Philip Guston, Part One

From:

Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston by Musa Mayer. Munich, Sieveking Verlag/Hauser & Wirth, 2016.

Something John Cage had said to him during the 1950s often came to his mind. “When you start working, everybody is in your studio -the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.” [7]

He treasured Willem de Kooning’s use of the word “freedom” to describe his “heresy” at the Marlborough opening in 1970. … “The other important thing that de Kooning said to me,” my father told an interviewer in 1980, “which I think is wonderful, was this: he said, “Well, now you are on your own! You’ve paid off all your debts! ...I think I am… I don’t look at my pantheon of the masters of the last 500 years of European painting as I used to. Or when I do I see them differently.” [8] (Mayer, p.235-36)

[7] Philip Guston, statement in It Is, No. 5, Spring 1960.

[8] Philip Guston, as quoted in Jan Butterfield, “Philip Guston- A Very Anxious Fix,” Images and Issues, Summer 1980.

****

I’ve never really looked at Guston much.

Starting out in the mid-1980s when looking to painters of his generation I tended to gravitate more towards the likes of Motherwell, Kline, Rothko, and de Kooning, and the women who were still considered peripheral figures thirty years ago. Later, leaving the New York School behind, I went further back to the European painters of the movements between the wars, German Expressionist, Surrealists, the French and Spanish painters. Eventually I just looked at painting, and forgot the painters.

By the mid-1980s what filtered through to me looking at painting of the past half-century on Philip Guston was the paintings of the last 10-15 years of his life. His period as a heretic. Only, I did not know what paintings came before, and facing the painting of the period in which I stood -after Pop Art, the Neue Wilden and the Pictures Generation- I really was at a lost to what the scandal of these late works of Guston might be. The Philip Guston paintings I saw in the museums and galleries were no longer the ‘early’ or even ‘mid-career’ Guston's, but these late, scandalous paintings so I had nothing to compare to.

Was it the imagery? A big, hairy eyeball. Stubbly, fat face. Gigantic shoe. Cigarette in a big, cartoon like hand. Maybe the hooded, Klu Klux Klan figures? The imagery seemed to pop and the Klan figures pointed to a political commentary that for the time they were painted was not too out of place. Lacking knowledge of the artist’s intent, the imagery he employed was not in itself scandalous.

Was it the color or handling of the paint? In this period of ‘post-...’ Guston’s palette, handling or anything that could be viewed from a formal or technical perspective could not be the instigator of a scandal of any scale.

Rather than spend the time figuring out why, I simply walked past.

****

Early this spring I received a short email from a. with a link and the comment “if you’ve never seen this film Robyn it’s well worth a look:” followed by a link. The link led to the film Philip Guston: A Life Lived (1982) directed by Michael Blackwood. Released two years after Guston’s death the film contains older footage of the artist painting in his studio in Woodstock, NY, giving lectures, and, importantly, viewing, reflecting upon, and discussing paintings in the career retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art during the days prior to its opening in May 1980 - three weeks before the artist’s death.

During a conversation over coffee a week later, in an aside, a. mentioned the memoir written by Guston’s daughter, Musa Mayer, and how difficult of a personality/parent Mr. Guston must have been. We did not discuss Guston’s painting. However, after watching the film days before my curiosity had been piqued. In the film I’d finally seen the early and mid-career work in relation to the late work, heard Guston in his own words speak of the change the work underwent, what others deemed radical though he himself did not.

I watched the film again. Then I ordered Musa Mayer’s book.

The impetus for taking a closer look at Guston was the way in which he saw the shift in his work as part of a natural progression, despite how radical others might have seen it, and how the reaction to this shift by the ‘art world’ was so incredibly harsh that, in spite of the acceptance of those same paintings today, is still talked about in terms of the scandal they caused.

Unlike the late works of Guston’s friend and colleague, Willem de Kooning, whose own radical shift in painting can be traced to the effect of physiological changes in the brain due to dementia, Guston’s shift came from within the painter’s practice. It was part of a process that happened the way painting happens in the artist’s studio, in the course of a long career, when -as in the words of John Cage cited above- even the painter has left the studio.

Hearing Guston speak of the work hanging in the museum in San Fransisco, reading the reflections of his daughter and the words she collected from various interviews her father gave, from conversations he had with friends, colleagues and his wife, it became clearer to me the scandal of the late paintings had little to do with the paintings themselves, and much more to do with the heretic act of the painter who painted them. Guston had the audacity to follow the painting, letting the painting become itself.

The retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the Spring/Summer of 1980 was not the first career retrospective of Philip Guston’s paintings. Eighteen years earlier, in 1962, a retrospective had been held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City; Guston was not yet fifty years old.

By the time that first retrospective was held Guston’s career had developed from a semi-autodidactic easel painter and politically motivated muralist working collaboratively in Los Angeles, to a New York City based, WPA sanctioned muralist, a professor at midwestern universities painting celestial navigation murals for the U.S. Navy during the Second World War alongside easel paintings that were becoming less and less representational and more and more abstract, until the early 1950s, when back in New York City he became known for his ‘abstract expressionist’ paintings in Mars black, cadmium red medium and titanium white. When viewed today in relation to all of the work that preceded the late paintings, not just to the work that immediately preceded, the progression seems quite logical -as it did to Guston.

A closer examination of Guston and the shifts that occurred in his painting over the course of his fifty year career in relation to the topic of my research is warranted. As is the freedom per de Kooning that Guston found within the process of the final shift. There are indications of a playful approach to the process that enabled the shifts; a playful-ness that led to the emptying of the studio of everyone except the painting per Cage. Although there is no indication that Guston worked with personas in the way I am suggesting, there is an interesting autobiographical fact that might be taken into consideration: Philip Guston was not always Philip Guston. Philip Guston was a creation of Phillip Goldstein.

Waiting for Franz: May 8 11 AM

May 8 11 AM

Waiting for Franz

I got out the painting I promised him. The big yellow one, a last in a series, one that was no longer working.

He could have it to play with I told him

I hung it on the wall.

Now I sit in the futon sofa, next to the cat, waiting for Franz to arrive.

I brought his blue ballpoint pen and grey sketchbook.

And his red Romeo y Julieta baseball cap.

I'll wait for him to get here, then I'll go my own way so he can go his.

Roland Barthes on Cy Twombly: play not game

“If the distinction between product and production that I’ve proposed as the foundation of all of TW’s oeuvre seems sophistic, one might consider the decisive clarification that other terminological oppositions have been able to give to certain psychic activities that at first sight would seem confused. The English psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott has clearly demonstrated that it is false to reduce the games of children to a purely ludic activity; he asks us to note the opposition between game (which is strictly ruled) and play (which is free). TW, to be sure, is involved with play and not with game. But that isn’t everything. At a later stage of his discourse, Winnicott goes from play, which is still too limiting, to playing. The child’s -as well as the artist’s- reality lies in the process of manipulation and not in the product that’s produced. (Winnicott then systematically replaces a series of concepts with the verbal forms that correspond to them: phantasying, dreaming, living, holding, etc.) All of this works very well for TW. His work is based not upon concept (the trace) but rather upon an activity (tracing) -better still, perhaps, one could say that it’s based upon field (the sheet of paper), insofar as an activity takes place within it. According to Winnicott, children’s games are less important than the atmosphere that surrounds them. For TW, “the drawing” is of less importance than the atmosphere that drawings inhabit, mobilize, work on and explore -or rarefy.”

-Roland Barthes on Cy Twombly (1976, 1979)

Random corresponding thoughts (edited)

Thoughts on child’s play as about pretending to ‘be’ (pretend play) when really it is all about ‘doing’ (playing)…the act or activity (not what is happening in the head but what is outside it). Don’t get me wrong, what is going on inside the head -the structure of the relationships being formed, the rules being followed or changed- is important too. Just that the difference between the play that children and adults engage in has much to do with the being/doing aspect of play. When a child engages in pretend play the being is doing. I’m not sure adults readily achieve this when they engage in play. First, I guess a question I need to ask is how often do adults engage in the kind of pretend play, ‘being’, that leads to doing in child’s play? Do adults ‘pretend’ when playing to the point that they surrender the being to the doing? Is this the difference between playing and acting?

I’m reminded somewhat of former President Obama’s re-emergence talk I heard the other evening on the radio as I drove to pick up my children. He described the realization he came to after his first (and I think only) lost run for public office. He had to reframe the question [of why he was running for office] for himself from ‘what do I want to be?’ to ‘what do I want to do?’… making it about doing (present participle) rather than being (verbal noun).

What Winnicott seems to point to is this subtle difference (ambiguity) in the various functions of the gerund ‘playing’ in English. I wonder how Barthes handled this in the original French, I guess because he was referencing an English psychoanalyst it wasn’t an issue? I do recall reading this in the German translation and will check on it when I go upstairs after writing this email. [I checked the German translation from the French and found Barthes left the English.]

What I like about the present participle in English is, like the idea of modernism containing both pre- and post-, the present participle as an ongoing action or state in the present implies an action preceded it and an action will follow it. The difference between ‘playing a game’ and ‘playing’, like Winnicott said, games have rules, a structure and therefore end. When playing a game, the noun ‘game’ denotes the playing will in the future come to an end. Unless the ‘playing’ is not about ‘the game’ (noun, neither active or passive) but about ‘playing’ (the verbal noun, which is active)…we wouldn’t say: “we’re playing playing a game” even if that is what we mean, and it could mean that. When ‘playing’ playing any rules which might give the playing some form or structure, for example ’the game’ (noun) can be changed.

Lev Vygotsky in Play and Its Role in the Mental Development of the Child used an example Sully’s observation of actual sisters playing a ‘game’ of sisters. This ‘game’ has rules that dictate how they are to behave which differ from how they actually behave when not ‘playing sisters’. Once the game ends the sisters return to their normal behavior.

What happens if the ‘playing’ is or becomes about playing and not about the game?

This begins to tie into what Vygotsky put forth on how humans develop through, for example, playing a game with a person knowledgeable about the rules to serve as a ’scaffold’ to help support the child’s learning/development. Once the child internalizes the rules of ‘the game’ his or her focus shifts to the action ‘playing’ the game. The game may still end, but the ‘playing’ the game does not in the sense that now the child has the knowledge he or she can resume ‘playing’ at any moment…re-entering the space that is ‘playing’

Duchamp, a fanatical player of games, internalized the rules of ‘the game’. He continued playing it… and still does!

This is how I understand the final sentence from Barthes on Tw and ’the drawing’.

Now to tie this into Playing Painting Personas, which may become Playing Personas Painting… and the persona as a tool. Tools, like games, generally have some sort of ‘rules’ of application associated with them. But once those rules of ‘how this tool can be used’ are internalized, like Obama, I can shift how I’m looking at the tool’s use from ‘how can this tool be used’ to using the tool -most importantly, how I use it for the task before me. The rules are still present, but it is no longer about the rules or playing the game by them, instead it is about the application or the action, the playing.

Actually, after hearing the Obama remark yesterday evening I felt what he was saying was related to the shift that might possibly (must? could?) happen when applying personas to a painting practice. If the approach to the development of the persona is ‘who do I want to be’ then the tool will likely be faulty Rather, it is based on this non-active ’thing’; shift the development to a persona with the (knowledge? traits?) the painter wishes to bring into, explore, or play with in painting. Then, the potential for the tool to open the painter’s painting to these ‘what I want to do’ things is greater because the focus is on not who the persona be but what the persona does. It’s still a form of copying; and the persona becomes in a way the ’scaffold’ alluded to by Vygotsky in his theory of developmental psychology.

This seems to be leading me back to the question of child’s play versus adult’s play. If one follows Barthes’ remarks on Cy Twombly, it is as a child that the artist plays, is playing...not as an adult. The playing personas of the painter might best be formed not by the structures associated with adult play, rather by the form of child’s play.

Notes on a search of adult play

From: Play Doesn't End With Childhood: Why Adults Need Recess Too, Sami Yenigun, All Things Considered, NPR, August 6, 2014.

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/08/06/336360521/play-doesnt-end-with-childhood-why-adults-need-recess-too

Defining play:

"Play is something done for its own sake," he explains. "It's voluntary, it's pleasurable, it offers a sense of engagement, it takes you out of time. And the act itself is more important than the outcome." -Dr. Stuart Brown, National Institute for Play.

Brown calls play a ‘state of being’. Children learn empathy, communication skills and persistence/endurance through play. These learning process are different than what adults receive through play, but are harmonious to what adults receive.

Reasons adults play:

Build community, form connections with others, maintain healthy relationships (explore levels of intimacy)
Stay sharp, improve and maintain mental functions/skills (memory, thinking)
To have fun, experience pleasure, be silly

The consequence of not playing (as an adult) according to Brown:

"What you begin to see when there's major play deprivation in an otherwise competent adult is that they're not much fun to be around. … You begin to see that the perseverance and joy in work is lessened and that life is much more laborious."

The National Institute for Play

Mission statement: The National Institute for Play unlocks the human potential through play in all stages of life using science to discover all that play has to teach us about transforming our world.

Founded by Dr. Stuart Brown to gather research on play from a wide range of scientists and practitioners, expand the clinical scientific knowledge of human play in order to translate into programs and resources to bring to what through the research has proven to be the transformative power of play to all segments of society. Identifying the fragmentary and lack in quantitative research data in what has been revealed about play in the clinical setting -science and evidence based understanding of play that could be applied to improve ways of playing - has led to a Dr. Brown researching animal play as a means of gaining further insight into human play by working together with National Geographic Society and Jane Goodall, PhD. This has led Dr. Brown to the realization that play is “a long evolved behavior important for the well being and survival of animals,” and “humans are uniquely designed by nature to enjoy and participate in play throughout life”.

Cultivate an understanding and value for play throughout all stages of life.

Quotes on the home page:

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” -Plato

“The opposite of play is not work, it is depression.” -Brian Sutton-Smith

“The truly great advances of this generation will be made by those who can make outrageous connections, and only a mind which knows how to play can do that.” -Nagle Jackson

From website text:

“For humans and other animals, play is a universal training course and language of trust. The belief that one is safe with another being or in any situation is formed over time during regular play. Trust is the basis of intimacy, cooperation, creativity, successful work, and more.”

“Kids have society’s permission to play, and most adults don’t. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, most of us exchange play for work, and forget to play with the abandon and joy of childhood. Giving adults the “go ahead” and techniques to resume adult forms of play offers multiple benefits. Being capable of generating, recognizing and acting on the play signals of others establishes, or re-establishes trust, safety and adaptation to the unexpected or complex. Perhaps this truth has been buried in the usual win-lose contests that characterize most adult negotiations.”

The science/ patterns of play:

Object Play:

“The correlation of effective adult problem solving and earlier encouragement of and facility in manipulating objects has been established. … To be a good research engineer, for example may mean that the times spent in high school fixing cars or building airplane models are as important as getting an advanced degree, particularly if the engineer is also expected to function as an innovative problem solver.”

Imaginative and Pretend Play:

“The ability of the young child to create their own sense of their mind, and that of others, takes place through pretend play, which continues to nourish the spirit throughout life, and remains key to innovation and creativity. Deprivation studies uphold the importance of this pattern of play, as understanding and trusting others and developing coping skills depends on its presence.”

Storytelling -Narrative Play:

“Making sense of the world, its parts and one’s particular place in it is a central aspect of early development. … the constancy of stories that enliven and help us understand ourselves and others, … give us permission to expand our own inner stream of consciousness, enrich our personal narratives with pleasure and fun as our own life stories unfold.”

Creative Play:

“We can access fantasy-play to transcend the reality of our ordinary lives, and in the process germinate new ideas, and shape and reshape them. Given enriched circumstances, and access to novelty, our play drive takes us into these realms spontaneously. Whether like Einstein imaginatively riding pleasurably on a sunbeam at the speed of light, or a light-hearted group of IDEO corporation designers wildly imagining a new product, each is using their playfulness to innovate and create. With the advent of brain imaging technology, these natural tendencies, so important to adaptation in a changing world, may be better understood and fostered. Play + Science = Transformation.”

In the corporate environment-

“Yet science already provides data to show that playful ways of work lead to more creative, adaptable workers and teams. One researcher, Marian Diamond, in her Response of the Brain to Enrichment work describes how “enriched” (read playful) environments powerfully shape the cerebral cortex – the area of the brain where the highest cognitive processing takes place. She concludes “there are measurable benefits to enriching [making playful] an individual’s environment in whatever terms that individual perceives his immediate environment as enriched [i.e., discover practical ways for people to do whatever is playful, joyful to them].”

Suggested Resources:

Play by Stuart Brown, MD and Christopher Vaughn

Leslie, A.M. (1987) Pretense and representation: The origins of theory of mind.² Psychological Review, 94, 412-426.

Stevens, V. (2003, May). Metaphor and the poetics of the unconscious. Paper presented for Psychoanalysis and the Humanities Lectures, Cambridge University, UK.

Paley, V.G. (1992) You Can’t Say You Can’t Play. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press

Bekoff,M and Byers J.,(Eds) (1998) Animal Play, Evolutionary, Comparative, and Ecological Perspectives,: Brown, S. Play as an Organizing Principle, Ch 12, p. 243-259 Cambridge Univ Press

Singer, Jerome L. and Switzer, Ellen. Mind Play: The Creative Uses of Fantasy. 1980.

Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge, 1999.

Frank Wilson, (1999) The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (Vintage)

Other findings:

https://www.helpguide.org/articles/emotional-health/benefits-of-play-for-adults.htm

https://wanderlust.com/journal/the-importance-of-play-in-adulthood/

Most of the examples given for play and adults are structured ‘games’, sport/fitness, or creative hobby-like activities and classes. There seems to be a focus more toward playing by the ‘rules’ than ‘playing’ by the rules when it comes to adult play. The exception might be in sex clubs, which raises its own question of why only in this situation is ‘pretend play’ acceptable?

When I google “how adults play differently than children” the results about the differences between adults and children are many, but play does not factor in other than through the ways children learn or experience the world differently than adults.

(How) is adult play/creativity different?

(How) is adult play/creativity different? (from childhood creativity) -RM

I’d like to only talk about play.

However, play and creativity are linked not only in my research, but in how they contribute to human development.

And this is about and led by a creative process.

In her paper ‘Play and Creativity: developmental issues’ Sandra W. Russ addressed the relationship between play and creativity from a developmental point of view. Viewing child’s play as pretending to ‘be’, this type of pretend play informs the development of cognitive process which are in turn important to the development of creative acts -creativity. (Russ 2003) Central to both play and creativity is divergent thinking. (Russ p. 291) Psychologists define divergent thinking as an approach to solving problems through the testing of a theoretically limitless number of possible solutions in order to find the best one. In creative process the benefit of divergent thinking is that the meandering nature, rather than the straight path of testing a finite number of solutions that is associated with convergent thinking, allows for new ideas to emerge. This is the type of thinking that children do when engaging in pretend play, and it is through play that in children the ability to think divergently is facilitated. The question Russ asked is to whether play facilitates creativity.

Over the course of my education as an artist participating in and observing my colleagues present their work, the product of their creative process, for critical feedback a common refrain is to ‘play with it’. Go back into the studio or wherever one engages in his or her creative practice and try out other solutions to the question being asked with or through the work. In this regard the feedback the artist receives is to ‘go play’ with the intention that through play the creative process (creativity) will develop further thus impacting the product in both its novelness and goodness, the factors by which the value of the creativity the work contains is judged. This refrain of play is echoed by artists when describing their approach to their work, how time is spent in the studio, and/or how the work originates.

Yet, play and creativity, though linked, are different, hence Russ’ question on how and if one might facilitate the other. In her research she cites studies showing the play skills of children can be improved upon. Does this improvement in turn improve upon the creativity of the child? In the paper Russ proposed as a focus for future studies on play and creativity the following two of three points: (i) investigate specific mechanisms that account for the relationship between play and creativity; (ii) develop play intervention techniques that improve play skills. (Russ p. 291)

Russ cites the research of Krasnor & Pepler (1980) in which they presented three views of the relationship between play and developmental skills. The third view is the one which Russ addresses, play as a causal agent in developmental change, as it impacts most directly the question of whether play process facilitate creative process or simply reflect these [shared] process? (Russ p. 292)

Returning to the question RM asked, how is adult play/creativity different from that of children, Russ cites Wallas’ (1926) statement for a truly creative product of a creative process to be produced the producer must have a wide knowledge base of the field, mastered the old ideas in order to incorporate new ones. With this criteria, children are at a natural disadvantage. (Russ p. 292) However, this does not make children less creative, just creative in different ways from adults, including in how they play.

Prior to this study Russ published research in 1993 and 1996 reviewing the existing literature on the relationship between pretend play and the development of creativity; noting the overlap in cognitive and affective process occurring in each. In the first study, Russ (1993) identified the two affective processes important to creativity as access to affect-laden thought and the ability to experience affect states, in other words the ability to express affect in fantasy and experience emotion, both important to how children play. Russ’ citation of Waelder (1933) view of play as a place where primary process thinking can occur and Morrison’s (1988) conceptualization of play as the place in which children can reconstruct past experiences and rework old metaphors [apply memory and existing knowledge they possess] as each pertain to her 1996 research expressing primary process thought as affect-laden and the development of divergent thinking are important to the development of the tool which is the focus of my research as each expresses [how] the expansion through skills associated with play might bring to the creative process. Russ cites Singer & Singer (1990) observation that play facilitates divergent thinking in children through practice by, in addition to using toys and objects to represent different things, role playing scenarios. (Russ p. 293)

Russ states, that although there are numerous studies on the relationship between play and creativity and the role of divergent thinking therein, the majority have been focused on the cognitive process rather than the affective process found in play. The reason for this appears to be due to the measures of play being used to assess the cognitive rather than the affective. Therefore Russ (1993, 20020 developed the Affect in Play Scale (APS) as a means to fulfill the need for a tool to standardised measure affect in pretend play; a scale appropriate for measuring in children ages 6 -10 years. (Russ p. 293) Relating the findings of the APS to other scales measuring divergent thinking and primary process thinking Russ found that affect in play did relate to significantly and positively to creativity and divergent thinking. (Russ p. 293) No significant difference was reported in terms of IQ measurements or gender, however important was the correspondence to the results on the Rorschach test measuring primary process thinking, which showed relation between more affect-laden primary process and higher fantasy in the APS. These results were replicated in other tests of children in Grade 1 and Grade 2 as well as in preschool (4 -5 year old) children; showing that even with the younger children there is a relationship between affect in play and creativity. (Russ p. 294)

Russ cites numerous studies where both divergent thinking and creative processes are deemed stable over time, the extent of each in regards to the individual remaining unchanged over time. (Russ p. 294) The creative, divergent thinking child remains so as an adult.

If this is so then why the constant refrain in critiques to ‘go play’? The assumption being that as artists we are creative and divergent thinkers. Yet the need to be told to ‘go play’ persists.

If creativity, the ability to think divergently, does not decline over time, can they be increased?

Russ (1999) retested the Grade 1 and Grade 2 children in Grade 5 and Grade 6. In the original test the children were given puppets to play with, in the follow up instructed to put on a play following the same basic task. The results did show a stability in the scores across the years; with the interesting revelation that the affect showed an increase in frequency and variety which was not present between the preschool and elementary school children whose difference in age was similar in span. (Russ p. 295) This could be related to the task itself calling for more affect in the telling of stories in a play as opposed to with puppets. Or it could relate to the younger children being tested individually while the older children were tested in a group. The findings did not predict real-life creativity or storytelling creativity, but the reasons for this remain unclear. (Russ p. 295) Retesting the same group again in Grades 11 and 12 using adult tests revealed similar results to the Grades 5 and 6 testing. Important is that the findings show the relationship between play and creativity is stable over time, but there is no evidence that play facilitate divergent thinking (in this sample). (Russ p. 296)

There is evidence that play facilitates creativity through insight. Russ cites research by Sylva et al [Bruner was a part of this group] (1976) showing the correlation between play in children age 3 - 5 and problem solving tasks. (Russ p. 296) Divided into three groups, the first group was given objects to play with while the second group observed the play. The third group was the control, neither playing with or observing the play. Later all the groups were asked to solve a problem using the objects. The group that had played with the objects were most able to solve the problem, and the observation group performed better than the control group. The experiment was refined by Vandenberg (1978) and conducted with an older and larger age range [4 -10 year olds]. In two groups, the one group played with the materials while the control group was asked questions about the materials. Both were given hints to the solution. [Scaffolding?]. The best results were from 6 -7 year olds who played with the materials, leading Vandenberg (1980) to conclude that the relationship between play and insightful tool use was mediated by age and task characteristics and enhanced motivated task activity. (Russ p. 296-97)

Vandenberg pointed up the similarity between play and creativity. In both play and creativity, one is creating novelty from the commonplace and has a disregard for the familiar. (Russ p. 297)

Studies from Dansky and Silverman (1973, 1980) reveal that play does facilitate divergent thinking; when given an object to play with children come up with more uses for the object than control groups who did not play with the object. In 1980 Dansky report that the mediator between play and divergent thinking appeared to be pretend play, free play only facilitated divergent thinking in children who incorporated make-believe into the play. (Russ p. 297) While these studies are in general important for revealing the direct effect of play on divergent thinking, they are of particular interest to my research for their revelation of the role of pretend play. [Dansky experiments received criticism for experimenter bias, which was itself later questioned.]

It is not a matter of going into the studio ‘to play’, rather it becomes a question of how one plays when he or she goes into the studio. The refrain ‘go play’ is less beneficial to the adult artist who might lack the tools possessed by the child in pretend play.

Dansky (1980) hypothesis was that the free symbolic transformations inherent in pretend play helped create a temporary cognitive set toward the loosening of old associations. (Russ p. 297)

Russ raised the question if the expression of affect in play can have an immediate effect on creativity. (Russ p. 298) Studies in children did not conclude that positive or negative affect impacted creativity; although a study by Isen et al. (1987) showed a correspondence between positive affect and creativity in adults. (Russ p. 298)

Russ asked if we can teach children to improve their play skills. (Russ p. 298) I am asking the same of artists. Citing studies beginning with Smilansky (1968) Russ shows that play training with children has shown to be effective. Though the methodological problems, particularly in terms of control groups, have been identified in the various studies which show a need for further research. While this is a problem, Russ did conclude: Research studies suggest that play does facilitate creativity. Further, Russ agrees with Dansky assessment that despite the methodological flaws of some of the studies, a significant number were rigorous in their research design. (Russ p. 300)

Russ’ research as well as that which she cites focuses on play and creativity in children. Returning to the question, how is adult play/creativity different than in that of children I still need to answer. However, I believe the theoretical reasoning for a difference between play and creativity in children and adults will be found in the developmental psychology research conducted by Vygotsky and others in the mid 1920s to mid 1930s. Wallas’ (1926) statement for a truly creative product of a creative process to be produced the producer must have a wide knowledge base of the field, mastered the old ideas in order to incorporate new ones, while viewed here as the disadvantage of the child who lacks the wide knowledge base needed to produce novel and good works, can also be flipped to be understood as the disadvantage of the adult, professional artist, whose wide base of knowledge can become a hinderance in the studio without the skills of pretend play possessed by the child.

Sandra W. Russ (2003) Play and Creativity: Developmental issues, Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 47:3, 291-303

Smoothing the edges: an observation

Yesterday afternoon, while Petra with her left hand sanded the back and sides of the panels of ‘A little madness in the Spring’, Part Two the following was observed.

Petra’s work was momentarily interrupted by the entrance into the studio of Robyn’s older son after his day at school. Although he knows Petra, he needed to interact with his mother at that moment. Petra left the room.

After her son went upstairs, while still dressed in Petra’s clothing, listening to her playlist, and sitting before her paintings Robyn decided to try resuming work on Petra’s paintings not as Petra, but as herself dressed as Petra using her own right hand.

It didn’t work. Robyn could not hold the panels with her left hand and sand the edges with her right. Coordination and control were missing, and it did not feel natural.

Petra re-entered the studio and completed the sanding using her left hand.

Maskenfreiheit

Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and It’s Legacy from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century

Simon Reynolds. 2016. Dey St. New York.

Central to mime is the idea of the mask: the feature-flattening white greasepaint serves to depersonalise, creating a blank canvas on which stylised expressions are depicted, according to a universal and timeless grammar of emotion. Descending from medieval dumbshow, mummers and masques, paralleling Japanese forms like Noh and Kabuki, and seeping into twentieth-century popular culture with tragicomic silent-movie stars like Buster Keaton, mime is all about escaping one’s actual self and donning the costume of a persona. Mime is theatre in its most pure and distilled form. The Germans have a words for it: ‘Maskenfreiheit’, ‘freedom in wearing masks’. This release - from the burden and challenge of having to represent his true self onstage - would be crucial for Bowie going forward. (89-90)

The digital continuation of a walking-talking conversation between two painters

Hi,

It’s great to hear from you. I remember reading the essay you sent the link for a while back on your blog and appreciating your perspective on Mr. Schnabel and the response his presence on the screen elicited from the audience. I think your observation of his offense being acting ’without irony or embarrassment’ is key to understanding both the man, the painter and how he is still perceived, to a degree, today. I also wanted to point out that the response to the broken plates as it has changed over the years has not deterred him from revisiting the approach in new work exhibited this winter at Pace. [BTW- I think the ‘Rose Paintings’ photograph quite beautifully, but have no desire to see them in person as I know I will be so disappointed!]

Your remarks are very helpful for me in thinking through how I present the idea of the persona as a tool to be applied in a painter’s studio practice.

I’d like to clarify that the application of personas is meant as a means to opening up a painter’s practice to possible ways of working that might otherwise be inaccessible due to a number of reasons; including the ways he or she has been trained (either formally or auto didactically) to engage with his or her practice, habits/routines fallen into over a long period, or even sticking to what has been the most successful path for reasons not necessarily driven by the art.

In this regard, ultimately the tool ‘persona’ should not be viewed as a single, one-size-fit-all tool. Rather it should be seen as tool that comes in many different shapes, sizes and materials to use in specific yet similar tasks; for example, a set of screwdrivers or box filled with different types of drill bits. If the painter has a particular task -a new approach he or she wishes to pursue, then the idea would be to look for the appropriate screwdriver, or drill bit.

However, the painter is not always aware of what he or she is hoping to bring into his or her practice; what might be missing -only the feeling that something might be missing, something more could be brought in; or even to a painting practice in which there is no intention or (overt) desire to bring something additional new into it in terms of technique, materials, or concepts. Perhaps the painter is only looking for another way to have some fun in the studio-a type of cross training which keeps the painter in the studio, doing what he or she does but from a different position- a way to play. In this case the painter will first need to explore the different screwdrivers or bits in the box to see what they do, how they might be helpful to the process, or simply, which ones would be fun to try out.

I guess the first example, when the painter knows what it is he or she would like to bring into his or her practice, the tool ‘persona’ could be analogous to the use of role play in various forms of therapy. However, this is not necessarily the intention of my research. I am more interested going back further to look at where the idea of role play as it is used in therapy comes from -play.

There is a lot of talk about ‘play’ and ‘playfulness’ among artists and other creative types. The feedback often heard in critiques is ’to play’ yet, why does this come up so often? Naturally playful types will find their way to play -and these people might find it odd to not only be told ‘play’ but to be presented with tools to play. For instance, Mr. Schnabel does not come across as a painter that needs to be told to or given the tools to play -he finds his own; whether or not the results of his playing bring forth interesting paintings I’m not going to comment on, but I do think this openness to play has led to him making some great films and maybe even the key to sticking with it.

Still, it seems that often people (not just painters or artists in general) find themselves in a position where they hear ‘play’. Back to the screwdrivers and drill bits- there are many ways to play and what is right for one job will not necessarily work (as efficiently or successfully) for another. Everyone has their own tool box filled with their own, customized tools and only the individual can decide which tools are getting the job done. [This is where the whole ‘authenticity’ thing comes in…]

To your experience, I can only say that it sounds like you know what you need to do -writing in the third person or other voices seems a playful way to start! The nice thing about trying on different personas is it is like having a number of shirts, shoes or hats in the closet. What might not be right for today may be perfect for a day next month or next year, so it’s nice knowing that you can find the article you’re looking for in the back of the closet or drawer when you need it. Who knows what else you’ll find if you dig around…maybe a pair of silk pajamas and a brandy snifter of your own…or something even ‘bolder, brasher and unapologetic’?

I look forward to talking with you again soon…and look forward to looking at more art with you, including your own (whoever might be standing behind you as it pours out onto the canvas or paper)*.

Best,
Robyn

Painters of Place

A thread I was not aware of when I set off to view a number of exhibits during my recent trip south of my normal place began to emerge as I viewed artworks, had conversations and time alone to think as I traveled up and down I-95.

The idea of ‘place’ as defining not only the identity of the artist but also impacting the work he or she creates.

For Sara Berman it was a closet at 2 Horatio Street in Greenwich Village.

For Marsden Hartley it was the coast, the mountains, the trees of Maine.

For Mimmo Rotella it was the streets of Rome with their torn posters.

For Brian Rutenberg it is the swampy coast of South Carolina.

For Mark Roth it is a place altered by the of clash of cultures migrating and mixing across it.

For Claire Barratt it is a nomadic place enabling quick changes and adaptability.

For Michael Williams it is place moving between yesterday and today, or maybe now and now.

For Betty Tompkins it is place of human desire.

For Al Taylor it is the place where forms, colors, layers of paint meet and (sometimes) overlap.

For Alice Neel it is Uptown.

For Sue Williams it is a sensual, sensuous, sexual, scary?, Seussian place.

For Henry Taylor it is the place where the compositions of painting since Post-Impressionism meet the realities of the subjects of Post-factual America.

For Jo Baer it is the place granted the subject and its reality in the painterly illusion.

For Celeste Dupuy-Spencer it is a place embedded with contradictions for which to report on.

For Shara Hughes place is a trippy, imaginary landscape traversed with a painter’s eye.

For Carrie Moyer place is a playful juxtaposition of fluidity and flatness.

For Albert Oehlen place is a hysterical contradiction.

For Emily Dickinson place was beyond the rose covered wallpaper surrounding her as she wrote.

Daughter and grandson question if the bleached, starched, pressed and folded stacks and hangers of white in Sara Berman’s closet where tied to her memory of a childhood in a small village next to a muddy river in Belarus or the bright, sunny Mediterranean light of her youth and young adulthood in Tel Aviv, both places where women, mothers constantly cleaned, ironed and starched.

Marsden Hartley painting the Alps in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1933-34 was also painting his memory of a place, Mount Katahdin in Maine. Later, back in Maine, the memory of the view of the Alps from Garmisch-Partenkirchen finding its way into the paintings of Mount Katahdin.

The residue of the paper torn from its place on a billboard in a street in Rome preserved as a memory on a canvas.

The lingering smell of the oil paint thickly applied to the canvas analogous to the swampy smells of a coast.

The memory of the plant seeding itself across a land bridge between two continents, or of pages from a magazine, or paintings from painters long canonized.

Searching for memories of places long forgotten or never seen before.

Remembering yesterday through the technology of today.

A memory of the colors radiating from beneath the layers to a surface making it anything but neutral.

A memory of then still fresh now.

Remembering a diversity disappearing.

A memory of a pause found in empty space on the canvas.

A memory of the stories paintings can share.

Remembering the place can change and still remain the same.

Remembering there are many in the same place as you.

A memory of a place can be more vivid than the place itself.

Remembering the studio is a playful place.

Remembering the innate freedom of the creative act.

The memory of a person, her words are forever tied to the place they were written as much as to the place from which they came.

Through our presence the place we are at contains the memory of all the places we have been.

Vygotsky: The Psychology of Art, Part One

The Psychology of Art

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky.

1971. [English translation]

The MIT Press. Cambridge, MA.

This book contains the research Vygotsky conducted between 1915-1922. It was submitted as his PhD in 1925 but not published in the Soviet Union until the 1960s (posthumously). The research conducted is not from the point of view of a trained psychologist, but from a student of the humanities whose interest lay with literature, theory, criticism and philosophy and the role of psychology in relationship to these. It introduces concepts that Vygotsky would put aside for the next ten (remaining) years of his life as he delved actively into the methodology of psychology, however, he would return to these in his last writings which comprise Thought and Language.

The following are notes from the Introduction to the original Russian publication (in English translation) by A.N. Leontiev.

Leontiev recommends to read as the psychology of art and the psychology of art while keeping in mind the historical context in which Vygotsky wrote this book.

“The main problem to which he addressed himself was of broader and more general significance: just what does an artistic creation do, what transforms it into a work of art?” (p. vi)

This question Leontiev has Vygotsky asking is quite similar to the question Wollheim asks of painting.

Leontiev has Vygotsky writing from the POV of a psychologist, however more recent research disputes this position and it is important to look at the relationship of Leontiev and Vygotsky.

However, Leontiev builds on the above with the following:

“His method is objective and analytical. He believes that in analyzing the structure of a work of art one must recreate the response, the internal activity to which it gives rise.” (p.vi)

This again gestures in the direction of Wollheim.

Leontiev further expresses Vygotsky’s aim as:

“...devoted to criticism of one-sided views of the specific qualities of art, its specific human and social functions. He is opposed to reducing the functions of art to a purely perceptive, gnostic function. If art does have a perceptive function, it becomes a function of special perception carried out by particular means. Art is not simply a matter of visual perception.” (p. vii)

Hmmm….that noise sounds familiar...more than retinal? Vygotsky was focused on the literary arts yet writing of art in general which led to addressing the divisions in schools/fields of psychology at that time by means of developing methods for a ‘general methodology’ of psychology.

“The essence and function of art are not contained in form itself, for form does not exist alone and has no independence. Its true validity appears only when we consider it in relation to the material in which it informs or “incarnates”, as Vygotsky puts it, by giving it new life in the context of the work of art. From this standpoint, the author expresses his opposition to formalism in art,... But is the specific quality of art perhaps embodied in the expression of emotional experience, the communication of feelings? Vygotsky rejects this solution as well.” (p.vii)

Transfiguration

-of the material

-of the feelings: from individual to a generalized/sociological

“...the nature of the process itself is hidden from the investigator, just as it is concealed from the observations of the artist himself. What the student of art has before him is not the artist’s work but its product -the artistic creation, the work of art in whose structure is crystallized. This is a very precise thesis: human activity does not evaporate or disappear from its product; it merely changes with the work of art from a form of motion into a form of being, or state of existence as an object (Gegenständlichkeit).” (p. vii-viii)

This ties into Wollheim’s description of the artist-object-spectator relationship which he describes as necessary for painting to occur as an art. It is what is happening in the spaces between the three points.

“...with Vygotsky, form is not separated from content; rather it penetrates into it. For the content of artistic production is not the material. Its real content is its effective content -that which determines the specific character of the aesthetic experience to which an artistic creation gives rise. Thus the content we have in mind is not simply injected into the work of art from the outside, but is created in it by the artist.”

Adding Wollheim’s thoughts to this mix content does also come from the outside...the spectator... but through the artist.

Catharsis

Vygotsky uses the term to designate the internal movement -”movement of opposite feelings” that is formed into the structure of the work of art. Catharsis is “...the resolution of a certain, merely personal conflict, the revelation of a higher, more general, human truth in the phenomena of life.” (p.ix)

Essay by Vygotsky to be on the lookout for: “On the Problem of the Psychology of the Actor’s Creativity,” in R.M. Jakobsen’s book The Psychology of the Feelings of the Actor, Moscow, 1936. P. 204

Note: Vygotsky was influenced by the writings/work of Stanislavski and Shklovsky during the period he researched/wrote this book.

Shock and Awe, Part One

Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century.

Simon Reynolds. 2016.

...says (Simon) Napier-Bell. ‘Real images come from real, unusual people.’ On the face of it, this is a curious definition of pop-star authenticity: the ‘true’ fake is in control of the masks he or she wears. But it fits figures like Bolan and his competitive friend Bowie. Both invented a series of personae before finding one that clicked with the public. (Reynolds p. 30)

The manufactured versus the self-manufactured is the divide running through pop history according to Reynolds.

What springs to my mind is how truth (fact) is obtained via untruth (fiction).

This is where art enters in and when the tool enabling the process becomes more than just a tool.

Sara Berman’s Closet @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The wall text was also printed on a small poster for the viewer to take:

Sara Berman was born in the village of Lenin in Belarus on March 15, 1920

...

Sara and her family moved to Tel Aviv in Palestine in 1932.

There they lived in a shack near the ocean.

Sand covered everything.

The women were always baking, washing, starching, and ironing.

The Middle Eastern sun bleached the laundry a blinding white.

Fanatically pressed linens were precisely folded and stacked.

The clothes were so heavily starched they could get up and walk away.

In 1954 Sara left Tel Aviv and moved with her husband and two daughters

to New York City. …

Many things happened, including a divorce

after thirty-eight years of marriage.

In 1982 Sara moved into a studio apartment at 2 Horatio Street in Greenwich Village.

She was happy in a room of her own.

…

She wore only white clothes.

We really don’t know why.

…

This closet ....

all lined up with military precision and loving care,

represents the unending search -from the monumental to the mundane-

for order, beauty, and meaning.

Maira Kalman & Alex Kalman

This child’s chair designed by Alvar Aalto Sara Berman used at her dining room table.

The color, the simplicity of form, and its inclusion in Sara Berman’s apartment whose atypical-typical NYC closet in which she alongside her clothing, linens and Chanel No. 5 kept her graeter and cookie press reminded me of the tea set I’d just seen in the previous gallery, 746, with the exhibit The Aesthetic Movement in America . I could imagine Sara Berman serving tea from this set at her low dining table with inflatable globes strewn on the floor of the minimal, bright, light studio. She might have even found a spot for it on a shelf in her closet.

The earthenware tea set was produced in Chelsea, Massachusetts (1879-83) by Chelsea Keramic Art Works in a style inspired by the late nineteenth century interest in Eastern motives, Japanese hammered metalwork and the designs of Christopher Dresser [paraphrased from the exhibit signage]

“Throughout the nineteenth century, morally based theories of design and construction suggested that deceptive or “sham” manufacture, such as veneering and the use of illusionistic decorative devices, corrupted the consumer by extension. Dresser believed that the ornamentalist could, through truthful or false design, “exalt or debase a nation.” In search of a moral design vocabulary, he established principles based on Truth, Beauty, and Power; Truth criticizes imitation of materials, Beauty describes a sense of timeless perfection in design, and Power implies strength, energy, and force in ornament, achieved through Knowledge. Finding inspiration in plants and their structures, which he determined were geometrically balanced, Dresser took a radically scientific approach to art and design. He believed that truth was founded in science and that art reflected beauty. Knowledge, the manifestation of Truth and Beauty, as Dresser resolved, is Power. However, rather than depicting plant forms in a naturalistic manner, he followed the guidelines set by Owen Jones in The Grammar of Ornament that “Flowers and other natural objects should not be used as ornaments, but conventional representations …” (Proposition 13). Equally important, Dresser took from Jones the precept that “All ornament should be based upon a geometrical construction” (Proposition 8) whereby stylizing or abstracting the “source” ornament through geometric reasoning removes all preconceived associations from the source and thus creates pure ornament.” (from: Essay- Christopher Dresser. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. online)

This was a photo on the wall, a view into Sara Berman’s apartment. The dining table and chairs are on the left, globes on the floor to the right. Bed in the foreground. Low, two seat sofa under the window. It was small, but it was hers.

This stained glass window in the previous gallery’s exhibition with the tea set would be out of place in Sara’s space.

Squash window with pebbles. Louis Comfort Tiffany 1885-1890.

But then again, maybe it would have fit in Sara’s space.

It is a fairly experimental work for its time in both form and use of materials...the pebbles are polished stones collected from a beach...but no more out of place in the 1880s NYC than Sara in 1980s NYC.

Maybe the materials and subject would have reminded her of her youth and young adulthood in Tel Aviv?

Lightness is a key component of this work just as lightness was a key component of Sara Berman.

Her shoes lined up in a row like the pebbles at the top of the window.

And the glass balls and mirror artfully placed on the top shelf to the right side of the closet… next to the grater, a red metal box with her glasses sitting on top.

The distance between Sara Berman’s Closet and The Aesthetic Movement in America is not wide.

Vygotsky in Context, Part One

The following information is taken from the Foreword (2012) and essay ‘Vygotsky in Context’ both by Alex Kozulin, editor and translator (together with Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar) of the revised and expanded edition of Thought and Language by Lev Vygotsky, published 2012 by MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

An important aspect of Lev Vygotsky is that despite his place as a, or maybe, the, formative figure in Soviet/Russian psychology he was not a formally trained psychologist but came to psychology through other areas of interests. He brought the perspective of an ‘outsider’ to theoretically address the ‘crisis’ of early twentieth century (p. xxxii) -a crisis between competing methods and methodologies seeking to define psychology as a unified science when in fact psychology is not this singular field, but ‘a collection of studies having absolutely different theoretical foundations and methodologies’ which is the position of Vygotsky restated in the work Sigmund Koch in the 1980s, fifty years after Vygotsky and one hundred years after psychology had been recognized as a science. (p. xxxiii)

This lapse of time between Koch and Vygotsky points to an interesting points in Vygotsky’s biography related to his research. The first, and perhaps most significant point is the recognition of Vygotsky’s ideas and research. Lev Vygotsky was active in the field of psychology for a very short time, a period of approximately ten years (1924-1934) before he died at the age of 38 from tuberculosis. Already by the time of his death the ideas he was putting forth were in conflict to those which would be viewed acceptable by Stalinism. By 1936 Vygotsky and his research , with concepts deemed too bourgeois, had become a footnote in Soviet psychology. However, by the 1950s Vygotsky’s methods and ideas were brought back first within the Soviet Union, and slowly through translations (first in the late 1950s). However, it would be another twenty-plus years, until the 1980s and 1990s, when the pace of translation of not just a few seminal works, but all of Vygotsky’s writings would be published (in Russian) and translated into English and other languages.

Kozulin on the first page of his Foreward to this most recent, revised and expanded edition of Thought and Language asks a very important question to the growing popularity of Vygotsky’s ideas in the late twentieth -early twenty-first century: ‘Why is it that a theory developed in Russia almost a century ago continues to capture the imagination of the present generation of American and Western European researchers and practitioners?’ Kozulin answers himself, “One possible explanation of this puzzling phenomenon is that Vygotsky’s theory offered some tentative answers to the questions we are only now finally ready to ask.’ When I consider the recent (last twenty years) discoveries made in the fields of neuro- and cognitive science which have been made possible by technological advancements in brain imaging -the ability to see how communication occurs physically within the brain- Kozulin statement seems valid. Perhaps the period spent away from Vygotsky’s ideas, exploring parallel paths and dead ends, was necessary in order to allow the technology which these other, related, fields are dependent upon to catch up. Interestingly, hours after I had read Kozulin foreword and introductory essay on Vygotsky I came across an article about research published in the current issue of Science on short and long term memory, research that disproves the ideas held by scientists for the last fifty years as to how short and long term memory function. Although Vygotsky, his ideas, were not mentioned directly in this article it is difficult to imagine that without them these recent findings in a different, yet related field about concepts and functions Vygotsky addressed -memory, higher function and consciousness- via psychology would not have been possible without the paradigm shift that Vygotsky’s research brought about.

Thoughts and Question by Melusine Van der Weyden

Part One

Thoughts:

Passion when it does not conform to the expectations of others can be misconstrued as aggression.

Taking a risk can be interpreted as an aggressive act by those who are averse to taking risks.

Intense examination can be seen as aggressive confrontation by those who secretly fear looking too closely, too intensely.

Mirrors that reveal a reflection other than the one that is expected, anticipated or desired.

Non-conformity to expectations.

Looking at the non-conformist as if into a mirror and having one’s own conformity, timidity and fear of intensity and intimacy revealed whether it is intended to be or not is often interpreted as an aggressive act.

Questions:

What threatens people most?

What do I ask myself when I encounter a person I deem aggressive?

Is the aggression driven by fear or by passion?

What drives fear?

What drives passion?

There can be fearful passion and passionate fear, and they are not the same.

Who is the aggressive one?

Is it I or is it the one I face?

Return to the first question.

Random Notes, Part One

Artist talk about play. Curators, critics and historians talk about how the artist plays. Scratch the surface of the work and how the artist has played may or may not be easily revealed. Play is not a formal part of the artist’s education, yet he or she is repeatedly encouraged to ‘play’. Each artist develops his or her own tools and the methods by which he or she plays. At times these tools and their methods of application can be found in the practice of many artists across a variety of practices, yet each tool and its application maintains a uniqueness within any given practice.

Examining how I incorporate play as a performative tool to my painting practice.

[See: https://my.vanderbilt.edu/criticaltheoryfall13/2013/11/judith-butler-on-gender-as-performed-or-performative/]

...it is my hope to persuade viewer/reader that through the development of the persona as a performative tool methodically applied to a painterly practice may serve as a model for methods of play in artistic practices exploring issues of personal identity…

Phenomenological (philosophy) perception of the action -painting as myself, as a persona- through videos, photos, the work and the feel, smell and sight of the clothing worn, followed by reflection on/within this painting practice through videos, photos, the work and the feel, smell and sight of the clothing worn.

How does (or doesn’t) this happen in terms of structure? How is the structure expressed in the work?

From the viewpoint of how humans develop cognitively Piaget, and before him Freud, assigned a very distinct step by step process. Vygotsky and those who followed him loosened this structure to acknowledge the randomness and overlapping that does (and must?) occur.

What is the attraction to structure and is it possible to maintain a structure over time or does the structure continually morph? How does this morphing occur? What does it look like?

Thinking of play, specifically games. The following thoughts come from Bruner.

Rules of play are established in advance of the game. However, in the midst of playing the games the rules are either held to to a point where the game reaches a conclusion, or the rules are changed so that the game may continue until it is stopped.

Players may stop playing a game but this does not mean the game has necessarily reached its conclusion.

Conclusion.

When is a painting finished?

Resolution versus conclusion.

Invitation(s) to construct identity.

Invitation(s) to play.

Invitation(s) to become the painter.

Invitation(s) to become the performer.

Invitation(s) to become the audience.

Invitation(s) to …

Speaking recently with another painter about the identity of the artist, the impact of personal identity of the painter on the painting, and the personas combined with thoughts on memory and its resurgence/emergence in the painting from expressed by Howard Hodgkin in a filmed interview [https://youtu.be/FvRtznZ3m1M] lead me to the following thoughts.

What the painter has experienced, remembered and forgotten finds its way into the work.

What the performer has experienced, remembered and forgotten finds its way into the work.

What the viewer, audience, reader has experienced, remembered and forgotten finds its way into the work.

What the work has experienced, never remembered and never forgotten finds its way into the work.

The personas began with a thought, a response to something both external and internal to myself.

Their further development was primarily a process internal to myself at first.

Through their externalization, their actions, interactions and responses I learn more about who each of them are.

This learning then becomes again an internal process for me to further develop the persona.

Their existence prompts questions of how they exist.

Their existence prompts questions of why they exist.

Why they exist impacts how they exist.

How they exists impacts how the works exists.

How the work exists prompts questions of why it exists.

Why the work exists returns to my internal process and its externalization through the work.

Petra paints with her left hand.

I paint with my right hand.

It was hard at first to use the left hand when Petra painted.

The marks were wonky from an inability to control the brush, to feel the mark; it was hard to say how much water was being held in the bristles because I did not know what felt right in the left hand.

Developing sensitivity to the feel of the brush in the left hand has been an important part of painting with Petra.

When I think about it this was something I did as I began to paint...learn to feel the mark, learn to feel the paint in the bristles. The difference is I most likely did not do this consciously, or rather I knew that was the purpose of painting frequently...to develop the feel… but at the same time, I did not intentionally say “I will paint … to develop the feel of the paint in the bristles, to develop the feel of the mark coming out of the brush onto the surface….

I just did it.

It has taken a few weeks for Petra to just do it.

Now when she sits down she picks up the brush with her left hand.

When the mark does not happen the way she wants, when she has misjudged the paint in the brush, I no longer break through in frustration and try to, or have to suppress trying to, resolve the problem with my right hand. Petra works through the problem with her left.

Reading essays and collected talks of psychologist the past few weeks I have been thinking of two things: 1. Tools and 2. Drawing with the non-dominant hand.

I’ll write later (a lot) more about tools -what the can be and how they can be applied as developmental aids- as they are (appearing) to be very important aspect of my research.

But now I want to write about the second thing, drawing with the non-dominant hand as a means of strengthening the dominant hand, as a means of challenging the other side of the brain, pushing ‘the practical’ aside to make more room for ‘the creative’.

Truthfully, if I’d ever been challenged to do this exercises in my drawing classes...and I probably was… I do not recall doing this.

And the exercises I find online, the reasons given for what makes drawing with the non-dominant hand beneficial, well, much of what is put forth is questionable in terms of what we have learned about the brain in recent years.

Still, it is an exercise that has been performed for a long time and there might possibly be a benefit from doing it. Perhaps this benefit is similar or the same to moving around when drawing observationally, copying the work of another artist, or eliminating a favorite color or tool from the box. More everyday would be to change the order of things, first breakfast then shower. Or taking another route to where ever it is one might travel frequently. Small shifts can precipitate big change, putting us in different locations at different times. Or simply reveal a common sight from another point of view.

Considering narrative

Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life

Jerome Bruner.

2002.

Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA.

Why do we naturally portray ourselves through story, so naturally indeed that selfhood itself seems a product of our own story making? ... Why narrative? (Bruner, 2002. P. 70)

Bruner compiled a list from research volumes edited together by Ulric Neisser addressing this question and came up with the following reminders of what is needed to tell or write a good story (Bruner, 2002. P. 72):

A story needs a plot.
Plots need obstacles to goals.
Obstacles make people reconsider.
Tell only about the story-relevant past.
Give your characters allies and connections.
Let your characters grow.
But keep their identities intact.
And also keep their continuities evident.
Locate your characters in the world of people.
Let your characters explain themselves as needed.
Let your characters have moods.
Worry when your characters are not making sense -and have them worry too.

Thoughts and questions to myself:

How am I employing narrative in the formation of my tools (the personas)?

How or what narrative is present in the paintings each of us creates or re-creates?

Which of the above points listed apply to what part of the work (the personas, the paintings)?

Fragments from a Fragment

Fragments from The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa translated/edited by Richard Zenith Published by Penguin Books 2003.

These fragments are grouped under the subheading A Factless Autobiography. They are attributed to the semi-heteronym, Bernardo Soares who appeared between around 1930, approximately 15 years after Pessoa had begun the initial writings which form The Book of Disquiet.

Reading them I am reminded that together they form a reflection not just of the writer of their writer, but also a reflection of the reader-editor who put them into the form in the book, and myself who selected them from the book and posted them here.

139
For a long time now I haven’t written. Months have gone by in which I haven’t lived, just endured, between the o_ce and physiology, in an inward stagnation of thinking and feeling. Unfortunately, this isn’t even restful, since in rotting there’s fermentation.
For a long time now I haven’t written and haven’t even existed. I hardly even seem to be dreaming. The streets for me are just streets. I do my o_ce work conscious only of it, though I can’t say without distraction: in the back of my mind I’m sleeping instead of meditating (which is what I usually do), but I still have a different existence behind my work.
For a long time now I haven’t existed. I’m utterly calm. No one distinguishes me from who I am. I just felt myself breathe as if I’d done something new, or done it late. I’m beginning to be conscious of being conscious. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll wake up to myself and resume the course of my own existence. I don’t know if that will make me more happy or less. I don’t know anything. I lift my pedestrian’s head and see that, on the hill of the Castle, the sunset’s reflection is burning in dozens of windows, in a lofty brilliance of cold "re. Around these hard-flamed eyes, the entire hillside has the softness of day’s end. I’m able at least to feel sad, and to be conscious that my sadness was just now crossed – I saw it with my ears – by the sudden sound of a passing tram, by the casual voices of young people, and by the forgotten murmur of the living city.
For a long time now I haven’t been I.

140
It sometimes happens, more or less suddenly, that in the midst of my sensations I’m overwhelmed by such a terrible weariness of life that I can’t even conceive of any act that might relieve it. Suicide seems a dubious remedy, and natural death – even assuming it brings unconsciousness – an insufficient one. Rather than the cessation of my existence, which may or may not be possible, this weariness makes me long for something far more horrifying and profound: never to have existed at all, which is definitely impossible.

Now and then I seem to discern, in the generally confused speculations of the Indians, something of this longing that’s even more negative than nothingness. But either they lack the keenness of sensation to communicate what they think, or they lack the acuity of thought to really feel what they feel. The fact is that what I discern in them I don’t clearly see. The fact is that I think I’m the first to express in words the sinister absurdity of this incurable sensation.
And yet I do cure it, by writing about it. Yes, for every truly profound desolation, one that’s not pure feeling but has some intelligence mixed in with it, there’s always the ironic remedy of expressing it. If literature has no other usefulness, it at least has this one, though it serves only a few.
The ailments of our intelligence unfortunately hurt less than those of our feelings, and those of our feelings unfortunately less than those of the body. I say ‘unfortunately’ because human dignity would require it to be the other way around. There is no mental anguish vis-à-vis the unknown that can hurt us like love or jealousy or nostalgia, that can overwhelm us like intense physical fear, or that can transform us like anger or ambition. But neither can any pain that ravishes the soul be as genuinely painful as a toothache, a stomach-ache, or the pain (I imagine) of childbirth.

We’re made in such a way that the same intelligence that ennobles certain emotions or sensations, elevating them above others, also humbles them, when it extends its analysis to a comparison among them all. I write as if sleeping, and my entire life is an unsigned receipt.
Inside the coop where he’ll stay until he’s killed, the rooster sings anthems to liberty because he was given two roosts.

141
RAINY LANDSCAPE
Each drop of rain is my failed life weeping in nature. There’s something of my disquiet in the endless drizzle, then shower, then drizzle, then shower, through which the day’s sorrow uselessly pours itself out over the earth. It rains and keeps raining. My soul is damp from hearing it. So much rain... My flesh is watery around my physical sensation of it.

An anguished cold holds my poor heart in its icy hands. The grey hours get longer, attending out in time; the moments drag.
So much rain!

The gutters spew out little torrents of sudden water. A troubling noise of falling rain falls through my awareness that there are downspouts. The rain groans as it listlessly batters the panes .....

A cold hand squeezes my throat and prevents me from breathing life. Everything is dying in me, even the knowledge that I
can dream! I can’t get physically comfortable. Every soft
thing I lean against hurts my soul with sharp edges. All eyes I gaze into are terribly dark in this impoverished daylight, propitious for dying without pain.

149
Many people have defined man, and in general they’ve defined him in contrast with animals. That’s why definitions of man often take the form, ‘Man is a such- and-such animal’, or ‘Man is an animal that...’, and then we’re told what. ‘Man is a sick animal,’ said Rousseau, and that’s partly true. ‘Man is a rational animal,’ says the Church, and that’s partly true. ‘Man is a tool-using animal,’ says Carlyle, and that’s partly true. But these definitions, and others like them, are always somewhat o the mark. And the reason is quite simple: it’s not easy to distinguish man from animals, for there’s no reliable criterion for making the distinction. Human lives run their course with the same inherent unconsciousness as animal lives. The same fundamental laws that rule animal instincts likewise rule human intelligence, which appears to be no more than an instinct in the formative stage, as unconscious as any instinct, and less perfect since still not fully formed.
‘All that exists comes from unreason,’ says The Greek Anthology. And everything, indeed, comes from unreason. Since it deals only with dead numbers and empty formulas, mathematics can be perfectly logical, but the rest of science is no more than child’s play at dusk, an attempt to catch birds’ shadows and to stop the shadows of windblown grass.
The funny thing is that, while it’s di!cult to formulate a definition that truly distinguishes man from animals, it’s easy to differentiate between the superior man and the common man.
I’ve never forgotten that phrase from Haeckel,* the biologist, whom I read in the childhood of my intelligence, that period when we’re attracted to popular science and writings that attack religion. The phrase is more or less the following: The distance between the superior man (a Kant or a Goethe, I believe he says) and the common man is much greater than the distance between the common man and the ape. I’ve never forgotten the phrase, because it’s true. Between me, whose rank is low among thinking men, and a farmer from Loures,* there is undoubtedly a greater distance than between the farmer and, I won’t say a monkey, but a cat or dog. None of us, from the cat on up to me, is really in charge of the life imposed on us or of the destiny we’ve been given; we are all equally derived from no one knows what; we’re shadows of gestures performed by someone else, embodied effects, consequences that feel. But between me and the farmer there’s a difference of quality, due to the presence in me of abstract thought and disinterested emotion; whereas between him and the cat, intellectually and psychologically, there is only a difference of degree.
The superior man differs from the inferior man and his animal brothers by the simple trait of irony. Irony is the first sign that our consciousness has become conscious, and it passes through two stages: the one represented by Socrates, when he says, ‘All I know is that I know nothing,’ and the other represented by Sanches,* when
he says, ‘I don’t even know if I know nothing.’ In the first stage we dogmatically doubt ourselves, and every superior man arrives there. In the second stage we come to doubt not only ourselves but also our own doubt, and few men have reached that point in the already so long yet short span of time that the human race has beheld the sun and night over the earth’s variegated surface.
To know oneself is to err, and the oracle that said
‘Know thyself’ proposed a task more di!cult than the labours of Hercules and a riddle murkier than the Sphinx’s. To consciously not know ourselves – that’s the way! And to conscientiously not know ourselves is the active task of irony. I know nothing greater, nor more worthy of the truly great man, than the patient and expressive analysis of the ways in which we don’t know ourselves, the conscious recording of the unconsciousness of our conscious states, the metaphysics of autonomous shadows, the poetry of the twilight of disillusion.
But something always eludes us, some analysis or other always gets muddled, and the truth – even if false – is always beyond the next corner. And this is what tires us even more than life (when life tires us) and more than the knowledge and contemplation of life (which always tire us).
I stand up from the chair where, propped distractedly against the table, I’ve entertained myself with the narration of these strange impressions. I stand up, propping my body on itself, and walk to the window, higher than the surrounding rooftops, and I watch the city going to sleep in a slow beginning of silence. The large and whitely white moon sadly clarfies the terraced differences in the buildings opposite. The moonlight seems to illuminate icily all the world’s mystery. It seems to reveal everything, and everything is shadows with admixtures of faint light, false and unevenly absurd gaps, inconsistencies of the visible. There’s no breeze, and the mystery seems to loom larger. I feel queasy in my abstract thought. I’ll never write a page that sheds light on me or that sheds light on anything. A wispy cloud hovers hazily over the moon, like a co_verture. I’m ignorant, like these rooftops. I’ve failed, like all of nature.

151
Outside, in the slow moonlit night, the wind slowly shakes things that cast uttering shadows. Perhaps it’s just hanging laundry from the floor above, but the shadows don’t know they’re from shirts, and they impalpably utter in hushed harmony with everything else.

I left the shutters open so as to wake up early, but so
far I haven’t succeeded in falling asleep or even in staying wide awake, and the night’s already so old that not a sound can be heard. There’s moonlight beyond the shadows of my room, but it doesn’t come through the window. It exists like a day of hollow silver, and the roof of the building opposite, which I can see from my bed, is liquid with a blackish whiteness. In the moon’s hard light there’s a sad peace, like lofty congratulations to someone who can’t hear them.

And without seeing, without thinking, my eyes now closed on my non-existent slumber, I meditate on what words can truly describe moonlight. The ancients would say that it is silvery or white. But this supposed whiteness actually consists of many colours. Were I to get out of bed and look past the cold panes, I know I would see that in the high lonely air the moonlight is greyish white, blued by a subdued yellow; that over the various, unequally dark rooftops it bathes the submissive buildings with a black white and floods the red brown of the highest clay tiles with a colourless colour. At the end of the street – a placid abyss where the naked cobblestones are unevenly rounded – it has no colour other than a blue which perhaps comes from the grey of the stones. In the depths of the horizon it must be almost dark blue, different from the black blue in the depths of the sky. On the windows where it strikes, the moonlight is a black yellow.
From here in my bed, if I open my eyes, heavy with the sleep I cannot find, it looks like snow turned into colour, with floating threads of warm nacre. And if I think with what I feel, it’s a tedium turned into white shadow, darkening as if eyes were closing on this hazy whiteness.

155
Just as some people work because they’re bored, I sometimes write because I have nothing to say. Daydreaming, which occurs naturally to people when they’re not thinking, in me takes written form, for I
know how to dream in prose. And there are many sincere feelings and much genuine emotion that I extract from not feeling.
There are moments when the emptiness of feeling oneself live attains the consistency of a positive thing. In the great men of action, namely the saints, who act with all of their emotion and not just part of it, this sense of life’s nothingness leads to the finite. They crown themselves with night and the stars, and anoint themselves with silence and solitude. In the great men of inaction, to whose number I humbly belong, the same feeling leads to the infinitesimal; sensations are stretched, like rubber bands, to reveal the pores of their slack, false continuity.
And in these moments both types of men love sleep, as much as the common man who doesn’t act and doesn’t not act, being a mere reflection of the generic existence of the human species. Sleep is fusion with God, Nirvana, however it be called. Sleep is the slow analysis of sensations, whether used as an atomic science of the soul or left to doze like a music of our will, a slow anagram of monotony.
In my writing I linger over the words, as before shop windows I don’t really look at, and what remains are half-meanings and quasi-expressions, like the colours of fabrics that I didn’t actually see, harmonious displays composed of I don’t know what objects. In writing I rock myself, like a crazed mother her dead child.
One day, I don’t know which, I found myself in this world, having lived unfeelingly from the time I was evidently born until then. When I asked where I was, everyone misled me, and they contradicted each other. When I asked them to tell me what I should do, they all spoke falsely, and each one said something different. When in bewilderment I stopped on the road, everyone was shocked that I didn’t keep going to no one knew where, or else turn back – I, who’d woken up at the crossroads and didn’t know where I’d come from. I saw that I was on stage and didn’t know the part that everyone else recited straight o!, also without knowing it. I saw that I was dressed as a page, but they didn’t give me the queen, and blamed me for not having her. I saw that I had a message in my hand to deliver, and when I told them that the sheet of paper was blank, they laughed at me. And I still don’t know if they laughed because all sheets are blank, or because all messages are to be guessed.
Finally I sat down on the rock at the crossroads as before the replace I never had. And I began, all by myself, to make paper boats with the lie they’d given me. No one would believe in me, not even as a liar, and there was no lake where I could try out my truth.
Lost and idle words, random metaphors, chained to shadows by a vague anxiety... Remnants of better times, spent on I don’t know what garden paths... Extinguished lamp whose gold gleams in the dark, in memory of the dead light... Words tossed not to the wind but to the ground, dropped from limp fingers, like dried leaves that had fallen on them from an invisibly finite tree... Nostalgia for the pools of unknown farms... Heartfelt affection for what never happened...
To live! To live! And at least the hope that I might sleep soundly in Proserpina’s bed.

160
...
Everything, for us, is in our concept of the world. To modify our concept of the world is to modify the world for us, or simply to modify the world, since it will never be, for us, anything but what it is for us. That inner

justice we summon to write a fluent and beautiful page, that true reformation of enlivening our dead sensibility – these things are the truth, our truth, the only truth. Everything else in the world is scenery, picture frames for our feelings, book bindings for our thoughts. And this is true whether it be the colourful scenery of beings and things – fields, houses, posters, clothes – or the colourless scenery of monotonous souls that periodically rise to the surface with hackneyed words and gestures, then sink back down into the fundamental stupidity of human expression.

Revolution? Change? What I really want, with all my heart, is for the platonic clouds to stop greyly lathering the sky. What I want is to see the blue emerge, a truth that is clear and sure because it is nothing and wants nothing.

161
Nothing irks me more than the vocabulary of social responsibility. The very word ‘duty’ is unpleasant to me, like an unwanted guest. But the terms ‘civic duty’, ‘solidarity’, ‘humanitarianism’ and others of the same ilk disgust me like rubbish dumped out of a window right on top of me. I’m offended by the implicit assumption that these expressions pertain to me, that I should find them worthwhile and even meaningful.
I recently saw in a toy-shop window some objects that reminded me exactly of what these expressions are: make-believe dishes filled with make-believe tidbits for the miniature table of a doll. For the real, sensual, vain and selfish man, the friend of others because he has the gift of speech and the enemy of others because he has the gift of life, what is there to gain from playing with the dolls of hollow and meaningless words?
Government is based on two things: restraint and deception. The problem with those glittering expressions is that they neither restrain nor deceive. At most they intoxicate, which is something else again.
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a reformer. A reformer is a man who sees the world’s superficial ills and sets out to cure them by aggravating the more basic ills. A doctor tries to bring a sick body into conformity with a normal, healthy body, but we don’t know what’s healthy or sick in the social sphere.
I see humanity as merely one of Nature’s latest schools of decorative painting. I don’t distinguish in any fundamental way between a man and a tree, and I naturally prefer whichever is more decorative, whichever interests my thinking eyes. If the tree is more interesting to me than the man, I’m sorrier to see the tree felled than to see the man die. There are departing sunsets that grieve me more than the deaths of children. I keep my own feelings out of everything, in order to be able to feel.
I almost reproach myself for writing these sketchy reflections in this moment when a light breeze, rising from the afternoon’s depths, begins to take on colour. In fact it’s not the breeze that takes on colour but the air through which it hesitantly glides. I feel, however, as if the breeze were being coloured, so that’s what I say, for I have to say what I feel, given that I’m I.

168
... And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination.* I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and nonexistence could coincide there, as if my con could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by contentment. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented, seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion – a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other.

169
Page by page I slowly and lucidly reread everything I’ve written, and I find that it’s all worthless and should have been left unwritten. The things we achieve, whether empires or sentences, have (because they’ve been achieved) the worst aspect of real things: the fact they’re perishable. But that’s not what worries or grieves me about these pages as I reread them now, in these idle moments. What grieves me is that it wasn’t worth my trouble to write them, and the time I spent doing it earned me nothing but the illusion, now shattered, that it was worth doing.

Whatever we pursue, we pursue for the sake of an ambition, but either we never realize the ambition, and we’re poor, or we think we’ve realized it, and we’re rich fools.
What grieves me is that my best is no good, and that another whom I dream of, if he existed, would have done it better. Everything we do, in art or in life, is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing. It belies the notion of inner as well as of outer perfection; it falls short not only of the standard it should meet but also of the standard we thought it could meet. We’re hollow on the inside as well as on the outside, pariahs in our expectations and in our realizations.
With what power of the solitary human soul I produced page after reclusive page, living syllable by syllable the false magic, not of what I wrote, but of what I thought I was writing! As if under an ironic sorcerer’s spell, I imagined myself the poet of my prose, in the winged moments when it welled up in me – swifter than the strokes of my pen – like an illusory revenge against the insults of life! And today, rereading, I see my dolls bursting, the straw coming out of their torn seams, eviscerated without ever having been...

Notes from: Play and Its Role in the Mental Development of the Child by Lev Vygotsky

Lev Vygotsky- Play and Its Role in the Mental Development of the Child

Kindle Cloud Reader

How play arises in development- origins and genesis?
Role of play as a developmental activity?
Is play the leading form of activity at this stage or the one most noticed?

Vygotsky says play is not the predominant form but the leading source of development.

Defining the value of play as the source of pleasure it provides the child is insufficient to ascertaining its true meaning because:

Other sources of functional pleasure (ex. sucking a pacifier) provide equal or greater satisfaction
Not all games are pleasurable experiences for the child, particularly when the outcome leads to dissatisfaction (loss)

However excluding pleasure from play leads to [over] intellectualization, also incorrect assessment of value/role and a problem among many theories of play (who/what is Vygotsky's referring to here?).

We need to consider the child’s needs beyond intellectual functions that move the child from one stage to the next (lower to higher, Piaget).

“Without a consideration of the child’s needs, inclinations, incentives, and motives to act- as research has demonstrated- there will never be any advance from one stage to the next. I think that an analysis of play should begin with these particular aspects.”

Advance to next stage accompanied by an abrupt change in motives and incentives according to V.

Understanding the incentives is key to understanding uniqueness of play.

Needs and incentives are expressed spontaneously in/thru playful activity.

Immediate (instant) gratification is desired, -the younger the child, the shorter the intervals between motivation and action.

“I think that if there were no development in preschool years of needs that cannot be realized immediately, there would be no play. Experiments show that the development of play is arrested both in intellectually underdeveloped children and those who are affectively immature.”

“...play is invented at the point when unrealizable tendencies appear in development.”

“..., a child over three will shoe his own particular conflicting tendencies; on the one hand, many long-lasting needs and desires will appear that cannot be met at once but that nevertheless are not passed over like whims; on the other hand, the tendency towards immediated realization of desires is almost completely retained.”

“Henceforth play is such that the explanation for it must always be that it is the imaginary, illusory realization of unrealizable desires.”

Imagination- not present in young and in animals because, according to V.it is/was viewed as a specific form of conscious activity available only to humans...perhaps debateable today) - as a function of consciousness arises out of action.

If play is ‘imagination in action’ in children, than in youth and adults ‘imagination’ is play without action.

Play does not occur as a simple response to each and every unsatisfied desire because children do not only respond only with individual but also with general tendencies. According to V. this move towards the generalized response increases with age (development).

According to V. play is the fulfillment of wishes that are themselves generalized affects, but this does not mean the child understands what those generalized effects are (where they originate).

Children play without realizing the motives of what they are playing. The motives remain abstract and are only discernible once the child has grown to adolescence and able to reason.

V. distinguishes play from other activity in children as “...in play a child creates an imaginary situation.” V. states this is a new POV because the imaginary was in previous theories assigned a secondary, one of many, role in play. He places it at the front...in part to avoid the over intellectualization by: 1. defining play as ‘symbolic action’. V. states play is never this; 2. limiting play to a cognitive process which neglects the circumstances (context); 3. does not address how imaginary situation assists the child’s development.

“What does a child’s behavior in an imaginary situation mean?” -the development of games with rules

Examining how children play games with rules offers a way to examine earlier forms of play where the ‘rules’ are less clear. There are always rules of play.

Ex. Sully’s observation children can make the imaginary and reality coincide in play by the rules and how they engage with them (sisters playing sisters). V. has found it is easier to evoke this imaginary-reality play in children than in adults.

“ The vital difference in play, as Sully describes it, is that the child in playing tries to be a sister. In life the child behaves without thinking that she is her sister’s sister. … In the game of sisters playing at “sisters,” however, they are both concerned with displaying their sisterhood; the fact that two sisters decided to play sisters makes them both acquire rules of behavior.”

“Only actions that fit the(se) rules are acceptable in the play situation.”

“What passes unnoticed by the child in real life becomes a rule of behavior in play.”

V. goes on to ask a question (relevant to the artist in the studio):

“If play, then, were structured in such a way that there were no imaginary situation, what would remain? The rules would remain. The child would begin to behave in this situation as the situation dictates.”

Play in general

There are rules stemming from the imaginary situation in play; the ‘freedom’ of play is thus illusory.

Studying games with rules played by older children revealed the rules of the game also stemmed from the imaginary situation. In other words, all the rules of a game come from the imaginary situation because all games played contain an imaginary situation.

Rules limit the possibility of actions by ‘ruling out’ certain actions. [ex. chess and the rules of movement associated with each figure]

V. states the development of play in children moves from overt imaginary situations with covert rules to games with overt rules and covert imaginary situations.

Thesis: “All games with imaginary situations are simultaneously games with rules, and vice versa.”

“What is specific to rules followed in games or play?”

V. found an answer in Piaget’s study of the development of the child and moral rules.

Two moralities -distinct sources/categories for the development of rules of behavior

(playing games): 1. acquired directly from adult/parent -thou shalt not; 2. acquired thru

mutual collaboration or independent from adult/parent -agreed upon code of conduct.

Rules of games tend to fall in the second category. Piaget termed these ‘rules of self-restraint and self-determination’.

Moral realism- according to Piaget the first category produces moral realism - a confusion between moral and physical rules, ex. lighting a match a second time versus prohibition from lighting a match at all; the child’s attitude is “all ‘don’ts’ are the same”. But the attitude is different to the rules s/he makes (category 2).

Role of play and its influence on child development: “enormous”.

Play with an imaginary situation is new, impossible for a child under three, and frees the child from situational constraints according to V.

Lewin- “things dictate to the child what he must do” the situational constraints of this in a young child mean that he or she cannot act other than how the situation is perceived...the motivation factors he or she encounters in the moment. In older children, in situations of play he or she can act other than as the situation dictates….they’ve moved beyond being motivated by their perception of the situation. ‘Things’ are no longer the motivating force. But this occurs over a stretch of time...developmentally, the ability to separate what is seen and what is meant, word from object. [Think literal versus figurative.]

“...in play activity thought is separated from objects, and action arises from ideas rather than from things.”

Play is a transitional stage for the child to separate the object from the meaning of the word (for the object)...playing with sticks….when this occurs the relationship to reality is radically altered, structure of perception changes.

Difference between symbolism and play. Children cannot yet address objects symbolically, only playfully. The properties of an object are maintained, ex. What makes a stick a horse, but meaning is inverted.

“... in play the child creates the structure meaning/object...”

Meaning is severed from object, but not in real action where they remain fused.

“This is the transitional nature of play, which makes it an intermediary between the purely situational constraints of early childhood and thought that is totally free of real situations.”

Play- school age- converted to internal process, such as internalized speech, logical memory, abstract thought.

“In play a child unconsciously and spontaneously makes use of the fact that he can separate meaning from an object without knowing he is doing it;”

Creation of an imaginary situation is “...the first effect of the child’s emancipation from

situational constraints.”

“The first paradox of play is that the child operates with an alienated meaning in a real situation. The second is that in play he adopts the line of least resistance, i.e. he does what he feels like most because play is connected with pleasure. At the same time he learns to follow the line of greatest resistance; for by subordinating themselves to rules, children renounce what they want, since subjection to rule and renunciation of spontaneous impulsive action constitute the path to maximum pleasure in play.”

“Why does the child not do what he wants, spontaneously and at once? Because to observe the rules of play structure promises much greater pleasure from the game than the gratification of an immediate impulse. In other words, ...recalling the words of Spinoza: ‘An effect can be overcome only be a stronger effect.’”

Groos- a child’s will originates and is developed through interaction the rules of play… between following the rules and acting spontaneously the child engages with conflict by acting counter to his or her desires. Here the child learns self-control, willpower as a means to maximum pleasure.

Such rules leading to maximum effect (per Spinoza) are internal rules; self-restraint and self-determination in the words of Piaget and not physical laws (or those of the first category ‘thou shalt’).

In short, play gives the child a new form of desires, i.e. teaches him to desire by relating his desires to a fictitious “I” -to his role in the game and its rules. Therefore, a child’s greatest achievements are possible in play - achievements that tomorrow will become his average level of real action and his morality.”

From action/meaning to meaning/action

How the child is liberated from actions in play.

ex. finger movements representative of eating.

A child is able to do more than he is able to understand.

Just as the inversion of object/meaning occurs with (age) development, so to does the action/meaning to meaning/action.

Meaning of action is basic, but not neutral.

Pivots- actions or objects to replace the ‘real’ ones in the transitional phase.

Movement in the ‘field of meaning’ allows replacement of one object or action for another; predominates in play where the field is ‘abstract’ but the method of movement is situational and concrete.

Play is the inverse of the child’s daily behavior; in play action is subordinate to meaning whereas in real life action dominates meaning.

For V. play is not the predominant form of a (preschool age) child’s activity because:

“To behave in a real situation as in an illusory one is the first sign of delirium.”

Play behavior in real life is only seen in the type of games (ex. sisters playing “sisters”) where they are playing at what they are actually doing. (“..., evidently creating associations that facilitate the execution of an unpleasant action.”)

Suggesting otherwise V. states would be to support theory that the only the search for pleasure is the requirement of a child’s life...it is not.

But it is also not guided only by meaning, the subordination to rules- this is only possible in play.

“...play also creates the zone of proximal development of the child.”

“In play a child is always above his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself. As in the focus of a magnifying glass, play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form; in play it is as though the child were attempting to jump above the level of his normal behavior.”

play-development and instruction-development relationships

“Play is the source of development and creates the zone of proximal development. ...the highest level of preschool development.”

“The child moves forward essentially through play activity. Only in this sense can play be termed a leading activity that determines the child’s development.”

How does play develop?

Imaginary situation with which the child starts is a reproduction of a real situation close to the child.

“Play is more nearly recollection than imagination -that is, it is more memory in action than a novel imaginary situation. As play develops, we see a movement toward the conscious realization of its purpose.”

“..., play is purposeful activity for a child.”

“In short, the purpose decides the game; it justifies all the rest.”

Purpose determines the child’s attitude…

The rules emerge with/thru play/game, becoming more demanding as it goes….if they didn’t it would become dull, and the game/play would end. What was originally secondary or undeveloped at the beginning through the process come, at the end, to the fore.

What changes in a child's behavior can be attributed to play?

The ‘illusory freedom’ of starting from the child’s own “I”

“A child learns to consciously recognize his own actions and becomes aware that every object has a meaning.”

Means of developing abstract thought thru creating imaginary situations, or for V., leads to actions dividing work and play, a fundamental fact.

“I should like to mention just one other aspect: play is really a particular feature of preschool age. …”

“All examinations of the essence of play have shown that in play a new relationship is created between the semantic and the visible -that is between situations in thought and real situations.”

Joe Fig's Questions, Part Two

Do you have a motto or creed as an artist to live by?

Always try to play in your studio and never waste any time, not a minute.

[Petah Coyne. Inside the Artist's Studio. Joe Fig. 2015. p. 49]

Who defines wasted time?