Glenn, thanks for the link to the Currie paper on Art, the Mind and the
Brain. I read it and Cynthia's paper, she posted the link earlier, to get a
sense of what the two of you were talking about.
I agree with you that the Art, Mind, Brain paper is vague. Personally, I
don't mind reductionistic approaches if there is data, but the paper didn't
have enough grounding for me to find it useful. A few thoughts, and I
suspect people might take issue with some of them.
Like Currie, I find much of the analytical literature re imagination
somewhat unilluminating. I've taken to disliking the word as a result --
but I don't find his solutions perceptive. To the degree that I understand
them, they seem to be too broad and philosophically based. Admittedly, I
have looked at very little material.
I found the references to autism particularly narrow because he is adopting
a 'narrative' approach and people with autism often are visual thinkers in a
way he does not seem to grasp. Temple Grandin, a successful autistic woman
with a PhD in Animal Science, speaks about her experience in her well
written book _Thinking in Pictures_. The chapter on autism and creativity
is especially worth looking at because she discusses the evidence that many
exceptional scientists say they, too, were visual thinkers. Her book
_Emergence: Labeled Autistic_ tells her story and I think indirectly has
raises some questions re Currie's assumptions regarding what visual thinking
is. By the way, if her name isn't ringing a bell, you probably know her
from Oliver Sacks' work. She is his Anthropologist from Mars.
>From Cynthia's piece I get the impression that Currie does not accept film
as a language, but does see it as a form of communication. What puzzles me
is why being a form of communication isn't enough? Can't it simply be its
own language? I guess I agree with Glenn here. It seems to me that a
'language' need not be word-based and narrative, assuming this is what you
meant Glenn.
Cynthia speaks of the view that a film has a language and we must somehow
read or decode this language. While I agree with Currie's that this
perspective leaves something out, I don't think I share his rationale. I
also think that when he says that it is imagination that is missing he is
falling into a morass since no one can say what imagination is.
>From my perspective, he is right that the decoding view' is problematic. I
believe this is because it is only a spectator perspective and the actual
creativity that brings the film forth seems to be ignored here. But
imagination simply does not cover the quality of attention and whatever that
was involved in first learning and then speaking the language that would
make a film successful. By the way, it is when art historians and critics
discuss art as something that we must decode that I tend to feel the same
way. It is precisely at this point where I find myself wondering if they
have lost touch with the elements that cannot be narratively defined in an
artistic product. Am I missing something, Cynthia?
One more thought. I would be interested in hearing about how musicians, for
example, might interpret ideas about 'narrative.' Anyone what to take a
stab at this? I think it is probably assumed that music has 'language,'
whatever that means. Still, as a visual artist, I am quite aware that
optical and narrative are different domains -- and it seems that the
tensions between visual and narrative approaches could not be translated
into a discussion about music. Does one speak of 'narrative' and 'aural'
tensions in music? If so, how? Everything that comes to mind seems only to
underline how ignorant I am in this area.
Amy
___________________________________________
Amy Ione
PO Box 12748
Berkeley, CA 94748-3748 USA
Phone: 1 (510) 548-2052
Fax: 1 (510) 548-2054
email: ione@lmi.net
URL: http://users.lmi.net/ione
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