the Box of Love: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection, 9cm x 9cm x 9cm
This artist book is based on Love at Goon Park, a biography of the famous psychologist Harry Harlow, written by Deborah Brum. In my artist book, I focused more on the controversy embedded in Harry Harlow and his experiments on rhesus monkeys. On one hand, his experiments are praisable because they made revolutionary contributions in the field of psychology and helped people to understand love scientifically. On the other, they are notorious and inhumane as rhesus monkeys were tortured and sacrificed cruelly in the process.
The box structure of the book is inspired by Harry's laboratory, which was converted out of an abandoned box factory. In this laboratory, there were hundreds of boxes which contained the experiment apparatuses and prisoned the rhesus monkeys.
Texts on this page:
Harry wasn't perfect in the way he went about his work. He performed experiments that no one today should repeat. If ever there was a legitimate scientific need to put baby monkeys into vertical chambers, that need is past. But since we are so ridiculously slow, sometimes, to understand the lessons of love, perhaps we need to listen even to the most painful messages. No one who knows Harry's work could ever being scooped up into someone's arms and reassured that the day is going to be all right. Let us remember the best of Harry's contributions as well as the worst. You don't have to like the way Harry found his answers. But neither should we pretend that he did anything less than arrive at some fundamental truth. Our challenge is not to squander it.
—— Deborah Brum, author of Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection
fig.1 Wisconsin General Test Apparatus
fig.2 Surrogate Mothers
fig.3 Auxiliary Housing Cage
fig.4 Social Play Room
fig.5 Total Isolation chamber
fig.6 Pit of Despair
The interlayers can be pulled out and inserted back like drawers.
To show the pain the monkeys suffered, I chose Harry's last experiment, which is also the darkest one, to build the book's inner structure. The name of the experiment and its corresponding apparatus is 'pit of despair'. The scientists put the monkey infants into a pit made of stainless steel and isolated them for more than 6 months to study what love could destroy. In the first two or three days, the monkeys tired tirelessly to climb out of the pit. From the forth day, they huddled up on the bottom of the pit and became more and more depressed and anxious day by day.
Printed on the transparent interlayers are apparatuses in six main experiments of Harry's study of love, which gradually went from the brightest side of love to the darkest side. Harry is a genius in psychology and designing experiments, which can be shown in these apparatuses. However, when they are overlapped over the monkey infant, they just become a burden loaded on the little infant, suffocating it and finally killing it.
The book is designed small enough to be held and played in hand. Readers need to hold the book closely to explore the details and hidden information. When the reader inverts the box, he or she can see the whole structure from the small window on the bottom again to experience from the monkey's perspective.
