Draft 1, Chunk 8 (Aesthetics/Perception)

[This was first written on 16 September 2011]

Introduction

I am quite keen to bring this first ‘wave’ of writing to a close and take some time to collect feedback, listen to discussion, and prepare to rework it. Before I do that, though, there are still a few points I would like to cover and so I have decided to give myself today and tomorrow to say something about three key terms that I have not explored yet. The first of these is AESTHETICS.

Aesthetics

To be clear about this, I am not suggesting that we should be making aesthetic judgements as a part of our practice. However, aesthetic issues enter the work in other ways.

(1) Writing is Already Aestheticised

In everyday life people do, in fact, make aesthetic judgements about writing. Or, better perhaps, people have an aesthetic awareness of writing, both as a form of language use and in its relationship to materiality. I shall give an example from each strand of the project.

Will and Irna have been looking at medals and there is clearly an aesthetic dimension to these artefacts. They are struck, preserved, and worn for the sake of remembrance. (Is the term remembrance so associated with death as to render it inapplicable to other types of conscious memorialisation? The dictionary definition does not limit it to that context, although it does note that the word is often used in that way.) For that reason, they need to have a ‘look’ that is commensurate with the dignity of what they stand for. And, in fact, fairly well known sculptors have at times been called upon to design medals. (I am quite curious to find out how designs for medals are commissioned and have sent for a second-hand book from Amazon to help me find out!)

In Kate and Zahir’s strand, textiles and sewing have emerged as important topics and this kind of craft activity clearly has a strong aesthetic dimension. Similarly, the texts produced by the young people participating in that strand sometimes signal a relationship with aestheticised literary genres (poetry, for example) and are often decorative at the material level too.

Steve and I have encountered quite a lot of graffiti on our walks and, once again, this is a form of writing that has its own aesthetic conventions. (I am tempted to send off for a book about this too but perhaps we should draw on your friends’ knowledge of this area, Steve?)

These brief examples are meant to illustrate the way in which aesthetic considerations are out there in the practices we are engaging with, whether or not we choose to foreground them.

(2) Aesthetic Judgements and Power

As I noted when writing about genre, aesthetic statements sometimes function ideologically. This is a well known effect and certainly operates in relation to language use. The prestige of Received Pronunciation has often been reinforced through claims that it is more attractive than other accents of English (although other accents have been seen as having their own aesthetic properties). Similarly, while criticism of graffiti has sometimes been couched in legal discourse, it has also been articulated in aesthetic terms – it has been condemned by means of claims that it is ugly.

I want to emphasise that I am not suggesting that the aesthetic is entirely reducible to the political or ideological. This is obviously not the case. People’s responses to commemorative art, to textiles and poetry, and to graffiti do involve a direct response of pleasure or dismay at the way these forms of writing make use of language and at the way they look. The point is that there is a dynamic interweaving of aesthetics and power that needs to be recognised.

(3) Aesthetics and Research

This is perhaps a more knotty issue than the other two. During the course of the project I have become more and more aware that audiences will tend to read the interventions of the researcher in aesthetic terms. Thus, when Kate attended a conference recently and showed a group of photographs taken by participants in her project, her powerpoint presentation was interpreted by her audience as itself an aestheticised object. Of course, we have built arts practice into the project itself and this includes an intervention in a gallery space, so we have – to a significant extent – invited this response. However, I suspect that the tendency to view the materials we have gathered in aesthetic terms would be there, even if audiences were not aware of those elements of the project and I want to say three things about this.

(a) It may be that audiences are right to interpret the material in this way because the use of photography as a means of documentation, for example, makes the aestheticisation of the materials unavoidable in the sense that photography is a practice with an in-built aesthetic. If you want to avoid this effect, then you are perhaps struggling against the medium itself. Photographs of everyday places and objects are a part of the archive of photographic art and so, by making such images in the context of research, one is inevitably making something that, at the very least, resembles an art object.

(b) In a number of fields, there has been a trend to ‘recover’, ‘reclaim’, or ‘celebrate’ the activities – and particularly the craft work – of disenfranchised groups by insisting on their status as art. An example would be recent responses to the quilting traditions of the US. In some ways, this makes it natural for a certain kind of politicised (more cynically, well-meaning) viewer to want to interpret everyday writing in aesthetic terms. The impulse is to find worth in it through the language of art criticism.

(c) It may be that we ourselves cannot help bringing aesthetic categories to visual and linguistic material, and, if this is so, I wonder which aesthetic categories are most relevant here: The picturesque? The sublime? The kitsch (in my inaccurate sense of ironised ‘tackiness’?) The abject? The ‘cool’? The cute?

So aesthetic considerations arise in looking at our own practice and I think these need to be related both to the aesthetics embedded in everyday writing practices themselves (see my point, ‘writing is already aestheticised’) and to the ideological uses of aesthetic discourse (‘aesthetic judgements and power’).

Perception

Another key term that I want to include is PERCEPTION. I started to think about this when I did a walk in Rawmarsh with one of my ex-students who is from the area and has lived there throughout her time at university. Steve and I had already walked in the area and had returned from the walk with a large number of photographs, so we had a strong sense of the kinds of writing that appeared in that part of Rotherham. Walking with someone else, I began to realise that she had barely noticed some of the writing which was very salient to me, and, conversely, that she was aware of writing that I had not registered at all. I began to think of this in terms of the categories of FIGURE and GROUND, which are well established in the psychology of perception. [The work of the early twentieth-century gestalt psychologists is significant here and this is examined in Edwin Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, 2nd edn (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1950).] The idea here is that we cannot give equal emphasis to everything that appears in our field of vision and instead pick out some parts of the field as salient (i.e. as figures) and interpret others as the background against which the figures stand out (i.e. as the ground). This is more than simply deciding what to prioritise. The claim is that we actually make sense of visual input by interpreting it in terms of figure and ground, a process illustrated by the ambiguity of Rubin’s vase and played upon in M.C. Escher’s famous tessellations.





I began to think of ‘writing in the street’ in these terms, certain texts leaping out as figures and some just constituting part of the ground. Indeed, even before walking with my student, I had had a conversation with Steve in which we had touched on this issue. In a park in East Herringthorpe, the graffiti on one of the pieces of play equipment was so dense that nothing leapt out from it as salient. It was, as Steve put it, just a ‘texture’. But I wondered if someone with more knowledge of graffiti might have seen more in it – whether s/he would have located figures against the ground of the texture.

I have come to feel that walking is an interesting mode of enquiry because, to a large extent, it constitutes a perceptual experiment. Walking alone and then walking with someone else, you find your perception of the space you are walking in reordered as the relations of figure and ground shift and change. And this applied to both of us – myself and the other participant. It was not simply that I, as an outsider, was inducted into a richer view of the area by someone who knew it better. She too felt that, as a result of walking with me, she was noticing things that she normally took for granted.