Vilhauer meets Gadamer / 20 February
Our reading for this session was Understanding Art: The Play of Work and Spectator. This was a chapter from a book by Monica Vilhauer based on the ideas of Hans-Georg Gadamer. The text explores philosophical hermeneutics as a kind of play. It considers how we engage with, understand and play with various art works/forms.
In Gadamer’s theory, ‘play’ can be thought of as ‘the “event” of understanding that occurs in the experience of a work of art’. Gadamer makes the case that artworks are not static objects, things that spectators passively observe without influence. He instead emphasizes the interplay between art and spectator as a form of knowing and understanding. Art is then, an event that has the capacity to change the person experiencing it. The spectator is involved in the artwork.
He further suggests that a condition for play is that it requires at least two parties and that games usually involve some form of constraint – usually in the form of rules.
Reflecting on the reading
The text particularly resonated with me in how it linked to ideas I am currently exploring in my teaching practice. Designing teaching sessions on my course, I regularly reflect on how to facilitate ‘play.’
If we work from the assumption that ‘the central concern of Design is ‘the conception and realisation of new things’ (2), then we might reasonably argue that play is an essential activity for a designer. The ability to detach form from meaning and play with it as a purely formal object can be a useful way to generate new or surprising ideas. Villhauer refers to this in the article as ‘the abstraction procedure of aesthetic consciousness.’
Encouraging play in teaching practice is not always straightforward. It tends to require this very rigid structure to make it happen at all. There’s always the risk you will push the structure too far and it will become completely disassociated from the idea of play at all. You might underplay it and the exercise will feel arbitrary.
I tend to find that students who are too focussed on theory and contextual issues, struggle to create surprising or interesting visual solutions. A preoccupation with process over play , viewing the task as a ‘problem to be solved’ often lead to an extreme form of monosemism. ‘Designing to the end’ and leaving nothing for the reader to do. In this way, the audience become passive observers as opposed to engaged readers of the design.
At the other extreme, students who are very focussed on form can lack a contextual and functional understanding in their work. This can lead to polysemic communication, too open-ended or introspective, lacking any real communication. This approach is rarely valued or required in the field of graphic design.
As such, the balance of thinking and making and how we talk about those two things is one that needs to be considered carefully. The sequence or weight of each can impact on how students think about the relationship between these aspects of practice.
Theory in practice
In Units 1 and 2, my colleague Kieran and I have experimented with sessions that challenge students to play with form, purely as a formal object. A recent example of this was a workshop where we asked students to bring an image and randomly dissect it. They treated it as a pure form, viewing it only in terms of shapes and spaces. They removed 5 shapes from the image and then repeated that across 10 copies of the same image, giving them a collection of shapes to work with.
We then used rules-based composition exercises. These gave them a framework for experimenting and creating new versions of the image. The exercises are timed, introducing the constraints of both rule and time. By removing the thinking time and space, the student are free to focus on the rules and the composition. The outcomes of the workshop are often very surprising for the students.
The process is informed by the approach at Basel School of Design where they focus on the analytical and process-oriented aspects of the Swiss design tradition. Taking Gadamer’s theory about the conditions for play – the two parties in this game would be the student and the image. The rules represent the contraptions within which the players operate.
There’s often a ‘test round’ where we remove all the rules. More often than not, the students find this round the hardest. They tend to reflect that they were more creative in the framework of constraints.
We provide a deliberate space in the workshop where we ask students to reflect on these experiments, to ‘read’ and reinterpret them. We also ask them to reflect on the value of the rule-based design process. In this way we create clear divisions between the ‘making’ and the ‘thinking.’
In an earlier workshop we used another different process. We pinned up all the work from the session. We gave the students two colors of sticky dots. We asked them to put one color on work that ‘communicated’ and other other on the work they found surprising in some way. Work with both dots allowed them to see how work can communicate but still feel fresh or surprising, leave something for the viewer to do. Thinking about the reading this week I realize what we were inviting them to reflect on could be conceived as the ‘interplay’ described by Gadamer. This being the pattern of movement – back and forth between the audience and the design.
Thinking Through Making
At CCW and at Kingston the mantra of the Design School was ‘Thinking Through Making.’ While I appreciate the sentiment I find the word order can be a little problematic. It seems to suggest that these processes happen in tandem which is a reality these workshops actively discourage.
As Sister Corita Kent says in her 10 Rules for Students, Teachers, and Life, “Don’t Make and Analyze at the Same Time, They’re Different Processes.’ (2) I tell my students this on the first day of the course. It’s a mantra they often repeat when reflecting on their work. On the course we take the view that making and analyzing are, and should be separate processes.
I find students can be reticent to expose themselves to conflict. Some seem to view university as the place that will give them ‘the answer.’ The idea that education will be a process in which they form a viewpoint, one that they may revise at various points can be difficult for them. The further idea that they alone are responsible for forming that viewpoint; even harder. We’ve been told for years that design is problem solver. A conclusive process. My course is often asking students to engage with design as an exploratory process – a problem-finder or perhaps a problem- revealer. It can be a big leap.
There seems to be a circular narrative to this whole process. It’s one of me reading this piece, reflecting on it, connecting it to my teaching practice and back to my reading. I realize I am harking back to the issue of subjectivism and it’s place in education. I realize this is just something I am thinking about a lot right now and I tend to see it in everything. Of course… I haven’t actually attended the seminar yet. Perhaps, I read this all wrong. I am certainly looking forward to hearing what others in my group made of it all.
References
Vilhauer, M. (2010). Gadamer’s ethics of play. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, pp.31-48.
Cross, Nigel. (1982). Designerly Ways of Knowing. Design Studies. 3. 221-227.
Crawford, M. (2015) The World Beyond Your Head: On Becomingan Individual in an Age of Distraction. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Popova, M. (2016) 10 Rules for Students, Teachers, and Life by John Cage and Sister Corita Kent. Available at: URL (Accessed: 19 Feb 2019).