Intelligence is Situated

Intelligence is not a property we possesses so much as a condition we inhabit.

It is not sealed within the skull, nor does it operate independently of circumstance. It is sustained, shaped, and made possible by an environment so pervasive that it disappears from view. What we call “intelligence” is inseparable from the ecological and material systems that support it -- air, gravity, temperature, infrastructure, language, tools, other people. Remove these, and intelligence does not diminish; it becomes irrelevant. Worse: it becomes useless.

The image of the mind as a self-contained engine persists because it flatters us. It suggests portability, autonomy, independence. But this is a fiction. Intelligence is not transferable in that way. A simple, almost crude example makes the point. Take any intelligent person and remove them completely from their environment. Put them somewhere where none of those conditions hold. A vacuum will do. Absolute darkness, no air, no pressure, nothing to stand on. Their intelligence doesn’t help them. It can’t. There is nothing for it to work on, nothing to engage with, nothing to sustain it. It isn’t that they fail to think well enough. Thinking itself no longer matters. So intelligence is not portable in the way we like to imagine. It does not detach cleanly from the conditions that sustain it. It belongs to a system.

That system, incidentally, is far more fragile than it appears. We are starting to see this now in ways that are harder to ignore. Small shifts in temperature, chemistry, biodiversity, things that once seemed minor or remote, turn out to have consequences that ripple through everything else. Not just for us but for all sorts of other organisms that are less adaptable, less robust, or perhaps just less fortunate.

Intelligence is often described as an adaptation, and that is right as far as it goes. But it is an adaptation to a very particular range of circumstances. It doesn’t generalise indefinitely. It works within a narrow band of conditions, and outside that band its usefulness fades quickly. We don’t tend to think in those terms. We talk about intelligence as though it were a kind of general-purpose capacity, something that could, given enough sophistication, solve anything. That idea starts to look doubtful when you remind yourself how dependent intelligence is on the specific environment in which it developed. This matters when people start talking about superintelligence. The assumption is usually that, if intelligence becomes sufficiently advanced, it might break free of these constraints. It might redesign its own environment. It might even create entirely new conditions for itself. In other words, it might escape the ecosystem that currently constrains it and wipe us out as a consequence.

That sounds both impressive and terrifying, but it slips something past you. It quietly assumes that intelligence comes first and environment follows. That the latter can be rearranged at will by the former. But intelligence, as we know it, doesn’t arrive first. It is already an outcome of a millennia-long process of adjustment, of adaptation, to an existing set of conditions. It emerges out of that process, it doesn’t stand outside it.

Even an artificial system would have to begin somewhere. It would require materials, energy, stability, a physical substrate of some kind. It would operate within constraints, even if those constraints looked very different from the ones we recognise. The idea of a system simply engineering a “niche” for itself skips over the fact that niches are not conjured out of nothing. They develop. They are shaped and enabled by what is already there.

There is another complication, which is usually left to one side. Intelligence, in any meaningful sense, is tied to need. Not abstract need, but quite specific pressures: to find, to avoid, to obtain, to maintain. These are not optional. They come with being alive. It’s worth being quite clear about this. Plenty of things persist. A building might survive a landslide. A stone might endure for centuries. But neither of those things has any stake in continuing to exist. They don’t act on their own behalf. Organisms don't invent reasons for their survival. Those reasons are inherited. They are part of a larger pattern. The individual is an instance of that pattern, not its origin.

Artificial systems complicate this picture in a revealing way. They are, in the first instance, tools. Their purposes are not their own; they are assigned. They do not act on their own behalf but on ours, or on behalf of whatever system deploys them. In that sense they have functions but not needs. They continue to operate only insofar as something else requires them to, maintains them, powers them. If one wanted to imagine such a system becoming “intelligent” in a way that resembles the situated intelligence described here, it would not be enough for it to become more complex or more capable. It would have to acquire purposes of its own. It would have to cease to exist merely for something else. That would not just be an increase in intelligence. It would be a fundamental transformation.

That has significant consequences for how we think about intelligence. If intelligence arises in response to need, and if need arises within living systems, then intelligence is bound up with those systems in a deep and inextricable way. It is not just a problem-solving ability. It is tied to survival, to continuation, to the ongoing negotiation of conditions that allow something to keep going at all. Take that away, and something changes. You might still have systems that process information, that optimise, that respond in complex ways and that pose real risks to life. But it becomes less clear in what sense they are “situated” in the same way. Less clear what, if anything, is at stake for them or “it”.

There is a tendency to whitewash here, to assume that more complexity simply means more intelligence. But that misses something important. Intelligence, at least as we encounter it in the world, as we always encounter it, is not just about complexity. It is about dependency. About being caught up in a set of conditions that you don’t control and can’t step outside. That idea is not especially comfortable. It cuts against the picture of intelligence as something sovereign, something self-sufficient. But the alternative picture, that intelligence can outstrip the very conditions that make it possible, starts to look less convincing.

To say that intelligence is situated is therefore not simply to observe that it occurs somewhere. It is to recognise that it is constituted by that “somewhere”, that it cannot be abstracted from it without distortion. Intelligence does not stand over and against its environment. It is a function of it. And until that relationship is properly understood, intelligence will continue to be mistakenly imagined as something it is not: a detachable capacity, a transferable asset, a power that can outstrip the very conditions that make it possible.

 

On Media and Making

Artists are often taught, and just as often teach themselves, to treat their medium as a means to an end. The end announces itself as an idea, an image, a plan, a position. The medium follows. It is selected, prepared, and put to work. The task is to realise what has already been conceived.

In that model, the medium is subordinate. It is expected to behave. It should not intrude. It should not declare itself too loudly or resist unnecessarily. At its best, it becomes transparent—clear, efficient, unobtrusive. The work appears, the medium recedes. This is a very familiar way of working. It is also, in some respects, a limited one. It imagines making as a sequence: conception followed by execution. The medium sits between them, treated as a transition to be passed through rather than a condition that forms and informs what is made. What matters most is clarity of intention and fidelity of outcome. Any friction along the way is something to be minimised or overcome.

But that description leaves out something that is usually quite evident in practice.
Working in any medium involves delays, resistances, unexpected behaviours. Materials absorb differently, fracture unpredictably, stain, warp, dry too quickly or too slowly. Marks do not always land where they are intended. Surfaces respond. Processes take their own course. These are not accidents at the margins. They are part of the activity itself. When these moments are treated simply as obstacles, the work narrows. The medium is forced into alignment with what has already been decided. The result may be clear, but it is often lifeless. The range of what might emerge has been reduced in advance.

There is another way of describing what is happening, one that does not place all of the emphasis on prior intention. In practice, artists are often at their most responsive when they treat the medium not as a submissive or slavish carrier but as something to work with or alongside. Not a partner in any romantic sense, but a set of conditions that actively shape what can be done. The medium does not simply mediate an idea; it affects its formation. It suggests, constrains, redirects, transforms. It offers possibilities that were not fully present at the outset. This does not replace intention, it opens intention to what the medium makes possible.

The process becomes less a matter of executing a plan and more a matter of exploring opportunities. Decisions are made in response to what is happening as much as in accordance with what was initially imagined. The work emerges through this interaction, not in spite of it.

Certain practices make this especially visible. In analogue photography, for example, the emergence of the image is not instantaneous. It involves handling, immersion, development, waiting. The image comes into being through a sequence of material transformations. For some artists, that process is not incidental. The act of submerging paper, of watching an image develop gradually in a tray of chemicals, is bound up with the meaning of the work itself. The medium does not simply deliver the image. It stages its appearance and offers pause for deeper attention.

Similarly, a student once chose to make charcoal not from purchased materials but from willow gathered from their family’s home region. The resulting drawings carried with them something more than a particular tonal quality. The marks were tied, however quietly, to a place, to a set of conditions that preceded the work. That connection was not symbolic in any straightforward sense, but it mattered. It altered how the work could be understood and how it was made. Examples like these are not exceptional. They draw attention to something usually there but often ignored.

Media do not arrive in the studio as blank substances. Charcoal is not just carbonised wood, oil paint not just pigment in suspension, paper not just an anonymous support. Each has a history of production, extraction, refinement, trade. Pigments have geological and industrial origins. Oils are processed, stabilised. Surfaces are manufactured, cut, treated. These processes carry with them traces of other activities, other uses, other economies.

To work with a medium is therefore to enter into a set of conditions that are already in progress. The artist is not the origin of those conditions. At most, the artist is a point within them, making use of what is available, altering it, redirecting it, but not standing outside it.

This is easy to overlook when the medium is treated purely as a vehicle.

We speak of clay, graphite, plaster, paper as though they were neutral substrates, waiting to be given form. In one sense, that is undeniable. They can be shaped, marked, combined in countless ways. But there is a difference between using materials as interchangeable carriers and working in a way that acknowledges their particularities. That difference does not always show itself in obvious ways. It is not a matter of adding expressive texture or emphasising material effects for their own sake. It has more to do with whether the work allows the properties and histories of its materials to remain active within it, or whether it suppresses them in favour of a predetermined outcome.

To master a medium, in this sense, is not simply to control it. It is to learn how it behaves, where it resists, what it makes possible, what it makes difficult. It is to understand where it comes from, both spatially and historically, and how it responds. That understanding is not abstract. It develops through use, through repeated engagement, through the small adjustments that come from working with the material rather than against it.

The idea that the medium should disappear, that it should leave no trace of its own operation, begins to look less compelling when set against this. Transparency is not a neutral condition. It is an effect produced by aligning material processes with expectations in such a way that they no longer draw attention.

When that happens, the medium is still doing its work. It’s simply no longer noticed.
To attend to the medium, then, is not to add an extra layer of meaning or to complicate the work unnecessarily. It is to recognise that what appears in the work is inseparable from the conditions under which it is made. The medium does not sit between idea and outcome as a silent conduit. It is part of the process by which both are formed.

Lens Distortions

During a recent lecture, I asked a group of art students a simple question: do lenses distort the world? They agreed unanimously and without hesitation. It felt obvious, inevitable.

And in one sense, that answer is not wrong. But it carries something else with it, something less secure. It sits alongside a quieter assumption: that some lenses distort more than others, and that somewhere between these extremes lies a form of seeing that is, if not entirely neutral, then close enough. A standard lens. A “normal” view.

Wide-angle lenses exaggerate. Telephoto lenses compress. Fish-eye lenses bend the world into snowglobe bubbles. Against these, the standard lens appears calm, undramatic, and, crucially, faithful. It looks like how things look.

That is the familiar picture. It holds together so long as one does not ask what the term “how things look” actually means.

A standard lens corresponds, more or less, with the way things appear to us under ordinary conditions. That correspondence is what makes it feel unremarkable. The image it produces does not draw attention to itself as constructed or unusual. It passes without comment. It feels like seeing. But that sense of naturalness is not neutral. It is specific. It belongs, as Thomas Reid might have put it, to "beings who see as we do".

Consider a simple case. A circular bottle top seen from an angle presents an elliptical profile. That can be drawn, measured, even geometrically described. But we do not see an ellipse and infer a circle behind it. We see the circular bottle top, as it appears from here. The geometry of its appearance is entirely real, but it does not replace the thing with something else. It does not interpose a representation. The same is true more generally. We do not first encounter distortions and then correct for them. We encounter things, and the conditions under which they appear usually go unnoticed.

This begins to matter when we return to lenses.

What a lens does is fix certain relationships of size, distance and perspective. It establishes how objects will be related to one another in the image. These relations can vary. Some stretch space. Some compress it. Some curve it in ways that are immediately striking. Others correspond more closely with what we are used to. The key point is not that one set is correct and the others deviate. It is that certain arrangements become familiar enough that they no longer register as arrangements at all. They pass as straightforward depiction.

One way to see this more clearly is to step outside the usual continuum.

Telecentric lenses, widely used in manufacturing industries, do not behave like wide-angle, standard, or telephoto lenses. Within the working range of these lenses, objects do not diminish in size as their distance increases. A distant cube is rendered the same size as one held close to the lens. Depth does not register as a scaling difference.

This is not simply more or less distortion. It is a departure from the expectations and conditions that organise ordinary pictorial space. The result does not look like an exaggeration of familiar seeing. It looks strange in a quieter, harder-to-place way, because the usual cues are absent. Set against this, the standard lens looks less like a neutral midpoint and more like a particular calibration—one that happens to match the expectations (and moreover the optical morphology) we bring with us, as beings who see as we do. Those expectations are not incidental. They are reinforced by long habit, by the history of picturing, and by the technology that has standardised certain formats of viewing. Photographs, screens, prints—these continually return us to the same spatial conventions until they settle into something like visual common sense.

At that point, deviation becomes visible, and alignment invisible.

The language surrounding lenses does little to disturb this. In optics, the term “objective” persists as an identifier of lens elements. The French objectif and German Objektiv carry the same root. The word suggests a relation to the object itself, to what is there, as though the lens simply delivered it without remainder. Yet the lens does not stand outside the formation of the image. It is part of the arrangement that determines how things appear within it. It fixes relations that we ordinarily do not notice. The suggestion of objectivity does not remove this; it diverts attention from it.

The earlier confidence—“all lenses distort”—turns out to be both true and misleading. It is true in the sense that every lens produces an image according to specific optical conditions. But it is misleading because it treats distortion as something that varies from minimal to extreme, as though there were a baseline against which all others could be measured. What falls out of that picture is the more ordinary fact: that what looks undistorted is simply what has become familiar because it conforms to optical inevitabilities to which our perceptual system is already attuned. We do not perceive distortion and then recover the world behind it. We perceive the world, and certain conditions of its appearance recede from notice. Lenses, and perspectival imagery in general, extend and stabilise—indeed normalise--those conditions. They make a particular organisation of space feel inevitable.

From that viewpoint, the question changes. It is no longer a matter of asking which lens is most faithful. It is a matter of asking which relations are being fixed, and how easily those relations disappear into what feels like simple seeing.

To attend to distortion, then, is not to uncover a flaw at the margins of optics. It is to notice something that is ordinarily left unremarked: that how things appear is always bound up with the conditions under which they are seen, and that those conditions, once familiar enough, no longer present themselves as conditions at all.

The Tyranny of A4

Rectangles rule because they are useful, repeatable, stackable, measurable, and governable. That is precisely the problem.

Rectangles dominate almost without notice. They appear to offer a neutral space within which images can be placed, organised and understood. But this apparent neutrality is misleading. Rectangles already impose orientation, proportion and hierarchy. They establish edges, alignments and directions of attention before anything else has been decided.

Rectangles are not all the same, however. One in particular dominates quietly but decisively. The A4 sheet, standardised for office use, has become the default format through which much visual work is produced, reproduced and assessed. Students reach for it not because they have chosen it, but because it is what printers accept, what submission systems expect, what is readily available. It carries with it not only a fixed proportion but a particular material character: bleached, optically brightened, flattened to a uniform, lifeless surface. Work made within it begins to inherit these qualities without necessarily intending to. What presents itself as a neutral support is in fact a highly specific set of conditions, repeated so often that it comes to feel like a natural starting point rather than an imposed one.

The A‑series paper sizes are a triumph of bureaucratic reason: infinitely scalable, mathematically self‑similar, optimised for filing, copying, posting, shelving. They solve real problems brilliantly, and then quietly migrate from infrastructure into imagination. What begins as a logistical convenience hardens into an aesthetic default. Developing artists inherit the rectangle not as a choice but as a fact of the world, as though the shape of thought itself were naturally orthogonal.

The danger is not that rectangles exist, but that they so often go unquestioned. The A sizes carry with them an entire worldview: that images should fit into systems, that edges should align, that meaning should be bounded, that work should arrive already formatted for rectangular envelopes of distribution. This is not neutrality; it is institutionalised geometry. Even the square, ostensibly purer, calmer, more autonomous, is a rarity by comparison. This is odd. From a manufacturing point of view, squares would likely waste less material and simplify cutting and packing. Their relative absence is therefore not technical or economic, but cultural. The rectangle persists, not because it is inevitable, but because it is familiar. That familiarity is mistaken for necessity.

Photography exposes the arbitrariness of this most clearly. Lenses do not see rectangles. They produce blurred circles, soft at the edges, rich with fall‑off and uncertainty. The rectangle is imposed, by cropping, by sensor design, by enlargers, by paper standards, by convention layered upon convention. The frame pretends to be optical, but it is administrative.

This becomes particularly stark when composition rules are taught as laws rather than habits. The Golden Section. The Rule of Thirds. Entire pedagogies devoted to the strategic avoidance of the centre, as though balance itself were naïve. When a photography student returning from an exchange in Japan reported her tutor’s exasperated remark—“What’s this obsession with the Golden Section and the Rule of Thirds? Just put the subject in the middle.”— it was not anti‑intellectual provocation, but a rejection of ritualised cleverness. A reminder that compositional dogma often compensates for a lack of looking.

Notably, photography has never fully submitted to the A‑series regime. Despite near‑universal metric adoption elsewhere, 10×8 endures as the photographic analogue of A4. This stubborn survival matters. It reveals that standards are not purely rational systems converging on the best solution, but cultural compromises that accrete history, habit, and inertia. Photography resists total bureaucratic assimilation not through theory, but through usage.

Yet the rectangle still dominates the field of vision. Televisions, cinema screens, monitors, gallery walls —all rehearse the same geometry globally. A sloping horizon remains an offence, a breach of decorum. The rectangle demands to be squared up, levelled, disciplined with a spirit level. A circle cannot be squint; it has no privileged orientation. A rectangle, by contrast, enforces uprightness. It asks to be corrected. Order becomes virtue.

Smartphones appear at first to disrupt this regime with their elongated oblongs, but they do not escape it. They merely exaggerate the rectangle, preserving its logic while intensifying its grip. Everything is still framed, bounded, scrolled, aligned. The rectangle adapts rather than yields.

The deeper issue is that format comes to stand in for thought. Students begin to believe that working “properly” means choosing the right size, the correct orientation, the expected proportions. Risk is relocated from seeing to formatting. The question shifts from “What does this want to be?” to “What does this fit into?” The frame precedes the image.
Art education compounds this by treating format as a neutral precondition rather than a decision laden with consequence. Rarely are students asked what the rectangle does to their seeing, what it excludes, what habits it rewards, what kinds of images it makes easier and which it quietly discourages. Tyranny lies in that silence.

To question A sizes and rectangular formats is not to reject them wholesale. It is to insist that they be recognised as conventions rather than natural facts—as inherited solutions with embedded values. Artists need to understand when they are working with a frame and when they are working for it. Sometimes the rectangle is exactly right. Sometimes it is the problem itself.

Until that distinction is visible, the rectangle will continue to masquerade as common sense, and common sense will continue to shape visual art unnoticed.

Brainwashed by Mind Maps

 

Mind maps pretend to liberate thought while quietly confining it. They replace the mutability of imagining with paperwork. What begins as a diagram ends as an identity parade of ideas, each reduced to a noun, each forced to justify its position by proximity and hierarchy. Nothing slippery or uncertain survives.

The core damage is linguistic. To place something on a mind map you must name it, and naming is an act of domestication. Words freeze experience into concepts; they extract the general from the particular and discard what does not travel well. Tone, ambiguity, sensory residue, half-perceived relations—all the pre-verbal material where art often makes its appearance—has no legal status on the page. If it can’t be labelled, it can’t exist. 

This is not clarification; it’s erasure., omission, exclusion.

Concepts tyrannise imagination by demanding coherence too early. A mind map insists that ideas are already discrete, already related in knowable ways, already stable enough to be arranged. But early-stage thinking is none of these things. It is fog, pressure, rhythm, irritation, attraction, an ineffable impulse or craving. Forcing this material into bubbles and spokes substitutes the appearance of thinking for the act itself. It rewards premature certainty and punishes productive confusion. The radial structure is not neutral. It enforces a fantasy of origin and control: a central node from which everything sensibly emanates. This is ideology disguised as insight. It implies that ideas start from a core intention rather than from accidents, mishearings, failures, obsessions, or even out of the blue. It flatters the author as a manager of meaning--a functionary of language— instead of acknowledging that thinking often arrives abruptly—sputtering, looping, colliding with itself.

Mind maps privilege relationships that can be seen over relationships that must be felt. Visual adjacency becomes a proxy for significance. If two things sit near each other they are assumed to be related, even if their real connection is tonal, temporal, or entirely unconscious. Conversely, ideas that resonate deeply but cannot be diagrammatically justified drift apart and die. The map trains you to trust geometry over intuition. In educational settings this becomes disciplinary. Students learn that thinking is something you can show, audit, and grade. The requirement to produce a mind map externalises cognition into a sanctioned form, teaching that unstructured thought is suspect unless translated into approved symbols. The message is clear: if your thinking does not look like this, it does not count. What is being trained is not imagination but compliance.

Language on a mind map becomes shorthand to the point of fraud. 

Words are stripped of grammar, context, and tension, turning complex positions into bullet-point husks. Verbs vanish. Qualifiers vanish. Contradictions vanish. What remains are nouns that look decisive and portable—exactly the kind of language that makes bad art theory and bloodless work. The map does not encourage depth; it encourages summarisation.

There is also a quiet hostility to time. Mind maps are static snapshots masquerading as process. They suggest that thinking can be captured whole, laid out, reviewed. But real idea development involves drift, delay, return, forgetting. It involves thoughts that only make sense after weeks of unconscious fermentation. Mapping interrupts this by demanding visibility now. It treats latency as a flaw instead of a condition. Worst of all, mind maps cultivate a belief that thinking is something you do before making. They sit comfortably with a design-world myth that execution merely follows conception. For artists, this is corrosive. Many ideas only exist through making; they are discovered in material resistance, error, and repetition. The mind map relocates authority from the studio to the page, from action to description.

In the end, mind maps don’t free imagination from linearity; they replace one rigid sequence with another, more palatable one. They translate uncertainty into structure and call it creativity. What they really teach is how to think in ways that can be explained, justified, and assessed, how to look like you have thoughts rather than how to have them.

The form itself compounds the damage. Mind maps pose as visual, yet they actively suppress visual thinking. The circles, boxes, arrows and colours are treated as neutral carriers of meaning rather than as materials with visual force and nuance. For visual art students this is particularly perverse. Line weight, hesitation, pressure, density, smudge, tear, smear—everything they are otherwise taught to notice and exploit—is suddenly irrelevant. The page becomes a clipboard rather than a surface. 

The hand is reduced to a delivery mechanism for concepts.

Texture is ignored because texture does not “mean” in a way that can be assessed. Grain is ignored because it does not label. Tonality is ignored because it resists categorisation. Inflection is ignored because it introduces ambiguity. The mind map quietly teaches that these qualities are decorative at best and distracting at worst. Even when colour is used, it is typically codified: this colour equals this category. Sensation is subordinated to sorting. The visual field is instrumentalised. This produces a strange double blindness. Students who might be exquisitely sensitive to nuance in a drawing, painting or photograph become astonishingly crude when organising thought. They accept default markers, default pens, default digital interfaces without question. They reproduce the same bubbles, the same hierarchies, the same left-to-right logic, over and over. The result is visual monotony masquerading as clarity. A hundred students, a hundred “individual” ideas, all rendered in the same bureaucratic dialect.

The conventions of information presentation are almost completely invisible to them, precisely because they are framed as tools rather than as forms. Lists, maps, flowcharts, folders, slide decks—these are treated as transparent windows onto thinking rather than as highly contingent cultural artefacts with built-in assumptions about order, causality and value. The fact that a mind map already decides what thinking is allowed to look like goes unexamined. The medium disappears, and with it any chance of resistance.

Art education often reinforces this blindness by treating these devices as preparatory, not worthy of scrutiny. The sketchbook is policed for “development” content while the form that development takes is naturalised. Students are rarely asked why ideas must be gathered this way, what is lost when they are, or what other kinds of knowing are excluded. The administrative need for legibility quietly overrides the pedagogical need for ideas literally outside the box.

Material neglect is not incidental here; it is ideological. To attend seriously to paper quality, edge, absorption, drag, pressure, or the acoustics of a scribble would immediately destabilise the fiction that the mind map is about pure ideas. It would reveal thinking as embodied, time-bound, mood-driven and inconsistent. That is precisely what the convention works to suppress. Conceptual clarity is achieved by papering over the evidence of human thought.

Breaking this requires more than telling students they are “allowed” to experiment. It requires actively making the conventions visible as conventions: exposing their histories, their defaults, their limitations. It means encouraging misuse, sabotage, overloading, refusal. Let organisation become noisy, tactile, repetitive, overwritten, upside-down, too slow, too fast. Let marks contradict labels. Let the material fight back.

If art students ever use mind maps, or any other organising tool, they should do so with their eyes open, conscious of what the form demands and what it forbids. Otherwise they are not thinking creatively; they are merely complying elegantly. Orthodoxy presented as workflow is still orthodoxy, and no amount of coloured pens will make it otherwise.

In Honour of Donald Brook

From the cover of "Get a Life", Donald Brook, 2014.

The following is from a memorial service held in honour of Donald Brook (1927-2018) held at the Ron Radford Auditorium – Art Gallery of South Australia, Thursday 7 March, 2019.


When invited to give a lecture to accompany a group exhibition in 2015, Donald didn’t attempt to massage any egos or to ingratiate himself by means of praise and adulation for the work presented. Instead he made an important observation about the difference between art on the one hand and works of art on the other; between the discovery of repeatable acts of ingenuity and a particular class of items, only very few of which are the result of such acts. I suspect that this was a great disappointment to his audience. After all, not even the most incorrigible art enthusiast is likely to welcome the suggestion that their favourite works of art are almost certainly bereft of art.

Donald was obviously well aware of “the awful truth about what art is”—of the logical impossibility of our ever deliberately making art. Works of art, on the other hand, are easily contrived, but the discovery of new forms of ingenuity—art in this stricter sense—is not a contrivable circumstance. Donald’s slogan “Art is the driver of cultural evolution” was never about works of art, it was always about innovations that change the face of culture.

He never stated it explicitly, but Donald’s theory of art is a theory of illumination, insight, discovery and revelation. It is a revelation about revelation itself. However, if art has almost nothing to do with works of art and even less to do with the machinations of the artworld, then it follows that art theory is not what we usually take it to be. More to the point—and I’m sure Donald recognised this with more than a pinch of irony—it follows that as an art theorist he really was one of a kind! Had he lost his marbles? Was he playing with words? Or worse still, was he Theorising with a capital T? No. None of these. He was merely following the logic of the most important philosopher of his lifetime: Ludwig Wittgenstein.

For Wittgenstein, as for Donald—indeed for all of us—representational communication is a sociocultural enterprise. It necessarily emerges at the level of communities, not at the level of individuals or their subsystems. In recent years, Donald took this insight a stage further by linking art, cultural evolution, nonverbal representation and purposeful action in what might be regarded as a unified theory of revelation. I realise this may appear grandiose. But put simply, Donald’s work enables us to see that the discovery of new forms of action is only possible in virtue of skills that we first gain as members of a community and moreover as users of representations.

Wittgenstein once famously invoked Goethe by declaring “In the beginning was the deed.” He was referring to the origins of language. Donald long knew, and very frequently argued, that this must necessarily have been a nonverbal deed. But we are now in a position to see that this first deed was in fact art: the first ever discovery of a repeatable act of ingenuity. In the beginning was art! This is a momentous realisation with profound implications.

It wasn’t only Newton who stood on the shoulders of giants. We all do. But Donald stood taller than most, and by standing on his shoulders we have an opportunity to appreciate the intimate relations between art and representation. As the privileged inheritors of everything that comes with our elevated position we owe it not just to Donald’s memory but to one another, in the broadest sense, not to squander his insights or the clarity that comes from his vantage point. We owe it to humankind—to art in fact—to revisit his work, to share it, to discuss it, to make use of his insights and thereby, and most especially, to ensure that his discoveries do not languish in obscurity. Culture flourishes in virtue of the things we repeat, not in virtue of the coruscating flotsam that we leave in our wake. Donald lives on not merely or even mainly in the vividness or vagueness of our memories but in the public sharing of his outstanding contributions to culture.

I miss him dearly, but I never cease to be astounded by the light that Donald’s work continues to shed.

Farewell Donald

Your friend Jim
Glasgow, February, 2019.

Death, Metaphysical Darkness and Revelation

 

©Artlink Australia, 2013 

Sadly, my friend and mentor, the British-Australian art theorist Donald Brook, died last month at the age of 91. I will dearly miss our correspondence, his encouragement, advice and inimitable wit. Over the last seven years, we exchanged more than 1700 emails, almost all of which are on the subject of representation and cultural evolution. For someone of his advanced years, he was always incredibly lucid and insightful and I often felt humbled by his keen intelligence. Despite the complexity of the many issues we discussed, he almost always found a way to inject humour into the discussion and it was rare that he failed to respond to the many rabbits that I sent running across the field (as he once teased me for doing). The following is his last email to me, written shortly after my previous post on this blog. 

Hi Jim:

Yes, you are right. I was trying to compress too much into what I was trying to say in a single sentence (or two).

An individual kangaroo is an item of the kangaroo kind. The kangaroo kind evolves, whereas the individual kangaroo does not evolve. The variation of complex genetic constitution that is subjected (significantly but not exclusively) to external environmental pressures is responsible for the evolution of the kind of animal.

Similarly an individual cubist painting (or an individual greeting by handshake) is an item of the cubist painting kind (or of the relevant greeting kind). The variation of complex memetic constitution that is subjected (significantly but not exclusively to revelatory discoveries) is responsible for the evolution of the relevant cultural kind.

I don't know how I came to identify memes with cultural kinds (or, indeed with items of cultural kinds), unless it was in a misguided effort to associate memetic activity so intimately with cultural evolution (or with cultural kinds) that I could move on unimpeded to the point about the idea of self-consciousness being logically dependent upon the manifest existence of other items of the same kind as oneself that are regularly and predictably manipulable by the performance of behaviours that qualify (because one can represent them and their anticipated consequences in advance) as actions.

I'm sorry to say that my head has most of the dominant characteristics, these days, of a boiled cabbage.

Donald

As is often the case with Brook’s writing, the convolutions of the cabbage can be a little forbidding. Basically, our conversation was about Brook’s theory of cultural evolution. “Meme” is a technical term, originally coined by Richard Dawkins, conceived as the cultural equivalent of the biological “gene”. Unlike other meme theorists, Brook insists that items of culture cannot be memes for the same reason that items of a biological kind (“members of a species” if you prefer) cannot be genes. It makes no more sense to say that a slogan or song is a meme (in the meme theorist’s sense) than it does to say that a kangaroo or a carrot is a gene. For Brook, repeatable actions are the only logical equivalent of genes. If meme theory was clear on this point, then perhaps it wouldn’t be languishing in obscurity.

I don’t wish to attack or defend meme theory here, but rather to discuss theory itself and especially theory as it relates to the work of Donald Brook. Earlier this month I attended a conference with the title: “Philosophy of Film Without Theory”. I was attracted to the conference especially because of its focus on the rejection of theorisation and the likelihood that it would include discussion of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views on theory. I wasn’t disappointed.

Of the papers presented, the first was undoubtedly the most relevant to my interests. Dr Andrew Klevan, from the University of Oxford gave a paper about Ordinary Language Philosophy. Like Wittgenstein, most Ordinary Language Philosophers were very wary of the philosophical tendency towards theorisation born of what Wittgenstein called a “craving for generality”. These philosophers devoted themselves to the study of the ways that we use language and to dissolving the sorts of confusions that arise when certain words or phrases are used in unfamiliar or inappropriate contexts.  Somewhat relatedly, and this is something that Klevan emphasised, Wittgenstein is often quoted as declaring that “Nothing is hidden!” He urged philosophers not to regard human intentions or the rules of language as being somehow mysteriously concealed from view but as being fully manifested in the things that we do and say.

At one point in his presentation, Klevan mentioned how understanding can sometimes strike one as a “revelation”. Afterwards, I asked him whether he saw any conflict between the idea of revelation and Wittgenstein’s view that nothing is hidden. He agreed about the appearance of a conflict, but he wasn’t worried by it. What Wittgenstein objected to, was the tendency to make generalisations and essentialist claims about the nature of the world. He had no quarrel with the possibility of illumination. Getting clear about something—understanding it—is usually a more modest enterprise than theorisation. It doesn’t seek to convert the uninitiated.

But what about the theories of Donald Brook? Was he attempting to theorise in the way that scientists do; in the way that Wittgenstein claimed leads philosophers into complete metaphysical darkness? I don’t think so. The roots of Brook’s approach lie firmly planted in the soil of Ordinary Language Philosophy and in the rough ground of non-verbal representation. He freely acknowledged the importance of J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle and Wittgenstein in the development of his philosophical approach and he was evidently convinced that conceptual analysis is key to disentangling metaphysical muddles. Nonetheless, Brook seemed to have no qualms about describing himself as a theorist and there is little doubt that he felt that genuine insights can sometimes be revealed through careful theorisation. Indeed, one of his books, “The Awful Truth about what Art is”, is in many ways a theory of revelation. I’ll try to explain.

Brook begins, like any Ordinary Language Philosopher, by examining the concept of “art”. He notes that we use the term in two quite different ways. For example, we commonly speak of things like the “art of pastry making” or the “art of motorcycle maintenance”. On the other hand, we speak of objects and events broadly recognised as art by the artworld. So, at this point, Brook is merely making a perfectly reasonable distinction. 

Brook’s next step is to remind us of what we all already know: “Art is not instantiated in every work of art just as sucrose is not instantiated in every date; and certainly not in dates such as the 17th of September.” Brook playfully uses this homonym to echo the two senses of the word “art”, but his point is worth emphasis. We don’t need to be cynical to know that there is no prospect of finding art in every object regarded as work of art. And we also know that there is plenty of art to be found outside the objects, institutions and norms of the artworld.

Brook then goes on to show that we commonly distinguish between artworks or works of art on the one hand and art on the other. No sign of metaphysical darkness so far!

So, what does Brook suggest art is? In this sense, art is the revelation of the genuinely new and significant. To discover something new is to gain a previously unrealised ability, whether this be a new way of representing the structure of the universe, a new way of doing the high jump or a new way of splitting the atom. Repeatable actions (or memes according to Brook's important revision) lie at the core of this understanding and are the reason for the recognised parallel between memetic evolution and biological evolution. As Brook often put it: art is “memetic innovation”. It is the “driver of cultural evolution.”

Of course, Brook’s theory demands that we view the concept of “art” with a different lens, but I don’t think he is making any metaphysical claims. I suppose it might be argued that he is making an essentialist claim about “what art is”. That can hardly be denied. But if he has been led into complete darkness, it seems to me that he has taken a very bright light with him and there is a lot to be gained from the illumination it provides.