Creativity and Learning in Later Life

An Ethnography of Museum Education

Shari Sabeti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317384885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Creativity and Learning in Later Life examines how processes such as 'creativity' and 'inspiration' are experienced by writers who engage with the visual arts, and questions how age is perceived in relation to these processes. The author's careful analysis challenges many of the assumptions on which museum education currently operates, contributing to wider debates surrounding the value of arts and cultural heritage education.

Containing detailed descriptions of museum tours, viewers' engagements with specific artworks, and the processes of creative writing and editing that result from such encounters, the book draws on a ground-breaking study to challenge the way in which the value of education and creative activity for older adult learners has been conceptualized in existing literature. It also demonstrates how learners adapt and subvert the intended pedagogies to suit their own needs and accommodate their ageing selves.

Drawing on a spectrum of disciplines including education, anthropology, art history, sociology, museum studies and the practice and theory of creative writing, this book will be of interest to academics, postgraduate students, and researchers in a range of fields, as well museum practitioners, creative writing teachers and those working in adult and community education settings.

Part I

Creative reception

Chapter 1

The guided tour

Introduction: ‘Inspired to be Creative?’

Museums were originally intended to be spaces of contemplation, reflection, and inspiration; indeed the etymology of the word indicates their self-fashioning as the ‘seat of the Muses’ – a place where people come to be inspired. The Painting Words group – a class focused on members of the public becoming creative subjects through an inspirational encounter with the museum’s artwork – continues in this vein. The gallery’s adult education program, according to their own publicity, ‘aims to inform, inspire and stimulate and to encourage enjoyment and exploration of the national art collection’. Their series of ‘Workshops and Practical Courses’ are billed in this way: ‘Inspired to be creative? There are lots of things to try throughout the year’ (National Galleries Scotland 2017 a). As well as advertising these classes on their web site, one can pick up a ‘What’s On’ leaflet from the front desk, or printed flyers about individual classes from holders which are attached to the wall in between the public lavatories and the entrance to the Education Centre. There are also posters inside the lavatories strategically placed by hand dryers and half way down on the internal doors of individual cubicles. On these flyers the vocabulary of ‘inspiration’ and ‘creativity’ is both explicit and implied; for example, ‘Artist X introduces a different range of techniques in each session inspired by works of art on show in the gallery. With step-by-step guidance participants will be encouraged to create their own modern masterpiece’ or ‘See how others have portrayed the human figure, then work from a model’. Other classes are described as being ‘inspired by Peploe’, ‘inspired by Turner’, ‘inspired by Visions of India’. The advertisements are also careful to emphasize the non-intimidating nature of these classes, using words such as ‘helped’, ‘encouraged’, ‘guided’, ‘friendly discussion’, ‘explanation’, clearly casting the gallery educators in pastoral roles, as intermediaries between the general public and the intimidating world of art.¹ These leaflets, and the programmes they advertise, reveal an assumed relationship between inspiration, creativity, and learning. To be inspired – in the way it is figured here – is to learn about, and to learn from, an artwork. In turn, creating is also a form of learning – we learn how to make something from inspecting closely how others have done so before. We also, it is implied, learn something about ourselves, gaining a sense of satisfaction and pride. There is individual development and growth located in becoming a critical and/or creative subject. Inspiration then is implicitly presented as a theory of learning, as well as a theory of creativity. Creativity is the outcome of learning and inspiration, and so on. The structure of these programmes also assumes, I want to argue, that it is inspiration that is a starting point for the other two processes. The vast majority of these classes, including Painting Words, begin with a guided tour of artworks in the gallery. It is here, in front of a painting, photograph or sculpture, and in the company of an ‘expert’, that class participants are supposed to be inspired.

Inspiration has attracted a degree of serious attention from scholars working in both literary criticism and human geography in recent times (Clark 1997; Brace and Johns-Putra 2010). In particular, there has been an attempt to rescue it from its relegation to a category of ‘popular’ usage to one that helps us to understand the claims that writers and artists themselves make about what happens to them during creative processes. The term itself, literally meaning ‘to breathe in’, stems from the Latin ‘spirare’ and in both Platonic and Biblical contexts was associated with a form of possession by some kind of transcendent authority (god or spirit). Through Medieval, Renaissance, and particularly, Romantic, usage it has become more associated with individual creativity. It often denotes a suspension of reason and control in order to allow access to the deeper psyche. However, as Clark points out, what is interesting about the discourse of ‘inspiration’ is that it ‘has often comprised a tight knot of different, even contradictory, claims about subjectivity, value and productivity’ (1997: 3). Most importantly, there is a blurring of agency involved in being inspired or inspiring others:

The writer is possessed or dispossessed, and may undergo an extreme state of elation. Composition may seem to be effortless, even automatic. The writer is often astonished by what he or she has written, yet the result is also a matter of personal credit.

(1997: 3)

There is, Clark argues, an odd temporality to how we use the term: we say that a text ‘is inspired’, not just that it once was; we refer to the poem as inspired, as well as the poet. In my interviews with, and observations of, gallery educators the terms ‘inspired’, ‘inspiring’, ‘inspirational’, and its opposite, ‘uninspiring’ were widely deployed. I met Lilly, a regular gallery guide, in her own artist’s studio in the north of the city. She settled on the word ‘educator’ to describe her job after toying with ‘facilitator’ and ‘enabler’. She explained this further:

I think [it is about] encouraging people to be inspired by the artwork and feel that they can come back. I think it’s important to get people into the building and for them to know that it’s there and that it’s comfortable to use.

Here she ascribes a somewhat vague sense of agency to herself-as-guide in bringing about some kind of inspirational encounter. Lilly’s own work was abstract and ‘inspired’, she told me, by ‘derelict urban landscapes’. Tanya, one of the other artists who frequently conducted tours, explained that she went to the gallery to find inspiration for her own work which was largely in engravings, wood cuts, and paper cuts. Reflecting on the tours she conducted in the gallery, she said:

I suppose you are giving them basic art historical information. You’re fitting that person’s work into a category in their mind … and then looking at the thing itself.

Different metaphors were used in an attempt to explain the significance of the artworks in the gallery to the creative process of members of the Painting Words group; indeed, these metaphors intended to explain what ‘inspiration’ actually was. Jenny, the gallery educator who had instigated the class, spoke about art as a ‘trigger’ for ‘writing well’; Tanya used the word ‘feeding’ to describe the relationship between the art objects and writers’ work. As people who work in, around, and for the gallery, the importance of that engagement with art objects is clear. It is also significant that, for some of them, the aesthetic properties of those objects was what made them ‘rich’ or ‘inspirational’ in the first place. Jenny said:

If you’re looking at a simple thing like a sugar bowl, you could come up with loads of things but there would be a limitation. You’re starting from a very, very narrow thing and then bringing it out, whereas with a painting it’s a wider thing in itself.

The gallery’s pedagogy works on the assumption that people will want to create something of their ‘own’ – ‘your own modern masterpiece’. This creative act – inspired by a tour of institutionalized art objects – will result in a material output which is ‘new’ and which indexes the creative abilities and talents of the maker (as well as indexing the originally inspiring artists/artwork). This is a theory of creativity that rests fully on the idea of inspiration. In this theory, agency is located in the artwork and in the creator but in a linear flow where the object acts on the person who then acts on materials (words, paper, pen) to produce a new object. However, as we have seen, the complications in agency and temporality inherent in the notion of inspiration as described by Clark seem to belie this. According to Clark, ‘inspiration’, ‘can denote both cause and effect, and its sense often plays deceptively between those poles (my emphasis). ‘Agency,’ he continues, ‘is uncertain and mobile’ (1997: 3). Given that the locus of that inspiration is identified as the tour of artworks it would make sense to look at these in some detail. While the gallery educators I interviewed repeatedly wavered over what to call themselves or to delineate clearly what it was that they were doing, the practice of guiding and touring remains ubiquitous in galleries and museums – an overwhelmingly popular pedagogical structure that has remained constant despite changing technologies (audio tours, digital tours, and even robot tours – see Burgard, Cremers et al. 1999; Wang, Stash, Sambeek et al. 2009). And yet as we saw in the vignette that opened the Introduction to this book, the tour/guide appeared to be at odds with the group in terms of her understanding of both agency and inspiration.

Touring a series of pictures

The practice of touring, like the ‘birth of the museum’ itself, emerged from the Grand Tour traditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Bennett 1995; Cohen 1985). A museum tour (like those carried out by travel companies) works on the premise that there is a series of images (or sights) that should be viewed. These sights are planned and predetermined, often by experts with local or specialized knowledge. The tour tends to present an over-arching narrative or perspective on a place, set of artifacts, or culture. It involves stopping at these temporarily, looking at them in detail and some verbal mediation related to the sight. In the case of the museum the ‘sights’ are also displayed objects that have emerged from exhibition-making (and before then, collecting) processes. Cohen has highlighted the complex conceptual underpinnings of guiding and how these are often in tension in the context of modern tourism. There are, he argues, two roles embedded in the ‘guide’: that of leader or ‘pathfinder’ and that of mentor or ‘mediator’ (1985: 10). In the case of the former the guide, rather than showing the way through a geographic region as they might have done in the past, provides instead ‘privileged access to an otherwise non-public territory’. In the case of the latter, the guide as mediator is someone who points out objects of interest and acts more like a ‘cultural broker’ (1985: 10). Both of these senses of the word were present in the practices of the museum guides I encountered. They would, occasionally, take us to spaces that members of the public were not normally allowed to see (examples are given in later chapters) or give us information about behind the scenes curatorial or display practices. Furthermore, as we have seen in the language of the advertising for classes and tours, they are clearly pitched as brokering a relationship between the visitors and the cultural objects on display. In this second iteration of their role the guide, Cohen argues, carries out representational, organizational, and communicative tasks (1985: 21). However, it is the latter, as Cohen points out, which is often seen by guides themselves as their primary task. It involves selection of objects, the relaying of factual information about those objects, and an implied interpretation, which, when taken too far, may also be a fabrication. Depending on what kind of site or object is being shown, the guide has less or more work to do in order to engage the tourist or visitor, or to put it another way – to inspire their imaginations. Cohen suggests that the guide taking tourists to see Niagara Falls or the Mona Lisa will have less work to do than the guide who takes people to view less ‘authentic’ or lesser known sites (1985: 23).

My interviews with museum educators revealed a preoccupation with two aspects of this practice – the verbal mediation (the balance and content of talk) and dwelling with (spending time looking at) the objects. The other features of the tour – the walking, stopping, sitting, turning, pointing – or indeed, the fact that most tours involve groups of people rather than individuals, was never alluded to. As part of my ethnography over the past seven years I have attended between thirty and forty guided tours with the Painting Words group. As time has gone on it has become common practice to include more ‘self-guided’ tours in the yearly plan. The impetus for this was initially a financial one: while entrance to the galleries, including all their special exhibitions (for which the public are normally charged), are free to this group, the freelance guides and creative writing tutor they work with require payment. As attendance waxed and waned, there was sometimes little money left. Eventually a decision was taken, by group members themselves, to self-guide a larger number of tours.² Given that I had become increasingly aware of a divergence between group members and the practices undertaken by the guides, I watched with interest to see how these contrasted with one another. In the following section I look in detail at a guided tour led by a gallery educator and a self-guided tour led by two group members. I attended both of these tours with the group and made extensive field notes; with the permissi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Creative reception
• Part II Creative writing
• Part III Creative ageing
• Conclusion: creative space?
• Index