iiae
Interactive interdisciplinary art events
Interactive interdisciplinary art education
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Basic Analogos iiae Paradigm |
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4
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Extrinsic
Structure
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De-context
(meta-configuration)
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3
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Extrinsic
Content
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Text
(figuration)
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2
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Intrinsic
Structure
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Context
(configuration)
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1
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Intrinsic
Content
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Pre-text
(ground)
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Note: Art Educators have long condemned the act of looking into artworks before starting to make art for fear of encouraging copying. Copying, rightly so, is problematic as it undercuts creative involvement. To bypass this difficulty, iiae posits an approach that enables a speaking subject to speak, not only when they are making art, but also when they are viewing art (or even when they are viewing events in life). It does this by outlining a process that makes looking into art a personal and creative act in its own right. As such, just as listening is a precondition for learning to speak a language (which is especially obvious in the case of infants when they are learning a new language), so too seeing art can be an essential stimulus for the act of making art—as long as the seeing is seen as a dialogue between the two histories that are brought on stage, that of the viewer and that of the image/event source. Even when artists are working without a present prior external image that stimulates them (i.e., art derived from art as opposed to art derived form life), they are calling up inner images of art previously seen. This process is touched on by Dylan in the quote below.
“I can’t say when it occurred to me to write my own songs. I couldn’t have come up with anything comparable or halfway close to the folk song lyrics I was singing to define the way I saw the world. I guess it happens to you by degrees. You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs, especially if you’re a singer who has plenty of them and you’re learning more every day. Opportunities may come along for you to convert something—something that exists into something that isn’t yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things you’re way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain, It’s not like you see songs coming and invite them in. It’s not that easy. You want to write songs that are bigger than life. You want to say something about strange things that have happened to you, strange things you have seen.”(Page 51, Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2004)
Iiae is desiged to foster fluency in inner/outer imaging.
Iiae extends the current Art Education focus on selected art disciplines (studio production, aesthetics, art history, and interpretation, as advocated in the DBAE* orientation) to include a much needed support foundation based on the roles occupied by speaking subjects and spoken subjects in dialogue (through subjects spoken: objects/ events). The iiae focus on roles and on the Analogos paradigm/syntagm which fosters not only inner-image/outer-image fluency, it opens the door to the possibility of interdisciplinary collaboration. Iiae is proposed, not as a displacement of DBAE, but rather as a primary foundation that supports and energizes DBAE by initiating a dialogue that gives an intrinsic voice to authentically interact as a speaking subject (iiae) in dialogue with the content provided by the disciplines (DBAE).
*DBAE, Discipline Based Art Education
Inner imaging involves responding (in nature or in culture) to a given stimulation and receiving it through any of the four technic/linguistic channels identified as intrinsic to an iiae pedagogy: sensual feelings (1), emotional feelings (2), auditory messages (3), and visual messages (4). Since the first two channels are primary processes, they have a more sonorous and open syntax—which tends to be richer in content but not necessarily as clear and articulate as is the case with secondary processes (3, 4); these latter two (secondary processes) have traditionally taken on a rigorous syntax, and accordingly, tend to be used in all cultures to articulate reasonably clear messages— including even those messages that are abstract and verbal. Inner images therefore can include a vast range of feelings (sensations and emotions), images and words, and speech and musical sounds, all of which in turn need to be represented in a vast range of technic/linguistic containers—and all of which can only occur in a virtual, imaginary form because the making of inner images involves no manifestation through real technics (the mind has no way to store, for example, real paint for pictures or real ink for text) or through real linguistics (the mind has no way to store, for example, real images/texts on paper, or no way to store, for example, real sounds, real speech or musical sounds as wave patterns in air).
Outer imaging involves the development of technic/linguistic skills that will enable one to manifest an external, material/virtual version of the desired inner image—even if the inner image is not conscious or seemingly not pre-planned in the imagination. The desired inner image may be latent until the outer image calls it into action. On the other hand, it may also be already richly endowed with content details; that is, already imagined inside a specific technic/linguistic mediation syntax—or it may even be able to shift between these two options of the impromptu and the pre-planned, or it may even evoke a blending of the two. Outer imaging can only occur through manifestation with real technics (such as real paint for pictures or real ink for text, or a real voice for speech or music, not to mention the vast array of tools and instruments that can be used to extend any of these) or through real linguistics (such as image/text visual languages, or speech/music auditory languages).
A Response Practice involves inner imaging inside natural or cultural events and then outer imaging in order to make sense of that same inner imaging experience by manifesting something externally. Then, to inner image the outer image that has been externalized, is to behold something of the meaning of the moment and of the larger sense of existence. An image-of-the-self—an outer image (no doubt stimulated by a previous inner imaging act) that we make so we can behold a version of ourselves outside of ourselves—is the dynamic source whereby we acquire a sense of who we are and who we will continue to be. It is this repertoire of making outer images over time that engages us to gain a self-image—an inner image that enables us to interact with continuity, stability and fluency in the world.
It is possible to proceed all the way through the eight inner imaging layers before committing oneself to speaking or making an image or manifesting any form of outer imaging. In gerneral, it’s recommended that one start outer imaging only after one has engaged in some measure in at least the first four layers of an iiae inner imaging response practice.
Outer imaging is more likely to involve one in collapsing and fusing the layers (1, 2, 3, 4), or even of leaping ahead and/or back than is the case with inner imaging. Inner imaging is the ground of an event, and, as such, can make or break an entire experience. For example if one does not spend time in a trance relation with a work initially (as recommended in layer 1 of an iiae practice), but rather starts off with an objective (layer 5) or factual approach (as DBAE advocates, after Edmund B. Feldman), it will likely be impossible to backtrack and try to forget the objective experience and fully engage in an intrinsic journey ‘into’ the work. For that reason, the first four inner imaging layers, the layers of intrinsic engagement (the iiae layers that constitute a ground for DBAE) are regarded as the most important layers to engage as an initiation in any Response process. After invoking the first four layers, individuals can decide to stop the process or continue to deepen their experience by delving into any or all of the other four layers (layers 5 through 8). They can also intuituvely dance though any of the layers in any sequence order they wish—or even forge their way to the top by leaping past layers. After ensuring an intrinsic inner imaging experiece (layers 1 through 4), then extrinsic, outer imaging has a head start.
When a participant starts with the iiae process, they engage their own voice, their own history (not just the art history of the work, as DBAE advocates) and they open the dialogue between themselves as viewers and the work. It is posited here that when participants are first grounded in an iiae foundation process (layers 1 through 4) before an objective orientation (layers 5 through 8) is undertaken, then the potential of this objective, secondary process (such as that endorsed by DBAE, which is loosely parallel to the iiae inner imaging layers 5 through 8), is greatly enhanced.
home ORG Artworks UFI Analogos Publications I Ching Roles Screens Author
A Summary of the iiae Inner Imaging Process
A Summary of the iiae Outer Imaging Process
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Basic Analogos iiae Paradigm |
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4
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Extrinsic
Structure
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De-context
(meta-configuration)
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3
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Extrinsic
Content
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Text
(figuration)
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2
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Intrinsic
Structure
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Context
(configuration)
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1
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Intrinsic
Content
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Pre-text
(ground)
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home ORG Artworks UFI Analogos Publications I Ching Roles Screens Author
Reading
Quotations from:
Manguel, Alberto, Reading Pictures,
A History of Love and Hate, Radom House, NY, 2000 (b).
Manguel, Alberto, A History of Reading
Viking. NY, 1996 (a).
Deja-view
When we respond, “(w)hat we see is the painting translated into our own experience. As Bacon suggested , unfortunately (or unfortunately) we can see only that which, in some shape or form, we have already seen. We can see only that for which we already have identifiable images, just as we can read only in a language of which we already know the syntax, the grammar and the words ... Mysteriously, every image assumes my seeing it (Manguel-b, p. 12-13).”
Narrative
“When we read pictures - in fact pictures of any kind, whether painted, sculpted, photographed, built or performed - we bring to them the temporal quality of narrative. We extend that which is limited by a frame to a before and and after, and through the craft of telling stories (whether of love or of hate), we lend the immutable picture an intimate and inexhaustible life (Manguel -b, p. 13).”
Response Variability
“... the elements of our response, the vocabulary we use to tease the story out of an image (whether of Van Gogh's boats or the portal of Chartres Cathedral ), are determined not only by the world's iconography but also by a vast range of circumstances , private and social, casual and obligatory. We construct our stories through echoes in other stories, through the illusion of self-reflection, through technical and historical knowledge, through gossip, reverie, prejudice, illumination, scruples, ingenuity, compassion, wit. No story elicited by an image is final and exclusive, and measures of correctness vary according to the same circumstances that give rise to the story itself (Manguel-b, p. 13).”
Transitional Experience
“The image of a work of art exists somewhere between that which the painter has imagined and that which the painter has put on the board; between that which we can name and that which the painter's contemporaries could name ; between what we remember and what we learn; between the acquired common vocabulary of a social world and a deeper vocabulary of private and ancestral symbols. When we try to read a painting, it may seem to us lost in an abyss of misunderstanding or, if we prefer, a vast no-man's abyss of multiple interpretations (Manguel-b, p. 14).”
Reading Codes
“Is (Joan) Mitchell's painting anything more than this mass of coloured strokes? Is there a context in which its confusion can be read? Is there a language ... with which the viewer must become familiar before the canvas relinquishes a meaning? Or is the attempt to go beyond the immediate emotional response one that is alien to Mitchell's creation, the imposition of a reading that, like a moral tag in a Victorian fable, distorts the very thing it tries to understand (Manguel-b, p. 24)?”
Reading Subjectivity
“Subjectivity, Pliny thought, was detrimental to the work of art. And yet we know that what we read in a picture varies according to who we are and what we have learned - a fact that lends little assurance to the belief that we could ever share a common vision of the world (Manguel-b, p. 69-70).”
Speed Reading Verses Reflection
“Paradoxically, in our time, when images are once again given priority over the written world, we lack that shared visual vocabulary. We have alloted advertising and the electronic media to privilege the image in order to deliver information instantaneously to the largest number of people; we forget that this speed makes them the ideal communication tool for all manner of propaganda since, manipulated by the media, these images don't allow us time for paused criticism or reflection. We 'worship pictures' but we don't 'learn in depth, by means of pictures (Manguel-b, p. 121).”
Realism
“Naturalistic depiction is ... a set of acquired conventions, white paint suggesting light and dark paint suggesting shadows, the much reduced figures on a canvas meant to represent life-size persons. A stick figure on a traffic sign or a 'happy face' button on a greeting card serve their purpose admirably; only when the portrayed face must also serve as documentary evidence will a stylized or imagined face not do: the recognizable face must have the weight of proof, much like the photographed face in a passport (Manguel-b, p. 126).”
Reading Text and Reading Images
“... if looking at pictures is equivalent to reading, then it is a vastly creative form of reading, a reading in which we must not only put words into sounds into sense but images into sense into stories. Of course, much must escape our narratives because of a picture's chameleon quality and because of the protean nature of a symbol. Image and meaning reflect each other in a gallery of mirrors through which, as through corridors hung with pictures, we choose to wander, always knowing that there is no end to our search - even if we had a goal in mind (Manguel-b, p. 149).”
Self-Portraits/Mirrors
“Every portrait is, in some sense, a self-portrait that reflects the viewer. Because 'the eye is not satisfied with (mere ) seeing,' we bring to a portrait our perceptions and our experience. In the alchemy of the creative act,every portrait is a mirror (Manguel-b, p. 155).”
Artist's Lives
“The relation between the life of an artist and the work that artist produces is amply studied by sociologists, psychologists, theologians and writers of fantastic literature. For most of us - the common viewers - an artist's work belongs not only to the artist's life but also to our own lives (lives that include no doubt certain ideas about what that artist's life might have been). Maybe the only usefulness in this kind of information is that it provides sometimes a starting point for observation, a lead (however false), a conjuring up of images (however bewildering), around which the viewer's reflections on the work can cluster (Manguel-b, p. 183).”
Transitional Knowledge
“ ... narrative threads ... the story suggested by the works' title, the story of how the work came into being, the story of its maker, and my own. And I wonder up to what point I can associate or dissociate the images from their source (if such a thing as irrefutably identifying a source were possible) or from the circumstances of their creation. Can I read an image of hatred, for instance, as a revulsion towards hatred if I know that it was bred in hatred? And since that which informs an image (the chattel of knowledge that accompanies it) can utterly transform, enhance or subvert it, can I read in an image and unspoken or invisible meaing that in effct contradicts what I know of its creation (Manguel-b, p. 201)?”
Art as Text
“Eisenman (the architect) draws his theories from outside architectural dogma, form literature and linguistics, from Noam Chomsky and Nietzsche. His designs have therefore been equated with texts, with 'speaking architecture' (Manguel-b, p. 258).
Image Stage Space
“An image, painted, sculpted, photographed, built and framed, is also a stage, a site for performance. What the artist places on that site and what the viewer sees performed on it lend the image a dramatic quality, as if it were able to prolong its existence through a story whose beginning the viewer has missed and whose ending the artist cannot know. The space of drama is not necessarily contained only by the stage of a theatre: the street, the entire city, can be that space, and it can be mirrored in the closed microcosm of a canvas (Manguel-b, p. 267).”
Public Readings
“(If it is) (r)ead out to an audience, a text is not exclusively determined by the relationship between intrinsic characteristics and those of its arbitrary , ever-changing public, since the members of that public are no longer at liberty (as ordinary readers would be) to go back, reread, delay, and to give the text their own connotative intonation. It becomes instead dependent on the author -performer who assumes the role of readers, the presumptive incarnation of each and every member of the captive audience for whom the reading is being held, teach them how to read. Author's readings can become thoroughly dogmatic (Manguel-a, p. 251).”
Low Density and High Density Texts
“ 'It is relevant to consider,' wrote Marshall Mcluhan, 'that the old prints and woodcuts, like the modern comic strip and comic book, provide very little data about a particular moment in time, or aspect in space, of an object. The viewer, or reader, is compelled to participate in completing the few hints provided by the bounding lines. Not unlike the character of the woodcut and the cartoon is the TV image, with its very low degree of data on objects, and the resulting high degree of participation by the viewer in order to complete what is only hinted at in the mosaic mesh of dots.' .... For me, centuries away, the two kinds of readings converge when I go over the morning newspaper: on the one hand, there is the slow progress through the news, continued sometimes on a distant page, related to the items hidden away in different sections, written in varying styles from the apparently unemotional to the blatantly ironic; on the other, the almost involuntary grasping of the ads read in a single glance, each story told within precise and limited frames, through familiar characters and symbols ... (Manguel-a, p. 104-105).”
Narrative Construction
“The pictures of medieval Europe offered a syntax without words, to which the reader silently added a narration. In our time, deciphering the pictures of advertising, of video art, of cartoons, we too lend a story not only a voice but a vocabulary (Manguel-a, p. 109).”
Food Metaphors
“Reading ... serves as a metaphoric vehicle , but in order to be understood must be recognized through metaphors. Just as writer speak of cooking up a story, rehashing a text, having half-baked ideas for a plot, spicing up a scene or garnishing the bare bones of an argument, turning the ingredients of a potboiler into soggy prose, a l\slice of life peppered with allusions into which readers can sink their teeth, we, the readers, speak of savouring a book, of finding nourishment in it, of devouring a book it one sitting, of regurgitating or spewing up a text, of ruminating on a passage, of rolling a poet's words on the tongue, of feasting on poetry, of living on a diet of detective stories. In an essay on the art of studying, the sixteenth century English scholar Francis Bacon catalogued the process: 'Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested (Manguel-b, p. 170-171).”
Readers Creating the Text
“The primordial relationship between writer and reader presents a wonderful paradox: in creating the role of the reader, the writer also decrees the writer's death, since in order for a text to be finished the writer must withdraw, cease to exist. While the writer remains present, the text remains incomplete. Only when the writer relinquishes the text, does the text come into existence. At that point, the existence of the text is a silent existence, silent until the moment when a reader reads it. Only when the able eye makes contact with the markings on the tablet, does the text come to active life. All writing depends on the generosity of the reader (Manguel-b, p.`78).”
Two Types of Writers/Readers
“In a famous essay, Roland Barthes proposed a distinction between écrivan and écrivant: the former fulfills a function, the latter an activity; for the écrivan writing is an intransitive verb for the écrivant the verb always leads to an object - indoctrinating, witnessing, explaining, teaching. Possibly the same distinction can be made between two reading roles: that of the reader for whom the text justifies its existence in the act of reading itself, with no ulterior motive (not even entertainment, since the notion of pleasure is implied in the carrying out of the act), and that of the reader with an ulterior motive (learning, criticizing) for whom the text is a vehicle towards another function. The first activity takes place within a time frame dictated by the nature of the text ; the second exists in a time frame imposed by the reader for the purpose of that reader (Manguel-a, p. 184).”
| 4 Evaluation: de-context
meta-figuration
self-conscious ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3 Realization text figuration conscious ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2 Schema container/context configuration conscience ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 Source pre-text background unconscious ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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