Teaching Creativity

Multi-mode Transitional Practices

Derek Pigrum, Anthony Haynes

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781441117892
• eBook ISBN: 9781441140654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This study is concerned with creativity in education - especially in arts education (broadly conceived to include the visual arts, music, and creative writing). It takes as its starting point Nietzsche's view that works of art do not appear "as if by magic". Using insights from philosophy, psychoanalysis, and semiotics, the book examines the creative processes of many artists in different media, showing how art works often result from processes of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction that may be long and laborious. Pigrum demonstrates how teachers and their students in all sectors of education may gain from a better, systematic, understanding of such processes.

Chapter 1

The Sign Modes

Why should an artist put something on paper only to reject it?

(Gombrich, 1982, p. 227)

The speaker of a language is not ‘the first speaker’, the agent is not the first to use the linguistic sign nor is the practitioner the first to use the sign modes of the non-finito, the dispensable surface of inscription, the ‘multi-mode object’ and the ‘charged object’. In terms of practices the practitioner acquires the ability to use these modes as a disposition to act, presumes them known to other agents, but also transforms them in terms of personal agency.

The expert practitioners that were my informants worked in fields that produce objects that are what Lefebvre (1991) terms ‘representational spaces’ which embody ‘complex symbolisms’ such as buildings, layouts, sculpture and art works but also works of literature.

The paradox is that it is the pre-existence of these modes and their acquisition in the social context of practices that make it possible for new things to be made. This is not, however, to say that they are acquired in a linear fashion as clearly defined stages of cognitive growth, or that they cannot be modified. The nature of the sign modes is not one of a pristine completeness but of a rudimentary sketchiness that produces ambiguity and indeterminacy. It is important to understand that the acquisition of the sign modes is intimately linked with the other modes in the ‘emergence’ that characterizes transitional practices.

The ability to use the sign modes grows in the process of interacting with objects, and people, thus the knowledge of the sign modes is embodied in action, their use in response to an immediate task. As Delueze states ‘learning is essentially concerned with signs. Signs are the object of a temporal apprenticeship, not of an abstract knowledge … Everything that teaches us something emits signs; every act of learning is an interpretation of signs’ (Deleuze, 2000, p. 4). All the modes of Transitional practices are ‘an apprenticeship to signs’ (ibid.).

The understanding of the sign modes is in their application to gathering, getting our bearings, following a trail and responding to the unpredictable. Thus the sign modes of transitional practices involve our way of being in the world.

1.1 The Mode of Non-finito Sign Use

Leonardo’s Advice on Compositional Drawing

In an article by Sylvester (1996b) on Cezanne, he mentions non-finito that while holding definition in reserve, allows for continuous revision of intention. It is, however, difficult to pin-point when the non-finito sketch came into use but, as Landau and Parshall state, in the Renaissance workshop it was common practice to disseminate workshop drawings and ‘the copying of these prototypes was concerned with capturing the lineaments of a style or a figural invention’ (italics are mine) (Landau and Parshall, 1994, p. 48). As we might expect, Leonardo was a master of this process which involved rapidly absorbing and metamorphosing ideas, often by other people – a practice that was not in the least at odds with ideas concerning creativity at that time, as invention was thought to have its origins in imitation.

But why do we need to acquire the mode of the non-finito? Popper, states ‘it isn’t so that we have first the thing perfect in our mind and then write it down. It is always a process of creating (in which) … there is a give and take … Even while we create something there is a constant give and take’ (brackets are mine) (Popper, 1994, p. 21) and Fiedler (in Barasch, 1998, p. 123) states, if we ‘cast a glance into the inner workshop of the mind’ we will ‘find that it is not filled with the “solid properties of completed figures” with ready made formulae; rather, it is a process of infinite change and constant transformation’.

Popper’s ‘give and take’ is a process of combination, permutation, deflection, disruption, revision and modification in a process of what will later be characterized as the ‘doing, undoing and redoing’, central to transitional practices, or the work of Penelope, wife of Odysseus who unravelled during the day what she had woven together at night to forestall definitive closure, what Benjamin has described as Das Penelopewerk (see Fleckner, 1995, pp. 266–274).

Long before Popper, Leonardo da Vinci provided very explicit advice on how to generate, modify and develop ideas towards a completed work while at the same time avoiding premature closure; advice that, although it was related to the compositional painting practices of his time, has had a pervasive influence on creativity in the arts and other fields. His advice is to get things down on paper in a way that leaves them open to transformation and development, revision and deferral, to ‘doing, undoing and redoing’.

Leonardo was very concerned to raise the status of painting in relation to poetry, and few artists have thought more intensely and searchingly about their working procedures, their relation to poetics and the nature and origin of artistic conception of both the artist and the writer (see Summers, 1990). In his Treatise on Painting, Leonardo states:

Now have you never thought about how poets compose their verse? They do not trouble to trace beautiful letters nor do they mind crossing out several lines so as to make them better. (in Kemp, 1989, p. 222)

Leonardo’s idea is that ‘drawing has to assume an entirely different character … reminiscent … of the poet’s inspired and untidy craft …’ (Gombrich, 1996, pp. 214–215). This produced drawings of a much higher degree of indeterminacy and established a link between the visual arts and the drafting practices of poets. The sign mode of non-finito keeps the creative imagination in a state of prolonged inventive flux, ‘hospitable to unformed ideas’ (ibid.).

Leonardo da Vinci’s advice was directed at the composition of bodily movement and rests on the principle that to create ‘varieta’ or diversity of subject matter, it is necessary to allow the inventive power of indeterminacy to run its course, leaving the possibility for corrections open to the last moment. ‘You who compose subject pictures, do not articulate the individual parts of those pictures with determinate outlines’ (Leonardo in Gombrich, 1996, p. 211). Advice that Gombrich observes is central to ‘the capacity to invent, not to execute’ (ibid., p. 214). For Leonardo it is indeterminacy that ‘stimulates the mind to further inventions’ (ibid., p. 217).

Both Leonardo’s drawing and the poet’s draft are a procedure that allow the artist/poet ‘to take away and add until (they) are satisfied’ (ibid., p. 219) (brackets are mine). This is a far cry from a notion that still persists of the artist/poet producing an intentional ‘unfailing line that needs no correction and no second thoughts’ (ibid., p. 212). But then Gombrich asks ‘why should an artist put something on paper only to reject it?’ (Gombrich, 1982, p. 227). The answer is negative feedback, of submitting the inventions of the mind to the critical judgement of the eyes in a process that is strictly speaking equivalent to the drafting practices of the poet and which, in the Italian Renaissance, developed into ‘a decisive … working methodology for the creative development of projects in painting, sculpture and architecture’ (Westfehling, 1993, p. 11).

In the language of the Renaissance there were different modes of nonfinito. Westfehling, (1993, p. 126) quotes Meder as defining Macchia as the most transitory draft of a thought (Gedanken), Schizzo, sketch, and Concepto or concetto is what we would call draft, or in German, ‘Entwurf’. The sketch, ‘is characterized by the speed and spontaneity of its execution, the word schizzo comes from schizzare, to splash or vomit forth. The function of the sketch was the rapid annotation of an idea or a sparsely outlined conceptual form’ (Westfehling, 1993, p. 130). The sketch can also be a quickly drawn impression of movement, landscape, etc., but there is also a sense in which the sketch can be seen as an initial or prima idea. Koschatzky in his definition of the sketch states that it is ‘the initial graphic laying down of an idea whether this comes directly from observation, the memory of something seen, or the free play (freischaffenden) of the imagination’ (Koschatzky, 1981, p. 306). Looked at in these ways the non-finito mode opens the way for more and varied thoughts and ideas to develop.

Leonardo formulated his advice on drawing in one of his many notebooks.¹ The drawings in the notebook became the focal point of discussion of ideas and their modification. There is evidence that sketchbooks were in use before the period we describe as the Renaissance, and there is the suggestion of a correlation in the Renaissance, between the sketch book and the ‘commonplace book’ in which students studying analysis, genesis, and literary composition would enter products of individual reading, and notes on style for future use, on the grounds as Bacon stated that they would ‘ensure copies (copiousness) of invention’ (in Dixon, 1971, p. 48).²

I mention notebooks here because in the drawings in the notebooks of the Middle Ages there is no willingness to be tentative, completeness seems to be all, whereas in the drawings by artist-engineers of the Renaissance like Leonardo da Vinci, the design emerges from various solutions that are entertained and possibilities clarified. But there is more to the comparison than this: ‘there was in the Middle Ages a paucity of diagrammatic vocabulary for the communication of technological ideas’ (Edgerton, 1991, p. 113). Edgerton, using an example from Konrad Keyser’s Bellifortiss (1405), shows that Keyser was still unable ‘to translate his romantic concepts into images that encouraged practical construction … his drawing gives no clear understanding of how one level of parts connects in depth to another’ (ibid., p. 119).³

By the time Leonardo da Vinci did a drawing of a similar, if not the same machine, in about 1490, there was already a vocabulary of pictorial conventions in place. That Leonardo did his reading of Keyser’s book pen in hand without indicating the original source of his idea was not unusual. Bramly, writing about another Renaissance artist-engineer Valturio, states, ‘he had borrowed much from Taccola, from Konrad Keyser and from Vegetius’ (Bramly, 1991, p. 27).⁴ Westfehling describes the importance of the sketchbook/notebook as a, ‘form resource, experimental field (Versuchsfeld) and developmental instrument’ (Entwicklungsinstrument) (Westfehling, 1993, p. 79).

To us in the 21st century the idea of copying and creativity seem contradictory but, in the Renaissance copying was used to ‘record, to interpret, to criticize and to learn. Each copy constitutes a dialogue between the interpreter and the interpreted; this dialogue fosters new solutions to problems shared by the two artists and creates new ideas’ (Haverkamp-Begemann, 1988, p. 1). The idea of copying took on new force in the Renaissance as the il primo motore of cultural innovation, as exemplifying the processes of choice, judgement and synthesis. When Leonardo reworked a copy the result was sometimes an invention in its own right.

Leonardo’s advice on compositional drawing built upon an already existing tradition that he had acquired from his master Verrochio, and that suggests that it was part of Renaissance workshop practices (see Cardogan, 2000, pp. 125–136). What Leonardo did was to extend the reach of this practice so that it could perform the same function as the writer’s draft. Like so much else he came into contact with, Leonardo charged this practice with a new form and function. Summers agrees that this method was based on parallels between painting and poetry, and supports Panofsky’s and Gombrich’s view that Leonardo produced a mutational change that facilitated the ‘Entfaltung’ or unfolding inherent in the concept of ‘poesis’ that, for the first time, called into question finished forms in a stable world; instead one form passed into another, increasing the capacity of the agent to create alternative forms in a process of continuous transition.

Non-finito and Indeterminacy

As I have suggested above, it is in the Renaissance that the non-finito mode becomes the main instrument of what Westfehling calls ‘project development’ (Projektentwicklung), where a form of drafting open to development, change, correction, modification and even cancellation in favour of a completely new starting point came into use. For Leonardo’s creative process the ability to endlessly delay finalization was of decisive importance. Thus, implicit in the notion of non-finito is the notion of deferment, of indeterminacy, permutational change, separation and combination, cancellation and repetition with modification.⁵

The contemporary Austrian sculptor Oswald Stimm likens indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheit) to the non-finito nature of drawing, that gives him ‘the chance through keeping the drawing open, to somehow develop the thing through a new approach’ (Pigrum, 2001, p. 304). Indeterminacy is ‘somehow connected to the ability to avoid prematurely fixing something, thus also leaving open the possibility for further development. Everything tends towards definition but this means minimizing the adventurous in the transition from drawing to sculpture. Definition, although it makes the work easier, at the same time steals something from the adventure of turning the drawing into a sculpture. I have very seldom an exact drawing from which the sculpture is constructed because it is very seldom that a drawing is successful in capturing an absolute totality of form. One has seldom such a degree of certainty’ (ibid.).

Leal (1998), in his foreword to Picasso’s drawings for ‘Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon’ talks about rapid sketching, obliterations, corrections, revisions, spontaneity, examination, refinement, close-up views, the parallel existence of conflicting ideas, questions of material size, depiction of general dynamics, accentuations, transmutation and indeterminacy: in other words a whole gambit of non-finito sign use to produce a passage of states. Antoniades states, such drawing ‘no matter how inconclusive or unrefined it may be, possesses the qualities of specificity and clarity along with endless freedom for evolution’ (Antoniades, 1990, p. 67).

In an exhibition of the work of Chris Burden (Noever, 1996), one of the exhibits was a 12-ton steamroller attached to an arm that was rotated until, by means of a transfer of weight at the end of the arm, it became airborne and whirled around the room for about 15 minutes. The non-finito ‘multi-mode’ drafts that Burden produced represent an aspect of transitional practices developed in the Renaissance workshop and enlarged by Leonardo da Vinci into a mode closely aligned to the poets’ drafting processes. Although this mode is used by engineers, designers, architects, artists and writers to this day, the separation of the activity of the engineer from that of the artist which has taken place over the intervening centuries, certainly contributed to my sense of trepidation as the steamroller circled above my head.

Non-finito and the Dialogic ‘Zone of Contact’

Shweder states that it is ‘no coincidence that those who study expertise do not equate the mental with the abstract. Instead they interpret the mind as it is embodied in concrete representations, in “mediating schemata”, “script”, and well-practiced “tools of thought”’ (Shweder, 1991, p. 98) and goes on to emphasize that an understanding of the experts’ knowledge and skill can help foster the progress of novices. In the context of education the teacher in dialogue with the student must model the rudimentary non-finito mode. A dialogue that must reflect the teacher’s endeavour to understand the ideas the student has produced and why they have conceived of things in a particular way, how this relates to previous work and perhaps external influences.

Nikulin (2006) points out that, while we all have ‘a recognizable voice, its expressive capacities … do not have to be finite’ (ibid., p. 58), but can be renewed each time we enter into dialogue. The reference to expression here is not used in the sense of ‘self-expression of the ego’ (ibid., p. 89) but of the ‘unfinalizability’ of dialogue. This does not mean that we cannot talk about definite things in dialogue, quite the contrary; Nikulin definitely places dialogue in the concrete rather than the abstract world, but that the meaningful activity of dialogue involves the disclosure of identity in an unfinalizable way because it is always open to another with the possibility of further unfolding.

It is interesting that this unfolding need not be exclusively an expression of ‘voice’, as Nikulin also refers here to something scribbled on paper. The psychoanalytic practice and theoretical writings of Winnicott (see Winnicott, 1965, 1971, 1986, 1993) are based on the thousands of sessions with children, where he would invariably play the ‘scribble game’ scribbling somethin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction, Method and the Model of ‘Multi-mode’ Transitional Practices
• 1. The Sign Modes
• 2. The Operative Modes
• 3. The Modes of Place
• 4. Teaching ‘Multi-mode’ Transitional Practices
• Conclusion
• References
• Index