Texture
An important element of Uµ thought to be compatible with psychoanalysis is its texture – movable layers of sound, suggesting thoughts and associations shifting in and out of focus. The texture of painted surfaces and other visual and olfactory sensations also suggest affective modulations. The layering of sound and tone creates a mood which holds the potential for a ‘pre-verbal’ emotional connection. The ‘sensual’ physicality of the office is an experiment in the building of space, acknowledging implicitly that psychoanalysis is a conjoint, sensory process. Like many structures, the psychoanalytic office is an example of a built environment with specific values. It will ultimately have more in common with a nature retreat or spa than a medical clinic or corporate office. But it is not a spa either. Rather, a comfortable, hospitable place, rich with interest but not overcrowding the senses. Space is left for the patient, as Ogden says, to ‘dream’ the coming session. The visual, aural and aromatic sensations help to orientate the patient. The paintwork in the waiting room is evocative of the textures and moods of the work of the artist Mark Rothko.
Mark Rothko understood that painted surfaces had the potential to create atmospheres and invoke powerful affective states. His Seagram Mural Project of the late 1950s, parts of which are illustrated below, was originally commissioned for the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building in NewYork City. Rothko’s aim was to gently ‘force’ diners’ attention ‘inwards’ through patrons being literally surrounded by his huge, luminous surfaces.
“I became a painter because I wanted to raise painting to the level of poignancy of music and poetry”
Kandinsky, decades before Rothko, combined colour and texture to ‘paint sound’.
Music – and the idea of music – appears everywhere in Kandinsky’s work.
The interconnectedness of music and the visual arts was widely discussed by
artists and intellectuals of the late 19th century.
Kandinsky and his fellow composers such as Shoenberg, Debussy and others were drawing
spiritual inspiration from their apparent ‘synaesthesia’, the gift of being able to have several
senses stimulated simultaneously, such as hearing music and seeing colour in the mind.
“A painter who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art.”
Below is Kandinski’s Composition V111. It illustrates how music can be depicted visually and texturally through colour, shape and movement. Its form evokes a bursting play of the senses, yet its cool, unsaturated palette and softened, diffuse shapes do not overwhelm or impinge.
“Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.”