patternsthatconnect

When I stepped back to look at this little painting I was working on (or is it a drawing?)…

Ghost, April 2012, ink on paper, 3"x3"

…I was reminded of a term I heard Mali Morris use in relation to one of her paintings, when she referred to a colour “ghosting through”. I like the use of the word ‘ghost’ as a verb.

By the way this one is actual size, (well it is on my screen anyway).

I didn’t intend for it to have an Easter reference but it could easily be read into it. Come to think of it I would like to see a 9′x9′ version of it in a public space, a church building. You wouldn’t be able to avoid the (unintended) iconography then!

NLPers are fond of reciting that Gregory Bateson derived saying “the meaning of the communication is the response you get, rather than the message you intended”.

Never Precisely Repeating, acrylic on canvas, 61cm x 61cm, (temporary photo)

Gregory Bateson’s aesthetic question: “What pattern connects the crab to the oyster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me, and me to you?” and the beginnings of his answer: “lines of symmetry, erupting into pattern, transforming into speed, colour and line,  a million lines never precisely repeating: the pattern which connects”.

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

Regular visitors to this blog will recall that I have been thinking about the prefix ‘meta’, as in ‘metamodernism’, and that I have also been experimenting with patterns that emerged from a drawing method involving the rotation of four stretchers arranged in a quad.

Gregory Bateson used the prefix ‘meta’ quite a lot. He was interested in metacommunication in his double-bind theory of schizophrenia, where a metacommunication is a communication about the way in which a communication is to be received. He was playful with metaphors, asking “what’s a meta for?” and showing that they are fundamental to the way humans think and behave. He was interested in metapatterns, proposing that

The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns…

My interest in patterns is only playful, they are possibly visual metaphors. Here is quadrant one of a quadrant I am calling ‘part one’.

Fable, Part One, Quadrant One, Drawing, 3" x 3"

It’s a work in progress.

By the way, the film about Gregory Bateson entitled An Ecology of Mind is coming soon to the UK, the promise of a February 2012 tour is showing on the website, dates to be announced!

If you want to know what a painting is really about, the artist is the last person to ask! The artist knows all about intention, yet “the meaning of a communication is always the response you receive, rather than the intention you had for it” (derived from Gregory Bateson). Remember the Pre-Raphaelites and what they thought they were doing? nothing at all like what they were really doing, right?

I have a wonderful drawing by Geoff Jones in my own collection…

…and though he will tell me it is about the marks he makes I will say it is about something else. I posted the other day that the positive marks construct negative spaces and I think those spaces are far more important than the marks themselves. I propose that the accidental marks somehow reveal necessary structure(s).

At the Blackpool Sequence Dance Festival 2011, in the Empress Ballroom of the Winter Gardens, attempting to learn brand new sequence dances, with a large group of people, I found it very difficult. It was wonderful and I loved it, especially as others took pity on us and helped us out, yet I really struggled to pick up 16 bars of steps in half an hour.

I could see many people, 20 years my senior and more, finding it quite easy to do what seemed an almost impossible task to me. What was it that made us different?

Maybe we could put it down to learning styles: this is not my favoured way of learning, I would rather read instructions first or have them explained to me in an environment where I could ask lots of questions, and then slowly piece the whole together part by part. I also seemed to suffer from ‘performance pressure’ that may have been absent in a smaller group or on my own.

It was possibly David Kolb that introduced the notion of learning styles, along the lines of: learning has a cycle of four stages and though all stages are required we may have a preference for a certain stage more than others. I have the impression that Honey and Mumford‘s learning styles are more or less the same as Kolb’s, but with more accessible labels, so we have Activist, Reflector, Theorist and Pragmatist styles. One implication of the theory is that we learn best when our own style is adequately catered for, Activists and Pragmatists preferring to learn by doing, Reflectors and Theorists favouring a more thinking approach etc. Learning professionals closer to NLP might use the distinctions Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic as learning styles.

But isn’t this somewhat limiting? “I don’t learn that way” “It’s not my learning style” could easily become an excuse to prevent further learning. Isn’t it rather that what is needed is learning at a higher level?

Gregory Bateson proposed that there are levels of learning, where Learning 0 is an habitual automatic response to a given stimulus, Learning 1 is a trial and error process of adaptation to the given environment, Learning 2 is a process of corrective change in the set of alternatives from which choices are made at level 1, and Learning 3 (which rarely, if ever occurs) is about our whole process of forming, exchanging and losing level 2 habits.

Learning how to learn in the situation I described above would be Learning 2, which would then mean that on future occasions I could participate more successfully in the trial and error process of learning the new dances in the large group in only half an hour. One way to do this would be to model the strategies of other dancers/learners, which would I suggest also be a more sophisticated use of NLP.

I have blogged before about Harold Osborne‘s distinctions, borrowed from linguistics and applied to abstract painting, of semantic abstraction and syntactic or non-iconic abstraction. Semantic being the type of abstraction that abstracts from a ‘real world’ event, syntactic or non-iconic being the type of work that claims to represent nothing other than itself.

The kind of work I am interested in the most, and that I practice, clearly situates itself in the category of non iconic abstraction: it makes no attempt to represent.

Borrowing systems thinker Paul Watzlawick‘s first axiom of communication, derived from Gregory Bateson “you cannot not communicate”, I have suggested that you cannot not represent. To varying degrees, the viewer will ‘read in’ or project their own content or meaning and I am thinking of this as representation (I acknowledge I am probably using the same word representation to mean slightly different things – as I will also be doing in a moment with the word icon).

Even though I do not wish it, you can assign representational meaning to this picture.

When I posted on my blog recently Unstoppable Beef said that it was a ‘smiley face’, and once you have seen that it is difficult not to keep on seeing it! Grrrrr

But what happens now?

Do you find that you assign Christian iconographical meanings to it?

In a recent blog post at ABSTRACTION, Monk asks what the straight line (i.e. made with the aid of a ruler or masking tape as is the practice in ‘hard edge abstraction‘) communicates. The criticism contained in the question becomes clear:

The simplicity is tempting, the lack of personal exposure comforting, the boundaries certain and readable, the invention of form and colour programmable and the overall appearance decorative but the grit is missing.

My own attraction to the line (not really hard edge, but they start out marked with ruler and pencil) is its potential for pattern making, I am particularly keen on the lines that are made up from the edges of other shapes, forming subjective borders, they are only there by the reading. The diagonal line in the image below is an example. I prefer those lines to the  ‘certain and readable’ ones.

I also have a  ‘literary’ attraction to the simple line, or stripe (with absolutely no necessity for it to be ruled or taped), contained in my oft repeated quote from Gregory Bateson

What pattern connects (us)?… lines of symmetry… erupting into pattern after pattern… a million lines of colour… a million lines, never precisely repeating: the pattern which connects.

Nevertheless, Monk makes a good point, especially in the suggestion that the grit is absent in the straight line. Sometimes, hard-edge just isn’t as edgy as soft edge! Here’s a failed project I was working on

I was attempting to make a pair, the second painting made from the way the paint ran off the first. It’s awful and I abandoned it. But look how much more easily we seem to understand the straight line, as opposed to the more chaotic ones, which are somehow more risky, and more difficult to think of as ever approaching decoration.

And, isn’t there something else that’s questionable about the straight line? Doesn’t it seem to communicate authority, control, or power, whereas the hand-drawn line has something more human, more vulnerable about it?  “Our love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah” – Leonard Cohen.

In a blog I guess that keeping the word count low is generally a good thing. So I keep coming back to  subjects that have written about before. Today I want to say more about the Mali Morris exhibition at Angel Row Gallery  that I saw way back in 2004.

I have said before that in the UK  it is difficult to find places exhibiting abstract painting outside of London, and even back in 2004 I knew for sure that getting a show of this kind of work in Nottingham city centre was unusual, so I went to see it many times. (Since then I can count on one hand how many shows of abstraction there have been here. We haven’t had any yet at Nottingham Contemporary.)

Morris works in series. There is a sense in which her work employs repetition, yet somehow not strictly so. I feel that my often used (no doubt over-used) quote from Gregory Bateson applies where, referring to the ‘pattern which connects’, he said it is made up of “a million lines never precisely repeating”. In these two paintings we get repetition, but never precisely so.

These two were there:

Mali Morris, Low Pink Hum, 1998, Acrylic on Canvas, 57 x 66 cm. Image by courtesy of the artist

Mali Morris, Marvell's Mower 1999, Acrylic on Canvas, 46 x 61 cm. Image by courtesy of the artist.

Although in one sense very similar, look how different they are. They look like they were made using the same process. Yet the differences in colour mean that they are experienced very differently. They can easily be seen independently and each one ‘stands up on its own’. Here they were displayed together and I enjoyed enjoying them separately and then comparing how my experiences of them were different.

I remember also that all 19 paintings were presented in what seemed to me to be a quite unusual manner, they were scattered as opposed to being arranged in neat rows.  Some of the small ones were quite low I think. I would love to see an installation shot.

I was surprised to find that loads of bloggers like to blog about blogging, I inadvertently found myself doing the same (here), and now here I am blogging about blogging about blogging.

And then blogging about blogging could be a metaphor for art about art. Both modern and post-modern art does that a lot (maybe we could think of modernism as art about art, and post-modernism as art about art about art).

Then there is also learning 1, learning 2 and learning 3: Gregory Bateson‘s helpful distinctions, roughly translated (and for this I am grateful to Julian Russell) as learning, learning about learning, and learning about learning about learning.  I don’t yet remember where I read that Bateson had at least speculated that NLP could be an example of learning 3.

…”It’s turtles, turtles, turtles all the way down!”

Although I am having fun with the recursiveness of it, this is serious stuff because it is connected to patterns of patterns – the pattern which connects…

But, whilst continuing to have fun, I guess if someone were to write a blog about this blog, that would be blogging about blogging about blogging about blogging.