Diagrams are forms of drawing that help us to see how things fit together and any system that embraces collaboration, recognises interdependencies, and helps us to understand how everything is interconnected can benefit from being visualised in diagrammatic form.
I can still remember the first diagrams I used in relation to systems thinking. I was undertaking a training course for Further Education managers back in around the mid 1990s. As part of the course I was given a challenge to think about how as managers we could think about the future needs of our sector and implement changes within the institutions that we worked in. I had to come up with a way to convince other managers that my ideas would work, so as a visual thinker, I decided to use diagrammatic drawing as my main rhetorical device. I had seen some systems diagrams based on grids, whereby information came in from one side and was enmeshed into a complex of factors that became entangled, but then reconciled and actions then emerged from the other side. In particular the contextual studies area of my college, (Leeds College of Art was not a university at the time) had for sometime been advocating the ideas expressed in E. F. Schumacher's book 'Small is Beautiful' and students had been introduced via Schumacher's ideas to systems thinking. I was also becoming more interested in the idea of 'flow' and staff on the Foundation course at Leeds where I taught had come up with various 'flow' diagrams, illustrating how real world experience and visual language could become fused together to create new ideas.
I presented my idea of the educational process as a series of flowing wave like movements to the then new principal. It was heavily criticised as being unworkable and naive and I realised I was seen as a typical arty type by him. I was soon gone from the management team, the then principal criticising me for my constant need to understand why we might be doing things, rather than me just telling people what needed to be done, which is what he wanted managers for. Even so, my early experience of systems thinking did stick and I have remained convinced that diagrams can be used as levers for change.
I drew a diagram of how the Leeds Creative Timebank operated for the Proto-Publics research project. At the time I was part of the management group of the Timebank and I firmly believed that this could be a way of developing a non cash economy. Looking back on those days, we were perhaps naive but the diagram still feels as if it has some sort of dynamic agency and that it represents possibilities of how people could support each other by offering their particular skills. However it is not annotated and therefore it is very hard for someone from outside the organisation to get an idea of what is going on.
All change is an emotional ride, one that I'm beginning to understand as something to either experience as exciting and exhilarating or something to fear and hide away from. Hopefully I can embrace the former and move beyond my fears and worries about what might happen. There are always other people out there who also think in similar ways, other artists that have taken similar paths. In 2023 the Marlborough Gallery in new York put on an exhibition entitled, 'Schema: World as Diagram'. It was an exhibition designed to highlight how artists had often been drawn to the diagrammatic in order to express their ideas.
I can see an interesting issue in relation to my recent thinking. When I was looking at how to visualise issues related to getting older, I came up with a diagram that allowed me to communicate ideas about the various stages of ageing. I wanted to at the same time find an overall image that gave the diagram shape and a more mythic context.
As you can see from the image below, at one point the diagram was very scarab beetle shaped, but I wanted a less obvious image and perhaps looking back the scarab design would have been better, as it communicated the idea more clearly.
The struggle to find an image as well as at the same time to make a diagram, reminded me of Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as a literary genre. The image was driving the diagram into another territory of visual thinking, it was becoming an ambiguous image. For Todorov, the fantastic occurs when in the course of reading a narrative one hesitates about how to interpret a seemingly supernatural event. If the event turns out to have a rational explanation, the tale becomes an example of the uncanny. If, however, the narrative explains it in terms of some supernatural occurrence, then we are in the realm of the marvellous. I wasn't sure where I wanted my images to lie and I think they fell between two stools, not quite clear enough as diagrams and not quite strong enough as images. But the idea that I could bring my interoceptual imagery into a format that included more diagrammatic ways of working, still I think holds water.
Pablo Carlos Budassi is a musician as well as an illustrator, he is probably rarely thought of as a fine artist, more an infographic designer, but his work has made me think a lot about how different scales can be found to mesh together and although it could be argued that he often deals with clichéd imagery, the beauty of his constructions has convinced me that he is an authentic artist, very worth looking at, especially if you want to get a feeling for how everything might possibly fit together. I still do like my own idea though, perhaps simply because it includes my coffee cup, masquerading as a devil, as well as that spiral, that keeps reoccurring over and over again.
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