Why Do It?

A couple of posts ago, I looked briefly at what goes on (or rather, doesn't) in the mind of the artist and put it all down to a condition known as cognitive disinhibiton. Perhaps by now, you've decided that you're cognitively disinhibited too and must be absolutely bursting with creative urges. You just can't wait to flick a brush about like one of the Hesperides, scattering stars across the sky, or maybe you're itching to get your hands into a lump of clay and pull it about like a God modeling Adam. We're still left, however, with one fundamental question: Why?

Certainly, many artists are motivated by personal trauma:

Francis Bacon recounted to the poet, Anthony Cronin, that as a child, he was regularly locked up in a cupboard so that his nanny could canoodle with her boyfriend and not be interrupted.

"Confined in the darkness of this cupboard Francis would scream - perhaps for several hours at a time - but since he was out of earshot of the happy courting couple, completely in vain."

"That cupboard," Bacon apparently said years later, "was the making of me."

In an interview with Artforum magazine, timed to coincide with her M O M A retrospective in New York, Louise Bourgeois revealed that the imagery in her sculptures was almost wholly autobiographical, that she obsessively relived through her art the trauma of discovering, at the age of eleven, that her English governess was also her father’s mistress. Like Bacon, it was a singular event in Bourgeois’ own childhood that inspired her - or should that be ‘haunted’ her? And no, that's not her handbag under her arm.

But what is wrong with these artists? Why can’t they just shut up and get on with their lives like everyone else? Why are they, in Andy Warhol’s words, producing things “that people don't need to have but that [they] – for some reason – think it would be a good idea to give them?”

Let's go back seventeen thousand years to the painted images on the caves at Lascaux in Southern France. These truly magical depictions may at some time have played a part in hunting rites, but the entire system is so carefully sequential that it is thought to evoke the rhythm of the seasons and the regeneration of time. Lascaux may well be homo sapiens' first impulse to depict the origins of the world.

Mating rituals play a significant part in the cycle of images at Lascaux and here we may at last arrive at the real reason behind our urge to create: it's all evolutionary biology.

In his book, the Mating Mind, psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues that the impulse to create art is a mating tactic; a way to impress prospective marriage partners with the quality of one’s brain. Artistic virtuosity, he claims, is unevenly distributed, neurally demanding, hard to fake and highly prized.

Miller goes on to give the example of the male bower birds of Australia and New Guinea who fastidiously create and then decorate their bowers with orchids, snail shells, berries and bark. The bowers are purely decorative, bear in mind, and not to be confused with the birds' nests, which are made at a later stage. Some bower birds even paint their bowers with regurgitated fruit which they apply with 'paint brushes' of  leaves and bark. The females then appraise these creations and mate with the makers of the most symmetrical and well-ornamented bowers. Andy Goldsworthy, eat your heart out.

Anyway, I'm convinced. I’ve seen stuff like this in the local art centre, although I wouldn't go so far as to say that every private view I've attended ends in a riot of coupling.

There’s a weaker argument too. Economist Thorstein Veblen, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the writer, Tom Wolfe have all suggested that humans make art simply to impress others.

But let's leave the last word on our urges to Chris Frith, professor emeritus at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London. In a recent Guardian podcast about conciousness and the brain, he said:

"We have very little access to what we're doing... but we think we do." 

Providence And The Failure of Eccentricity

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."  Goethe

I love this quote. Whenever I share it with those who are unfamiliar with it, I sense they have an instant feeling of kinship with it and a keen hope that it might, in fact, be true. But what does Goethe mean by Providence moving? The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines Providence as: the protective care of God or Nature as a spiritual power. That's a bit of a fuzzy notion for a rational, skeptical 21st Century human being, isn't it? Given that it will rain on your washing and toast always lands buttered side down, how can the whole universe get going just because you've made a decison? - a very dubious notion indeed, when you consider that there are now supposed to be more than 7 billion of us all trying to get God and Nature to dance the way we want them to.

My own explanation is a little less grandiose and based on recent findings in neuroscience about cognitive disinhibiton. According to Harvard University psychologist, Shelley Carson, 'cognitive disinhibition is the failure to ignore information that is irrelevant to current goals or to survival' and artists, apparently, have it in spades. Put simply, because artists are distracted neither by the rain on their washing or carpet fluff on their toast, their brains are free to concentrate on other stuff; stuff that other brains are filtering out: colours, textures, relationships, the strangeness of the familiar, the beauty of the banal and most importantly, new ways of doing things. Cognitive disinhibition also explains why so many arty types and geniuses are just that little bit eccentric.

If you want examples of the way the brain filters out 'irrelevancies', check out The Monkey Business Illusion or think about the last time you drove a new car and then noticed, as if for the first time, how many others just like yours were on the road.

I visited my oldest daughter in Manchester recently and we took in the Ford Madox Brown 
exhibtion at the fantastic Manchester City Art Gallery. When Harriet got home, she realised that FMB's The Last Of England, was on the cover of a book she's been reading for quite some time. 'I must walk around with my eyes shut,' she lamented. Not really. Ford Madox Brown's masterful evocation of the great emigrating movement of the 1850s just wasn't important to her.

Now it is.

Providence moving? It's been moving all along. I think what Goethe was talking about was giving ourselves a chance to catch up with it...