Duration, progression, stages
Human animal, blood watch
The main stages of a total creative journey are as follows: the previous movement in us, the acting, operative movement, turned to the work, and finally the step to the other, spectators, the movement recorded in the work. Pre-creation, creation and re-creation.
As a painter and painting professor, I worry about the fit between the reality of my practical experience and the academic need to organize teaching according to an idea of the progression that will allow the student to become aware and actively involved in his or her own training. There is in this sense a blatant contrast between the experience of the creative process as a kind of continuous present in which you can never know whether evolution is positive or negative, and the ideal projections of beginners who seek learning as a sum of cumulative experiences that will ultimately enable them to achieve expressive excellence.
I would not want to make the common mistake of automatically applying theories or teaching methods which, despite their good intentions, may not be adequate to the complexity of artistic activity. So, in this approach, following Bergson's, Klee's and Simondon's ideas, I will try to describe a stance that transductively seeks to allow the fundamentals of the processes of creation to pervade and shape a teaching style that respects its object.
The experience of the becoming in the process of creation in painting matches Bergson´s conception of time. Creating involves living and being, each in its own time, and vice versa: "The more I delve into the nature of time, the more I understand that duration means invention, a creation of forms, continuous elaboration of the absolutely new" (Bergson, 2007:30)
Moreover, if learning, as I consider it here, refers to creation, and this in turn, to duration, it could be said that learning to paint means giving up "the spatial conception of time used by science and measured by the clock" (Bergson, 2004: 8), to reside in duration or the time that passes. In most cases, according to the characteristics of our cultural background, to learn painting means to develop patience as an opposing force to the anxiety generated by our belonging to a techno-scientific, projective, pragmatic culture.
In painting, patience develops from the indisputable fact of succession. Despite being pushed one way or another by desire, though we are driven by our ideals, although the mental image seems to be complete and perfect, the picture only gradually becomes real. We see, we feel our hand in motion and recognize the traces or stains we produce, not as immediate consequences of our desire or our witticisms, but as products of their own genetic process, as a result of an act of appearance, progressive in retrospect, happening over time. From an analogy with Bergson´s example of sugar water1, I'd say that the time it takes for paint to dry is a key lesson: after preparing the canvas and before starting to paint, you have to wait. Anyone who wants to correct an already applied colour must also make a pause; if you want flat, clean colours, you must proceed step by step so that they do not dirty each other – you must wait.. All this always coincides with the impatience of those who paint; with a portion of their life which cannot be extended or shortened at will.. When painting, the obligation of waiting or, in other words, the coincidence of our duration with the duration of things gives us an experience of the wholeness that is essential.
Along the same lines, learning to paint also consists in giving up the idea of progress in an approximation of the Punk slogan no future; a motto that does not imply here that the only thing that exists is the present. It is true that self-awareness is linked to change, and that
the “I” that does not change does not last. Our duration is not an instant replacing of another moment: then there would be nothing more than present, there would be no extension of the past in the present, neither evolution nor specific duration. Duration is the continuous progress of the past gnawing at the future and which swells to advance (Bergson, 2007: 24)
Therefore, I speak of an active or positive nihilism, vitalistic, and fundamentally open to the new. According to this, anticipation is not feasible, but you can be confident in repetition understood as an act:
To foresee consists of projecting into the future what has been perceived in the past, or of representing for a later time in a new grouping, in a new order, elements already perceived. But what has never been perceived and is at the same time simple, is necessarily unforeseeable (Bergson, 2007: 26)
In this radical living in duration, change or progress cannot be understood in the creative process as a sum of moving moments (as occurs in the time of physics). This would be an operation of juxtaposition that only happens in space, but not at all in the becoming of consciousness. Since duration does not consist in the juxtaposition of a moment that replaces another, "the past is constantly increasing and is retained indefinitely." (Bergson, 2007: 24) For this reason, duration is irreversible; a continuous change affects our conscience so that one is never the same: from the "survival of the past is the impossibility, for a conscience, of passing through the same state twice." (Bergson, 2007: 25) Psychic time or duration has its own dynamics, involving a permanent moving, to a continuous and irreversible modulation that "cannot be thought about without being stopped." (Bergson, 2004: 8) Duration implies quality, not quantity; it is related to modulation rather than articulation. Therefore, in referring to duration I speak of succession and tendencies, about a continuous flow which contracts and expands according to affect and figure-ground relationships (referring to the subject in a particular environment). This flow advances as much as it retreats, and you only can distinguish different parts in it if you perform an exercise of estrangement, alienation, and abstraction.
Perhaps in death, when the individuation process concludes and you look back, you might discover a growing sense of a succession, but it would have absolutely nothing to do with the internal experience of process2. It would be nothing but an alien interpretation of the process itself. You cannot measure or analyse duration; you can only feel it. The duration-quality of our experience is very different from time which, somehow, has been materialized. “It has become quantity because of development in space." (Bergson, 2004: 16)
The most appropriate here would be to speak of phases, in the meaning Simondon gives to the term (2007). A phase, for him, is not a moment that takes place or replaces another one, but one of the aspects in which being unfolds and opposes other aspects. To define this notion, Simondon is inspired by the physical concept of the phase relationship; that is, there is no way of conceiving one stage if not in relation to one or more other phases. In a system formed by several phases, there is always a relationship of equilibrium, complementarity and tension between them. The reality is the set of all phases related to each other; one cannot be isolated, it is nothing by itself and is always with others. The existence of a phase system involves the reality of a neutral balance centre in connection with which there is the possibility of a mismatch. Therefore, we can understand each stage as a symbol3 of the other, in the original sense of term, where
none of them is balanced in relation to itself and does not hold true or complete reality: every phase is abstract and partial, without handle; only phase system is balanced in its neutral; its truth and reality is this neutral point, the procession and conversion relative to the neutral point (Simondon, 2007: 177-178)
Thus, by linking Bergson's duration and Simondon's phase with the terms pre-creation/creation/re-creation used by Klee in the opening quote to this text, I distinguish the existence of three main phases in every process of individuation in creative work. These three steps are equivalent to those Simondon posited to talk about the process of individuation: pre-individual, individual, trans-individual (Simondon, 2007).
Although Klee refers to them as stages, I think it is inappropriate to speak of a chronology, a progression, or a source and an absolute destiny. The three phases might better be used to name a relationship which takes place in duration, the singular mode of materialization results in of which results in a work which would come to be the neutral point of the system: the bison of Altamira fleshes out a way to relate pre-individual, individual and trans-individual. In the eternity of its life, it resolves, in metastable equilibrium, the tension between potential energy (rock, ash, earth; the animal-human relationship), formalized representation patterns (ways of making that are repeated from one painting to another) and modes of reception (from a possible correct interpretation by its contemporaries, to our speculative exegesis).
The three terms did not exist before the creative process itself, but the relational fact which works itself out in duration creates them. If, as expressed here, the important thing is the process (creative, of individuation) itself . The neutral point, while being the point of equilibrium and reality of the system as a whole, would not be determined by the triad’s intermediate term. This would only be a phase (either creation in Klee or individual in Simondon). Because, really, the individual only exists as an interruption of becoming: even the artwork created, finished and inserted into the circuit of culture, according to the view expressed here, keeps alive a pre-individual remnant, and is not, in that sense, completely individual. The rest would allow further access to trans-individual or re-creation due to its demand for the viewer's active participation to be completed. Therefore, I think we should not interpret the triad as revolving around its midpoint. In any case, one should consider that the midpoint is the entire system defined by the three phases, and consequently none of them in particular; as a whole, it expresses the forces and tendencies that go into it; becoming as a relational fact. Individuation plays between the three terms that it generates, and returns cyclically. The pre-individual survives in the individual and the trans-individual; each new individuation produces a pre-individual reality and allows metastability, which is a condition of individuation.
Painterly creation also takes place this way, so that what we could interpret as progression would be rather a succession of feedback instantly experienced in duration. It would be the process as an experience and a technical resolution of the tension between pre-individual, individual and trans-individual, which are phases of being, voltage poles, possible tendencies. Creation cannot consist in going through stages to acquire full creative ability. In any creative moment, you have to work out a unique way of knotting between the three instances at play; and know that problems, technical difficulties, will always arise from there, although they will never be the same, because, as I mentioned above, the past gnaws at the future. And even would not have beforehand the poles of pre-individual, individual and trans-individual as possible elements of a creative combinatorics: we would not even have the pre-individual, individual and trans-individual poles to work with beforehand as possible elements for creative combination; they are the result of the institutive process of the creative act itself.
Accordingly, I understand that Klee's stages or Simondon's phases do not serve as a temporal explanation of the process: it is not about considering one phase over in order to progress to the nest; progression does not exist either in art as an institution or in creative activity. The only possible progress, for which the teacher is always partly responsible, is that once having started to paint, the student continues to do so. The work of becoming does not necessarily imply any improvement; it must in any case be experienced.
As I said above, the phases described may be useful if we no longer relate them to the time of science, but instead link them to duration. None of them could then be considered conclusive. The process never ends but returns; it does not therefore overcome stages along a path of perfection or completeness. It suggests no progress, but passage and modulation through various phases and tendencies which determine a cyclical evolution.
Along with all this, my painting practice and teaching experiences lead me to reaffirm the conviction that, in learning and teaching art, the idea of progression is not workable. It is true that anyone who paints wants to feel able to progress and improve: the student asks the teacher to help him or her to thrive. But the teacher, through his or her experience, must recognise that what is commonly understood as progress, that is, familiarisation with and integration of artistic techniques, concepts, categories, etc., does not in itself constitute an advancement. It just means an increase in complexity at each moment of becoming, which must be resolved by repeating the first opening up to the unknown: now I know more than before, but that does not help me to paint better.
Consequently, I think we should help students to internalize and experience this fact as described. In duration, the problems of desiring expression and powerlessness to materialise are always equally pressing, from the first day to the last. With time and dedication, we may gather more procedural and conceptual resources, but this will not alter or relieve the creator's feeling of initial helplessness. All that changes, through habit, is the disposition to confront the unknown; but that in no way can establish itself as a possible method or formula, which would be, after all, the only guarantee of a growing sense of improvement. If a creative process is grounded on repeating the first opening up to the unknown, we cannot speak of progress in it. Apparently, in practice, creative evolution occurs, but it does not respond to a teleological sense of refinement. It is impossible to determine absolute criteria for quality: were Picasso and Cezanne better painters at the end of their lives than in the beginning? Is Renaissance painting better than cave painting? From the point of view I am trying to build here, these questions cannot be answered with a yes or no, and are neither useful nor operative inquiries.
Although desire and will come with the subject, the absence of progress means that one of the teacher's fundamental tasks is to hold the student's will and desire in adversity, with the difficulties this necessarily involves. I would say, therefore, that none of this must necessarily involve renouncing the possibility of teaching or invalidate the idea of teaching as an accompaniment. In duration, teaching is feasible, even without faith in progression. In it, consciousness of one's own progress as a strategy for motivation is replaced by the certainty of the possibility of a continuous encounter with the motif; the process thus becomes an almost magical activity: one learns in the sense that one gets used to going where you do not know where you do not know.
1. The example reads: "If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, whether I like it or not, wait until the sugar melts. This little fact is large with meaning. For here the time I have to wait is not the mathematical time which would apply equally well to the entire history of the material world, even if that history were spread out instantaneously in space. It coincides with my impatience, that is to say, with a certain portion of my own duration, which I cannot protract or contract as I like. It is no longer something thought of, it is something lived." (Bergson, 2007: 29)
2. About this impossible distancing, Bergson says: “let us imagine a straight line of unlimited length and on this line a material point A, which moves. If this point were conscious of itself, it would, since it moves, feel itself change: it would perceive a succession; but would this succession take the form of a line? No doubt it would, if it could rise, so to speak, above the line which it traverses, and perceive several points of it simultaneously in juxtaposition: but by doing so it would form the idea of space, and it is in space and not in pure duration that it would see the changes which it undergoes displayed.” (Bergson, 2004: 22).