Art and Human Development

Constance Milbrath, Cynthia Lightfoot

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415965538
• eBook ISBN: 9781136643040
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

This interdisciplinary volume explores art, its development, and its role in the construction of knowledge. Presenting theory and research on artistic development as a cultural and creative endeavor, contributors examine the origins of human art during the Paleolithic cultural revolution, as part of a modern cultural transformation, in the growth of a creative artist, and in developing children.

Target chapters expressing the disciplinary perspectives of psychology, archaeology, communications, education, and the performing arts are followed by commentaries from internationally acclaimed scholars of human development. Part 1 explores how cultures harness and exploit the arts to give expression to values, social practices, and traditions. This section traces the emergence of new art forms that arose during social unrest, including the symbolization of spiritual beliefs expressed on the walls of Paleolithic caves, and the racial identity and cultural values expressed in the media of the hip-hop generation. Part 2 examines the journeys of a composer and a group of students to highlight the process of becoming an artist and the role education plays in its development. The book concludes with a focus on the development of aesthetic appreciation and artistic activity in childhood and adolescence, including, for example, how a child's developing theory of mind affects appreciation for the arts, and how developing empathy and emotional regulation contribute to the cognitive and affective underpinnings of acting in adolescence. As a whole contributors explore the developmental, sociocultural, and evolutionary processes that make the creation and experience of art possible.

Intended for researchers and advanced students in both human development and the arts, this book will also serve as a textbook for advanced courses on psychology and the arts and/or special topics courses in cognitive and/or human development.

1

ART AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
Introduction

Cynthia Lightfoot and Constance Milbrath

The idea of the Boddhisattva, one who comes back and entices others on the journey, is to some degree the task of the artist…. This is where I began to appreciaThe an art that could be a nonvicarious act, a seeing whose subject was your seeing.

–J. Turrell (1993, p. 18)

Piaget (1987) wrote that the generation of “possibility in cognition means essentially invention and creation”; Vygotsky (1994), that “no accurate cognition of reality is possible without a certain element of imagination.” It is a basic tenet of constructivist theory that supposing, speculating, and imagining are inherent to developing systems of knowledge and action: we reach as if objects can be grasped; we speak and gesture as if meanings can be shared. Notwithstanding the avowal that we live in and develop through conjectural worlds, traditional approaches to human development are more often concerned with “the real,” the known, the salted-down-in-the-keg and actual. Rooted in a realist epistemology according to which a contingent environment becomes known and manipulated through processes of progressive adaptation, these approaches tend to view the products and processes of imagination as exotic or even frivolous departures from development's more serious course of adaptation and acquisition of “objective” knowledge. The purpose of this volume, and the 2006 meeting of the Jean Piaget Society from which it sprang, is to contest this view. Our aim, in particular, is to examine stories, paintings, music, and myths—all marker buoys and trail signs of transparently creative human activity—in order to shed light on the developmental task of making sense of ourselves and our place in a world of other subjects.

Although our agenda is in many ways revisionist and intended to challenge what we perceive as a pervasive objectivism running through mainstream contemporary approaches to human development, its roots reach deeply into the history of developmental theory. James Mark Baldwin (1911), for example, whom many credit with establishing developmental psychology as a legitimaThe field of inquiry (e.g., Cairns, 1983; Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000), devoted the entire third volume of his seminal triumvirate, Thought and Things, to exploring the relationship between knowledge acquisition and the imaginative activities of art and play. According to Baldwin, the “mergings and reversals” between the actual and the imagined, between the “merely known” and the “playfully or aesthetically” known, show the “very nerve of the process of the development of knowledge” (pp. 3–4). In the less distant past, D. W. Winnicott (1971) traced a similar argument while defending his position that the activities and products of both science and art are analogous to the play of young children in that they serve to create a “transitional space” between a personal psychic reality and an objective shared reality—a space that constitutes the aesthetics of everyday life. “We experience life,” Winnicott wrote, “in the exciting interweave of subjectivity and objective observation, and in an area that is intermediate between the inner reality of the individual and the shared reality of the world that is external to individuals” (p. 64).

Although our agenda is not new, neither is it narrowly circumscribed in the interest it holds for today's scholars. Novalis' famously expressed “making the familiar strange” has become a rallying cry for a growing number of modern theorists bent on arguing that development is as much a process of generating novelty and new ideas as it is a process of constructing order, truth, and knowledge out of disorder and the yet to be understood. Early insights of the sort voiced by Baldwin, and later by Piaget, Vygotsky, and winnicott, consequently have been expanded in recent efforts to work out an understanding of how individuals undertake the fundamental task of creating and imagining possible worlds. There is, for example, a highly productive stream of current scholarship according to which our lives are storied; our minds literary; our identities aesthetic projects; and our art, music, and myths all instruments that confer meaning and value on who we are and what we do.

Thus, accounts both historical and contemporary have sought to narrow the divide between ordinary meaning-making folk and those artists, poets, shamans, and seers who impact our lives by interpreting our worlds. The purpose of this volume is to bring under one cover the work of scholars who share an interest in such world-making activities and whose work on aesthetic experience and artistic activity can be seen to have implications for understanding the course and processes of human development. Significantly, this shared interest is held aloft by distinct foci and occasionally conflicting tensions regarding how to theoretically capture why people paint, sing, dance, sculpt, and play music, and the effect these activities have on people. Such differences in foci and theory are hardly surprising given that the contributors to this volume work in relative isolation from each other across the disciplinary boundaries of archeology, psychology, communications, education, and the performing arts, as well as on vastly different time scales that range from the ontogenetic to the historical and the evolutionary. Although our authors may be perplexed and inspired in equal measure by matters concerning aesthetic activity and experience, they differ, sometimes subtly, sometimes radically, in the questions they ask regarding the emergence, function, and significance of making and understanding art, as well as how they set about answering those questions.

The primary chapters in the volume were contributed by the invited plenary speakers of the 2006 Jean Piaget Society meeting. A commentary chapter that exposes a fresh perspective on the material at hand follows each primary chapter. Chapters in the opening section, “Art in the Context of Culture,” explore how cultures harness and exploit the arts to give expression to values, social practices, and traditions and in the process create new world-making activities. Both primary chapters in this section trace the emergence of new forms that arose out of social unrest; in the first case it constituted the first material expressions of what are interpreted as socially significant symbols, and in the second, the creation of a new multimedia art form that stands as a defant symbol to the established order.

The volume begins with a chapter by David Lewis-williams, a cognitive archaeologist, who describes the origins of image making amidst the complex social structures that marked the Upper Palaeolithic transition in western Europe. He argues that the emergence of cave painting transformed naturally occurring labyrinthine caves into manifestations of a sophisticated supernatural realm that already existed in the minds of early humans. Early (cave) art was of deep religious significance, functioning to establish and maintain connections between two separate realities—that of the artist and that of the spirit world. Interestingly, the spiritual functions of our earliest art may have had important social implications. According to Lewis-williams, such image making expressed and deepened social schisms between those gifed with second sight and those more ordinary people whose knowledge of the spiritual realm was indirect and implicative. In addition to the cave art itself, Lewis-williams draws from reports and analysis of hunter-gatherer communities around the world and recent neuropsychological studies of altered states of consciousness, in concluding that the spectrum of human consciousness and the way in which mental imagery is sometimes experienced in altered states give us insight into how early people first came to recognize and make two-dimensional imagery, that is, to think that small lines on a flat surface could stand for a huge, live, moving animal. Constance Milbrath's commentary on the chapter turns to methods from physical anthropology and developmental psychology to suggest that the neurological bridge, which forms the foundation of Lewis-Williams' interpretation, can be put on firmer foundation. She adds a more extended treatment of the social landscape of this culturally important transitional period by addressing the size, movements, and activities of Upper Palaeolithic human populations, and closes her commentary by remarking on the aesthetic aspects of these early images from the perspective of development of an art form.

Murray Forman brings the perspective of communication studies to the development in contemporary culture of a new multimodal art form, hip-hop, which he describes as “the modern lingua franca for the expression of racial identity, spatial politics, and the cultural values of black and Latino urban youth.” Forman situates this new art form historically—in the specific social, economic, technological, and cultural influences that led to its naissance as an adaptive strategy for countering the hostile conditions of poverty and racism by way of providing a forum for representing the realities and dreams of innercity minority youth. In discussing the new cultural identities for youth that have been forged globally since the inception of hip-hop, Forman observes that the notion of “hip-hop youth” has begun to unravel as it enters its fourth decade, undermined by the market-driven forces that have diluted the strength of both its founding themes of resistance and its association with poor, inner-city minority youth. Brian Tinsley, Shaunqula Wilson, and Margaret Beale Spencer take a developmental perspective in their commentary on Forman by critically exploring the relationship of hip-hop culture to adolescent identity formation. Although openly acknowledging the dark side of hip-hop culture, these authors focus on the potential benefits afforded to youth and explore how identifying with hip-hop culture can indicate a form of resiliency by serving to generate personal, group, political, and cultural forms of identity for many youth. In particular, they note that engagement with hip-hop is voluntary, giving a creative voice to the natural adolescent rebellion against authority and providing emotional and social support in contexts that are often hostile toward youth. The authors also starkly comment on how gender roles are both reflected in and influenced by hip-hop culture.

The second section of the volume, “Educating the Artists and Using the Arts to Educate,” examines the personal journeys of a composer and of a group of students exposed to the arts. The first of these chapters reveals the key role formal education plays in scaffolding the development of a creative artist, whereas in the contrasting chapter, the arts become the decisive medium through which education can effectively take place.

Gerald Levinson, internationally recognized as one of the major composers of his generation, presents a compelling narrative of his own growth as a major creative talent. Validating other observations in the area of prodigious talent (e.g., Winner, 2006), Levinson acknowledges that for him, music was not a choice but a discovery and a compulsion. Beginning with his earliest memories, sounds and meter captured his attention, so much so that his early piano practices became a vehicle for improvising and reproducing pop music of the day rather than perfecting the assigned scales and pieces. Levinson credits this bent toward experimentation with leading him toward composition. His fascination with the perceptual exploration of sound became a model for composing that endured into his maturity. Studying with some of the most illustrious composers of the 20th century as a young adult, Levinson found his compositional voice gradually under their tutelage, which culminated in the important years he spent with Olivier Messiaen. Travels in Asia and further study of the music of Bali and India eventually resulted in integrating these unfamiliar scales and sonorities into a “composer's tool kit” upon which he still relies. Armed with a diverse tool box, Levinson approaches creating much like a painter, jotting down “primordial notions” as melodic motifs, rhythms, textures, chords, and musical images in a sketch book on which he later relies for developing a new piece. Jeanne Bamberger, a Piagetian scholar, an expert in musical development and an accomplished musician herself, gives us extraordinary insight into Levinson's developmental process in her commentary. Introducing us to a concept she calls the “dialectical spiral,” Bamberger takes us through Levinson's development, pointing out instances in his narrative that mark his deep engagement with the sensuously sonorous moment and his subsequent reflective process, and cycling back to rework his initial perceptual experience. According to Bamberger, these “paired moments of direct sensory experience with related instances of reflective inquiry … and the ongoing construction of inner and outer representations” both characterize the protracted work of the artist's development and his short-term enterprise of an emerging composition.

In contrast to Levinson's emphasis on art as a calling, something bred into one's bones that results in a special way of hearing the world, Carol Lee construes art as a means of connecting daily life and experience to formal, canonical knowledge. She suggests, in particular, that art can be used to further specific educational goals by bootstrapping “school work” to culturally framed, lived experience. She illustrates her “cultural modeling” approach with real cases of instruction that are built upon cultural repertoires of youth from ethnic minority and low-income communities. Using students' comprehension of fictional narratives as a case in point, Lee suggests that the knowledge generative capacity of the creative arts is to be found in the medium they provide for the “identity work” characteristic of adolescent life in general and the lives of low-income minority adolescents in particular. Colette Daiute, in her commentary, draws our attention to the growing number of youth surviving worldwide in other types of extreme environments as a result of armed conflict, major political transitions, and familial relocation. Daiute picks up the thread of “culture and identity across challenging contexts” as a productive approach to questions “about the interdependent nature of individual and societal development.” Noting that adolescent identity work in contexts where engaging with society is threatening appears much more central than in relatively safer contexts, Daiute cautions that an interpretation of a universal identity crisis in adolescence appears unwarranted. She suggests further that the transformative power of “cultural tools” may lie not so much in the process of identifying with these symbolic tools but in the goals that are mobilized in the process of interpreting and engaging with them. She advocates foregrounding goals in the classroom and using cultural tools to mediate the gap between the actual and the ideal.

The final section in the book, “Artistic Development,” focuses on the development of aesthetic appreciation and artistic activity in childhood and adolescence. In this context the authors make reference to particular requisite developmental capacities, such as the child's developing theory of mind or the developments in empathic ability and social cognition required by acting.

Norman Freeman argues that whenever children immerse themselves in a domain of knowledge, they quite naturally develop a theory about it, and art is no exception. In his chapter, Freeman grapples with how to characterize the development of a communicative theory of pictures, cross-comparing it with theory of mind and the end point of the art critique. Noting that at the very least, even the untutored readily pass judgments when looking at art, and so must children, the question becomes whether children can be considered naïve but developing art critiques. Drawing on his past research and that of others, notably Parsons (1987), Freeman presents examples of what children say about pictures to support the central claim that children do develop an increasingly articulated theory of pictures, and that their changing understanding of art maps the journey of their developing grasp of subjectivity. A prime task, however, is to work out how we would know whether what we regard as the child's theory is actually operative in the way that researchers suppose it to be, that is, whether the child's theory is, indeed, a theory. Clearly opposed to the “theory theory” of knowledge acquisition and its depiction of the child as a developing scientist or theorist, Alan Costall takes issue in his commentary with the idea that children must develop something like a theory about pictures. In particular, Costall appears to suggest that by endowing a child with early theory capacities, we strip away the historical significance of developments in fields such as physics, biology, or more broadly the sciences, replacing the long historical road to theory building with a set of domain “givens” that need only be discovered as the child's mind gains in sophistication. Although contentious, Costall's motives can be read as a desire to put “development” back into developmental psychology.

Despite the widespread involvement of humans in acting as either performers or audience members, Thalia Raquel Goldstein and Ellen Winner in their chapter draw our attention to the fact that psychologists know very little about the cognitive and affective underpinnings of acting. They suggest that this understudied art form may provide a powerful lens through which the mind can be better understood. In particular, studying acting and actors from a developmental perspective can shed light on three aspects of social cognition: (a) theory of mind, or the ability to read another's beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions; (b) empathy, or the ability to congruously feel the emotion of another person; and (c) emotion regulation, or the ability to understand and exert control over one's emotions. A review of how actors are trained, as either Method or Technique actors, leads to the suggestion that these different forms of training may have differential effects on the individual's developing theory of mind, empathy, and emotion regulation. Joan Peskin, Raymond Mar, and Theanna Bischoff comment on the dearth of adequate measures for adolescents and adults in the areas of social cognition addressed by Goldstein and Winner's chapter. Methods more common to the study of expertise with contrasts between expert and novice are suggested as alternatives to more global social cognitive measures particularly because they are domain specific. These commentators note that although Goldstein and Winner only examined theatre, the issues they raised could be extended to other genres such as the writer or audience. They expand the frame to include these two genres, writer and audience, and discuss the different roles that aspects of social cognition have for becoming an “expert” in these genres.

We offer this collection of work as evidence for the generative scope of art and artistic activity and how it might be fruitfully explored to further our un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The Jean Piaget Symposium Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• IN MEMORIAM
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Contributors
• Chapter 1 Art and Human Development: Introduction
• PART I Art in the Context of Culture
• PART II Educating the Artists and Using the Arts to Educate
• PART III Artistic Development
• Author Index
• Subject Index