Describe What You See
This may or may not be a plate from the Rorschach series of diagnostic inkblots, which may have been procured without the proper mental health care practitioner licensure. I'm not saying it was actually ordered online directly from the Swiss publisher by someone with the wrong degree who bluffed his or her way into convincing the nice folks at Hans Huber to send one over, but that could have happened. Let's have some fun. What do you see? I see Georgia O'Keeffe paintings, which is to say I see female anatomy.
Leave a comment describing what you see.
Labels: art
posted by The Masticator at 11/28/2007 10:57:00 AM
5 Comments:
Two unicorns on their hind legs and facing each other...sprouting out of two identical maps of North America. In a bed of tomatoes.
No, I'm not making this up.
I see the greatest scam I ever pulled! That's what I get for being honest.
Actually, I see a skeleton's pelvis and sacrum.
I see the pelvis. And the two unicorns looked to me like two wizards urinating on each other.
I wonder what the dignostic difference is between seeing the inkblots as two halves of a symmetrical whole (as in the pelvis) vs. mirror images (the unicorns or the wizards.
The beauty of the Rorschach Test is that, in our more scientifically rigorous age, it's just as subjective as Freudian psychoanalysis. It's about talking and interpreting -- it's basically art criticism.
Which is why Freud is more fashionable in English and Cultural Criticism depts in universities than in actual clinical settings.
But whither the Rorschach?
Yikes! I see menstruation. The green is a pelvis (I thought of that all by myself, I swear), the yellow by inference is lungs, and the red is...well, red.
A comment on the female genitalia aspect of this--I think it's like those optical illusions in which you can see two things at one time, like the young woman and the old lady or the two angry men and the candlestick (or vase). Most people can only see one thing, but once it's been explained to them they see both. In the same way, some people see vaginas and some people don't think of it, but once you've been told "hey, Rorschach tests look like vaginas", you can never not see it, and the image takes on a whole new meaning (just like when you're a kid and you find out about sex, and all of a sudden double entendre is everywhere). Which to me spells the death of the Rorschach. Once the idea has been processed and assigned a value by the culture--in this case Freudian and sexual--it loses its value as a therapeutic tool. The human brain is set up to use shortcuts based on experience, and the Rorschach=giner shortcut is pretty well established at this point.
I see the two sides of beef from Damien Hirst's crappy pointlessly provocative carcuss art menagerie.
Great comments Sarah
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