Francesc Torres’ multimedia installation, The Head of the Dragon, grew out of the artist’s interest in neurologist Paul MacLean’s model of the triune brain. MacLean, according to Torres, sees the brain as something like an archaeological site, composed of three different layers of evolutionary development—the cerebral cortex, the limbic system, and the R-Complex (the deepest and most primitive layer, which dominates the brains of our evolutionary forebears, the reptiles and lizards). Though all three layers operate simultaneously in the human brain, in this installation Torres chose to focus on the pervasive influence of the R-Complex in Western civilizations; by so doing, he suggested the ways in which primitive forms of territoriality, aggression, and ritual function in our approaches to technological development, power relationships, and war.
Appropriately, the dominant image in the piece was that of the snake, the mythological symbol of evil, cunning, and sexuality. On entering the gallery, the viewer heard an audiotape (repeated every 45 seconds) of a snake’s hiss, which grew louder for several moments, faded, and then crescendoed in an explosive sound like a bomb blast. This juxtaposition of primal, animal sounds with modern technological ones introduced spectators to a structural device used throughout the installation: by consistently juxtaposing reptilian imagery with visual and sculptural elements from Western civilizations, both past and present, the artist declared his work to be not a statement about a specific political system, but a general exploration of the interconnections between various cultures, eras, and evolutionary stages.
The “dragon” was on the right side of the gallery. Eight video monitors sat on pedestals which were arranged in a snakelike curve, defining the dragon’s “tail.” The same short segment of tape was repeated on all of the monitors: a racing car, careening out of control, somersaulting wildly across a road. Torres created a sense of progression in these repetitive cycles of destruction by gradually shortening the pedestals, and by darkening the image on the screen until, at the end of the series, it was almost completely black.
The ever-darkening tail led the spectator toward a 15-foot-long wooden battering ram—the “body” of the dragon. At the back of this symbol of primitive aggression was a small steam engine, a contemporary “power machine”; at the front was a video screen, which displayed a black-and-white televised image of a snake. The whole contraption was aimed at a white door suspended from the gallery ceiling. Yet the secret behind the door—the ultimate reward for all this aggression—was, as the viewer soon discovered, no secret at all: the head of the dragon was a live (caged) boa constrictor—the same snake whose image was televised on the battering ram itself.
This circularity was an important part of the concept of the work, since The Head of the Dragon was primarily about biological and cultural vicious circles. These vicious circles were described metaphorically in a film loop continuously projected onto a large screen at the end of the gallery. The film showed a man, painted red, doing a simple hopping dance. Accompanying him was an animated snake, who writhed and wriggled in a related, if somewhat different pattern of movement. While acknowledging the continuity and the limitations of biological evolution, this repetitious “dance of life” also suggested that human cultural rituals have hardly progressed beyond the instinctual patterns of our forebears.
The end result of this evolutionary stasis was prophesied in the eight small drawings of snakes that hung on the left wall of the gallery, corresponding to the eight video monitors at the right, and completing the circular structure of the installation as a whole. Like the videotaped car wrecks, these snake images became darker as the series progressed, thus allowing Torres to forge a link between cultural destructiveness and biological destruction—a link that was reinforced by the presence of a jigsaw puzzle which would have depicted a world map and national flags, if the pieces had not been strewn across the floor.
During the show, visitors gradually put the puzzle together, reinforcing Torres’ one offering of hope. Next to the eight snake pictures hung a large drawing, showing a cross-sectional sketch of MacLean’s triune-brain model and a chart of the rise and fall of civilizations. Beneath these visual images the artist had handprinted the words “The liberation movement vs. the social manifestation of the reptilian brain has to fight its final battle in a field situated at square c-10.” This square corresponded to the field of “culture” in the chart. According to Francesc Torres, only culture can help us to plug into the more highly evolved layers of our brain, and thus transcend the primitive behavior patterns which have so far defined our civilization’s “dance of life.”
—Shelly Rice
