Words and Images By Karen Fitzgerald

“Being alive means being organized in a certain way. You’re organized to have a certain autonomy, and that immediately carves out a world or a domain of relevance.” Evan Thompson* calls this “life-mind continuity.” Or as Paco Calvo** puts it, echoing the 19th-century psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, “Where there is life there is already mind.”

We are privileged to live at a moment when a new story is being written about how we understand ourselves in the world. The old story said we were all separate from one another, from the natural world; even our bodies separate from our minds. The new story is revealing something quite different.

It’s the whole organism that’s conscious, not just the brain. It’s the whole organism that attends or remembers. There is a unity not just within organisms, but within the environment that sustains them. While the brain makes animal cognition possible, it facilitates and enables it, it is not the location of it. A bird needs wings to fly, Thompson says, but the flight is not in the wings. Disembodied wings in a vat could never fly—it’s the whole bird, in interaction with the air currents shaped by its own movements that takes to the sky. 

“The mistake was to think that cognition was in the head,” Calvo says. “It belongs to the relationship between the organism and its environment.” The same act that keeps a living system living is the act by which, as Noë puts it, “the world shows up for us.” A full understanding of this relationship includes intuition. It is perhaps the glue of this relationship. 

We show up for the world. We embody, embed, extend, and enact. We are an ecological psychology that exemplifies a specific connectedness. And like the octopus with cognition centers scattered throughout its body (each arm has its own “brain”) our cognitive apparatus is also distributed among our sensual capacities.

What does all this have to do with the visual language? For a long time, we believed the experience of the visual language was located in the brain. As with the new story, we are re-membering the sensual delight of experiencing visual art. Though primarily visual, this experience manifests in all our senses. We show up for the world when we expand our understanding of this broad-based experience. The rich network of sensual delights present in much of contemporary artwork does what all masterful artwork accomplishes: it shows up for the world, as the world shows up for it. 

In 2017, Axel Vervoordt and Dainela Ferretti mounted a sophisticated exhibit at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, titled Intuition. My estimation of this exhibit is that it was all about peripheral seeing. Not just physical peripheral seeing—but a unified, perceptual peripheral seeing. That is what intuition is. When we tune in to intuition, we are using a kind of spiritual / holistic / metaphysical / peripheral thinking / seeing / understanding. And like peripheral seeing, as soon as you attempt to bring it into focus, POOF. It vanishes. Like an electromagnetic particle becoming a wave and then switcher-ooing back to a particle. Like Belkis Ayón’s work*** skating along on Nkame content (peripheral seeing) but actually articulating (foveal seeing) conundrums of the human condition. The metaphors become so clear that the Nkame content ceases to exert any significant interruption in interpretation. Because of the seamless shift within her visual language, she is able to reach a higher plane of communication. And that is exactly what our intuition is urging us toward: a higher plane. We each must figure out what that higher plane of function is—what actions we need to take to put ourselves there.

The new story opens the door to many different planes of communication. As we return to our perceptual intelligences, it offers a slip, slide, glide toward the peripheral. Similar to energy, that which inhabits the periphery is like a bridge, uniting the world of the physical with the metaphysical world, the world of spirit. In the new story, we learn the how-to of the slip, slide, glide. We return to the deep capacities of sensual intelligence. A new sense making of the world is at hand.

* Evan Thompson is a philosopher at the University of British Columbia and one of the founders of the enactive approach in studying cognition. 
** Paco Calvo, the plant whisperer. Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence W. W. Norton & Co, New York, NY (2023).
***At El Museo del Barrio, NYC: June 13 – November 5, 2017, NKAME: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker, Belkis Ayón.

Karen Fitzgerald is a mid-career visual artist living and working in NYC. Her curatorial work is featured on Artsy.net as well as nationally. She teaches across a broad spectrum, and maintains an active studio practice. Heavily influenced by poetry, her work delights in the energy of gardens, mysteries and all things invisible. See more of her work at Fitzgeraldart.com, on Instagram at kbfitzgeraldart, and on Facebook at FitzgeraldArt.