BmoreArt

Salcman has been actively thinking, writing, and lecturing about the relationship between the scientific mind and the artistic mind for decades. In 1991, delivering the Presidential Address for the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, he reflected on the influence of C. P. Snow’s lecture “The Two Cultures” (1959). Snow argued the increasing, detrimental divide between science and the humanities; Salcman argued the Western world typically values philosophers and the writers while the eastern world typically values scientists and engineers—but that over time one would realize artists and scientists employ strategies that bear more resemblances than differences. Salcman would go on to write regular cover articles for the journal Neurosurgery that would explicitly discuss a piece of visual art in the context of the field of neurology, integrating all three of Salcman’s principal passions.

Art, neuroscience, and poetry also converge in one of Salcman’s main beliefs: The brain is a metaphor-making machine. Salcman says, “The visual and the poetry and the knowledge of the brain, what we’ve learned about how it works, all kind of dovetails together. We’ve learned where the part of the brain is that is required to decode metaphor and create a metaphor.” The more peculiar and stranger the metaphor, more and more areas of the brain are required to process it; simultaneously, these expanded reaches of the brain are further away from the areas of the brain that function in the ways scientists understand the best. 

While the areas of the brain that control our eyes or our limbs constitute just a small part of the entire brain, most of the brain is an association cortex. In Salcman’s words, “It’s the association cortex that allows the painting and the poem and the metaphor to get together,” giving further insight into Salcman’s use of artworks from his own collection as the cover images for his books of poetry.

“You can clearly separate people who don’t understand metaphor and people who make metaphor all the time,” says Salcman. “But it’s very hard to link sickness or health to what we know about how the brain is organized and built. With everyone who has a healthy brain, it’s pretty much the same. It’s possible that people who can’t ‘do’ metaphor are ill in some way or having problems with the brain. We know that on the Spectrum, there are people at all sorts of levels who can’t say that something is like something else. They speak in absolutely concrete terms. They’ve lost the capability to make metaphor—if they’ve ever had it. This could also happen from having a head injury in a car accident.”

Through all the years he wrote and lectured about the relationship between art and science, Salcman never used art in his role as a doctor with his patients. Within the walls of the Salcmans’ home, however, is another story. What happens when one collects the works of great artists and arranges them within a domestic space?

Their living room contains at least one piece from every decade of the collection in the house. Salcman describes the outcome as a lot of “competition”—the works on the walls span the years from 1960-2015, including pieces by John McLaughlin, Osami Tanaka, Moira Dryer, Moshe Kupferman, Richard Tuttle, Franz West, Franz Kline, Richard Serra, Kaari Upson, Scott Treleaven, and Jack Whitten. 

When guests come to the house, Salcman can see them thinking, how people’s faces light up and where their interests reside. He also notes that, unlike in a museum, one is alone with the art, which is an entirely different experience. A potentially warmer experience. “When Ilene or I are alone in that room, there is great pleasure and surprise and endless looking. We’ve learned a lot.”

Tactility is one element of art that endlessly fascinates Salcman. He’s excited by paintings that bulge up in one area or lay flat in another because that texture allows him to imagine the motions of the artist’s hand—and relive the emotions the artist may have been feeling while applying the paint. He predicts this way of looking at a painting involves more than one major section of the brain. 

“There are nerve cells in the parietal region of the brain that respond to both touch and vision,” says Salcman. “With most neurons, there is just one sensory modality coming in, but we now know that there are clusters of neurons that respond to both—which may explain why a work of art has its own unique stimulatory powers. The more the artist does, the more they are going to stimulate you, but the brain is not happy with too much, just as it’s not happy with too little.”

According to Salcman, being surrounded by great abstract art throws the viewer back on themselves. In studying the painting, one studies themselves. This line of thinking suggests building collection is also a method of personal development. In dedicating decades to understand the art hanging on one’s own walls, a collector might also be dedicating decades to understanding themselves.

“We have never kept anything in the house that one of us didn’t love,” says Salcman. “As collectors, we always did it together. But even the very rich need to remember that we are just holding onto these artworks for a brief period of time. We have to figure out what we are going to do, where these artworks will go, and how to protect them.”