Ethereal fingerprints of artful vitality
by Steve Xoh

I rarely go to art exhibitions. This feels like a bit of a shameful confession as an artist, but the truth is that I often find them too busy and sometimes quite boring. However, I found myself at a loose end on a Sunday recently, which happened to coincide with the opening of an exhibition by outsider artist Sam Doyle at The Gallery of Everything. As I was in central London, I also decided to head over to the Royal Academy to see the collection of Richard Dadd they currently have on show. The contrast of seeing these two exhibitions one after another was striking.

I was absolutely captivated by every piece of Sam Doyle’s work. There was something about it that just drew me in and made me feel something that I could not possibly describe. The Richard Dadd exhibition was a very different experience. Whilst I am deeply fascinated by Dadd’s story and can appreciate the brilliance of his art and how it arose from the challenging circumstances he found himself in, I couldn’t help but notice that it didn’t grab me in the same way that Doyle’s did. I feel nervous writing about this experience here as it might reveal something about me that people who properly “get” art will pounce on and use as evidence that I’m not really an appreciator of outsider art or indeed art of any kind. But the contrast of experiences felt like an important thing to explore.

The American psychologist Daniel Stern was deeply interested in how infants develop a sense of self through their early interactions with others. Through his observations, Stern became fascinated by something beyond recognisable emotions, language and gestures. He came to believe that the dynamic feeling of an experience could be just as significant to our development and developed his concept of “Forms of Vitality” to explore this idea further.

Stern suggested that the human experience contains qualities that aren’t adequately described through our conventional method of labelling emotions and sensations. Visceral experiences such as a feeling that slowly swells before collapsing, an interaction that feels hesitant and fragmented, or a moment that suddenly seems to explode into existence - these aren’t necessarily emotions in themselves but ethereal qualities of how our experience unfolds. Stern proposed five interrelated elements to forms of vitality: movement, time, force, space and intention/directionality. What I find fascinating about this theory is that it suggests a baby might very well understand the shape of its experience before it can understand any words or emotions associated with it, and that this understanding likely continues into adulthood.

Stern went on to suggest that the arts are particularly powerful ways of revealing what he called “the stylistic personal signature that is stamped on all experience”. He suggested that what matters is not simply what we create, but how we create it. The movement, rhythm and force of a brushstroke, a musical phrase or a dancer’s gesture can express something uniquely personal, communicating in ways that, as Stern put it, “language can’t quite cover”. For me, this suggests that each of us leaves behind something of our own distinctive vitality fingerprint in the things we create. Something a viewer might pick up on beyond the aesthetics of the art that they see.

I’m curious whether this goes some way towards explaining my contrasting experiences of Doyle and Dadd’s work. Perhaps what I was encountering in Doyle’s paintings was something of the vitality he experienced in creating them, expressed through the movement, force, rhythm and energy of his marks. Maybe there was a particular vitality fingerprint that I found compelling, even though I couldn’t explain why. I’ve experienced this with other art and concluded that I simply know what I like when I see it. But now I’m wondering whether these encounters might be moments of serendipitous vitality matchmaking, where the vitality fingerprint of the artist resonates with my own vitality fingerprint in the moment of viewing it.

I find this idea very exciting. It somewhat blows up the question of “What is art?” and what is good or bad artwork. It reassures me as an artist that my role is not to try hard to make something that people like, but to simply make from a spontaneous and authentic embodied state. If the vitality fingerprint etched into the work resonates with another, then that is wonderful. If not, then it is inevitable. When I ran the Spongleheim online gallery of outsider art, I realise now that the selection process was perhaps based entirely on vitality matchmaking. The anonymous selection panel was simply shown the artworks with no titles or information about the artists and selected them based on what resonated. This led to some incredible exhibitions of a wide variety of artworks from diverse artists around the world.

Having written this piece, I am left with a number of thought experiments. What if we were to use artistic vitality fingerprints in other ways? What if organisations recruited people not from CVs and application forms but by experiencing their artistic expression and choosing those whose work resonated? What if a dating service was developed where, instead of displaying photographs of its users, photographs and videos of their artistic expression were shown? I can imagine the pushback on these ideas being “but art is soooo subjective”, to which my response would be “Yes. That’s the point.”