Gallery Artists

Untitled (Various)

Robert Beck installed 44 mysterious drawings in New York City (CRG Gallery) during 2007. Beck challenged assumptions that there are norms of behavior by re-creating art therapy drawings and their evaluation. Like so many Trojan Horses, his drawings were positioned to question some of the underlying assumptions of psychoanalysis. Beck redrafted drawings by patients of various therapists; some focused on drawings made by patients of early clinical psychologist John N. Buck. Buck’s influential manual, The Tree-House-Person-Technique (1948), called for the interpretation of scenes consisting of a tree, house and person drawn by the patient, assigning values based on such characteristics as the inclusion, omission or exaggeration of particular features. Robert Beck’s drawings involved the viewers in the process of reconstructing historical medical records of psychological functioning. In addition to re-drafting drawings by patients, each of Beck’s artworks included a re-typed excerpt of a psychoanalyst’s interpretation. Beck typically made his works with charcoal, conté crayon, graphite and ink and added latent fingerprint powder. This last substance is used by forensic investigators to recover fingerprints at a crime scene, underscoring that the drawings of patients had been used as “evidence” of pathology. Beck’s installation raised many questions involving proof, interpretation, agency, identity and states of mind. Beck’s provocative layering made visible the unraveling of a string of assumptions regarding the possibility of rendering reliable clinical judgments on the basis of drawings.

A later press release stated that in 2008 Robert Beck changed his surname to Buck.

—Ellen K. Levy

Untitled (Is This Your Child’s World? by Doris J. Rapp / Art as Therapy with Children by Edith Kramer), charcoal, acrylic, oil pastel, graphite, carbon, latent fingerprint powder on paper, 12 × 9 in, 2004. (© Robert Beck. Photo: CRG Gallery.)

Untitled (Interpreting Children’s Drawings by Joseph H. Dileo / Childhood Revealed: Art Expressing Pain, Discovery and Hope by Harold Koplewicz and Robin F. Goodman), charcoal, acrylic paint, colored pencil, conte crayon, graphite, ink and latent fingerprint powder on paper, 9.5 × 8 in, 2004. (© Robert Beck. Photo: CRG Gallery.)

Untitled (Carving Duck Decoys by Harry V. Shrouds and Anthony Hillman / Child Psychiatric Techniques by Lauretta Bender), charcoal, acrylic paint, colored pencil, graphite, charcoal, latent fingerprint powder, carbon and tape on paper, 9.75 × 7 in, 2004. (© Robert Beck. Photo: CRG Gallery.)

Phantom Limb

How can someone feel sensation in an arm that has been amputated and therefore no longer exists? Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran has developed a method to treat phantom-limb pain that is based on the understanding that the brain map is remarkably plastic. By holding one’s arm inside a mirror box, Ramachandran discovered that the visual information from viewing the reflected image of the existing limb could trick peoples’ minds, enabling them to “re-map” their brains and forget the memory of their phantom limb pain.

In 2005 I was in a car accident that caused me to lose the ability to move my arms. It became clear that my inability to move was due to a perception disorder triggered by the impact of the accident. My doctor and I discussed the possibility of using a mirror box in conjunction with physical therapy as a way to trick the brain into remembering how to move again.

I decided to make a 16mm film that synthesized the information I had absorbed, to function as a faux experiment that would “rewire” my viewers’ brains. I used the 10 mirror boxes as props within the space of the film and set them on industrial-grade dolly wheels so they could be pushed, rotated and generally give the impression of movement when filmed.

Phantom Limb, 16mm film, silent, approx. 17 min, 2009. (© Jennifer Bornstein. Courtesy of Gavin Brown.)

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