and encoded by the hippocampus and other regions of the medial temporal lobe, brain structures that are required for conscious awareness. It soon emerged that the brain is capable of forming two major types of memory: explicit (declarative) memory, for facts and events, people, places, and objects; and implicit (nondeclarative) memory, for perceptual and motor skills.

Aplysia’s various behaviors—orienting, feeding, mating, crawling, and defensive withdrawal—are controlled by a very simple nervous system made up of relatively few neurons. While the human brain has 100 billion neurons, Aplysia has only 20,000 (fig. 4.2). These neurons are distributed in ten clusters called ganglia, each of which contains about 2,000 cells and controls a family of behaviors.

One form of learning used in these studies was classical conditioning. A light touch to Aplysia’s siphon causes the animal to withdraw its gill slightly (fig. 4.3). When a light touch to the siphon is followed immediately by a shock to Aplysia’s tail, the animal learns that the touch to the siphon predicts the shock to the tail. A subsequent light touch to the siphon alone will produce a massive withdrawal of the gill. Thus, in classical conditioning Aplysia learns to associate the light touch to the siphon with the shock that follows it.

The release of serotonin leads to a transient strengthening of the connection between the sensory and motor neuron (fig. 4.5, center). When repeated shocks and repeated release of serotonin are paired with the firing of the sensory neuron in associative learning, a signal is sent to the nucleus of the sensory neuron. This signal activates a gene, CREB-1, which leads to the growth of new connections between the sensory and motor neuron (fig. 4.5, right) (Bailey and Chen 1983; Kandel 2001). These connections are what enable a memory to persist. So if you remember anything of what you have read here, it will be because your brain is slightly different than it was before you started to read.

In Snowstorm, figurative elements are so reduced as to be practically nonexistent. Gone are the clearly delineated clouds, sky, and waves; the ship is merely suggested by the line of its mast. The distinction between sea and sky is barely perceptible, yet the viewer senses the towering masses of water, the sweep of wind and rain pounding the ship with terrible ferocity, the powerful, spiraling arrangement of dark and light. By conveying the overwhelming power of movement in nature without the use of clearly defined forms, Turner evokes an even stronger emotional response in Snowstorm than he did in Calais Pier. The English literary critic, philosopher, and painter William Hazlitt (1778–1830), who greatly admired Turner, referred to his later work as “atmospheric” and “all without form.”

Monet went on to create several other “series” paintings, depicting haystacks and cathedrals at various times of the day, to illustrate how a figurative image changes with different conditions of light. He used a limited palette of new, synthetic oil paints straight out of a tube and mixed the colors on the canvas.

An often-repeated episode in the history of modern art has it that Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), the Russian painter and art theorist, tried to abandon figurative painting but could not succeed completely until January 2, 1911. On that date he attended a New Year’s concert in Munich and heard for the first time Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, composed in 1906, and Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11, composed in 1909. Best known as the composer who founded the Second Vienna School of Music, Schoenberg (1874–1951) introduced a new conception of harmony that had no central key, only changes in timbre and tone. This revolutionary form of composition, referred to as atonality, electrified Kandinsky. It showed him that one could reject an artistic convention—the idea of a central key in classical music—and create a more abstract approach. Kandinsky then proceeded to break free of the painterly convention of representing nature and abandoned the last vestiges of figuration.