Excerpt from: “I PROBLEMI DELLA PEDAGOGIA”

bimonthly journal edited by Prof. Luigi Volpicelli

no. 1 January – February 1979

 

Bruno Pinto

Art as the child’s discovery of self

 

“The purpose of imaginative education is: to instill a complete and sensuous consciousness of the harmony and rhythm that enter into the constitution of all living things and are the formal basis of all works of art, so that the child, in his life and activities, may participate in the same grace and organic beauty. With this education, we make the child conscious of that instinct for relationship which, even before the intervention of reason, will allow him to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly, the good from the bad, the right line of conduct from the wrong, the noble person from the ignoble.” (Herbert Read)

Many ancient and modern thinkers assert that education through art is the truly organic, integral type of education—the only one capable of eliciting the action of human faculties in a unified way, connecting them to one another through paths that are perhaps difficult to define, yet effective in disposing the mind and the entire being toward a creative intelligence of man and the world around him.

Of course, it is not that we wish to reduce all education to a diffuse and unlimited aestheticism, but, as Argan says, since art is the typical expression of a creative principle, aesthetic activity is that which presides over every human development, both of the individual and of the community.

But what is this artistic quality, what is this aesthetic dimension?

It would be that dimension in which human activity is produced and produces an organic connection between the cognitive and sensitive faculties, between the mental and vital spheres—a connection without which a vital intelligence of phenomena and an integrated existence do not seem possible.

Now, it is generally recognized that current education precludes the development of the most original creative faculties, producing a fracture in the human being that causes neurosis. Education through art has, fundamentally, nothing to do with psychology, pedagogy, or politics, but essentially with anthropological knowledge and the ontological sphere.

When we speak of artistic education, we are not speaking of any simple didactics of expression, but of the function of the aesthetic dimension within the scope of didactics and general pedagogy.

A very dense network of images produced by nature and human will continuously strikes our eye, which chooses, separates, associates, superimposes, and synthesizes them automatically; just as automatically, impulses, feelings, thoughts, and actions are aroused by these images. But what does our eye see consciously? How much do we evaluate what is proposed through seeing?

The prejudice is widespread that what we see is objective, real, and necessarily seen well—that our seeing is naturally and spontaneously correct—but in reality, this way of thinking is entirely unfounded. We see what we are used to seeing; our eye is not free at all but conditioned by our culture. Our vision expresses our likes and dislikes and reveals the qualities of our thinking, the nature of our affectivity, and our desires.

Educating the vision therefore means educating the eye to perceive the vitality of forms and to understand the meaning of this vitality by evaluating it; accepting, rejecting, and refraining from the action that the visual stimulus necessarily arouses.

But there are many prejudices, conformisms, and superstitions regarding the aesthetic fact and poetic creativity. Today, when it has become a common fad to talk about art and artistic education, they are even more dangerous because they mask themselves under presumed progressive attitudes. On television, through specific publications for children, programmed visits to works of art, etc., attempts are made to promote aesthetic education, but in the vast majority of cases, the problems and meanings of art—and modern art in particular—are treated by distorting and trivializing their original contents.

But whoever, in the intent to mediate the sense of the modern aesthetic experience, extracts practical, didactically communicable rules from the forms created by it (including the idea of the absence of rules), only demonstrates how much they are conditioned by that very mentality that modern poets have sought to denounce as unrealistic and mystifying. Valéry states: “For the purpose of artistic culture, we have given impetus to our museums, we have introduced into our schools a certain mode of aesthetic education. But these are only specious measures, which can only succeed in spreading an abstract erudition without positive effects. Everything is limited to distributing a knowledge without living depth… we possess within us a whole reserve of ready-made forms, names, and phrases, which are pure imitation, which free us from the worry of thinking, and which we tend to consider as valid and appropriate solutions. Our thought is then nothing but a simple automatic response.”[2]

It is precisely when we find ourselves before childhood—that is, when we are in a relationship with an existence for which the abstractions of language and ideological discourse serve to establish no organic communication, when we must express ourselves through acts, I would say through aesthetic facts—it is precisely here that we realize the unbridgeable distance between our desires and the ability to turn these into a free, active, living will, dialectically expressed in our real behavior, and therefore truly communicable.

In front of children, the insufficiency, flatness, and inexpressiveness of our usual language, even when it seeks to communicate uncommon facts, things, or notions, becomes glaring, and the failure of our critical-ideological mentality cannot be silenced. Such an attitude of thought can indeed make us see clearly what the true necessity is, the real problem to be solved, but it cannot be the means to solve the problems that it can nevertheless pose with precision.

This fact leads us once again to reflect on the nature and qualities proper to the reality of Poetic thought.

Poetic expression in its form has all the characters of logical thought, but its operations are rooted in a supra-logical dimension in which intelligence seems to establish a more immediate and substantial cognitive participation with reality. Modern art has sought to affirm, in opposition to the technical-utilitarian-consumerist mentality and mechanical logic, the necessity and capacity of man to realize a mental attitude—indeed, a broader, deeper, and more plastic way of being—toward the world.

Infantile figurative expression is a heterogeneous bundle of expressive elements of a symptomatic character, belonging to a fluid existential situation. Psychological excesses and weaknesses connected to particular inclinations of individual character, to social customs of group and family, and to clichés are confused with complex and obscure existential impulses, oscillating evolutionary needs—a sea of human matter in ferment, often seething, a labyrinth of impulsive reactions from which it is impossible to emerge by means of arrangements conducted analytically: along this path, one will necessarily fall into schematic, reductive, generic proposals that can only further complicate the situation.

This psychophysical matter expresses itself in figurative forms that I believe should be considered nothing more than residues of artistic forms from previous cultures of the past, even remote, alien to any authentically formative force and passively reacting in the infantile psychological sphere, also constituting themselves as repressive tendencies in conflict with new and latent creative potentialities.

The problem that arises, then, is to understand what forms the child should practice to dissolve psychic conflicts that are insoluble through merely compensatory actions; how to release the paralysis of vital forces by opening a breach in the usual psychic space through which an authentic way of existing and understanding can emerge. What expressive forms should be proposed in the various stages of growth in relation to the need for the development of their own intelligence? What modes of thought keep conscious reflective activities alive, relating them correctly to those deep potentialities that must find adequate expressive forms?

Because what a realistic education must pursue is precisely the autonomy of consciousness, the realization of its authentic freedom; and if it is generally recognized that current educational systems are in various ways repressive, it does not seem to me that so-called committed or experimental educational experiences aim, despite their intentions, at a real education of the free consciousness.

Rather, they are interested in changing certain technical aspects of learning, but what must be learned, upon close inspection, always aims to make the child into that adult who tomorrow will be a more or less functioning machine in the service of some absurd myth.

One can change the methods of learning, updating them to the most sophisticated demands of a utilitarian society, but in any case, man is distracted from that effort of searching for his own original identity, from the search for his specific form of action, and is necessarily pushed toward the exercise of neurosis.

Recently, I had the opportunity to carry out an experience of aesthetic education in the elementary schools of Monteveglio (Bologna) with children of the first and second cycles, and I was immediately struck by the heavy mannerisms that children’s drawing presents. This evidence confronted me with the need to find a behavior that would induce the child to a more fluid action, less preoccupied with absurd symbolic representations, less abstractly projective; to realize themselves in a more organic and plastic space, a space in which they felt more vitally implicated, globally engaged, I would say magnetically interested.

Because, if it is true that the child perceives the world in an animistic way, it is also true that their being does not assimilate such animation, which is present in the world; indeed, the impossibility of possessing it is the cause of their neuroses. The eclipse of their creative imagination through regressive projection into dreamlike fantasizing alienates them more and more from those vivid images of the world which alone can be a strong stimulus to their attention, a real, objective point of reference for authentic reflective exercise and real cognitive activity.

The visual stereotypes of kinetic images, cartoons, comic books, and all that junk of images produced by the cultural industry—artificially moved—contribute heavily to the regression of the creative imagination into the automatic game of daydreaming. From the point of view of psychological ecology and mental health, they are a true poison.

The patterns of these psychologically stereotyped and tautological images de-animate perception, blocking all spontaneity of impulses and preventing the child from discovering themselves as a living being in a dynamic relationship with things experienced in the world, within and outside of themselves.

On that occasion of concrete didactics to which I dedicated myself, as I said, as far as time and means allowed, I attempted to make the child perceive the artificiality of certain justifications of theirs, and how much richer the reality of the things we observe was; and this not only with the activity of drawing but by means of readings, comparisons of ancient and modern paintings, and comparisons between their own drawings.

I must say that if the apathy and amorphousness of certain attitudes of theirs struck me, I was also amazed by some emergences of intelligent perceptivity in them.

The drawings produced were not, obviously, something original or freed from psychological complications, but in my opinion, they revealed in a more immediate, complex, and plastic way the flow of their real psychological-existential space, revealing a more immediate impulsivity and emotionality, connected to fragments of a memory that has accents of authentic reviviscence: phantom presences appear that ask to be understood, visionary images that seek to connect by means of oscillatory movements, pulsations, superimpositions, and rhythmic interferences with the needs of physical, bodily space; at other times, instead, they tend to blur into dreamy fantasizing, into oneiricity. Faced with these drawings that live on a sort of animal impulsivity and looming emotional pressures, our usual modes of interpretation are expropriated.

“According to psychoanalytic terminology, humanity inherits from childhood not only the aspiration to transcend neurosis but also neurosis itself.” [3]

Now it is of particular interest to point out certain less conspicuous dimensions of the child’s behavior, which seem to me of fundamental importance because they can establish, I believe, a solid starting point for developing in them a deeper receptivity and a more autonomous and original expressive consciousness, less subjugated to the tumultuous incursions of the psychological-existential unconscious, to that indefinite swarm of fragments of things—behaviors, that is, which can constitute themselves as truly formative tendencies.

A positive aspect of the new spatiality emerged in the drawings manifested itself in the fact that the child, despite being totally involved in the action they are performing, cannot identify with it because they sense that there is something clearly unfinished and obscure in their doing; this element makes them perplexed and curious; they are interested in it, that is, not only in the vital sphere but also in the mental one.

This “open” space evokes in them a feeling that carries within itself a potential evolutionary force, because it deeply awakens and freely disposes their cognitive faculties to action; it is of a nature that is not merely psychological but is the expression of properly spiritual and cognitive needs: this feeling is restlessness.

From a psychological point of view, the child is simultaneously attracted and repelled by the new way of operating; they cannot understand the meaning of their images because they cannot justify them by means of representations familiar to them: then their habitual psychological space begins to oscillate between two poles, attracted by two great needs of the soul that begin to express themselves immediately: that of vital impulses in which they are empathetically involved, and the other, the need to understand, possess, and signify the action they are carrying out.

The dialectical relationship between these two forces that animate existence is, I believe, the foundation on which a truly intelligent educational activity can develop.

We have touched here upon a dimension of child psychology that seems to me ignored by psychological currents and which I think instead can constitute, from the point of view of real evolutionary possibilities, a truly “other” dimension; it is a sphere of the human soul that presents characters of autonomy with respect to the common psychic dimension. This particular situation that arises in the child’s ego, when they find themselves discovering a new space, is a moment of particular existential intensity. From our point of view, what interests us is not so much this

moment in itself, but what provoked it and how to maintain it at increasingly deeper levels and how to articulate it in relation to the needs of rational consciousness.

The artistic product of the child, even if unusual, does not have great value in itself but as testimony to a particular human condition.

It is this condition that is to be understood; we are not interested in the drawing itself but in the quality of the forces that provoked it.

If these have a truly evolutionary character, they generate freedom and autonomy; and positive results will also be seen on the psychological level: one will notice a greater flexibility and fluidity in the mental faculties, an eclipsing of regressive crystallizations, a greater plasticity and flexibility in bodily movements, agitated and distracted gestures will disappear, and the capacity for attention will stabilize.

I would say then that while in usual, habitual drawings, what the child is not is expressed, showing rather their impossibility to realize themselves, in some of those produced in our meetings one can intuit what the child can be, because they express potentialities that live beneath the crust of their habits.

This highlights how heavily mortifying the mental patterns transmitted to them by the environment are, and how much the forms of their reflective consciousness are dissociated and dissociating from the deepest structures of their being and from the most vivid and fresh experiences of their soul.

How then to dispose the child to understand the meaning of a doing in which they realize a more authentic space-time? I say the meaning, not an abstract justification.

I believe we can aim to arouse in the child a right disposition toward self-understanding, by having them pay attention to the quality of a more vivid and intense perceiving, introducing them to an action in which they perceive that they are working on a living matter, even a violent one, which requires great tact and puts them in difficulty because they sense its complexity; but it is this very complexity that frightens them that also urges them to act, overcome difficulties, and conquer fears.

They must understand that experience, if real, always involves a risk, an imponderable element, and perhaps many failures before concluding; just as a happy achievement is the consequence of an intelligent activity that cannot be determined a priori or voluntarily programmed; that reflection and application, in order not to disperse into the arbitrary and the gratuitous, must be continuously focused on the phenomena that have interested them, and that these have vital value only if they interest our faculties at various levels and have a character of looming necessity.

By keeping these dispositions to vivid attention alive in the child’s soul, their mental and sentimental faculties will be educated toward a spiritual flexibility, toward an active presence, free from ideological crystallizations, without which they will not be able to discover and understand the adequate forms for an ever-renewed relationship with the world.

In the “game” that the child will weave in their experiencing of the world, we can only try to play with them, adhering to the objectivity of a design that may unfold in unexpected ways.

Our strength lies in believing and understanding that the child can be something other than that infantile image we generally have of them, which causes an attitude toward them that is continuously altered with respect to their real human needs: they have many more resources than we think.

There must exist a behavior that is not the abstract superimposition of our neurotic fantasies about childhood onto the real life of the child—a behavior, that is, that places us as mediators of the child’s discovery of self, a self that becomes an adult and in the adult awakens that dead child they carry within, preventing them from being authentically adult.[4]

 

[1] Giulio Carlo Argan. Preface to the book Educating through Art by Herbert Read, op. cit., p. 11,

[3] Norman Brown, Life Against Death, ed. Adelphi, 1964

[4] Bruno Pinto, Organic Education Through Art – Sagittaria by Luciano Padovese, no. 72 pp. 205-210, 1977 edition