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Art As Cure For Technological Anxietyby |
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"If we are not to go on being 'helpless illiterates'--passive victims as the 'media themselves act directly toward shaping our most intimate self-consciousness', then we have to adopt the attitude of the artist." 1
From Platonic To Digital Republic
Writing in the 1950's, McLuhan used a military metaphor taken from the Cold War to describe an historically enshrined but often overlooked quality of artistic imagination. In a long line of commentators upon the role of the artist in society--a dialogue sparked by Plato's banishing the artist from the ideal Republic, a debate picked up by Shelley and others in various "defenses" of poetry--McLuhan adds his voice and basically echoes Shelley: from Plato in the Agricultural Age, through Shelley at the birth of the Industrial Age, up to McLuhan at the advent of the Age of Information, there is a continuum of discussion about the role of art and the artist in the ideal society. McLuhan says the artistic imagination can act as an "early warning system" in sensing coming shifts in the techno-structure. Shelley delivers the same message, though he employs a biological rather than a military metaphor, when he proclaims the artist as "the antennae of the race." Both agree the artist has a privileged place in enabling the social body to advance into the frontiers of the unknown--in effect, the future.McLuhan basically reappoints the Artist to this place of importance in the electric techno-culture. There is an "average, everyday understanding," to borrow an expression from Heidegger, about what it is to be an "Artist". This average everyday understanding is that the Artist is simply another commodity producer of "things"--pleasant representations to hang upon the wall, for example, or what Duchamp, king of the Dadists and perhaps the true Artist of the Twentieth Century, called "expensive wallpaper". This average everyday understanding is what keeps alive the confusion between artist and craftsman; it confuses albeit clever representations of owls, whales and eagles with genuine works of art and goes to show the enduring nature of Plato's objection: that the artist merely makes imitations of specific examples of "Forms". McLuhan cuts through this objection and looks not at what the artist produces, but at the manner in which the artist goes about the business of creation--process rather than product--and concludes it is the "attitude" of the artist which is important and an essential component of future survival thinking.
The object d'art can be a by-product of the art process, one of many tokens in a trail of clues testifying as to where artists' imaginations led them. In this view, the artist is not a simple manufacturer of consumer fetish objects, not just another craftsman, creator of expensive wallpaper, but an explorer, a scout with an attitude that we can learn from and should adopt and emulate.
"The mind of the artist is always the point ofFor centuries we have viewed art and works of art in the context of time, whether past or present, and regional circumstance; but as we hurdle into an uncertain technological future, it is all the more important to focus instead on attitude. We can see the recognition of this in education, where it is slowly being acknowledged that the rote memorization of facts is of less importance than training in the ability to think creatively. The Artist is not afraid of errors, mistakes, false turns, dead ends, unfinished business, or contradictions. As Walt Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large: I contain multitudes." 3
maximal sensitivity and resourcefulness in exposing
altered realities in the common culture"-- (McLuhan) 2
Think Globally
The "attitude of the artist" as a tactic for facing the future is something that must, as the world approximates "Global Village" status, transcend geographical borders and mere issues of content or nationalism.The subject matter of Art varies from location to location, of course, but the attitude of the artist has to do with the nature of the human mind and is, therefore, refreshingly universal. If the strategy for facing techno-anxiety lies in the mind, it is comforting to know that the strategy lies like a fertile seed within us all, the growth and blossoming of which is impeded only by the civilized structures we have created. The inner workings of the artist's mind are human, archetypal, and touch more upon "collective unconscious" than they do on mere questions of nationalistic content.
In 1969, Rhoda Kellogg published the remarkable results of a study of children's art, focusing on the characteristics of line formations, particularly in scribbles and drawings, in the work of children before the natural operations of their minds are interfered with by "education". What most people dismiss as the meaningless results of muscular activity, Kellogg sees as the child's first attempt at drawing and as important clues in understanding the mental processes and the development of the child's mind. Her study is among the first to show concern for direct observation and study of the spontaneous work of children.
She traveled the globe and collected over one million examples of these line formations or scribbles from more than thirty cultures, and presented her findings in Analyzing Children's Art 4. Not only were there patterns in these scribbles, but the recurring designs may be considered archetypal symbols as well as suggesting an explanation of the forms of primitive and prehistoric art. Children from every culture go through the same stages of scribbling and artistic development, and the stages are predictable and consistent regardless of culture or level of cultural development or sophistication. Furthermore, these stages are experienced with no training, coaxing or teaching. It is only when the natural, innate ability of the child to draw is interfered with--i.e. when the child goes to school--that this development is arrested.
"...the expressive gestures of the infant, from the moment that they can be recorded by a crayon or pencil, evolve from certain basic scribbles towards consistent symbols. Over several years of development such basic patterns gradually become the conscious representation of objects perceived: the substitutive sign becomes a visual image....every child, in its discovery of a mode of symbolization, follows the same graphic evolution. Out of the amorphous scribblings of the infant emerge, first certain basic forms, the circle, the upright cross, the diagonal cross, the rectangle, etc., and then two or more of these basic forms are combined into that comprehensive symbol known as the mandala, a circle divided into quarters by a cross. Let us ignore for the present the general psychological significance of the process: I merely want you to observe that it is universal and is found, not only in the scribblings of children but everywhere where the making of signs has had a symbolizing purpose--which is from the Neolithic Age onwards." 5Now what this says is that if you leave children or primitives alone and let them pick up an instrument and draw, whether on rock or sand or paper, they move through the same stages of making marks, lines, circles, and figures no matter what the culture or country, "literate" or "illiterate", or age they live in. "Prominent in the art of prehistoric man are the abstract and early pictorial motifs commonly found in child art today. Indigenous art also contains these motifs." 6 This speaks volumes and demonstrates a universality not only of artistic development but of the development of mind in the human species.If McLuhan is correct that we need to appreciate the artistic attitude in order to survive the future, and that the new technologies increasingly bring about a "global village" environment, then it is important to appreciate this natural process at the core of mankind's social and cultural development as reflected in art. Furthermore, these findings are reflected in other areas of study. Roger Fry, for example, says that "The form of a work of art has meaning of its own and the contemplation of the form in and for itself gives rise in some people to a special emotion which does not depend upon the association of the form with anything else whatever....The esthetic emotion is an emotion about form." 7
Use Both Sides of the Brain: Divergent and Convergent Thinking
How do artists think? The difference between convergent and divergent thinking was pointed out to me by a most excellent teacher I had the fortune to study under for a few months. John was an instructor of art instructors, recently returned from two years of study and teaching in Africa. Each week of his art education course we were exposed to art challenges none of us had ever before experienced. The assignments were so strange as to be sometimes frightening. There wasn't a single person who did not avoid one such class as they were partially designed to be "threatening". John's theory was that art instructors routinely go into a classroom and ask children to do things the child has never before experienced, but to the instructor the activity is routine, almost blasé. John wanted us to feel the same trepidation, the same challenges, excitement and often anxiety that children feel when faced with something foreign to their experience.The assignments were threatening at times as we had nothing to cling to. For example, he instructed us to fill the room with cardboard, proceeded to make a perfect darkroom of the classroom, then we were each to go to the window, poke a tiny hole in the cardboard and "work with the light." That was it! No further instructions or guidance. Cardboard and light. Those were our materials. Light was the medium and no one had worked with light as a medium in that way: in the same way the child, when first handed a new medium experiences...but the children we observed when given something new did not fall back upon the standard adult responses. Or not always. Many times the children showed no fear whatsoever when faced with new materials, new mediums with which to work. They did not need the same kind of security adults need when dealing with something new.
And what is the medium of the twenty-first century? Technology itself. How we meet and greet these new media is similar to how we, as students in that class, met the challenges of media unfamiliar to us. During the course of our work, John would circulate and ask us how we were "feeling", and get the responses on tape which he would later play to us. Out of this emerged a vision of how the artist approaches such challenges and one of the conclusions was that the artist uses both divergent and convergent thinking. Think of divergent thinking as a flashlight beam which expands to illuminate a broad spectrum of opportunities. The think-tank approach. When faced with something new, the best strategy is to explore as much ground as possible and welcome possibilities without censorship. Then, once something promising pops into the foreground, narrow the beam and converge upon it with all the analytical resources at our disposal. Too many of the present ills of society are the result of an excess of one or the other of these methods to the exclusion of the other. True artistic thinking employs both these techniques. The contemporary German artist, Joseph Beuys, undertakes "searching explorations of how artistic creation can directly convey the existential attitudes of a more profound understanding of natural ecological relationships, and how an expanded conception of art can tackle even the social, economic, and political reorganization of Western society. He saw this as necessary to replace the current ecology-destroying tendencies embodied in consumerism, patriarchy, statism, and capitalist growth." 8
Construction Versus Creation
In 1943, in a ridiculously simple but typically inspired stroke of genius, Picasso took the seat and handlebars of an old bicycle and combined them in a way as to suggest a bull's head. There was no "making" in the ordinary sense involved here, no manual skill or craftsmanship involved, but a leap of imagination and a single manual response to it.The process of creative thinking consists of such leaps, and it is precisely this kind of daring and risk taking that is at the core of artistic thinking and at the heart of the kind of process painting exemplified by Basquiat. Whether you "like" this painting or not is unimportant and even irrelevant; what is important is to recognize, if you do not already, that art--such as this painting--is not about commodity (in spite of the fact that it's worth several hundred thousand dollars) but about process and ultimately attitude. The fact that the artist need not be sure of what s/he is looking for until it is found--or need not be looking at all for anything in particular or anything at all, and has no need to 'find' anything in particular--this drive to and respect for chance and that mysterious ability to recognize and discover which we call talent distinguishes art from craft. This daring in the face of the unknown, the willingness and eagerness to tackle and absorb new experiences, the wisdom to embrace rather than flee from insecurity and uncertainty is the attitude needed by designated digital drivers when navigating the highways of the electric future. To paraphrase Nietzsche:
Drive dangerously! 1Kroker, Arthur. "Digital Humanism: The Processed World of Marshall McLuhan",CTheoryquoting McLuhan, Marshall, "A Historical Approach to the Media", Teacher's College Record, 57(2), November, 1955. p.110. [back]
NOTES
3I believe this is from Leaves of Grass and I'm guessing at the punctuation. Long a favorite quote of mine, Walt's "attitude" here expressed would no doubt be heartily endorsed by McLuhan. [back]
4Kellogg, Rhoda, Analyzing Children's Art Palo Alto, Calif : National Press Books, [1969] [back]
5Herbert Read, in an introduction to Kellogg's research. Quoted in Analyzing Children's Art, p.2. [back]
7Fry, Roger."The Artist and Psychoanalysis." Bulletin of Art Therapy, Vol.I No.4, pp.3-18 in Kellogg. Analyzing Children's Art, p.227. [back]
8Adams, David. Art Journal. Summer92, Vol. 51 Issue 2, p.26. [back]
Special thanks to Mark Harden for images by Kandinsky, Basquiat and Munch
