Loss of innocence and its rediscovery

Detail of an imaginary landscape

On the subject of the loss of innocence and its rediscovery, Picasso is quoted as saying "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up" and he is also quoted as stating, "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child".

I was reminded of these quotes when I was listening to Kirsty Young's podcast 'Young Again' that was focused on an interview with the writer Phillip Pullman. He was he said at one time a middle school teacher and during the years 9 to 13 he saw children change their behaviours as they became self aware. He referenced in relation to this, 'On the Marionette Theatre' by Heinrich von Kleist, and this extract below is what I think he was referring to.

"About three years ago", I said, "I was at the baths with a young man who was then remarkably graceful. He was about fifteen, and only faintly could one see the first traces of vanity, a product of the favours shown him by women. It happened that we had recently seen in Paris the figure of the boy pulling a thorn out of his foot. The cast of the statue is well known; you see it in most German collections. My friend looked into a tall mirror just as he was lifting his foot to a stool to dry it, and he was reminded of the statue. He smiled and told me of his discovery. As a matter of fact, I'd noticed it too, at the same moment, but... I don't know if it was to test the quality of his apparent grace or to provide a salutary counter to his vanity... I laughed and said he must be imagining things. He blushed. He lifted his foot a second time, to show me, but the effort was a failure, as anybody could have foreseen. He tried it again a third time, a fourth time, he must have lifted his foot ten times, but it was in vain. He was quite unable to reproduce the same movement. What am I saying? The movements he made were so comical that I was hard put to it not to laugh.

From that day, from that very moment, an extraordinary change came over this boy. He began to spend whole days before the mirror. His attractions slipped away from him, one after the other. An invisible and incomprehensible power seemed to settle like a steel net over the free play of his gestures. A year later nothing remained of the lovely grace which had given pleasure to all who looked at him. I can tell you of a man, still alive, who was a witness to this strange and unfortunate event. He can confirm it, word for word, just as I've described it."

A key moment in Jewish and Christian religious terms was of course the fall of mankind. By eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, we were no longer innocent and knowledge brought with it the difficulties and vicissitudes of too much awareness; suddenly we realised we were naked. As knowledge is gained innocence is lost and we become more self-conscious. We have hopefully when children all at some point in our lives inhabited those states of unselfconsciousness; experiences that were often pure and joyful. As adults though we have to attain those types of experiences in other ways. The poet Lorca suggested that we could regain the poetry of unselfconsciousness via what he called 'el duende'; that quality of human 'lost in the moment' action that he found in the best flamenco dancers; who could attain an almost trance like state that made the experience of their dance unforgettable. Lorca believed duende could be found in all the arts, not just in dance, and that it could only come into existence when someone is totally possessed by the experience, one where subject and object are conjoined, where the physical world and the artist merge with the spirit world; and when this happens forms arrive as if “shaped like wind on sand”. (Lorca, in Berger, 2016, p.99) But to achieve that state, we need to practice and practice and practice, until our body/minds meld into one and we know what to do without thinking. As we get older, what we loose in spontaneity we can regain through hard work. Through practice, a new type of grace can be attained that is even better than the one we had as an unselfconscious child. Hard work and long effort can lead eventually to an apparent child like simplicity, which is the state I'm sure Picasso was referring to when he said it takes a lifetime to paint like a child.

Philip Pullman then went on to say that you don't make art because you are inspired, inspiration he stated is a reward for hard work. I have spent endless hours drawing, years and years of making artwork, and gradually I think I'm beginning to make some things that look easy, but which on second looking it hopefully becomes apparent that they have a deep complex conviction behind them.

Childhood is though always with us. I remember at the age of 10 looking out of the window of my bedroom in our house in Himley Road, Dudley. We were about to move house and I wanted to remember the landscape that I had spent so many hours playing in. My bedroom was at the back of the house, it looked out over the scarred wasteland that had been the space within which I had grown into my own self awareness. There was the slag heap down whose sides I used to run or ride my battered old scooter, bomb craters that I had in the past lined their edges with hedge clippings in order to make dens and hide away from everyone else. I looked at the walls that formed the backs of yards where the pigs were kept, animals that would inhabit my imagination throughout my life, a slag mound hillock on which I once stood holding a roof slate in my hand for an older boy to shoot at with his air rifle, the pain as the pellet went into my hand still remembered, the rusty remains of old factory equipment still left broken after wartime bombing, but which were now entangled in weeds; all a backdrop for vivid imaginary play.

That landscape is still with me now, the cradle of my innocence. I have tried to rediscover it time and time again, each time looking for a way of capturing something of that feeling of total immersion that comes from being lost in play. Part of an artist's role it would seem to me is to try to maintain some sort of naivety and to try and hold off the sophistication of adulthood for as long as you can, or at least to fold into the knowledge that comes with age, a memory of the innocence that came first. 

Landscape of the past

The drawing 'Landscape of the Past' is based on my memories of the time when I looked out of that bedroom window. I made the drawing about 5 or 6 years ago, so roughly 60 years after the actual experience. Has enough work been done to regain an innocent eye? I suppose that is up to others to decide, but within my own aesthetic process, the loss of innocence and its rediscovery are key components that need to be added into a mix of animist practices and a need to be entwined into the world and not to stand outside of it. I still struggle to accept the subjective insides that have become enfolded into me from a previous outside, but in that very struggle, perhaps my most interesting work is done. 

Running with low cloud and pig

The drawing 'Running with low cloud and pig' melds together several stories. Clouds were wonderful things to watch as a boy, I would lie on my back for what seemed hours just gazing at them and imagining worlds and creatures they contained. Then one day as a teenager I saw the film based on Michelangelo's life, 'The Agony and the Ecstasy' and saw Charlton Heston doing the same thing, but this time seeing in his clouds the Sistine Chapel Ceiling. This very romantic take on an artist's life effected me deeply and it was one of those 'moments of epiphany', whereby I realised that I wanted to be an artist. The clouds are tadpoles waiting to metamorphose into whatever they needed to. I run down the hill towards home, arms outstretched as I did as a boy, always about to take off, always about to fly. The pig, my nemesis, waits in ambush, all tales from a younger self, but now re-seen with an older eye. 

See also: 

Contemporary landscape 

Contemporary landscape part two

Drawing plants

Why do I draw?

Clouds

Carlfriedrich Claus and Sprachblatt

Carlfriedrich Claus's sprachblatt or speech sheets, are forms of a writing/drawing mix, whereby text is fused with texture, and as you stand away from the image, texture begins to dominate text, but as you focus in, text becomes more important. So for instance at the scale of screen reproduction texture is more immediately apparent and the image can be read as a visual sound.

The use of language in visual poetry was a specialty of Carlfriedrich Claus, who developed his work in the early 1960s. He believed that the 'naturalised individual’ ought to live in harmony with a 'humanised natural world’ and his ideas mix European philosophy with Eastern mysticism and the writings of Marx. His text-drawings, often drawn on both sides of transparent sheets, illustrate both the processual and dialectal approaches to his ideas. For instance you might get two pages that set out a thesis and antithesis in order to arrive at some sort of synthesis; however no matter how hard you try to 'read' these images, it is hard to avoid the sense that their meaning will always be hidden. 

'Aurora’ (1977)

This is how Claus wrote about his processes: "The production of speech sheets and of phoneme processes ran parallel. The speech sheets arose through my experimental use of my left hand (I am right-handed), and in doing so I noticed, first, the formation of internal blockages, like a psychological stuttering, and second, a different coloration of the content of my thought. (…) These phoneme processes or speech operations are not speaking in the sense of phonology, in which the specific scaffolding of a natural language must precede each act of speech. Here, the whole point is to break through this scaffolding, to break out of it or out of the prison of natural language, which determines in great part our relationship to the world. (…) Basically, the 'phoneme aggregate' suggests to the listener that he experiment with his own organs of speech and that he explore how various sounds, consciously articulated, affect his psychological state."

Carlfriedrich Claus: installation in the former Reichstag Building in Berlin

Carlfriedrich Claus at work

However it is in the work he did with sound that I think has the most potential to be revisited and thought about as a stimulus for students interested in contemporary drawing. Claus had been working on an installation from the 1950s to the 1990s, which addressed language as a written image and sound process. 'Lautaggregat K' used a spatial layer of sound, forming a 'sound aggregate', originally used for a WDR radio play, using a special stereophonic system; this sound material then forming the basis for a 1995 installation, in which several speech processes ran in parallel and were mixed at an editing desk. These layers of sound corresponded with the writing images, that were spatially arranged on transparent surfaces. The subject of the text dealt with philosophical themes, while the sound process itself was intended to be experienced physically. These two normally separate experiences, the intellectual and the physical being brought together.

Carlfriedrich Claus: sound processing room 1995

In his work there was a constant dialectical flip between reading, hearing and looking and he stated that his works aimed to impregnate ‘ways of seeing with lingual thinking’.  Perhaps I have been reminded of his work because Sue has begun working towards a PhD and she was looking at how work she had done in the past when curating sound artists, is now being archived. Sometimes our interests feel very different, but they also touch at sometimes unexpected points and this work of Claus's is I think an interesting case. He now has his own archive, where his acoustic work is available on 15 reel-to-reel tapes and 267 cassette tapes and it would be interesting to see what issues and problems the archive has faced in reconstructing experiences of his work for those who visit. 

The move towards a gesamtkunstwerk, whereby various elements of an artwork come together to create a totality, is something that at one point or another many artists consider, because by the nature of things artists try out various approaches to communicating related ideas. This often leaves you with a diverse body of work that only seems to make sense when the various elements are collected together. For myself the drawings Claus produced make far more sense when coupled with the sound pieces he made. I think in my own case my drawings make more sense when shown alongside my ceramics, prints and written work, but how to organise all the elements is at present something I'm not sure how to do, I need curatorial advice. 

See also:

Eye music

Drawing sound

Mapping as translation

Asemic writing

Drawing as portable sculpture

Drawing into installation

Old and new traditions

Tenmyouya Hisashi: RX-78-2 Kabuki-mono 2005 Version

I've posted a few times on other cultures and traditions, and the posts have tended to concentrate on the past and the historical legacy that comes with being part of a different culture. However there are other stories and one of the most common is how tradition and contemporaneity coincide. The Japanese artist Tenmyouya Hisashi for instance uses tradition to reflect on contemporary life and at the same time question the notion of tradition itself. His work questions what traditional culture is, not just in relation to Japan but everywhere.

When my son was a young boy he was fascinated by Transformer toys. The Transformers toy line was created by the Japanese company Takara and was initially marketed in Japan under the names of 'Micro Change' and 'Diaclone'. In 1984, the US company Hasbro bought the distribution rights to these toys and re-branded them as 'The Transformers' for a North American audience. The designs for the original figures, all of which could transform from one thing such as a car, aircraft, gun or even a cassette into robots, were made by Japanese artists such as Shōji Kawamori, (who was probably the most well known), but also designers such as Kouzin Ohno, (Ironhide, Jazz, Starscream) and Takayoshi Doi, who designed the Dinobots. I was at the time fascinated by the Insecticons who were designed by Takashi Matsuda. I thought I could see traces of Egyptian scarab beetle sculptures in their design; a design that was constructed so that these toys could transform from insects into robots. 

Egyptian scarab 

Bombshell Insecticon 

Takashi Matsuda also came up with the form of Megatron, a robot that could also transform into a gun. All of these toys had one thing in common, they could take on more than one identity. A tiny insect could morph into a giant robot, size constancy didn't seem to be a problem for a child's imagination. 

The cultural tradition young boys were growing up with in the 1980s and 90s was definably Japanese, especially as Nintendo released their Gameboy in 1990 hot on the heels of the Transformers coming to the UK. Culture within the commercial world of capitalism is global. Hasbro needed English names and associated back stories for the characters, so that they could be marketed to English speaking customers with a narrative that was understandable in relation to Western young boys and their interests and so they approached Marvel Comics and Bob Budiansky was given the job. He conceived the names of many of the original Transformers that would be then released onto the American and European markets, such as Megatron, Ratchet, Starscream, Sideswipe and Ravage. He also wrote the vast majority of the descriptive "tech spec" biographies printed on the Transformers' toy packages, giving each figure unique personality traits in the same way that Marvel superheroes such as Spiderman were constructed. In this way two cultures were blended, the world of Japanese toy design and the superhero world of American comics. The fusion would of course result in Marvel releasing another comic title, The Transformers'.

From Transformers the comic

You can easily spot the historical references in the design of the robot forms.

Traditional samurai armour

Tenmyouya Hisashi

Tenmyouya Hisashi's images illustrate the 'mash up' of traditions that occur as hybrid global cultures emerge. In 2006 the Japanese football team had qualified for the football world cup which was held in Germany. A game originally invented in England, now belonging to a world wide culture, a game that now represented serious international money and that also wanted to celebrate the inclusion of specifically recognisable 'other' cultures as proof that the game was now global. Tenmyouya Hisashi's images were perfect illustrations of this and his work was chosen as one of the posters that celebrated the event. The use of traditional gold leaf backgrounds to his images, now also signifying the background of wealth that at the time surrounded world football. His 'RX-78-2 Kabuki-mono' image of a Transformer toy, constructed again on a gold leaf background and this time with a traditional dragon wrapping itself around the robot, fuses the old and new traditions together in such as way that we are reminded that the robot's design is based on ancient Japanese warrior costumes. 

The robot within Japanese culture is particularly fascinating. It is an object that generates meaning for its Japanese observers and participants within a tradition that is specifically Japanese. Shintoism has been followed in Japan for over a thousand years and it is a religious tradition that embraces animism. Spirits or kami, can be seen to inhabit animals, natural features like mountains and many other non-human things. Therefore the idea of a robot being able to be animated by human like attributes was more easily assimilable by Japanese culture. There had also been a long tradition of automata using clockwork mechanisms. The term 'karakuri ningyō' refers to a variety of clockwork automats created in Japan during the 17th century.
Karakuri = ‘mechanism’ or ‘trick’ / ningyō = a puppet.

Chahakobi ningyō

A chahakobi ningyō or miniature tea server, was made in the 19th century by Hisashige Tanaka, founder of the Toshiba Corporation which would eventually become a diversified enterprise involved in electronics, electrical equipment and information technology and which is still based in Minato-ku, Tokyo and they of course now make robots for industrial use. The Toshiba Corporation website includes video demonstrations as to how its latest robots can do the work that used to be done by humans. 

Current Toshiba Corporation video of robot use

The next step up in technology to be used to make automata after clockwork was inflatable rubber tube hydraulics. Gakutensoku, a humanoid robot built in 1928 by Nishimura Makoto, used this technology to tilt its head, move its eyes, smile, and puff up its cheeks and chest. It was also programmed to use calligraphy skills. It has recently been reconstructed and a new computer-controlled pneumatic servo system has been designed to keep it going over 90 years after it was first put into operation. What was fascinating about Gakutensoku, was that this was a very early attempt to give human expressions to a robot and cemented the idea into modern culture of robots often being humanoid in form. For myself, I have tended to see this as a continuing form of animism and often think of these forms as being similar to pre-historic shamanistic figures, such as the one illustrated below of a bee faced Algerian shaman figure, that has mushrooms growing all the way around it. This might of course be an indication of early drug use, something that might have helped the shaman get deeper into character. The final form is another hybrid one, an image that suggests that the sharp differences between humans and other creatures is not as sharp as we think it is. 

Gakutensoku’s head could express human affect

An ancient Algerian shaman figure

Robots had gradually entered Japanese culture, and there was less of a worry in their society about how their introduction might effect our human lives in the future. Perhaps because they had had to deal with the aftermath of the atomic age of science fiction becoming atomic bomb science fact, the society was much more open to future casting, whatever the reason, the first mass-produced mechanical toy robots were built in Japan following World War II. These wind-up robots, typically made from tin and brightly coloured, captured the world's imagination and were the first step in the development of a new hybrid culture, whereby robots took on humanoid forms. 

Samurai armour the traditional form behind the modern icon

By the time that films such as Pacific Rim came out in the 21st century, the visual idea of what a robot should be like had been fixed, its Japanese lineage now locked fast into a global idea. 

Design for a giant robot for the film Pacific Rim 

Another culture has been mixed into the hybridity in the image above, that of the engineering 'blueprint'. This is used to give 'scientific veracity' to the design. A design which itself relies heavily on the ideas that came out of Japan in the 1980s, the forms and shapes of which were rooted in traditional samurai armour. The following my nose 'logic' of this post seems to be outlining a post-modernist idea of culture, but I didn't set out to imply that this was what I thought contemporary society was about. I was simply trying to unpack a few thoughts set into motion by looking at some Tenmyouya Hisashi images. As students sometimes it is worthwhile doing the same thing and what it often reveals is the importance of children's culture on what will become an adult world. When I asked the highly regarded contemporary sculptor Thomas Houseago where he thought his main sculptural ideas came out of, he told me that Sesame Street was right up there as one of his main influences. 

Oscar the Grouch in Sesame Street 

Thomas Houseago

For myself it was perhaps Sooty and The Flowerpot Men that have stayed with me all these years, which were, it could be argued, deeply animist ideas as well. In fact at one point I tried to bring images from the two worlds of puppets and humanoid robots together, fused around a memory of when my mother worked as an usherette in the Gaumont Cinema in Dudley during the late 1950s. I found the film so frightening, I had to get my Sooty puppet to watch it instead. 

Sooty watches 'The Day the Earth Stood Still'

I'm now living in an age that recycles the remains of the culture of my youth. Little Weed from the 1950s TV series 'The Flowerpot Men' seemingly a much more threatening thing now than she was at the time; she is no longer the polite weed of yesterday. In a time of global warming and ecological disaster, the taking seriously the life of a weed, seems so much more important and her sagacious advice to the flowerpot men, now seems more like a metaphor and a parable for about how we should have been listening much more closely to nature in the past, and that if we don't in the future, all of us will find ourselves redundant not just 1950s children's puppet shows. 

Little Weed from the Flowerpot Men

Capitalism is driven by a constant need for new forms, so what is current for one generation is totally outdated by the time the next generation comes through. This is something most of human society historically would have found very strange. In the distant past change was very slow and your grandparents' culture would have been virtually the same as the one you would experience. However our propensity for an animist relationship with non human things still remains a powerful force, so I am hopeful that we might eventually begin to treat the world as a living, complex entity, rather than a resource to buy and sell. We still have to deal with our existentialist angst and buying new things never did bring happiness, but reflecting on these issues can at least bring us some sort of awareness and in awareness lies knowledge and in knowledge lies wisdom and in wisdom lies the overcoming of the sadness caused by desire.

See also:

Japanese aesthetics

Drawing in Japan part two

Thinking with articulated body parts

Johan Creten: Ceramics and drawing

 

Johan Creten

Johan Creten: Exhibition view

Johan Creten was making ceramics before clay became a fashionable material for fine artists; so he commands a certain respect for working with these materials for so long. However it is his drawings that I want to showcase for this blog, especially as I'm also someone who makes ceramics and draws. However, unlike myself, he treats the drawn element of his work as a discrete area of practice. Each drawing is a stand alone image, one that often occupies the space of drawing in a similar way to how his ceramic objects occupy architectural space. But as soon as I write this, I realise that he can also occupy space in a more painterly way. Whichever way is foregrounded, I think its worth having a look at the relationship between his drawings and his ceramics, even if only to help myself think through how and why I use the same materials. 

In the drawings above it is a sense of insides shaping outsides that most interests me. They feel as if the internal marks compact together to locate the outside. In this way I personally then find these drawings excellent vehicles for carrying human form. Instead of thinking of drawing a body from the outside appearance, it helps me to think that you could draw a body by using internal analogies, some marks being bones, others muscles and others internal organs. 

Johan Creten: Drawings

There is a blunt directness about his drawing that I find very powerful and he uses the materials of drawing in such a way that they remain what they are, whilst also being able to represent ideas for ceramics. 

Johan Creten: Ceramic forms

Creten works on a scale that is a reflection of his status and now works in bronze as well as clay. I am very aware of the type of technical support and equipment needed to make ceramic and cast metal objects of this size. It is perhaps best if I therefore concentrate on presenting his drawings rather than his sculptures. In fact I find some of his sculptures overly finished and too predictable. He has achieved a high level of control over the years and I'm very aware that in my own ceramic work I don't have that control but its the surprise of not knowing that keeps things fresh for myself and I still see that in his drawings.

Ceramics Now has an article about his recent work which you can access here.

See also:

Drawing and ceramics

Drawing using clay

Candice Lin