For a large print version please contact the engage office: [email protected]
This PDF is an extract from engage publication:
• engage review Promoting greater understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts
• Imagination
• Issue 16 – Winter 2005
• 72 pages
• ISSN 1365-9383
The original publication is available from engage as below, subject to stocks.
This text is copyright, and is made available for personal/educational use only, and may not be used commercially or published in any way, in print or electronically, without the express permission of the copyright holders engage. engage reiterates its gratitude to the authors and editors concerned, many of whom work without fee. For more details of engage see end.
Contents
Imagination Issue 16 – Winter 2005
Editorial
Richard Kearney On Imagination
Lindsay Clarke The Prime Agent: imagination as mandorla
Gavin Jantjes myooh’zee-?m: imagination in the museum of our time
Susan Rowe Harrison Creatology Creativise Creatovate
ResCen artists roundtable Picture the Sound of a Dripping Tap
Maria Balshaw Here, There and Everywhere: the cultural value of imagination
Idit Nathan Let’s Play: on engaging childrens’ imaginations
Amanda Phillips Imaging Imagination: ten different boxes from the same starting point
Clare van Loenen Planes, Trains and Rocking Horses
Reviews Dick Downing and Ruth Watson School art: What’s in it? (Hannah Fussner) On Reason and Emotion: 14th Biennale of Sydney (Michael Prior) Under Our Street: a Creative Partnerships project (Harvey McGavin)
engage journal subscription form
Editorial, Imagination
Karen Raney
Given the swell of interest in ‘creative thinking,’ it seems timely to consider how it is being thought about in art practice, theory and education. We have chosen to build this issue around the related concept of imagination. Why imagination? For one thing ‘imagination’ as a term is not so overworked, and so has accumulated less baggage, pro and con. And if imagination is seen not only as the ground of creativity, but as the ground of our relationship to other people and to perceived reality itself, it is potentially a more capacious idea.
How then to start thinking about imagination? Most accounts of imagination emphasise it as a power to conjure up images mentally, or to realise images in outward form - ‘image’ of course being a word with many meanings, not confined to the visual. Lindsay Clarke understands imagination more fully as the ‘prime agent’ of human perception - what gives us ‘reality’ in the first place. If this is so, imagination is also the means by which our perceptions, and hence events and circumstances themselves, can be changed. We are born into a world of stories, we tell our lives in stories, and we can alter the stories we tell. ‘Reality is not simply out there, fixed, obdurate and impervious, but changes according to the stories we tell about it. Which is to say reality is always porous to the imagination.’ In the full exercise of the imagination, we negotiate between the public world outside us and the private world within, honouring the claims of both.
Richard Kearney looks at the way the creative human imagination has been degraded or dismissed in much postmodern theory. He first wrote about this fifteen years ago and things have moved on; however the suspicious attitude to these ideas is still around. I have colleagues in art theory who visibly wince when they hear the word ‘creativity’; they feel the concept misrepresents a collective, social process as a private, individual one, and leads to woolly rather than critical thinking. The past decade has seen not only a reappraisal, theoretically, of many notions disqualified as ‘modernist mystification’ - aesthetic experience, imagination and creativity amongst them - but also a rush by policymakers to make creative thinking the key to societal health, wealth and happiness. Clearly, uncritical celebration is as damaging as wholesale rejection. What is needed is a model of the creative imagination which avoids both the modernist overemphasis on individual expression, and the postmodern dismissal of human agency and meaning. Such a model, according to Kearney, would be in equal measure poetical and ethical. Each is indispensible to the other.
We are split beings, Kearney reminds us, split between conscious and unconscious, strange and familiar, same and other. We can either relinquish some control and try to embrace our experience of strangeness, or with grave consequences we can project strangeness onto outsiders. The embrace of strangeness means accepting ‘a certain decentring of the ego which opens the
self to the novel, the incongruous and the unexpected.’ It is just such a decentring which is implied when people talk about ‘taking risks’, ‘flexibility of thought’, ‘open-endedness’, ‘leaps into the unknown.’ The fruits of this relaxation of control are the surprises, the unforseen solutions, the new links and forms characteristic of art, and of creative thinking in any field. In a wider sense, the fruits of the imagination, properly exercised, are a renewed relation of self and other, and a will to transform reality by ‘imagining otherwise.’
How, then, do artists speak about the imagination? What are the conditions under which it thrives? Amanda Phillips describes one of many recent projects designed to study creative process. Ten artists in Leeds were asked to make a work which would embody their interpretation of creativity. Through this exercise and the accompanying discussions, she came to see the ten works as symbolic of different ways that imagination is conceptualised in our culture now. She reflects on the stimulating role of a brief, and calls for a more culturally positioned account of imagination. ‘In order to truly argue for the value of artistic practice in education, we would need to more fully grasp how the products of artists have come to be understood as imaginative and creative and why such ideas have a currency within our culture.’
Artists in the ResCen roundtable discussion spoke about their own imaginative process as choreographers, directors and composers. A number of themes recurred. One was the state of dreamy dislocation deemed necessary for their work. The artists spoke of moments just before sleep, when they are purposeless, bored or wasting time, or when riding in ‘suspended animation’ in a car or train. Thoughts or images generated in these moments ‘go into a little bank and you bring them out later.’ Psychoanalysis suggests that artists must return to a primary process state of perceiving which is fluid and unstable, and perhaps this state is accessed most easily in the ways described.
But at other points in the working cycle, imagination seems to involve what choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh calls ‘the heightened ability to make choices.’ This is a more active stage, where one is directed toward a goal, though it still is an open-ended, improvisory way of proceeding. ‘There are so many variables,’ said Jeyasingh, it’s hard for me to have a pictorial image... I don’t have a picture, or blueprint of what it will be like at the end of the ten days of rehearsals. The only thing that I know is that I am going to put my faith in the dancers, and the process of selecting. Then I will have something at the end.’
The ‘fragment’ was another recurring theme. ‘I’ll see part of something in life,’ says Errollyn Wallen, ‘and then, because I don’t know the whole story of that person or that incident, I’ll finish it off.’ A phrase, an idea, a word, a remembered atmosphere, a note, a taste, might develop into a dance, or it might allow a composer to ‘hear something that hasn’t happened yet’. In The Hidden Order of Art, Anton Ehrenzweig talks about the ‘fertile motif’ or seed from which works in music, drama, the visual arts often evolve. The fertile motif has something incomplete and vague about its structure because it bears the stamp of the non-analytic thinking that brought it into being. Its open, unfinished quality allows it to be projected into the as yet unexperienced future. The ResCen artists spoke of imagination as an everyday function, ‘part of our survival kit,’ but something which artists exploit for specific purposes.
If imagination is part of our perceptual survival kit, and if we know something about how artists make use of it in an intense and deliberate way, what is its role in education? Idit Nathan of Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination describes strategies for developing the imaginations of very young children: making the familiar strange, using minimal props, making room for the unplanned. The more open-ended the project, the more engaging it seems to be for the children; this requires flexible spaces as well as flexible teachers.
Susan Rowe Harrison offers some useful touchpoints from creativity theory. Imaginative work is an interaction of the gifts and talents of individuals coming up against available cultural forms; hence the products of artists, and the way the imagination is conceived, will vary from culture to culture. The conditions that can encourage creative thinking in individuals include: exposure to risk-taking people, an environment that challenges but does not defeat, and peers who are willing to experiment. Good teachers in the arts, Harrison observes, ‘are more inclined to construct their teaching style on an understanding and knowledge of their students and their lives outside of school than are educators in other subjects. In this way, arts teachers are in a unique position to establish the trust necessary to encourage individual experimentation and growth.’
Maria Balshaw considers the argument that creative thinking is vital for 21st Century learning, for the knowledge economy and for societal health in general. She gives an overview of Creative Partnerships, a major action research programme which supports the development of imagination in young people, artists and teachers. Her example of a gallery-school collaboration in Birmingham, along with another Creative Partnerships project described in the reviews, suggests the transformative power of imaginative work, if it is valued by young people, schools and the larger community.
The big challenge, however, which Balshaw and others point out, is that a standardised school system which needs to quantify, document and deliver results tends to be at odds with the culture of risk-taking, flexibility and open- endedness needed for the work of imagination. ‘Put crudely, the educational system needs still to know whether imagination makes children do better in tests - because test scores are still the mass measuring tool for school performance.’ While there is evidence that creative work can improve school performance in measurable ways, ‘it takes a courageous headteacher to hold onto ‘imagination’ for young people in the face of SATS and GCSE results that do not seem to be moving in the right direction.’ A final and very interesting point is this: the kind of independent thinkers industry says it needs will also be likely to debate and be critical, to question the status quo in a way that might prove challenging to institutions. ‘We should perhaps take a moment to think whether schools, and educational systems more broadly, are currently well configured to deal with this kind of dynamic awkwardness.’
In ‘Planes, Trains and Rocking Horses’, Clare van Loenen describes a project inspired by a photography exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. Artist Hiraki
This PDF is an extract from engage publication:
• engage review Promoting greater understanding and enjoyment of the visual arts
• Imagination
• Issue 16 – Winter 2005
• 72 pages
• ISSN 1365-9383
The original publication is available from engage as below, subject to stocks.
This text is copyright, and is made available for personal/educational use only, and may not be used commercially or published in any way, in print or electronically, without the express permission of the copyright holders engage. engage reiterates its gratitude to the authors and editors concerned, many of whom work without fee. For more details of engage see end.
Contents
Imagination Issue 16 – Winter 2005
Editorial
Richard Kearney On Imagination
Lindsay Clarke The Prime Agent: imagination as mandorla
Gavin Jantjes myooh’zee-?m: imagination in the museum of our time
Susan Rowe Harrison Creatology Creativise Creatovate
ResCen artists roundtable Picture the Sound of a Dripping Tap
Maria Balshaw Here, There and Everywhere: the cultural value of imagination
Idit Nathan Let’s Play: on engaging childrens’ imaginations
Amanda Phillips Imaging Imagination: ten different boxes from the same starting point
Clare van Loenen Planes, Trains and Rocking Horses
Reviews Dick Downing and Ruth Watson School art: What’s in it? (Hannah Fussner) On Reason and Emotion: 14th Biennale of Sydney (Michael Prior) Under Our Street: a Creative Partnerships project (Harvey McGavin)
engage journal subscription form
Editorial, Imagination
Karen Raney
Given the swell of interest in ‘creative thinking,’ it seems timely to consider how it is being thought about in art practice, theory and education. We have chosen to build this issue around the related concept of imagination. Why imagination? For one thing ‘imagination’ as a term is not so overworked, and so has accumulated less baggage, pro and con. And if imagination is seen not only as the ground of creativity, but as the ground of our relationship to other people and to perceived reality itself, it is potentially a more capacious idea.
How then to start thinking about imagination? Most accounts of imagination emphasise it as a power to conjure up images mentally, or to realise images in outward form - ‘image’ of course being a word with many meanings, not confined to the visual. Lindsay Clarke understands imagination more fully as the ‘prime agent’ of human perception - what gives us ‘reality’ in the first place. If this is so, imagination is also the means by which our perceptions, and hence events and circumstances themselves, can be changed. We are born into a world of stories, we tell our lives in stories, and we can alter the stories we tell. ‘Reality is not simply out there, fixed, obdurate and impervious, but changes according to the stories we tell about it. Which is to say reality is always porous to the imagination.’ In the full exercise of the imagination, we negotiate between the public world outside us and the private world within, honouring the claims of both.
Richard Kearney looks at the way the creative human imagination has been degraded or dismissed in much postmodern theory. He first wrote about this fifteen years ago and things have moved on; however the suspicious attitude to these ideas is still around. I have colleagues in art theory who visibly wince when they hear the word ‘creativity’; they feel the concept misrepresents a collective, social process as a private, individual one, and leads to woolly rather than critical thinking. The past decade has seen not only a reappraisal, theoretically, of many notions disqualified as ‘modernist mystification’ - aesthetic experience, imagination and creativity amongst them - but also a rush by policymakers to make creative thinking the key to societal health, wealth and happiness. Clearly, uncritical celebration is as damaging as wholesale rejection. What is needed is a model of the creative imagination which avoids both the modernist overemphasis on individual expression, and the postmodern dismissal of human agency and meaning. Such a model, according to Kearney, would be in equal measure poetical and ethical. Each is indispensible to the other.
We are split beings, Kearney reminds us, split between conscious and unconscious, strange and familiar, same and other. We can either relinquish some control and try to embrace our experience of strangeness, or with grave consequences we can project strangeness onto outsiders. The embrace of strangeness means accepting ‘a certain decentring of the ego which opens the
self to the novel, the incongruous and the unexpected.’ It is just such a decentring which is implied when people talk about ‘taking risks’, ‘flexibility of thought’, ‘open-endedness’, ‘leaps into the unknown.’ The fruits of this relaxation of control are the surprises, the unforseen solutions, the new links and forms characteristic of art, and of creative thinking in any field. In a wider sense, the fruits of the imagination, properly exercised, are a renewed relation of self and other, and a will to transform reality by ‘imagining otherwise.’
How, then, do artists speak about the imagination? What are the conditions under which it thrives? Amanda Phillips describes one of many recent projects designed to study creative process. Ten artists in Leeds were asked to make a work which would embody their interpretation of creativity. Through this exercise and the accompanying discussions, she came to see the ten works as symbolic of different ways that imagination is conceptualised in our culture now. She reflects on the stimulating role of a brief, and calls for a more culturally positioned account of imagination. ‘In order to truly argue for the value of artistic practice in education, we would need to more fully grasp how the products of artists have come to be understood as imaginative and creative and why such ideas have a currency within our culture.’
Artists in the ResCen roundtable discussion spoke about their own imaginative process as choreographers, directors and composers. A number of themes recurred. One was the state of dreamy dislocation deemed necessary for their work. The artists spoke of moments just before sleep, when they are purposeless, bored or wasting time, or when riding in ‘suspended animation’ in a car or train. Thoughts or images generated in these moments ‘go into a little bank and you bring them out later.’ Psychoanalysis suggests that artists must return to a primary process state of perceiving which is fluid and unstable, and perhaps this state is accessed most easily in the ways described.
But at other points in the working cycle, imagination seems to involve what choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh calls ‘the heightened ability to make choices.’ This is a more active stage, where one is directed toward a goal, though it still is an open-ended, improvisory way of proceeding. ‘There are so many variables,’ said Jeyasingh, it’s hard for me to have a pictorial image... I don’t have a picture, or blueprint of what it will be like at the end of the ten days of rehearsals. The only thing that I know is that I am going to put my faith in the dancers, and the process of selecting. Then I will have something at the end.’
The ‘fragment’ was another recurring theme. ‘I’ll see part of something in life,’ says Errollyn Wallen, ‘and then, because I don’t know the whole story of that person or that incident, I’ll finish it off.’ A phrase, an idea, a word, a remembered atmosphere, a note, a taste, might develop into a dance, or it might allow a composer to ‘hear something that hasn’t happened yet’. In The Hidden Order of Art, Anton Ehrenzweig talks about the ‘fertile motif’ or seed from which works in music, drama, the visual arts often evolve. The fertile motif has something incomplete and vague about its structure because it bears the stamp of the non-analytic thinking that brought it into being. Its open, unfinished quality allows it to be projected into the as yet unexperienced future. The ResCen artists spoke of imagination as an everyday function, ‘part of our survival kit,’ but something which artists exploit for specific purposes.
If imagination is part of our perceptual survival kit, and if we know something about how artists make use of it in an intense and deliberate way, what is its role in education? Idit Nathan of Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination describes strategies for developing the imaginations of very young children: making the familiar strange, using minimal props, making room for the unplanned. The more open-ended the project, the more engaging it seems to be for the children; this requires flexible spaces as well as flexible teachers.
Susan Rowe Harrison offers some useful touchpoints from creativity theory. Imaginative work is an interaction of the gifts and talents of individuals coming up against available cultural forms; hence the products of artists, and the way the imagination is conceived, will vary from culture to culture. The conditions that can encourage creative thinking in individuals include: exposure to risk-taking people, an environment that challenges but does not defeat, and peers who are willing to experiment. Good teachers in the arts, Harrison observes, ‘are more inclined to construct their teaching style on an understanding and knowledge of their students and their lives outside of school than are educators in other subjects. In this way, arts teachers are in a unique position to establish the trust necessary to encourage individual experimentation and growth.’
Maria Balshaw considers the argument that creative thinking is vital for 21st Century learning, for the knowledge economy and for societal health in general. She gives an overview of Creative Partnerships, a major action research programme which supports the development of imagination in young people, artists and teachers. Her example of a gallery-school collaboration in Birmingham, along with another Creative Partnerships project described in the reviews, suggests the transformative power of imaginative work, if it is valued by young people, schools and the larger community.
The big challenge, however, which Balshaw and others point out, is that a standardised school system which needs to quantify, document and deliver results tends to be at odds with the culture of risk-taking, flexibility and open- endedness needed for the work of imagination. ‘Put crudely, the educational system needs still to know whether imagination makes children do better in tests - because test scores are still the mass measuring tool for school performance.’ While there is evidence that creative work can improve school performance in measurable ways, ‘it takes a courageous headteacher to hold onto ‘imagination’ for young people in the face of SATS and GCSE results that do not seem to be moving in the right direction.’ A final and very interesting point is this: the kind of independent thinkers industry says it needs will also be likely to debate and be critical, to question the status quo in a way that might prove challenging to institutions. ‘We should perhaps take a moment to think whether schools, and educational systems more broadly, are currently well configured to deal with this kind of dynamic awkwardness.’
In ‘Planes, Trains and Rocking Horses’, Clare van Loenen describes a project inspired by a photography exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. Artist Hiraki