Thinking through Art: the Social Body Mind Maps
‘We are led to believe that problems are given ready-‐made, and that they disappear in the response or the solution…We are led to believe that the activity of thinking, along with truth and falsehood in relation to that activity, begins only with the search for solutions … According to this infantile prejudice, the master sets a problem, our task is to solve it, and the result is accredited true or false by a powerful authority… As if we would not remain slaves so long as we do not control the problems themselves, so long as we do not possess a right to the problems, to a participation in and management of the problems.’
(Deleuze, 1994: 158) ‘I’m not so interested in single things; I like the collision between things. I’m not so interested in straight lines of thought; I prefer collisions of different lines of thought. That strikes me as a more “social” mode of construction, less the product of a unitary voice.’
(Kelley, 2006: 361) What is thinking in art?
reflection should be separated from production, for example in the form of ‘self-‐evaluation’. I will do this through the example of a workshop-‐based diagrammatic tool I have called the Social Body Mind Map (SBMM) – something I have used with A-‐Level, Foundation and MA level art students. Through this creative thinking tool, I hope to show the profound capacity art has to open up different ways in which we, as desiring individuals, connect to, and are caught up in, intricate social networks of influence and possibility. Key to this capacity is a necessary shift away from the idea of a ‘self’ as a pre-‐established identity from where artworks spring (whether from a brain, innate talent, personality, cultural background, etc.), and away from artistic projects that serve to reinforce already known identities by steering expression and personal interest back to a self. Genuine thought is never transparent to itself, and in this sense it is the artwork, rather than the artist-‐subject, which ‘thinks’. This conception moves thinking into unknown and unrecognized territory, with the possibilities this offers for questioning and subjective transformation. Gilles Deleuze (1994) calls this creative power ‘the new’ or ‘difference’, that which:
calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely different model, from an unrecognised and unrecognisable
terra incognita. (p.136)
Rather than simply recognizing something that already exists, thinking and learning is always a question of exploration; of seeking to understand something about our life as a productive act which alters both the sense of what we are capable of, and a sense of how we are part of the world, with possibilities for articulating the problems that need addressing, rather than simply responding to pre-‐set questions.
The Social Body Mind Map
Diagrams are familiar tools in education, used for both didactic and heuristic learning. According to John Cussans (2012):
Diagrams – or more generally, visualizations of non-‐apparent systems, concepts, relationships, processes and ideas – help students to recognise and understand parallels and structural correlations between things in the world; their constitutive natures, their internal structures and relationships; the systems of which they form a part, and the processes they are involved with; as well as their own physicality and subjectivity; the coming-‐into-‐being of all of these through time and space; and hypothetical explanations for these becomings. (p.1)
The Social Body Mind Map is a diagrammatic learning tool to enable critical reflection on previous or current creative practice, with a view to future work. Students draw a ‘map’, which begins with an image of an artwork or part of an artwork (sculpture, drawing, film, etc.) that they have made, are making, or are thinking about making. The name itself can be broken into separate combinatory parts: the ‘social-‐body’ combination signals the fact that the ‘individual’ is not a separate, indivisible entity but is always embedded within a social reality, but that equally ‘society’ should not be conceived as an abstraction independent of the actual bodies that make it up; the ‘body-‐mind’ combination signals that ideas do not spring ready-‐formed from the mind, but are the effect of distinctly bodily and affective processes – sensations, emotions, desires, and so on, even though ideas and artworks cannot be reduced to these processes. ‘Mind-‐map’ is meant to give the exercise a familiarity for students, who have usually done mind mapping, brain storming and spider diagram exercises in classroom situations. The big difference between these exercises and the SBMM is that the latter begins not with a named topic, concept, or person (‘me’), around which a map or diagram forms, but from an ‘unknown’, ‘alien’ object, which resists articulation through words. This mysterious thing is the student’s artwork. This may seem odd – surely a student’s work is something very well known and recognized, after all they have made it themselves, and are subjectively invested in it in all kinds of ways which speak of agency, interests, pride, or even feelings attached to something done under compulsion. However everything in this exercise depends on the student’s ‘alienation’ from their work, on it becoming ‘estranged’ from them, in order that it can play the role not of reinforcing an identity and personality, but of opening the student up, beyond a ‘self’, to the complex interrelations that affect their lives, and the possibilities they have for creative invention. The artwork is seen here not as a reflection of a predetermined subject, nor as an answer to a pre-‐set problem or exercise, but is rather generative of a subject, and of thought. In drawing their map, this thinking occurs
through the estranged artwork that is placed at the centre of the map, such that what has been produced by means of the idiosyncratic energies of the artist – the work of each student is singular, ‘different’ from any other student’s work on account of the way manifold influencing factors are manifested – appears as radically external, an effect of forces beyond the artist’s conscious control.
Workshop: Part 1
through connections that spring most readily to mind when a word is viewed in isolation. Rather than a limitation on thinking, the conditioning factors act as a compass to navigate thinking towards the non-‐immediate and ‘non-‐apparent systems, concepts, relationships, processes and ideas’ (Cussans 2012) that operate unconsciously and abstractly to influence and affect our actions, ideas and creative endeavours. Meanwhile, the insistence on the mystery of the artwork (as imagined in its drawn representation), prevents the risk of determinism – that the artwork could be fully explained, its meaning or origin re-‐discovered, in any specific social, biological or psychological factor (class, ethnicity, family, memory, gender, medical condition, etc.). It is precisely a clearer understanding of the effect of influences outside of immediate consciousness that turns the student’s artwork from something familiar to him or her, into something strange and unknown. We need the beginnings of a cognitive map to help guide us towards terra incognita. This initial guide, as I have conceived it, consists of four category headings: Capacities, Motivations, Resources and Organisations.
CAPACITIES MOTIVATIONS RESOURCES ORGANISATIONS
Perception (5 senses) Will Materials School, College
Imagination Pleasure Tools/machines Galleries/Museums
Conception Boredom Space to work Media
Imagination Inspiration Teacher/assistant Shops
Memory Interest Friends Manufacturers
Strength Instruction Books, films, etc. Government Dexterity (motor) Deadline/pass exam Dreams Funding Bodies
Intuition Friends Other art Auction Houses
Emotion For someone else Life experiences Job Centre
The elaboration of the category headings is an interactive group activity where the overriding question is: ‘where might an artwork come from?’ ‘What makes it possible?’ As terms are listed, definitions and examples can be given (I see your head, perceive it with my eyes, but I can imagine
being justifies it. The point is, through critical reflection, to construct a preliminary cognitive map of multifarious influencing factors that points each student to their own artwork’s expanded reality beyond a ‘self’ or the immediate context of its making. Human ‘Capacities’ seem to come from nature, whilst ‘Motivations’ appear more psychological, an effect of both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ factors (inspiration after seeing an artist’s work; instruction from a teacher). ‘Resources’, meanwhile, belong to the world of things or other people, whilst ‘Organisations’ bring into the picture a more abstract, institutional reality belonging to a social world beyond one’s immediate environment. It is possible that some terms appear in more than one category:
friends may be the ‘Motivation’ for taking a photograph of a certain subject; they may also be a human ‘Resource’ (I may take a photo of my friend for my coursework, or they may help me set up the camera and tripod). ‘Resources’ can include physical things (clay or tripods), physical space to work (an art classroom, or studio), people (a teacher or classroom assistant); but they might also be immaterial – the Surrealists made use of their dreams, not just for inspiration, but also for subject matter. ‘Resources’ will also include tools, or machines such as computers and the things that run on them – software programmes, internet search engines, etc. Such ‘resources’ themselves must come from somewhere, and there must be reasons for ‘Organisations’ to supply or provide materials, tools, etc. An economic world of complex interdependency is opened up: the running of the museum or gallery, where you saw that painting which inspired your own work. And so on.
Workshop: Part 2
piece of furniture, but between what she thought she ‘perceived’ in the dark, and what was
actually there – as her toe related painfully to her brain; a collision which, consciously or unconsciously, triggered the work). As reflection through art production is a dialectical process of making and articulation (language and concepts generated by, and generative of, making), it is best to communicate with each of the students individually as they draw their maps. (Ideally concentrated solitary production should not be interrupted at this stage by general group discussion, which may subsume subjective difference under common criteria). What I found with the A-‐level class in a school is that the students tended to answer the question of why they made that particular artwork by saying things like ‘it’s part of my project’, or ‘sir said I should do this’. In this respect the purpose of the exercise is to give agency back to the students as artists, by estranging them from their identity as school pupils (via the mediation of the now alien object or image). When the work takes on a life of its own, detached from the immediate context of schoolwork, new possibilities arise. Other interests and passions can be drawn in, but rather than being the originating idea or ‘theme’ of a project, the former are discovered for the first time through the creative-‐interpretive process itself, like hidden roots ‘dug up’ from beneath the ground (another student started making connections between a drawing she was working on and the horror films she was a fan of – her images revealing something their ‘author’ didn’t know). As the SBMM is a heuristic tool to generate reflection through production, and vice versa, there can be no ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ maps, only maps that are more or less engaged, more or less developed. Talking through ideas with a student as they are drawing their maps, encouraging interesting pathways, and referring their specific linkages to concrete determining forces, enables more confidence in ‘letting go’, letting the diagrammatic machine they are constructing ‘think’ for them. And just as reflection shouldn’t be separated from production, neither should content be separated from expression. How the various Capacities, Motivations, Resources and Organisations link up to the artwork represented at the centre is as much a part of the thinking process as the ‘content’ and the abstract mapping of its formal relations. One student designed her map as a tattoo spreading outwards over the very body that she initially drew as a representative element of her artwork; another (from a foundation workshop) imagined her furry sculpture to be equipped with articulated, skeletal arms, reaching out to different aspects of her life.
Conclusion
‘a more “social” mode of construction’, an effect of ‘collisions of different lines of thought’, to quote the artist Mike Kelley on his preferred working process. Unfortunately, an understanding of reflection as inseparable from artistic production goes directly against the current assessment culture that compels many art teachers to constantly check ‘performance’ against pre-‐ determined ‘learning objectives’, turning creative discovery into a recipe of sequential steps to success, rewarding presentation over exploration, and making reflection a matter of confirmation – matching what happened against what was expected (‘show that you have understood’). By contrast, the SBMM doesn’t offer clarity, in the sense of assimilated knowledge or universally applicable solutions, but promises agency through the invention and control over problems, as we voyage further into the unknown.
Bibliography
Cussans, J. ‘Diagram as Thinking Machine. Art as Metapractice’, paper for DRUGG (Diagram, Research, Use and Generation Group) Symposium, UCL (2012), available at:
http://diagramresearch.wordpress.com/symposia/
Deleuze, G. Difference & Repetition (1994), New York: Columbia University Press.
Kelley, M. ‘Mike Kelley God, Family, Fun, and Friends: Mike Kelley in Conversation with John C. Welchman’ in Welchman, J (ed.) (2006) Institutional Critique and After: Volume 2 of the SoCCAS (Southern California Consortium of Art Schools) Symposia, Zurich : JR/Ringier.
