art and the mind || perceiving, thinking, forming

National Art Education Association

Perceiving, Thinking, FormingAuthor(s): Rudolf ArnheimSource: Art Education, Vol. 36, No. 2, Art and the Mind (Mar., 1983), pp. 9-11Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3192653 .

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Rudolf ArnW

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"One cannot speculate on the purpose of art and art education without pondering in one's mind the ultimate question of what life is for. It is fashionable nowadays to discourage ultimate questions with a smile, but one does so at one's own peril."

A rt education may be said to have an aristocratic ancestry. What is being taught nowadays

in the art rooms of our schools derives not so much from the workshops of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in which apprentices such as Leonardo da Vinci, under the supervision of a master craftsman, learned how to paint an angel. Rather the rationale of our art education should remind us of the up- bringing of the courtiers, who, as Baldesar Castiglione describes in II Libro del Cortegiano of 1518, were ex- pected at least in theory to become pro- ficient not only in the arts of riding and fencing but equally in dancing, singing, playing an instrument, writing verse, drawing, painting, and sculpture. All those arts were, as Castiglione says of music, non solamente ornamento, ma necessaria al cortegiano (not only an or- nament but a necessity to the courtier). More than training, this was refinement, intended not to produce professionals in the various arts but to polish the mind and the body. The development of the most attractive human abilities, both mental and physical, gave grace and brilliance to the entourage of princes such as Castiglione's patroness, the duchess of Urbino.

This rationale of feudal art education has survived its gradual transformation into a democratic instrument. In fact, one might say that more of it has survived than is good for us. When one listens carefully to the arguments by

which the place of the arts in the curriculum is justified, one cannot help sen- sing that even their proponents still count the arts more as ornaments than as necessities of life. The arts are said to provide relief from the rigor and ten- sion of the necessities, they are privileges rather than duties, and they offer plea- sure rather than practical gain. This onesided praise of the arts and, by reflec- tion, the equally onesided conception of the main body of the curriculum as a burden of necessary chores has created problems in art education. It has af- fected the morale of art teachers as well as their social and financial standing in the profession. But given the flimsy arguments by which the arts are defend- ed, administrators can hardly be blamed when they make the arts the primary vic- tims of budget cuts. First things have to come first.

One cannot hope to counteract this misinterpretation by simply pointing out that the arts have been an indispensable component of all well-functioning cul- tures. All social rituals, the affairs of state and religion, had to translate their nature and action into symbols directly accessible to the senses, and these symbols - to speak only of the visual arts - took the form of imagery provided by the artists. Unfortunately, however, it is precisely in this respect that our society is lacking. All too often the pomp and circumstance of our cere- monies is stale, vitiated by the bad taste of the authorities and barely preserving

the meaning they once held. Works of art have become isolated objects and have retreated to storehouses. Our museums are splendid service facilities like well-equipped hospitals, but too many survive by now as mere islands in decimated cities whose inhabitants have no way of caring about them.

Art has become a means of individual comfort, an indispensable source of per- sonal delight, purification, and wisdom, and I would be the last person to discourage art educators from making this comfort available to their pupils. But for some time now I have been convinced that the principal function of art education is an even more fundamental one. Since that time, about a dozen years ago, when I introduced the concept of "visual thinking," I have come to see that all productive problem solving - the kind that can be assisted by com- puters but never taken over by them - takes place in perceptual imagery, and this means essentially visual imagery. There is no need here to rehearse what I have explicitly discussed elsewhere. I will limit myself to a single example.

Visual training calls for more than the careful observation of the things that ex- ist and go on around us. To be sure, the ability to truly perceive the properties of things is an indispensable condition of reliable and original work in the arts and the sciences as well as good functioning in practical life. But facts do not tell much as long as they are observed in iso- lation. Productive thinking consists in

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the grasping of structure, for which I will use the simpler concept of "relations." Perceiving means understanding relations, i.e., what things do to one another. In what ways do they belong together, and what separates them? Are they coordinated or subordinated? What is central and what is peripheral? Is a given relation reciprocal, concor- dant, or conflicting? Is it parallel or cir- cular, converging or centrifugal, inter- twined or overlapping?

There is not a single field of knowledge in which the answers to such questions are not of the essence for understanding; and in all those fields of knowledge the kind of problem solving that goes beyond mechanical computa- tion is accomplished in the mental realm of imagery, be it by the direct inspection of situations exposed to the eyes or by thought operations performed in the im- agination. The training ground par ex- cellence for visual relations, however, is in the arts. When an artist examines his shapes and colors on a canvas or co- ordinates the spatial aspects of a com- plex sculpture, he asks exactly the same questions about relations that face the thinking of scientists, engineers, busi- nessmen, or politicians in their own fields. The artist sees these problem situations concretely in front of him and can handle their formal aspects without undue distraction from a particular subject matter. He also can make changes easily and observe the effects. All this makes the arts the medium of choice for training in what one might call the syn- tax of relations.

Needless to say, the benefit of this experience is not reserved for professional artists but is available whenever someone uses a pencil, a brush, or a lump of clay. The sense of good form, granted to all of us as an outcome of biological evolution, operates even in the un- tutored child, but it can be overruled and smothered by wrong instruction. What is needed is the kind of teacher whose sense of form has been carefully developed and who has come to understand that no problem can be envisaged and no statement clearly made without the shaping of the appropriate form. It is also high time for us to realize that art teachers cannot fulfill their particular function in education unless they know that they are responsible for more than just teaching children how one makes or copies pictures and figures: that it is up to them to train the young

mind in handling the problems of life through the shaping powers of the senses.

Such increased responsibility leads to a rise in status. For if what I am reassert- ing here is correct, art training is not one of the minor fillers of the curriculum but relates to the very fundamentals of education. What are these fundamentals? Reading, writing, and arithmetic? Certainly these are indispensable skills; but should we not realize by now that they are just skills? And that even as a list of skills the list is incomplete? If I am not mistaken, the three fundamentals of education are

Perceiving Thinking Forming

and the tools needed to exert these faculties of the mind are numbers, words, and shapes. Of these three sets of tools the first two have been con- sidered the only essential ones since the Middle Ages. We must now rehabilitate the third.

What I have said should be amplified by two observations. First, the three fundamentals of education I named are not separate abilities to be trained separately. There is no perceiving without thinking and forming, no thinking without perceiving and forming, and no forming without perceiving and thinking. Together they are the three aspects of the productive mind, and as one trains one of them, one always has to train all three.

Second, art teachers may be reluctant to see their task broadened in the way I have indicated. They may feel that this means giving up their dealing with art for its own sake and reducing it to a technique for the practicing of nonartis- tic skills. This apprehension seems to me due to a parochial conception of the role of art in human experience. The human species copes with the challenges of life by means of two cognitive procedures, the intuitive and the intellectual. Intui- tion is the principal domain of art, but it is not art's monopoly, nor is it alone sufficient for the needs of the artist. Art requires the collaboration of all the faculties of the mind, of which the intellect is one of the most important. By no means is art all intuition. But it is equally true that conversely the sciences and other mainly intellectual pursuits rely heavily on intuition. The shaping of their theories, of models, and systems applies aesthetic criteria and provides an

emotional involvement not different from that of the artist. And while it is true that the methods and objectives of the arts and the sciences are not the same, we must also admit that the mental activity of working in art and science differs mainly in the ratio in which intuition and intellect contribute to the creative effort. This means that none of the pleasures of making art need to be sacrificed in the art room when the skills of shaping visual materials are under- stood to refer to more than the making of pictures or sculptures.

It will be evident that art education can meet its ambitious goal only if the teaching stresses certain essential aspects. There are many ways of teaching art, and there are many suitable materials; but I would like to single out two indispensable prerequisites which come to mind partly because their neglect has had deplorable effects in professional art during the last few decades. One is the willingness to judge degrees of suc- cess. In the studios, the art galleries, and even the museums an indiscriminate tol- erance has created a situation in which anything goes, no matter how simple, how shallow, how capricious, or how gratuitous the product. In art education this attitude has led to the notion that what matters is not the quality of the work but the mere doing of things at whatever level. Some teachers have come to believe that the pupil's mind will profit from the work regardless of achievement. This I believe to be er- roneous. To be sure, art education does not aim at professional standards; but it attains its objective only if it makes pupils strive for the best possible product. Each in his own style and direc- tion, each to his own upper limit, but there should be no letup until the statement has become as strong, clear, and satisfying as possible.

Let me insert here in parenthesis that for all my insistence on standards of ex- cellence I cannot endorse the widespread conviction that unless progress can be measured and proved by quantitative procedure, it carries no weight. This has been the plague of the recipients of re- search grants, and from the funding agencies that try to cover themselves against criticism, the dogma has spread to school administrators and the researchers themselves. It should be made clear that while certain skills can be measured, others cannot, and the skill to do good art work is among the lat-

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ter. Art can be judged, however, and al- though even the evaluation by compe- tent professionals is fallible and sub- jective, it is much to be preferred to the alternative predicament of having to reduce one's facts to what can be enum- erated in statistical tables. Whoever is concerned with the arts must resign him- self to the fact that many vital aspects of our existence cannot be measured which prevents them neither from ex- isting nor from being vital.

To the first prerequisite I mentioned, a second is closely related. It is based on the trivial wisdom that no good work comes easy. Even the smooth virtuosity of the master was earned in years of dis- ciplined effort. A piece of work that has not mobilized the entire potential of perceiving, thinking, and forming is not likely to mean much to the young person who made it. Nor will it give him or her the experience of what it is like to invest one's best powers in any field of application and what can be achieved by doing so. The arts are privileged in promoting the best possible motivation for such an effort, an incentive directly

inspired by the goal to be attained. To be sure, maximum achievement and maximum effort can be exacted also by pressure from outside or by the competi- tive drive to win over someone else. But in the arts more easily than elsewhere, an objective freely chosen and pursued by one's own criteria and for its own sake will make for good education, whatever the line of living and work it leads to.

One cannot speculate on the purpose of art and art education without pondering in one's mind the ultimate question of what life is for. It is fashionable nowadays to discourage ultimate questions with a smile, but one does so at one's own peril. Those questions turn up with a vengeance, and the less explicitly they are defined the more disturbingly they haunt the mind. What is it all for? Let us assume that the only purpose of life is life itself, i.e., the unfolding of life's productive potentialities, and let us assume further that the human faculty to which the arts can most contribute is understanding. What young children gain when they make sense on paper of

the intriguing complexity of the things around them is exhilarating understanding. And understanding through the logic of vision is what we ourselves gained, to use a fairly recent impressive example, when we saw the sculpture that Henry Moore designed for the Univer- sity of Chicago in commemoration of the first atomic chain reaction. Moore conceived an abstract shape that reflect- ed the mushroom cloud of the atomic explosion and the skull of death - a profound analogy that existed only in the realm of visual imagery, yet pointed with startling immediacy to the inter- twining of human progress with the threat of final destruction. Here perceiving, thinking, and forming combined to a fine example of understanding through art. U

Rudolf Arnheim is Professor Emeritus of the Psychology of Art, Harvard University, and at present a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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art and the mind || perceiving, thinking, forming

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