Art As Laboratory: How Art Lets Us Think and Work Differently

I used to think that the central idea of my artwork was to examine the nature of what it means to work — to exert time and physical energy on something and turn it into a piece of art. Now, I don’t think that’s really the core idea that I am after. I think it was an interesting by-product. I think that a central theme in my life is that I am trying to understand how my brain works, to understand what it can do, to understand how to leverage it, and work with it or against its natural tendencies with intentionality, to understand what can happen. Thus, I now think that my artwork is about exploring HOW I work.

Art — making it, looking at it, talking about it, thinking about how others make it, considering what it is, what it isn’t, and why — have also helped me make sense of my brain. Even before I was diagnosed with ADHD right after college, I was drawn to art because it seemed like a place where my brain worked well. I love that each artist has a different process that is unique to them, one that they developed on their own terms, and that their processes opened up worlds of exploration. These explorations are wide ranging, including elements of science, philosophy, psychology, social critique, creative imagining, and more. This has made me feel like I could find my place and my own process within art, and made me think that I could find intellectual rigor, personal satisfaction, and creative expression, and could do so in a way that worked with my brain, not against it.

Even now, a lot of advice, information, and therapy around ADHD is focused on getting people with ADHD to adapt to and function like a neurotypical person in a society set up for that kind of brain. We are still not culturally at a place where we can ask, on a large scale, “What is the benefit of this kind of brain? What can it do that others cannot? What can we learn from them? What happens when we change the way we work and communicate? Who could be invited into conversations, spaces, and disciplines from which they were excluded? How could those conversations, spaces, and disciplines be changed for the better by these kinds of brains?” 

These are the kinds of questions being asked by champions of all kinds of accessibility and equity, not just in the realm of neurodivergence. For me, I arrived at them in the context of ADHD because I am living the consequences of both asking and not asking these questions. I am kind of right in the middle — much of my life has been shaped by dissonance between how my brain works and how I am asked to work, but I have enough privilege (like the ability to choose art for a career, and be supported by my parents when I am having a hard time making it in said career) to explore how I want to work, and enough self-observation skills (gained from a lifetime of noticing I think differently and trying to figure out why that was and what to do with that reality) to know that something else is possible for me.

I hope my artwork, my writing, and my self-observation can be a laboratory of sorts. It is a space in which I can ask questions like “Is this how I work? Why is that? Is this how other people work? Why is this? What is the result when I produce something in a state of flow/hyper focus? What is the result when I produce something in an unfocused state? My brain makes a lot of connections quickly - what happens when I let it? What happens when I don’t let it?”

I think that art is a great space for these kinds of questions and this kind of experiment. As an artist, you set your own terms for exploration in a way that you often don’t get to in other fields. For example, a lot of difficulty I have, and I think a lot of people with ADHD, have in fields like the sciences or math is that set procedures are outlined and they are presented in a linear or sequential fashion. Chemical equations, algebraic functions, they are taught in a sequential manner — one thing after another gets you to an end point. (ADHD brains are terrible at sequential processing, but great at simultaneous processing. They can take in a ton of information at once. Not great at holding it in the short term, because they have bad short term memories. Great at processing its significance and analyzing it conceptually, because they have great long term memories and creative capacities. You can literally see this in the brain of someone with ADHD — alpha waves regulate creativity, and they have a ton of those, beta waves regulate task completion, and they have few of those.) Because there is a default way of presenting information in these fields, there is a large association between analytical fields and linear processing. And, a lot of people with ADHD think that they can’t engage with these fields, because they got cut out of the conversation really early, when concepts are taught in a linear manner in schools. This does not mean that people with ADHD are not analytical. They can be very analytical — people with ADHD tend to have higher than average IQs (measuring IQs is a highly flawed system, but generally, at least, this information indicates that people with ADHD aren’t lacking in intelligence), and are really good at processing a ton of information quickly. We just tend to absorb information all at once, and take it in in what I think of as “snapshots.” I am so curious about what could happen if these fields were taught differently. Who could be included? What could they learn?

I had a small taste of this possibility in a high school math class — I was not amazing at math in high school, but I was really good at trigonometric proofs. It was the one place in math where what we were asked to do was to process simultaneously rather than sequentially. As I mentioned above, a lot of math is “do this thing then this thing then this thing to get here. Also, remember all of that stuff we told you 5 minutes ago in order to do it.” A nightmare for someone who processes simultaneously. Working on a trigonometric proof is different — you have to see all of the relationships between the angles at once, understand how they all work together, and then you break it down for someone else to understand. The key is that it all has to “snap” together in your brain at once first. At least, that’s how it feels to me when I understand something. That is the simultaneous processing part. 

In a trigonometric proof (at least the high school ones I encountered), working on them involved working off of a picture of a shape or angles. You might think that I am just a “visual” person and that I was better at these proofs because they involved pictures. A lot of people with ADHD are dubbed “visual learners.” However, I don’t think that’s the core of what is going on. I think visual presentation is just one of the main types of communication that does present information simultaneously. 

(The most concise example I can think of that both crystalizes the difference between simultaneous and sequential processing, and underscores the role of written versus visual presentation of data in this process is the following: Think of a map of a city - it is a visual representation of how a city is laid out - you understand all of the relationships of the streets and buildings at once. This is different from when someone gives you written or oral instructions of how to get somewhere. In that case, the information is presented sequentially — the relationships between the things described are revealed one after another.)

In working on a trigonometric proof, I got a taste of what math could be like if it were taught or organized in a way that made sense to me. It made me curious about where other opportunities for different kinds of processing could live. As for math and science, I am not sure. I got nudged out of these fields so early that I can’t tell you where other opportunities might be in those fields, but I am curious. In contrast, because art is so open and individualized, I didn’t run into the same barriers I did in math and science, and it has been flush with possibility for me. On a daily basis, I encounter how learning and sharing information can take many forms. Exploring the possibilities within this field is what shapes my artistic, scholarly, and writing practice.

Here are a few examples. When you look at a work of art (let’s say a static work like a painting or a sculpture), all of the information is presented at once. This is not to say that every piece of understanding from a work of art hits you all at once — observing a work of art can lead you to new conclusions over time. However, the conceptual ideas within the work all exist together via the materiality of the thing — the thing that exists simultaneously, as one thing, at one point of time. Looking at a work of art opens up many analytical pathways one can take:

• You can think about the relationship of elements within the painting

• You can think about the materials used, and what effect that has on the work

• If you know the context in which the work was made, you can examine the subtext, or an interpretation (this draws on long-term memory, a strength for people with ADHD)

• You can think through your own emotional or intellectual reaction to the work, examining this in your own context

• You can compare your reaction to that of your friend’s, and think through how different people’s experiences lead them to different conclusions

All of these rely on processing a lot of information from the painting. It also relies on information drawn from long-term memory. For me, long term memory works like a map — if I can see in my mind, however imperfectly, how all of the information I have in my brain is connected, then I can situate the new information within it, and enrich the new source of information (the work of art I am looking at) with information from my existing web. In a way, this is also simultaneous processing. This is not a perfect system — because my brain works through connections, by “seeing” the web of linkages, I am prone to making too many connections too quickly, in ways that may be strident or not in line with appropriate methodology for the situation. Such was the case with my study of art history — the studying art history opened up a lot of possibilities for me, but it has not been without its challenges. If you want to hear how I have been working through that, check out my previous blog posts.

As I write this, I am now realizing that this is perhaps why I don’t love video work. The experience of the object’s temporality is different than that of a painting or sculpture. This is not to say that you can’t have the same kinds of experience with video work, as it does exist as an object that has a fixed temporality. I just notice that I am not drawn to it in the same way that I am to works that don’t take such a long time to experience — my brain wants to grab onto something that I can see all at once and work through it. The temporality of my own thoughts and the changing nature of my experience perhaps present enough of a challenge without adding in this new variable. With a painting or sculpture, I have many different thoughts and facets of an experience just looking at one static version of the work. Having all of these experiences while looking at a work that is also changing at the same time introduces a lot of factors. I like to isolate variables in the process of my intellectual exploration. Perhaps looking at something static lets me isolate the variable of the work’s temporality. (Also, I just get bored, impatient, and squirmy in front of most video art. I’m sorry to everyone making really interesting video-based art. I’m sure I would love yours.) However, now I am curious — what happens to my experience when the timeline of my experience of a work overlaps with the work’s own timeline in a way that challenges me? As I mentioned in a previous blog post, what can I learn when I am working and thinking in a way that is not in line with my sensibilities? 

That was a tangent, but it gets at the core of what I am trying to say — art opens up so many possibilities for observing how one’s brain works, how to leverage these capacities, and explore the implications of one’s processes in different scenarios. They allow us to do this on our own terms and our own timelines, with a degree of freedom that I don’t find in many other places. To me, this is immensely exciting. 

Looks like I made it into the lab after all. I just had to make my own.