As Gladwell tells it, using a very good art-as-example:

The Poster Test is you get a bunch of posters in a room, you bring some college students in, and you say ‘pick any poster you want, take it home’. And they do that. Second group is brought in and you say, ‘pick any poster you want, tell me why you want it, and then go home’. Couple of months passes, and he calls up all the students, and he asks, “That poster you got a couple of months back, do you like it?’ and the kids, who is the first group didn’t have to explain their choice, all liked their poster. And the kids in the second group who did have to explain, now they hate their poster. And not only that, the kids who had to explain their poster picked a very different kind of poster then the kids who didn???t have to explain their poster.So making people explain what they want changes their preference and changes their preference in a negative way, it causes them to gravitate toward something they actually weren’t interested in in the first place.

Now, there’s a wonderful little detail in this – that there were two kinds of posters in the room, there were Impressionist prints and then there were these posters of, you know, kitten hanging by bars that said, ‘Hang in there baby’. And the students who were asked to explain their preference overwhelmingly chose the kitten. And the ones who weren’t asked to explain overwhelmingly chose the Impressionist poster. And they were happy with their choice obviously, who could be happy with a kitten on their wall after 3 months? Now, why is that?

Why when you ask someone to explain their preference do they gravitate toward the least sophisticated of the offerings? Cause it???s a language problem. You???re someone, you know in your heart that you like the Impressionists but now you have to come up with a reason for your choice, and you really don’t have the language to say why you like the Impressionist photo. What you do have the language for is to say, ‘Well, I like the kitten cause I had a kitten when I was growing up,’ and you know … so forcing you to explain something when you don’t necessarily have the vocabulary and the tools to explain your preference automatically shifts you toward the most conservative and the least sophisticated choice.

It is important to clarify the Language Problem to say that just because people can’t describe to themselves or others why the feel the way they do, does not mean those feelings are absent – language isn’t limiting their thoughts. The people who chose the Impressionists were responding to their thoughts, their inclinations, even though if they’d be asked they may not have been able to come up with an answer. I also think this experiment highlights a problem of status – status as in a concern for how one is thought of, or represents oneself. I can’t be the only one who imagines that the person who chose a kitten was a girl: and a girl may chose a kitten because it conforms to an idea of femininity. I know when I was in university, there were no kitten posters in the guy’s rooms – I seem to recall posters of big breasted women and ‘student crossing’ stick figures carrying bottles.

However, the Language Problem is another indictment toward the post-modernist gobldly-gook of academic prose. Artists have over the past few years been arguing that they have to go to school, and learn the process, the arguments, and so they don’t owe anyone easy answers. They want the audience to do their homework. Gladwell’s examples seem to make that clear, that without doing their homework, people won’t be able to like challenging works. As if doing your homework gives you the language so that you can explain your preferences to others, which is quite relevant because we hear people complaining.

They aren’t going to galleries, unconsciously liking things and keeping that to themselves. If they are unconsciously liking things, we’re hearing them complain, because they can’t speak our language. That, or they know full well what they’re saying, and the work really is shite. As Pinker points out in a chapter on language, language doesn’t define and constrain our thoughts, it communicates them. Our brains are full of concepts and reactions, and we use language to share our experience of those. The Poster Experiment shows two levels of communication – the mind communicating to itself in such a way as to direct the choice toward something they may not be able to explain, and the distortion of choice toward the familiar when they are asked to communicate their feelings to another when they don’t have a language to communicate the sophistication of their intuition.

The ‘doing your homework’ idea, which gives people that language, seems to be true for those among us who enjoy reading theories. But we are suffering from a severe lack of translations. Steven Pinker is a cognitive scientist, a linguist, who made his career at MIT and now works at Harvard. He is an academic publishing papers in peer reviewed journals. But the example I’ve borrowed above is from his trade publication, which serves as a translation of the work he does in his field, absent the jargon. As he said in an interview (PDF file):

Another invaluable bit of advice came from an editor, when I was planing my first book for a general audience. She said I should not think of my readership as the general public – truck drivers, grannies, chicken pluckers. They don’t buy books. Any attempt to reach them would lead me to write in motherease. Instead, I should write for an old college roomate – someone as smart as I was but who didn’t happen to go into my field. Respecting the intelligence of readers and acknowledging their lack of specialized knowledge are the two prerequisites for good science writing.

I’ve come to think of the Homework-Excuse as coming from those among us who want the arts to be proffesionalized and academized as if becoming an artist was somehow akin to becoming a doctor or a lawyer.

The law allusion is interesting, because law is trying to sort out the complications of our vague intuition of justice. Art too is a vague intuition, but law – at least the language used in the courts – is clear, it is understandable by everyone – as popular television shows exemplify. The language of the law, as turned into drama, is something we all understand, but the printed legal decisions are not today, nor will they be in the future, considered great literature.

Art seems to have failed in its language. Perhaps the reason there aren’t many art television shows is because art-folk in both galleries and in print aren’t speaking a language that is clear and obvious. What’s obvious in law is that someone was hurt and the other person wants justice. We’re exercising our desires for revenge, for rebalancing the scales between two people, fighting for a concept of fairness which, as recent studies with chimpanzees shows, is embedded within our genes as apes. For most of our history, art too was clearly the expression of our genetic inclination toward beauty. Beauty, and a love for the absurd. This recent video is clearly art, in the way that is revels in the uselessness of its actions. Hosted on iFilm, every video there is what anthropologists would call art, even though in our daily lives we conceptualize things as TV Shows, or Commercials, or Parodies. The important thing is that humans spend a great deal of energy imagining, make images born in the imagination, making their dreams come true.

The desire to make some of the better videos on iFilm is an expression that all artists should be familiar with. But what makes it good art for me is that it is free of the self-consciousness of current conceptual concerns. With regard to the video linked above, I can’t help but feel that a similar piece within an art gallery would be pedantic, and would try to reference the Iraqi War and or Palestine and Israel, like the pieces I saw last summer at the AGO.

When one is in a gallery, looking at something unattractive to the eye, boring in concept, and when one asks, or tried to bring this up, you encounter, “oh I think it’s great” and yet, ask that person why, and you will not get a clear answer. Invariably, the only reason to find these things wonderful today is because it’s the tip of a conceptual iceberg – it somehow relates to bigger ideas, bigger movements within the zeitgeist of the intelligentsia, things which are vague and that this art has somehow made a little bit more concrete. Already equipped with that language, they can appreciate it in a way that someone not familiar cannot. And, the way it works nowadays, is if they look to the artist statement or the press-release for clarity, they get serving of language in a potentially unfamiliar vocabulary, or, more often then not (since art has so alienated itself from those who don’t ‘do their homework’), you get a rehashing of ideas not very intriguing to begin with. You’re getting kitten art. As Pinker writes (p.416), quoting Adam Gopnik, “the political messages of most postmodernist pieces are utterly banal, like ‘racism is bad’. But they are stated so obliquely that viewers are made to feel morally superior for being able to figure them out.”

Because I have a facility with words, I find it easier to concretize the bigger vagueness by writing paragraphs than by trying to invest images or objects with those thoughts, and because of this I find myself as an artist more often than not making content-less work, which if it express anything does so unconsciously. Or I’m thinking very hard in trying to marry an idea with the appropriate form. Someone, like Tony Scherman, who identifies as a painter, will paint images based on his thoughts, his studies, in the history of Napoleon or whatever. Gerhard Richter will paint the Baader Meinhof Gang is such a way that John Ralston Saul writes about them thus in On Equilibrium:

I didn’t know of the paintings. I walked into the room and was immobilized by the atmosphere. I hadn’t yet looked at a picture. The force which he somehow put into his paintings overwelmed the space. And it remained when you examined the paintings one by one. The force is virtually impossible to describe, except to say that Richter is a great painter and he has the genius to create something like a force field which connects him with the viewer.This is not emotion. […] Richter has touched something in our imagination which is only secondarily about visual perception.

Having seen Tony Scherman’s Napoleon show at the U of T Art Centre in 2001, a year after attending a lecture he gave in the fall of 2000, I feel as if Scherman’s facility as a painter is informed by his studies. Whereas I’m much more inclined lately to write things to post on this blog to express what I’ve been thinking about, I’m under the impression that a painter like Scherman paints and saves the thoughts about his studies for his excellent presentations.

All this relates though to what art is ultimately about. In October 1999, I read a profile on Julia Kristeva in The Globe and Mail, where it said:

What she chiefly borrowed from Freud was the idea of a ‘psychic space’ inside each individual. In her view it is largely nourished by narrative, which is why she sees literature and the arts as essential to a sane life – and consumerism as gravely dangerous to it. “People become literally sick if they have no interior representation.” She also thinks that, in a world where people are spilling in vast numbers from one culture into another, it is essential to decide what a national identity should be. “I have students in my classes who literally do not know what language to dream in. The ‘psychic space’ is frozen.” (Interview with Ray Conlogue Oct 14 1999)

Later that month, I wrote down in my notebook:

Art – this is the point of art – art allows us to string together narratives. Humans are creatures dependent on narratives, and art shows us, guides us, in the construction of our own stories. Because it is necessary to conceptualize structure within the historical time frame of our lives.Lives are like pieces of music – not songs, because songs imply words and lives are structured moments resonating in the world, moments built upon moments, and having a beginning and an end.

Narration, as Kristeva was getting at, supplies the mind with examples and models that are required for it to tell itself its stories. Since, as Buddhists emphasize, we self-narrate ourselves into existence, we become more conscious the more we feed the mind with stories. Literature and art is quite literally ‘food for thought’. As John Ralston Saul tells us, in the paragraphs preceding the above quote:

What I also know is that many visual artists need music to work, as do some writers. This does not function as an image generator, but rather as a key, unlocking their imaginations. Many musicians need words. If I sit in a live concert, after almost exactly twenty minutes words and phrases will begin to tumble into my consciousness, unlocking different ongoing problems of writing. Angus Wilson felt that it was Zola’s love of the Impressionists which gave him another sense of how to write. Here truly images were producing words.David Malouf has made an even more direct connection, pointing out that, until Australian writers dropped specifically British images and took up specifically Australian, they could not imagine where they were. There were no trees, flowers, birds of Australia, in early Australian verse. “This is not because they were not there in the landscape, to be seen and appreciated, but because there was as yet no place for them in the world of verse. The associations had not yet been found that would allow them entry there. They carried no charge of emotion.” So the trees, flowers, birds, landscapes, climates had first to enter into the imagination of the immigrants. It wasn’t a question of nationalism or of excluding others, but of imaging being at home there themselves. Then it happened. And it was as if the people had “come at last into full possession of a place”.

The opposite can just as easily happen. Police and courtroom dramas set in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago have become so common around the world – they are America’s most common expression of itself – that many people in other countries now think their own legal system is like that of the United States. German youth have no other legal image, unless they are arrested. And then they ask to be read their rights and later ask for trial by jury, as if their system worked that way. There is a sentiment in Germany that more locally produced television police-court dramas are needed to create vaguely relevant images. Without the images, they cannot imagine themselves.

My own example of what I need in my environment is dialogue … while painting I like to play videos of documentaries, and while at home working each day I most often have either CBC Newsworld, CNN, or the Star Trek re-runs on the Space channel. Occasionally I’ll chose music, but not that often.