Henri Barande’s Saatchi Gallery exhibition monograph

To mark the first UK show of artist Henri Barande, graphic designer Christoph Stolberg and German studio Schultzschultz have created Henri Barande.

Most times, ideacide hap­pens with­out us even real­iz­ing it. A pos­si­ble off-the-wall idea or solu­tion appears like a blip and dis­ap­pears with­out us even real­iz­ing. As a result, some of our best stuff is sup­pressed before even get­ting out into the world. Whether it’s because we’re too crit­i­cal or because we recoil at the impend­ing pain of change, the dis­rup­tion of nor­mal­cy, self-cen­sor­ing aris­es out of fear. Welsh nov­el­ist Sarah Waters sums it up elo­quent­ly: “Mid­way through writ­ing a nov­el, I have reg­u­lar­ly expe­ri­enced moments of bow­el-cur­dling ter­ror, as I con­tem­plate the dri­v­el on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick suc­ces­sion, the deri­sive reviews, the friends’ embar­rass­ment, the fail­ing career, the dwin­dling income, the repos­sessed house, the divorce…”
We know self-cen­sor­ing by many names. Carl Jung called it our “inner crit­ic.” Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers called it the “voice of judg­ment” in their clas­sic book, Cre­ativ­i­ty in Busi­ness, based on a pop­u­lar course they co-taught at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty Grad­u­ate Busi­ness School. Nov­el­ist and screen­writer Steven Press­field called it “Resis­tance,” writ­ing that it is “the most tox­ic force on the plan­et” and that it is “a mon­ster.”

 

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One touch of a red-hot stove is usu­al­ly all we need to avoid that kind of dis­com­fort in the future. The same is true as we expe­ri­ence the emo­tion­al sen­sa­tion of stress from our first instances of social rejec­tion or ridicule. We quick­ly learn to fear and thus auto­mat­i­cal­ly avoid poten­tial­ly stress­ful sit­u­a­tions of all kinds, includ­ing the most com­mon of all: mak­ing mis­takes. Researchers Robert Rein­hart and Geof­frey Wood­man of Van­der­bilt Uni­ver­si­ty refer to this phe­nom­e­non as the “Oops! Response,” which is the prod­uct of the adren­a­line-fueled, threat-pro­tec­tion sys­tem in our brain that not only gov­erns our fight-flight-sur­ren­der response, but that also enables us to learn from our mis­takes. This response is impor­tant for our abil­i­ty to learn from mis­takes, but it also gives rise to self-crit­i­cism, because it is part of the threat-pro­tec­tion sys­tem. In oth­er words, what keeps us safe can go too far, and keep us too safe. In fact, it can trig­ger self-cen­sor­ing.

This response is impor­tant for our abil­i­ty to learn from mis­takes, but it also gives rise to self-crit­i­cism, because it is part of the threat-pro­tec­tion sys­tem. In oth­er words, what keeps us safe can go too far, and keep us too safe. In fact, it can trig­ger self-cen­sor­ing.

Our great­est weak­ness lies in giv­ing up. The most cer­tain way to suc­ceed is always to try just one more time.

That imme­di­ate­ly brought to mind one of my fond­est mem­o­ries, involv­ing my daugh­ter when she was just a tod­dler of one: tak­ing her with me on the short walk to check the mail. I live in a small enclave of homes in which all the mail­box­es are togeth­er in a cen­tral loca­tion, less than a minute’s walk from my front door…when I walk alone, that is. When I would take my daugh­ter with me it was eas­i­ly 20 min­utes. Every­thing along the way, to and from, fas­ci­nat­ed her: every peb­ble, ant, stick, leaf, blade of grass, and crack in the side­walk was some­thing to be picked up, looked at, tast­ed, smelled, and shak­en. Every­thing was inter­est­ing to her. She knew noth­ing. I knew everything…been there, done that. She was in the moment, I was in the past. She was mind­ful. I was mind­less.

Default­ing to Mind­ful­ness: The Third Per­son Effect

Part of the answer is some­thing psy­chol­o­gists refer to it as self-dis­tanc­ing, a term coined by researchers Ethan Kross and Ozlem Ayduk. What spurred Ethan Kross to inves­ti­gate the con­cept in the first place was an act of mind­less­ness: He acci­den­tal­ly ran a red light. He scold­ed him­self by say­ing out loud, “Ethan, you idiot!” Refer­ring to him­self in the third per­son made him won­der if there might be some­thing more to this quirk of speech, and if it might rep­re­sent a method for chang­ing one’s per­spec­tive.

The short answer is yes. Accord­ing to Kross, when you think of your­self as anoth­er per­son, it allows you give your­self more objec­tive, help­ful feed­back.

Both of these assump­tions, of course, could be entire­ly false. Self-cen­sor­ing is firm­ly root­ed in our expe­ri­ences with mis­takes in the past and not the present. The brain mes­sages aris­ing from those expe­ri­ences can be decep­tive. And if what our cen­sor­ing self thinks it “knows” may in fact not be true, then auto­mat­i­cal­ly accept­ing it as some sort of inert truth is indeed mind­less and self-defeat­ing. Langer agrees: “When you think ‘I know’ and ‘it is,’ you have the illu­sion of know­ing, the illu­sion of cer­tain­ty, and then you’re mind­less.” Langer argues that we must learn to look at the world in a more con­di­tion­al way, ver­sus an absolute way. Under­stand­ing that the way we are look­ing at things is mere­ly one among many dif­fer­ent ways of look­ing at them requires us to embrace uncer­tain­ty.

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