Dr Wendy Gunn
Creativity and Practice Research Group, University of Dundee
Learning is understanding in practice: exploring the interrelations between perception, creativity and skill
Abstract
Both art and anthropology may be considered as ways of exploring how the knowledge that people have of the world around them is generated, organised and transferred. Our project aims to bring both disciplines together in order to forge an integrated approach to such an exploration. The fundamental premise of this approach is that knowing, along with perceiving, learning, remembering and imagining, is a social activity that goes on within the context of people’s mutual involvement in a richly structured environment. A research team comprising of artists, art historians, anthropologists and architects have been developing this approach by way of a study of the knowledge practices of fine art.
What can be learned from the practice of making? How does art enrich pedagogy? How are artists’ skills learned or acquired? Can an artist be educated? How does knowledge gained through art practice relate to other forms of knowledge regarded by the public as more or less authorative or trustworthy? Underlying these questions is the broader question of how information transmitted through formal instruction relates to skill that learners develop through their own experiments. Skill is often understood as the mere application of knowledge. This implies however, that knowledge is transmitted in a disembodied, context-free form-that is, as information – independently and in advance of its application in specific contexts of practice. Our approach overturns this view. We take skill to consist in the embodied capacities of action and perception that people develop throughout life in the course of their practical activities. In this sense, we argue, skill is the very ground of knowledge, and not merely its application. Nevertheless the relation between skill and information remains problematic.
As a collaborative venture between researchers in art and anthropology, this project is entirely novel. Up to now, most anthropological work in the field of art has treated visual culture as an object of investigation, yielding an anthropology of art (Coote and Shelton 1992, Gell 1998). Our approach, by contrast, regards art an investigative and exploratory practice, on par with the practice of anthropology. Thus our aim is to exploit the synergy between art and anthropology as practices of exploration. The synergy, in 2 short, lies not so much in the products of art and anthropology, as in their ways of working. Though novel in art history and social anthropology, our approach resonates with that of well-established currents of research in ecological psychology and in science and technology studies (STS). Influenced by James Gibson’s (1979) pioneering work on visual perception, ecological psychologists have shown how the development of perceptual skills –or what Gibson calls ‘the education of attention’ –takes place within the contexts of perceivers’ direct, practical engagement with their surroundings. This has been paralleled, in STS, with the approach to knowledge as grounded in environmentally situated actions, developed by Lucy Suchman (1987). Building on this work, the sociologist of science David Turnbull has explored the relation between local knowledge and comparative scientific traditions, in a way that could have direct parallels for our investigation of how locally developed, skilled practices can suggest new ways of looking at environmental perception and understandings of nature (Ingold 2000), the politics of objectification (Harvey 1998), the connections between persons, technologies and places (Harvey, Green and Agar 2000), and the relation between ‘local’ and ‘global’ knowledge systems Strathern 1995).
In the context of our research we treat the fine art teaching studio, the anthropology seminar room and the architectural design teaching studio as places in which to study the interrelations, in practice, between perception, creativity, innovation and skill. Within these contexts we are examining how students, teachers and creative practitioners move between a variety of materials and technologies in the exploration of innovative practices. Through this, we aim to understand how students and teachers of fine art, architecture and anthropology perceive the relation between the mental and the material, and how this might be affected by the introduction of new technologies into situated contexts of learning.
Central to the entire project is the idea of practice-based exploration conceived as a way of enhancing collaboration between the various disciplines and knowledge traditions involved in the study. The methodologies adopted are designed to connect the research questions with the ethnographic practice of participant observation. The way to understand how knowledge is acquired, we contend, is for the researcher to participate in the processes and settings of its acquisition, and to reflect critically on these from the perspective of an insider. This is fundamental to an anthropological approach adopted by the project. It is for this reason too the project is intrinsically interdisciplinary. Moreover our experiments in teaching and learning have contributed to our project aims of testing whether learning can be a way of doing research, and practice a way of doing theory.
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