Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Art Talks
If you want to have a really interesting conversation, start with a painting and watch what unfolds. Forget about any preconceived ideas of what talking about art should be and simply follow what attracts you and what kind of ideas, feelings and memories arise.
I remember reading about a meditation instructor that counseled never to look in the direction of a noise because every new thing to intrude on vision would start a train of associations. Imagine how much more material is stirred when the thing we see reveals deep perceptions about what it feels like to be human.
Before the first discussion of out-of-class work each semester I quote Thomas Carlyle,
“The chief value of a book is that it stimulates the reader to self-activity” and note that the same is true of art. Picasso said, “when a painting is finished it’s dead for the artist but lives on in the mind of the viewer.”
How my images live on and what they evoke in others is the information I most want to hear. In any discussion where the artists are present, information about what viewers see reveals the implications of the artist’s choices, and is more illuminating than having it evaluated by standards the artist may not share. Discussions about art enable each individual to experience their own sensibilities through what is triggered by the image and the varied thoughts of others. The I Ching emphasizes the importance of sharing varied opinions saying, ”Knowledge should be a refreshing and vitalizing force. It becomes so only through …discussion [with others]. In this way learning becomes many-sided and takes on a cheerful lightness, whereas there’s always something ponderous and one-sided about the learning of the self-taught.”
This is the wonderful thing about a studio class. Artists are independent thinkers. The variety of ways of seeing enrich the group as a whole. Every association reflects the range of meanings the work can evoke. It’s important to draw out the contrasting views so the artist has an accurate picture of the full scope of connections the image can engage. As the current class disperses, a particular kind of discussion, grown of the individual worldviews of this group of students, this class-mind, disappears as well, but the range of outlooks and enlarged perspective created by the group remains in each individual. Every different group brings out new ideas and enhances flexible thinking.
What is most important about talking about art is that everyone should do it.
Building on the work of Rudolf Arnheim, Abigail Housen and Philip Yenawine developed an educational system called “Visual Thinking Strategies” backed by experimental work showing that the thinking skills of schoolchildren can be improved in other subjects by talking about art, describing what they think about when they look at a painting or photograph and why. They see improvement not only in observational skills but reasoning skills. Building neural connections between the feeling and thinking parts of the brain unifies felt assessments of significance with generation of ideas that relate to the image, fostering self-awareness and liberating thinking from a need to be right. Without the contest for rightness, our views are expanded by the range of other opinions. Where there are no wrong answers, creative thinking flourishes. In an article in “Family Medicine”, (April 2005,) Reilly, Ring and Duke recommend “communal viewing of artistic paintings as a modality to increase sensitivity, team-building and collaboration amongst medical trainees” additionally citing a study where it improved medical diagnostic skills. Moving beyond “the realm of right answers” led to more meaningful discussion and more thoughtful reflection.
Having more art around opens opportunities for people to engage in discussion that would have a beneficial effect on their minds and their understanding of others. It pushes conversation beyond the trivial and superficial to the big themes of life. It offers opportunities for creative imagination inviting viewers to make up their own stories about what is going on in the painting. The studies showing the value of discussing art for all kinds of thinking emphasize the enjoyment that participants feel in such a liberatory mode. It enables us to be stimulated by differences rather than threatened. Regular art talks with friends, colleagues and community groups could educate neglected aspects of our intelligence, tuning our sensitivity to each other and the deeper meanings revealed by vision.
I remember reading about a meditation instructor that counseled never to look in the direction of a noise because every new thing to intrude on vision would start a train of associations. Imagine how much more material is stirred when the thing we see reveals deep perceptions about what it feels like to be human.
Before the first discussion of out-of-class work each semester I quote Thomas Carlyle,
“The chief value of a book is that it stimulates the reader to self-activity” and note that the same is true of art. Picasso said, “when a painting is finished it’s dead for the artist but lives on in the mind of the viewer.”
How my images live on and what they evoke in others is the information I most want to hear. In any discussion where the artists are present, information about what viewers see reveals the implications of the artist’s choices, and is more illuminating than having it evaluated by standards the artist may not share. Discussions about art enable each individual to experience their own sensibilities through what is triggered by the image and the varied thoughts of others. The I Ching emphasizes the importance of sharing varied opinions saying, ”Knowledge should be a refreshing and vitalizing force. It becomes so only through …discussion [with others]. In this way learning becomes many-sided and takes on a cheerful lightness, whereas there’s always something ponderous and one-sided about the learning of the self-taught.”
This is the wonderful thing about a studio class. Artists are independent thinkers. The variety of ways of seeing enrich the group as a whole. Every association reflects the range of meanings the work can evoke. It’s important to draw out the contrasting views so the artist has an accurate picture of the full scope of connections the image can engage. As the current class disperses, a particular kind of discussion, grown of the individual worldviews of this group of students, this class-mind, disappears as well, but the range of outlooks and enlarged perspective created by the group remains in each individual. Every different group brings out new ideas and enhances flexible thinking.
What is most important about talking about art is that everyone should do it.
Building on the work of Rudolf Arnheim, Abigail Housen and Philip Yenawine developed an educational system called “Visual Thinking Strategies” backed by experimental work showing that the thinking skills of schoolchildren can be improved in other subjects by talking about art, describing what they think about when they look at a painting or photograph and why. They see improvement not only in observational skills but reasoning skills. Building neural connections between the feeling and thinking parts of the brain unifies felt assessments of significance with generation of ideas that relate to the image, fostering self-awareness and liberating thinking from a need to be right. Without the contest for rightness, our views are expanded by the range of other opinions. Where there are no wrong answers, creative thinking flourishes. In an article in “Family Medicine”, (April 2005,) Reilly, Ring and Duke recommend “communal viewing of artistic paintings as a modality to increase sensitivity, team-building and collaboration amongst medical trainees” additionally citing a study where it improved medical diagnostic skills. Moving beyond “the realm of right answers” led to more meaningful discussion and more thoughtful reflection.
Having more art around opens opportunities for people to engage in discussion that would have a beneficial effect on their minds and their understanding of others. It pushes conversation beyond the trivial and superficial to the big themes of life. It offers opportunities for creative imagination inviting viewers to make up their own stories about what is going on in the painting. The studies showing the value of discussing art for all kinds of thinking emphasize the enjoyment that participants feel in such a liberatory mode. It enables us to be stimulated by differences rather than threatened. Regular art talks with friends, colleagues and community groups could educate neglected aspects of our intelligence, tuning our sensitivity to each other and the deeper meanings revealed by vision.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Shadow
“In front of most scenes and our experience of them, light is divided into spatial zones of sureness and doubt. Vision advances from light to light, like a figure walking on stepping stones.” John Berger
What’s in the dark is unknown, unseen, and we tend to avoid it. We don’t know what to expect, where the dangers lurk, and feel safer in the light. We could think of light as a metaphor for consciousness itself. We shine our light where we direct conscious attention. Where we don’t look stays in shadow. One of the most powerful images in psychoanalysis is the image of the shadow, referring to parts of ourselves that we don’t want to see, pain and fear we don’t acknowledge. Jung used the shadow as an image for the repressed contents of the psyche, what we find unacceptable about ourselves or in our memories that is kept from the light of consciousness, but still operates unconsciously, invisible to waking life unless conscious efforts are made to retrieve them. Leaving them in darkness allows them to influence behavior and use up psychic energy repeating old patterns and keeping the banished elements out of awareness. The psychological terms externalization and displacement refer how we try to deflect the shadow elements by attaching them to outside patterns that bear shared features. An unresolved issue from the past, hidden in the shadows, will find ways to resurface, triggered by an even minor correspondence to the original pattern but carrying all the emotional baggage of the original pattern. Recognizing the pattern frees the mind from underlying conflict. When I realized that the majority of arguments I had with my husband for the first ten years of our marriage were really arguments with my father, they stopped. He would trigger one aspect of an old theme and I would jump on it as though the rest of the pattern were true. When I finally saw that my husband didn’t share the attitudes and positions of my father and that I was using him to fight old battles, I became aware of an unconscious issue that was getting in my way. Once conscious, the pattern became knowledge.
Projection calls out feelings and traits of our own in other people- positive and negative- and can be seen on a conscious level as the mind trying to recognize itself. This makes it a tool for personal insight. If you look at the things you criticize and admire in others as reflecting yourself, you gain the kind of self-understanding that can help you utilize your full being.
Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer did a fascinating study that showed that one reason people can’t change things about themselves they didn’t like was because the trait had a flip side they valued. The shy quality is also a reflective quality that takes in more of a situation than a more quickly reactive person. A person with a bad temper has a passionate nature that if not displaced or misdirected can be tapped for personal accomplishment. What could be thought of as stubborn on one side could be sticking to principles on the other. This is not an argument for the negative excesses of a trait but for recognition of its full scope so it can be integrated and utilized rather than fought. If all of the elements in the shadow can be woven into our personality, we extend our depth and understanding.
The cultural predisposition to criticism and denunciation creates barriers to accepting
patterns from the shadow that would enhance our self-awareness and understanding of others. If we view what we criticize and denounce, what we fight or lash out at, as valuable information from our shadow, we free psychic energy to use the capacities they were holding back. As Daniel Goleman writes in his book “Emotional Intelligence”, “emotional aptitude is a meta-ability determining how well we can use whatever other skills we have.” Every emotional block that keeps part of our being in darkness interferes with the clarity of our intelligence. Our shadow contains information that when brought into the light enlarges our picture of ourselves and our world.
What’s in the dark is unknown, unseen, and we tend to avoid it. We don’t know what to expect, where the dangers lurk, and feel safer in the light. We could think of light as a metaphor for consciousness itself. We shine our light where we direct conscious attention. Where we don’t look stays in shadow. One of the most powerful images in psychoanalysis is the image of the shadow, referring to parts of ourselves that we don’t want to see, pain and fear we don’t acknowledge. Jung used the shadow as an image for the repressed contents of the psyche, what we find unacceptable about ourselves or in our memories that is kept from the light of consciousness, but still operates unconsciously, invisible to waking life unless conscious efforts are made to retrieve them. Leaving them in darkness allows them to influence behavior and use up psychic energy repeating old patterns and keeping the banished elements out of awareness. The psychological terms externalization and displacement refer how we try to deflect the shadow elements by attaching them to outside patterns that bear shared features. An unresolved issue from the past, hidden in the shadows, will find ways to resurface, triggered by an even minor correspondence to the original pattern but carrying all the emotional baggage of the original pattern. Recognizing the pattern frees the mind from underlying conflict. When I realized that the majority of arguments I had with my husband for the first ten years of our marriage were really arguments with my father, they stopped. He would trigger one aspect of an old theme and I would jump on it as though the rest of the pattern were true. When I finally saw that my husband didn’t share the attitudes and positions of my father and that I was using him to fight old battles, I became aware of an unconscious issue that was getting in my way. Once conscious, the pattern became knowledge.
Projection calls out feelings and traits of our own in other people- positive and negative- and can be seen on a conscious level as the mind trying to recognize itself. This makes it a tool for personal insight. If you look at the things you criticize and admire in others as reflecting yourself, you gain the kind of self-understanding that can help you utilize your full being.
Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer did a fascinating study that showed that one reason people can’t change things about themselves they didn’t like was because the trait had a flip side they valued. The shy quality is also a reflective quality that takes in more of a situation than a more quickly reactive person. A person with a bad temper has a passionate nature that if not displaced or misdirected can be tapped for personal accomplishment. What could be thought of as stubborn on one side could be sticking to principles on the other. This is not an argument for the negative excesses of a trait but for recognition of its full scope so it can be integrated and utilized rather than fought. If all of the elements in the shadow can be woven into our personality, we extend our depth and understanding.
The cultural predisposition to criticism and denunciation creates barriers to accepting
patterns from the shadow that would enhance our self-awareness and understanding of others. If we view what we criticize and denounce, what we fight or lash out at, as valuable information from our shadow, we free psychic energy to use the capacities they were holding back. As Daniel Goleman writes in his book “Emotional Intelligence”, “emotional aptitude is a meta-ability determining how well we can use whatever other skills we have.” Every emotional block that keeps part of our being in darkness interferes with the clarity of our intelligence. Our shadow contains information that when brought into the light enlarges our picture of ourselves and our world.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Art for Healing
In ancient Egypt the Temple Beautiful was the center of healing. It was a place that used all of the arts to restore balance in the sick. There was an instinctive understanding that music, beautiful objects, incense, massage, graceful movement, as expressions of balance, order and harmony, could entrain the body and pull together disordered energies.
For centuries of recent history we’ve treated the body and mind as entirely separate domains. The title of Antonio Damasio’s book “Descartes Error” sums up what he and other neuroscientists were finding. Feeling, the response of the body toward balance, directs conscious attention and motivates thinking. Groundbreaking scientist Candace Pert uses the term bodymind to emphasize that our whole being is the mind, far more interlaced than we’d ever realized. Understanding the depth of that interconnection, it’s not so hard to understand how emotions can affect health. In the research, it was less an issue of what emotions were present, but more a case of awareness of them. Dr. Herbert Benson in his book “Timeless Healing” emphasizes that attitude toward one’s situation is central to healing.
Unrecognized emotions are more apt to pathologize, to express their presence physically as some type of illness, as if the bodymind can’t get our attention any other way. Since as Susanne Langer says, ”Art looks like feelings feel,” finding the art that corresponds to an inner state is a way to recognize them. When we respond to art of any kind it’s because it resonates with personal themes alive in us at the time. We’re drawn to what reveals our heart. Art serves to help us see feelings that the stresses of day-to-day life obscure. Understanding internal patterns can help us discover fears and contradictions that may be interfering with the best use of the flow of our lives. Where there’s a disintegration of order in the bodymind, beautiful art, which exemplifies order, can help reintegrate.
The I Ching notes “Music has the power to loosen the grip of the obscure emotions.” Not only loosening and clarifying, modern studies have shown that listening to favorite music stimulates production of endorphins, which moderate pain and reward helpful behavior with pleasure. Science is beginning to support the efficacy of art for healing.
Just like the travel to beautiful locations has healing benefits, even time with an art book can stimulate endorphins and reroute our attention to whatever will help us grow. With so many ways to access images, through search engines and websites, all people can find the kind of art that reflects them and through it see the deeper levels of self, which go beyond surface differences. This connection may be the most healing element of all.
Social isolation has been determined to be a serious risk factor in health. Whatever creates a sense of connection to the human community can offer some relief. When an artist expresses a feeling that has deep resonance with a personal emotion the viewer has a sense of being understood, that someone else in another space and time has felt this way, shared this state of being. Reconnecting to the cosmos through the universal language of art pulls us back into the whole from which we mistakenly felt separate.
For centuries of recent history we’ve treated the body and mind as entirely separate domains. The title of Antonio Damasio’s book “Descartes Error” sums up what he and other neuroscientists were finding. Feeling, the response of the body toward balance, directs conscious attention and motivates thinking. Groundbreaking scientist Candace Pert uses the term bodymind to emphasize that our whole being is the mind, far more interlaced than we’d ever realized. Understanding the depth of that interconnection, it’s not so hard to understand how emotions can affect health. In the research, it was less an issue of what emotions were present, but more a case of awareness of them. Dr. Herbert Benson in his book “Timeless Healing” emphasizes that attitude toward one’s situation is central to healing.
Unrecognized emotions are more apt to pathologize, to express their presence physically as some type of illness, as if the bodymind can’t get our attention any other way. Since as Susanne Langer says, ”Art looks like feelings feel,” finding the art that corresponds to an inner state is a way to recognize them. When we respond to art of any kind it’s because it resonates with personal themes alive in us at the time. We’re drawn to what reveals our heart. Art serves to help us see feelings that the stresses of day-to-day life obscure. Understanding internal patterns can help us discover fears and contradictions that may be interfering with the best use of the flow of our lives. Where there’s a disintegration of order in the bodymind, beautiful art, which exemplifies order, can help reintegrate.
The I Ching notes “Music has the power to loosen the grip of the obscure emotions.” Not only loosening and clarifying, modern studies have shown that listening to favorite music stimulates production of endorphins, which moderate pain and reward helpful behavior with pleasure. Science is beginning to support the efficacy of art for healing.
Just like the travel to beautiful locations has healing benefits, even time with an art book can stimulate endorphins and reroute our attention to whatever will help us grow. With so many ways to access images, through search engines and websites, all people can find the kind of art that reflects them and through it see the deeper levels of self, which go beyond surface differences. This connection may be the most healing element of all.
Social isolation has been determined to be a serious risk factor in health. Whatever creates a sense of connection to the human community can offer some relief. When an artist expresses a feeling that has deep resonance with a personal emotion the viewer has a sense of being understood, that someone else in another space and time has felt this way, shared this state of being. Reconnecting to the cosmos through the universal language of art pulls us back into the whole from which we mistakenly felt separate.
Monday, March 30, 2009
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