Of Heroes and Nudgers

There’s a cultural tradition, particularly in the 20th Century, of regarding the artist in a heroic light: someone struggling to bring forth a new vision against the odds – wrestling with their medium – fighting through economic hardship. Picasso comes to mind – perhaps because he was the blueprint for the self-conscious hero-artist (picture his close colleague and fellow cubist inventor George Braque – can you? – and you realise how much Picasso invented his own image). The type fits many American artists – Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko – perhaps aided by the tragic end of these two in particular. But perhaps it also has something to do with how we regard artists – always trying to fit them into a narrative which adds value, emphasises their extraordinariness. Artists in movies are the giveaway here – think of Kirk Douglas as Vincent Van Gogh (Lust for Life, 1956), or Charlton Heston as Michaelangelo working on the Sistine Chapel (The Agony and the Ecstasy, 1965). This isn’t limited to artists of course: writers, composers and performers make similarly rich subject matter. All of which preserves the Romantic image of the artist as outsider. Which is quite a safe place to keep someone whose work may be a little off the wall. But actually, it strikes me that most people committed to a creative activity are involved in a rather more gentle pursuit – however passionately they might believe in it.

Richard Thaler is an American economist who has been courted by leading western politicians recently and lectures regularly in the UK on of his concept of ‘nudging’. In his book, co written with Cass Sunstein, ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness’ he proposes that people are quite poor at making decisions or seeing things in a different way. There’s no point, he argues, in giving people all the facts and hoping they’ll make the right decision or even hectoring them into a given behaviour or action. Much more effective is to give people a little nudge. His most colourful illustration involves the male urinals in many locations in the Netherlands. These urinals have a life-sized image of a fly printed in a strategic position on the ceramic. As Thaler pointed out in a recent radio interview, “give men a target and they’ll aim for it.” Having been in Amsterdam recently I can vouch for this – that little fly was irresistible. The net result is that ‘spillage’ has declined at these locations - thus improving the facility and reducing maintenance costs. This is one paradigm of the nudge. It alters our response to the world with a tiny push. How far politicians believe this will be an effective tool in their arena has sinister or comical overtones, depending on your view of politicians.

Thaler acknowledges that this is not a new phenomenon; commerce has been ‘nudging’ us towards certain sales outcomes for decades – what he calls the architecture of choice with regards to retail. And it seems to me that most artists are involved in a process of attempting to nudge their audience towards a new point of view. Looked at this way all art becomes a proposition by the artist of a new concept of how at least a part of the world is. Every major art movement can be seen in this way - as a new concept of how the world is perceived, with the art work as the proposition, manifesto - nudge.

But what motivates creative people to engage in attempting to nudge the world along? Heroics? Vanity? To me, it's more analogous to science (I find it it curious how often science and art are described in terms of polar opposites). We happily think of scientists conducting their experiments in an unegotistical manner - observing and recording the world - sharing their work with their peers and waiting while their theses are absorbed into common understanding. Newton, Darwin, Einstein; their observations and propositions are widely accepted as parts of the fabric of our reality. Stephen Hawking observed that scientific theories are models based on the reality it is possible to observe at any given time. These theories hold good until new observations prove them wrong (or they may be reinforced by new observations). This seems to me to be a direct equivalent of the arts.

Anyone who has been involved in creative activity knows that it can be a compulsive mixture of curiosity and experiment. Engagement with a medium and a subject (and again I mean any art form or medium) charts a connection between personal ability, perception and the real world. Probing the limits of these - inevitable when human curiosity is involved - leads to new conclusions, new ideas. And the test of these new ideas is in the sharing. The British educationalist, Ken Robinson, believes that creativity is "the process of having original ideas that have value". In this sense, the arts and sciences share a commonality. The motivations of artists and scientists are, I believe, also similar. It's a paradox that both are engaged in observations and conclusions about the real world, but although science may seem to offer concrete, proveable conclusions, art is concerned with a more subjective perspective on the same thing - truth. Most creatives will argue passionately that their work reflects an aspect of how the world is - it may not be the whole truth, but it will be at least a small truth. Or an attempt at one. Some artists, like their scientific equivalents, may be off on a daft tangent. Others may be too complex or controversial for common acceptance. At art school, I remember those latter qualities being the most appealing.

The notion of the romantic outsider, the artistic hero, was a powerful one to me and most of my fellow students in the painting department at Gray's School of Art in the late 70's and early 80's. Maybe it's just a phase for young people - a way of separating yourself from your parent's generation or the expectation of the conventional pathway. I look back now and think of the lecturers' long-suffering, heavenward glances. I can only imagine how much hilarity would have been involved in staff-room discussions of rebellious student antics. But they knew, and I've realised this ever since art school, that they were embedding us with skills to go on learning beyond our studies and giving us the resources to develop and drive forward our curiosity. Even then, our engagement as students with art materials and art history and the world around us meant that everyone was fumbling enthusiastically towards half-formed propositions of how we saw things. Naive, some of it. Embarrassing, even. But each and everyone a nudge - look at my proposition - see it my way.

Every artistic proposition is a nudge, I think. Like a scientific experiment it needs to stand up to scrutiny - the more thoroughly researched, the more accurate the observations that have formed it, the more successful the proposition; the more irresistible the nudge.

Picasso's breakthrough Cubist works (and Braque's) proposed a new way of seeing the world which reflected the complex possibilities explored by the new discoveries at the turn of the century - theirs was the time of Einstein, Freud, Ford and the Wright brothers. Cubism nudged the world towards the idea that reality in the 20th Century was going to be multifaceted. Contemporary times are even more in flux, and artists' propositions today reflect the extraordinary range of experiences available to us and the width (if not the depth) of information at our finger-tips.

Hawking has also said that he concedes that there is the theoretical possibility of other dimensions but that, as yet, they may be impossible to observe, if they exist. This contemplation of possibilities seems to me to be at the heart of both scientific and artistic endeavour. Theories of how the world might be - maybe not a theory of everything, but maybe just a humble part of it - are the inevitable product of engagement with a form or medium; humans aren't all heroic, but they're nearly all opinionated. The excitement of sharing a realisation or a discovery - of devising a work which will nudge others towards that same conclusion seems to me to be the real driver for artists.

It may not always come off, it may not always be palatable (anyone who watches, reads or listens to the arts will have been to that place) - and this again has parallels with science (anyone for stem-cells?) - but art has endured, sharing new observations, nudging common understanding towards them; a vital, life-exploring, life-enhancing human activity.

GSJ
March 09

Illustrations from top: Pablo Picasso, 1962; House Fly; Super String Theory illustration; Georges Braque, 'Man With Guitar'.