Art, Science, Processes, and Connections
/
I met my friend Sheena for lunch the other day. You may know her from my first ever blog post, when she created a universe under my garage stairs (if not, I recommend having a look – at both the blog, and the garage). Before going to see the new exhibitions at the San Diego Museum of Art, where she works, we were chatting about informal education, and the similarities between working with students learning about science and about art. She said something that really got me thinking.
We were talking about processes. Having worked for a long time in teaching engineering design, I have often thought about the ways in which kids develop skills that help them create an object. Usually working in teams, they design, test, modify, and try again. Eventually, they may come up with a successful final product, such as a solar-powered roving vehicle, that can accomplish a challenge. If they don’t, it is likely they learned a great deal about the process. Sometimes their ideas don’t result in a finished product because they were following an idea that was so different and original, it would have required a much longer amount of time to learn what worked and what didn’t.
With education in the arts, I knew students learned how to test a variety of methods, not simply following a rigid how-to-make formula. They tried, they amended, they discarded, they refined. It was very much like engineering. Somehow, however, I always imagined that there was a final product at the end, and that this product had a lot of value. I remember as a kid that rewarding moment of holding up my work, or seeing it on the classroom wall. When Sheena explained that sometimes there was no final product to showcase, and that the act of creating was about testing the processes and building creative strength, I had to stop and think. How had I missed this before? How could I have spent every vacation as a kid in college art and design departments, and yet made such an assumption?
Thinking it through, I can only imagine it is because I see technology integrated into everything around me; an ever-evolving and modifying, improving world. With art, while it could be said that elements are integrated into everything, in general I have consciously experienced art as finished products, in a setting designed for me to contemplate and appreciate. I had not been thinking of the process being as rewarding as the outcome.
After our meeting, Sheena texted me with some more thoughts:
“I believe our culture places a strong emphasis on consumerism and commodities. This, perhaps, is why such a primary focus is placed in the end result. As a culture we are more likely to find value in the material good and that becomes the goal and not the process. It is harder to qualify something as valuable when it isn’t a tangible thing. When the act takes place in time and is temporary, and evidence of it is internalized, what do we have to commodify? It’s a philosophical dilemma for artists in that the creative process is revered by us, yet the object holds us captive. I think it’s because of this dilemma that performance art and conceptual art were birthed.”
Coincidentally, I had been reading something that very morning about writing, which hit on many of the same thoughts. It was an opinion piece that stated if “content” is part of your job description or something you think of as a career, then perhaps it is time to rethink. It declared that creating written “content” is creating a product – no more, no less. And if writers are churning out product, they are not truly engaging with all of the possibilities of writing. They should add creativity, and originality, rather than simply working to a template, even when the end result still has to be of a fixed length and subject, for a specific audience.
I’m still not done thinking about how these three different ideas all intersect. How trying the process of designing and making can be enough. How a final product, whether arts or sciences, whether writing or a physical object, will benefit from creativity instead of simply focusing on the end goal. I suspect that whenever I personally create, and when I teach others, I will benefit from keeping all of these thoughts in mind.