| by: | Linda |
| to: | VL |
| date: | 4 June 2020, 9:00 AM |
| preliminary remark: | I got a question about reading suggestion in Mandarin from someone [a multi-lingual] who is preparing to write a thesis centered on children’s art-making: she is trying to prove that children’s paintings can be rightly considered as artworks. In order to do so, she needs to define what a work of art is, discuss how children paint, and determine if there is any intention behind their creative act, etc. |
You have picked a contentious philosophical / cognitive scientific / neuroscientific topic, I am afraid that there is not very much information available about children’s art-making process. Certainly not in Mandarin. Your best bet is in English (for scientific research) or French (for aesthetic / socio-historical discourse).
I can only provide some informations based on my personal reading and the aesthetics course I audited at McGill. I still have the course pack if you want to read the articles. To give you an introduction, read the following:
- Theory of Art (Wikipedia)
- The Definition of Art (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- History of the Ontology of Art (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good resource for philosophy, but it’s more difficult than Wikipedia to read.)
In the history of the philosophy of art (also called aesthetics), traditional philosophers didn’t focus on the definition of artwork; they simply assumed that readers knew ‘intuitively’ what a work of art was, and how such object differed from other materialised objects. Their point of interest leaned towards aesthetic experience / aesthetic emotion / aesthetic taste that the beholders had when encountering with an artwork. Example of these philosophers: Immanuel Kant; see his Critique of Judgment (1790) (a very challenging read).
While traditionally, an artwork is often intuitively regarded as an artefact that is created to evoke an aesthetic emotion towards the beautiful (you shouldn’t be surprised to know how many people equate art with beauty), since Romanticism onward, intention of the artist has come into play; Western artists have become to some extent self-centered (not necessarily in the pejorative sense of the word). Something is an art when it externalises the depth of the creator’s inner state. Later, the ‘intuition’ about artworks shifts to that something becomes an art when someone has the intention to call it or make it into an art. The most notorious embodiment of the last approach to art in the history is perhaps — you certainly have seen it — Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ (1917).
It is only until recently — until the second half of the last century — that a number of philosophers began to provide an ontology of art before discussing anything else aesthetically related, and to answer how we should distinguish art from non-art (in philosophy, this is called a demarcation problem). Ontology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the concept of being. A typical ontological question is in the form of ‘What is something?’ Ontologists try to provide a set of necessary and sufficient conditions by which this something can be defined. For example, consider the following question: ‘What is science?’ A possible and widely accepted answer would be ‘the study of universe in the form of empirically testable explanations and predictions’. Then pure maths that results from a series of deductions of formal logic cannot be considered a science under this definition.
For a more thorough exposition of different trends of thoughts in aesthetic, see George Dickie’s Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach (1997).
Note that an ontology is hardly ever all-encompassing in itself; new artworks or discoveries keep challenging the consensus that people have agreed upon for a certain period of time. A definition can be overturned by the emergence of a counterexample. Recall how Romantic art overturned the ‘imitation theory’ that had governed the (Western) artworld until the 19th century. This theory states that an artwork is an imitation of life and the observable reality, and applies namely to representational art. Then came along the ‘expression theory’ that defines art as an expression of emotions in the language of imagination, which a surprisingly large number of common folks today still hold central to their idea of art and artistic practice, though from which scholars have moved away for about a century.
Dickie himself considers art as an institutional concept that involves a social institution, an artworld: something is considered an art because some people in the artworld — artists, art critics, art dealers, museum curators, etc. — call it art, be it a Raphael masterpiece, Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, or John Cage’s 4’33”. Artworks in the contemporary sense have grown into a sea of manifold bewilderment with new genres, art-forms, and styles being developed. They need not be made by the artist herself; they can be readymades. They need not exclusively be inanimate objects; they can — controversially — involve dead and living animals as in Damien Hirst’s ‘One Thousand Years’ (1990).
Suggested reading: George Dickie, ‘What is Art?: An Institutional Analysis‘ (1979).
Definition of artwork aside, I think your quest requires strenuous elaboration to ripen into a well-written thesis, because first, the qualification of ‘children’ poses a problem. Who are they and what do their works share in common to deserve an independent categorisation? Common sense tells us to differentiate children from adults by age and level of expertise, with children under a certain age producing works characterised by spontaneity, untutored rawness and lack of sophistication. However, there exist child prodigies capable of technical brilliancy that is rarely observed in ordinary children. You will have little trouble justifying the artistic merit of a piece composed by the 5-year-old Mozart, which is rightly regarded by the general public as an artwork, whereas a song whimsically invented by my friend’s 5-year-old daughter may not meet so universal an opinion.
Then you may define children artists by technical immaturity to rule out the extreme cases of artistic genius. You may be on the right track, for during the past few decades, there has been a growing curatorial interest in outsider / naïve / folk art by people who have no formal training in art (or at least, so they claim), and indeed, their works exhibit little mastery of techniques compared with mainstream insider art. Unlike children’s art, this area has received considerable attention in recent scholarship. The first person who championed outsider art, or Art Brut, is Jean Dubuffet, but his definition is often viewed by his critics as too narrow to the point of making such an art a myth. You may read Roger Cardinal’s Outsider Art (1972) for a more generalised version of Art Brut and its defence based on the expressional ground that traces back to the Romanticists. McGill professor David Davies who taught the aesthetic course is an expert in the philosophical debate about the artistic statue of outsider art.
Now that suppose you have delineated a general portrait of children artists you want to study, your challenge, I think, is to demonstrate their intention. The question you need to answer if you choose to explore the intention of the artist in the creative act of presenting something is: Do children intend to make art?
It is my personal conviction that children are capable of coming to the resolution that ‘I am going to create a work of art’, and of having an intuitive though largely inarticulate understanding of what they are doing, but I am not too sure if there is a scientific consensus about the age starting from which human beings develop necessary cognitive awareness in art-making (not the technical skill at, say, executing a painting, though they often go hand in hand). Just like research into other high-level cognitive process such as moral decision making, if there be any scientific attempt at understanding children’s creative process, the research is likely far from being conclusive. The main challenge about answering how a cognitive skill occurs is that it evolves and matures over time and its development has a complex relationship with the child’s upbringing. Maybe you should just avoid delving into the cognitive part of the art-making altogether.
Lastly, I want to remind you that every definition of art — imitational, expressional, formal, institutional, etc., or you can invent a new definition of your own — is bound to have its constraints. No definition (outside of the realm of mathematics of course, ha ha) is perfect or can be applied to every sort of artwork. In defining (demarcating) something, you inevitably leave out something else. Take the institutional definition of art as an example. The British autistic child Iris Grace (or rather, sometimes her parents on behalf of her) has demonstrated acts of creating, selling, exhibiting painting of hers, therefore her works can be deemed art according to the artworld professionals. If you accept this explanation, you automatically rule out all other sorts of children’s paints on canvas / papers that are not sold or exhibited as art. Isn’t it a bit pretentious to say so? (It’s like saying only the sort of maths done by professional mathematicians is maths; rudimentary arithmetic done by common folks isn’t (applied) maths.)
As for aesthetic resource in Mandarin, I know only this book:
The author has written about ‘Chinese aesthetics’ (華夏美學) but I am not sure if it is relevant to your quest.
Linda
P.S. I am a formalist in aesthetics.
P.P.S. I who never gotten an university degree am advising someone on how to write a thesis!
(I posted this letter onto my Facebook and got a wealth of insights from my friends. I wrote the following note on 8 June 2020.)
On a side note, I should like to clarify that by mentioning outsider / naive / folk art, I didn’t mean to assert that children’s ‘art’ is a special case of this art. I merely meant to illustrate how problematic an attempt at finding a definition can be, since a definition can be too broad so as to include everything or too narrow so as to exclude everything.
The label ‘folk artist’ taken broadly by those who label themselves as such can simply mean that one has no formal training in art. Some scholars have argued that this definition is too broad. Jean Dubuffet’s definition of Art Brut involves social isolation and creative execution in complete isolation from external cultural influences. This leads to its application to works produced by those who suffer from marginalisation such as the mentally ills living most of their life in mental institutions. Critics have argued that this definition is too narrow, as it is impossible for anyone to be totally devoid of any influence from other(s). I can only think of the (fictional) example of Tarzan who meets this criterion. Is what he made in the African jungle art? (Why not Robinson Crusoe on a desert island before the arrival of Friday? Because he was brought up in a human society.)
Moreover, I just thought about a potential problem for the definition of children’s ‘art’ to rely solely on the lack of formal training. It’s not that ordinary children receive no training in art — many of them actually do take art lessons, not just those who are on their way of becoming an insider of mainstream artworld with specialised training — but rather, that they haven’t developed sufficient cognitive / physical ability at executing their art. We can also ask: considering those who later become professional artists, do their works produced during the formative years of their life works of art? Or, are these, as someone told me, ‘just practices / exercises’?
Everyone seems to have her own opinion on how to categorise art / non-art (or great / minor work of art), and on the last question I side with E. who would say that these are surely artworks.
LINDA’S ARTWORLD 