Observational Drawing (a misnomer)

Art teachers often regard the techniques and discipline of observational drawing to be a fundamental skill for the preparation and production of artworks. To be skilled in observational drawing is to have acquired a range of sophisticated competences that only highly intelligent creatures are capable of learning — skills that have gradually emerged through cultural evolution and that in many cases have only been discovered in very recent history. Observational drawing is one of these remarkably late additions to our cultural toolkit.

Observational drawing is distinguished from other kinds of drawing by being specifically directed towards the depiction of observed objects and scenes as opposed to the depiction of imaginary or remembered subjects. It requires careful scrutiny and is an extremely time consuming skill both to learn and to practice, especially so in a world averse to all forms of delayed gratification. 

Observational drawing is difficult not only because its techniques do not come easily but because in many ways it involves one of the most contradictory and absurd forms of observation known to exist. In short, it demands the deliberate restriction of observation in the following ways: maintaining a fixed point of view, closing one eye and occasionally squinting. None of these procedures is essential to observational drawing but without them, it becomes a significantly more challenging prospect both to learn and to perform.

It should be obvious that our perceptual skills are not perfect. But the reason they are not perfect has almost everything to do with our sensory capacities and very little to do with our brains. When we see a balloon "disappear" into the distance we do not suppose that it has actually vanished. All that has happened is that our retinas are no longer picking up sufficient stimuli for us to see the balloon. The further things recede, the less we see of them. The same goes for failing light. At a certain point the cones of the eye become insensitive and only the intensity-sensitive rods are stimulated. As the light continues to dim, even the rods become insensitive. Likewise, when we squint at a scene, in order to draw tonal values, we deliberately restrict the sensory stimulation to our intensity-sensitive rods.

So it turns out that observational drawing is actually a very restricted form of observation, a pseudo, quasi, or partial observation — a form of looking that we have to strive both to learn and to perform because in many important respects it goes against everything that perception has evolved to do, i.e., to see things as they actually are.

Realism and Reality

Despite the fact that more distant objects are projected at a smaller scale onto the retina than closer objects, it is crucial that we perceive the size of distant sources of food, predators etc. as accurately as possible. If our ancestors had perceived proximate objects as larger than distant objects, their chances of survival would have been severely limited. One of the major evolutionary obstacles for the development of visual processing therefore, must have been to overcome the fact that distant objects are projected onto the eye in this way. What we see when we look at distant fruit is distant fruit, not tiny little tidbits. Nonetheless, when we draw distant fruit we have to render them at a smaller scale than closer fruit. It is nothing less than extraordinary that this technique works at all, let alone that it leads us to say that pictorial images look realistic. And it is no wonder also that it took us so long to discover one of the most important strategies for producing such images: perspective.

According to the influential educational psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980), young children do not draw “what they see”, they draw what they know. In Piaget’s view the child is not capable of “pure observation” but instead “he sees the world as if he had previously constructed it with his own mind.” Piaget’s theory has its origins in the philosophical doctrine of Subjective Idealism, a view that conceives of perception as a mental construct, an inner analogue of the external world - a world to which we have no direct access. Traces of this doctrine inform the work of many theorists and educationalists, both past and present, including John Ruskin and Georges-Henri Luquet whose work greatly influenced Piaget. Both Luquet and Piaget claimed that children’s drawings develop from “intellectual realism” (i.e. what children know) towards “visual realism” (i.e. what they see).

So, according to this theory, when we draw with visual realism, we draw what we see. But does this really stand up to scrutiny? Visual realism and reality (what we actually perceive) are by no means the same and it doesn’t follow therefore that there is a simple correlation between what we see and visual realism. If there were, we probably wouldn’t need to distinguish between the real and the unreal, between the real and the realistic, between reality and realism.

We take it as given that everything we see is real and we reserve words like ‘realism’ and ‘realistic’ for representations. So, to say that photographs are realistic is to say very little about what we actually see.

It should be obvious that we have evolved to see the world – as far as is humanly possible – exactly as it is. And whilst pictures look like the world, the two are not interchangeable. Our terminology has evolved in its own ways to reflect this fact.

No matter how realistic an image might be and no matter how susceptible we are, in certain rare circumstances, to mistake images for reality, there is never some point at which pictorial realism gradually or suddenly becomes full blown reality. There is no special lens, no magical painterly potion, no mystical technique that will ever transform a depiction into reality. Realism is forever barred entry into the kingdom of the real.

For a child learning to draw, it is a significant challenge to acquire the many skills necessary to convert three-dimensional experience into two-dimensional depictions. Fortunately children are surrounded by examples (pictures) that show them that the feat is possible. But one of the most significant things that stands in their way is a formidable evolutionary background in which the perception of a distant predator has always been the perception of a distant predator, not the perception of a cute little predator looking at us with hunger in its eyes.

Representing Neurons

Last year several websites posted articles about the research of David B. Hay and co-researchers (Darren Williams, Daniel Stahl, Richard Wingate) who published a paper investigating the drawing styles of undergraduates, trainee scientists, and leading neuroscience researchers when making drawings of neurons. The following image shows the three sets of drawings. 

The upper line was produced by undergraduate students and shows a close adherence to textbook diagrams whilst the mid line was produced by PhD students and postdoctoral researchers more familiar with neurons under the microscope. The lower line of drawings was produced by expert neuroscientists and shows the greatest variety of approaches to the task.

The research of Hay et al claims that:

“The analysis strongly suggests that a willingness/ability to hybridize extant brain cell knowledge with imaginative conjecture grounded by experience of experimental plausibility gives rise to drawings that are recognized as being ‘expert signatures’ by all classes of participants.”

In other words there was general agreement that the drawings of expert neuroscientists were more “creative,” and on the back of this conclusion various visualization techniques were employed to encourage undergraduate students to be more inventive with their visualisations of neurons. Apparently at the end of this process the drawings of the undergraduates were indistinguishable from the drawings of the experts.

The ability to visualize ideas on paper (and increasingly on screen) is a valuable means of stimulating theories, testing hypotheses and communicating ideas. It is also an important tool in science education - and education in general in fact - because it allows concepts to be digested quickly and efficiently thus optimizing learning and often making it more enjoyable in the process. I’m sure I wasn’t the only child to have wished that physics, biology and chemistry could have involved a lot more drawing and visualization. But what is often missed in the drive towards optimal learning is the value of lateral approaches to concept generation. Students are often treated as inert vessels that need to be crammed full of facts and it is assumed that once these facts have been assimilated that other more lateral skills will emerge of their own accord – or more worryingly - that such skills are superfluous to the advancement of science.

Clearly the work of Hay et al intends to counter such narrow-mindedness and for this reason it should be applauded. Nonetheless, I have several reservations about the way that the study interprets the theory and practice and drawing and the conclusions it makes about creativity in both educational and expert settings.

Different kinds of drawing serve different kinds of purposes and it is vital to understand that these differences have nothing to do with ‘expert signatures.’ When undergraduate students draw neurons the reference material they are given tends to be diagrammatic - usually diagrams in which certain details have been exaggerated in order to make them more informative for a wide variety of applications. When these students draw a neuron they are expected to copy the diagram. Strictly speaking, when a student copies a diagram they produce a predominantly matching representation of the predominantly symbolizing  illustration. So, what they end up with - and few people ever acknowledge this subtle but obvious fact - is a drawing that represents two things simultaneously: a neuron and a diagram of a neuron.  And in either case the strategy of representation is significantly different.

When a PhD student or postdoctoral researcher draws a neuron seen under a microscope they are most likely seeking to produce an image that closely resembles what they see. Even if they are asked to draw a neuron from memory, they are likely to attempt this form of simulating representation. Equally, if their branch of research isn’t concerned with observing neurons under a lens, then it is likely that their drawings will be more like those of an expert neuroscientist, as several of the drawings confirm.

When an expert neuroscientist draws a neuron they are clearly not interested in simulating what neurons look-like. They are probably more interested in how neurons function and their drawings tend to be more schematic because they intend to symbolise what they believe to be salient neuronal processes.

So, when Hay et al ask undergraduate students to experiment with alternative methods of representing neurons they are encouraging different ways of thinking about the features and functions of neurons. This is good. But when they assume that expert drawings are more “creative” they make an important error that is easily exemplified. When a doctor scrawls a prescription, even if it is perfectly legible to the pharmacist, this is no evidence of creative flair and we are right not to seek to encourage aspiring doctors to develop similarly idiosyncratic writing styles. Where information is concerned the style of communication is completely irrelevant. What matters is the purpose.

If experimentation with different forms of representation leads to insights then it is obviously important to exploit this practice. But if the representations produced are uninformative, or worse still if they lead to bad medicine, then there is little point in promoting them, no matter how creative they are claimed to be.

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Thanks to James Atherton for posting the link.

Appearances: Seeing, Perceiving and Drawing (Part 1 of 4)

To speak of appearances, as many aestheticians, philosophers and art teachers do, is to talk in a very particular way about the things that we see. It is to suggest a vaguely sceptical attitude in which the entire realm of the visual is understood as being somewhat deceptive, faulty, incomplete or illusory. Appearances are conceived in this way as something 'out there' in the world that we passively receive. Things are thought to present themselves to us through appearances, and in so doing they undergo distortions that make them 'seem' not as we know they are. A commonly cited example would be the circular disk that is believed to 'appear' as an ellipse when tilted relative to our position.

To 'appear' is to come into view but it is also to ‘seem’. The latter form must surely be the one most commonly intended in descriptions of appearances. It is certainly unlikely that anyone would seriously suggest that appearances involve any form of active agency or any wilful determination on the part of objects to reveal or obstruct their apprehension: to 'present' themselves. Yet there remains a suggestion that appearances are objective properties of things. To speak of appearances in this way is to pay surprisingly little attention to the role of perception – indeed it is to regard perception as being only indirectly related to appearances. If appearances are indeed attributes of things located out there in the world then they must, of necessity, precede perception - they must come before it and can be in no way dependent upon it.

A tilted disk cannot be both an ellipse and a circular disk at the same time. We all know that a tilted disk is a tilted disk and not an ellipse, no matter how much art teachers might insist that what we are in fact seeing is an ellipse; if only we would look hard enough to see what is in front of our eyes. A significant proportion of the teaching of representational drawing is predicated upon this notion of appearances – as if everything we see were in fact some kind of pre-packaged two-dimensional representation that we simply have to copy onto paper, as if ellipses and foreshortening and negative space etc. were uncomplicated objective properties of the world. If this were the case one wonders why children and the naïve are so unanimous in their conviction that circles are circular. Have they not yet learned to look? And if looking comes before knowing – as it surely does – wouldn’t they be able to draw what they see before they can draw what they know?

Contrary to popular opinion, what children and the naïve draw is not the product of a lack of looking or even a lack of visual discrimination on their part nor is it a lack of dexterity. If you think that children lack dexterity then you should look again. Beyond the mere scribbles of infants, in nearly every child’s drawing I have ever seen, their ability to join the ends of a circle is practically faultless. If this doesn’t prove that children can manipulate pencils with a high degree of accuracy then I don’t know what test would.

It is very true that children draw what they know rather than what they see. We could go further than this and say that what children and the naïve draw is not what they see, they draw what they perceive. Perceiving is not another word for seeing. Perceiving is our response to things seen. Perceiving is the knowledge we form on the basis of what we see and therefore children strive to draw what they perceive – what they know of what they see.

To say that what the naïve artist needs to do if they wish to produce photorealistic drawings is simply to look harder or to see more exactly is presumptuous at best. To believe that the failure of untrained and naïve artists to draw perspectivally correct images is due to a lack of observation skills - of attention to appearances - flies in the face of millennia of representations by innumerable artists, many of whom have devoted their lives to image-making and the disciplined observation of the visible.

What the naïve artist needs to learn is not to see better or to look harder but to acquire the sophisticated strategies of perspectival simulation and pictorial representation. By doing so they will continue to see things just like the rest of us but their perception will have changed in a fundamental way: they will now know how to make pictorial representations of tilted disks, and much else besides.

Drawing and Representing

The other day a colleague sent me the following quote from Emma Dexter’s Introduction to “Vitamin D New Perspectives in Drawing”:

“Drawing is everywhere. We are surrounded by it,  it is sewn into the warp and weft of our lives: we practice it as one of our earliest experiences as schoolchildren, and as parents we treasure the drawings made by our offspring like nothing else. People draw everywhere in the world; drawing can even be used as a global visual language when verbal communication fails. As adults we use it pragmatically to sketch our own maps and plans, but we also use it to dream  in doodles and scribbles. We use drawing to denote ourselves, our existence within a scene; in the urban context, for example, graffiti acts as a form of drawing within an expanded field. Indeed, drawing is part of our interrelation to our physical environment, recording in and on it, the presence of the human. It is the means by which we can understand and map, decipher, and come to terms with our surroundings as we leave marks, tracks, or shadows to mark our passing. Footprints, in the snow, breath on the window, vapor trails of a plane across the sky, lines traced by a finger in the sand  we literally draw in and on the material world. Drawing is part of what it means to be human…”

My colleague is considering using this quote as part of a drawing project and asked my opinion of it. I responded by saying (perhaps a little cantankerously) that:

“the quote rests on an unspoken but questionable division between drawing on one hand and representing on the other. I'd suggest that it is actually representing that Dexter is speaking of, not just drawing. And by that I mean the full range of media from static 2D media through  film, to audio, performance and poetry etc. Drawing is a medium. It just so happens that it is also common to a number of - but by no means all - processes that are used by artists. Representing, on the other hand is used, not just by artists, but by everyone.”

In the arts we have inherited divisions between media that have dominated the teaching and conceptualisation of art for centuries and, sadly, in the process we have also inherited much of the hierarchical thinking that accompanies them. The fact that drawing has been seen to have a subsidiary role to other disciplines like sculpture, painting and printmaking is because drawing was long considered to be a fundamental skill or core activity and was consequently not recognised as the medium that it very definitely is.

“Drawing is the primal means of symbolic communication, which predates and embraces writing and functions as a tool of conceptualization parallel with language.” Deanna Petherbridge, “The Primacy of Drawing”

No doubt the expediency of drawing has also led to its relegation amongst its more ‘noble’ peers, since the disciplines of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking are often far more labour intensive in their manufacture, and skilled labour – especially resolute skilled labour - is often highly valued.

The reason it is so vital to recognise drawing as a medium equivalent to sculpture or printmaking etc. is because in this way we can better appreciate what happens when it is taught as a core activity. By doing so - by taking a medium and teaching it as if it were a fundamental skill - we actually reinforce the doctrine of drawing as a subsidiary process whilst also obscuring its position as one of any number of tools that comprise the wider set of practices that we might call Representation. If we teach drawing in this way then it makes little sense to exclude other equally important skills like modelling, photography, moving-image making or even gesture, song, music, dance, writing etc.

Let me be clear though. I am not advocating the dilution of art education to a smorgasbord of very different and often incompatible processes (try making sculpture out of song) but rather I'm trying to show that drawing is no more a core skill than photography is. Core to what? Core to representing? Not even nearly.

Representing (verb) unlike drawing, painting and sculpture (noun?) etc. is not a medium. Representing is what we do with media. Representing encapsulates all forms of communication and it is representing , not drawing, that is the primal means of  communication, which predates and embraces writing, language, drawing, painting, photography etc. and functions as a set of tools and processes of conceptualization without parallel.

There are two reasons why we might want to give increased attention to drawing in the teaching of art. Firstly, drawing is comparatively difficult to master and secondly (and, I would argue, much more importantly) it slows down the process of observation and can lead to greater sensitisation to its own processes, to the subject at hand and by extension to the work of other artists. I’m all for that. But let’s not forget what drawing is. Drawing is a medium, and like any other medium it can be used to compliment, underpin, resolve and contradict other media and like all other media it is just one tool amongst many that allow us to create representations. Representing is not just part of what it means to be human, it is perhaps the very essence of what it means to be human.

What Can Drawing Teach Us About Perception?

When drawing, we do not take in everything as a whole in the manner of a camera. We do not 'see' the whole arranged in every interconnected detail as one complete mass of unified information but rather we scan across the scene, picking up on specific details that capture our attention or that seem salient to the overall impression. So whilst we may form an overview, and can even sketch this in rough outline as a guide, in order to proceed it is necessary to work on each detail individually, even if we deliberately flit back and forth across the drawing, building up the whole through a skein of accumulating detail. In order to do so we work from impressions towards increasing complexity and our observations record a deepening perception of each detail as it corresponds to the overall scene. Detail doesn't arrive all at once, neither as representation nor as perception but emerges only through scrutiny.

Concentration

Studies in Line

"Cloudburst", Leonardo da Vinci

"Cloudburst", Leonardo da Vinci

"Deluge", Leonardo da Vinci

"Deluge", Leonardo da Vinci

Drawing out the Core

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?

Creative for whom?

When I first began one of my current teaching jobs I was tasked with the additional responsibility of leading a life drawing class once a week. Back when I was a student of Fine Art Photography we had to attend life drawing classes one day a week, the theory being that such skills were essential to the budding artist of whatever discipline. I actually enjoyed the classes and on a good day I could turn out one or two fairly reasonable drawings. So when the responsibility befell me to lead a weekly life drawing class I felt it was my duty to make the sessions as engaging and creative as possible, in part, I guess, to mask my lack of experience. Perhaps this is the telltale sign of all eager new teachers: an overzealous determination to have an appreciable influence. I remember frequent nights lying awake trying to think up innovative new exercises and ways to reinterpret the conventions of the life room. Each week I’d come armed with yet another alternative take on the subject, a new approach, set of rules or limitations. One week I had the students bring thick charcoal but instead of doing drawings I got them to sculpt the charcoal with scalpel blades. Another week I had the model pose in one room whilst the students walked back and forth to their easels in another room whilst desperately trying to cling to the memory of what they had just seen. Other times I had one student describe the model while another had to draw from the description. I had a whole list of such exercises.

Many of the students clearly enjoyed the classes and found them stimulating and challenging. We’d often get involved in group discussions about the different obstacles and solutions. I always felt that I had plenty of challenges up my sleeve, even for the most accomplished students.

However, despite the generally positive feedback there were nonetheless students who were less engaged and who would comment occasionally that they never felt they had a chance to simply draw in a more conventional fashion. These students almost always tended to be less confident and it was clear that they yearned for an opportunity to consolidate their skills rather than being constantly disrupted in their perceptions. They sought fixed parameters against which they could evaluate their progress. They longed for the feedback of seeing their current drawing working out better than the last one. Rather than creative stimulation they desired the opportunity for practice.

Slowly it dawned on me that the problem lay with my assumption that the classes had to be creative all the time. What I’d managed to do was demonstrate - to show off in fact - how constantly inventive I could be, rather than supporting the students and helping them to become more confident with their own risk taking and uncertainty. Indeed, my creativity wasn’t just intimidating them, it was almost literally tying their hands behind their backs.

Tread softly because you step on my beans

I’ve been sent the above image by a reader of an earlier post. The image is by a young schoolchild - let’s call him Al – who has evidently been asked to produce a drawing and write a sentence to accompany it. Below his sentence is the teacher’s translation, presumably from Al’s verbal description.

Al’s character; Kasper, is rendered as a catlike being with whiskers, pointed ears, two spindly legs and arrows for arms. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch of the imagination to say that this image and accompanying sentence indicate that Al is thinking about what it means to nurture something: to sew a seed. It’s about cultivating a small grain of potential with the hope of seeing it blossom and bear fruit. As yet, the bean is simply an unassuming nondescript thing, but, as every child knows, beans should never be underestimated because someday they will become beanstalks. Kasper plants a bean. Al draws Kasper. Kasper is a cat. Cats are pets which, like beans (and children) need to be treated with care.

In a brilliant essay on adult paternalistic stupidity in the face of children’s passionate fascination with cartoons, Dave Hickey explains why the “spectacle of ebullient, articulate, indestructible animals” was such a vital antidote to the incomprehensible frailty of pets:

“What we did not grasp was just exactly why the blazing spectacle of lawn-mowed cats, and exploding puppies, talking ducks, and plummeting coyotes was so important to us. Today, it’s clear to me that I grew up in a generation of children whose first experience of adult responsibility involved the care of animals – dogs, cats, horses, parakeets – all of whom, we soon learned, were breathlessly vulnerable, if we didn’t take care.” (Air Guitar, Essays on Art and Democracy)

Kids feel these things. They grow to understand that they’re part of a chain of care and responsibility. They have to learn to attend to things which respond, often in very subtle ways, to their care. Children in turn, are cared for and it is the ways they are cared for which, in turn, model and influence their own acts of caring.

I realise that I’m laying it on pretty thick here but I think it’s important to acknowledge the huge disparity between what Al is talking about in his own simple way and his teacher’s utter lack of sympathetic awareness (tact). Sure, his sentence construction is poor but the response from the teacher is simply deplorable: a “well done” (praise) and an admonishment to think about his targets, when what he clearly needs is constructive suggestions and encouragement – after all, he has attempted to use a past participle when a wiser child (or more compliant one even) would have chosen to write in the present tense: “Kasper plants a bean.” or “Kasper kicks a ball.” or easier still: "Jack kicks a ball." You see, that's one of the risks with imposed targets: they discourage risk taking and encourage devious corner cutting. At least deviousness requires some inventive creativity, but then, such teachers soon stamp out this tendency at the first opportunity too.

But let’s be fair. Perhaps this teacher was overworked. Perhaps s/he had very little experience or confidence in interpreting children’s drawings. Perhaps s/he felt that legibility and grammar was the paramount objective (“target”). All of these things are probably true and ultimately, let’s face it, it’s only a brief comment in a notebook, it’s not going to have any lasting influence on Al – he probably can’t even read it anyway. But to think thus is to entirely miss what education is all about. As John Dewey once wrote: “The effect of an experience is not borne on its face.” In other words, we can’t know the true consequences of our pedagogic actions, and to presume therefore that something will have no lasting effect is simply irresponsible. As Al’s little story deftly illustrates: we can plant our beans, but we’ll never know quite what we’ve planted until they grow up.

Why Bother? (Effort, Achievement and Risk)

Lucy Gunning: “Climbing around my room”. Video, 1993

"...effort is nothing more, and also nothing less, than tension between means and ends in action, and that the sense of effort is the awareness of this conflict." -John Dewey

I was involved in a really interesting series of studio discussions with some of the Photographic and Electronic Media students last week. They were sharing experiences from over the Summer break as a method of reintroducing themselves to thinking about how these experiences and observations might be placed within the context of reflecting upon, discussing and working towards art making. One thing in particular struck me amongst the many fascinating things we discussed - this was the extent to which almost everyone, myself included, had invested time, energy, money and especially expectations in the pursuit of specific experiential encounters: holidays, weddings, childbirth etc. Somehow almost all of us (though there were some exceptions) had bought into to the conventional notion that only these kinds of experiences are worthy of aspiring towards, making an effort for or sharing with other people, whilst everything else - jobs, relationships and a multitude of other 'commonplace' experiences - are merely a necessary part of - or, at best, a pleasant distraction from - our striving to acquire money or opportunities to achieve these other more 'unique' experiences. By way of contrast (though I didn’t mention it at the time) I was reminded of Xavier de Maistre’s extraordinary, but at the same time extraordinarily modest, expeditions:

“…in the spring of 1790, a twenty-seven-year-old Frenchman, Xavier de Maistre, undertook a journey around his bedroom, later entitling the account of what he had seen Journey around My Bedroom. Gratified by his experiences, in 1798, De Maistre undertook a second journey. This time he traveled by night and ventured out as far as the window ledge, later entitling his account Nocturnal Expedition around My Bedroom. […] …it was not Xavier’s intentions to cast aspersions on the heroic deeds of the great travelers of the past: Magellan, Drake, Anson and Cook. …it was just that (de Maestre) had discovered a way of traveling that might be infinitely more practical for those neither as brave or as wealthy as they.” -Alain de Botton

Much as I love this idea of a unique journey amongst the commonplace and familiar and much as I admire artworks that transform our understanding of such experiences, I’m nonetheless tempted to think of this particular case as an inventive but somewhat extreme example of the Principle of Least Effort. Indeed, De Botton goes on to say of De Maistre that: “He particularly recommended room-travel to the poor and to those afraid of storms, robberies, and high cliffs.” This seems a form of travel most suited to the risk averse, the unadventurous and the lazy:

“The most indolent beings won’t have any reason to hesitate before setting off to find pleasures that will cost them neither money nor effort.” -Xavier de Maistre

But is this really laziness? The great beauty of this idea (though it was patently intended as a parody) is it’s wonderfully unconventional simplicity, but would it be true to say that no effort is required? Effort has nothing to do with the grandeur of the ends but rather, as Dewey suggests, the conflict or tension between ends and means. As the games of every child clearly attest, it’s quite possible to create a genuine and engaging challenge even with the most meager of materials or environment. The effort in this instance then, becomes entirely a labour of the imagination: to embark on the journey anew, as if never before travelled and to voyage over each encounter, savoring every intricacy with the curiosity of the most inquisitive and observant tourist.

So what correlations may we draw between effort expended and our sense of achievement?

In psychology there’s a process known as Effort Discounting, which describes how our sense of reward diminishes as effort increases. We naturally tend to prefer low-effort routes to rewards. An analogue of this effect has also been observed in a neurological study published in 2009 by Botvinick, Huffstetler and McGuire. From a survival perspective, effort discounting makes evolutionary sense since there’s very little point in pursuing food, for example, if the resources expended in order to acquire it outweigh the benefit gained. But human tastes are far more complex than this alone would suggest. We often expend inordinate quantities of energy in seeking things to satisfy all manner of strange and exotic desires, despite the fact that these things provide very little in the way of energy return. It’s the promise of pleasure which drives many of these desires - desires that are essentially aesthetic in nature: food, music, art, literature, dance and even holidays. However, even with these unique experiences, we almost always have an underlying sense of how much effort is deserving of the end result and we quickly tire of what we anticipate to be unrewarding pursuits. Equally, when we gain something with unexpected ease the pleasure is often multiplied.

These observations strongly suggest that, as beings, we’re very highly attuned to the economics of effort and reward - to our own individual cost-benefit analysis. But there’s one further set of experiences for which we’re frequently prepared to exert ourselves physically or cognitively and these are processes that are in themselves pleasurable - that provide stimulating feedback or the release of mood elevating endorphins. Many areas of human endeavor exploit this tendency, from sport and exercise to art and craft. There’s little doubt though, that many of these pleasures are acquired tastes and to expect them to arise spontaneously or to be appreciated as immediately gratifying is frequently unrealistic or frustrating. For example, the pleasures of exercise are relatively easily acquired by comparison with the pleasures of creation which require skills and sensitivities that take time and practice to develop:

“Children who have not learned that drawing skill is based on practiced observation will be very frustrated when they reach the next developmental stage. They will wish they could draw more realistically. As they get older, they mistakenly believe that they lack talent while others are gifted in drawing. They give up because they see others who can do better. Art educators refer to this as the "crisis of confidence." -Marvin Bartel

In all this talk of effort and reward there is one further consideration that demands our attention: risk. I’ve written about risk previously, but in that instance it seems I neglected a vital aspect which has only become clear to me through a recent exchange in which I was asked if a grade for effort might be a legitimate method of encouraging students to take risks “particularly in the creative arts, where the "willingness" to fail is such a hard thing to encourage?”

The important thing to bear in mind in relation to effort and risk is that the teacher and student both need to understand, and agree upon, exactly what is being assessed (the "ends" for which effort is being expended and risks taken) and this ideally shouldn't be set by the teacher but rather negotiated between tutor and student (though, of course, this isn't always possible, especially when there's a fixed curriculum to follow).

Much as it might appear to make intuitive sense to grade students on their effort, their “willingness” to expend effort or to take risks should never be c0-opted by the temptation or threat of a grade but rather by the aim of improving what they do to the greatest possible degree. Success should therefore not depend upon an artificial extrinsic reward, but rather on achieving what they set out to achieve or, ideally, even more than they set out to achieve. This is the value of self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation, as opposed to fixation upon rewards, or conversely, being continually reminded of others' “evaluation” of how much effort needs to be put in. Ultimately it comes down to establishing what exactly the student is aiming for, so that the teacher can support them to achieve this - or, if they're aiming for something unrealistically difficult, to encourage them set their sights on something a little more achievable and to help them to see how this is something genuinely worth working towards instead.

Willingness to fail can only come about when students (or anyone for that matter) feels secure enough to take risks. So it's the teacher's - indeed Education's - duty to ensure that every possible measure is taken to alleviate pressure upon students and certainly not to add a little extra in the form of an intimidating or distracting grade for effort.

References:

BARTEL, M., Teaching Observation Drawing to Young Children. Goshen College Publication.[Online]. Available from:http://www2.goshen.edu/~marvinpb/PreSchool/aboutschematic.html

BOTVINICK, M. M. & HUFFSTETLER, S., McGUIRE, J. (2009). Effort discounting in human nucleus accumbens. Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience, 9(1), 16-27. [Online]. Available from:http://www.princeton.edu/~matthewb/Publications/BotvinickETAL_CABN09.pdf

DE BOTTON, A., (2002) The Art of Travel. Penguin. p.243-245

DEWEY, J., (1897). The Psychology of Effort, Philosophical Review 6: 43-56. [Online]. Available from: http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1897.html