Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny

While in Edinburgh last week I fortunately had the time to make it to the Fruitmarket Gallery to see the exhibition Air Iomlaid (‘On Exchange’) just a few days before it closed. Ian Stephen has already reviewed the exhibition for Northings and there’s also a website which documents the project  so I won’t repeat the whole story here, just summarise that this was an artistic exchange between two Gaelic medium primary schools, one in Sleat in south Skye and one in Tollcross in Edinburgh.

By a happy coincidence, when I visited the Fruitmarket, lead artist Julie Brook, who lives on Skye, was there to document the project. I first met Julie many years ago when I worked for the Scottish Arts Council, and had been instrumental in getting her funding for what seemed at the time a mad project, to live and work in a cave on the uninhabited west side of Jura. Since then her own accomplished work has advanced alongside, and sometimes fused with, her grand scale educational projects.

Talking to Julie, and looking with her at several of the work books produced by the children, three things struck me about the whole project, in terms of what it might say about how we intuitively grasp the artistic process. The first was that Julie had shown the young children little or no examples of art, from the past or present, before leading them through this complex journey from first sketches to huge collaborative compositions. This is, if anything, contrary to normal practice. Thus any resemblances in the paintings the children produced to the styles of well -known artists—a Matisse here, a Hockney there—were almost entirely coincidental.

Almost entirely? This is my second point. There’s a once popular, now discredited theory in Biology known as ‘Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny’, that is, the foetus in the womb (human or other) goes through a series of stages of growth which repeat the different stages of that species’ evolution, from single-celled creature upwards, through fish-like gills, and reptilian brain structures, to the fully formed present day creature.

Looking at these work books, each of which charted a single child’s journey from first tentative sketches to bold and confident renderings of their own, familiar environment, then back to uncertainty as they encountered the very different environment of their ‘exchange’ (Tollcross or Sleat), and then a gradual coming to terms with how to render this new set of visual stimuli, I felt I saw something similar at work. It was as if these children were ‘recapitulating’ in their own personal development of artistic skill something of the history of Western Art. Particularly when struggling to grasp mountain or urban landscapes which were new to them, the young artists wrestled to evolve, through perspective and other tools, different ways of rendering complex spaces, passing in a few weeks through very similar stages to those that artists in Western Europe took centuries to traverse, from the late Middle Ages to the High Renaissance.

And the final point that struck me was that Julie and her colleagues had agreed to show individual finished paintings by every single child who had taken part in the project. As Ian notes in his review, the result is a huge display of paintings which nonetheless have a certain consistency of style and visual language. One would certainly not want to start dividing these individual efforts into ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘successful’, or ‘unsuccessful’ paintings.

Has Julie therefore developed something akin to a visual arts equivalent of the Suzuki method for instrumental music teaching—that is, a teaching method which means that almost any young child can be, fairly quickly, taken to a significant level of both skills acquisition and understanding of the artform? Wikipedia describes the Suzuki method as immersion, encouragement, small steps, and an unforced timetable for learning material based on each person's developmental readiness to imitate examples, internalize principles, and contribute novel ideas. That sounds like a pretty good description of Air Iomlaid. So perhaps Joseph Beuys was right when he said that ‘every human being is an artist’—it’s just that most of us haven’t realised it yet.

Footnote on links between art and science. Last year was the 50th anniversary of CP Snow’s infamous definition of ‘Two Cultures’—a destructive split, as he saw it, between the sciences and the humanities. Few well intentioned observations have been more pernicious. A new book published to mark the 350th anniversary, this year, of the founding of the Royal Society helps to refute that stale argument. ‘Seeing Further’ is a collection of essays edited and introduced by Bill Bryson, and like Bryson himself several of the contributors are best known as creative writers—Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Richard Holmes and Maggie Gee--while many of the scientists—Richard Dawkins, Richard Fortey, Steve Jones and Martin Rees—are also fine and lucid writers. It’s an utterly enthralling read and I warmly recommend it.

Footnote to the footnote. I didn’t find out about ‘Seeing Further’ on the Internet, or by reading the newspapers, I found it while browsing the shelves of Inverness Library. In fact, I’ve found many of my most stimulating and enjoyable reads while browsing library shelves--although, of course, Highland Libraries are also very good at enabling users to reserve specific books online. Back in the bad old days of Thatcher, I used to think, ‘well, at least they’re not closing libraries yet. When that happens, it really will mean the end of civilisation as we know it.’ O tempora, O mores, as Cicero once said.

© Robert Livingston, 2010