Abstract
What is the value of art education; what are the values that art education seeks to propagate; how is the value of each artistic inquiry assessed? What is the nature of creativity?
Visual art in the contemporary world encompasses a wide range of practices and disciplines, requiring creative research in many areas. The visual sense, like other aspects of perceptual experience, is a mode of apprehending the world and the various codes that represent the diverse social, cultural and artistic ‘realities’. The act of ‘seeing’ and the word ‘see’ are often used metaphorically to describe ‘understanding’ or ‘perceiving’ – phenomena that do not occur at the retinal level. The word idea derives from the Greek eidos: “both that which one sees […] and that by means of which one sees.” To transmit this idea of ‘seeing’, it is necessary to avoid referring only to pre-existing ‘forms’. How does one, for instance, refer to an idea, or potential form? To grasp the full implications of concepts and ideas, we should recognize and apply the inherent visuality in language and figurative discourse – the “space” within which ideas get discussed, transformed and re-articulated into visual art, which in turn generates more thought and new ideas.
The translation of experience – both everyday and extraordinary – necessitates the crossing into synaesthetic thresholds. The use of synaesthetic metaphors or strategies is more than just an appeal to the senses: it triggers off a process of ‘translation’ of experience and re-vision of sense-perceptions. Synaesthetic metaphor pushes perception further around surprising turns and corners in thought than the more usual sense associations. In poetry and art, the expression of one experience via another is what brings fresh insight into perception of the world. In art, emotions are given form and colour, or weight and depth. An auditory experience translates into colour or the memory of a touch becomes sound – inter- and intra-sense-associative experiences open up new ways of knowing. We already experience the productive yield of this approach in science, e.g., ultrasound mapping of the body, where sound conjures image.
My approach to the arts and art education is interdisciplinary, and allows for critical, creative and mutual cross-fertilization of ideas across other ways of knowing and experiencing.
Art is exploring fundamentally new modes of perception, through the senses, and new forms of imagination.
(Bohm 1996, p. 134)
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Notes
- 1.
See page 5.
- 2.
See Appendix A.1 for the image of the poster the class created. The event was called ‘Gyre’, a title inspired by W. B. Yeats’ poem The Second Coming.
- 3.
Ray Langenbach taught at the National Institute of Education, Singapore, from 1993 to 1996. He incorporated performance art in his teaching of contemporary art practices, and at the request of some of the students opened a studio for the exploration of performance in a large storage shed, set away from the other buildings on the campus. The students and Langenbach would congregate there during some class-periods and at odd hours for performances and critiques.
- 4.
Victor’s work, His Mother Was a Theatre (1994), was acquired by the Singapore Art Museum, where it is now considered a pivotal contemporary work, marking artistic response to a tumultuous time in Singapore’s art history. The work was created as a response to the 1994 censorship of the performing body and nudity in artistic practice.
- 5.
From November 1999 to September 2003, I taught across a range of theoretical and studio practice subjects, as well as Creative Writing (Art Enrichment Programme) at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore.
- 6.
Conceptual Drawing (first designed for students doing 3-D Studies – Sculpture, Ceramics, Fine Art Jewellery – at LASALLE-SIA, College of the Arts) where synaesthetic tasks allow for the ‘translation’ of sensory experience e.g., from sound to image.
- 7.
These are edited transcripts – extracted from my PGDipTHE thesis (2001) – of conversations I recorded in March 2001, with four case studies featuring art students undertaking the Diploma in Fine Art (3D Studies) at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. The interviews relate to the Conceptual Drawing Course I designed and conducted then for the 3D Studies students – they included students specializing in Sculpture, Ceramics, Jewellery, and, for a short time, Glass. The dialogue chosen here is from various one-on-one dialogues, as well as recordings made during a class critique where we reviewed the works done over the past 7 weeks to prepare for the Mid-Year Review. It involved peer assessment and commentary of each other’s work. There were 13 students in this class – for Project I & II. Given the constraints of the chapter, I focus only on one student’s response: Heleston Chew.
- 8.
Tape I: Conversations in 3rd Year Drawing Class, Department of 3D Studies (20 February 2001).
- 9.
Tape IV: Conversation with Heleston on the roof (14 March 2001).
- 10.
Tape II.
- 11.
Patsy Rodenburg was Director of Voice at the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London for 26 years and until recently at the Royal National Theatre.
- 12.
Cid Corman, ‘Speech: As It Falls: Is Poetry’ & Susan Sontag, from “Aesthetics of Silence”, The Poetry Reading, A Compendium on Language & Performance, eds. Vincent & Zweig (Berkeley: Momo’s Press 1981).
- 13.
Philip Pullman in his introduction to the 2008 edition of Kipling’s Just So Stories (London: Vintage Books, 2008).
- 14.
Some ‘Why So’ questions that surfaced were: “Why does the full Moon seem to follow you around?”, and a more adult one: “Why do men have nipples?”, etc.
- 15.
Letter to George and Tom Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Jim Pollock (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), p.491. ‘…I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason [.]’
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Appendices
Appendices
A.1. Writing for Performance, GYRE POSTER (UWS, 1996)
A.2. Conceptual Drawing: Experiential Synaesthetic Tasks
Case Studies (2001)
Project I – Sensory Perceptual Translation
Heleston’s ‘Braille’ Works: Series of three prints
Project I – Sensory Perceptual Translation
Serene’s ‘Noise’ Works: 2D sketches & 3D remote-controlled work
Project II – Sensory and Perceptual Translation: Auditory-into-Visual
Heleston’s works done during session: Three mixed media pieces
A.3. Sweet Like a Crow (Ondaatje 1989)
For Hetti Corea, 8 years old
The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical
people in the world. It would be quite impossible to have
less sense of pitch, line or rhythm. ~ Paul Bowles
Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed
through a glass tube
like someone has just trod on a peacock
like wind howling in a coconut
like a rusty bible, like someone pulling barbed wire
across a stone courtyard, like a pig drowning,
a vattacka being fried
a bone shaking hands
a frog singing at Carnegie Hall.
Like a crow swimming in milk,
like a nose being hit by a mango
like the crowd at the Royal-Thomian match,
a womb full of twins, a pariah dog
with a magpie in its mouth
like the midnight jet from Casablanca
like Air Pakistan curry,
a typewriter on fire, like a hundred
pappadans being crunched, like someone
trying to light matches in a dark room,
the clicking sound of a reef when you put your head into the sea,
a dolphin reciting epic poetry to a sleepy audience,
the sound of a fan when someone throws brinjals at it,
like pineapples being sliced in the Pettah market
like betel juice hitting a butterfly in mid-air
like a whole village running naked onto the street
and tearing their sarongs, like an angry family
pushing a jeep out of the mud, like dirt on the needle,
like 8 sharks being carried on the back of a bicycle
like 3 old ladies locked in the lavatory
like the sound I hear when having an afternoon sleep
and someone walked through my room in ankle bracelets.
A.4. MEd: Visual Arts & Creativity (Elective) at NIE
Primary School (Science) Teachers’ Group Project on Symmetry
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Lingham, S. (2013). Turning the Curious Corners of Thought: The Synaesthetic Mind and Ways of Knowing in the Arts. In: Lum, CH. (eds) Contextualized Practices in Arts Education. Education Innovation Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4560-55-9_38
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