Imagination vs. delusion: Shutter Island

After reading Dr. Katherine Taylor's article and the few films she mentioned, I was provoked to think of more films that related to the topic of imagination vs. reality when it comes to psychological disorders.

First to come up was Scorcese's Shutter Island. "Psychology Today" journalist Jeremy Clyman discusses the movie and disillusion in his article, "Reel Today:  Unraveling the mind through film":
(Shutter Island: Separating Fact from Fiction). Throughout the entirety of the film we think Teddy is trying to figure out a crime and then is held in the institution against his will. It's not only until the last scene of the film we are told that he actually suffers from a psychotic disease and murdered his wife upon finding out she killed their three children. As Dr. Taylor states in her essay, "

“One might say...knowledge: it must derive from experience...[but] Imagination is a private thing, the leap of a single brain from established fact to exciting novelty.”  At the end of the film, we begin to question, Did Teddy hold this "knowledge" that he was a murderer all along derived from his experiences of living through his traumatic familial affairs? Or, did his imagination really take over (as a way to suppress those traumatic lived experiences, to "leap" from the fact that he was a killer to the more "exciting novelty" that his wife had died and he was actually the hero of his story trying to solve a crime?  

This film made me wonder, when one suffers such a traumatic experience as Teddy did, does imagination take over knowledge to suppress horrific memories and replace them with our own "private thing" in which happier thoughts prevail? 

In response to Brycen...

This week, Brycen brought up the topic of "marginal utility"--as Piper puts it, "the utility or desirabliity of the last in the series of commodities consumed." As Brycen explains it, "One gets the most satisfaction or pleasure from the first time experiencing something. The same goes with art. The first time you experience something you gain the most pleasure from it."  He then raises the question, "could one gain more satisfaction from a non original or copy of a work of art?"

First off, I disagree with this idea of marginal utility in some senses.  It is true that oftentimes the more one sees/experiences something, the less they'll be overwhelmed or impressed with it, but I think (at least with a lull of time in between) one can be just as satisfied the first time seeing something as the 20th time they see it.  This is especially the case with performance art.  Why else would people return to see the same bands or return to see the same ballet or musical more than once?  These types of art are oftentimes unoriginal copies of the initial performance, yet people continue to come back to see repeat performances, and are similarly or even perhaps more satisfied the more they see them.  I also believe that over time as one becomes more educated on the performance--ie. studies ballet themself, learns the lyrics of a bands songs, etc.--the more they'll come to be satisfied with the show the next time they attend a performance.  

So, to answer Brycen's question, yes, I do believe one can actually gain more satisfaction from a copy of art, yet this applies more to performance art than to visual art.

Revision of assumptions

Piper philosophizes that in order for an art object to be properly critiqued it must be taken out of its typical setting and away from its usual implementation. “We are regularly blinded to the mystery of objects in daily life,” Piper says, “because we so often utilize them as tools or instruments for achieving our ends, or for satisfying our needs and desires. Under these conditions, the objects in question are not seen as self-subsistent entities in their own right." In other words, we need to view things not for what they can do for us in the everyday sense, but for what they actually are, separate from their daily setting and use—we need to put them in a light that “forces us to revise our assumptions about the external world and calls into question the expectations we bring to it.”  

This brings up once again my favorite example of Duchamp's "Readymades," the most famous example of course being that of Fountain.  Piper would see these as the epitome of art, for they are perfect examples of the artist simply choosing an everyday object (or objects) and "repositioning or joining, tilting and signing it...[a] process involv[ing] the least amount of interaction between artist and art... represent[ing] the most extreme form of minimalism up to that time."  Duchamp takes objects of daily use out of their typical settings, pulls them from their typical implementations and places them in a setting where viewers are forced to reshape their usual ideas on that object, seeing it for precisely what it is not what it can do.

Information on Duchamp's "readymades"

Ability to shake off instinctive tendencies...impossible?

Wartenberg explains to us that, in Piper’s definition of art, “one way to think about art...is as an attempt to pluck objects from their normal referential frames, to get us to ponder precisely their specialness, their uniqueness.” Although Piper believes that we are stimulated by “the mystery of the object”—the thing that makes them unique—it is not enough to see it in this light; by human nature, we are always going to instinctively compare artworks to other, similar artworks.  To Piper, seeing art objects is “a process of searching out and understanding their peculiar logic and structure, and discerning whatever it is that makes them unique.” We tend to treat objects as possessing powers they could never have and expect them to 'speak' to us; but instead, we need to know that art objects cannot speak to us and we need to look for meaning and attend to them.

How do you think one can come to do this more effectively?  How are we to forget these instinctive tendencies of human nature to 1.) compare objects to similar objects and 2.) to personify objects and expect them to 'speak' to us?  Do you think it is even possible to shake off these tendencies or will they always be an inherent part of our being, forever in the back of every individual's mind?