patternsthatconnect

Second version of a sketch I posted the other  day.

Three figures from the fable series, drawing with collage elements, 4" x 6"

I have written from time to time about art in the workplace, keen as I have become, to see good paintings there, pleased on the odd occasion that I find some, and fascinated by the responses of workers.

Why I haven’t thought before about art on display in those particular workplaces called universities I don’t know, especially as there are often galleries associated with them, and also that the buildings are sometimes open to the public. In Nottingham the Lakeside Gallery is part of the University of Nottingham and The Bonington Gallery is in the School of Art & Design at  Nottingham Trent University. It is not so long since I visited the Whitworth, at Manchester University and the other day I was introduced to the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery in the Parkinson Building of Leeds University.

They have some lovely abstract paintings, including work by John Hoyland, Terry Frost (one that I think is particularly good), Victor Vaserely, Victor Pasmore and Trevor Bell.

I have many times been on the campus of Warwick University but never realised that there was art to be seen there, not only at the Mead Gallery, but also on the walls in the University buildings. Click here for an excellent introductory online exhibition.

I was interested to find this web site chaos complexity in education

which includes the following information

Definition (short)

The term metapatterns was coined and first used by Gregory Bateson (1979). A metapattern is a patterns of patterns or a ubiquitous, transcontextual pattern. “Metapattern” also is related to Bateson notion of “the pattern which connects.” Metapatterns as patterns that connect are more than mere repetitious patterns of some sort. Rather they become “functional” or “meaningful” connections. As functional and meaningful metapatterns, Tyler Volk (1995) explored a number of examples within the contexts of biology, mind, culture, and technology.

Explanation

Gregory Bateson described metapatterns in the following excerpt:

My central thesis can now be approached in words: The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that metapattern which defines the vast generalization that, indeed, it is a patterns which connect. (Bateson, 1979, p. 10)

Bateson preceded this description with a delineation of three “orders” of these patterns as functional or descriptive connections:

1. First-order connections = descriptive patterns within an individual organism or object.
2. Second-order connections = descriptive patterns between different organisms or object, such as between “crabs” and “lobsters” or humans and “horses.”
3. Third-order connections = descriptive patterns between descriptive patterns, such as between the connecting patterns of “crabs and lobsters” and the connecting patterns of “humans and horses.” (Bateson, 1979, p. 10)

Tyler Volk (1995) identified 11 fundamental metapatterns in his book, Metapatterns: Across Space, Time, and Mind. He “defines” metapatterns in the same way as Bateson (with whom he studied in 1977), but with the following elaborations:

To me, a metapattern is a pattern so wide-flung that it appears throughout the spectrum of reality: in clouds, rivers, and planets; in cells, organisms, and ecosystems; in art, architecture, and politics…. I use the word metapattern in the Batesonian spirit — as a pattern of patterns — and seek examples at the very broadest scale. Alas, my definition, too, is round-about. I define metapatterns by saying where they are found and how I use them. But what are they? And are they out there (patterns sensed) or in here (patterns imagined)? (Volk, 1995, pp. viii-ix)

Volk’s eleven metapatterns are:

• Spheres
• Tubes
• Sheets
• Borders (and Pores)
• Binaries (and more complex)
• Centres
• Layers (including Hierarchies, Holarchies, Holons, and Clonons)
• Calendars
• Arrows
• Breaks
• Cycles

Some other possible metapatterns suggested by Bloom (see “Metapatterns Overview” on Metapatterns: The Pattern Underground) include:

• Flexibility — Rigidity
• Gradients
• Webs (and Networks)
• Clusters
• Emergence
• Triggers

Three abstract figures.

Three figures, sketch, acrylic on paper, 4" x 6"

My scanner seems to struggle with flourescent colours. The blue/green is much nearer to leaf green in ‘real life’ and the pale pink here is ‘really’ flourescent orange. The black is black though.

Yesterday I posted about an artwork by Klaus Weber subtitled “Against Nature” an allusion to the novel of the same title by J.K. Huysmans, which I feel I have a connection with simply because as an art student I read it as part of my Aesthetics course and enjoyed it. There is nothing unnatural in that! Nor in the connection I then made to my Aesthetics tutor whom I emailed and got a reply from.

By chance today, as I was surfing the net, I came across another art work entitled “Against Nature“. I wonder if it has any connection to the Huysmans novel. It is by David Batchelor, with whom I also have a connection, he was an art student in the year above me at Trent. I remember him, and I liked him, (though I would be surprised if he remembers me).

His piece is on display at the University of Warwick, and I hope to see it in the near future.

When I was an art student, many years ago, our Aesthetics tutorial group were encouraged to read Against Nature by JK Huysmans, one of those books that I find stays with you for a long time, in that it keeps coming back to memory. I do not know how much that is to do with the brilliance of the book and how much the brilliance of the tutor.

When I was visiting Nottingham Contemporary recently I saw a copy in the book store and wondered why they had it there. Then, when I saw the Klaus Weber exhibition, it became clear.

Sun Press (Against Nature) contains layers of allusion to the natural, and our idea of it. A heliostat on the roof concentrates the sun’s rays to print A Rebours (Against Nature) by JK Huysmans in the gallery below. The ultimate natural force is harnessed to slowly reveal a book that was explicitly a break with the 19th century Naturalist style of literature.

An alternative translation of the book title is “Against the Grain” you can read the whole book here.

Why do we decorate?

Every year, in our house, we buy a tree and out come the decorations, many of them made by the children, when they were children. There’s something satisfying about the ritual, seeing those decorations again and remembering making them. There’s a connection to the past and also to the future as we anticipate this year’s festival.

A few days ago I quoted Zizek for my post about old time dancing and repeat patterns, and I wonder if that quote might also have some relevance here.

We become “humans” when we get caught into a closed, self propelling loop of repeating the same gesture and finding satisfaction in it.

Of course there is a sexual reference here, though I am not saying that decorating the tree is an act of sublimation. At least I don’t think that’s what I am suggesting.

Visiting the Klaus Weber show at Nottingham Contemporary the other day I realised that one of the things I like a lot about Nottingham Contemporary is that the gallery attendants talk to you about the art, if you want them to.

I noticed that in this piece one of the heads was missing…

…and I had fallen for the artist’s little joke when I asked the attendant of it had actually been stolen or damaged or if it was part of the piece. You guessed the answer! I asked if she had met the artist, which of course she had, and was able to tell me all about his visit to the gallery.

The exhibition, showing until 8 January 2012, is in two parts: If you leave me I’m not coming is Weber’s solo show, whereas Already there! is  Weber’s selection of artifacts from the Science Museum, The Ashmolean Museum, Berlin’s Bode Museum, Archaeological and Zoological collections of University College London and art works mostly from the Tate collection.

Already there! represents our tentative understanding of ourselves – belief systems since discredited or abandoned. The exhibition is perhaps a memento mori of our own scientific and social systems – now the apogee of human achievement. In the future our own artefacts will be just as charged and curious Weber seems to suggest – part of another natural process of decay.

(from the notes on the exhibition web page)

As well as the heads already mentioned If you leave me I’m not coming includes Bee Paintings, looking like abstract paintings of dots and blobs they are actually the record of bee performance,

every year when the bees first leave the hive they perform a ‘cleansing flight’ when they excrete, preferably on clean white surfaces. In this casethey have obligingly decorated Weber’s canvases.

In the little video I have posted here the Bee Paintings can be seen behind the Large Dark Wind Chime (Arab Tritone). What would usually be a small garden ornament, cheerfully making audible the natural force of the wind, is here a gigantic object set in motion by electirc fans and tuned to the “devils music” or the “tritone”. Click on the video clip to hear it.

The video starts with Weber’s massive “windscreen wipers” constantly clearing away the artificial rain that pours down the inside of the gallery window.

I blogged recently about a USA survey of over 800 employees, working for companies with art collections, finding that

• 78% of employees surveyed agreed workplace art helps reduce stress.
• 94% agreed it enhances the work environment.
• 84% agreed it was evidence of their employer’s interest in improving the quality of life in and out of the workplace.
• 64% agreed it increases creativity and productivity.
• 67% agreed it enhances morale.
• 82% indicated that art is important in the work environment.
• 73% wanted more art in their workplace, claiming it helps make them feel more ‘motivated’ and ‘inspired.’

and I observed that a problem with this method is that it cannot measure unconscious effects. There is also the issue of sample size, but we won’t go into that just now.

Then I got thinking about other “measures of mind” that follow a similar method for data collection: the survey, or questionnaire, with Likert items: those so called psychometric tests, or personality tests beloved by organisations, and that HR professionals seem to believe in so readily like 16PF, OPQ, MBTI etc,etc,etc.

Surely they are fundementally flawed in that they are based on self report, having no units of measurement and no true zeros. Falling a long way short of being scientific tests, I wonder whether they offer us any useful information at all.

The one that I see used most for learning and development purposes is the Myers Briggs Type Inventory or MBTI. Once we get over the fact that it is scientifically unsound, we might think rather about its practical usefulness. Some companies spend a fortune on MBTI and the workshops usually get high enjoyment scores on evaluation surveys (also very dodgy instruments). Yet when I attempt to measure actual usefulness in the workplace I struggle. After all, once you have “identified” your “type”, what can you really do with this “knowledge” that actually makes a difference to anything? Verdict – highly enjoyable (for some) but not very useful.

The Cult of Personality Testing by Annie Murphy Paul is subtitled “How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves”

She goes a step further than just wondering whether they have any practical value. She shows convincingly that they are downright misleading and potentially damaging.

Art in the workplace may or may not be beneficial, its effects are difficult to measure. However, unlike psychometric testing, I am sure that at least it does no harm.

I am exercising self discipline resisting the urge to look in the exhibition catalogue for The Indiscipline of Painting that I saw in Waterstones, and bought and asked my kids to wrap up for me as a Christmas Present.

I had hoped to go and see the show at Tate St Ives, before then seeing it in Coventry at the Mead Gallery in Warwick Arts Centre, but St Ives is a long way, so I will wait until 13 January and see it for the first time at Mead Gallery. It is on until 10 March 2012, and it is near enough for me to see it once a week if I choose to do so (and I may well do)!

Warwick Arts Centre is part of Warwick University, and I had no idea that they had a collection of colour-field abstract paintings which are on display across the campus. I have booked a tour.

It’s only recently that I have been admitting my interest in colour field abstraction now that I am so unfashionable myself that I have given up caring about what is in or out of fashion.

There’s a bar in Nottingham called ‘Fashion’ and I used to like stepping into it and out of it saying “now I am in fashion” and “now I am out of fashion” (childish I know). It was the oscillating between positions that was so enjoyable.