Abstract Expressionism

“Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris….”

Jackson Pollock, No. 5, 1948, oil on fiberboard

As my time spend working on our home becomes more manageable, I find myself once again turning to the joy of art. For years I’ve wanted to practice art again. In a way, I always have, from works of architecture, to writing, art can be many things. However, the real practice of art for me, is to be unencumbered by needs, wants, or even desires. It just needs to happen. And to make it happen artistically in a way I like, it needs to ‘feedback upon oneself’ – where the artist enters into a conversation if you like, with the work being undertaken.

This post is really a way for me to get to grips with some ideas as I start to experiment. In particular, I like the idea of letting the medium nurture the nature of the work, and in this respect I have been drawn to understanding some of the basic fundamentals behind:

Abstract Expressionism is an overtly expressive form of free painting style, as developed by American painters Jackson Pollock who ‘dismantled and redefined modernist painting’, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the 1940s and 1950s.

On the recent contemporary scene – the featured image is a work by Gerhard Richter, taken at the Tate Modern last year. Richter shows how paint can be used to develop texture, using a technique he developed and made his own. Each artist has their own ‘discovered method’ to painting, using the action of painting to create the wok of art through manifesting a certain aspect of the medium itself. This kind of painting is made by the group who are called action painters. My own approach to abstract expressionism is in keeping with the recognised field of:

Action Painting

To get an understanding of abstract expressionism also requires understanding the different types of painting from which it is derived, in particular ‘action painting’. The term was coined by Harold Rosenberg in his (groundbreaking) article The American Action Painters published in ARTnews in December 1952. Action painters worked in the post war period until the 1960’s, using paint with splashing, gestural brushstrokes and dripping paint onto canvas rather than carefully applying it. See Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock.

Artists who practice action painting can ‘nurse the canvas’ as Richter does, or they can attack it with expressive brush strokes or mark-making, making real the ‘expression of paint dynamics’, what the Tate Modern calls ‘the impression of spontaneity’.

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On the featured image: ‘In The Studio’ series

The featured image is chosen for an invisible reason – Richter was inspired by the experimental composer John Cage. Since the early 80’s, he undertook a series of abstract works allowing earlier moments in the paintings creation to be revealed, the finished work composed of layers of painting in time. Richter listened to the music of Cage as painted each work in the series. Links between the work and the music are loose, letting the inspiration of Cage’s approach to ambient and silent sound move the artist onwards.

 

 

Artistic Directions 1: Ymir

The time has come to make real the ideas I’ve had for a very long time to produce a series of works of art interpreting Nordic Mythology. First to be worked will be Ymir, the ancestor of all jötnar (mythic gods). Ymir was the ‘first being’ who was created from ice (Niflheim) and fire (Muspelheim). All of this happened at the beginning of creation, in the in-between of eternity and time, before the existence of the Earth. Ymir has been called the first being being neither male or female, yet containing elements of the masculine and the feminine.

Ymir birthed the male and the female, and in doing so, can be said to have created the organic whole of man, woman, and the world they inhibit that contains both. Ymir’s process of creation is threefold. Related to Ymir is the famous Odin, to be the subject of the next work of art.

Ymir came to his end through malice aforethought, confronting the gods and their offspring who came into being after Ymir had already taken form. Buri (created after Ymir), is often acknowledged as the first of the Norse gods, and it was through his son Bor, through allegiance with one of Ymir’s descendants Bestla, that Odin was created as one of three sons – Ve, Vili, and Odin. Ymir came to his end through the intervention of these three brothers. These three gods created the earth from Ymir’s fallen body, his blood accounting for the seas and oceans, while his bones made up the rocks and mountains. His hair was used for the trees, his skull transformed into the sky and heavens, and his brains became the clouds in the sky. It was however Ymir’s eyebrows that fashioned Middle Earth – Midgard – the  realm of mankind, and of Elves, as we know from the work of J.R.R. Tolkien.

To follow will be Ve and Vili after Odin.

 

Imagineering

“As numerous philosophers from John Locke to Ludwig Wittgenstein have remarked, animals live entirely in the here and now. Humans by contrast, have broken free of the tyranny of the moment. We have a consciousness that can wander about, thinking back to review memories from our past, or thinking forwards to imagine how life might be in the future… there is no reason to suppose that a monkey ever sits around mulling over the story of its life.”

John McCrone – quoted from: Going Inside. A Single Moment of Consciousness

Imagineering is a registered trademark of the Walt Disney Company. Disney was absorbed by developing the creative process in teams. Teams were connected around collective interaction, playing three distinct roles, each involving a different way of thinking and doing that connected people together no matter what kind of role they adopted based on three archetypes.

History

Imagineering is the implementing of creative ideas into practical form: A concept brought into being through combining the words imagination and engineering that builds bridges between ‘the imagination and reality’. While we know of imagineering from it’s use in connection with Walt Disney, the word actually originates from the US aluminium manufacturing company Alcoa from around 1940. The term appeared in a number of publications such as urban design, geography and politics, evolutionary economics, corporate culture and futures studies.

Wiki tells us that following World War II, Alcoa created an internal ‘Imagineering’ program to encourage innovative usage of aluminum in order to keep up demand. Other notable pre-Disney usages include an October 24, 1942 mention in the New York Times in an article titled ‘Christian Imagineering’, a 1944 Oxford English Dictionary entry which cites an advertisement from the Wall Street Journal, and the use by artist Arthur C Radebaugh to describe his work, which was mentioned in the article ‘Black Light Magic’ in the Portsmouth Times, Portsmouth, Ohio, 1947:

“IMAGINEERING is what artist Arthur C. Radebaugh calls his work. He concedes that such designs as the helicopter landing field above provide only the nuclei of ideas which must be transmitted into workable plans by skilled engineers.”

It is also interesting to note that this 20^th mindset relates breakthrough ideas to a profession.

Other early usage includes Richard F Sailer’s 1957 article “BRAINSTORMING IS IMAGINation enginEERING” written for the National Carbon Company Management Magazine, and reprinted by the Union Carbide Company.

WED Enterprises applied for a trademark for the term in 1967, claiming first use in 1962.

Disney and Imagineering

Disney spent a lot of effort developing the roles and finding the right balance, so creativity was connected and coordinated into a whole of action and response, developing the ‘correspondence between different points of view’:

Creativity as a total process involves the coordination of these three subprocesses: dreamer, realist and critic. A dreamer without a realist cannot turn ideas into tangible expressions. A critic and a dreamer without a realist just become stuck in a perpetual conflict. The dreamer and a realist might create things, but they might not achieve a high degree of quality without a critic. The critic helps to evaluate and refined the products of creativity.

Source: Robert B. Dilts, Strategies of Genius: Volume 1.

We can look at all of the imagineering roles as different disciplines – as a series of stages adopting a different persona to be able to seek for the best, make it happen and test everything we hold to be dear, so we’re not falling into the trap of ‘chasing our darlings’. There is also a wonderful creative aspect to being ‘in the groove’ that is so captivating. With reference to Disney:

When Walt was deep in thought he would lower one brow, squint his eyes, let his jaw drop, and stare fixedly at some point in space, often holding the attitude for several moments … No words could break the spell.

Source: Ollie Johnstone and Frank Thomas, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation

The Three Imagineering Archetypes

The Dreamer: The visionary who dreams up products where the sky is the limit. Defining the desirable.

The Realist: The producer role, making things happen by taking what the dreamer has produced and making it feasible.

The Critic: The evaluator who finds faults if necessary to improve on what the dreamer and the realist have passed on down the chain making it viable.

The Dreamer – desirability

The dreamer role is all about being visionary, about opening to possibility, pushing the conventions of real life to one side for a moment in order to capture the desirable. It works with the drive and passion of generating great ideas without being restricted by ‘conventional’ thinking, thinking out of, not inside the box.

Dreamer questions:

What do we want?

What is the best solution?

How can we imagine something bigger and better?

What is the greatest benefit we can envision?

The Realist – feasibility

Later, when we have allowed ourselves the luxury of not being tied by more mundane matters, we can take a step back and assess what we have done. Only by capturing something, can we improve on it, forming it to context, shaping content in terms of the pieces from which it is also composed. This is the ‘planning’ style of thinking, of seeing what stages need to be accomplished to make it happen devising plans according to, ‘is it possible?’ Realists work with plans, action plans and asks the questions:

How can we make the idea work?

What do we need to do?

What actions do we need to undertake?

How long do we have?

How can we evaluate if we are on track?

The Critic – viability

When we think product, content or process is defined in sufficient detail, we can evaluate what we have done, prepared to be as critical as possible in order to improve on what we have done, and/or define it in greater detail so it conforms to the needs of a particular context, making it probable. The critic looks for barriers that have to be overcome, constraints that have to be met. Teams make constructive criticisms of the dreamers ideas and the realists plans, seeking to develop a final solution by asking:

What is wrong with what we have done?

Is anything missing?

Can anything be improved?

Is anything getting in the way of making it happen?

What are the weakest points we can find?

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 Image credit: Joe Penniston

Natural Born Creators

In the Canadian TV documentary from 2015, The Great Human Odyssey, we are presented with the story about how humans are natural born creators. So it may still come as surprise to some, that creativity lies at the very centre of what it means to be human. All of this came about in the distance past, where rapid changes to climate and the effects of climate on topography, represented a constantly shifting threat to our existence. The series highlights those threats and how the shift in landscape, from wet to dry and back again, from pasture to wasteland, how fertile pastures came and went, all defined an arena for early man was forced to learn and adapt to shifting patterns of weather. The point is made that it is the environment that provides the conditions for learning, learning being the means for survival. The only way we could survive, was harnessing that learning as a process of invention – discovering and inventing artifacts that enabled us to move beyond the reach of the hostile environment. In turn, this enabled us to settle new lands, creating more tools and founding communities that put those tools to use. So in a sense, we are natural born creators and – innovators.

The series also tells us, that of all the early branches of advanced primates, only one branch out of a whole tree of different species was able to adapt itself and be able to survive. At one point in time, mankind was reduced down to just 600 individuals, an endangered species on the brink of extinction, close to the end of the great human journey even as it began. Our survival, according to latest scientific and archaeological research, suggests now that the key to survival lay in learning, and applying that learning in envisioning what could happen in the future.

As children, creativity is all around us. We need turn no farther than looking at our children to see how valid an argument this really is. Play is about being creative. All children play, not for the sake of being creative, but to learn to interact with the world. In ‘The future of Learning’ by the Lego Foundation, the future of learning is creative learning, fostering confidence on a journey towards mastery:

“Learning is a process where knowledge is created through the transformation of experience”

In the search for meaning, Lego describe the skill, the will and the thrill of learning. This places emphasis on the need to be able to reflect upon own abilities, to be aware of own competences and work out the best ways to learn new things (the skill). It also needs motivation that comes from new experiences and new ways to exchange ideas (the will), so learning becomes enjoyable and rewarding (the thrill). 

So next time, if someone was to ask me: ‘Innovation, I’m hearing that word a lot, what does it mean?’ I can say, ‘It means we’ve forgotten who we are and we’re doing our best to get back to our natural state again by being prepared to experience in new ways.’

We are all natural born creators. in a world that has rationalised the free nature of creativity out of our ‘training’ to interact with a world based on the application of logic, sequential actions, rational argument, analytical thinking. We are also waking up to the fact that, we need to adapt to more creative modes in order to address the complexity and chaos of a world that no longer follows the rational, ordered, progressional and to be quite frank, creatively dead methods of intellectual inquiry, all of which has come to become the dominant paradigm for education that continues today.

Towards an Integrated Practice of Innovation

Innovators on multidisciplinary projects are increasingly removed from a personal contact with outcome:

Innovation management levels of communication fail to be communicated to the production levels of service responsibility.

Many different aspects and levels of complexity are involved in an ‘integrated practice of innovation’, and that combining these various aspects effectively constitutes a new paradigm for innovation by design:

> project products (and design projects) must be (described and) designed on the basis of an appropriate quality-orientation, risk assessment and roles and responsibilities assigned in line with the hierarchies of involvement from team to direction. Fragmented.

> the creative process has to develop within a framework applicable to collaborative multidisciplinary teams, and that the process is appropriately formalised to this end.

> designers must learn to work more systematically and engineers more creatively in line with the above – while also navigating the increasing tendency to disseminate core ideas across the business-do supply chain.

The problem with the practice of innovation in real settings, is thus the often chaotic and fragmentary nature of coordinating the flow of information from the conceptual to the specific, from the soft to the hard. The conceptual phase has continued along traditional paths whilst additional hierarchies of design and innovation complexity have entered into the equation, together with conflicting interests and protective practices. Decisions made at the early stage of the process sets the scene for the development of the project as a whole, where any representation of design is just a snap-shot in this dynamic exchange.

conceptual operational distinctions

To develop these issues a conceptual-operational distinction has to be made. A first step is to formulate the right questions:

> How can we methodologically communicate a concept for innovation as something that can embed information within the knowledge that fosters innovation?
> How can we use our tools in this communication in a product and service-networked understanding of the innovation process?

A fundamental, networked basis for knowledge-managed innovation has yet to be provided. For this provision to be actual, a fundamental understanding is required of how different aspects to design and innovation can be treated and related to one another. This approach is based on the examination of:

(1) – Defining a fundamental structure for relating the outcomes and processes of design.

(2) – Defining the relationship between the construction of  information and its structure

(3) – Understanding how the systematic and structured processes of innovation can provide support for the ‘expert’ knowledge- networked service.

(4) – Understanding how the essential creative core processes employed in innovation and design and their potential in constructing and structuring information from design knowledge can be formalised.

(5) – Defining the key theoretical relationships between the above that could make it possible to integrate design outcome and Design practice as a universal basis for development.

composition decomposition

Composition Decomposition is used in this respect as Lakatos’ ‘hard core’ hypothesis. This is based on the supposition that a innovation design, as an ‘operational decomposition’, needs to define itself in terms of its ‘conceptual composition’. The relationship between the values in a composition and the decomposition into services and products orders the construction and structuring of information. A back-to-first-principles approach is therefore adopted that interprets the title ‘Composition Decomposition’. Here the design process itself, as a specific application of innovation practice, is examined as a twin cycle of simultaneous composition and decomposition employing different levels of information by abstraction. Specifically, how an information model environment defines the reasons for objects, as well as the objects themselves .

New Creativity Paradigms Required

While many projects of innovation today can be argued to support a knowledge-based paradigm change, the implementation of such paradigms has also required the abandonment of old ones, hence perhaps, the reluctance to accept new thinking and technology. This author whilst valuing such projects, also is critical of them. They examine too selectively an ‘information dimension’ that simply does not define, or appreciate the human-based context of ‘designing & innovating’. Creativity as an area of research is in these terms becoming increasingly significant and could be critical for applicability for much future research.

Innovate, or Become the Dog That Was…

In the fourteenth century it became high fashion for towns in Europe to invest in clockwork technology. The clocks were normally installed in church towers, to be seen all over town. They were built on the premises by clockwork makers, who usually stayed on to manage the clockwork maintenance, and in the process educate their sons in the trade…

Being a successful technology, clocks spread throughout Europe, turning clockwork makers into a powerful and respected profession. But the success of the technology encouraged its development, and gradually the technology changed its nature. Home clocks and personal clocks (watches) were introduced and became a great success. The sheer volume of production made the craftsmen obsolete, replacing them with an industrialised production process. Decentralised, widespread use of clocks turned the town clock into more of a symbolic than a functional artefact. Clocks are now more important than ever, but the clockwork professionals have vanished…

In terms of the clock industry, the clockmaker became a Dog – low growth, declining market share – one of the four basic elements in the Boston Growth Matrix (Star, Cash Cow, Question Mark and Dog).

The vast majority of business are forced to close because they become the dog simply because they failed to innovate. So innovation is not a buzz word or a cliché – its a means of economic survival and a basis for sustained growth.

 I work with Innovation by developing a sharp theoretical thrust, by seeing design and innovation as the same thing – changing existing conditions to more desirable ones for the purpose of economic advantage. It’s what all the successful players do. It’s what new business do creating a new market. It’s what Apple does defining what we will want in the future so plot the path of development providing something desirable, often creating a star in the process.

To define what we do, how we do it making the products we do to gain that economic advantage is a complex business requiring boiling down to its simplest ingredients.

Its all about design

I decompose ‘design’ into two primary components: ‘design’ the outcome or product dimension, and ‘Design’ the unfolding of actions as process that bring these outcomes into being. This distinction forms the basis for constructing an accurate picture of how we design, what we design, to what ends, with what means. The results reveal a fundamental understanding that helps clarify that which had previously been diffuse.