Thoughts on Art and Teaching

Dialogue

2012-02-02T22:47:00.004Z

Dialogue 1

TUTOR: Are you interested in how people interpret your work?
STUDENT: Yes.
TUTOR: A lot?
STUDENT: Well I don’t go out looking for comments if that’s what you mean.
TUTOR: So you’re happy for people to interpret your work as they like?
STUDENT: Yes - I’m not interested in forcing my ideas on anybody.
TUTOR: What if someone was offended by something you'd made?
STUDENT: I’m not aiming to offend.
TUTOR: Okay, but what if lots of people were offended?
STUDENT: Then I suppose I’d have to listen to their reasons and decide if they were justified.
TUTOR: Who is your work aimed at then?
STUDENT: Anyone that’s interested.

TUTOR: What if nobody was interested – would you continue?
STUDENT: Yes, I think so.

TUTOR: And who would your work be for in that case?
STUDENT: Me, I guess.

TUTOR: So who is your work for then?
STUDENT: Probably me in the first instance and then anybody that’s interested.

Dialogue 2
TUTOR: Are you interested in how people interpret your work?
STUDENT: Not especially – I don’t really make work to find out what other people think, I make it to find out what I think.
TUTOR: And what if someone took offence at your work?
STUDENT: Well that’s up to them. I’m certainly not aiming to offend anyone.
TUTOR: And what if lots of people were offended?
STUDENT: Then I’d be interested to hear their reasons.
TUTOR: And if they had good reasons, would you consider changing your work?
STUDENT: I’m not sure… probably.
TUTOR: So you’d change your work then?
STUDENT: Probably.
TUTOR: So you are interested in how people interpret your work?
STUDENT: No. What other people think may influence me but, like I said, I make work to explore what I think, not what other people think.

Dialogue 3
TUTOR: Are you interested in how people interpret your work?
STUDENT: To a degree, yes. But I don't actively seek it.
TUTOR: Why not?
STUDENT: I don't think it's really a priority for me.
TUTOR: So what is your priority?
STUDENT: Perhaps it sounds self-centred to say so but I think I'm more interested in exploring my own thoughts rather than seeking other people's.
TUTOR: So you’re happy for people to interpret your work as they like?
STUDENT: Pretty well, yes.
TUTOR: But what if they were offended?
STUDENT: I’m not interested in offending anybody.
TUTOR: But what if it turned out that lots of people were offended?
STUDENT: Then I’d be interested to hear their reasons.
TUTOR: And if they had good reasons, would you consider changing your work?
STUDENT: Probably. I guess if their reasons were good ones then my own interpretation would change too and I’d want my work to reflect that change.
TUTOR: So you’d change your work then?
STUDENT: Probably. It wouldn’t make sense to me to show work that reflected ideas that I no longer stand by.

Craft and Poetry (teaching and education)

2012-01-28T20:31:00.007Z

"Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy", David Hockney, 197o- 71.

My friend John posted the following quote from David Hockney on Facebook today:

"I used to point out at art school, you can teach the craft; it's the poetry you can't teach. But now they try to teach the poetry and not the craft."

I felt compelled to reply:

Hmmm, Hockers [this was on Facebook remember] is oversimplifying as ever - nice for a soundbite but flawed as a reflection of what decent teachers really strive for. As I’m sure you’d agree, overemphasis on craft leads to vapid technical exercises whereas an overemphasis on poetry leads to self-important ineptitude.

Whilst it may be true that you cannot "teach" the poetry, as Hockney calls it, it would be a mistake, I think, to assume that it emerges naturally out of fine craft. Poetry can be nurtured, inspired, informed and encouraged just as surely as it can be neglected. Let's not allow our prejudices about teaching to cloud the issue. We live in a different world to the era of Hockney's studenthood and it’s arguable that art, let alone its poetry, is far less well regarded now [or at least regarded significantly differently] than it was in Hockney's time. If art schools devote greater emphasis to the poetry of art then this is probably simply a reflection of a belief that we have a duty, more than ever, to promote this easily trampled upon but vital aspect of culture.

…

Thinking about this again I think much of the problem derives from the way that we think of teaching as a form of imparting – usually of skills and knowledge: of quantifiable things. The idea that something as nuanced, complex and sometimes vexed as the poetry of art could be instilled in this way seems wholly unconvincing, preposterous even. And if we were to follow this reasoning to its logical conclusion then it would be pointless to attempt to teach the poetry of art, as Hockney’s quote suggests. However, if we were to think in terms of the word “educate” (from the Latin “lead out”) the whole issue evaporates. Many common prejudices about teaching seem to hinge on this subtle misunderstanding.

Obliquity

2012-01-24T10:35:00.007Z

Over the winter break I spotted a copy of John Kay’s 2010 book “Obliquity” on the shelf in Waterstones. Intrigued I bought a copy and found it well argued and insightful. Having read few damning reviews on Amazon I decided to write my own oblique (ie: 1*) response:

If you’re like me then you’re reading the one-star reviews of this book to compare them with the five-star reviews to gauge the most convincing arguments. In that case let me try to explain why, in this singular instance, a one-star rating - in an entirely oblique way - is the only sensible rating to give John Kay’s excellent - yes Excellent - book.

When reading reviews there quickly comes a point when there is little necessity in reading yet another rave review - just buy the book. On the other hand, a negative criticism might actually reveal an underlying flaw that jars with your own values and perceptions and would thus make reading the book a pointless and wasteful exercise. According to Kay’s insight, this very strategy, of skipping directly to the criticisms, can be considered a prime example of obliquity ie: of taking a lateral route to make an evaluation about a potential expenditure of energy, money or time.

Despite whatever criticisms might be thrown at this book, the overall argument is a vitally important one: high-level objectives are difficult to attain because they invariably involve extreme complexity and uncertainty and it makes little sense therefore to attempt to achieve them by direct means. Kay provides a variety of examples from a range of fields to explore this thesis and he analyses the point from a number of differing perspectives and gives nuanced arguments to back his claims.

If you already agree with the underlying thesis and you’re not interested in any of the explanations then clearly this book is not for you. If however, you are intrigued about how the pursuit of high-level objectives can go so disastrously wrong and why a more modest focus on intermediate goals is often so much more effective then this book might well be worth a few of your pennies.

Some highlights (not in the Amazon review):

“I think that obliquity is a process of experiments and discovery. Successes and failures and the expansion of knowledge lead to reassessment of our objectives and goals and the actions that result.”

“We not only lack fixed criteria of what constitutes greatness in poetry: to have such criteria would be to miss a vital component of poetic greatness. When we describe a great poem, we use words like freshness and originality. Great poets do not necessarily conform to the accepted concepts of what constitutes great poetry. They not only break the rules, they redefine them. Such obliquity is a key part of what makes poets great.”

“We don’t reach decisions about how to behave, what should go into a poem, what to teach or how to run a company as a result of performing some direct process that begins with abstract speculation about these large and general questions. We reach these decisions through an oblique process of negotiation, adaptation and compromise. As a result, these decisions will be resolved in different ways by different people at different times.”

“The human mind is programmed to look for patterns and to seek causes, and this approach is often valuable. But that programming leads us to see patterns in random events and to attribute intentions where none existed. We believe we observe directness in obliquity.”

“Surely you must do better if you intend to achieve something than if you don’t? The metaphor of the Blind watchmaker illustrates that the answer to that question is often no. If the environment is uncertain, imperfectly understood and is constantly changing, the product of a process of adaptation and evolution may be better adapted to the environment than the product of conscious design.”

“We devote hours of staff evaluations, quality assessments and risk reporting, but these hours are not really devoted to evaluation, assessment or reporting: they are spent ticking boxes, and our personal judgements, our assessments and our risk management are based on other criteria.”

“Mostly, we actually solve problems obliquely. Our approaches are iterative and adaptive. We make our choices from a limited range of options. Our knowledge of the relevant information, and of what information is relevant, is imperfect. Different people will form different judgements in the same situation, not just because they have different objectives are because they observe different opinions, select different information and assess the information differently: and even with hindsight it will often not be possible to say who was right and who was wrong. In a necessarily uncertain world, a good decision doesn’t necessarily lead to a good outcome, and a good outcome doesn’t necessarily imply a good decision or a capable decision maker. The notion of the best solution may itself be misconceived.” [my emphasis]

“Klein’s paramedics and firefighters became competent by learning the rules and became good through practice.”

“When faced with the task that daunts you, a project that you find difficult, begin by doing something.”

“Obliqity doesn’t mean that we should stop thinking about objectives, fail to examine options or omit to seek information and understand as best we can in the complex systems that we deal with. Far from it: we should start and continue. The alternative to a ‘rational’ process of defining objectives, evaluating options, modelling consequences is an approach that is oblique, but truly based on reason and evidence.”

“To call these processes “intuition” is to miss the central point, which is that what we are describing as “intuition” is based on evidence and evaluation and is repeatedly successful when practised by Beckham, an experienced art curator or Picasso – and not successful at the feet, or in the hands or minds, of amateur footballers, casual gallery visitors all weekend artists. The more we practice the better our judgements.”

Pleonasm

2012-01-19T15:02:00.003Z

Spectrum

2012-01-12T13:26:00.001Z

Expert Criteria

2012-01-06T00:00:00.014Z

If we accept that we each apply subtly different (and sometimes radically different) criteria to the decisions that we make and to the production of our work then does it make sense to require students to comply with a one-size-fits-all set of criteria?

In 1989 artists and Turner Prize nominees Jane and Louise Wilson (sometimes known as "the Wilson twins") graduated from their respective BA courses in fine art: Louise from Dundee and Jane from Newcastle. For their degree exhibitions they decided to collaborate and to submit exactly the same work for assessment.

Unless I am mistaken, the two identical shows received unequal marks: one a 1st class honours degree, the other a 2:1 (2nd class upper). The twin who received a 2:1 subsequently appealed and her mark was raised also to a 1st class honours degree. We might be tempted to assume that the initial disparity in marking was due to either a lack of professionalism or thoroughness - which amounts to the same thing - on the part of one of the institutions awarding the marks. But there is another interpretation which we might make: each institution was employing different criteria.

All courses have criteria by which they mark student work but, in the Humanities at least, these criteria often differ quite significantly between different institutions. Thankfully this distinctiveness has not yet been overridden by a singular set of criteria to be applied to all work across all institutions. Such a move would surely make a mockery of education, even if it were to have the desired result of creating greater parity in assessment. Nonetheless, the disparity between different institutions in terms of the way that work is marked, ie: how certain outcomes are weighted and how certain activities are prioritized, may offer an insight into what we are actually evaluating when we assess student work.

During assessments it might be thought that we make evaluations based on the stated assessment criteria? We certainly strive to. But can we be so sure that these criteria really capture the full extent of our evaluative judgements? In the Humanities as elsewhere, few experts agree about exactly what constitutes the good, the great or even the deplorable, so it is no surprise that most assessment criteria are little more than stripped-down compromised rationalizations of a barely understood, complex and intangible process.

"Indeed, the history of dramatic criticism, including criticism of the plays of Shakespeare, is in great part the history of unresolved disagreement over the necessary and sufficient properties of dramatic greatness. If there are such properties, then, we must nevertheless admit that no one has ever stated satisfactorily what they are.” -Morris Weitz

When we judge a person, in no matter what aspect, is it true to say that we are judging them on the basis of that particular characteristic as an objective fact? Or isn’t it more true to say that we judge them on the basis of our own criteria of what exemplifies that characteristic? In other words, without a clear and precise universal designation of what constitute greatness in any particular form, we are limited by the frailty and capriciousness of our own judgements. Such judgements are based upon experience, experience which furnishes us with conceptual models - exemplars - that we use to compare with other experiences and artifacts. The more wide ranging and sophisticated these models, the more discriminating we become and the more elaborate and extensive become our evaluations.

Much as we may value our own hard earned criteria, it is the criteria that the students apply to their own work that matter, not their compliance with ours. If we want students to make work according to our criteria then, by extension, we wish them to make the work that we would make. What makes far more sense is that students are supported to make the very best work that they can make and in the process become as expert in their deployment of their own criteria as we are with ours. Granted, such criteria take time to develop, but far better that they should be formed through deliberate practice and experience than through conformity and compliance.

The Delicacy of Instruction

2012-01-01T00:01:00.001Z

How important is it that educational experiences be challenging? How challenging? And from where should the challenges arise? If such challenges can be just as easily provided by technological sources does this spell the beginning of the end for teachers as we currently understand them?

In the early decades of cinematography it was believed that film had the potential to completely transform education, Thomas Edison even went so far as to proclaim:

"I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks. I should say that on average we get about two percent efficiency out of schoolbooks as they are written today. The education of the future, as I see it, will be conducted through the medium of the motion picture, a visualized education, where it should be possible to obtain one hundred percent efficiency."

With the benefit of hindsight we can see how misconceived this optimistic vision was, but how could Edison have got it so wrong? The most obvious explanation is that his conception of education was constrained by his meagre understanding of the ways in which knowledge is acquired. Following on from the work of Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, it is now widely believed that the most effective forms of learning involve an active process of knowledge construction as opposed to simple passive absorption. All forms of information transmission (film, TV, radio etc.) are therefore necessarily limited in their educational potential since they do not adequately engage the active construction of knowledge.

This may take us closer to the truth but it nonetheless fails to explain why video games for instance, fare no better in their instructive potential (though many games companies are investing significant resources in order to increase the educational value of their products). It would appear that mediated experiences of this kind are simply incapable of providing the necessary form or range of stimulation necessary to generate effective learning. Something else must be required, something that perhaps involves a more acute understanding and application of the role of challenge.

“When parents decide to intervene when a young child is having a bit of difficulty learning to tie their shoes is an important tactical decision. If the parent intervenes too soon, the child may become dependent upon the parent. If the parent provides too little help too late, the child may become frustrated. The parents task – like the teacher’s – is to be tuned in well enough to make the right decisions about when, how much and how.” -Elliot Eisner

As Eisner’s characterisation suggests, this process is an extremely delicate one which may explain why the job of teaching is often such a demanding and unpredictable task. Teaching, it might be argued, can be conceived very simply as a process of creating instructive challenges - challenges that are neither too difficult that they become overwhelming nor too simple that they prove tedious. Between these two poles, lies the productive zone of learning. However, the judgement of how best to pitch challenges in order that they operate as near to the point of being overwhelming as possible without tipping over the edge is an extremely subtle skill. One of the risks with constantly aiming at the most demanding challenges is that students eventually become so fatigued that their tolerance for challenge quickly diminishes. Similarly, if a challenge becomes overwhelming it is likely that students will be all the more wary the next time and the benefits of pushing so hard will have been lost. Optimising instruction in such dynamic circumstances is therefore a highly taxing operation in itself and it is not surprising that most teaching occurs at a more sedate level and pace.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from overwhelming difficulty we find the tedium of undemanding monotony. But, there is another far less obvious hazard that permeates almost the entire spectrum of challenge - it is often forgotten or misunderstood largely because it frequently receives very positive feedback from students. This presents itself as a form of mollycoddling that, while it might seek to support students, neglects to develop both their independence and resilience in the face of the very challenges through which learning most profitably occurs.

This human element, in particular its dimension of fallibility, may provide an alternative explanation for Edison’s grandiose claim. Perhaps he felt that by reducing the human element we might free education of one of its most fickle and uncontrollable aspects. Where human to human instruction is concerned, one hundred percent efficiency would appear to be nothing more than a fantasy. Nonetheless, without a capacity for perceiving and adjusting to the finest details of challenge and motivation it seems unlikely that artificial forms of education could ever reach the pinnacle of efficiency either.

Through the proliferation of online tools and networks it is now possible to engage in an enormously rich and edifying range of informative and educational experiences from the comfort of your own keyboard. Many of these also involve a significant portion of social communication and participation, a variable and adaptive mix of the formal and the informal, the social and the artificial. In this context the role of the teacher would appear to be increasingly threatened. But from a more nuanced perspective it is clear that teaching may not be quite as expendable as some might have us believe.

Since the days of Edison, recorded music, film, TV and the internet have become primary forms of mass entertainment, yet most people continue to value the uniqueness of one-to-one experiences to a far greater degree. Manufactured experiences are rarely as powerful and enduring in memory as those encountered individually and at first hand. Such experiences speak to us directly as the individuals that we believe ourselves to be and we place greater emphasis upon such experiences as a consequence.

Education can neither afford to dispense with the teacher entirely nor place them so centrally that they distract from the goal of learning. Distractions, like so many incidentals in education, need to be avoided as much as possible. The authoritative, domineering or even the nurturing presence of the teacher can become just as much of a distraction as anything else – perhaps even more so. If education is to be truly useful it surely needs to encourage students to generate their own challenges and to pursue them without fear of failure. Challenges that are sought for their own sake in this way are infinitely more rewarding than challenges sought for the transient thrill of institutional approval or a teacher’s praise.

Education then, becomes a process by which students are led to identify and originate their own challenges and to evaluate their progress as they accumulate new realisations and new skills that enable them to tackle yet more challenging tasks. And the teacher’s job? The teacher’s job, in Higher Education at least, is to lead the student to the point where they have no further use of the teacher.

A Show of Hands

2011-12-28T00:01:00.010Z

Last March I decided to begin each blog post with a specially made image. Here's a selection of hands to wave out the year.

The Moral Dimension of Privacy

2011-12-22T20:58:00.002Z

A conversation with a friend the other evening left me thinking about the difference between privacy and secrecy. In particular it left me ruminating over the silent burden of guilt that some people carry around with them when keeping secrets from friends and family.

Aside from the secrets we keep from loved ones about gifts and surprises, secrecy almost always brings with it an implicit assumption of deceit, of something concealed, illicit or hidden from view in order to maintain or gain power, influence or social standing. Whilst other people’s secrets are invariably regarded with distrust, privacy is regarded as an inalienable right of all. Both are things that we’d prefer to keep to ourselves (or at most a limited entourage of close acquaintances) but only secrecy brings with it a moral dimension, in fact, secrecy can be thought of as the moral face of privacy, a sub-classification of it, tinged with moral responsibility. But what constitutes this moral dimension? And, since these are conceptual abstractions formed and informed by social mores, what might be the purpose of such a distinction?

Morality, social taboos and religions in particular perpetuate the distinction between the secret and the private. How better to police the mind and actions of others than by compelling them to preside over their own thoughts and to determine if any particular action, memory or impulse should be categorized as either private or secret? It would seem to be this very tendency to categorize our thoughts according to differing moral standards that may, on occasion, lead to feelings of guilt and responsibility. Morals, of course, are a construct of social consensus, but they are rarely, if ever, universally shared across a culture.

If you have done something that is deemed as lawful by society as a whole but which is felt by some subgroup to be immoral - a sin even - then from their perspective it would be true to say that you are keeping a secret. But in actuality it is only a secret if you subscribe to their moral stance. Otherwise it is simply a matter of privacy, and what is private is nobodies business but your own and certainly no reason for either shame or guilt.

A Doubtful Show of Hands

2011-12-16T10:01:00.005Z

Each year university students are requested to fill out questionnaires about the ‘student experience’ - questions relating to their satisfaction with a range of areas from staff approachability or the resources of the courses they take, to their overall satisfaction. Last year the course I run received an embarrassingly low percentage for “organisation”. Overall we received a satisfaction rating of 91% so it wasn’t entirely bad news but, despite the fact that it is almost taken for granted that fine art courses are poorly organised, this year I’ve been determined to keep a better eye on things.

A few weeks ago I asked a group of students how they felt about the organisation of a recent project. I was met by a wall of screwed up faces and wobbling hands clearly meant to communicate uneasiness with the question. Shocked that I could have made such a universal hash of timetabling the workshops, the online resources and tutorials etc. I asked for a little more clarification about what aspects of organisation were least satisfactory. It turned out that every last student had thought I’d meant their own organisation.

Transformation (the unspoken Learning Outcome)

2011-12-12T00:03:00.010Z

In response to the previous post on the subject of Threshold Concepts in fine art, AF made a comment questioning whether the “need for students to put the expectations of friends and family behind them” could be considered as a “maturation process” - as Lesley and I described it. This is an important question that deserves a more thorough reply than would ordinarily be available via the comments box.

“There are a series of transitions that art and design students must negotiate as they move between the compulsory and post compulsory education sector and between higher education and employment within the creative industries sector. These transitions are key points where gaps in expectations become evident and where we as educators need to undertake further work to support our students as they enter and exit further and higher education.” Vaughan et al: “Mind the gap : expectations, ambiguity and pedagogy within art and design higher education” (2008) [my emphasis]

Whilst Vaughan et al.’s paper makes no direct reference to Threshold Concepts, there are several parallels that can be drawn, especially where shifts in ontological status are involved. In order to explore these implications it might be useful to look a little closer at both the real and perceived sources of expectation that play a role for students as they move through higher education.

This diagram outlines some of the major overlapping expectations that have a bearing both on the perceptions and aspirations of students. Every journey through education is obviously unique, and the influences and demands upon each student shift and change in relation to a multitude of complex factors. Some students begin higher education with far greater support from friends and family than others and therefore they find it much easier to settle-in than students who’s friends and family ignore or, worse still, resist their decision to pursue further study. For this reason there is often a vast disparity in terms of the background support (both financial and psychological) provided to students as they enter and continue through education. Many students from poorer backgrounds (and increasing numbers of students in general) often have to work to be able to afford their education, thereby creating further demands on their time that remove them from their studies. Local students often continue to live with their parents and whilst such preexistent social networks may provide a familiarity, immediacy and perspective that non-local students lack, it is equally likely that the consequent social demands distract from a more sustained focus on the subject of study. Responsibilities of work and family also make it much more difficult to commit to the social life that their peers take for granted that is often so vital to cultivating and reinforcing the social bonds that comprise any particular cohort of students.

These are just a few of the complex expectations and responsibilities that face students especially within their first few months of higher education. Very similar stresses and conflicting expectations also confront graduates when they leave education where they must negotiate their position within the world of work.

Presumably there are no Assessment Criteria or Learning Outcomes in any university that explicitly state that students should be prepared to reconstruct their social circle. But, as can be seen over and over again, students who struggle to fit-in socially, or to develop their own social circle, rarely make it to the end of a course without difficulty.

Universities are frequently perceived by prospective students as opportunities for self improvement and transformative experience. But it is not always the case that the transformations effected by education are universally welcome. The question then, is whether it is possible to achieve anything of significance in education without such transformation. If it is, then the institution presumably has a duty to support students to be able to achieve as much as possible without expecting transformation. If it isn’t, and transformation is indeed a necessary part of higher education, then universities should acknowledge this and make the expectation explicit whilst simultaneously ensuring that the process is made as painless and inclusive of each student’s existing social and professional commitments as possible.

Ten Threshold Concepts in Fine Art

2011-12-06T00:01:00.011Z

When Lesley and I were studying for the PGCert HE in different institutions a couple of years ago we put together a list of Threshold Concepts in fine art. The intention was to work this up into a research output. Until that happens perhaps this can be of use to anybody who might take the unlikely step of searching for “threshold concepts in fine art” on Google, as we did without success.

Threshold Concepts in Fine Art

The idea of ‘threshold concepts’, as outlined by Meyer and Land, proposes that there are areas which students repeatedly have difficulty with, but unlike core concepts specific to a discipline, these threshold concepts are characterized as having the power to radically alter a student’s subsequent perception and understanding of their given discipline. Once ‘mastered’, the student is unlikely to be able to return to previous perceptions and understandings; indeed, return could well be impossible. Also, the new knowledge may open a route to new understandings unattainable without having crossed this threshold. Threshold concepts are often thought of as requiring the student to pass through a liminal stage, where this passage may be troublesome. Indeed, this idea of “troublesome knowledge”, where there is a degree of difficulty involved, often questioning the very identity of the student, is seen as being characteristic, and this knowledge is often “conceptually difficult, counter-intuitive, or ‘alien’”

1: Leaving “Home”
This is not, strictly speaking, a discipline specific Threshold Concept (but definitely a threshold) though it is certainly crucial (for many students) for the development of full engagement with fine art education. Often thought of as simply “growing up” this threshold concerns the need for students to put the expectations of friends and family behind them (in many ways like the Rita Character in Educating Rita). This maturation process is a vital part of adopting the new context of study and creative exploration/learning. (More info on this Threshold here)

2: The shift from aesthetic to conceptual awareness 
From school education where the emphasis is on skills: hand eye coordination, the ability to draw well, the ability to perceive things accurately and the ability to translate this, to some extent imaginatively, onto paper or into form - to an understanding of the creative process as one which requires critical thinking and idea development through research and reflection conducted using a variety of approaches, methods and materials. Most students experience this threshold as a sudden drop in the way that their work is evaluated by the people teaching them. No longer can they impress their teachers through producing skillful work alone. Now the emphasis is much more upon the quality and depth of the ideas which their work articulates or explores. Conversely the ability to carry out processes in a skillful manner is almost taken for granted.

3: Understanding ideas surrounding authorship & appropriation
 With the acceptance of this, a huge barrier in the understanding of and the willingness to engage in key ideas of 20th century art is opened up. …Duchamp’s readymades, the death of the author etc.. Once again, this comes from a realisation that contemporary art is just as much an intellectual process as a technical one.

4: Understanding how research influences and informs practice 
Being strategic and relevant in one’s research rather than randomly filling sketchbooks and study journals with everything looked at in an attempt to prove that research is happening. This echoes Ray Land’s point that when students don’t quite grasp threshold concepts, in their liminal phase, they seem to go through the motions, imitating what they see others doing, and which they think they ought to be doing rather than comprehending the connectedness between things. Inevitably students who are new to the discipline may need to cast their net wide in the initial stages of study so as to build their foundational knowledge but as they become more familiar with the context they also become more discerning, selective and strategic.

5: Understanding the professional context in which artists work
Being able to relate and identify with or “inhabit” the title “artist”. This is a difficult one, and perhaps not strictly speaking, “key”. Some students use it from day 1 – to the dismay of some staff ! – and some have to leave art school before they use it – if they ever do. This is further complicated in discipline areas within fine art (eg. photography) where the term “photographer” often seems a more acceptable label because of it’s vocational interpretation by self, family, friends, etc. It may also be a threshold for staff to be able to accept that not all students studying fine art actually want to become artists…

6: Being able to differentiate symbolism from metaphor 
Once a student grasps this difference, they are often more able to take advantage of the more subtle ways in which metaphor might be employed, rather than through the more heavy handed and closed use of symbols. The student’s use of symbolism is often predictable to the point of cliché eg Red = passion etc, or, conversely, almost entirely unintelligible. Metaphor tends to offer a more open ended method of creating associations and forming meanings. This is what we mean when we talk about forming a personal language (as opposed to a language that is personal).

7: The private to the personal 
Students often wish to explore very private subject matter and in the process they often encounter difficulties with the boundary between what they wish to explore and what they wish to discuss. This is frequently experienced as a significant struggle one effective solution for which is to recognise that it is possible to explore all kinds of private concerns in work which is intentionally layered and therefore able to be interpreted in a number of ways which protect the more private aspects of the work and therefore the individual.

8: Creation as an ideological process 
The realisation that all creative practice is in some way ideological in content and effect. As with any politicized subject, this can lead to tensions and disagreement (even amongst staff) and as such it is often avoided. For similar reasons few undergraduate students ever encounter this threshold as a taught component. It is often encountered as troublesome area which causes students to reconsider their responsibility to their audience, the materials they use, and their own position within society. This can often lead to students adopting a more politicized direction within their work and even - in more extreme cases - to become disillusioned with art as a means to bring about social change.

9: Accepting authorship for unintended or intuitive successes
Students often encounter successful outcomes (and therefore recognition from staff and peers) through mistakes or unintended spontaneity or good fortune. In such situations it is often difficult for these students to reconcile intention and achievement. Learning to accept – and even to cultivate – these serendipitous or intuitive outcomes is a threshold which demands a new and more expansive conception of creativity as a process of inviting, perceiving and accepting the unexpected, chance and discovery, etc.

“Failure-prone individuals do not accept credit for their successes because they are afraid that they will be unable to repeat them later. But if these students exercise proper task analysis and set realistic goals, then success is repeatable. Hopefully, the students will not only accept credit for their successes – and not just partial credit – but will also become increasingly confident about their future chances.” Martin V. Covington “The will to learn: a guide for motivating young people”. P.147

10: Discoveries as opposed to messages
A common tendency among new students to Fine Art is the belief that you need to convey or express an idea or message which you intended at the start of the project. This notion can severely restrict one of the most important aspects of all art forms: the process has the potential to reveal things which never could have been imagined beforehand. This is such a vitally important thing to understand about art. If students end up where they expect to be, they will have only confirmed what they already knew and they will have discovered nothing.

“Whether they are photographs involving a great deal of preconception or not, I think there is something in the way that I try to do it that does involve things that I don’t even understand.” INTERVIEW: “Philip-Lorca diCorcia on Hustlers & Thousand” (2006)

So, whilst it is often necessary to have some kind of initial idea it is also important to give this breathing space and allow it to evolve – even if this means that initial idea becomes completely lost. The measure of a great work is not what was intended but what was created; not its origin but its destination. This is one of the biggest challenges when working with emotive subject matter (as is often the case with art) because there’s such a tendency to feel beholden to the original intention. As artists become more confident and familiar with this subtle process they become more able to loosen their grip in the certain knowledge that things which run deep come through whether you like it or not and the worst thing you can do is attempt to force them into existence.

Excess Knowledges

2011-12-03T11:53:00.008Z

In order to understand the nature of knowledge is it really necessary to carve it up into ever more finely divided fragments? Consider the following list: objective knowledge, subjective knowledge, tacit knowledge, implicit knowledge, explicit knowledge, inert knowledge, carnal knowledge, declarative knowledge, propositional knowledge, procedural knowledge, possessive knowledge, performative knowledge, proactive knowledge, embodied knowledge, extended knowledge and situated knowledge.

The other day I came across a couple of new contenders to add to this list: “paranoid knowing” and “reparative knowing”, coined by Eve Sedgwick in her book “Touching Feeling”. But where should we draw the line between valid subdivisions of knowledge and fanciful nonsense? It seems that not only do we know woefully little about the machinations of our cognitive faculties but that this very lack of understanding creates opportunities for all kinds of false assertions and far-fetched speculation that simply mischaracterize what’s happening and may even divert clear insight into the genuine workings of the mind.

Art Gymnasium

2011-11-26T23:58:00.016Z

I’ve been invited to be one of a group of artist contributors to a current exhibition ("Atelier Public") in Gallery 3 of the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow, due to finish on the 17th January 2012. I’m working in collaboration with a good friend, Peter McCaughey, and so far we’ve spent two afternoons working (playing) in the space and we’re planning to spend a few more before the end of the show.

The exhibition takes the form of an open studio where everyone (both invited artists and general public) is encouraged to create artworks in a freeform accumulating installation. A selection of materials etc. are available and there are various means of display as well as furniture for working, reading and talking. It’s not a new idea but if you know my views on “newness” or “progress” then perhaps you’ll understand why I don’t think this is a significant criticism.

I heard today that one of the other invited artists was taken aback when they found the space so filled with other people’s work. It’s not surprising really since it’s already bristling with stuff. As a backdrop to anything subtle it couldn’t be worse and I’ve often found myself looking for a quiet spot to photograph things out of the range of other work, so I can certainly see why other artists would be completely put off by this environment. But despite my misgivings I’ve noticed something which seems unexpectedly positive about the whole event. Today I had the realisation that the gallery isn’t a gallery in the conventional sense at all but has been transformed into a kind of creativity gym. People are turning up in surprisingly large numbers and getting stuck in and are genuinely enjoying themselves. They’re staying not for what they can see but for what they can do. And whilst for the invited artists this is unlikely to be a major motivation (because it provides neither a stage nor an isolated garret), for the general public it’s an opportunity to exercise skills that probably haven’t seen the light of day since school.

Perhaps a few more of such workout spaces would be a good thing for the 'creative economy' that we so often hear that we are part of.

Complexity

2011-11-21T16:28:00.008Z

complicated = a telephone

complex = a weather system

Overrated

2011-11-15T12:47:00.006Z

Back in March I attended a presentation by Sir Ken Robinson in Glasgow and subsequently became involved in a lengthy discussion on this blog about Sir Ken’s message. Since I had not read any of his books it seemed appropriate to see what he had to say for himself in his latest offering “The Element”. I bought the book in March and have been struggling to finish it ever since. Today I decided terminate the struggle and to commemorate this with a review on Amazon:

Is this book right for you?

Like many people, when I saw Sir Ken Robinson’s first video on Ted.com I was inspired. He seemed to get right at the heart of the problem with present day education and his focus on creativity spoke directly to some of my most deeply held and cherished values. There is no doubt that he has some important things to say and he clearly possesses a prodigious skill with storytelling but the more I consider his message the more I feel that he is playing on a whole swathe of unexamined assumptions and vagaries about the nature of creativity, human capacity and achievement.

Surely nobody would wish to be LESS creative than they currently are. But the consequence of this modest truth is that any respected person who proposes to offer us a way to enhance our own, or our children’s, creative potential is likely to command our attention to a far greater degree than might otherwise be the case - especially if they themselves communicate with intelligence and creative flair.

There are two questions that you need to ask yourself before buying this book:

1: Does everyone possess a unique creative talent?

2: Could there be a universal formula for maximising this creative potential?

If your answer is “yes” to both of these questions then you will love this book. If you are unsure then you will probably like this book. If your answer is “no” to both of these questions then you will find Sir Ken’s evangelism absolutely insufferable.

Multiple Occupancy

2011-11-13T10:33:00.002Z

Data and Meaning

2011-11-07T12:56:00.007Z

One of the first X Ray images by Willhelm Röntgen, 1896.

I read a very interesting article by Henry H. Bauer recently that proposes a distinction between two forms of knowledge: “map-like” and “story-like”. Bauer states that: “Failure to distinguish between the meaningfulness and the reliability of knowledge helps to make arguments intractable.” This conflict between information and significance is one that arises in art a great deal. Many artists find themselves caught between a desire to tell what they see as important truths and a counter desire to discover significances, between a use of art as a medium and the use of art as a tool for exploration.

The following is from a recent email to a student intended to clarify some similar issues that came up in a critique:

“The "basic failure to communicate" that you mention is, I suspect, based upon an assumption that there is a message that the work needs to convey. That's where the conflict lies because art isn't particularly great as a purveyor of facts since the language it uses is so fluid. In order to tell the facts it's likely that you'll need to resort to a more stable form of communication (ie: text) - that is, if you feel the facts are necessary. Better, I would suggest, is if the facts inform your thinking and image making by osmosis but instead of trying to wrestle the materials and processes to tell 'the' story, you work with the poetry of materials and processes to discover how they might reflect and reveal the underlying themes - some of which hopefully haven't even occurred to you yet. It's the difference between seeing art as a message (data) and a search (meaning). ”

A Mountain of Science and Experience

2011-11-05T10:11:00.002Z

"Schiehallion" Lesley Punton and Jim Hamlyn, 2009 - 2011.

It was from Schiehallion that the first accurate estimate of the mass of the earth was determined. The experiments that were carried out for this purpose also led to the invention of contour lines.

The Talented and the Undeserving

2011-10-30T09:58:00.005Z

During a tutorial last week a student told me that she thinks I’m wrong in my rejection of the notion of talent. She presented me with the example of two equally able and hardworking individuals who decide to learn a new skill. Invariably one will become better - sometimes markedly so. She asked me how I might account for such inevitable divergences other than through the agency of talent.

I don’t doubt that variations amongst individuals within any culture can be the result of genetic differences but the thing I find objectionable about common conceptions of talent is the tendency to attribute seemingly inexplicable or untraceable variations in performance to a genetic source. Two individuals of comparable ability who take up learning a new skill and find themselves unevenly matched despite expending comparable energy, need not explain their differences by recourse to genes. For example, one individual may have enjoyed a now forgotten childhood pastime that predisposes them to learn a related skill more quickly. They may find something humorous about their new learning that lends it more significance and promotes greater cognitive processing and memory retention. Equally likely is that an entire complex of subtle biographical details and influences are combined in unique ways to bring about a measurable difference in performance. Such causes of variation can be have significant influence over peoples’ development and are extremely difficult, if not entirely impossible to trace. But just because we can find no simple explanation for something, is it therefore necessary to invoke what amounts to speculation dressed up as certainty?

“Both popular and scientific explanations of behavior, accustomed to invoking genes, parents, and society, seldom acknowledge the enormous role that unpredictable factors must play in the development of an individual.” –Steven Pinker

If accepting the notion of talent did not betray an underlying assumption of immutable genetic superiority and were simply a way of describing otherwise unattributable causes (both environmental and genetic) of advantage, then I might be more inclined to accept it. But, to assume that any given example of superior performance is due to genetic advantage is to make a leap into territory of which few of us have any thorough understanding. Philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists and evolutionary biologists are still researching and debating these issues and although they are beginning to reveal many fascinating and often counter-intuitive insights in the process, many questions over the relationship between nature and nurture remain unexplained.

But the arguments over whether talent is a truth or fallacy are perhaps an irrelevance when considered beside the fact that believing in talent - other people's talent that is - has a well documented and measurable influence on student achievement – a negative one. Studies across cultures, genders and age groups have shown that students who attribute the success of others to talent are less likely to persist in the face of difficulty and are therefore more susceptible to sub-optimum performance when compared with individuals who view hard work as the road to achievement.

But if we were to accept that talent exists in the form of a significant genetic advantage, that some individuals possess and others simply don’t, where would this leave us? Most especially, how would it influence the provision of education, not just in Higher Education but at all levels? More to the point, many people currently do subscribe to this reductive idea of talent, including many teachers. We might well ask how such beliefs influence teachers’ perceptions of student potential and of how much attention they are prepared to devote to those they feel lack talent? As one colleague recently quoted of a now retired teacher: “Good students don’t need to be taught, because they’re already good, and bad students don’t deserve to be taught.”

Improving on Deliberate Practice

2011-10-25T17:39:00.006+01:00

Talking with my friend Ailsa the other day she mentioned how she regularly plays tennis with another friend - Jon. I asked her if she’s a better player, to which she responded that she isn’t but she wins more often. She went on to explain that she thinks Jon is a better player but he’s always trying new techniques and making mistakes which cause him to lose much more than he would if he played a “straight” game.

Ailsa's explanation exposes some important differences between practice, variation and challenge. Practice, on its own, allows people to maintain their of ability and fitness. However, without attempting more taxing challenges, progress is likely to be relatively slow and may even decline. Experimentation, on the other hand, whilst it is likely to develop new skills more quickly, can also give the impression of poor performance.

Hard work, persistence and practice on their own are insufficient then. What is also needed is a willingness (confidence) to take risks, to vary the experience, and to learn from the consequences.

“Everybody’s Good at Something”

2011-10-18T22:38:00.003+01:00

“Everybody’s Good at Something”

I heard someone say this on the TV today and was reminded of just how prevalent this nonsense truism is. I remember being fed this conceit at school and wondering how it might apply to someone like Muhammad Ali. Could there have been someone better who, due to circumstance, simply hadn’t had the opportunity to discover their talent? And if so, perhaps there are countless people in the world possessed of undiscovered talents or talents for which circumstances do not yet exist or talents with no value at all.

Telling someone that they’re bound to be good at something is a handy way to turn their attention away from what other people possess back towards what they themselves have control over. In this sense it’s not an entirely bad thing but what is unhelpful is the extent to which this idea suggests that you simply have to look deep inside yourself to discover your unique talent and all will be well. It places practically no emphasis on the importance of practice, persistence and hard work. Far better would be:

Everybody can become good at something.

Though I suspect the reality of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is far less comforting than the prospect of simply uncovering an innate ability.

A Puzzled Question and a Thoughtful Reply

2011-10-12T18:52:00.000+01:00

A friend, poet Thomas A Clark, is currently involved in a curatorial project (blog) with art historian Alistair Rider of the School of Art History at St Andrews University, called ‘The Single Road’ – after Mondrian’s famous assertion that ‘True art like true life takes a single road’. They are examining a wide range of artists from the mid 1960s onwards who have dedicated their careers to one ongoing project, such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Daniel Buren, Alan Charlton, Hamish Fulton, On Kawara, Roman Opalka and Ad Reinhardt.

I've followed their progress along The Single Road for some time and the other day I sent Tom and Alistair a few thoughts and questions. You can find these along with Tom's thoughtful response here.

Visual Literacy

2011-10-07T23:33:00.007+01:00

Beware the authoritative text or teacher - the ideologue - who speaks of a language of photography, a grammar of drawing, a syntax of painting or a vocabulary of sculpture. Nowhere in the copious annals of art will you find the formidable dictionary, compiled by universal consent, to which their annunciations point wherein are amassed these magnificent systems of signification. Art enlists methods, processes, strategies, genres, forms, styles and traditions. On occasion it may even advance a set of principles, though these rarely endure. Anything that purports to be more structured, more systematic, more explicit or more elaborate is nothing but a deceit.

Happy Accident

2011-10-02T09:34:00.005+01:00

a confluence of discovery and tacit knowledge

Interpretation, Intentionalism and Assessment

2011-09-26T07:51:00.007+01:00

In the following post I sketch out two commonly recognised interpretive strategies (Intentionalism and Conventionalism) and propose a third (Culturalism). I then briefly touch on the research of Susan Orr in order to examine some implications for assessment in art education.

In art theory, Intentionalism is the belief that the meaning of an artwork is defined purely by the artist’s intention. What the artist says the work is about is what the work is about – no more, no less. Few but the most naïve interpreters of artworks hold much store by this idea since it leaves precious little room for interpretation at all. We might as well ask the artist to write down the meaning and we can all get on with more pressing matters. For this reason Intentionalism is often termed the “intentional fallacy”.

The alternative to Intentionalism is sometimes termed Conventionalism. Conventionalist interpretive approaches allow for a more expanded view that accommodates the full range of cultural influences available to the artist. What the artist could have meant is now admitted as legitimate currency. It is not difficult to see though, that even this proves an unsatisfactory solution to the vexed question of the meaning of artworks. The artist could have meant all sorts of things but must we credit her with each and every one?

The great advantage of the Conventionalist approach is that, instead of constituting the audience as passive receivers of meaning, it invites them to engage in an active process of interpretation. Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author can be seen as a Conventionalist strategy in this sense because it dispenses entirely with the intention of the artist and places readers centre-stage as active constructors of meaning. For Barthes the key to a text is not to be found in its origin but in its destination: "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author".

Radical as Barthes’ idea appears, the niggling sense that we’ve overlooked something never seems to completely evaporate. As much as we might wish to neutralise authorial intention it is impossible to ignore its presence, whether real or imagined, pervading the work at all levels. And here emerges a fascinating and often confusing confluence of intention, interpretation and discovery. Artists intuitively embed tacit knowledge in the work they produce and this becomes mingled with any new discoveries that might be stumbled upon. The only 'work' to which the artist can rightfully claim authorship, or any ‘reader’ attribute to them, is the work the artist has put in, whether consciously or tacitly – though, of course, this can be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to tease out. Everything else is either the felicity of chance, the projection of readers endowed with conceptual tools that are, so far, foreign to the author or the projection of readers who happen upon their own discoveries that they misattribute to the artist. The magic, such as it is, is merely a confusion over this complex intermingling of tacit intention and unintended discovery – both those of the maker and those of their audience.

Another method (let’s call it “Culturalism”) of resolving this conundrum is to give up on individualistic explanations of intention altogether. In this scenario both artist and viewer are conceived as products both of and in culture and, as such, the artwork and any meanings generated must be seen as the result of a collective cultural dynamic in which works-of-art and works-of-interpretation are considered as conduits through which meaning is channelled, with subtle variations and additions along the way. When seen from this perspective the cause of confusion amongst Intentionalist and Conventionalist approaches can be understood as deriving from their misplaced tendency to attribute credit to an originary authorial presence whereas, in truth, any such presence stretches back indefinitely through cultural history. However, this should not be confused with determinism. The intent of the artist still plays a vital role but, just as technology never reinvents the wheel but rather stands on the shoulders of previous discoveries, so too does culture.

Within the Culturalist approach both kinds of interpretation - reader-centered and author-centered coexist. However, whilst this proves a powerful means to overcome some of the conflicts of interpretation it raises several very interesting, not to mention problematic, issues for the evaluation of artworks in a culture primarily reoccupied with the achievement of individuals. In the context of education especially, the issues become yet more pronounced since teachers inevitably have to interpret student work in order to assess it.

Interestingly, when it comes to assessment, art teachers seem to be as given to the intentional fallacy as anyone else. Evidence for this claim can be found in the art and design research of Susan Orr where one quoted lecturer makes the following remark:

“It is essential that you know something about who that person is and what they are trying to do, what they…what they think they’re doing in order to….to measure the quality of what they’ve done”.

Orr’s work shows that art teachers employ a wide variety of approaches to assessment, both Conventionalist and Intentionalist as well as Culturalist (though whether they would recognise these as such is another question). However, rather than the what or how, perhaps the real question is when ie: at what point in the process are these strategies deployed, or at what point might they be best deployed? If art teachers employ Intentionalist strategies during formative assessment* for example, then this would seem to be entirely appropriate to the formation of relevant feedback. Feedback only makes sense - has value to the learner - when it takes account of what they are aiming to achieve. Only then can advice be directed toward making this end possible or else redirecting attention toward what the teacher believes may be a more profitable goal. Conversely, to employ a single Conventionalist interpretive strategy at a formative stage would likely burden the student with what Karen-Edis Barzman has dubbed a “Master Reading” that universalizes a singular authoritative interpretation thereby terminating or, at best, inhibiting the ongoing work of interpretation by the student.

The issue of Master Readings also extends into the summative* assessment process where teachers debate the marks of students.

"When artwork is being assessed in the studio the lecturers in my studies privileged the assessment views of lecturers who had worked most closely with the students whose artwork was being marked. What this means is that if there was any kind of disagreement about the mark to be awarded the marking team would defer to the lecturer who knew the student best and had worked most closely with them." -Susan Orr

This process of advocacy might seem like a equitable form of resolving differences of opinion, however, in practice the results are often far from satisfactory. In all walks of life there exist certain individuals who are more given to the expression and maintenance of strong and stubborn opinions. Students who find themselves under the close tutelage of such individuals are therefore far more likely to be vigorously defended than those who are less fortunate. And, in situations (increasingly common in the current financial climate) where single members of staff are often responsible for entire cohorts of students, this strategy easily slips into an unhelpful, not to mention unhealthy, form of sanctioned favoritism.

So, despite the fact that we might be able to access a greater insight into the what, how, when and by whom of assessment, this still leaves completely untouched the more profound question of why?

* Formative assessment is usually understood as a form of ongoing assessment and feedback whereas Summative assessments are generated at the end of a period of study. A more accurate way to think of these two forms of assessment might be as “Supportive Assessment” (ie: Formative) and or “Unsupportive Assessment” (ie: Summative).

An Insight into Creativity and Innovation

2011-09-20T19:39:00.003+01:00

Following on from an earlier discussion of the theories of Donald Brook and applying some elements of this (though avoiding his memetic theory for the moment) to an emerging trajectory within a number of posts on this blog I’d like to put forward what seems to be a radical new understanding of creativity and innovation that finds support in the work of Wasserman and Blumberg (here). I realise that this is a grand claim so until it can be more extensively tested and debated I offer it up here simply as a conjecture.

Ordinarily we think of discovery and innovation arising as the consequence of human ingenuity and creative engagement with the world. But imagine if this were a wholly inaccurate representation. Imagine instead that innovation arises as an epiphenomenon, side effect or by-product of variations in human engagement with the world. Imagine also that creativity is no mystery of talent and divine ability but is simply a process of multiplying - of varying - the physical and cognitive approaches we apply to problems, materials and relationships and that the consequent variety of outcomes and perceptual perspectives results in an increased probability of innovation and discovery.

How different would this world appear to us?

In such a world there would be numerous people engaged in a vast multitude of activities, from fearsome risk-taking to mindless repetitive drudgery, from feats of unutterable beauty and wonder to acts of unspeakable immorality. Far from being a chaos of variation though, such a world would have to carefully monitor and guard against all forms of exploitation and criminality to ensure that these did not infringe or impede the more general impetus toward cooperative engagement and variation. Similarly there would be a need to avoid unintentional harm or obstruction of the free flow of variation. Laws and codes of practice would therefore have to be instituted and on occasion these processes of regulation, legislation and policing would themselves slow and even halt the progress of variation in some quarters.

It will already be obvious that this description bears all the hallmarks of exactly the world we inhabit. What is most striking about this hypothesis is how snugly it fits all situations to which it is applied. But it isn’t simply a case of a convenient fit or a congenial alternative view but more importantly that the outlook it affords makes clear a whole range of what were previously murky and confused ideas about creativity and innovation. It explains why notions of creativity are mired in the hocus-pocus of genius and talent peddled by such people as Sir Ken Robinson, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi or Eric Booth. It explains why so many so-called geniuses rarely have more than a single major insight in their lifetime to which they return in endless variety. It explains why other geniuses (perhaps the only ones who deserve the title) only arrive at further insights via a mountain of hard work and failure. It explains why using FMRI scanners to locate the neurological core of creativity is a wasteful and futile quest for the most impossibly wild goose, a goose that is in fact no more than a phantasm. It explains why all forms of regulation are a hindrance to innovation and why highly regulated cultures exhibit such a paucity of innovation. It explains the unwavering tension between tradition and innovation and how science’s lack of concern for tradition propels it forward with far greater momentum than art. It explains why innovation will continue to consume ever-increasing quantities of natural and human resources. It explains why there can never be a "calculus of discovery or a schedule of rules by the following of which we will be lead to the truth" and why the notion of "the" scientific method is a myth. It explains how the desire for specialist expertise is very often a desire for access to a territory of greater opportunity. It explains the tension between learning (as a form of pattern recognition) and discovery (as a form of play). In short, it corroborates and deepens the vast majority of the principal insights I have shared on this blog in the last 2½ years.

So to reiterate the main thesis: innovation arises as a by-product of variations in human engagement with the world. And what makes some people stand out from the crowd is that they are in the right place at the right time and/or that they have worked damned hard to get where they are - simple as that.

Tarmac and Chewing Gum

2011-09-14T09:34:00.002+01:00

Coffee Grounds

2011-09-08T14:27:00.008+01:00

Lesley and I have some work in the Vault Art exhibition that opens tomorrow at the Briggait in Glasgow. The work was made last month whilst we were Artists in Residence at Sydney College of the Arts. The full work work consists of 28 digital prints of the dregs at the bottom of our coffee cups (slightly manipulated, ie: made negative).

Twelve of the 28 are on display (and for sale as a full group of 28 or as individual images).

Vault Art

The Briggait

141 Bridgegate

Glasgow

Friday 11am-9pm
Saturday 11am-9pm (6pm - 9pm Free Entry)
Sunday 12noon -5pm

Tickets available on the door - £4 / Children under 12 free
www.vaultartglasgow.com

And Thanks to James A. for this related link: http://www.npr.org/2011/08/17/139681851/scientists-crack-the-physics-of-coffee-rings

Brought to Brook (Memetic Innovation as a Threshold Concept)

2011-09-02T07:14:00.014+01:00

In a previous post I mentioned a conference keynote given by Donald Brook and his claim that “experimental art” is a tautology. Soon after posting I was contacted directly by Brook wishing to politely clarify some points and to offer me a copy of his paper so that I could study it more carefully.

After a momentary impulse to stand my ground and argue the case I decided instead to give his paper a closer look and to try to follow the thesis. This led to a flurry of emails which I’m pleased to say Brook was generous and patient enough to engage in.

In educational theory there is an increasingly popular idea known as “Threshold Concepts” which describes those areas of difficult conceptual terrain encountered as one ventures further into any specialist domain. These thresholds invariably challenge already established conceptual schema (in fact they often overturn them) and once assimilated they transform the learner’s view of the subject forever and may even alter their view of themselves and of the world. Powerful stuff where epistemology and ontology collide!

I’m not entirely sure that Brook’s ideas have been exactly a threshold concept for me but they have certainly proved troublesome, discursive and liminal: all characteristic elements of threshold concept thinking.

Now comes the difficult part – to describe the concept.

The initial idea, as I see it, stems from the identification of a split in the meaning of the word “art”. “Art”, according to Brook, is a homonym and the two senses of the word are so often conflated that any discussion of the term quickly leads into a mire of unnecessary philosophical complexity and specious argument.

Art version 1 or “art#1” as I will call it, is a trans-historical, cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary human capacity for creative innovation and it’s the art we speak of when we discuss the “art of gardening”, the "art of crime" or even the “art of craft” for that matter. Brook dubs this form of art “memetic innovation” (not to be confused with mimetic innovation). Following on from Richard Dawkins’ and others theorisation of memes (which are the cultural equivalent of genes) Brook sees art#1 as those unexpected – and to that extent unintentional - discoveries within all fields of human ingenuity (not just that field where artworks are made) that can be recognized, shared and repeated. This aspect of repeatability is crucial since it is this that allows a mere epiphany to endure beyond being a simple flash in the pan to become a disseminable meme (this raises some very interesting ideas relating to the nature of survival to which I will return shortly).

Memes, like genes, propagate themselves as copies. However, there is an important difference, as Brook writes:

“Genes are replicated, which is a causal process, whereas memes are imitated, which is an intentional and voluntary process. The one thing they have in common is that they may be perfectly replicated (or imitated, as the case may be) or they may be imperfectly replicated (or imitated). Perfect replication (or imitation) ensures the perpetuation of a kind; imperfect replication (or imitation) results—through evolutionary adaptation—in the historical emergence, shaping and extinction of a kind.”

So like genes, memes undergo variations which may or may not be better adapted to their current environment. Those that are, survive and propagate themselves further, those that do not, tend to be superseded or to die off in classic Darwinian fashion.

“Art#2” as it will be known here, is the name the artworld gives to those objects and experiences, in all their myriad forms, that it classifies as art: it is “the class of works of art” as Brook puts it. Brook’s insight into the bifurcated nature of the term "art" allows us to gain powerful conceptual traction when dealing with, for example, what has become known as the “Institutional Theory” of art widely popularized by Arthur Danto and particularly George Dickie in his books Aesthetics: An Introduction (1971) and Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (1974). Simply put, the Institutional Theory of Art claims that art is anything that the artworld says it is. It’s an extremely prevalent justification (most likely because it takes no brain power to trot it out, ie: it’s a resilient meme) used by gallerists or artists like Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst.

In 1980 the British aesthetician Richard Wollheim took the Institutional Theory of Art to task by arguing that art should have reasons for being art. If there are no good reasons then there is likewise no good reason to consider the artifacts claiming to be art as art. Furthermore, if the artworld adopts something as art then we should examine the artworld’s reasons, since the claim that “it’s art because we say so” is simply neither a compelling nor a persuasive justification.

Dickie returned to the debate in 1998 but Wollheim’s emphasis on reasons continues to stack up very well, though it is perhaps true that a few concrete examples of what he meant by reasons would have provided clearer evidence of what was required as necessary and sufficient conditions for considering something as art.

Brook’s theory allows us to take this argument one step further and by a completely different route dispensing entirely with the field of aesthetics which Brook views as spurious. Through it we are able to establish that the art that Dickie and the Institutional Theorists speak of (the art that most of us think of when we hear ‘authorities’ speak of art) is predominantly art#2. It may also contain examples of art#1 (memetic innovation) but the Institutional Theory provides no purchase upon this distinction.

In an essay of 1947, on the subject of Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell writes:

"In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is 'good' ... Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion."

This aspect of survival, which pertains equally to artworks as it does to literature, can be seen as an analogue of memetic replication. Memes survive by being imitated, and culture, as a closely woven tapestry of memes, reproduces itself through the imitation of these memes and evolves as a direct consequence of memetic innovation: through favourable variations in imitation that are recognised and exploited. The test of literary, artistic or cultural merit, according to this theory of memetic innovation therefore, is not simply measured by survival but through the continuing duplication of its underlying memes. Art#2 survives by being repeatedly made in the likeness of previous art and is fuelled by those rare, unpredictable and invaluable variations that comprise art#1.

Art then (or rather the art#1 of art) comprises all those firsts of a kind: the first use of perspective, the first use of cubism, the first work of abstraction and so forth. Everything else is merely a repetition of a then recognizable form*. There may be a certain latitude for the refinement of a newly discovered meme (think for instance of Picasso’s refinement of Braque’s invention of Synthetic Cubism) though this is arguably simply the exercise of greater determination, deviousness or quick wittedness on the part of Picasso and is therefore not a form of memetic innovation but simply the skillful exercise of art#2. Art#2 can quite comfortably be thought of as craft: bereft of innovation what else could it be? This is not to say that art#2 lacks skill or meaning or is an entirely redundant form of cultural production and discourse but simply that the initial insight or discovery (the art of art) is only ever manifested in the first of its kind: the originary memetic innovation.

If the implications of all this have not struck you yet it may well be that, as in my case, you initially perceive all this as fairly straightforward. However, to return to the theory of Threshold Concepts for a moment: a further characteristic of Threshold Concepts is that they are reconstitutive ie: it’s not so much the initial acquisition of the theory that is troublesome but the consequences of the application of the theory for ones conceptual schema and this only emerges once one begins to apply the theory to already existing examples (like the idea that cultural survival – Ars Longa - is intrinsically linked to the replication of memes). Also, due to the nuances and complexity of many Threshold Concepts, it can take time to fully assimilate the theory with the result that learners often find themselves switching between feeling that they’ve grasped the concept one moment only to find the next moment that they need to start right back at square one (as I often have). On a side note, I imagine there is some very interesting – perhaps even innovative - work to be done on the nature of Threshold Concepts as memes and the importance of reproducibility and digestibility in concept formation and dissemination (Threshold Concepts are invariably the hummingbirds of the meme world: highly specialised). Equally, there is perhaps a challenge for Brook to package the theory of memetic innovation such that it might itself become a meme rather than a rather thorny academic epiphany.

There’s much more to say about this theory and I’ve already skirted over a lot of the important details (like his claim “there's no way to make art; only to find it?”) but this blog post is already far too bloated. Inevitably there are more questions raised than answers provided here but if you have a desire to follow up on the theory I have included a couple of links below. There’s also a 145 page book available, published by Artlink, Australia - though the price tag is prohibitive. It’s also likely that the organisers of the Conference where Donald Brook presented his keynote will publish his paper. If so I’ll post a link here too (here).

*Brook also points out that: “It’s important to see that there is both absolute memetic innovation (nobody could do whatever-it –is before somebody did it) and relative or subjective memetic innovation (lots of people could do it, but nobody had mentioned it to me). You might be astonished to find that something working as a merely repetitive commonplace for you is a revelation for me!”

Links:

Here’s a review of Brook’s book “The Aweful Truth About What Art Is”:

http://www.artlink.com.au/articles/3239/brooks-way-with-kinds-categories-and-memes/

And several edifying and entertaining essays can be found here, some quite closely related to the ideas of Memetic Innovation:

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/donald-brook-27486.html

Criteria

2011-08-28T00:10:00.005+01:00

When somebody says that they're not very good at something, what they are really acknowledging is that the criteria they have accepted (or imposed upon themselves) are beyond their reach. The more unassailable these criteria appear, the more the drive and determination to overcome them diminishes.

Sometimes we’re better off not knowing where the top of the mountain lies.

Experimental Art and Play

2011-08-21T03:44:00.008+01:00

I've just attended and presented at a two-day conference in Sydney, Australia, on the subject of experimental art. My criticisms of this conference could run into several megabytes, but in this instance I'll simply express my disappointment that there was so little discussion and debate of the term "experiment” and almost no-one, at least amongst any of the presentations I attended, made even the slightest attempt to sharpen the terms used and consequently I have real doubts about the value of the conclusions that might be drawn from the conference.

One of the keynote speakers, Donald Brook, did make one or two salient contributions. Brook focused in particular on the idea of art as a meme which replicates itself with small variations in much the same way as genes do (I'd like, at some point, to explore this idea further in relation to some thoughts I've expressed recently on the nature of variation in art). Brook also made the assertion that all art is experimental, therefore the term “experimental art” is a tautology. It’s a compelling point but I believe we could take it a stage further which could certainly help us understand what might be meant by “experimental art” and therefore give us a deeper insight into how this might operate in the larger field of activities that we call art.

My contention would be that experimental art is not a tautology in the least and this can be exemplified by contrasting it with the idea of “playful art”. Playful art is indeed a tautology which is probably why the term is rarely, if ever, encountered.

The process of art production is playful in that it involves multiple variables and seeks neither to limit these nor to apply itself to systematic accumulative enquiry. This is not to say that art cannot, or does not, engage in processes more closely aligned with Scientific Method but when it does so, beyond simply establishing its techniques or the superficial appearance of “the lab”, it must necessarily be exactly what we might term “experimental art” since it uses experiment, in the strict and only useful sense, to arrive at its objectives.

Earlier this Summer Lesley and I conducted a number of video interviews with artists in Glasgow on the subject of art, experimentation and play. One of the interviewed artists made the claim that what distinguishes play is its purposelessness. This struck me as a powerful insight at the time but on reflection I've come to regard this as more of a common misconception which finds support in the fact that the results of play are so intangible. Play is not purposeless. We might say that play is activity directed towards stimulation and learning. I don't have any books here in Sydney to check any authorities on this subject, but I'm sure Piaget would agree - play is the first and foremost means by which we come to know the world, not experiment. You only have to watch a young child to see how true this statement actually is. Humans are inordinately gifted pattern recognisers and when expected patterns are contradicted we are drawn to them, presumably, because they hold the promise of expanding our understanding. As many philosophers from Alfred North Whitehead to Heidegger have noted, we come to know the world in the first instance not through proof but through use.

Play then, is the primary form of inquiry that artists are involved with and it's significant, I think, that experiments can form a part of play - can be a subspecies within play - but play cannot form a part of an experiment (other than by being its subject) since play would immediately threaten to undermine the necessary logic, objectivity and traceability of the process.

It’s important here not to confuse the play of artists with aimless fiddling (in fact the term “to fiddle” tells us a great deal about how the word “play” has become normalized within the discipline of music for example). The play of artists is tempered by their expertise (itself a kind of limiting of variables) which allows them to discriminate between unexpected outcomes that are merely odd, superfluous and insignificant and those that are genuinely worthy of attention.

Roman Signer No. I don’t want my art to be didactic. There is actually nothing to be learned from me. Beuys always lifted his didactic finger.

Armin Senser Are you sure there is nothing one can learn from you?

Roman Signer Learn to play more.

Art Doesn’t Progress, it Varies

2011-08-16T08:00:00.005+01:00

Not only do the results of scientific experiments confirm discoveries but the knowledge gained is accumulative such that further theories may be formulated and new experiments devised for testing them. Science makes progress in a way that no other field of human endeavour can equal, and this sets a challenge for art since the criteria used to evaluate art are predicated upon many of the very same assumptions as are applied to science, one of the most pervasive and misdirected being the idea that artists and the work they produce should improve. Art, according to this logic of achievement, must make progress.

One of the major contributors to this mindset would seem to be the fact that art has adopted and inherited a significant number of the core terms used to describe and evaluate science. Art involves research, development, exploration, experiment, discovery, inquiry, insight, knowledge and so forth and this sets up an expectation that art can, or indeed should, deliver results on the same basis or according to the same principles.

A few days ago James Atherton linked to a wonderfully iconoclastic and enlightening paper by the philosopher Eric Dietrich, entitled "There is no Progress in Philosophy". Dietrich makes an extremely persuasive case that philosophy has made no progress at all since the days of Aristotle:

“Except for a patina of twenty-first century modernity, in the form of logic and language, philosophy is exactly the same now as it ever was; it has made no progress whatsoever. We philosophers wrestle with the exact same problems the Pre-Socratics wrestled with.”

Applying the same arguments to art we find that the case is almost identical: art makes no progress whatsoever. Atherton goes on to speculate whether we might also question the progress of literature and the humanities in general and he also, quite rightly, reminds us that the humanities are already threatened in the academy. How could this be otherwise when compared with the formidable and measurable achievements of STEM subjects?

If a whole raft of disciplines have been found to lack some seemingly essential ingredient, perhaps rather than doubting the validity or contribution of these subjects we should instead examine both the validity and applicability of this required essence as applied to them. We might also do well to more accurately determine what goods we believe the humanities actually bestow upon the world and to ensure that we confidently champion these when faced with demands for such things as “new knowledge” and “progress”. Atherton makes a brief but brilliant connection here by introducing Michael Oakeshott's "The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind" (1962). The same was quoted –understandably - by the late Richard Rorty in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (where I first encountered it as a student) and is a fabulous piece of nuanced thinking that deserves to be read in full. Here’s a lengthy extract:

“In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no 'truth' to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. ... Of course, a conversation may have passages of argument and a speaker is not forbidden to be demonstrative; but reasoning is neither sovereign nor alone, and the conversation itself does not compose an argument. . . . In conversation, 'facts' appear only to be resolved once more into the possibilities from which they were made; 'certainties' are shown to be combustible, not by being brought in contact with other 'certainties' or with doubts, but by being kindled by the presence of ideas of another order; approximations are revealed between notions normally remote from one another. ... Nobody asks where they have come from or on what authority they are present; nobody cares what will become of them when they have played their part. There is no symposiarch or arbiter, not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials. Every entrant is taken at its face-value and everything is permitted which can get itself accepted into the flow of speculation. And voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy. Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, not is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. … It is the ability to participate in this conversation, and not the ability to reason cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized man from the barbarian.” [my emphasis]

Is it not enough that art, the humanities and culture in general should contribute to - constitute even - this very discourse? For Richard Rorty this constant comparison and contestation of perspectives leads to a kind of discursive distillation whereby the most appropriate framework for the current moment emerges. Recently Hugo Mercier of the University of Pennsylvania and Dan Sperber of the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris have advance a very similar conclusion with their “argumentative theory” of reason:

“Reasoning is made for arguing. Because of this people have a strong confirmation bias that plagues lone reasoners. But when people argue, the biases of the arguers can balance each other out and lead reasoning to felicitous outcomes. Let’s reason together!”

Culture is a framework or lens through which we view the world. It informs our thinking and gives complexion to our ideas and expressions. Without exposure to other cultures though, it becomes practically impossible to recognise, let alone fully appreciate, our own perspective upon the world for the contingent and partial thing that it is. Our desire then should not be to progress to a single ‘perfect’ homogenised global culture but rather to share and experience the profound and subtle interplay of diverse perspectives, tastes and interpretations. This is why a diversity of cultures is so valuable to society, since monoculture discourages discourse and reinforces monotony and dogma. A good analogy here might be to think of cuisine. With all things culinary, we enjoy - and therefore crave - variety as much as perfection itself. If perfection were the only measure we sought in food then we’d be perfectly happy eating the same perfectly balanced meal ad infinitum. But where aesthetic matters are concerned variety is not just the spice of life, as the cliché goes, but its very substance.

Prejudice and Parochialism

2011-08-15T21:51:00.010+01:00

One of the students I teach in Aberdeen has some work in a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender pride exhibition at Aberdeen Art Centre. The venue want her to remove several of her pieces since they fear these might cause offence, presumably to more “sensitive” minds. You can read about it on her blog here.

If art really had the enormous power to corrupt impressionable minds that some people attribute to it then there would need to be one heck of a lot more censorship than there is, not just that of removing the saucy bits from brief exhibitions in near forgotten public spaces. What she is having to deal with is ignorant, conservative puritanism pure and simple. “Prejudice” would be the more familiar name for it. I've written about this form of social exclusion elsewhere.

When people do not fear the corruption of their own minds but those of the more 'sensitive' they are simply responding to their own ignorance and confusion in the most cautious way they know how. If it weren’t so contemptible - because they wield power and believe they’re doing the right thing - it would be pitiable. They are the ones whose minds are corrupted.

Experimentation and Discovery (art and science)

2011-08-13T00:00:00.007+01:00

©/Hamlyn/ Punton, SCA Sydney 2011

The Swiss artist Roman Signer is renowned for the quirky and inventive “events” he stages using a diversity of familiar objects (suitcases, canoes, bicycles, umbrellas etc.) transformed through explosions and other dynamic forces of change. Constantly varying the conditions and combinations of materials and setting, Signer has compiled a vast compendium of varied and thought provoking works that span more than 35 years of continual practice.

Much of the work is modest in scale, resisting the temptation toward grand gesture so common amongst established artists, and whilst the work often refers to the idea of the spectacle it rarely reduces (or exceeds) to the merely spectacular, preferring rather to explore the more familiar and personable scale of everyday experience. This contrast becomes all the more provocative due to his careful balancing of proportions processes and materials.

Commentators upon Signer’s work frequently make reference the terms “experimental”, “experiment” and “experimentation”. These terms are clearly intended to suggest the testing of volatile substances, the combination of unpredictable circumstances and the uncertainty of the result. In this sense the word “experiment” is used loosely to refer to the idea of trying something out to experience a process and result.

Scientific experiments, on the other hand, are more rigidly defined:

“experiment
noun |ɪkˈspɛrɪm(ə)nt| |ɛk-| a scientific procedure undertaken to make a discovery, test a hypothesis, or demonstrate a known fact”

It would seem unfair to apply a scientific expectation to Signer’s practice, after all, it was never intended to prove or disprove a hypothesis, nor to demonstrate a fact nor even make a discovery (though many would disagree with me in this last instance). I would contend that the “discoveries” have already largely been made in the initial imaginative visualization/conceptualization of the ideas and in the more speculative testing of methods and materials. For example, we rarely, if ever, see the many failures that inevitably occur in preparation for the work we do see. This is not to say that beautiful incidents and accidents are absent from Signer’s work but, due to the often hazardous materials and circumstances involved, there is perhaps less room for improvisation than might otherwise be the case.

AS Do you have any expectations when you’re working on something?

RS Never, but I imagine certain scenarios. The ideal-case scenario is the one I had imagined: for instance, there’s a puff of smoke and a helicopter disappears into it and then emerges again. But when I do an action it might turn out completely different. That’s the adventure. I’m actually looking for small adventures in art. Otherwise art gets boring.

This process of allowing the work to lead to unforeseen conclusions – of courting the unpredictable - is a major compulsion for many, perhaps all, artists. In so many instances of creative production there is such a demand for control of materials, of skill in manufacture and realisation that little room is left for surprise and serendipity (or failure for that matter). Too much expertise too rigidly applied often results in the most stilted, preconceived and lifeless work. No doubt this is why Signer is so fascinated with the explosive moment. It is a dangerous game and one in which a great deal of care must be taken to ensure that even the desire for unpredictability remains within certain given tolerances. In many ways it is this implicit threat, this frisson, that fuels the underlying appeal of Signer’s work.

In a scientific experiment the outcome is paramount and is intended to either prove or disprove a theory. Once again, as with Signer, the result of the experiment is less a discovery than the realisation (or in the case of science – possibly the contradiction) of what has already been imagined. For Karl Popper this potential for confirmatory or dis-confirmatory outcome (testability and falsifiability) exactly differentiates science from pseudo science.

Scientific discoveries then, are the result of a two part process, first of theory formation followed by proof through experiment. If a test fails, either the experiment was poorly conceived, poorly conducted or else the theory was flawed. For this reason science attempts, wherever possible, to limit the number of variables in any given experiment in order to avoid rogue results. Art, on the other hand, often multiplies the variables in order to do the very reverse. Unexpected results in art, when they are not detrimental to the result, are often perceived and presented as discoveries since anything that contradicts expectation is likely to provoke curiosity and may even have instructive value, if only on a technical level. Discoveries, thus encountered, are valued but rarely, if ever, become part of a systematic inquiry since the object of art is less about illustrating facts and securing knowledge than producing meaning and experience (and that’s a subject for another blog post).

New Knowledge

2011-08-10T13:09:00.011+01:00

Increasingly in academia there arises an emphasis upon “new knowledge” and in tandem with this comes a growing pressure upon senior art students and art teachers to unearth and explain how their work and research provides a contribution to knowledge. Knowledge, it is felt, is the major commodity of academia, an exalted substance through which intellectual, social, cultural and economic progress is made and in and through which learning is inscribed and enhanced. By focussing specifically upon new knowledge we are able to prioritise those innovations and discoveries at the forefront of human intelligence and ensure that unnecessary repetition and duplication are avoided thereby saving valuable resources and maximising efficiency.

In order to measure up to this formidable objective, substantial amounts of intellectual energy have been and are being expended to establish exactly how and to what extent art might embody or generate knowledge and in the process a litany of philosophers and philosophical theories are being mobilised to underpin the claim that art is indeed a significant, though tricky, producer of new knowledge.

Impressed as I am by the arguments, I can’t help wondering that if it takes such convoluted and complex argumentation to stake this claim then there must surely be something wrong. Aren’t we simply looking in the wrong place? Whilst knowledge might result from artistic endeavour it’s hardly a principle objective.

It seems to me that art is the soil upon which ideas and knowledge are cultivated. This soil is not directly responsible for any knowledge generated but rather it provides the conditions by which knowledge might emerge and flourish. ‘Good’ artworks are those that sustain extended discourse, that keep the conversation going - that continually generate new questions, thoughts and ideas and occasionally new artworks. In this sense art is like an interlocutor who stimulates rich discussion. Knowledge, when it occurs, is not a product of any singular individual or event but is a dynamic outcome of an interaction with already existing and emergent ideas.

We can applaud the perspicacity and rapport of a good interlocutor but I think we’d be perfectly justified in doubting any claim they might make to having singularly generated new knowledge in any significantly involved conversation with us. This might explain why it’s so difficult to ascribe knowledge directly to those artefacts we call artworks. It might also reassure us that the soil we create as artists need not be barren due to lack of care, skill or ingenuity on our part but may simply be waiting for exposure to light, water or the right seed to bring its potential to life.

The Laughter of Philosophers

2011-08-08T19:58:00.004+01:00

“The Laughter of Philosophers”, 2011. Audio work, 47sec (source: Philosophy Bites Podcasts)

The Doctors Are Taking Over The Asylum

2011-08-05T01:12:00.009+01:00

Sydney College of the Arts at the former Callan Park Lunatic Asylum for the Mentally and Criminally Insane

I’ve just started an Artist’s Residency at Sydney College of Art and yesterday I had an introductory meeting with the Dean and Associate Dean. As I was being shown around the studios and introduced to the customs of the college it came up in conversation that there is a growing pressure upon Australian universities, whilst making new staff appointments, to employ applicants with doctoral degrees (especially with staff under the age of 35). I’ve never previously heard any explicit mention of this particular “pressure” before but it was spoken of as if it were both familiar and internationally recognised. Quite what form it takes and how forcefully it is exerted is still unclear to me but it would appear to have a logical, if rather suspect, basis. It reminds me of something an ex Programme Leader at Glasgow School of Art (also an Australian as it happens) used to describe as “creeping credentialism”: the tendency for university degrees to become devalued due to the increasing numbers of graduating students and the associated pressure to gain (and provide) postgraduate degrees (MA, PhD etc).

It’s logical because it makes sense that institutions dedicated to the propagation of credentials should be run by people who are qualified to do so. For example, in the last 3 years I’ve been roped into “2nd” supervising two doctoral students even though I only have a MA. My 15 years of teaching experience at both BA and MA level obviously count for something, but until I get some PhD “completions” under my belt it’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever be made a principal supervisor to a PhD student. In this respect then, I have been aware, for quite some time, of the subtle pressure academic institutions are under to provide adequately qualified staff to support the increasing number of doctoral students they are offering places to. It also hasn’t escaped my notice that “experience” is only ever grudgingly accepted as a qualification for teaching. And this is the strange irony, because in practical subjects, like art and design, there is only so far a research oriented academic qualification will take you in terms of a genuine engagement with the stuff of making and doing. And as qualifications become increasingly inflated and the staff that administer them become more academically qualified there’s a real danger that experience, as well as all things experiential, become relegated to the lowest orders of education. This privileging of theory over practice, knowledge over skill and qualifications over experience isn’t simply an Australian problem, it’s a problem the world over.

Studies in Line

2011-07-31T01:00:00.011+01:00

"Cloudburst", Leonardo da Vinci

"Deluge", Leonardo da Vinci

Uninformative

2011-07-28T14:20:00.002+01:00

Ariely’s Origami

2011-07-22T03:43:00.004+01:00

The following is a recent 5 minute video from behavioural economist Dan Ariely. It makes the case that we ascribe greater value to things we work to produce rather than things we simply buy or commission.

In a general sense he's probably right, we may well benefit from greater "surplus, utility and happiness" when surrounded by things made by our own hands rather than things made by other people. However, interesting as I find many of Ariely’s ideas and reassuring as it was to hear him making a convincing case for the fruits of our creative labours, the video left me with more questions than it provided answers.

In the video Ariely mentions a study he undertook where people were given instructions to make origami shapes. When these people were asked to put a value on their origami they attributed greater value to their own shapes than other people’s and they also believed that their own were more beautiful.

Backing up his claims with research certainly reinforces the point but I can’t help thinking that when you eliminate all the variables from a complex set of relationships, as this kind of research often does, then you need to be very careful with the extent of the conclusions you draw from the results gathered. Imagine for instance, an alternative experiment where you asked people to make origami shapes but you paid them a pittance to produce lots of identical ones. Or imagine you got an expert to guide people and show them some examples of really sophisticated origami to compare with their own. I think it’s likely that in both of these instances people would exhibit varying opinions about the value and relative beauty of their work. As the second of these examples suggests, a significant element that seems to be missing from Ariely’s account is expertise and it’s closely related dimension of skill. Following Ikea instructions or an origami diagram is one thing, but as tasks become more complex the level of skill necessary to complete them to a satisfactory standard increases accordingly. The risk of a botched job and the potential for additional costs in time and materials of having to repeat the process also increase and who wants to be constantly reminded of how poor their plastering skills are every time they look at the wall?

Tenacity

2011-07-20T00:31:00.002+01:00

Edutainment

2011-07-14T09:48:00.004+01:00

How far are we prepared to go in making the educational experience enjoyable before we find that we’ve replaced teaching with entertainment?

Drawing out the Core

2011-07-07T22:26:00.006+01:00

I've gotten into a bit of a disagreement with a colleague over the prominence given to Drawing in a joint text we are preparing for a future course brochure. What started as a slight difference in perspective has polarised into a full blown professional (though fortunately not personal) disagreement.

My colleague teaches in a different (more traditional) department of the art school and in his opinion drawing is a "core" procedure which is "crucial to visualise critical thinking." For my part, I'm not at all convinced that any particular set of physical skills is a prerequisite for making art and I've certainly never encountered any evidence that drawing is an indispensable mode of demonstrating critical thinking. On the contrary, I've seen plenty of evidence that it's quite possible to possess prodigious skills in draughtsmanship but little attendant critical capacity.

Within the historical tradition of art production it is invariably the case that drawing has played a central role in enabling a remarkable diversity of visual exploration and expression. Likewise, in the contemporary setting, there is little doubt that drawing continues to function as a fantastically useful and powerful set of capacities that inform and underpin the manifold practices of a great many artists.

Prior to the invention of photography this centrality of draughtsmanship may have been largely unquestioned but even here we find numerous examples of extraordinarily skilful and insightful artworks made by artists who barely used drawing at all, let alone as a core aspect of their practice. I'm thinking principally of sculptors here and although sculpture shares many common skills with drawing it would be crazy to suggest that a good sculptor must, of necessity, be good at drawing.

“Drawing ability is regarded as a prerequisite skill for observation, recording, analysis, speculation, development, visualisation, evaluation and communication.” -QAA Benchmarking Statement, Section 3.4, 2008

We can thank the art academies of Renaissance Europe for the idea that drawing is a core skill. A similar emphasis, though in radically different form, reverberated through the pristine walls of the 1920's Bauhaus, which sought to foster a more technically oriented ethos more fitting to an industrial age. James Elkins discusses this historical lineage in his book, "Why Art Cannot be Taught", where he also notes that many current art schools continue to model themselves after the Bauhaus example.

Admirable and influential as the Bauhaus has proven to be, the world of art and design production has undergone a transformation in the intervening years and many of the skills of artists and designers have evolved, changed, died out and formed anew during this period. Coupled with these transformations has come an explosion of new courses with ever more bewildering titles, each seeking to accommodate its own particular media niche. But does it make sense to attempt to incorporate each and every new subdivision of emerging media by devising ever more finely divided specialist courses?

If skills are not the immutable things we once thought they were, then perhaps we need to look a little deeper - towards what lies at the heart of an artist’s “being”. What then emerges is a set of what we might call “dispositional tendencies”; such things as curiosity, inquisitiveness, determination, perseverance, criticality, exactitude, resilience, confidence, perspicacity and thoughtfulness.

This is not to suggest that technical skills are somehow obsolete or unnecessary but rather that these are themselves underpinned by a whole raft of sensibilities/dispositions/inclinations/aptitudes, call them what you will, that an education in the arts - whether explicitly or implicitly - seeks to cultivate. After all, we don’t just teach technique do we?

Dead Shredder

2011-07-05T08:53:00.003+01:00

Utter Bollocks (an essay on swearing)

2011-06-29T13:50:00.005+01:00

Last year I had the following essay published on Dyske.com. Recently I tried to access it from my workplace but found myself blocked by the University web server: “Tru-View has categorized this page as Offensive and Tasteless.” Now that’s ironic since one of the principle points I raise in the essay is the extent to which swearing is used, either directly or through injunction, to establish and reinforce social exclusivity.

Steven Pinker has some fascinating things to say about the subject of swearing in the following 2 part video (here and here) though he makes little, if any, mention of swearing as a practice of social differentiation and exclusion. There is also a very interesting article (here) about differing attitudes to the use of profanities within academic disciplines (Thanks to Sean for the link).

Utter Bollocks (an essay on swearing)

We often think of “innocence” as something completely uncorrupted, a state of moral purity, but to what extent might this notion be a fabrication in which we subtly compel one another, and children in particular, to conform to social norms?

Some friends of mine are having difficulties with their five year old son who has started swearing whilst at his new school. They've tended not to discourage him from swearing at home and now they’re faced with the task of socialising him into a set of values which are somewhat different from their own but which are held by the social sphere into which their son is being initiated. It makes one wonder who’s actually being manipulated to conform the most: the child or his parents?

With children it's often pointless to attempt to rationally explain the complexities of a mode of behaviour which we wish them to modify. Instead we tend to lay down rules and injunctions to control and encourage behaviours which we feel are appropriate to a particular context. We say "No, don't do that" or "Stop it", and when asked for an explanation we all too often say "Because I said so" or, if we're not too distracted or stressed by the situation, we might work a little harder to come up with a shorthand explanation like "Because it's bad" or "Because it's naughty". Whilst this is understandable, it's often the case that such responses are simply inherited from our parents and other childhood figures of authority. We tend to accept these norms and when explanations are required, the most expedient and conventional responses are easily to hand. How often, I wonder, do we stop to consider the values and motivations behind these attitudes? For the most part, the explanations we give aren't really explanations at all: they're descriptions of what we judge swearing to be, and they provide very little indication, if any, about the root of the issue. So, not only do our children miss out on the truth, but we ourselves have only the barest understanding of what we believe. If we’re pushed on this subject the most common response we give is that swearwords are sexual in nature, and children should be protected from such things. But is this really anything more than a half-truth?

Swearing is perceived by many people to be the result of poor upbringing by parents who, for whatever reason, are too busy, too unconcerned or too liberal to discourage their kids from such antisocial or ‘obscene’ behaviour. But already we can see a series of clear judgements underlying these responses. I suggest that it’s precisely this, ‘judgement’, rather than simply moral outrage, which is at the heart of our attitudes to swearing.

Swearing allows us to distinguish between members of different social groups and social levels in a very similar way to regional accents and slang. It's a universal discriminative capacity which creates linguistic differentiation and provides clues as to the values, upbringing and social status of different individuals. The important thing to recognise is that the conventional objection against swearing has relatively little to do with the explicit sexual content of expletives.

“A word becomes an insult, one would suppose, because it means something bad; but in practice it’s insult-value has little to do with its actual meaning.” -George Orwell

The argument that children need to be protected from such things, neatly avoids the fact that the typical injunction against swearing contains a significant component of social differentiation and exclusion. As with all exclusionary practices, the uninitiated are either denied entry to the group, expelled, or forced to conform to the group’s dominant norms. The truth, which is easily missed here, is that the argument about the sexual content of swearwords is, in many ways, simply a convenient moralistic foil for these exclusionary and manipulative social practices. Indeed, it could be argued that these censorious attitudes are the very cause of the problems they seek to eradicate:

“Taboo topics tend to generate many slang expressions, and these have been conceptualized as functioning to resist oppressive norms that deny voice to certain groups of people and render some subjects unspeakable.” -Virginia Braun and Celia Kitzinger

But this isn’t to suggest that all swearwords are entirely innocent or that the intentions behind their use are simply noble expressions of resistance against oppression. Many swearwords are forms of abuse, specifically designed to alienate and insult people by marking them out as different, inferior or abnormal, and we’re right not to tolerate such xenophobic and abusive attitudes. We all have our moral limits and many of these are shared across differing social groups and are crystallised in social taboos. But not only do these taboos tell us about where we set some of our most delicate moral boundaries, they also tell us about our collective fixations and anxieties. As with any group, these fixations and anxieties are frequently associated with what we regard as sacred, and by extension, profane – from whence we derive our conceptions of profanity.

Alongside this perception of language as a register of the sacred and profane resides the belief that words are more than simply utterances: words have the power to offend, to shock, to violate and to transgress. The well known phrase that ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me’ becomes, from this perspective, little more than a case of wishful thinking: words can, on the contrary, inflict severe and lasting psychological harm. But we need to be careful around such arguments. For example, in US law there’s a term sometimes known as the Hecklers Veto in which a group can effectively force the government to prevent an individual from exercising free expression by taking offence and threatening to riot. It’s the government’s duty in such cases to prevent a riot whilst granting all individuals free speech, so long of course, as this free speech isn’t acting with the singular intent to incite a riot.

“The rioters are the culpable parties, not the artist whose work unintentionally provoked them to violence.” –Judge Posner. Nelson v. Streeter, 16 F.3d 145, 150 (7thCir. 1994).

http://ftp.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/16/16.F3d.145.92-3177.92-2991.html

The vital issue here then, is the intent behind an utterance or expression rather than the offence taken. Inevitably, it’s not always a straightforward matter to determine the underlying intentions behind an utterance but it’s certainly preferable to allowing self professed offended parties to dominate or veto free expression.

“Much might be said on the impossibility of fixing where these supposed bounds are to be placed; for if the test be offence to those whose opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer, appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an intemperate opponent.” JS Mill

One of the principle complexities at the heart of our consideration of swearwords derives from the confusing lack of consistency in the ways that different groups, and even individuals within these groups, use expletives. This inconsistency is much less a consequence of the fluidity of linguistic meaning than a clear indication of the fact that swearing is primarily a form of social negotiation and exchange:

“swearing functions not only as a marker of (group) identity, but also as a means of negotiating and actively constituting that identity.” -Karyn Stapleton

Once again, we find that the literal meaning of expletives tends to be secondary to the communicative dynamic which such words create. Swearing reinforces relationships or quite literally comes between them, and differing social groups define their linguistic boundaries in a variety of nuanced and complex ways in order to negotiate and express their collective values, often to the point of inventing their own euphemisms or, on occasion, entirely new lexicons.

This tendency for taboo subjects to stratify into distinct lexicons was noted by the British author CS Lewis who pointed out that when discussing sex we are “forced to choose between the language of the nursery, the gutter and the anatomy class.” This observation illustrates how each lexicon is closely associated with a particular contextual use. Moreover, when we encounter terms from a particular lexicon outside their familiar setting they often seem incongruous, if not completely absurd. For example, you're unlikely to say in the heat of passion “let's have sexual intercourse”, nor are you likely to say to a doctor “I have an uncomfortable pain in my arsehole”, though, interestingly, such things are becoming more common (see here).

When I first began thinking about the issues of swearing I was tempted to consider the exclusion of children from the use of ‘adult’ language to be a case of irrational inconsistent disingenuousness on the part of adults. Willy, Penis and Prick name exactly the same thing after all, so why might we wish to prevent children from using these different associated lexicons freely? I can see two possible reasons. The first is related to the contextual dependency of different lexicons and the subtlety with which individuals use swearing to test, negotiate with and/or to gain entry to different groups:

“Speakers who use taboo language successfully (i.e., they do not seem to offend their listeners) are often attuned to the situation in which they are speaking.” -Robin-Eliece Mercury

It has been found that the urge to swear originates at a fundamental neurological level and is therefore an unusually instinctive and pre-linguistic form of expression which has been identified even in primates. Despite these primitive origins, swearing has also been shown to involve sophisticated process of predictive modeling which subconsciously assesses potential audience response:

“Researchers point out that cursing is often an amalgam of raw, spontaneous feeling and targeted, gimlet-eyed cunning. When one person curses at another, they say, the curser rarely spews obscenities and insults at random, but rather will assess the object of his wrath, and adjust the content of the ‘uncontrollable’ outburst accordingly.” -Natalie Angier

The higher-order forms of cognitive processing and sensitivity to nuance involved in the use of swearwords are specifically enabled, on a neurological level, by the functions of a well developed Pre-Frontal Cortex; a portion of the brain which only fully matures in late childhood. To expect children to understand, yet alone appropriately utilise such sophisticated, context dependent forms of language would surely be unrealistic and would undoubtedly to lead to error, confusion and misunderstanding in the use of forms of language to which many people are especially sensitive.

But there’s another, equally compelling reason why swearing might be thought to be a sensitive issue for children and this relates to children’s developing understanding of the meaning of privacy. As children’s language skills develop and they become more independent, it’s important for them to be able to function effectively within the moral culture that surrounds them. At this stage it becomes increasingly necessary for them to form conceptions of the Personal and the Private and their first encounters with these concepts are most likely to be through language and the taboos which are so deeply inscribed within it. The way adults frame and proscribe language through the use of different lexicons becomes an alert to children that there’s something curious about the things to which these words refer but also something mysterious, powerful and, most of all, threatening which they don’t yet quite understand. In a sense, it might be argued that taboos act like a form of protection, by raising awareness of social sensitivities and forcing parents to demarcate boundaries of acceptability. In many ways taboos functions exactly like subtle socially accepted versions of parents who say “You can’t do that because I said so”: they establish boundaries based upon authority and they leave explanations to be sought or invented by minds which, in this and so many other regards, have other peoples ideas of innocence foisted upon them.

References:

ANGIER, N., 2005. Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore. New York Times. [online] Available from: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/science/20curs.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=swearing%20brain&st=cse

ARNOTT SMITH , C., Nursery, gutter, or anatomy class? Obscene expression in consumer health. [online] Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2655816/

BRAUN. V. AND KITZINGER. C., 2001. "Snatch," "Hole," or "Honey-pot"? Semantic Categories and the Problem of Nonspecificity in Female Genital Slang

Journal of Sex Research, May, 2001. [online] Available from: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2372/is_2_38/ai_79439405/

JOELVING. F., 2009. Why the #$%! Do We Swear? For Pain Relief. Scientific American. [online] Available from: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-do-we-swear

MERCURY. R.E., 1995. Swearing: A "Bad" Part o f Language; A Good Part of Language Learning TESL CANADA JOURNAUREVUE TESL DU CANADA VOL. 13, NO.1, WINTER 35 . [online] Available from: http://www.teslcanadajournal.ca/index.php/tesl/article/viewFile/659/490

ORWELL. G., 1933. Down and Out in Paris and London. Penguin. London.

STAPLETON. K., 2003. Gender and Swearing: A Community Practice. Women and Language, Vol. 26. [online] Available from: http://tinyurl.com/35onaxx

Reading Between the Lines

2011-06-23T22:25:00.003+01:00

Thanks to Charlotte Young for this great video.

Experiments in Situated Knowledge

2011-06-20T16:11:00.010+01:00

Earlier this year I was selected for an Artist's Residency at Sydney College of Arts in Australia. At the same time there's a conference at the Institute of Experimental Arts in Sydney on the subject of Art and Experimentation. Lesley and I submitted the following abstract and received confirmation a few days ago that we've been selected. Now all we have to do is put the whole thing together!

Experiments in Situated Knowledge

"We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched." -Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Part academic presentation, part performance, part discursive documentary, this presentation takes an alternative approach to the format of conference presentation in order to argue, by constructive example, that art arrives at its own unique forms of knowledge and knowledge generation through speculative experimentation with concrete reality, form and process.

The profound success of certain forms of epistemic enquiry - principally scientific research and academic thought - has resulted in a relative marginalization of creative and improvisatory forms of critical and analytical investigation and to a parallel adoption, within the arts especially, of aspects of the terminology of science in order to legitimate the processes and practices of art production and consumption. For example, the use of the term ‘experiment’ is itself predicated upon an implicit association with empirical science as opposed to the more abstract trials and even ‘play’ that are fundamental to art production.

Drawing upon the experiments of Swiss artist Roman Signer (who’s work literally fuses the improvisatory and experiential with the more exacting necessities and laws of physics, often to explosive effect) and the research of the eight artists and cultural theorists involved in the newly formed “Co-creativity of Hand and Mind” research group based at Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK (whose work investigates the interchange between Experience, Experiment and Expertise - etymologically rooted in the term experiri: ‘to try’), this presentation seeks to propose that the language and significance of alternative forms of communication (situated knowledge, contemplation, humor, sex, reverie, narrative etc.) offer valuable ways to understand the indispensable contribution of experimental creativity (art) to our understanding of the world and our place within it.

Hear Hear!

2011-06-18T07:21:00.006+01:00

Several people have recommended an article to me that was printed in the Guardian a week ago about a move in UK university education to introduce what has been dubbed a Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR). The report will provide a far more detailed record of student achievement throughout their studies than those insulting and impoverished things we know as grades and, although the current recommendation is that the HEAR should incorporate the degree classification (1st class, 3rd Class etc.), it is anticipated that more innovative and appropriate alternatives to this may be developed in future.

The sooner, the better!

Lives of the Artists

2011-06-15T10:03:00.007+01:00

“Skill is fine, and genius is splendid, but the right contacts are more valuable than either.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

Last September I wrote here about a disparity in the way that theory and practice are graded in art schools and the potential inequality this raises for students. Since joining Facebook last November I’ve become all the more aware of a related anomaly that pertains to the way that courses acknowledge - or largely ignore - the engagement of students beyond the confines of the institution.

It has always been the case that some students are more engaged than others - that will never change. But whilst for a proportion of students, studying is very much a 9 to 5 affair undertaken in order to gain a qualification, for many others their chosen discipline is an integrated and consuming part of their daily life. When these students walk out of the door at the end of the day they continue to engage in communities, discussions and creative cultures that stimulate and inspire them and they in turn contribute back to these cultures: as musicians, DJs, VJs, voluntarily working in galleries or community arts projects, submitting for competitions, attending exhibitions and openings and generally participating in a wide variety of creative opportunities and contexts.

Very often these are the students that excel and continue beyond art school, undoubtedly because the ethic that such engagement engenders becomes a self perpetuating habit. Their hard work doesn’t even feel like work because they are doing what they enjoy and immersing themselves in it as much as they can.

Unfortunately though, when it comes to marking students, it’s already hard enough to fully acknowledge this kind of engagement because the criteria that degree courses use rarely have much space for kinds of engagement that are not a direct consequence of structures instituted and controlled by the institution.

It might be argued that these engaged students will necessarily be more confident and experienced and therefore better able to achieve good grades anyway. To a large degree this is true but there are others whose involvement in such extracurricular culture is more intangible, perhaps more discursive, less visual but nonetheless inventive, playful, thoughtful, and significant. Sometimes these students are brilliant catalysts: not so productive or surprising in the things they create, but rather in the situations or discussions they generate, nurture or promote. Such individuals are an indispensible part of the kinds of critical and creative cultures upon which progressive societies are founded and it is extremely fortunate that the drive to be involved, for such individuals, is intrinsic to the role because certainly the support and acknowledgement they receive from academic institutions is paltry at best.

And I’m not talking about a tiny sub-group of students here either. Over the years, I’ve observed many such individuals on numerous occasions and since I’ve joined Facebook I’ve noticed their engagement even more. If, during the past, it was possible for such individuals to join, for example, a pub discussion and throw in a few well aimed remarks and light hearted volubility across the table in order to keep the discussion flowing into ever more insightful territory, now they are armed with a vast reservoir of links, articles and media that pepper their communications and inform their social presence. Yes, much of what is posted on facebook is inane rubbish and yes it’s often haphazard, but considering the sheer volume, the engagement, the enthusiasm and the evidence of awareness, surely we can do better than to completely ignore the vital participation and contribution that such individuals make to a thriving creative culture.

handbook

2011-06-10T11:15:00.004+01:00

ayePhone

2011-06-10T11:13:00.002+01:00

Variation and Perfection

2011-06-07T11:01:00.009+01:00

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about “variation” and I’m beginning to realise that it plays an easily overlooked but vital role in our understanding and appreciation of a constellation of concepts including “uniqueness,” “rarity,” “perfection,” “quality,” “value,” and “greatness” etc. These are things to which we might aspire and they lead many people in the world to extraordinary lengths simply for the hope of experiencing the vaguest glimpse of them. Global culture is, to a large degree, driven by this desire: to be the best, the greatest, the highest quality, the most efficient, the most economical, the most sustainable, the most valuable, the most perfect.

All quantifiable things, by definition, lend themselves to being measured, and it is through measurement that we might seek to improve them. As Lord Kelvin famously noted: “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.” But not all things that can be measured, can be improved. We can measure the hue, intensity and brightness of a myriad of colours but we’d likely be certifiable if we sought to improve say indigo, crimson or ochre. These colours are what they are. We might prefer one particular colour over all others, but this does not make International Klein Blue either qualitatively or quantitatively better than any other colour. Our preferences are subjective aesthetic choices, not objective facts.

When discussing aesthetic matters we can still talk in terms of “quality,” “value” and “greatness” etc. but the further we venture into this territory the more unwieldy and contentious the criteria we might apply. Once again, we are dealing with preferences – very elaborate ones - but preferences nonetheless. Over time we might find that we share the ‘taste’ of a certain connoisseur and that their preferences lead us to a fuller understanding and enjoyment of our own experiences but there is nothing objectively more True about their opinion than that of any other equally well informed and experienced consumer. Truth, in fact, doesn’t actually figure in the equation, since we are not dealing with facts so much as feelings and sensations - not measurable things ‘out there’ so much as complex and notoriously difficult to quantify internal states. If you’re at all doubtful about this claim then consider for a moment the extent to which societies institute teams, juries, boards, committees and panels etc. to make critical judgements in cases where the possibility of subjective bias may lead to faulty or damaging decisions. In such cases we substitute inter-subjectivity (collective judgement) as a proxy for the goal of pure objectivity.

So where does variation fit in? Perhaps the easiest way to approach this is to introduce the experience of food (though the principle could be applied to any sensory experience). Imagine the most perfect meal you’ve ever eaten. Would you wish to dine on this same experience day in, day out, morning, noon and night for the rest of your life? Doubtful. The experience would very soon become monotonous to the point of disgust. My point therefore, is that where aesthetic matters are concerned, quality is nothing without variation.

Yet another important aspect of what makes anything valuable is “rarity,” such that when rare things become abundant they cease to retain their value. Paradoxically though, what we also find, is that rarity and variation pull in entirely different directions. Rarity calls for uniqueness and scarcity whereas variation calls for multiplicity and diversity. This might well explain why there is such a widespread emphasis on originality within the fields of aesthetic choice, since originality simultaneously provides something rare (the first of its kind) and variation (by adding something different to what we already have). It might also explain why true perfection is an ideal forever tantalisingly out of reach.

Raw Material

2011-06-01T04:50:00.007+01:00

When I was an art student I had a tutor who considered his teaching to be part of his artistic output and who made a great show of the fact, to his students at least. Evidently he believed his role to be more unique and therefore more profound than that of other teachers and wanted us to feel special as a consequence. Perhaps I should have been flattered, but instead I couldn’t help wondering: so what does that make us - your raw material?

The Aesthetics of Crime (and a petty misdemeanor)

2011-05-25T06:37:00.007+01:00

According to the stats, my post entitled “How to Cheat the Word Count” is one of the most visited on this blog, searches for “cheat the word count” apparently being fairly popular on Google. No surprises there then. Now, I’m all for the creative bending of rules and inventive alternatives to unexamined orthodoxies but borrowing other peoples hard earned deceits is surely a bit rich. Coming up with an innovative cheat is one thing, but stealing one simply heaps subterfuge upon swindle and lacks even the controversial virtue of guile. No honour among thieves indeed!

Seriously though, whilst I’m critical of unimaginative pilfering, the idea of dreaming up novel ways to cheat the system is by no means wholly distasteful to me. Moreover, the notion that creativity is somehow universally positive is clearly mistaken. Creativity’s dark side finds expression in fraud, computer viruses, terrorism, fakery, counterfeiting and many other familiar, and not so familiar, crimes. I’m certainly not about to condone such acts but it’s surely inconsistent not to be curious about, and sometimes even to admire, the human ingenuity that often lies eerily close at their heart.

A book on the aesthetics of crime would seem to be long overdue but perhaps the significant challenge for such a text would be to disentangle the principles at work in beautifully planned and executed crimes from their inherent immorality, the danger being that crime becomes unwittingly elevated to the status of art form. But there is no doubting that certain crimes have something strangely sublime - in the Burkian sense - about them that makes them all the more horrifying, and this horror emerges directly from the profound discord between the aesthetic and the moral. The same fascination can be seen in such films as Silence of the Lambs in which the character of Hannibal Lecter is portrayed as an inordinately creative but depraved monster.

As I say, this is a potential subject for a book (but not one that I’ll ever write) and is perhaps a little too ambitious for a blog post, so instead I’d like to relate a story on a much smaller scale.

Recently I was requested to attend some “staff development” training consisting of several online tasks, an online test and a day of workshops. I hate online tests, I’ll do almost anything to avoid them, and when it comes to assimilating information that has doubtful relevance to me or the things that I value, I’m also a good deal less than enthusiastic about sacrificing time that I could devote to more productive work (I’m sure I’m not alone in this respect?).

Since the online tasks were provided as independent study material, I decided to complete them as quickly as possible, which meant that I would have to devise an efficient method of cutting corners but at the same time gather the necessary data to pass the test (in education theory this is disparagingly termed “Surface Learning” but it’s something in which I consider myself to be something of an expert!).

One of the tests was audio based and required listening to an account of a fictitious event and answering questions based on information recall. I tried it once and failed. Being dysgraphic the task of keeping notes is quite a challenge for me, especially if I have to do it quickly, so this conventional solution really wasn’t applicable. How else to capture the audio then, so that I could refer back to it? My mobile phone of course! And since I’d taken this leap into the sneaky utilization of technology it was only a small step to open up each of the online learning materials in a separate window on my computer and to use this to directly access the answers to the required questions. I probably could have achieved a 100% score but that would have taken more time – I was trying to do this quickly remember – so a few incorrect answers were perfectly acceptable to pass the test.

Was this cheating? It certainly felt like cheating, but then, it also felt like being creative and in some ways the two are indistinguishable. Creativity is a process of improvising, of inventing solutions and transforming imagination into form. It frequently involves illusion (which itself is a form of deception), corner cutting and the exploitation of resources. If our ancestors had never evolved this formidable array of skills, including both their positive and negative aspects, it seems extremely unlikely that we would ever have descended from the trees.

So was it unethical to use technology to short-cut the test? If the information that needed to be assimilated was vital to my job then the answer is “Yes.” Am I therefore admitting to unethical behaviour? Not exactly. Some individuals are very good at retaining information and some are simply not – not unless it’s interesting to them that is – I’m obviously of the latter category. When we lesser mortals are tasked with the job of retaining information we often resort to tools and familiar methods: pen, paper and note taking for example, since it’s cheap and easily available.

My dysgraphia aside, why should the use of a technological form of data retrieval be more unethical than the conventional practice of note taking? I’d argue that it doesn’t. The only thing that made my use of technology ‘sneaky’ was the fact that this wasn’t envisaged by the people who put the online staff development materials together. Presumably it was their intention that these materials would slow down the process and force participants to take notes and assimilate the information at a slower rate. Slower does tend to correlate with better retention, but this begs the vital question: is information retention really necessary when technology provides us with readily available repositories of rapidly accessed information that effectively extend our cognitive capacities?

“Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” -Samuel Johnson

Last February Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely published their research into the correlation between creativity and unethical behaviour in which they claim to have “found a robust relationship between creativity and dishonesty”. If the findings stand up to scrutiny and further research in a wider variety of settings then this would seem to create a genuine dilemma for employers in how to weigh up the potential gains as opposed to the potential losses of employing creative people in their businesses. The findings also present a dilemma for creative people themselves in evaluating their own ethical behaviour since, as Gino and Ariely point out, creative people are also more likely to come up with ingenious explanations to justify their unethical behavior.

Ah… perhaps I should go and do the staff development test again!

High Wind in Glasgow

2011-05-23T18:51:00.000+01:00