Featured photo- Simon Bill.
The hippocampus is not an equestrian college but part of the human brain. The human brain works on a strict use it or lose it policy, which is why, if you never think, you get more stupid.
Simon Bill’s arts end of the world novel, ARTIST IN RESIDENCE, fits the bill in making you think, therefore stupefying stupidity.
The aesthetic version of reality is bound to be different from the consensus reality because that’s what art is. Its all made up. Artists invent things. Its called creativity.
Simon Bill is an artist who has turned his hand and considerable brain to writing a novel, ARTIST IN RESIDENCE, a brilliantly funny brain teaser satire cum crash test course in neurology.
When he finds his paintings aren’t selling, the anonymous narrator of ARTIST IN RESIDENCE, a colourist prone to blackouts accepts the post of artist in residence at the Norman Neurological Institute at Gray’s Hospital.
Here he comes in contact with a group of people with neural deficits and their myriad malfunctions. There’s Colin, a people person who suffers from prosopagnosia – the inability to recognise the faces of familiar people, and a blind couple, one of which, the woman, has visual agnosia, which means she can see everything but recognise nothing. The man doesn’t know he can see and has lost forever a part of the brain that allows you to know you can see. (And you thought the eyes had it!).
And Emily, a pre Raphaelite beauty who can never hang on to any new information for more than fifteen minutes or so. The artist in residence is totally smitten by Emily and lusts after her something rotten. Of course, his dilemma is that her condition makes a mockery of consensual coupling, and even if romance could spark in the fifteen minutes of her focal memory, there is the spectre of taking advantage of the disabled.
The ulnar has a nerve calling itself the funny bone because really the funny bone is the skull. It houses the brain which gathers what is humorous, including the pun on the humerus, the limb more often identified as the funny bone.
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE is one of those rare reads – entertaining and educational – especially about the brain, the way we visualise, remember, think and feel.
It’s also an examination of the corporatisation and medicalisation of art – public funding, social and therapeutic application – the business of art, and the inherent bureaucracy that entails and entrails!
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE by Simon Bill is published by Sort of Books