arts – Stumbling with Confidence

Revealing assessment through drawing

When leading workshops on assessment I often start with a ’warm-up’ exercise in which the participants, supplied with sheets of paper and plenty of coloured pens, are asked to draw/make marks on paper about how they feel in relation to assessment: as assessors or being assessed or both. They then share their work with the rest of the group and are given 30 seconds to describe/explain their drawing.

The task not only energises the room at the start of an intense few hours but is also very revealing about attitudes towards and feelings about assessment. It also puts paid to the idea that only some people are creative or can draw. No matter which disciplines are represented by the participants, there is always an interesting, revealing and creative response.

During Covid, the workshops went online and participants were asked to create their drawings then upload them together with their short commentary. These are just a few, published with permission, of the responses to the task.

Notes from the edge: piano lessons

I aim to play the piano most days, if I am near one. I work from home a great deal of the time, and I do a lot of writing. The work often involves some complex problems – large and small – that need to be addressed. When I am stuck, simply fed-up and frustrated or just need a break, I’ll go to the room with the piano and play for 10, 20, maybe 30 minutes. When I sit at the piano, I might choose to run through one or two of the classical pieces I’ve learned to play reasonably well over the years. Or I might choose a jazz or popular standard that I’ve picked up by ear, which involves a bit of improvisation in that sense of working relatively loosely within a recognised framework. I never play the same tune in exactly same way: but then, who does?

Usually I just place my hands on or over the keys, and I wait to see what happens. I have no idea of what is going to happen before it takes place. Something stirs. Something starts. A note or a chord is played. And off I go. Or off ‘it’ goes, because I feel I’m not in conscious control of my fingers. I am, of course, but it doesn’t feel that way.

David Sudnow, in his now classic work Ways of the Hand (1978) which is a remarkable insider’s account of learning to improvise jazz piano that was based mostly on his own introspection, describes having the most vivid impression of his hands making music by themselves. Sometimes, for me, it feels a bit awkward, as I travel down some musical cul-de-sac or find myself in a particular and sometimes too-familiar groove. Other times it just flows, I’m ‘in the zone’, and I know, especially when it really flows, that it clears and refreshes not only my mind but also my spirit.

In relation to ‘flow’ and Czikszentmihalyi’s influential work on that topic, we know that performances that combine flow states with a degree of risk taking might hold the key to achieving optimal levels of musical communication in improvisation. Being in the flow or ‘groove’ sometimes enables experienced improvisers to move beyond or extend their previous cognitive limits.

Sudnow uncovered many principles about learning, and particularly, what we might call embodied learning. His analysis and observations resonate powerfully with the work and research around creativity in learning and teaching, and what might be referred to as learning or teaching at the ‘edge of chaos’.

_{Photo by Paul Kleiman}

”It’s cheating Jim, but not as we know it”: the problematic arts of plagiarism

Recently, while the academic world attempts to negotiate its path through the minefield posed by Generative AI, I was looking at some university policies about academic integrity and stumbled across these two statements:

There are few intellectual offences more serious than plagiarism in academic and professional contexts.

To submit a paper or comparable assignment that is not truly the product of your own mind and skill is to commit plagiarism. To put it bluntly, plagiarism is the act of stealing the ideas and/or expression of another and representing them as your own. It is a form of cheating and a kind of scholastic and professional dishonesty which can incur severe penalties. It is important, therefore, that you understand what constitutes plagiarism, so that you will not unwittingly jeopardize your college career.

Reading those dire warnings about academic misconduct took me back to the now seemingly far off days when we obsessed about plagiarism and you couldn’t move for workshops and seminars on topics such as ‘Designing Out Plagiarism From Assessment‘. But it also reminded me that for anyone with an arts background or a knowledge of art, literature or music history, the idea of plagiarism as a black and white issue is an absurd idea. There’s a lot of grey.

Consider this famous engraving of ‘The Judgment of Paris’ by Raphael, created circa 1510-20, and pay particular attention to the group of three figures on the lower right. Do they remind you of anything?

Let’s now skip over the engravings made soon after by Raimondo (left) and Marco Dente da Ravenna (right)….

….and consider this famous painting from the 19th century.

As Manet’s figures are clearly based on the three figures in those engravings is the painting ‘truly the product of his mind and skill’?

But the chain of ‘borrowing’ continues. Picasso sees the Manet painting and creates this, at least acknowledging his immediate source (or at least the Musee Picasso is acknowledging the source)

Then, in 1981, this album cover appears:

Or consider these album covers and that university statement about there being ‘few intellectual offences more serious than plagiarism in academic and professional contexts.’

It seems clear, particularly in regard to art works, that a conception of the creative process that imagines that new works are original and autonomous may often be at odds with actual acts of creation that in many instances involve copying, directly referencing, adapting and other uses of existing works.

While some artists e.g. Manet and Picasso are lauded for their appropriation of previous art, the popular artist Jack Vettriano, who died recently, was frequently dismissed by the art establishment for being derivative and unoriginal (as well as popular!). The often quoted example is that the two dancing figures in his most famous work ‘The Singing Butler’ (section below) – the most popular art print in the UK – were virtually direct copies of the dancing figures from The Illustrator’s Figure Reference Manual.

In a number of disciplines and fields of study terms such influence, intertextuality, formulaic cultural production, appropriation and borrowing are important parts of the disciplinary discourse. In art and literary criticism, terms such as intertextuality, allusion, quotation, and influence are used, In musicology terms used to discuss relationships between musical texts include borrowing, self-borrowing, transformative imitation, quotation, allusion, homage, modeling, emulation, recomposition, influence, paraphrase, and indebtedness. Brahms, for example, openly admitted the strong influence of Beethoven. His First Symphony is sometimes referred to as ‘Beethoven’s Tenth’ and Brahms famously stated, “You have no idea how it feels to hear his footsteps constantly behind you.” In the context of plagiarism in popular music, the work of the forensic musicologist Joe Bennett is worth reading and listening to. One of the problems with identifying plagiarism is that, if and when it comes to court and as Bennett also makes clear in his work and research, what sounds superficially similar – certainly on first hearing – to a jury of ‘ordinary people’ is actually far more complex. Certain combinations of notes and chords are so ubiquitous across the musical landscape that they have become ‘commonplace’ items and are, in fact, common property.

As examples accumulate it becomes apparent, as Jonathan Lethem wrote in The Ecstasy of Plagiarism (2007) ‘that appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production.’

The final example, returning to the two images at the start, is the cautionary tale of a book cover from 1974 and a very large painting that was a Turner Prize finalist in 2000. The full story of the plagiarism furore it caused and the law suit that followed can be read here https://artquest.org.uk/artlaw-article/originality/ , but here are the bare bones.

In 1974, Robert Heinlein’s book ‘Double Star’ was published with a cover created by the sci-fi artist Anthony Roberts. In 2000, the artist Glenn Brown’s large painting ‘The Love of Shepherds’ was chosen as a finalist in that year’s Turner Prize. Brown frequently uses the work of other artists in developing his large-scale work and is known for the use of art historical references in his paintings (as did Manet and Picasso). Starting with reproductions from the works of other artists, his biography states that he “transforms the appropriated image by changing its colour, position and size”.

Anthony Roberts was alerted to the similarity with his own painting for the book cover after a visitor to the Turner Prize exhibition noticed the similarity and the story hit the headlines. Roberts sued Brown and eventually the case was settled out of court. The painting is now titled ‘The Love of Shepherds’ (after ‘Doublestar’ by Anthony Roberts).

When a university states that students must “understand what constitutes plagiarism, so that you will not unwittingly jeopardize your college career” perhaps they should clarify precisely what they mean. If they are referrring to plagiarism in a purely academic context i.e. writing essay, dissertations etc. then what is and is not plagiarism is, or should be clear. But beyond that, particularly in the areas of creative practices, we enter the ‘Grey Zone’, and we should be ensuring that understanding plagiarism also means enabkling students successfully and effectively to understand, appreciate and negotiate their way through that grey zone.

Beyond the Debatable Hills: is it curtains for the arts in education?

As yet another UK university announces major course closures and redundancies – mainly affecting arts and humanities – it’s worth being reminded that entries for A level arts subjects: dance, design & technology, drama, music among others, have reached the lowest since at least 2011.

Back in 2016 I presented at an arts conference and wrote an associated journal article ‘Predictive Texts’ that took a look into the future of the arts in the UK in 2026 based on the then current trends. I described a cultural landscape in which the arts had largely been stripped out of the educational experience of children and young people. I described the consequences of that policy on the live performing arts sector which was now being by-passed by a generation of students who had not received consistent, or in many cases any, arts education through primary and secondary education where the focus was on STEM education. I reflected on how that educational neglect had led to a kind of cultural blindspot or illiteracy which, in turn, had led to a severe decline in arts attendance as that generation of millenials now sought other avenues for their entertainment and spending.

There have been many dozens of articles written in the last few years voicing concern about state and future of the arts in the UK, particularly in education. Tory policy towards the arts threatened the existence of the entire creative sector, particularly those parts of the sector in which live performance is an integral part of their raison d’etre: live theatre, dance and music. Today, despite the change in government, almost daily there is news of another university cutting its creative and performing arts courses.

The decision to cut arts funding in higher education by the last Tory government signalled not only a drastic diminutions of the arts in education but also, as a consequence of this and other policies, an acceptance that whole sections of the creative sector could be allowed ‘go to the wall’ despite the fact that the sector as whole contributes massively to the GDP. The contrast with the then government’s support of the fishing industry, which played such a huge role in Brexit, is stark. At present fishing contributes around £1.4 billion to the economy (Gross Value Added data from the Office for National Statistics). The creative industries contribute around £124 billion to the economy (2022 figures)

While the election of the Labour Government and the accompanying positive statements about supporting the arts and creativity in education provide some indication of a change for the better (we’ll wait and see on that one), in the meantime a bleak future for the arts beckons. The creative industries are fed via a pipepline of skills and talent that are nurtured in our education system. By reducing or stopping the flow of creative talent along that pipeline ensures that the creative industries, and certainly those parts of the sector that are seen to be less ‘valuable’ in economic terms, wither on the vine. It also ensure that access to the arts and arts training increasingly becomes the preserve of the wealthy and privileged and those who have social, cultural and economic capital.

I am reminded of a sentence from the 2015 book by the eminent producer and impresario Michael Kaiser titled ‘Curtains? The Future of the Performing Arts in America’. Examining the trends, Kaiser describes a ‘doomsday scenario’ in which, across America, many theatres, arts centres and other performance venues, hit by the decline in audiences and/or funding, “sit vacant, reminders of a different era, not unlike the Colosseum in Rome and the Parthenon in Athens”. Kaiser was projecting some years into the future, but in the UK the Covid crisis massively accelerated the onset of that doomsday scenario.

Thinking about all this I was reminded of a book I read years ago, which remains one of my favourite books (it’s also on Neil Gaiman’s list of all-time favourites, so I’m in good company). The book is called Lud-in-the-Mist, written in 1926 by Hope Mirrlees. Mirrlees was a classicist, and much of her work dealt with the contested boundaries of Art and Life.

In Lud-in-the-Mist there are two countries. There is the land of Dorimare, a nation of stolid burghers, merchants and artisans. A rather prim and very proper place, where everyone knows their place, where the motto is essentially ‘it’s the economy, stupid’, and where the arts are relegated to activities such as needlework and country dancing: pursuits for the refinement of gentlewomen and gentlemen.

On the border of Dorimare, however, on the other side of the Debatable Hills, lies the land of Faerie, a strange, dark land full of mysteries and wonders…not all of them pleasant. The upright citizens of Dorimare so fear the land that lies beyond those dread hills, that the word ‘Faerie’ is never to be uttered.

Dorimare’s main city of Lud-in-the-Mist lies at the confluence of two rivers: the Dapple and the Dawl. The Dawl is like any other commercial river, but the Dapple happens to flow out of the land of Faerie, and brings with it fairy fruit, that is smuggled into Dorimare. Eating fairy fruit has a terrible effect on the upright citizens of Lud-in-the-Mist: it causes people to start singing strange songs, to spout poetry, to dance with abandon. In other words, it turns them mad.

The plot revolves around the disappearance of a group of young ladies and the Mayor’s son who have been kidnapped and taken to the land of Faerie, and the attempt of the Mayor, a bumbling, self-important, rather fatuous man to rescue them. (Any resemblance to a real persons is entirely coincidental). As a consequence of that quest, fundamental changes are wrought – to the Mayor and to Dorimare itself.

In Lud-in-the-Mist, Mirrlees is dealing with the division of the world into Apollonian and Dionysian aspects: the homely and the wild. There is also the long battle between Classicism and Romanticism, and Freud’s theories of the conscious and unconscious mind, and the relationship between terror and beauty.

The actor Mark Rylance, in an interview, said that the arts are essentially ‘mysterious’ which is why they frighten politicians and policy-makers, because they can’t control them, they can’t measure them.

I imagine the educational curriculum in Dorimare’s schools is very much what like the one demanded by Gradgrind in Dickens’ Hard Times;

“Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the mind of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.“

And if you think that’s rather extreme, consider this – handed to parents at a primary school in London:

‘The new programme of study in English is knowledge-based, this means its focus is on knowing facts rather than developing skills and understanding. It is also characterised by an increased emphasis on the technical aspects of language and less on the creative aspects.”

So, alongside schools dropping all ‘non-core’ subjects i.e. arts subjects and a few others from the school curriculum in order to enable students to catch-up on everything they missed due to Covid, we also had catastrophic cuts to arts subjects in higher education in line with the Tory government’s insistence that all higher education programmes must align with “economic and societal needs” – which the government believed will only be met by STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) programmes and some others such medicine and agriculture. One can only look with envy at the financial support some other countries are putting into supporting their creative and cultural sectors as they recognise the importance and value of those sectors to the well-being of society as a whole.

I was thinking about Lud-in-the-Mist because it seems to me we are increasingly living in a country which is becoming more Dorimare-like by the day, where the arts are increasingly banished to the equivalent of the land of Faerie, where creativity is associated with the creation of goods and wealth, where any hint of an artistic or genuinely creative spirit is dismissed as bad influence, and to be actively discouraged and eliminated.

Across our education system, from primary through to tertiary, there is now a very real danger, evidenced by the course and departmental closures and the significant drop in the take-up of arts subjects, of subjects like art, dance, drama and music disappearing entirely from the curriculum. The clear and present danger for the wider creative arts sector will be the cutting off the pipeline of interest, skills and talent on which the sector relies. We are facing the prospect, in many areas of the country, of the spectre of a cultural wasteland, not unlike Kaiser’s ‘doomsday’ scenario.

A hundred years ago, in Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirrless asked how might we truly embrace the arts in all their wondrous, dangerous, life-affirming glory along with the eccentrics and mavericks? Or are we fated to banish them, their works and deeds, to that strange, wonderful, forbidden land beyond the Debatable Hills?

The final, celebratory chapter of Lud-in-the-Mist, as the citizens of Dorimare throw open the gates of the city to allow those mysterious, dangerous, life-affirming Faeries to enter, provides the answer.

We’d never get away with it now!

6 problems and developing creative confidence in students

LIPA (Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts) welcomed its first students in 1996. In those early days, as a very rare brand new higher education institution, LIPA had many of the typical characteristics of a ‘start-up’: exciting, risk-taking, a bit of a roller-coaster. Looking back at that time, we were certainly operating on the edge of chaos.

I was Head of Performance Design and had designed and written most of the Performance Design curriculum. One of the things I was really keen on was the idea of ‘de-schooling’: getting the new first year students out of the more creativity inhibiting habits and expectations they had arrived with.

So, during induction week, alongside the usual introductory sessions, the handing out of timetables, module handbooks, etc., we set the students six visual ‘problems’ that they had to solve before the end of that first semester.

There were some interesting strings attached to that assignment:

the students were on their own, they could not discuss the problems with their fellow students or with any of their tutors
their work would not be assessed
all their ‘solutions’ would be shown in an exhibition at the end of the semester which would have a proper opening and an invited guest list.

A number of colleagues, when they heard about this, thought we were mad, confident that the students would never do it as it wasn’t being assessed.

The six problems included the following:

Create a self-portrait in any medium.
Create a map of how you get from your bed to the studio in the morning
Take three matchboxes and create an object or objects using all the contents and the boxes themselves
The Black Square Problem: using six black squares against a white ground illustrate a series of words e.g. chaos, love, kindness, growth etc.

(To be honest, nearly thirty years on, I can’t remember the other two problems! One, I think, was something to do with delineating space, and I have no idea what the sixth one was. I was hoping it might come to me as I was writing this).

The day the students came in to set up the exhibition was an extraordinary day. As each student brought in their work, their peers gathered round to see and discuss what was before them. The sense of collegiality and excitement was palpable as was the sense of creativity and imagination at play.

Some of those solutions remain clear in my mind to this day. Here are just three:

J., a German student who had grown up in East Germany before unification, had taken the three matchboxes. She had flattened out the three drawers and stuck them together to make a flat sheet. On the sheet, she had drawn three musical staves (five lines each) using the ends of some burnt matches. Then, using the matches as musical notes, she stuck them along the staves in such a way as to create the opening bars of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’. The remaining matches were stuck around the sheet to make a frame. Two of the outer matchbox containers were used as labels for the work. But where was the third? It was stuck on the back of the sheet and used to hang the sheet onto a hook on the wall.

(I know I have a photograph of it somewhere!)

C. had attached a very large, rectangle of black card on the wall. It was in landscape format and across the middle, horizontally, ran a c.4cm strip of paper which was covered in dozens of identical, narrow vertical stripes of red, orange, light blue and dark blue. It looked like a beautiful spectrogram. In the bottom right hand corner was written ‘C’s map’. I remember staring at this with a colleague and wondering what did this map represent. Eventually, we called C. over and asked her to explain. It turned out that she lived about 2 miles from LIPA and it was a very cold day when she started making the map. What she had done was to walk from her warm bedroom, through the cold streets to LIPA taking a temperature reading every 20m or so. The different colours represented different temperatures. Red/Orange = warm, Light Blue/Dark Blue=cool/cold. When we asked what the warm strip right in the centre was, C. answered that her measured steps had taken to her to a hot air outlet of a shop.

T. had really struggled with the Black Square problem. Just couldn’t get his head around it. Sitting at breakfast a day or so before the exhibition opening, he was pondering the problem to the extent that he forgot he’d put a slice of bread in the toaster. Suddenly out popped a square of blackened toast. It was one of those Eureka moments. T. had found his solution to the black square problem. His solution consisted of illustrating the words using a series of four pieces of square black toast stuck to the windows of the exhibition space.

The exhibition opening was a great success. All the students managed to produce a creative solution to each of the problems…some of them truly extraordinary. There were 2D works, 3D works, video, audio, animation. Some made one laugh. Others, particularly some of the self-portraits, were rather disturbing. The strange, bloodied doll in the box which had a peep hole haunts me still!

Art work. Wooden bok with peep hole. Through the peephole you see a doll sitting in the corner of the box, with a dribble of blood coming from her mouth.

All the art works were presented and lit beautifully. The purpose of the whole enterprise was, of course, nothing to do with the actual problems or the exhibition of work. It was all about confidence, enabling the students to realise that not only did they have some wonderful creative ideas but they could work on their own and create and produce wonder-full work.

The offer of the exhibition was key to getting the students motivated and committed to the project despite there being no assessment. The exhibition made it clear that we valued their ideas and the work they produced. Too often, work into which students have poured their heart and soul is simply handed in or submitted electronically without even a ‘thank you’. I recall one department in another institution where essays and dissertations were simply posted into a box fixed to the wall near the departmental office.

The six visual problems project demonstrated that if you create interesting assignments and make it clear that you really care about the work students produce, assessment isn’t a given. In recent decades, higher education has developed to the point where the culture is one of ‘if it moves, assess it!’. The solving and exhibiting of the six visual problems proved that need not, necessarily, always be the case.

Could we get away with it now?