Dot to Dot

In between several busy weeks of work out of the studio – and partly inspired by them – I’ve been trying to write up an entry but just couldn’t get the ideas into shape. I hope to return to them and finish it soon but in the meantime a memory from art school has been winking away at me.

I remember, as a fresh-faced 1st year art student, sitting in one of the design department studios at Gray's School of Art. Our tutor was an artist called Ainslie Yule; a quiet spoken man, he had a gentle voice and affected a slightly eccentric manner. In that first class he was trying to get us to think differently; what would now be called ‘out of the box’ thinking although at the time we used to think that he was just ‘out of his box’.

One idea of his has stayed with me in the 30 or more years since he shared it. What he did was fantastically simple and although it may not have worked for everyone in the classroom jings! it worked on me. I can remember he was at the front of the room at an easel with a big flip pad and he began in storytelling mode by asking us to picture a time before history when we were all cavemen - no civilisation - no art. Everyone was attentive, partly because he was a witty story-teller, and partly because this was more fun than the kind of colour or tonal exercises we’d get in other classes. Then he asked us to imagine one of the cavemen picking up a burnt stick of wood from the fire and thinking about it: invented fire – invented charcoal. And then he said something like, ‘Imagine what it would be like if he did this on the wall of the cave.’ And then, dramatically holding up a piece of charcoal to us he turned to the board and pressed a single black dot into the centre of the flip pad. Pause for reaction.

And that was it.

I can still remember the giggles and excitement that rippled round the room. Is that all? A dot? But slowly, we got it - he was trying to get us to imagine the first creative act. I think it was a piece of genius – at a stroke he’d elevated the ability of mark-making, the process of thinking 'what if I tried this', to the status of a uniquely human and primal activity.

I still believe it is.

It also sent me hurtling back, as if on some time-traveling helterskelter, the relatively short distance at that time to my child-hood – to mark-making, to the joy of exploring a medium (a soft crayon, a pencil, a biro, paint) simply for the quality of mark that it makes. It validated that process of enquiry, effect and sharing and joined me with both something in my own nature, and some deep and enduring human nature. That single dot and where the charcoal might go next, seemed to signify the latent possibility of human creativity.

It’s remained for me like some Newtonian apple-falling moment as the spark that proved a universal law – a self-evident, but up to that point unarticulated truth about being human. Well, it pointed towards a truth at any rate - something to do with why humans create things. Unlike Newton I'm not smart enough to have come up with a Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Artistica, but I was pretty sure it was out there.

It’s something which has been reinforced by seeing my own children explore their world through making marks – the pleasure in the quality of a mark, or the satisfaction in creating an image. One scientific branch – cognitive science - marks out distinct phases in our ability to grasp and understand the world and these correspond to distinct levels of ability in many fields.

Research for an art school essay introduced me to the Swiss scientist Jean Piaget who identified three levels of cognition (actually he described four, but the final three relate strongly to creativity) . The clearest way I can think of to illustrate them is to use the acquisition of Mathematical comprehension as an analogy for others.

The first level could be described as pre-Arithmetic in nature: the world is a series of counting blocks which have baffling results - four blocks piled high in a tower will seem to be greater than four blocks in a low square, yet they are equal. This level of experience is immediate, emotional, has no logical function yet and corresponds to a child’s level of drawing.

The second level is Arithmetic: logic is applied to the first conception of the world and is developed into more complex models and manipulations. This level could be said to correspond to complex ways of drawing and envisioning the world like perspective – the world is not just the visible, it is infinitely structured, and obeys rules which cannot be seen, but which are still provable from our experience of the world.

The final level is Abstract: mathematical formula and structures can be deduced which have no proof or measurable basis in the known world - think of a blackboard covered in mathematical gobbledygook. This - even though as students we were only just acquiring or refining our use of the rules of perspective drawing - was the ‘out of the box’ phase we were all arriving at and seeing in the contemporary art world around us.

That abstract level of thinking seemed exciting and highly relevant since cognitive science was not only describing a child’s development, it was also describing anthropological and cultural development throughout history - and we were living in the very latest phase, right at the edge. Ainslie’s caveman operated at an Arithmetic level, the Renaissance could be seen as the flowering of the Mathematical era, and Kandinsky and Picasso in the 20thC. could claim the fame of launching us into the Abstract era. Seen this way, art had a developmental structure and we were at the very tip of it in an ever-refining abstract mode.

In fact, at that time, the end of my time at art school, it felt as if everything had been tried in art. The world seemed to be saying that the developmental trajectory of art had culminated and we were all entering the post-developmental era of post-modernism. The history of art was a story of progress and it had apparently arrived at the end of the last chapter.

Looking back I can’t help but have a sense of crap timing - it was as if I'd graduated into the discovery of a cul-de-sac and much art since then has seemed to be about recycling or desperately breaking out of that dead-end. Art had in fact, it seemed, gone over the edge. Personally, this was debilitating (wouldn't it have been nice, I sometimes think, to have been born in turn-of-the-century Paris with all that wide open art possibility ahead; oh yes, and two world wars, poverty, revolution, holocaust... maybe not) and it’s taken most of the time since then to rediscover a sense of what thrills me in art as much as that dot by Ainslie Yule did all those years ago.

For me it still involves marks, but there are so many mediums, means and processes available these days that mark making can now be something altogether different – unrecognisable - the term simply analogous.

This is what I love and hate about contemporary art. It's as if there's been an explosion of new theories to challenge the old order - much like contemporary science continues to search for truths beyond Newton. Since Picasso and Kandinsky proposed their Einstein-like breakthrough-theories the world of art has never been the same and the drive for discovery has accelerated exponentially; complex, magnificent and incomprehensible ideas about art and what art is have proliferated ever since. Just as physics proposes new ideas far beyond a description of gravity, the art world has passed through its theories of relativity into the equivalent realm of phenomena such as quarks and ideas as difficult to grasp as quantum mechanics and string theory and worm-holes.

And just like contemporary science, contemporary art's new ideas are unproven and, so far, unproveable. Will they be seen as plain bonkers in the future? On one hand much art today can seem like an inarticulate fumbling with new ideas, new devices, new media. Sometimes though, this can come off thrillingly and the effect can be the same as seeing that magical dot for the first time. Post-modern, Alter-modern? Who knows. But today, surely, we are as alive to exploring, making and sharing – whatever the form - as we ever were. We’ll never be post-human.

I wonder if those early cavemen responded by saying, “What’s that meant to be? My cub could do that!”

I wish I could ask Ainslie.


GJ
FEB 09

Illustrations, from top: Gray's School of Art; 'Caveman' by Gary Larson; 'Untitled' by Margot; 'Composition VIII' by Wassily Kandinsky; 'Sleeper' by Mark Wallinger.