Why art education still matters

I have been working as an art educator for nearly 50 years. Today begins another year, and alongside making resolutions and hoping for new experiences, it is perhaps time to reflect again on what I'm doing. It is very easy to become stuck in one's ways and to allow experience to become a stick with which to beat people with, as opposed to it being something that can be drawn upon as an aid for others or as a help for them to make their own decisions when they need to find the best pathway to take. Recently Art21 asked art educators to reflect on what they thought they were doing and I was in particular interested in what Amiko Matsuo had to say about the art educator as connector. Matsuo had this to say when writing about her own approach to drawing to our attention the tapestry work of Otobung Nkanga.

 Otobong Nkanga, Double Plot, 2018. Photo by Amiko Matsuo

'I walk to the larger textile: a map or network layered and woven in the cosmos. The edge of the textile welcomes a figure about to step forward without feet or a brain. It enters the plane on the wall next to urchiny tree branches. Is the figure tethered to circular captions? Is it directing the mechanical arms to pull at the bubble captions? Floating, it feels unmoored even as it appears to be hard at work'. 

Matsuo points out how she attempts to translate for her students the sense of connectivity and geopolitics that she finds represented in Nkanga's work. She hears her own voice as an arts educator participating in the witnessing and telling of such stories and states that her understanding arrives via a lens of who she is right now and that the collective work of the art educator brings together an awareness of art, artists, other art educators and students, something that as a process she feels both defines her and expands far beyond her.

The fact that Amiko Matsuo begins by stating that it is her own voice that is central to the  witnessing and telling of stories and that she understands artwork through 'a lens of who I am' was I thought spot on. I also thought that it was important to remind everyone that she is also interconnected with a rhizomatic network of artists and other teachers and that her role is to try and connect others that she encounters with that network. She teaches ceramics and has had to think hard about how her own experience can be used to open out new possibilities for an area of creativity that has often been far too constricted in its use as a fine art material, by being seen as 'pottery' or looked at through a very Western lens as 'craft'. Above all she asks open ended questions, suggesting that her students have as much ownership of answers to these questions as she does. She reminds me that as a white, male, Anglo-Saxon I have to be very careful to continue opening myself up to wider and wider forms of thinking in relation to art practices. This is hopefully something I try to constantly work on, being very aware that my background is one of white, male privilege, but at the same time, I still feel able to make work about what it is to be who I have been and reflect on my time as an artist who has emerged from a working class Black Country, English town and who has attempted to always come to terms with life through the practice of making art. We are who we are, but that doesn't mean that we should be complacent, we need to keep on striving to be more aware, to watch what is going on and to uncover the many histories that lie behind the things we experience. As well as trying to remain self aware and trying to keep myself open to changing sociological patterns in both art and society, I have also had to think about why I might still be of value to a community of practitioners. Olivia Laing, in her book 'Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency', looks to find a stance for her writing that as she puts it, avoids 'paranoid reading'. I.e. the world is so full of horrid and worrying things that it is too easy to spend most of our time unpicking the wounds of modern life. I agree with her and would like to think that an aspect of my role as an art educator and as an artist is to look for things that are positive possibilities, that are speculative futures that suggest life affirming directions of travel, rather than using my activities to erect static platforms from which to rage and shout about the tragic consequences of our present day political realities. As Laing puts it, to be 'more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison'. (Laing, 2021, p.4) 

The readers of this blog as well as current and past students will of course be the judges of whether or not I manage to provide a fertile soil with which to nourish practice or whether I have just missed the point and that art practice is now somewhere totally different and that it is time for me to retire. I still though have a belief in a practice that has at times been compared to a religion. It has been argued that the foundational principle for the interconnection between art and religion is the reciprocity between image making and meaning, a connection similar to a creative correspondence between the human and the spiritual. The actual process of making something that operates as an external mind, that is at its core a fetish, something that is inanimate but which is possessed by an idea, is something wonderful. Artists supply the world with things to think with, special tools that are magical in that we embed within these things triggers for possibilities, we provide the grit around which, pearl like, ideas may form in other minds. 

The art educator also needs to help provide a safe but also transformational space for students to operate within. This has become harder to do since covid. I am aware that some students no longer see the studio as a safe space. In communal spaces other people become threats, their bodies potentially hosting invisible microbes and for those that see life in this way, daily existence becomes a constant battle against unseen menaces. Maslow's 'Hierarchy of Needs' is something all would be educators are introduced to in the early stages of any educational qualification; you are taught that every person has unique capabilities and has the possibility to move towards a level of self-actualisation. Unfortunately, educational progress is often disrupted by a failure to meet basic needs. Life experiences often causing an individual to become stuck and recently life seems to have thrown up a complicated mess of experiences, designed to unsettle and undermine the confidence of many would be learners. Therefore as an educator, I have to believe that I can help provide a safe space for thinking, one that can offer sustenance in times of unease, as well as provide information upon which someone can build their own educational pathway. One aspect of this is, as Amiko Matsuo puts it, to offer a series of connections to others working in the field, hopefully at least one of which will work for you, ring true and make sense. Each of these blog posts you could therefore think of as a possible connection to an idea or a person or to a way of working; lifelines stretched out between things, that anyone can also connect to. Remember, every journey, no matter how long, begins with the placing of just one step in front of another, but sometimes you need a shoulder to lean on if you are to take that next step and that perhaps is the best anyone can offer.

Otobong Nkanga: Search

But back to Otobong Nkanga, and my role as an art educator. There are always questions. How should I introduce her work? It feels important to state that she is from Nigeria and that she mainly works out of Belgium. An image like 'Search' of course makes us think that she is searching for something. This image of a human has a building sitting on top her, a construction that obscures her identity from the observer. This is a giant figure, that stands on one world whilst pointing to another. Is the presumption that this figure is a 'she' the right one? How much of a story do I need to initiate before there is enough of a narrative to help others begin their own interpretation? How much do I need to say? That her feet have sunk down into the ground on which she stands? That white lightening surrounds a newly discovered or revealed other world? That the fact that these are woven textiles creates a very important contextual reading to them?  She in many ways brings together the textile making practices of West Africa and Belgium, but what does that mean?  Or is it enough to simply show an image of her work? By putting her name into this blog's index, have I given her enough status to be worthwhile investigating by you as a student or follower of this blog? Otobong Nkanga is one more artist to add to a growing list, that has come to represent a world wide movement of artists emerging from what were at one time called 'Third World' countries. The old Western art canon has been challenged and we are all asked to redefine what we think contemporary practice is. Not just educators, but museums and art galleries have been required to re-think what their existing or historical curriculums, collections and curatorial strategies represent. As this process goes into action, there will of course be a time of debate, confusion and difficulty, especially for students entering into what was one type of culture and set of established art practices and which is rapidly having to re-define itself. An exciting time, but one full of hidden and very visible dangers. It doesn't seem long ago to myself, that German artists were forced to decide whether or not their art stood for Hitler's National Socialist ideals or whether it was unfit and impure and thus subject to be being ridiculed and burnt. As new and much wider cultural forms enter into contemporary art practice, I hear rumblings and critiques, such as the way that the word 'woke' is now used. Once meaning 'being conscious of racial discrimination in society and other forms of oppression and injustice'. It is now becoming used in a disparaging way, referring to a type of overly liberal progressive orthodoxy, especially one promoting inclusive policies or ideologies that welcome or embrace ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities. This standpoint has led to Brexit, a fear of immigration, a rise of far right politics and a stance that has argued that the new Global orientation of society does not understand or recognise the importance of older more local or national cultural values, which it is further argued, many people still believe in and therefore find it difficult to accommodate or even acknowledge sets of cultural values that have come from other parts of the world or which have emerged in order to acknowledge various struggles with identity. This is a situation many seek to use as a lever for their own political gain. However we must always remember:

"Wherever they burn books, they will in the end burn human beings too". Heinrich Heine

I would never underestimate the power of fear. Change brings with it elevation and new status for some, but always loss of status and fear of redundancy for others. When this happens it is fertile ground for the rise of fascism, and it is instructive to look carefully at why during the 1920s and 30s many people across Europe in their yearning for national unity and strong leadership, turned to an idea that would lay the blame on others for collective economic and spiritual problems; a climate of blame that would eventually lead to the Holocaust. This is why the development of intellectual and spiritual nourishment for all and not just some, should be the key factor when looking at what role art and artists should be undertaking in the future. Above all as an educator I would like to remind the people I work with, that at times we seem to collectively fall morally asleep and that education can help people to wake up from that sleep and support society as a whole in the devising of ways to live, especially approaches to life that accept and value the lives and cultures of others. Teaching art is about far more than art education, it is about looking and as we learn to look we need to take off the social media blinkers and learn to see what is actually going on in front of us. It is also a celebration of the power of speculative futures, of creative possibility and the need to continue playing, especially as we become adults and most of all it can be reminder of the joy of seeing something new and fresh for the first time.

References

Laing, O (2021) Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency Dublin: Picador 

Laing writes for Frieze magazine and is a long running contributor to current debates as to why art matters. By writing across the various art disciplines she makes it very clear that art as it is now experienced is a multi-platform discipline and that sometimes it is the written word that makes most sense and at other times moving images and then at other times static ones. Above all, art for her demonstrates that there are alternative possibilities and that the moments of contemplation that the arts give to us, are much too important to the health of our internal lives for us to ever give them up. 

ART21

Art of Now: Hong Kong Artists 

See also:

Why it matters

Why do we draw?

What use is art?

Drawing as entanglements with life

John Dewey: Art as Experience 

Why interoception?

Days of coughing brings back pains in my ribs that I haven't had since breaking them some years ago

Nighttime itch

Lying in bed and unable to do much exercise causes the body/mind to return to an awareness of its own surface irritations and the need to scratch an itch

Interoception is defined as the sense of the internal state of the body. (Khalsa & Lapidus, 2016, p. 2) This can be both conscious and non-conscious. I have been looking at how to visualise our internal awareness for a while now and the more I do so the more I believe it is central to our grasp of what it is to be in the world. I have finally gone down with Covid and this is the first day since being taken to my bed that I have been able to type anything. My last post on visualising energy flow was put up just as I was starting to feel ill, then I have had three days when my own energy levels were virtually it felt, non-existent. As I start to rest and have more energy, I'm fully alive to the fact that without all that energy flow I have been thinking about, I can do nothing. My awareness of the importance of energy levels feels a bit like an affirmation for what I have been exploring recently, so as I emerge from brain fog, and attempt the re-insertion of my own body back into the flow of experience, I'm going to attempt to clarify for myself and hopefully for any one still interested, what I'm doing and how an artist like myself can even begin to think that what they are doing is any form of research. 

So a few bits of information that I think are central. The relationship between the mind and the body is now understood to be one of a symbiosis between them. (Fogel, (2013), Varela, Thompson and Rosch (2017), Merleau-Ponty, (1969). For instance our body secretes hormones that change our psychological state in response to physical events. In a fight or flight situation, adrenaline is released so that the heart pumps faster and limbs can move quicker. However any stressful situation does the same, so prolonged periods of stress can lead to over compensation by the body, eventually extra releases of various hormones, (basically chemicals, because hormones are our body's chemical messengers), will cause problems and both the body and mind will suffer because of that. If we look at a few more of these chemicals, we can begin see how and why they are so important. The wrong levels of estrogen can increase the risk of certain cancers, lead to depression, weight gain, difficulty sleeping, headaches, low sex drive, anxiety, and menstrual problems. In particular too little estrogen can cause weakened bones (osteoporosis), menstrual problems, loss of fertility and mood disorders. Testosterone can effect sex drive, fat distribution, muscle strength, bone mass, and red blood cell production in both men and women. Insulin converts glucose (sugar) in the things we eat so that our bodies can use the stored energy, if this is not working properly our energy levels become uncontrollable and one symptom of that is diabetes. If you know someone who suffers from this you will be very aware of how this effects mood swings. Cortisol is a type of steroid hormone and is produced by the adrenal glands. It has many responsibilities that keep you healthy and energetic. Cortisol is responsible for helping regulate metabolism, regulating blood pressure, acting as an anti-inflammatory, and even forming memories. Cortisol is secreted during higher levels of stress; if secreted for extended periods it can cause hypertension, anxiety, sleep loss, and autoimmune problems. Too little cortisol is associated with low blood pressure, weakness, and fatigue. Your thyroid gland's hormones regulate metabolism. An imbalance can cause problems with weight management and energy levels. As you can see from this very basic introduction hormones are central to both how our body works and how our mind operates; lack of drive, fatigue, depression, over anxiety and memory loss are just as much a response to hormone production as weight gain, speed of response, the development of cancers, weak bones and our general health or not as the case may be. 

There are direct feedback loops between our heart and our stomach and our brain. These facilitate deeply embedded types of information processing that our logical, language driven part of the brain often ignores, but which in reality are often far more right about the state of the world. For instance people with aphasia; a loss in language ability resulting from brain damage, appear to have a significant advantage in spotting liars, particular when untruths are given away by changes in body language. You know it in your guts and in your heart. 

As interoception is so important to the day to day regulation of our body and mind, it would therefore seem to myself that as an artist I need to embed my processes of visualisation into an awareness of this fact. 

The central issue in terms of visualisation is metaphor. What can work and how to establish a communicable language? For instance growth hormone triggers are produced in the hypothalamus (these are also hormones). which stimulate the pituitary gland to produce and release growth hormone into the bloodstream, which in turn floods out into the body to control metabolism and growth. In my mind I see various coloured waters, each one carrying tiny bits of chemical information that I represent as grains of undissolved pigment and the capturing of colour blending as one mixture begins to intermix with another. 

Like so: 

or

or

Fluids interacting

The suggestion I am trying to make, is that the movement of fluids carrying various pigmented substances can represent the fact that everything that is being depicted is in constant flow, both inside, (hormones, blood etc.) and outside, (the constant perceptual flow). 

Rodin

If you get a chance to see Rodin's watercolours, many of these have a surface that sits between representation and re-creation. On the one hand a figure in movement is suggested by a pencil line and yet at the same time a spreading, pooling sequence of watercolour marks feels as if it is trying to recreate the situation as a material flow. The eye/mind tik-toks between one reading and another and as it does so, the movement originally perceived by Rodin re-enters my own perception of the image. An image can hold within itself competing and various readings, this very ambiguity allowing it to be more capable of communicating some types of experiences than words. 

A flow of energies between inner and outer embodied worlds

Which brings me back to the other issue that I have been trying to deal with, the problem with verbal language. Language it seems to me is a very controlling way of understanding the world. It sort of fixes it or glues it down. Of course words are brilliant at carrying ideas, without them I wouldn't be able to think about things in the way I do, but words do have a way of turning the solid physicality of experience into something both chimerical and at the same time fixed down by the very words used to describe it. I'll try and explain what I think the problem is. Once something is named it seems to take on a life of its own. Look at countries. The Earth is a physical continuity with no edges or boundaries, but once you put a name to a particular area you can draw a boundary around it and as that area is defined by a name such as England, France, Saudi Arabia or the Ukraine, it begins to evolve a definition of itself separate from all the other bits of the world. In point of fact there is no such thing as a solid object called England, only an idea of one. For the brain, a memory is as real as a perception, an idea as potent as a feeling. A written language can be used to differentiate these things and as it does the separation seems to reinforce meanings that were initially only chimerical but which in terms of how humans make decisions is now central, our need for flight or fight now triggered as much by ideas as perceptions. In fact every perception is in some respects a memory idea, and we know that some people have from their own experience developed world views that blur the distinction between ideologies, facts, fictions and memory. Some studies have demonstrated that language loss improves our ability to spot lying*, which suggests that language is not so much about truth but about conviction or the telling of believable stories. The thing is that these believable stories are told with and about words, as well as without words and not about words but they are acted upon as if they are a reality. The situation is that in many ways words are shaping what we think of as reality. In the world of particle physics it is understood that when you measure a particle the apparatus of measurement is in some way shaping what can be observed of the particle. The reality of the situation being a joint state or compound 'apparatus + particle' system, which is not separable because its parts are not independent of one another. The apparatus of measurement produces an entanglement between the measuring and the measured and language I would suggest operates as a type of very sophisticated apparatus that is also shaping what can be observed. Part of its shaping is the construction of nouns to identify separate things and in doing this the world is atomised into small separate bits and these can of course be owned or categorised or listed. 

In novels there are often stories within stories. In Vasily Grossman's great novel of war and ideological tyranny, 'Life and Fate', Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum is a physicist who when he goes to work can be inspired by a wonderful idea, such as of the universe being an entangled unity. He enthuses over the fact that the new physics rejects the concept of individual entities and acknowledges only aggregates. Grossman puts it like this, "But space - measured by metal rods and rulers - and time - measured by the most accurate of watches - had suddenly begun to bend, to stretch and to flatten. Their stability had turned out not to be the foundation-stone of science, but the walls and bars of its prison." However Viktor also realises that the reality of the life he leads will lead to "doubt, suffering and lack of belief". In his day to day experience the tyranny of words that emanate from the communist party and its various committees, can be like nails hammered down into meaning. Throughout the book people are shown to be capable of the most heinous crimes, their language twisting and reshaping reality to fit whatever power happens to be in place at any one time, only a rare few being able to hold fast to a position of moral certainty within a corrupt world of war and terror. 

The interconnectedness of the perceptual flow that we are immersed into is a key concept in Buddhism: “When there is this, that comes to be; with the arising of this, that arises. When there is not this, that does not come to be; with the cessation of this, that ceases” (Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi 1995, p. 655) The belief that everything is interconnected can obviously be expressed in words, but the problem is that the sentence, "Everything is interconnected" has the same conceptual force or truth weight as the one that states, "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." This quote from Donald Trump, epitomises the issue, he operates as if words have their own reality and anything he disagrees with is 'fake news'. Trump has at least made us realise how slippery words are and how we can become trapped by them. Before the written word verbal language simply floated out into the air and what was said was quickly gone, only retaining a sense of permanence via stories that were passed on orally. It was also clear that the stories were just stories, storytelling being an art that ensured important concepts were passed on, legends were created and elaborated over many years of retelling, what would over time become powerful myths. But once written down, words become fixed, and once fixed they start to sit outside of the flow of life. Words as you can see, tend to generate more words, they don't let you go, you keep writing more and more of them, trying to control what it is you are trying to say, but in reality being controlled by the apparatus called writing. Each letter a nail, each noun a rivet and every sentence a straightjacket. 

The body and its immersion in energy fields

I began this post by detailing the effects hormones have on our emotional state. The apparatus that produces them being our bodies. During war or other highly fraught times, stresses are so high that hormone secretion goes through the roof, and the balance between decision making fuelled by good judgement or by instinct begins to break down. Just as I'm arguing language shapes the world, the body shapes the world too. In making images I'm arguing for an area of thinking outside of verbal language to be considered as a way of decoding experience. Interoception begins in the body and as Merleau-Ponty explained in relation to what he called the “flesh of the world” awareness arises as an event, an event where perception and meaning are born, not as a relationship between a constituting subject and a constituted object but as an intertwining or ensemble of being. The image below is my attempt to diagram this situation, adding into the mix the issue of time. For many peoples, past, present and future are events that occur within a simultaneity, just as the body cant be separated out from the mind, or from its environment, the past cant be separated from the present or the future, all are entangled. I have therefore decided to design an enamel badge to represent this, something very small, but which I believe can be used to represent all of the words not just written in this post, but in this blog. 

I hope I have been able to argue a case for the mind's ability to think using clay and ink and paper as well as other materials, and that by thinking in that way outside of the written word, ideas that are less polemic can be opened out, ways of thinking more open to hybridity and constant metamorphosis can perhaps take centre stage, rather than arguments as to what is right and what is wrong. Hopefully thinking with objects and materials concerns us less with constructions of difference and is more about raising awareness of the connections between things.

Finally and forgive the rambling, as I slip in and out of consciousness I'm also reading and the novel, you may already have guessed that has filled most of my Covid time, has been Vasily Grossman's 'Life and Fate'. Throughout the book there are characters arguing, old Mensheviks and Bolsheviks still bringing up differences, even when the German army sits on people's doorsteps; there are the scars left of Stalin's repressive slaughtering of millions of fellow Russians who didn't follow the party line, a reminder of the Holocaust and how a policy of extermination could be 'logically' embarked upon by a society of believers and what seemed to be the worst thing in my half dreaming state, this Jewish Ukrainian writer, who lived through it all, at times seemed to be writing about the Ukraine now. Radio Four reports of mass graves being dug in Ukraine merging with Grossman's stories of people having to dig mass graves for jews and gipsies. The need to burn disinterred bodies in order to destroy evidence of mass slaughter was systematically developed during the later part of WW2 and tales of the collecting of contemporary evidence of supposed genocide now flows into a nightmare state of unease, slaughterhouse images and worry about the evil nature of human beings and their failure to learn. The book asks a question of each and every one of us, "How would I act in similar circumstances?" I was also reminded of an old image of mine from many years ago now. I was walking through a council estate, and came across a group of people standing round watching a group of lads kicking someone. Something had kicked off, but what it was I never knew, but just like at school when boys got into a fight, by magic a small crowd had formed, not to intervene but to watch. I was deeply disturbed, because I realised my own 'me too' moment. I had quickly walked on, I hadn't been brave enough to step in, I was intimidated by the collective, afraid of the consequences of making people aware that I might think differently . It was much easier for me to make an image about the situation after the event than to step in and try and stop it. Society brings us into close physical proximity but fails to bind us together. Our internal worry as to how others might judge us, it appears to me, becomes more powerful in relation to our subjective decision making, than how we judge ourselves. Wondering what other people say or think about us has probably been the reason why many potentially great ideas have never made their way into the full light of day, but far more worrying is that the same internal fear has also allowed the most awful and distressful crimes to be committed on others, because no one stepped in, no one opened their mouth to say no, until it was too late and the situation became irreversible. 

Watching the wheel turn (1990)

*Ref: 

Khalsa, S. S., & Lapidus, R. C. (2016). Can Interoception Improve the Pragmatic Search for Biomarkers in Psychiatry? Frontiers in psychiatry, 7, 121. From: <https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2016.00121/full> accessed on 06. 05. 2022

Massachusetts General Hospital. "Study Shows Language Loss May Improve Ability To Spot Lying." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 15 May 2000. From <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/05/000512082608.htm> accessed on 06. 05. 2022

Fogel, A., 2013. Body sense: The science and practice of embodied self-awareness (Norton series on interpersonal neurobiology). London: ww norton & company.

Freund, P.E., 1988. Bringing society into the body. Theory and society, 17(6), pp.839-864.

Merleau-Ponty, M (1969)The Visible and the invisible New York: Northwestern University Press

Grossman, V. (2006) Life and Fate London: Vintage

Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi (1995) The middle length discourses of the Buddha, a translation of the Majjhima Nikāya. Boston: Wisdom Publications.

Varela, F.J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E., (2017) The embodied mind, revised edition: Cognitive science and human experience. New York: MIT press.

See also:

Using pigments suspended in water

Visualising energy flow

Hybridity and permeability 

Paul Klee and Markov Blankets 

Texture and perception

The etymological root of Art

I have used the diagram below before, but have no apologies for showing it again, because I think it is important at a time like this to stress the deep and long history of ideas. It could be that when these times are looked back on, they will be seen as significant moments in a return to a kinder more 'mythic' relationship with the world, rather than the present capitalist one that sees the planet as a resource to be mined. 

The Proto-Indo-European root of the word 'art' was the morpheme rt. It was associated with a dynamic process of universal creation. There are other derived ‘rt’ words such as right, rhetoric, worth, rite and ritual. Rt was associated with ‘creation’ and ‘of beauty’ but also moral and aesthetic correctness.  It was concerned with what was 'right'. It also referred to first or original things, so therefore it was associated with creation and what was created. What was beautiful  was also linked with repetitive order and ideas of moral and aesthetic correctness.

I'm suggesting that the prehistoric morpheme 'rt' is still resonant and useful for us to think about in relation to an ongoing search for what is 'right' and what it is that we should be doing as artists. 

The oldest word derived from 'rt' that is still in use in relation to the original meaning is 'rta' a word in Sanskrit that represents the ‘cosmic order of things’. The Sanskrit language is considered to be the most faithful to the Proto-Indo-European root. The word 'rta' is from the oldest portion of the Rg Veda, which is the oldest known writing that still directly relates to the original Indo-Aryan language. 'Rta' as a concept combines both the 'cosmic order of things' as a physical order of the universe and as a moral ordering of the universe. Therefore 'Rta' is a pivot between the physical and the intellectual, between matter and spirit. It has been argued that this looking for 'rightness' is the oldest idea known to humans. 

It would seem that in western Europe we have spent an inordinate amount of time considering the elements of (a)rt that are to do with making and skill and thinking about beauty as things separate from nature but not enough time thinking about the dynamic processes that lie behind how things fit together and the possibilities of using (a)rt as part of a ritual designed to re-attune ourselves to the ever unfolding act of creation and being joined in with and embedded into nature. 

I first came across Rt or Rta in relation to the concept of a dynamic process by which the whole cosmos continues to be created, in the writings of Robert Persig, he introduces the idea in 'Lila: an inquiry into morals'. In his  'Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance' I found an empathetic writer who seemed to really understand the importance of making things by hand.  'The physical order of the universe is also the moral order. Rta is both'. (Persig,1992, p444)

Understanding 'Rta' as a root out of which our concept of art gradually developed can help in the establishing of personal and societal well-being. For example, when making artwork we often have ethical dilemmas, but if you see art as part of the ever unfolding interconnectedness of life, decisions regarding environmental conservation informed by an awareness of Rta, would emphasise this. Something that has helped myself in the establishment of an ethical framework within which to practice. Any initiatives whereby you place your work within a social context can draw upon the concept of Rta to ensure that your work helped in the development of any community's internal harmonic structure and ability to recognise contact points with the world that surrounds it. Instead of trying to hold on to how it has always been, a community might be helped to embrace the fact that the universe is an ever unfolding event and that accepting change is a strength rather than a weakness. 

N. b. A 'morpheme' is the smallest bit of a language to make sense, a morphological unit of a language is one that cannot be further divided. 

Coda

Since writing this post there has been considerable interest in what I was thinking about. Follow the link below to see how one person's research has taken the idea on further.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD1fQ-xPq-U

See also:

Fine art?

Embrace insignificance

Drawing elephants

Drawing and spirituality

Sanskrit Indian aesthetics

Why do we draw?

Why it matters

A lumpen form

Whether I'm using clay, chalks or ink, there is a constant plastic morphing of shapes that as I work with them can emerge sometimes as frog-like forms, sometimes as images of rocks or landscape and sometimes as humans or plants. Why should something as fluid and unpredictable as this matter? 

Anthropomorphic map of Chapeltown

Polity Books have begun to commission a series of texts designed as arguments for the continuing relevance of various academic disciplines. Tim Ingold was given the task of developing the argument for anthropology. His argument, set out in Anthropology; 'Why it matters' included this short sentence, "Difference is the glue that binds us all." I found this really interesting and after reading the book, I decided to set out an argument for why I continue to pursue my own discipline, and although I haven't the time or space to devote to a full and complete articulation of my position; (Ingold sets out his argument in well over a hundred pages), I will attempt in this much shorter format to set out my own position as to why art matters, in particular, as to why it matters now and why it is central to understanding how difference is something that can gradually disappear when drawing and making things.  

The most important issue for myself is the relationship between art and the world. I believe that art does not set out to critique social issues or to answer problems, it is not about knowledge gathering or illustrating an idea. It is therefore a very poor academic discipline, as it cannot be measured easily and if asked what questions it answers or what issues it solves, many artists may well say that it does not ask questions or give answers. But as the issues and problems that face us today are so huge and pressing, does this mean that art is useless? Art is for me something much more about being embedded into life, rather than standing outside of it. It is about experiencing the world and the things that make up the world, both its processes and its physicality. It is also about using the stuff of the world to reflect on the world. It therefore deals with material possibilities. My personal approach is that as stuff comes into contact with my hands and my sight and the rest of my body's experiential bundle, it can be engaged with and as change happens its implications can be followed until something emerges. The world not being the subject of some sort of objective study but something I am immersed in. As I try to swim in it, my movements create eddies in the water, these eddies can be just splashes if I'm not in tune with the water or they can be beautiful swirls if my actions flow with the fluid I'm in. In making drawings or ceramics I try to attune myself to both the materials I am working with and the various processes and activities that I am entangled with, these other things being what we call politics, gardening, reading, having relationships with other people, feeling ill or smelling cut grass. It could be argued that everything matters, but sometimes I need to make images of things to let their 'mattering' make sense to me, I also need to filter what matters, if not I would be overwhelmed with so much information that I wouldn't be able to function. I do believe making art is about making some sort of sense, but not because it explains things, its a sort of sense that relates to how the experience of living has something about it that can be seen through the imagination. It is as if the intuitive coming into being of an image as it arrives out of a material, helps crystallise certain types of observations, not those of scientific measuring or reasoning, but those that are more about love and kindness, of empathy, of paying attention to something and how it interconnects with other things. Old ideas such as 'harmony' and 'interrelatedness' still seem important, if only because in order to achieve these things you have to look and listen and acknowledge other forms besides your own. 

Several of the drawing projects I have been involved with over the last few years have begun with conversations, I have either been drawing in the street and someone has come up to me and decided to tell me about their lives and what it is like to be them, or conversations have just happened randomly. As I get older conversations change, the things that I talked about with others in my teens were very different to the things I talk to people about now, not more interesting or deeper, just different, because as I interact with the flow of conversation today my bones ache and my feeling tone is that of someone in their 70th year and not their 17th. But above all I try to listen. Back in the studio I go on to continue my part of a conversation through imaginative drawing or making. This is not about being the analytical artist standing back from the world and being objective about it, it is about flowing with the implications of the conversation, and as images arrive using these as extensions of that conversation. Not just with people but with the materials that I have also joined in with in opening out possibilities. By making the conversations more visible, I also get to become part of a wider ongoing conversation, one that occurs on social media as much as a result of people seeing the work in exhibitions. Images thus become part of a flow of both verbal and visual conversations, but the images work slightly differently to the words, they allow others time to digest them and they take on new meanings as they are translated into digital forms. However the meaning is more to do with what is articulated at the various points of contact, rather than something directed or shaped, its a meaning that flows into forms in a similar way that molten metal flows into a mould. 

A glowing sun/virus illuminates a dark sea

There is something about care that is important here, valuing others lives is part of an attempt to value the earth itself and this means that I also have to take other viewpoints seriously, whether this be of people or non humans, which is part of a duty of care that is a hard thing to follow sometimes. 

Taking others seriously is something I found that the art world was very poor at doing when I first arrived in art college in the late 1960s. Art it seemed to me then was much more about learning to operate within a series of positions that were acceptable to certain gatekeepers within the profession. It was certainly not about developing conversations I had previously had with the people I knew before I entered the art world, especially the world I came from in the English Black Country. My teachers from that time would despair of me if they saw the work I did now, their position would be that artists deal with the type of questions that other artists find interesting, the proper subject of the discipline of art being an interrogation of the discipline. There is a long tradition of art writing going back to Lessing and including Greenberg and Dickie that discusses what can and what cant be the subject of art. It was Tom Wolfe's 'The Painted Word' that helped me to eventually articulate my own stance in relation to what I found was an arrogant and stultifying approach to art, one that was a celebration of a certain type of elitism and in England in particular, it was something to do with class. Working class people worked with their hands, therefore the crafting of things could never be as important as the planning and intellectual positioning of ideas, which were the sorts of things middle and upper class people did. It took me a long time to accept that my hands thought in their own way, and that they could have a deep conversation with a material, a conversation that was an enfolding of possibilities, rather than an intellectually understood position. The one was about an ongoing, constantly readjusted dance of relationships, the other was more an observed 'frozen' thing, an isolated object. This was why, I began to realise, that all those wonderful objects that you could look at in glass cases in the British Museum, were somehow 'dead'. They had been plucked out of their event, cut off from the doing that they were involved with. I was often told that the making of art was a thing done in isolation, it would be received within a process of a 'disinterested interest'. But the art I looked at that appealed to me always seemed to be about an approach to the world that suggested an engagement with it. Not to solve anything or to unpick the details of social ills, but to help open out an awareness of what is there. Goya does not solve anyone's problems but he makes me aware of the continuing vanity of people, the stupidity that we can all descend into and the violence human beings can inflict on each other. He is aware that reason sleeps when anger and self interest take over, is tuned into the dark side as well as the funny side of awareness. He is also attuned to ink and paper, as well as paint and its ability to be transformed into the forms he sees and the forms he imagines, the one flowing into the other. 

One thing that we need to remember about art is that it is made by people, people immersed into the world and when I look at art I cant do that without feeling or thinking about how it was first of all engaged with that world and then of how it continues to be entangled into it. This is why older art is still useful now, it changes in how it engages us because nothing stands still, but it continues to engage, because the basic things that have been central to the content of artwork remain the same. 

I have gradually come to realise that art making is something 'stitched into the fabric of the world' as Tim Ingold put it when thinking about anthropology. Our perception of the world is in fact the world's perception of itself, an idea that Ingold took from Merleau-Ponty and which when I read it, I understood as being central to how I could think about how I was working as an artist and as how as an individual being I am in the world. As I do things I interact with the world around me, it is shaping me and I am in my small way shaping tiny bits of it. We mould ourselves together, I am cast from the environment I find myself born into, but as I move through it, I begin to dance with it and hold certain parts of it closer to me than others and as I do so we grow together. Out of this experience and forming an integral part of it comes art. It is a dynamic process, one that is always seeking harmony with the environment it finds itself emerging from. 

The world of degree level art education, within which I work, has seen the rise of the need for lecturers to undertake PhDs. I have never been against the reading of theoretical texts, and in fact have often celebrated their existence and encouraged others to read them, because what they represent are other voices, other conversations as to what the world could be about. But I have always believed that these voices should not to be elevated above those of poets, farmers, street cleaners, wood workers, nurses and overhead crane fitters. All of the people you meet, either in person or via something they have written or visually imagined, are like currents that swirl around us as we swim, sometimes a current will be so strong that it almost pulls you underwater, at other times the existence of a barely perceptible undertow might almost go unnoticed, but will still be a forceful shaper of the direction you will end up going in. My personal observation has been that a PhD prioritises academic learning and the research question above instinct and a haptic understanding and in doing so analytic and objective decision making are elevated as leading to new knowledge, which is in turn valued above any wisdom gained from material thinking, intuition or hand learning. Wisdom it seemed to me could only be arrived at if it had a common purpose, and a common purpose could only be arrived at by working alongside and in collaboration with people and things. For instance if I really want to know what the landscape is like between my house where I live and the place where I work, what I ought to do is try walking from one place to the other with no shoes on. This is a very different approach to knowledge. A collection of facts is something that is too easily commodified and linked to outputs and some sort of measured impact. I have perhaps tended to rely overly on ostensive definitions of what things are, i.e. I prefer pointing to things to show how or what is happening. Wisdom is something that operates in and between people and the world, knowledge is something you can save up, like capital. It can define power relationships and elucidate difference. Knowledge leads to either or situations, which identify difference and if I know you are different from me, I may well treat you differently. This simple fact lies behind so many of the world's problems. We are not things that can be separated one from another, we are entanglements of events, parts of which are always being entangled with other events. If I could see myself and others as an ongoing event whereby we all have parts to play, I would be more inclined to help facilitate the action that is going on between things and people, rather than to create blockages, by working to disadvantage certain players. The event of a fruit ripening on a tree, encompasses many things in its becoming, from sunlight streaming down onto the Earth over many months, to a developing soil complexity and microclimate, that includes minerals, fungi and insects. There is an ever shifting and shaping combination that enables the tree's roots to embrace nourishment, and these events are intertwined with human events such as picking and eating and digesting. For the tree event I also become a distribution system, facilitating seeds to move as far from the tree as possible, so that they can survive outside of its own shade, and for myself I gain nourishment and the energy resources to amongst many other things, type this text. On the other hand, I can use words to differentiate one thing from another; I am a human being and that thing over there is a tree. If I use the two separate nouns in this way, a proposition is developed; it states that humans and trees are very different things, rather than interconnected parts of a process. This writing is art too, which is why hopefully as the words are read, an idea emerges about noticing things. It would be argued by an OOO philosopher however that the nouns are important and what is more useful to think about is the points of contact between things and how change is made at those points of interaction. Whichever way round I think of it, it is interaction and change that results. 

No matter how hard I try I always see everything through very human eyes. Everyday I take a few moments to spend time looking into the pond in the garden. It is that time of the year that the tadpoles are about to get legs and set off out into the world. There is a frog in the pond that always hides behind a particular stone and I always look to see if it is still there and worry when I don't see it. I cant but help think about the frog through my own human form and when I do I picture the frog in my drawing mind as human. As a child I read many a story where frogs were really people, or where they acted as if they were human. I also realise that still thinking like a child is a stupid thing to do, however I am of a very stupid cast of mind, so as our paths cross, I record my thoughts about this in a way that only makes sense to me, by making a drawing, a drawing that suggests that the frog is human, like myself. If this is an argument for my own discipline, then it seems to fall apart at its very inception, but in the conundrum of being illogical and subject to sometimes childlike innocence, perhaps we will find the very thing we are looking for, as it is not about profit or reasoned argument or hubris, it is simply about re-inserting ourselves back into the world, and if this means a process of stupid re-connection then so be it, if it means I think kindly about the life of a frog for five more minutes than I would have done before, if my day to day activity includes a frog in its event cycle, perhaps that's a good start. 

A flower morphs into a frog

So what is it that makes my discipline one that is useful and still of importance to the world? Perhaps it's the fact that it can take seriously a child-like point of view, that it can stand outside of academic structures, that it allows for an enmeshing between people and materials, that it facilitates a flow of change and that it is more about process than final objects. Perhaps it is also because it has a huge mythic weight on its back, one that includes all those very expensive works of art in museums and bank vaults, perhaps its to do with the fact that it is supposed to represent some sort of truth, or just that it is forever morphing and shifting its form, so that it becomes something that can be used by each society as it finds it needs something to help it understand itself. 

Bird form emerges from watery environment

My present cast of mind could also due to the fact that I have been asked to consider undertaking a PhD. Something I have been avoiding for several years has suddenly come to sit right in my centre of vision and I have to make a decision as to whether or not to undertake something that all of my colleagues have done or are in the process of doing. Therefore my earlier statement, that 'the PhD prioritises academic learning and the research question above instinct and a haptic understanding and in doing so analytic and objective decision making are elevated as leading to new knowledge, which is in turn valued above any wisdom gained from material thinking, intuition or hand learning', needs a bit more interrogation, does it always have to be so? If not how can a body of doings be constructed that allows for the serendipity of unexpected interconnections that I like to make as I write this blog, in fact, is this blog a form that could lead into a PhD? 

A long time ago I drew a diagram that attempted to show how art was always changing and that it was never a fixed entity. Perhaps it's time to revisit it and to think about what it could be again. 

Diagram of the evolution of the word 'art' I made for a GIDE conference 

Art as an idea is in constant change, if it wasn't it would have little baring on reality because reality is an ever changing experience. The only people that want art to be some sort of set of eternal values I would suggest are those that have an investment in an idea of such values. 

See also:

The problem with mountains and words

Drawing it all together

Why draw animals

Theory or not theory

Drawing as research

Originality and value: What use is art?

As an artist I have often been brought into discussions about originality and value. There is a tricky question at the centre of this issue, "What value has the arts?" and this is very closely linked to that other question often asked me by my father, "What use is art?"
When I was trying to study philosophy I came across similar questions and found a part answer in Wittgenstein's idea of "The meaning is the use", and the associated concept of "use value".  
So what use is the artwork that I do? Perhaps in asking myself the question and making some sort of attempt to answer it, it might help others, as I know it's a question most artists at one time or another ask themselves.  So here goes nothing... Most of my work begins with me listening to people, so I think I had better start there. This is Mary's* story, told to me a few weeks ago.

Mary has been having nightmares, she can’t sleep and she wants to know what her dreams are about. She has asked her local priest and he has told her that these are only dreams and that she shouldn’t worry.  She finally tells her dream to the artist and his wife, she knows that these are people that will listen to dreams and take them seriously.

Mary has been dreaming of a bleak office type space, it is full of bustling about people and they are all white. She has turned up in this place to make a complaint directly to God. She wants to know why he has stolen her charisma and why he hasn’t given her any qualifications.

At first she cant find God, but she is directed to a huge desk, so big she cant see who is sitting behind it but she can feel his presence and she believes it is God behind the desk. “Why” she demands, “have you stolen my charisma?” “Because”, replies God, “if you had had charisma alongside all your other talents no boy would have been safe from you, you would have broken all the men’s hearts and I couldn’t allow that”.

Mary remembers the time when she was the fastest girl around, she ran everywhere and one day she was picked to run for her school in the local races. ‘Three speed grey pigeon’ she was called at the time, and she had a special boyfriend, one that loved to watch her run and who always expected her to win all her races, and she prided herself that she would always win for him. But on the day of the race, she wasn’t feeling well and as soon as the race started she fell over and cut her knee. It bled heavily and she never recovered, the race was lost and so was her boyfriend. She still remembers the shame of that day, letting everyone down and now she knows why. It was God taking away her charisma, and that was the day he did it.

She now wants to know why she has been given no qualifications for all the work she did in that school, but God is no longer replying, instead a very elegant white woman is standing there and she tells Mary that she must go now and that she hasn’t got permission to be there.

Mary then tells us that everywhere surrounding this dream is a ‘nothingness’, so she can’t go anywhere but into this nothingness and it’s then that she wakes up because she is frightened.

I ask Mary if she has been worried by the Windrush stories on the news and she tells us that she came over to England from St Kitts as one of the Windrush people. That’s why she has no paperwork. Her husband is very ill and her grandson has been finding it hard to get work. Her priest had been telling the congregation not to worry and that it would all be sorted out and that they should trust in the will of the Lord but she doesn’t really believe him.  Her son comes over to see us and after apologising for his mother’s dreams, tells us a long story of how difficult it has been over the years to get things done as a family because of the lack of certain proofs of identity.

Two days after Mary told us the story her son comes to tell us she has been taken into hospital, she has had a stroke.

Stories like Mary’s are common, especially in an area of the city where everyone comes from somewhere else. There is a shape to everything, and Mary’s is that of a wonderful ‘Three speed grey pigeon’, no matter that she is now an old white haired woman in her late 70s, she has a presence and a grace of movement that belies her age, her skin glows and she wears her carefully chosen clothes with grace and carries herself with pride. 

All communities are full of stories, but without someone to listen to them and to shape them into images the stories fade away with people’s lives.

If Mary’s story is to have any meaning beyond what it means to her, it needs to find a shape outside of the immediate community and if the collected stories of the community as a whole are to be preserved they need to find a shape as well. The feeling tone of Chapeltown, and this is where Mary has now lived for many years, is a layered history of immigration, Jews, Irish, Eastern Europeans, Caribbean, Indian etc. every community bringing stories of the past and stories of arrival and stories of life in a new place.

Mary's story is one of many stories that I have heard over the years and her story is now lodged in my head waiting for some sort of outlet, so that I can pass it on in a sort of Chinese whisper sort of way. Everything for me is a translation. Mary had to translate her dreams into a story, I have had to retranslate my memories of her story into a written text and at some point I will re-translate something from the feeling tone of her experience into an image.  For someone that draws, stories need a place to settle into, what I call a geography of the imagination, and that geography is found by making drawings as I walk the streets of Chapeltown. More stories are collected as I make further drawings and engage people in conversations as I do so. Each time I hear a story the map of the imagination expands, sometimes a story might be from Europe and at another time from South America. The traces and lines of all the different stories are important to the imaginative development of another world, some stories will have come from my reading of both fact and fiction, some from the media and others from talking to people or just observing what goes on, until within my head a series of potential drawings will be starting to be visualised, and then as they are put down onto paper they will be reshaped again as they emerge into a world of ink or pencil or paint. An imaginary town may grow within the suburb of a real city, finding itself located within an imaginary map that looks very like an actual map, the one dependent on the other, the harsh reality of the day to day gradually becoming a fairytale, but like all fairytales it may have a dark core that belongs to the reality out of which it emerges.

All the various elements in the drawing above have been developed in response to stories heard, things seen and events experienced, however they have now been poetically refashioned into a mythic landscape, one that is centred on an impossible tower, an image that was designed as an allegorical response to being told that after living in Chapeltown for a while all those hopes and desires that someone had before they arrived now seemed hollow promises of a bright future, the towers of the city were not full of riches, but were impossible mirages. 

So what use is it to make an image like this? I would argue that in the same way a fairy tale contains within it something of the subconscious, something about the way things are that we don't always want to confront, so images like this become entry points into conversations and meditations on what the world is like. Not as answers to questions, that is perhaps for politicians and not as some sort of sociological study, but as a poetic image, and if it is argued poetry has no use, then perhaps this type of work doesn't have a use either, but I would hope that by providing a window within which people can take a step backwards from reality, they may be able to somehow see it more clearly and in that step backwards a use value is born.

What this has to do with originality and value is that there is a need to find a shape for the information behind the drawings, a shape that you could call the drawing's 'subconscious' and in finding that shape a certain originality is needed, especially if there is no existing form that will fit. However originality in itself would not appear to be the most important thing, sometimes the forms developed by earlier artists are the right fit for what I want to say and if so I see no harm in using them. As to value, it would seem that there are various ways of looking at that. One is that some people will value the drawings I make because they help them to experience the world by providing them with a means to take that one step backwards from it, the drawings give them an entry point into thinking about the world in a different way. The second is that of monetary value and that is something only conferred by those that can make those sorts of decisions, art dealers, collectors and people involved with the art market. The art market rarely dips its toes into the local waters of a place like Leeds, so it is unlikely that the things I do will ever be given the validity of monetary value, but that doesn't mean that one shouldn't bother to make art. The job of trying to communicate something is one that you can always do better and every time you make something you can hope on the one hand that something of value is communicated and on the other that even if it isn't it may be that what you did do has helped you think about how to shape a new communication in just that bit better a fashion. Like all conversations sometimes they are boring, sometimes of no apparent value, but occasionally you will have a conversation that changes your life. 

It could be argued that I have no business making the art I do in an area like Chapeltown, an area where most of the people who live there see themselves as part of the African diaspora. I think of myself as someone who's own story rubs up alongside a series of stories from somewhere else, but even though these stories don't refer to my own background and ethnicity, they affect me and make me think. So I respond to stories and shape them according to my own predilections but I suspect that is what everybody does, we will all interpret the world through the colour of the lens that sits over our own eyes. We can never be objective, but we can emphasise with other people, other animals or things and attempt to feel what they feel, understand what they understand or simply be like they are and in that empathy lies perhaps the main reason for making images.
So what use is art? Perhaps it is to give a shape to feelings, emotions, observations and thoughts that can become entry points for others to develop their own awareness. These shapes in turn allow us to develop links between ourselves because they help us to create stories about things we were not aware of before. In the stories we tell we shape the world, in the shapes we make we refashion the way the world is seen and as we do we create new possibilities for how we will engage with whatever it is that is out there to be engaged with. Art in effect becomes an intermediary between one thing and another. In religious art it can work as an intermediary between the material world and the spiritual world, a connection between humans and gods, and in a more materialistic culture it can operate as a communication channel between speakers of different verbal languages or between those that inhabit different cultures. Art makes us more connected with things, but it doesn't tell people what to do with this awareness, something else will always step in to fill that gap, power abhors a vacuum.

*Names have been changed to protect people's identities.