Chris Bruce’s time in the Palouse has clearly led him to explore the basic questions about what art is and how it works. In the cheerful, low-key style that charmed Seattleites during his tenure as Curator at the Henry Art Gallery during the 80s and 90s, Bruce – now the Director of the Washington State University Museum of Art – spoke last night about the role of cognition and creative thinking in both art-making and art-viewing. Roy Lichtenstein, the witty and referential subject of the current Henry exhibition he has curated, was the ostensible topic of the discussion and his key example of these processes.

Quoting from various neuroscientists, he explained how art – in the words of Susan Sontag – “de-simplifies the world,” creating mental connections he called a “storage of comparables” that allow us to navigate the world in all of its complexity.

As utopian as it may sound, he made a compelling case for art as a means of improving human understanding and repairing our nation’s fractured social environment. The fact that he came to these conclusions in Pullman, WA – a place where, he said, people are much more familiar with wheat and lentils than with art – suggests that there may be more to this theory than we realize.

I enjoyed his local example of three Tom Otterness sculptures placed in the wheat fields near WSU. I could easily imagine people slowing down in their pick-ups, trying to figure out just what exactly was going on in this beautiful golden landscape of rolling hills.