[Xmca-l] Re: discussing "Posing the question"

Tue May 27 06:14:01 PDT 2014

Hello David,

Thank you for your comments and for sharing your book as well.

You noted that you found the idea of young people posing for Flickr a
little depressing - and I can certainly understand this. Not to add to this
depression, but remember that few young people even visit museums at all
outside of school visits! I don’t think that ‘flickr’ was a particularly
large motivator in the end. The most surprising finding that led to this
study was that visitors “pose” naturally. Many many people when approaching
Munch’s “The Scream” would bring their hands to their faces to “scream” as
a part of normal museum practice. I think the exciting thing is building
off of this natural tendency to create richer engagements and conversations
with and about the art- Not to replace interactions with the works with
photo taking activities. Although it is also interesting to see what
expectations youth bring to these experiences.

You also provided a few questions that I wanted to follow up on. You
mention a distinction between “mimesis” and “depiction” that I think is
really interesting. I actually spent a great deal of time debating the
appropriate concept to use to describe these activities and I think both
are appropriate and share subtle distinctions. I agree that ‘mimesis’
implies a dialogic relationship between the participant and the artwork -
but I would also argue that ‘depiction’ better captures the dialogic
relationship between the participants. I used the concept of depiction to
be consistent with Streeck’s framework.

You also mention that assuming gestures are either iconic or deictic
suggests that artwork does not have ideal content? Maybe you can elaborate
on what you mean by ideal content? I hope that I didn’t give the impression
that I feel visitor gestures are limited to these types (A goal of this
article was to introduce posing as a unique gestural activity).

Thank you!

On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 12:18 AM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>wrote:

> I think I'd like to try to tie the discussion of Rolf Steier's intriguing
> article to a book we published in January here in Korea, a book which is
> also related to the discussion of Vygotsky, the Imagination, and
> Creativity.
>
>  Since we are discussing posing and artworks, let me provide the cover of
> our book, a painting by the Russian children's portraitist Nikolai
> Bogdanov-Belsky.
>
> http://www.aladin.co.kr/shop/wproduct.aspx?ISBN=8994445536
>
> The book contains three very different works by Vygotsky on creativity and
> imagination, which we translated into Korean: his "popular science" account
> ("Imagination and Creativity in the Child", which was published in JREEP in
> 2004), "Imagination and Creativity in Adolescence", which was published in
> "Pedology of the Adolescent" and which can be found in the Vygotsky Reader
> (Blackwell, 1994) and "Imagination and its Development in Childhood", part
> of which appears in Volume One of the English Collected Works.
>
> But the cover painting really says it all in gesture: Vygotsky asks--and
> answers--the question of why one form of creativity after another is
> exhausted, when the child's imagination is still developing vigorously. The
> child poses. Then, at a certain point, the child becomes disillusioned with
> mere posing and becomes interested in drawing. The child draws. Then, at a
> certain point (usually right when the child appears to be making real
> progress), the child becomes disillusioned with drawing and takes up
> writing. The child writes. Then, at a certain point (usually, as captured
> by Bogdanov-Belsky, right when the child begins to learn how to write
> compositions in school) the child becomes disillusioned. The now powerless
> and disillusioned daydream, which we extravagantly call "imagination", is
> all that is left.
>
> I liked the article. I loved the idea that recreating a painting as a
> "tableau vivant" includes both an external plane (dialogue) and and
> internal one (narrative). I thought the ability of the author to recover a
> kind of underlying structure of pose, comparison, focus, and adjustment
> from the careful analysis of two incidents was actually very convincing and
> shows the power of a theoretically informed analysis over a statistically
> equipped but merely empirical one. I also find this underlying structure
> far more helpful than the usual vague talk about extra-corporeal artistic
> experience and reflection that we get, even in the work of Bakhtin.
>
> But I confess, I found the idea that children spend their days in museums
> recreating paintings with their bodies for a Flickr account a little
> depressing. I wonder if there is any evidence that the evident
> understanding that emerges leads to any actual creativity or even any
> posing outside the museum. Perhaps, if it doesn't, that is a good thing:
> Munch, in addition to being a smoker, was a notorious depressive.
>
> Some specific questions:
>
> a) On p. 149, the author says that "meaning is embedded in the word".
> Doesn't this imply a conduit metaphor? Isn't it more likely--on the basis
> of the author's own argument--that the way in which words carry cultural
> meaning is by forcing the hearer to re-enact the meaning making itself?
>
> b) On p. 151, the author appears to confuse the concept of metaphor with
> Lakoff and Johnson's "conceptual metaphor". Also, I can't see how children
> can develop concepts from metaphors, because it seems to me that in order
> to have a metaphor you need a concept first.
>
> c) On p. 152: if we assume that visitor gestures are either iconic or
> deictic, doesn't that suggest that artwork has no ideal content at all?
>
> d) On p. 152, the bottom: isn't "depiction" more of a NARRATIVE stance,
> while mimesis is a more DIALOGIC one because it places us inside the
> artwork? Just a thought.
>
> I remember taking part in an art exhibition in my wife's hometown of Xi'an
> in China twenty years ago where we left a huge canvas by the exit and
> invited all the viewers to try to paint something. It was at a big
> university and some of engineering students tried gamely, until the art
> students came along and painted everything black. Interestingly, though,
> neither the engineering students nor the art students tried to reproduce
> any of the artworks--they were more interested in looking out the window
> than in looking back at the exhibition.
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>
>
> On 23 May 2014 01:09, Vadeboncoeur, Jennifer <j.vadeboncoeur@ubc.ca>
> wrote:
>
> > Dear XMCA,
> >
> > Rolf Steier is now on XMCA, and his article "Posing the question" is open
> > on the T and F website:
> >
> > http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hmca20/.U3zs4Sjsq24
> >
> > Just click on the green button to the right side of the article.
> >
> > There is loads to talk about, and one question that comes to mind is in
> > relation to the museum installation as a design experiment. In what sense
> > is it a design experiment? What does it make visible? How is learning
> > shaped by access to this experience in a museum?
> >
> > More questions?
> >
> > Best - jen
> >
>