"Confining the discussion to art, we can see that every artist, no matter man or woman, has the capacity for the attributes commonly associated with masculinity and femininity." Thus is the conceptual background of my new essay, The 1-2-3 of Conscious Light, posted in Writings. Enjoy.
Gardner's case studies have been widely acknowledged and incorporated into academia. For those who aren't familiar with them, here's a good, concise rundown (hat tip Barbara Reser):
Verbal Linguistic intelligence (sensitive to the meaning and order of words as in a poet). Use activities that involve hearing, listening, impromptu or formal speaking, tongue twisters, humor, oral or silent reading, documentation, creative writing, spelling, journal, poetry.
Logical-mathematical intelligence (able to handle chains of reasoning and recognize patterns and orders as in a scientist). Use activities that involve abstract symbols/formulas, outlining, graphic organizers, numeric sequences, calculation, deciphering codes, problem solving.
Musical intelligence (sensitive to pitch, melody, rhythm, and tone as in a composer). Use activities that involve audio tape, music recitals, singing on key, whistling, humming, environmental sounds, percussion vibrations, rhythmic patterns, music composition, tonal patterns.
Spatial intelligence (perceive the world accurately and try to re-create or transform aspects of that world as in a sculptor or airplane pilot). Use activities that involve art, pictures, sculpture, drawings, doodling, mind mapping, patterns/designs, color schemes, active imagination, imagery, block building.
Bodily Kinesthetic intelligence (able to use the body skillfully and handle objects adroitly, as in an athlete or dancer). Use activities that involve role playing, physical gestures, drama, inventing, ball passing, sports games, physical exercise, body language, dancing.
Interpersonal intelligence (understand people and relationship as in a salesman or teacher). learners think by bouncing ideas off of each other (socializers who are people smart). Use activities that involve group projects, division of labor, sensing others' motives, receiving/giving feedback, collaboration skills.
Intrapersonal intelligence (possess access to one's emotional life as a means to understand oneself and others exhibited by individuals with accurate views of themselves). Use activities that involve emotional processing, silent reflection methods, thinking strategies, concentration skills, higher order reasoning, "centering" practices, meta-cognitive techniques.
What cultures across the world call "art" is, through examination of Gardner's work, the ongoing result of these and other intelligences in combination over time. Some arts seem to use one directly (musical - music, kinesthetic - dance, linguistic - poetry, and so on) but in addition to that, a fabric of intelligences also influence the creation of art. A composer, for example, might have a high degree of spatial intelligence, a medium degree of interpersonal, and a low degree of intrapersonal intelligence, and ALL of those and more provide the filter and interface between creative vision and creative artifact (ie, a work of art).
Technically, intelligences represent the horizontal capacities of artists. The cultivation of each of the intelligences provides the vertical development of the artist. At the very least, use of Gardner's and others work on intelligences (Wilber has gathered much of the work into his Integral Psychology) provides material for a rich and interesting discussion of artists, as well as artist education.
Viktor Lowenfeld, in Creative and Mental Growth (Macmillan Co., New York, 1947), suggests that there are at least five stages of early childhood to adolescent visual representation (drawing/painting). His stages hook up in principle with Piaget's early stages for cognition. Check it out. (Hat tip to Jim Brutger and DASHH.)
1. SCRIBBLE (2 to 4 years)
The Scribble stage is made up of four sub-stages. (a) Disordered - uncontrolled markings that could be bold or light depending upon the personality of the child. At this age the child has little or no control over motor activity. (b)Longitudinal - controlled repetitions of motions. Demonstrates visually an awareness and enjoyment of kinesthetic movements. Circular - further exploring of controlled motions demonstrating the ability to do more complex forms. Naming - the child tells stories about the scribble. There is a change from a kinesthetic thinking in terms of motion to imaginative thinking in terms of pictures. This is one of the great occasions in the life of a human. It is the development of the ability to visualize in pictures.
2. PRESCHEMATIC (4 to 6 years)
The preschematic stage is announced by the appearance of circular images with lines which seem to suggest a human or animal figure. During this stage the schema (the visual idea) is developed. The drawings show what the child perceives as most important about the subject. There is little understanding of space - objects are placed in a haphazard way throughout the picture. The use of color is more emotional than logical.
3. SCHEMATIC (7 to 9 years)
This stage is easily recognized by the demonstrated awareness of the concept of space. Objects in the drawing have a relationship to what is up and what is down. A definite base and sky line is apparent. Items in the drawing are all spatially related. Colors are reflected as they appear in nature. Shapes and objects are easily definable. Exaggeration between figures (humans taller than a house, flowers bigger than humans, family members large and small) is often used to express strong feelings about a subject. Another technique sometimes used is called "folding over" this is demonstrated when objects are drawn perpendicular to the base line. Sometimes the objects appear to be drawn upside down. Another Phenomenon is called "X-ray". In an x-ray picture the subject is depicted as being seen form the inside as well as the outside.
4. DAWNING REALISM (9 to 11 years)
Dawining realism is also known as the gang age. Group friendships of the same sex are most common. This is a period of self awareness to the point of being extremely self critical. The attempts at realism need to be looked at from the child's point of view. Realism is not meant to be real in the photographic sense rather than an experience with a particular object. In this regard this stage is the first time that the child becomes aware of a lack of ability to show objects the way they appear in the surrounding environment. The human is shown as girl, boy, woman, man clearly defined with a feeling for details often resulting in a "stiffness" of representation. Perspective is another characteristic of this stage. There is an awareness of the space between the base line and sky line. Overlapping of objects, types of point perspective and use of small to large objects are evident in this stage. Objects no longer stand on a base line. Three dimensional effects are achieved along with shading and use of subtle color combinations. Because of an awareness of lack of ability drawings often appear less spontaneous than in previous stages.
5. THE PSEUDOREALISTIC STAGE (ll to 13 years)
In the previous stages the process in making the visual art was of great importance. In this stage the product becomes most important to the child. This stage is marked by two psychological differences. In the first, called Visual, the individual's art work has the appearance of looking at a stage presentation. The work is inspired by visual stimuli. The second is based on subjective experiences. This type of Nonvisual individual's art work is based on subjective interpretations emphasizing emotional relationships to the external world as it relates to them. Visual types feel as spectators looking at their work form the outside. Nonvisually minded individuals feel involved in their work as it relates to them in a personal way. The visually minded child has a visual concept of how color changes under different external conditions. The nonvisually minded child sees color as a tool to be used to reflect emotional reaction to the subject at hand.
It is worth pointing out that Lowenfield's research takes us to artistic development up to age 13, with the pseudorealistic stage. Beyond this stage, Lowenfeld's work tails off. To be fair, his work has been used by art educators, school systems, and teachers around the world. It appears effective and important as far as it goes. In a similar manner, the manner in which Abigail Housen's likewise important work has been most used is for children's education. If we can engage a child's imagination and help their attitudes and practices of art along the path in ways that he or she can relate with, then as children enter adulthood, the native capacity of creativity can bloom as it should, even the the adult is no longer an artist.
It is also worth mention that the traits Lowenfeld assigns to the specific ages (Scribble is ages 2-4, preschematic is ages 4-6) are not a cut and dried rigid account of exactly when these capacities unfold in children. Much as a bell curve represents averages, these age-specific capacities are suggested through a wide perspective that examines this developmental unfolding through a large group of children from various backgrounds.
Where is this going for capacities that might emerge after age 13, or after the pseudorealistic stage? We might make informed speculation of this (if research along these lines does not already exist, which it indeed may) through examination of the conclusions drawn by developmentalists, like Lowenfeld, who examine the waves of consciousness, cognition, and other intelligences. By aligning Lowenfeld's work with similar-minded researchers with similarly-gauged work, at least two things happen. One is that we have a fuller picture of not only 'artisthood' but the human person as a whole. Two is that capacities others have documented, which tend to emerge after age 13, might suggest what the subsequent stages of visual representation might look like.
The work of Charles Alexander and Jean Piaget, as two of many possible examples, documents the unfolding of development after age 13. Piaget's work on cogition suggests that 'formal operational', at ages 13-19, gives way to a transitionary stage (age 19-21) from form-op to what he calls 'polyvalent logic' or systems of systems (age 21 onward). Alexander's work, on levels of or stages of cognition or mind, suggests that age 13 is the end of what he calls 'representational mind' (which sounds similar to Lowenfeld's pseudorealistic stage). Subsequent stages are 'abstract mind' (age 15-19), 'transcendental intuition' (age 30-41), 'root mind' (early 40s), 'pure Self' (late 40s), and 'Brahman-Atman' (50 onward).
Each of these corrolations are provided in Ken Wilber's Integral Psychology. Wilber's own work suggests several stages after age 13. 'Formal' (age 13) gives way to 'Vision-logic' (age 21), 'Psychic' (age 28), 'Subtle' (age 35), 'Causal' (age 42), and 'Nondual' (age 49 onward). All in all, if visual representational development bears any similarily to the development of cognition, then there would be stages beyond what Lowenfeld's work names. Indeed, there is a wealth of evidence that suggests visual representation might have further stages. It is left to the case studies of the future to possibly bear this out, or suggest what indeed may lie for visual artists, in terms of verifiable developmental stages, after Lowenfeld's stage of pseudorealism.
May I admit one to y'all? This record by The Darkness called Permission to Land. Man, it rocks. Their music reminds me of AC/DC, Queen, any number of 80s metal-lite stuff, but in a way that sounds different than both of those groups, and the unfortunate metal-lite genre. Hannah turned me on to this record. She starts dancing, screaming, and pretending she's in a punk band. Hold me back -- I just might join her.
From my forthcoming work, The Lines and Mystery of Integral Art:
IOS by design is open to change as people try it out in their personal laboratories. The wonderful necessity of creative community and artist collective is that all can share in the reports we each can offer to gauge how our art practice unfolds in real time, given the emerging Integral Age. As the dignities and disasters—the good news and the bad news—of modernity and the 50-100 years of so-called postmodernity give way to the developmental worldcentric embrace of integrality, we can talk to each other about what is working, what is not working, and what sorts of seeds we have planted in our practice, our art making, and our lives. We can watch, nurture, and reap the harvests both as individuals and cultures informed by a truly astonishing amount of information and technology, at a geographic scope utterly unheard of until our age. IOS as a model and a touchstone for individual and collective exchange can provide a means for the kinds of informed, embracing distinctions artists need and want to make in their lives. The pluralistic age opens a vast terrain of possibility and engagement never before acknowledged on any kind of wide scale. But it is the integral age that can honor pluralism, and go to the next step to enact and put into motion the kinds of change and healthy revolution in most every area of human life that pluralism cannot. Pluralism opens individual and cultural doors to a greater span of exchange, and for that we are thankful. But it is an integral approach that walks through those doors. An integrally informed artist does so fully, openly, and in appreciation of the complete mystery of this whole thing.
Look for this essay in the next week or so. The initial draft was offered to the students who participated in the recent Integral Artistry Intensive. The revised essay will be geared towards inclusion in the Integral University Art Domain's library.
That is the name of the third movement of my Elemental Suite for violin and alto saxophone. It is newly posted over on Momentary I. Have a listen. The entire 4-mvt work is part of my forthcoming record, I Am Sound.
There are several meanings of the term "creativity", and this, to say the least, brings about a certain degree of confusion.
1) Creativity is exhibited by a certain skill in problem solving, logical/mathematical reasoning, kinesthetic manuever, and in fact any novel act by any of the multiple intelligences cited, for example, by Howard Gardner. The general idea here is: "the ability to take existing objects (material, bodily, conceptual, emotional, etc) and combine them in different ways for new purposes." And the main point: creativity is available to any one no matter what level of development they have in any number of intelligences. Creativity here is still a skill, or skills, the results of which are examined by a group of peers and deemed worthy, or unworthy.
2) Creativity is exhibited only at the highest levels of any intelligence. Here, creativity is equivalent to a certain spiritual or mystical development, or development that pushes the leading edge of logic/mathematical reasoning, kinesthetic action, and so on. There is a certain degree of emergent consciousness and conscious awareness of a person as a 'creator', where every thought becomes an action, or has an effect. Thus, creativity is a level, or a group of very high levels, of personal development.
3) Creativity is a state of consciousness. As a temporary altered mode of being, creativity is the exhibition of impulses that arise in a person, and then die down, to be experienced spontaneously at some later point. Thus infants and the elderly, and all in between, can potentially exhibit creativity. Creativity comes about from nowhere, stays awhile as a heightened awareness or impulsive drive, and then leaves, to return without reason or rhyme.
4) Creativity is the fabric of the Kosmos (all of interior and exterior existence) and thus there isn't a single thing, action, thought, exchange, or mode of being/knowing that does not exhibit creativity, or is not creativity at its core. As the primary drive of sentient and nonsentient existance, in the manifest and unmanifest realms, creativity is inevitable, inescapeable, and the primary condition of life. One cannot avoid creativity, just as one cannot avoid birth, life, and death. One can simply accept creativity, in is vast, unqualified ISness, and as the always already symphony of everything.
This is a summary, but the main idea is that the concept of 'creativity' can mean several things, and thus we have to make sure what definition we mean when we use the term.
Here is a published excerpt of an new book by one of our most solid writers on Western art, Roger Kimball. It is from his new book, Rape of the Masters.
I want to underscore the nature of the attack on art. Here is what’s happening: the study of art is increasingly being co-opted by various extraneous, non-artistic, non-aesthetic campaigns. Instead of seeking to preserve the distinctive pulse of aesthetic achievement, art history is pressed into battle—a battle against racism, say, or traditional notions of aesthetic achievement; it is enlisted on behalf of some putatively disenfranchised group or made an accessory to one or another version of academic arcana in which the political can barely be disentangled from the metaphysical or (to be more strictly accurate) from the floridly linguistic.
Here, here. I suggest that because an integral approach to art interpretation and appreciation aims to honor the artwork in all of its native habitats (in the conception of the artist, in the formal construction, in the extent social forces around the artwork, and in the responses by art lovers and critics), it is an integral approach to the making and feeling of artistic meaning that is best suited to address Kimball's rightly-stated concerns. We do want to honor the truths of so-called postmodernity, and so-called postmodernism. In my estimation, a certain amount of time and rigorous examination of the role that historicity plays in the shaping of artistic meaning indeed will continue to show the dignity and truth (amongst other truths from other interpretive schools) of some of what Kimball, Camile Paglia, Jay Nordlinger, and others critique, which can be summed up as extreme deconstructionism.
What happens when a music reviewer, in critical appreciation for a work of music, takes the following aspects into account, and explicitly explores these in the critical review?
1) Conscious/unconscious intent of the artist, in a way that the artist would agree with 2) The technical craftsmanship 3) The techno-economic base, and political climate, when the art was birthed, and received by audiences 4) The actual responses by audiences, critics, and the reviewer him or herself?
What do music reviews look like, and read like, given these suggested sources of meaning?
"A lot of artists I've spoken with are blown away (in a good way) by the distinction between art and artifact. When we think of the whole (un)conscious/light vision/energy pie that is what cultures call 'art', citing its material and energetic qualities as artifact tends to simultaneously open up the discussion to the non-artifactual aspects of 'art'. Which happens to be exactly what an integral approach ought to do."
So begins a new essay, about an integral theory of music, including an integral semiotics for music.
In preparation for both the launch of the Integral University Art Domain, as well as the publication of my own new essay on Wilber's writings on art, called To Bring Transcendance, I posted a bibliography of Ken's primary art writings.
And I can't tell you how excited I am that the Art Domain, as the world's first integral art learning community, is about to be birthed. You all are more than invited to participate. May IU-Art be an alchemical engine for all manifest and unmanifest beauty, and to help bring radical transcendance and divine love in your day to day life.
If you have ever wanted to see me in a white boa, then here's your chance. In the latest offering at Integral Naked, there is a Stuart Davis short film called Super Dukkha Part Two. Both me and Hannah make a brief appearance, because at Stu's last Chicago show, something energetic made both of us put on this white feathery getup and sit in front of the camera for interviews. Silly silly us.
Anyway, check it out if you have a moment. You can get a coupon for One Month Free here.
Two pictures from my recent headlining gig in Boulder, CO. I performed plainchants, solo guitar pieces, and a Rumi-meets-Johnny Cash song for voice and guitar, called 'Quietness'. Me and 4 other acts performed to a packed house of 45 people. By all accounts, it was the best TMLive gig yet. And we are just beginning.
Hey everyone. I wanted to give a brief report of the weekend workshop that I taught, along with Willow Pearson and John Forman. Basically, it was a success beyond all of our dreams. The feedback we received from our participants, written, verbal, and bodily, was basically top marks across the board. It was such a melting experience to have 16 brave artists inhabiting the voice of the 'integral artist'. There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that we can, and indeed should, teach just this sort of workshop on a regular basis. Everyone, teachers and participants alike, got something valuable and enriching out of our time together in Boulder for 2.5 days. It is my hope that some truly resonant seeds were planted, the fruits of which we can all enjoy in the coming months and years.
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