Event 5: Hammer Museum (Extra Credit)

When I visited the Hammer Museum, one of the exhibits displayed the works of Forrest Bess.  Forrest Bess was a painter from Bay City, Texas.  From a very young age, he began having extremely vivid visions and dreams; however, it was not until the age of thirty-five that Bess began to depict his dreams through his canvas.  He would always keep a pencil and paper by his bed, so he could wake up in the middle of the night and jot down what he had seen: he wanted to make his paintings as accurate as possible.

Bess's work tied in Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious as we discussed in lecture.  In order to make sense of his dreams, Bess employed Jung's archetypes to decipher a hidden universal meaning. To aid his search, Bess also studied a multitude of different fields such as medicine, psychology, anthropology and philosophy looking for clues in all of their respective literatures.  Eventually, Bess came to the conclusion that male and female unison in one body could facilitate mortality.  Bess, himself, conducted numerous experiments on his own genitals to create a hermaphroditic element within himself.  

Forrest Bess and his work highlight the theme of this class: the use of underlying science to find meaning within art.  He portrayed his dreams through his paintings and analyzed them through psychoanalysis and Jungian principles.