Dolores Links and the Placebo Effect

by Eva Mantell

I would like to discuss what I call a placebo effect in art; that is, how certain forms of art with large areas of emptiness, art that either has large areas of non-art within it, or implies a certain lack of art, may come to seem as effective or more so than other types of art which actually contain more art. I'd like to explore this idea of "no art" in certain holes and absences in the work of Dolores Links, a self-taught artist from Edison, NJ. Links' work has recently been embraced by a burgeoning American Buddhist movement, and has been featured in such magazines as "Buddhist Journal" and "Meditation Mind". Her work has also been touted by recent enthusiasts of the Kabbalah and has gained a following among art collectors in the film and entertainment industries.

A placebo is an empty pill. As something of no intrinsic value, it may paradoxically insist upon its own value (sometimes) in terms of appeasement, reassurance, and raised expectations and may (if rarely) produce quantifiable medicinal effects. The empty pill may prove itself occasionally to be as good as the pharmaceutical pill, though on the other hand, of course, the pharmaceutical pill may occasionally prove itself to be as bad as the empty pill.

Why are there so many holes in this art? What is what we can't see? Is what we can't see ether, jelly, bubbles, strings, dark matter, dark energy, gravitational glue? Is the invisible made up of the breath of angels? Is it made of numbers?

In The Quantum Self (1990), Danah Zohar describes a character to explain The Many Worlds Theory in physics. She introduces a kind of a Quantum Gal, and her story, for our minds tend toward the anecdotal, as a way to understand the behavior of an electron in transition from one energy state to another. Quantum Gal wants to get married and the way she finds the right guy is to begin 100 relationships simultaneously. She dates each at exactly the same time, talks and laughs on her cellphone to each one, i'ms each one, banters with the hundred myspace pages with their curated exhibitions of selves, their clusters of pop songs, friends, snapshots, and revelations that all identify her to be in that one specific relationship, visits one hundred different restaurants simultaneously, one hundred different sporting events, catches 100 foul balls hit into one hundred different stadiums, dropping 100 beers to make each catch. She even moves in with each man, into myriad real estate possibilities: apartments, houses, dorm rooms, developments. Where Quantum Gal lives with each man may border the next house where she lives with another man or may be oceans away, but she can still meet her selves on the front lawn over one hundred cups of coffee and ask herself with one hundred winks, "Hey, how's it going with you-know-who?"

But finally Quantum Gal, this electron in transition, does choose one man, and she does live happily ever after with him, but a part of her lingers in each of these other possibilities, her phone number showing as last caller, photos of her hang-gliding, clinking Margaritas, laughing in funny hats, tangled memories, keystrokes taps, DNA, all containing traces of what has occurred. This woman, this electron, is smeared across reality as she transforms, changes, evolves and as the world and all those bachelors themselves evolve.

The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, by Marcel Duchamp inspired Octavio Paz (Marcel Duchamp, 1970) to write about it: "Mutations: gas turned into solid needles turned into sequins lighter than air turned into inert vapor turned into liquid explosive turned into reflection in a mirror-glance." The generative artistic method resembles the energy transition, the generation of multiple realities until one seems to work, catches the imagination, leaps into the museum, the other possibilities dispelled, relegated to moldy basements, yard sales, memory cells.

Who is Quantum Gal and how can I meet her? This idea of the way a transition in energy occurs bears a resemblance to the way evolution occurs, as explained by physicist David Bohm, that genetic mutations occur, promiscuously, in great quantity, and in all directions, and that only some will make it, through the chance of some combinations being more suited to success than others. Traces of this frolic, these experiments, remain like fragments of a language smeared across the genetic code. (David Bohm, 1951)

Charles Darwin used the British mail service the way we use the Internet today. He got mail, he sent mail -- all over the world. Imagine the day he got this package in the mail. He wrote that Ernst Haeckel's images "were the most magnificent works which I have ever seen, and I am proud to possess a copy from the author." Though some of what Haeckel drew was incorrect, and though his work was used by the Nazis, so the smear of his work into that transition leaves an uneasy memory attached to his work, we still feel some of the awe that Darwin did when he opened up that package.

We still live in an era of excitement or dread over what a package will contain, the unknown space, the puffy envelope. Quantum physics has the contents of the box deciding what IT will be in a strange dance with what the opener of the box WANTS it to be: Duchamp's readymade can be or not be art; it's the artist's thinking which clings to the object and makes it so, just as a viewer's thinking clings to it and may change it back. Schroedinger's Cat may be dead, alive, or both, but what decides is opening the box.

What about the empty pill? What's inside? Is it sugar? Is it chemistry?

"A placebo is something which is intended to act through a psychological mechanism. It is an aid to therapeutic suggestion, but the effect which it produces may be either psychological or physical. It may make the patient feel better without any obvious justification, or it may produce actual changes..." (Gaddum, 1954) The placebo then is different from the dummy pill, which is used in drug trials to distinguish pharmacological effects from the effects of suggestion. As I understand it, the dummy pill is a dummy pill, whereas the placebo really does make you feel better.

Give me some placebos, man. You got any placebos? The body with its holes, feels everything. The body with its holes, each with its own talent, its own comedies and tragedies....The hole is the hole of anguish. It is the hole of possibility. It's the hole of daydreams. It's the hole of the senses, sensations, whispers, filligrees, fafaluffle. "The body fills us with loves and desires and fears and all sorts of fancies and a great deal of nonsense, with the result that we literally never get an opportunity to think at all about anything," said Socrates. Frank Zappa has a song called "Your Mouth", and he sings, "You put your faith in a hole like that?"

George Orwell gives us the memory hole in his novel 1984. These literal holes in the architecture are part of a system of pneumatic tubes carrying information, or disinformation. "in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating....for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building." Orwell creates here something like a nightmare honeycomb, a structure of holes with workers busy around them, fussing over the contents of each hole, but surely not making honey. Erasing paper, erasing notes, information, history, erasing content, erasing memory, erasing humanity.

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, babies are made in test-tubes and the ever-young, tanned population is regularly dosed with soma so as not to get too emotional throughout the day. With no fear of death, these people have no God, but their leader admits that God still exists though the world doesn't know about it, "God expresses himself more as an absence," he says.

Stephen Hawking, physicist, has said that black holes destroy what flies into them and then start losing radiation and mass, eventually evaporating and leaving no trace of those things that flew into them. Emptiness that actively produces even more emptiness. A very greedy emptiness. But wait -- recently Hawking has changed his idea to suggest that all is not lost in a black hole. Quantum physics says that information is never completely lost, that traces remain, and Hawking has been reconciling this paradox with a reenvisioned black hole, one that is not as bad-assed as the classic model, but instead is fuzzier, a little more giving and a little less taking, and its radiation now seeming to send out information revealing the information that had been thought to be lost.

When Duchamp gave us a glass vial, we could see through it, but we could not see what it was. To get the information, that it contained 50 cubic centimeters of Paris air, we read the wall label. Information is not lost.

"Before the creation of the world The Infinite withdrew itself into its essence, from itself to itself within itself. It left an empty space within its essence, in which it could emanate and create." (Daniel C. Matt, The Essential Kabbalah,1996) The Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism originating in the medieval era, is creative in and of itself, and its initiates work and rework texts and numbers to generate more information. God created man because he needed a partner in creation. (Gershom Scholem, The Creation of Man, 1983) Who better?

Here's Rainer Maria Rilke, "We are the bees of the invisible. We madly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible." (Letter to Hulewicz) The universe is creative and so are we. We are so creative we can make something out of nothing, but we can do an even better trick which is to make nothing out of something, and have the somethingness stay, linger, delay. In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream the play within the play is the tale of Pyramis and Thisbe, and one of the players is assigned the part of the hole in the wall, the absence, a space, a ray of light, an opening through which the lovers may talk in secret. The actor simply draws his fingers together to define, to give boundaries and to shape emptiness.

"Many organisms use membranes as scaffolds for erecting stronger, more rigid superstructures with fantastic architectures...the shells of marine organisms such as radiolarians and diatoms are the casts of patterns formed by ephemeral membranes and vesicles packed into foams....To scientists interested in pattern formation, these microscopic follies have surely been the most inspirational of life's constructions." (Philip Ball, The Self-Made Tapestry, 2001)

Karl von Frisch wrote that nature roars on, endlessly creative, and that we ought not to be bowled over by what seems so baroque, so fabulous, so delightful to our eyes. These tiny organisms can't even see each other. Aesthetics may be beside the point. The point is structure, design and basic rules of chemical pattern formation. He wrote "I do not want to wax philosophical about so much "useless" beauty scattered over the oceans. Nature is prodigal."
Elvis Costello must have read the same book I did, because he sings, "What shall we do, what shall we do, with all this useless beauty?"

Paul Klee once said, "Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion." Klee thought the artist's job was to be quiet.

*******

The mud is tracked into the building and there is an an old woman with a mop, pushing the dirt around the black and white chessboard floor. It's Dolores Links and this is her day job. She works as a janitor during the day at a retirement facility, her old glasses crooked, oily and smeared. She's short and her sweater is buttoned wrong. It turns out she isn't even employed here, she's not even on the payroll! She shows up for a job of her own invention and this is the job she invents? The regular cleaning crew comes in at night, descends on the building, trundling in their own vacuum cleaners and floor waxers and some time later trundling them out again into the back of their van, night after night, but Dolores just gets the mop from the closet every morning.

Her girlhood, her adolescence, her years as a young woman, even her middle age are all in question, as is frankly her current stint here with the mop. We don't have a lot to go on. She seems an empty shell. Dolores Links seems to be a crazy old woman, but aren't all women past a certain age crazy? She mutters, has chin hair, is ignored. This Dolores requires some work in my imagination: she needs to eat better, she needs medication, she needs a bath, a makeover, new clothes, dentures. She is an artist, but I can't connect her to her work. Her hands look crooked, arthritic. Did she make all this stuff? Richard Gere is one of her collectors? Well, here goes the interview.

*******

Tell me Dolores, have you always been interested in ephemera?

What?

Tell me, Dolores, you've been represented in so many ways: as a fashionable recluse, a la Garbo; as a somewhat conventional housewife from the suburbs; as an isolated mystic, a Talmudic scholar; and even as something of an idiot savant -- no disrespect intended -- a mathematician expressing obscure formulas in your artwork.

Tell me, Dolores, which description gets it right? Can you talk about the woman behind the art?

Who is-

Dolores, an interesting point which I believe anthropologists would absolutely concur with is that many tribes around the world never gave themselves names; it's only from what others called them that they even get their names.

What?

You seem in a sense not to be self-conscious, I mean I don't mean to make you self-conscious, but you don't seem to have a sense of self. This is where the interest from the Buddhist community comes in I think, that you seem to be beyond the usual egotistical shenanigans that take up entire lifetimes of most people. I do begin to connect you now to all that is not there in your work. I have felt at times that your work is satirical, that you are poking holes in our accepted forms of thinking, in our so-called conventional wisdom, but as we sit and talk I feel the presence of this work and of your life as a testament to Meditation.

Dolores, may I see your artwork?

She gets up and slowly goes over to a locker-sized closet near the back of the room and takes out an old cardboard box. She places it on my lap. I look at her as to whether I should open it, hoping she'll say yes. She nods that it's ok for me to lift the lid. At first I see nothing inside, but then I notice an old worn envelope lying at the bottom. I pull it out. I look to her and she nods for me to open it. Inside is a sheet of paper with some pencilled writing on it. Read it, she motions to me:

I look at her. Dolores Links. You don't say. I keep reading.

(Marcel Duchamp) and Physicist John Wheeler wrote about The Participatory Anthropic Principle which states that "observers are necessary to bring the world into being" (John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, 1988)

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