Building a flying machine

—Creativity—

Here's a good analogy for some aspects of the creative process.

Suppose you wanted to make a flying machine. You might start by emulating a bird and you might construct a vehicle with flapping wings. And people might call you a moron and you might feel like an idiot because the thing looks like a bird but doesn't fly at all. Eventually you might get it to work a little, but not much.

Sooner or later, however, you make some adjustments and now the wings are static and the airplane is invented. You started with the idea of the bird, but what you really needed to make was an airplane. Yet, you had no idea what an airplane was in the beginning. So you had to start with the bird, even though you couldn't really make a mechanical bird

The interesting thing is that, in the final product, the bird is there after all. The airplane has wings. People say it looks like a bird. But you had to focus on the lift and the soaring of the bird and find a different way to propel the craft. It had to be kind of like a bird, but its own thing. The flying machine you finally invent does share attributes with birds, but obviously not all of their attributes.

Art is similar. You start with a strong idea, like the idea of the bird. You try hard. You try too hard. The idea is too prevalent, too prominent, too central. You work too literally around the idea. And the result is very weak art. It just doesn't work. It won't fly.

But then, through the process of working out what works and what doesn't, through this process of elimination, you end up somewhere just a little to the left of where you started. You arrive at something you couldn't have predicted, but which, undeniably, satisfies your initial goals. Like the bird in the airplane, the idea is intact, integrated in a way you had not expected, and you could not have foreseen.

Process and product

—Creativity—

How we love to tear reality into two pieces and color these pieces as extreme opposites. In art-education parlance, process is on the good side and product is on the bad side—particularly for teaching the youngest artists. But I don't see it this way.

As an art educator, I've seen this dyad at its extremes, and my feeling is that both process and product are equally important, but at their extremes are pretty useless. That's because process should be the way to get to a product. Without a product, process is aimless noodling. Without a process, product is mindless mimicry.

Now, I should immediately define my terms and differentiate my concept of process and product from the way they are conventionally understood. For me, process in art is a series of actions taken to achieve a finished, public artwork. Product is that artwork. I don't practice or teach art as an isolated personal activity performed entirely for one's own enjoyment. That might be part of it, but in my thinking, art is communication and that involves a work that is finished and then shared through display. This is just one approach, but I believe it works. As a counterexample to my uses of process and product, I offer a couple ways I've seen other teachers focus exclusively on one or the other, to my horror and, I believe, to the disservice of the student. I admit these are extremes, but I was there and I was required to participate.

Picture the creative arts day care that favors process. These teachers see process as experimentation. Children's self-esteem requires that they direct their own activity and the important thing is that we give them room and freedom to explore their materials. For example, we will remove most of their clothing and let them get paint and other materials all over their bodies. They can scramble all over huge sheets of paper together in collaboration. They won't take the result home, but I have them hang it in their class space to share. We let them discover by experience how paint feels, how it sticks, how it smears and mixes. Some of the materials we give them won't make conventional art. We foam them up from head to foot with shaving cream and let them explore tactile qualities knowing that it is impossible to make any product of it. We let them build sculptures and knock them down again and again.

None of this is without value and some of it is essential. But what is missing is the sense that, ultimately, art is about communicating with other people through display. I don't believe it is harmful to start teaching this early. If a child is old enough for art, he or she is old enough to conceive of process as leading to a conclusion, regardless of how permanent or public it is. An extreme concept of process favors a particularly contemporary attitude of instant gratification and self-indulgence that is not really in tune with art-making. At an extreme, it completely ignores the existence of rules in art, natural or human-made and misses the point of communication. The only argument I can see for this type of process-oriented pedagogy is that it is age-appropriate for very young children. I disagree entirely with that argument, however, and later in the post I will offer an example from my own childhood to argue against a pedagogy that favors process to the exclusion of product.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, however, let's look at the most problematic kind of product-oriented pedagogy I've seen. We've all experienced the activity that starts with a paper plate in front of every chair filled with an array of pieces of construction paper, cotton balls, pipe cleaners, and tongue depressors. Some of the pieces are traced out and cut in advance by the teacher. This is the enemy that process-oriented educators see when we utter the word product. But this is an extreme way of teaching art, however common it is. Look at what we start with: every seat has the exact same array of objects, down to the same colors. The object of this game is for every student to carefully follow the directions that result in a complete object that Mom will love to put on the refrigerator. It is extremely important for every child to write his or her name neatly on the finished project. This is because the child will hardly be able to tell their's from the other children's, or even if they can, the teacher won't be able to.

But what are these kids signing off on when they lay that signature down? Forcing a child to take authorship for something he or she didn't really create is only half an art activity and yet people love to do this. Some people will explain that it's the best way to teach little children, saving more creativity for adult classes. The only argument I can conceive of for this type of product-oriented pedagogy is that it teaches the student to take concrete steps and that there needs to be a process to follow in order to accomplish something. But I disagree entirely with that argument (and I imagine more sinister or at least lazy reasons for the activity, anyway). And now it's time to share an example from my own childhood to argue for a pedagogy of process and product that utilizes a balance of individual creativity, teacher-directed rules, personal preference, and a concrete audience.

When I was a child, we had a holiday tradition in our home that has affected me greatly as an artist. Every year, in those days, we would receive scores of Christmas cards from friends and family and at the end of the season the used cards went in a box for the next year. A month or so before Christmas, we would excavate this box and another box of supplies and tackle the annual ritual of making hand-made Christmas cards for our own recipients out of recycled commercial holiday cards. The trick was to cut out words and pictures from the old cards and rearrange them into our own unique creations. Part of the fun was picking the cards to start with. Looking through the old cards, one was able to imagine possibilities and try them out. We had to share diplomatically since we would all end up with unique material to work with. In the event that there were duplicate cards, two of us could come up with unique responses to the same material. This is another interesting difference between our experience and the extremes I cited above: our experience reinforced group dynamics, while the first two extreme examples I related offer little development in collaborative skills.

Mom had showed us several methods that we all used. First of all, we had a way of folding and gluing a sheet of construction paper into a card. Secondly, we employed a method of gluing glitter. We also had a formula for making an envelope out of more construction paper. I'm sure we had other tricks of the trade that Mom had learned herself or had invented, and the kids probably came up with some tricks of our own. The cutting up of old cards involved pretty universal methods for cutting—although one of us is left-handed—but the way we extracted the images from the cards was all our own. Mom gave us no rules for how we composed our creations, other than that they had to be mailable.

This yearly project was a perfect recipe for teaching creativity. We had a process that was open-ended to an extent, but had the kinds of limitations that help us focus and problem-solve. We had some rules to follow and freedom to imagine our own creations, too. And we returned to this project again and again, through two decades of our collective childhoods. To this day, I am convinced that my creative process is informed by these early experiences every Christmas. From a very early age, I created product with my family and it didn't hurt me one bit.

Product is an essential conclusion to the creative process. When we made these Christmas cards, one of the foremost thoughts in our minds was about how the recipients would view them. Audience was an essential element of the process because, as we created, we played the role of the recipient in our minds as we played the role of the artist with our hands and eyes. Children love to share their art with others. In fact, they hardly have any interest in keeping it for themselves until they are older. This supports the idea that young children are more concerned with process, even as it supports the conclusion that children practice communication through the sharing of meaningful visual objects.

Some teachers will use modern artists as examples of process over product, which simply isn't true. Picasso and Van Gogh were extremely serious about their products and it is a misconception that their art is entirely personal and lacks academic convention. Where would anyone get such an idea if they were really looking at the art by these artists? And yet I just saw a show of Van Gogh's work in which the wall text exclaimed surprise at the careful compositions where a fury of emotional activity was expected! What damage have we've done to our ideas of creativity through our collective conceit of process as wild emotion? We value personal expression. This is fine. But the idea of process as loose emotion that we've shamelessly projected back upon the earlier modernists (let alone the later ones with the moniker Abstract Expressionist) is one that some educators now impose unquestioningly upon our children in the names of freedom and self-expression.

We live in a world in which most people survive, somehow, with little understanding of process. I encounter this all the time. Adults don't understand how most things work, they don't understand the steps required to accomplish things, and they constantly miss the big picture. We aren't doing people favors teaching them that process is a self-absorbed activity that has nothing to do with other people or with a successful product, let alone composition. But we also live in a very conventional society that, for all its emphasis on self-interest, doesn't reward those who leave the path we've beaten down into quagmire. We aren't doing people any favors if we don't teach that personal creativity is part of a social equation.

Depth in meaning cannot come about from pure process. Engaging in process alone won't require that others (or even the artist) understand it. And an uncreative product, devoid of a personal method, also has no depth of meaning because it just reiterates the same tired clichés. Only through a balance of convention and personal expression can deeper meaning be constructed and shared. This is essential, I believe, for the best art education as I practice it just as it is essential for my practice of art making.