Reference:
Gabora, L. (2007). Perspectives on artistic creativity: A review of M. Turner (Ed.) ‘The Artful Mind’. Philosophical Psychology, 20(5), 669-674.
Perspectives on Artistic Creativity
A Review of ‘The Artful Mind’ (Mark Turner, Ed.)
Liane Gabora
University of British Columbia
Address for Correspondence:
L. Gabora < liane.gabora[at]ubc.ca
>
University of British
Columbia
Okanagan campus, 3333 University
Way
Kelowna BC, V1V 1V7, CANADA
Phone: (250)
807-9849
Fax:
(250) 470-6001
This
book is not actually about the artful mind, i.e.
the mind of one who uses devious means to achieve certain ends, but the artistic mind, i.e. the mind of one who creates art. It consists of fourteen
chapters by prominent scholars from a variety of disciplines ranging from art
history to cognitive science to modern languages and literature. The book is
the result of these scholars meeting for periods ranging from a few months to a
year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 2001-2002.
It is a provocative and eclectic compilation of perspectives on what goes
through the mind of the artist, how the creative process works, and how human
creativity came about. This review will say a few words about each chapter, and
end with a comment on some recurring themes.
The opening chapter by Merlin Donald explores some cognitive principles of art, and reviews his account
(developed in detail elsewhere) of key transitions in the evolution of human
cognition. He argues that approximately two million years ago the mind
underwent a transition from an episodic mode of
cognitive functioning, which is more or less stuck in the ‘here and now’
(Eckhart Tolle would be impressed), to a uniquely human mimetic mode, characterized by the capacity for mime, imitation, gesture,
and the rehearsal of skill. A problem with this proposal is that imitation is
commonplace in other species, and the others – mime, gesture, and rehearsal
of skill – rely on what Karmiloff-Smith (1992) refers to as representational
redescription (RR): the capacity to recursively
operate on or manipulate the contents of thought and thereby refine an idea or
motor act, or retrieve an event from the past through the linking of
associations. Moreover, imitation, though possible without RR, would be
enhanced by it; it would enable imitated skills to be reworked and perfected,
perhaps one step at a time. Thus it seems more parsimonious to propose that the
transition was due to the onset of RR, which enabled mime, gesture, and skill rehearsal, and merely enhanced imitation. This simultaneously alleviates another problem with
Donald’s account: the idea that enhanced imitative capacity enabled us to
become more firmly tethered in a cultural network, which was critical to the
evolution of our exceptional creativity. In fact as a species we exhibit the
opposite tendency, to go our own way and do our own thing, and creative
individuals are the least tethered of all, with strong leanings toward
isolation, nonconformity, rebelliousness, and unconventionality (Crutchfield,
1962; Griffin & McDermott, 1998; Sulloway, 1996 to name but a few). Thus
the claim that imitative capacity is what makes us so creative is problematic.
But all said, Donald presents a patchwork quilt of ideas drawn from different
disciplines that together brilliantly tell a story of how the artistic mind
came to be. There are inconsistencies – patches that don’t fit together – but to construct such a quilt
in the first place is a feat few would even consider attempting.
In a chapter titled ‘The Aesthetic Faculty’, Terrence Deacon proposes that the ability to use and understand symbols is critical
to aesthetic experience, and argues that the juxtaposition of symbols brings
about novel emotional experiences. To me it feels the other way around (I know
ahead of time what the outcome will feel like, and I seek the juxtaposition
that brings me closer to that feeling). Nevertheless Deacon’s taxonomy of emotions,
and discussion of how art functions to generate emotions that are unprecedented
or even “deviant”, is certainly interesting.
Francis Steen offers an
intriguing chapter titled ‘A cognitive account of aesthetics’. He notes that
evolutionary psychologists claim that we have evolved to recognize and seek
beauty because it is indicative of health and fertility with respect to both
habitat and mate choice, and thus possession of an aesthetic faculty helps us
make adaptive decisions. His alternative proposal is that our aesthetic faculty
is used for the purpose of self-construction, i.e. “new orders” perceived in
art are “incorporated into [one’s] own perceptual system, in effect teaching
[one] to perceive and sense the world in new ways” (p. 65). Steen claims that
when we view a painting we enter the reality it depicts, perhaps taking on or
entertaining the perspective(s) of portrayed individual(s). Thus the act of
viewing art is an act of pretending, of exploring possibility, thus of learning
and transforming. The other chapter in a section titled Art and Emotion is by David
Freedberg. It concerns the relationship between
how pictures look (and how music sounds) and the emotional responses they
evoke. Freedberg argues convincingly that this relationship may be much more
precise and consistent than is generally assumed.
Mark Turner’s chapter outlines
his theory of how conceptual compression is achieved by mapping elements of one
domain to elements of another in a ‘blended space’. In double-scope
integration, the mapping involves different, potentially clashing, organizing
frames. It should be duly noted that these ideas were already present in
previous work under the name of structure mapping (Gentner, 1983), schema
induction (Gick & Holyoak, 1983), and frame blending (Hofstadter &
Gabora, 1989), and that they are taken up more rigorously in other contemporary
work on analogy and concept combination[1].
But Turner excels at providing plentiful examples that make the basics of
analogical transfer and its pervasiveness in human thought accessible and
widely known to scholars in the arts and humanities. He has also gone to
greater lengths than other analogy and concept combination scholars to posit
that onset of these capacities may provide an explanation for rather sudden
burst of culture observed in the archaeological record during the Middle-Upper
Paleolithic. This is compatible with Mithen’s (1996) proposal that the
transition was due to the onset of the ability to explore conceptual spaces. It
is also compatible with my own thesis that it was due to onset of the capacity
to subconsciously shift between focused and defocused attention, thereby
shifting between analytic thought—conducive to logic and symbol
manipulation—and associative thought—conducive to 'breaking out of
a rut' (Gabora, 2003). This would confer upon the mind both hierarchical
structure and associative richness conducive to language and other complex
tasks. The capacity for associative thought would facilitate analogy and
conceptual integration, but the capacity to return to a more analytical mode of
thinking would ensure that one is not inclined to dwell on how ‘everything is
connected to everything else” when it would interfere with survival tasks.
The notion of mapping conceptual spaces is explored in different
ways in the next few chapters. Lawrence Zbikowski’s chapter titled ‘The cognitive tango’ gives examples of how
cross-domain mapping and conceptual models are used to make sense of the
sequences of patterned sound that constitute musical form. One of the most
tantalizing chapters is that of Shirley Brice Heath. She points out that
art presents gaps and disparities that invite us to a form of play that
culminates in reconciliation and completion. It seems reasonable to posit that
the evolution of the capacity to forge an internal, conceptually integrated
model of the world, and the natural desire to regain a sense of completion with
respect to this model of the world in the face of the challenges to it that art
presents, played a role in the cultivation of our aesthetic faculty.
George Lakoff’s chapter
presents a fresh take on his previous work on category and metaphor, inspired
by insights from Arnhein, Talmy, and Narayanan[2].
Central to the chapter is what he refers to as the Cog Hypothesis. A cog, he
claims, is a neural circuit that computes complex patterns relating to the
action, simulation, or observation of a particular movement, but that can
operate when the connections to the appropriate motor effectors are inhibited.
It is thereby exploited for more abstract cognitive processing. Thus, for
example, the same cog is active when you knock a lamp off the table, or watch
someone else do it, or read the sentence “The election knocked global warming
off the legislative agenda.” It is tempting to write “this chapter will knock
you off your feet”; at any rate it is compelling, with broad implications, and
Lakoff offers us a glimpse of them by showing how cogs may structure what we
see as form in art.
In
a similar vein, Stephen Murray writes of
how metaphor is sometimes overextended in the attempt to explain how something
came to be, resulting in a slippage of meaning. He uses as an example Gothic
architecture and its metaphorical relationship to the forest. Per Aage
Brandt discusses how we split experienced
situational meaning into content and expression, using as examples paintings by
Monet and Magritte.
The
next few chapters deal with the relationship between art and sacred belief. Robert
A. Scott describes how in medieval times people
believed they could be miraculously cured (whether they wanted it or not!) by
touching, or even just coming near to, relics kept in sacred vessels closely
guarded by priests. The relics were remnants of, or items closely associated
with, a particular saint: things like threads from a veil, fragments of a
sandal, or of bone or cartilage, fingernail or toenail clippings, or vials of
blood. I was not convinced that these relics count as ‘art’ but Scott’s account
of the power they held at the time is memorable. A chapter by Gloria
Ferrari explores how ancient Greeks employed
metaphor in architectural design “that casts sacred space as the palace of the
God” (p. 235). Particularly insightful is her discussion of how metaphor
reflects the historical conditions under which it arises.
The final section deals with ambiguity. An interesting chapter by Semir
Zeki investigates how it is handled by the
visual system. This chapter is informative, though it could perhaps have
strayed a bit further from the neurophysiological details to speculate about
the implications for creativity. De Rey’s
chapter explores how works of art invite us to recognize and reconcile
ambiguity, with a focus (so to speak) on the artistic depiction of light and
shadow. He explains how, to many great painters, to gain insight into the
workings of light was to gain insight the myriad ways in which God or some
other divine force expresses itself, and writes “Instead of seeing light as a
device that helps to reveal the structure of objects, we should see the structure
of objects and the various ways light is reflected by their surfaces as a means
of tracing light closer to its origin” (p. 284). This chapter was in my opinion
a highlight (so to speak) of the book. It was particularly interesting after
reading about Lakoff’s notion of cogs. Can an experience of divinity be
conveyed by depicting the reflection, refraction, absorption, etc. of light in
such a way as to reactivate the same cog(s) thereby recapturing the experience?
‘The Artful
Mind’ is not comprehensive (for example, ‘inspiration’, ‘insight’, ‘intuition’,
and ‘muse’ are not in the index) but it is full of provocative ideas that
suggest avenues for future research. The perspectives of the various authors
exhibit many instances of both convergence and divergence. As an example of
convergence, the chapters by Steen, a professor of communication studies, and
Zeki, a neurobiologist, both stress on the basis of very different kinds of
arguments that the brain does not just passively register information but is an
active participant in the construction of what we see. As an example of
divergent perspectives, Donald claims that “Art is aimed at influencing the
mind of an audience”, but elsewhere in the volume, such as in Steen’s chapter,
one gets the impression that the artistic impulse is not outwardly aimed but
striving irrepressibly to manifest a truth, a “hidden and generative order” (p.
64) gleaned from a realm of pure aesthetic sensibility or beauty. There are not
many attempts to ‘cross-pollinate’ in this volume other than those of the ‘this
or that constitutes a blended conceptual space’ genre, but this undoubtedly
reflects the fact that the different facets of the topic are generally the
domain of widely disparate academic disciplines.
A slight
weakness is that much of the discussion revolves around particular pictures
that are not available in the text; one is directed to a website to view them.
Unless you are eager to, after ever few pages, get up and go to a computer and
look up the website (which I never did myself), you are left with the recurring
feeling that you’re missing something. It might have been better to spend the
extra dime to print more of the pictures in the book itself. But this is nitpicking. The book is a
great read, and a “must have” for those interested in creativity, or anyone who
has ever wondered what is going on in the mind of the artist or the beholder of
an artistic work.
Brooks, V.
(1987). The Neural Basis of Motor Control.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crutchfield, R.
S. (1962). Conformity and creative thinking. In H. G. Gruber, G. Terell, &
M. Wertheimer (Eds.) Contemporary Approaches to Creative Thinking. New York: Atherton.
Gabora, L.
(2003). Contextual
focus: A cognitive explanation for the cultural transition of the Middle/Upper
Paleolithic. In (R. Alterman & D.
Hirsch, Eds.) Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive
Science Society, Boston, July 31-August 2. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/liane/papers/cf.htm
Gentner, D.
(1983). Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for analogy. Cognitive
Science, 7, 155-170.
Gick, M. &
Holyoak, K. (1883). Schema induction and analogy transfer. Cognitive Psychology,
15, 1-38.
Griffin, M.
& McDermott, M. R. (1998). Exploring a tripartite relationship between
rebelliousness, openness to experience, and creativity. Social Behavior and
Personality, 26, 347-356.
Hofstadter, D.
& Gabora, L. (1989). Synopsis of a workshop on humor and cognition. Humor, 2(4), 417-440.
Mithen, S. (1996). The
prehistory of the mind: A search for the origins of art, science, and religion. London:
Thames & Hudson.
Sulloway, F. (1996). Born
to Rebel. New York: Pantheon.
[1]
Other approaches address issues such as what
kind of structure must concepts have
to function as strict categories in some situations yet forge remote
correspondences with one another in other situations (e.g. in the writing
poetry or drawing of an analogy)? And what kind of logic could account for the emergence (or loss) of properties when they
combine? (For example, the properties ‘talks’ and lives in a cage’ are not
considered true of the concept PET, nor of the concept BIRD, yet subjects rate
them as true of the combined concept PET BIRD.) That concepts behave this way
is self-evident; the big question is why?
[2] An error in this chapter is that it is not Narayanan (1997b) who discovered that the same phase structures for bodily actions recur in case after case, for this is thoroughly presented and argued in Brooks’ (1987) The Neural Basis of Motor Control.