Souls of Weight? I Seelen von Gewicht?
A philosophical essay on the artistic work of Marie Lynn Speckert
By Dr. Konstanze Caysa, Artist Philosopher
In her depictions, Marie Lynn Speckert addresses the artistically necessary and difficult question of the materiality of the soul. If the soul has a veritable matter of which it is made, is it then in a sense corporeal and can it be measured? Or weighed? If that were the case, the soul would be subject to our physical and mathematical laws.
The artist shows both individual items: things, objects and on the other hand living beings in the form of animals. Whether living or physical, every single thing in the exhibition seems cut off, maybe a little lost. Individual bodies or organs that are self-contained things and do not in any way extend beyond their own thing boundary. Individuals or body parts that each stand alone.
The great fascination of this exhibition, which asks prosaically and analytically about the substance, the nature and thus also the meaning of talking about a soul, is that Marie Lynn Speckert also seems to be asking about new forms of functioning community.
On the one hand, the exhibition "58106g WEIGHT OF SOUL" uses the concept of the soul to address something that previously only played a role in religious, cultural, and above all also traditional Christian contexts and abused the soul as a guarantee of immortality and as a promise of a better life in heaven, in a secular way with the means of art. Duncan MacDougall experimented on the weight of the soul in 1902 and wanted to do a study to prove that the soul is material and measurable. He weighed the weight of the patients' bodies before and after their death and found an average weight difference of 21g. The title of the exhibition takes up the study "Soul has weight, physician thinks" published in 1907 in the New York Times. Speckert's works were weighed for the exhibition, which totaled 58106g. Is that the indication of weight, which indicates the measurability of the soul of the artwork or can make it calculable?
What is the "soul" in the midst of our materialistic and technologically ordained life? Are the scientific questions about the human state of mind in the form of psychology or psychoanalysis sufficient to actually pinpoint "soul"? Despite the knowledge of God's death, is the soul immortal? Can we hope for our own immortality through the soul? Maybe there is something tangible: a number of grams that can adequately express the weight?
Perhaps the weight of the soul is an individually experienceable empraxis of a new form of community that is self-determined and based on the freedom of the individual. Then you would probably not find measurements such as kilos or grams, but discover another measure for the soul: intensity, for example.
58106g WEIGHT OF SOUL
58106g WEIGHT OF SOUL
exhibition view "58106g WEIGHT OF SOUL", @ Galerie Paul Scherzer, Halle Saale Germany, 2023
photos by Manuel Wagner
