“The Brain Display” is a composite arrangement:a stand holds a sign announcing the work’s name in mostly blue block letters; cornering this is a wooden post supporting a plastic book holder with an issue of LIFE magazine; four rocks sawed cleanly into approximate halves are staggered in front and back of the stand, and a baby doll in a bumblebee suit sits underneath a different, and, this time, unencased issue of LIFE. All of these items have been placed on a large mirror that serves as the display’s reflective platform.

In one of the LIFE issues, we are presented with the enchanting cognition of the “New Music Man”, Pierre Boulez. Recently promoted as the director of the New York Philharmonic, Boulez is photographed with his famously batonless hands; like the display’s bumblebee doll below, his arms are raised in a posture of inspired conduction.

In a different issue of LIFE, which features an article on “Revolutionary Devices to Control your Brain,” the head becomes the site of a conquerable master, one who is apparently out of control, but promisingly vulnerable to foreign influences. In this way, the brain is not only a stranger within, but a stranger who plays host to a fantasy of a more amenable strangeness or the mediation of devices.