Adam Helms

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Halsey McKay Gallery is thrilled to present new works by Adam Helms now available in the Viewing Room. How to Be Anxious introduces a new series of Rorschach and doubled images produced between November 2020 and March 2021, during the second lockdown period of the global pandemic. On view through April 30, 2022, the project is accompanied with a conversation between Helms and Alexander Provan, a writer and the editor of the magazine Triple Canopy. This presentation precedes a two-person show alongside Bruce Conner at the gallery in the spring.

This viewing room is currently closed. For information about available works please email: info@halseymckay.com

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The INTERPRETATION of ARBITRARY FORMS

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Alexander Provan: We live in an age of personality tests and comparable mechanisms for classifying people based on how they respond to stimuli—tests that are conducted via phones, browsers, streaming platforms, etc., whether the subjects realize they’re being tested or not. Though phrenology was meant to assess personality by measuring bumps on the skull, the current fad for sorting people based on what they say and see (or what they click on and buy) goes back to the pseudo-scientific tests that became popular after World War I, the most famous being the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the test developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, based on a clinician showing symmetrical inkblots to a patient and soliciting responses. These tests changed how personalities were understood and how people were defined —as introverted, anxious, suicidal, or perverse—with effects ranging from the jobs offered by employers to the prison sentences handed down by judges. Given that you’ve been using Rorschach-like imagery into your work, I have to ask: have you ever taken the test?

Adam Helms: No—not officially. Have you?

Provan: No! I wish we could test each other right now. I want to know who’s more anxious.

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Helms: Unfortunately, the test doesn’t work without a set of the inkblots that’s been made exactly as Rorschach intended, from the colors to the paper to the dimensions. And the Society for Personality Assessment will come after us if we reproduce the patterns. Oddly, everyone thinks they know what a Rorschach looks like, but hardly anyone has seen one of the official inkblots.

Provan: How did you get interested in Rorschach patterns and begin to integrate them into your work?

Helms: I initially became interested in them after encountering Bruce Conner’s intricate drawings with symmetrical inkblots from the 1990s. I saw those works reproduced in the catalog for his retrospective at the Walker in 1999, and, later, in person at his exhibition at MoMA in 2016. I’d been aware of Rorschach patterns before, and I’d come across the giant Warhol paintings inspired by them, but seeing Conner’s work made me understand them differently—as an artist.

Provan: I actually saw the retrospective at the De Young in San Francisco in 2000, when I was in high school, and I bought the catalog—my first, I think. I remember the exhibition completely changing my sense of how artists study, appropriate, and ultimately transform popular culture.

Helms: Absolutely. To me, the Rorschach-influenced works define Conner. He saw everything in terms of patterns and symbols; his vision of the world became increasingly private, even recondite, after he became terminally ill with liver disease in the 1980s. That’s when he started making the drawings. The disease eventually limited his mobility, and he began to focus on smaller works that required him to focus intensely without moving around too much. Of course, Conner was also a fan of psychedelic drugs: he was part of the 1960s scene in California that included Dennis Hopper and a bunch of very far-out people.

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Provan: Generally, personality tests—or “people-sorting instruments,” as they used to be called—are thought of as antithetical to art, right? But the inkblots designed by Rorschach, an amateur artist, are very different from a questionnaire that provides a score at the end. Rorschach’s test first appeared in his 1921 book Psychodiagnostics, as a set of ten prints with detailed notes for clinicians on how to ask questions and interpret responses. The images look like art and promise a window onto the self based on imagination and interpretation rather than rigid categorization. They affirm the importance of individuality and creativity, even though the point is to identify pathologies (many of which seem inextricable from the societal obsession with individuality).

Helms: Yeah, and I didn’t really think about Rorschach patterns before seeing them reflected in popular culture and art. So I thought of the images in aesthetic terms and then came to understand them as tools for revealing the most personal qualities of the individual—as mechanical and neutral.

Provan: They’re machines for prompting interpretation, right?

Helms: Or for registering who viewers are based on what they see. And that’s very different from saying that the meaning of an image—or of everything—is entirely subjective.

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Provan: What we see not only depends on but indicates our perspectives. Really, the images speak, telling us—and others—who we are. That said, there’s a difference between what we see and what we interpret. I called Rorschach patterns machines for prompting interpretation, but the historian of science Peter Galison argues that the test is actually about how the patient perceives the images. He writes that Rorschach subordinated interpretation to apperception, which “marks a shift in the logic of the self.” The test is more than a tool for evaluating personalities: it’s “a technique of the self,” a way of understanding and constructing individuals.

Galison asserts that the Rorschach test wasn’t meant to understand the interior life of the patient and, in fact, hinges on the self having no fundamental character. Instead, the self is formed through continual responses to stimuli; it’s a product of conditioning and, of course, manipulation. Galison describes the Rorschach as the precursor to contemporary psychometrics: the algorithmic characterization of individuals based on how they respond to countless nudges, notifications, interface tweaks, and so on.

Helms: To me, that’s partly what the Rorschach patterns now symbolize: the evolution of the scientific—or pseudo-scientific—approaches to discerning and molding the self, that gave us the attention economy.

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Provan: Rorschach patterns have been called “X-rays of the mind,” but they end up silencing the patients, speaking for them, doing away with any sense of self that can’t be classified, codified, and mechanically interpreted. Rorschach and his followers set up a strict method of questioning and decoding the responses of patients, which was later translated into a computer program that automated much of the process, linking interpretations to pathologies. And now we all live with the technological script that evolved from the interviewer’s script, even though the Rorschach test has been debunked—though, of course, Rorschach’s acolytes continue to promote the test, which continues to be used in various psychiatric settings and legal proceedings. I suppose the question is how to work with the Rorschach in order to articulate the self as something that can’t be comprehended or confined by those scripts.

Helms: Definitely. I’ve used Rorschach-esque imagery in my work before: many of my paintings and prints include depictions of masked militants and other characters who identify themselves through heralds and obscure symbols. They act as sites of extraordinary cultural projection—and they exploit the paranoia directed at them, the meaning ascribed to them. I’ve often concealed their faces with abstract forms that resemble pools of ink, which sometimes extend from the masks that they wear. But focusing on the technique of creating Rorschach patterns—incorporating materials from the studio but subjecting them to chance procedures—allowed me to give up a degree of control, to appreciate the effects of my thoughts and actions that I hadn’t determined.

I began this body of work in the early days of the pandemic after moving to Cologne, Germany, and I was feeling really isolated; I was manic about being in the studio, as if I had to constantly produce work in order to prove my own existence. And these works revealed something—something of myself—that might not otherwise have materialized, and that I might not otherwise have encountered.

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Provan: You didn’t get into cooking or watching TV? Peloton?

Helms: Yeah, well, after living in Germany for a couple years, I realized how toxic and overwhelming the diet of American media had been for me, and I felt that I had to go through a cleanse in order to regain some level of autonomy. I wanted to learn to think in a different way, in a different context—and I didn’t have room for exercise equipment. I’d moved to Cologne, which was totally new for me, so while I did feel isolated, I also felt a sense of freedom; I didn’t feel that everything I was doing had to lead to a particular outcome. And there was nothing at stake, so I could do whatever I wanted. That gave me the ability to make some incredible discoveries.

The works are imperfect: there are marks that I wouldn’t necessarily have made if I’d been drawing or painting, and that have to somehow become part of what I want the work to be. I’m always adjusting my intentions and expectations based on how the work is materializing. I’m not aiming to perfect an image that I have in mind, or even to attain a sense of clarity or comprehensibility. The works—and the self as manifest in the works—are expressions of a continual negotiation.

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Provan: That seems counter to the “technique of the self” represented by the Rorschach, but also to the ways in which people are prompted to express themselves (and engage with others) in a world in thrall of data—and, of course, to the technologies that promise to find meaning in the data.

Helms: Yeah, and I think that’s related to my attraction to Conner’s work, which is so much about the artist’s hand, whether in the inkblot drawings and mandala drawings or in his collages and photogravures. His work is often extremely detail-oriented and obsessive. Seeing the inkblot drawings, I wondered: How is he making these? Is he copying existing images by hand? If so, how is he copying the patterns so neatly and cleanly, while transforming them into something entirely different, which requires maintaining a sense of the larger image that’s formed from all the patterns? That fascinated me as an artist.

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Provan: There’s so much control at the level of the line but also at the level of the image that’s formed from all the infinitesimal marks. But you’re also left with a sense of the impossibility of exerting so much control—of the work not also being governed by chance, randomness, and intuition.

Helms: Absolutely. In person, you can see creases on the surface of the works: artifacts of Conner folding the paper in a particular pattern. The works don’t really resemble any of the actual Rorschach patterns, but they make use of the procedure. And there’s a ridiculous level of precision, but in service of abstraction, which brings to mind traditional Japanese landscape painting. Each drop of ink is meticulously applied, each pattern is perfectly rendered, but the overall image is also determined in part by chance operations, moments where control is deliberately ceded.

Provan: That seems like a significant difference, right? The images produced by Rorschach may seem to involve chance and randomness, but in fact they’re meant to reveal nothing of the maker, source, or process. They look like art, but they also look like they “had made themselves,” as Damian Searls writes in The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing (2017). Rorschach wanted the patterns to be devoid of any reference to the world beyond the image, because he was worried about patients drawing on associations rather than plumbing the unconscious.

It’s strange that the Rorschach patterns are so ubiquitous in visual culture, given that the idea is for the images to elude any common interpretation, and to put the onus of making meaning entirely on the individual. The images are extraordinarily popular but also esoteric because the content is inscrutable and reproduction is highly restricted. Rorschach was concerned that if the patterns were widely circulated they’d no longer be useful: having already encountered them, people would cease to understand them as neutral; they’d interpret the patterns as Rorschach patterns.

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Helms: Yeah, they’d become familiar with the images and they’d ascribe meaning to them that came from culture rather than individual psychology. Rorschach wanted to ensure that the patterns were interpreted in the same way—i.e., on individual psychological terms—by everyone, which meant that the images had to be completely autonomous. But it’s kind of like trying to get comedians not to steal each other’s material: you can discourage people from lifting lines word for word, but at some point the jokes become part of the culture and you can’t tell where they came from or who (if anyone) authored them. If you hear the jokes over and over again, they’ll become part of your unconscious, and you’ll think of them in terms of your own experience, your own set of references. The same is true, at this point, with the Rorschach patterns: for most people, they’re embedded in the unconscious, which defeats the point, at least in a clinical setting.

Provan: Weirdly, Rorschach wanted to prevent the patterns from becoming part of the visual discourse, and now the opposite has happened. But the images that are part of the discourse aren’t the original ten patterns; they’re the kind of images that people recognize as “Rorschachs.” They’re emoji, basically—and yet no Rorschach emoji exist, as far as I can tell! There should, at least, be Rorschach emoji based on the most famous images, the so-called mother and father patterns.

Helms: Oh, totally! But would the reference be to the mother and father or to psychotherapy’s fixation on the mother and father? At this point, when people see a Rorschach, they see psychology.

Provan: Or projection.

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Helms: Exactly. And the image of the Rorschach as a symbol of projection has already become part of popular culture. You texted me a Rorschach-esque emoji that’s based on the Watchmen character named after Rorschach, a vigilante who wears a mask with inkblots formed by two liquids—black and white—that are constantly changing in response to heat and pressure, forming symmetrical images. Rorschach considers the mask to be his real face; he embodies the projection. And that’s what many people think of when they see a Rorschach: the Watchmen character.

Provan: Rorschach also happens to be a right-wing nationalist who understands the world in terms of black and white, good and evil, rectitude and perversion.

Helms: The very pathologies meant to be uncovered by the Rorschach test! In a clinical setting, the Watchmen character’s interpretation of the patterns would probably get him institutionalized. And I think that connects to Warhol, who had a special sense of the relationship between the banal and the pathological, the normal and the freaky. I’m thinking of the brilliant recent Warhol retrospective at the Whitney in 2018—I saw the version of the show at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne in 2021. The focus was on everything other than his most famous works, and the show emphasized how serious he was about form and technique. Most people think of Warhol in terms of the Factory, celebrity, portraiture, soup cans—the iconic images. But the retrospective showed him to be a deeply curious, investigative artist who was always asking what painting could be. I think his Rorschach works are emblematic in terms of the content, approach, scale, and aesthetic. He elevated the mechanics of small inkblot drawings through his heroic, grandiose paintings.

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Provan: Instead of seeing a photo that gives a “human face” to a terrible, complex situation, you see another effect of the institutional mechanisms that keep war in the realm of abstraction, even if that’s not the intent in the case of documentation of funerals. Your work compounds that effect: rather than relate to the humanity of the individual subject, I’m prompted to project—or to consider the ways in which meaning is projected onto such figures. And I’m attuned not only to the aspects of myself that animate my interpretation, but to the social and cultural forces at work, which prevent the individuals in the photos from ever being represented as individuals. The combination of the subject matter and inkblots speaks to the collective production of meaning—and how I, as the viewer, am implicated.

Helms: One thing I’m interested in doing with the Rorschach-esque works—and, specifically, with the ones that incorporate these figures, these forms of redaction—is reinstating referentiality, and asserting that making sense of images has to do with culture, experience, frame of reference, and so on. And, of course, one way to do that is appropriation: extracting images from one context and inserting them into a different one, forming novel juxtapositions and associations, which puts pressure on interpretation (as opposed to mere perception).

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Provan: And the result is a sense of agency that hinges on connections with others: the meaning that you make from these images is personal and irreducible, but also emerges from—and contributes to—a collective imaginary.

Helms: Yes. That’s the opposite of what happens with software designed to form relationships between data sets, or to characterize people based on behavioral patterns, consumption habits, and so on, right? And without the sense of agency and connection—without the understanding that each comes from the other—I’m afraid we’ll continue down the path of mass psychosis.

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