A Game of Theory?

Former A Course student Tom McPhillips asks - Is context just another set of debilitating preconceptions that stymies creativity?

At one moment during the 2010 Symposium, Gareth Jones stated:

“It should be said that initially that was in our minds that we were teaching sculpture, and as we go through these two days it will come out that we began to wonder if we were teaching sculpture or something else, but that’s to come, I’m sure that conversation is to come.”

As someone who went through the course and didn’t become a sculptor my ears pricked up when Gareth said that, and I began to wonder if the course wasn’t teaching sculpture, what was it teaching?

What was that “something else” that Gareth is referring to? It is my belief that above all else what the structure of the course enabled and perhaps promoted was actually very simple – it was play. I say “perhaps” because if it was a course that avoided intentions, one might say any effects that it had were unintentional!

Putting that conundrum aside, the aspect of the situation that we were introduced into that still resonates with me, is that moment when I find something is put in front of me without instructions, but with an unstated expectation that I’m expected to do something about this “something” and for me, what’s next is where it gets interesting…. I think that is the point where “play” starts – if I am uncertain about what this “thing” is or what it means, maybe if I play around with it for a while before I fix my understanding of it, I may learn something new and unanticipated…. There might be a downside to this, the parable of the blind men and the elephant comes to mind:

“A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said: "We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable". So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it. In the case of the first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said "This being is like a thick snake". For another one whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person, whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a tree-trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said, "elephant is a wall". Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth and like a spear.”

Students of the A Course working in the Locked Room 1970 (In this contemporary illustration the Locked Room is represented by an Elephant which is also the Elephant in The Room)

I think approaching anything without knowing its context is liberating. Context is often a series of preconceptions that murder creativity, that fence off possibilities that might have led in more open-ended directions. Not having a clue enables one to make up one’s own clues and exist in a consciousness where there are no wrong answers, all part of a Sisyphean quest to come up with a hoped-for answer that as yet is undiscovered. However, taking a lesson from the parable of the elephant, it’s definitely important to assemble as many clues as possible and build the biggest picture you can… Such is the treadmill I still enthusiastically climb onto, each and every working day!

The A Course could be defined as the creation of a situation where context was deliberately removed. But even if its manifesto was a list of the things that it wasn’t, there was still a lot of context beyond the walls of the Locked Room that deserves consideration. Was it ever a sculpture course? Or was the locked room an elaborately constructed playroom where no (and by equal measure every) result was intended? These days we might describe those results we created as multi-disciplinary. But then today we have the luxury of making digital connections and we’d be uploading our playroom projects to Instagram and if our educators told us that was forbidden, we’d laugh in their face and tell them this is how art is done in our generation, this is the baseline!

So back in that pre-digital analog world of 1969 what were the contexts that lurked in the world outside the door? Now, what I’m not suggesting is that these were the actual influences that engendered the thinking of our Locked Room Guardians, but since they wrote a manifesto that defined what the course wasn’t about, well, we students abhorred that vacuum and inevitably were at pains to fill in the blanks. What we, well I shouldn’t speak for all of us, what I, surmised went along the following lines…

First and foremost, what we participated in was primarily a role-playing game. Perhaps all teaching is a version of that, but this put the roles and the game deliberately into the foreground.

That all this had something to do with Game Theory was something we often pondered. Game Theory was certainly something that many of us were aware of, but for myself, lacking the mathematical chops to really understand it in depth, my own awareness was a bit hazy. I knew, for example that the character of Doctor Strangelove was loosely based on John von Neumann, one of the leading original thinkers in the field. I had read stuff about the Prisoners Dilemma and other aspects of game theory especially the counterintuitive aspects of advantages of cooperation over self-interest. As we reacted to the Course I felt we were acting out some version of those strategies, whether we cooperated or resisted determined how a situation or a relationship would play out either between us and the staff, or between ourselves. It felt like a constant flux of action and reaction, with everyone very aware of what we and our observers were doing. Inevitably over time the bonds loosened and familiarity either bred contempt, engagement or ennui. Of course, the fact that Peter Atkins had a definite aura of Strangelove about him, that did tend to enhance our suspicion that this might actually be the staff’s hidden agenda.

Another meme of the moment was Homo Ludens, the idea that play was an important aspect of human culture. “Homo Ludens” was originally the title of a 1938 book by Johan Huizinga, which proposed that play is necessary to the very generation of culture. The concept was co-opted by 60’s alternative culture and the idea of play as being at the very center of human interaction, inspiration and activity was a strong component of the movement which seeing play as the basis for how humans learn, began to apply that to education, especially early education. Because the 60’s were a period of high employment and there was a lot of utopian speculation that machines would replace the need for most jobs, a world of leisure could be imagined and what work was done would be in the form of play. “Play Power”, a 1971 book by Richard Neville was typical of its era, he promulgated a playful pursuit of pleasure. “Play”, Neville wrote, “adorns life, amplifies it, and to that extent is a necessity both for the individual – as a life function – and for the society… as a cultural function”. Yet one had the suspicion that however much the A Course seemed to endorse “play”, there was a strong seam of work ethic running throughout the whole endeavor, (perhaps all the way from those Welsh Non-Conformist valleys…) Play was acceptable, but there was there was a hopeful expectation that we would work hard at it.

Another influence was the introduction of chance as a generator of creative decisions. The “cut-up” techniques of William Burroughs were a primary touchstone, the idea that you could take a piece of writing and by reassembling it in a random fashion you could discover or expose new meanings and ideas that were hidden in the original composition. We always seem to be referring to the “materials” project, but it was a good example of how a random factor was introduced into the mix, whether it was a new material or its unexpected removal. One thinks of John Cage: “I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.” Whatever else he’s saying, Cage leads us to believe that an intentional choice serves one no better than one made at random. The A Course acted to randomize our experience, the lesson being perhaps that all “artistic” decisions are random, and most artistic narratives are fictional. We say, “I did this, which led to this and that led to that,” but really one might as well say, “I made up this random action and justified it and my further actions by creating a story about why I did it”. Our staff, by attacking the hierarchy of education, positioning themselves as observers not teachers, by implication also questioned the hierarchy of ideas, making the point that even though they were the designated teachers, their ideas were no higher in the hierarchy than ours. If you refuse to teach, then it’s reasonable to assume that all ideas are of equal validity. Which puts the burden on deciding what ideas are valid for oneself on oneself and that probably brings us back to Game Theory…

That story from John Cage, also brings up the idea of synchronicity, the concept of meaningful coincidences that was proposed by Carl Jung. It attempts to explain how when you open a book at random you amazingly find exactly what you were looking for. The idea isn’t that far from the “happy accident” of finding a relationship by chance rather than by design. I remember this being a fairly prevalent meme at the time. Perhaps not directly related to the A Course, just part of the background noise…

What all is this is leading to is that it is my belief that these elements, the removal of context, the encouragement to play, which in turn provided opportunities for chance or accidental discoveries, all led in one direction – Process. I think that is the “something else”.

You might as well have called it the “Process Course” as the Sculpture Course.

Which isn’t the first time that’s been said, of course, but I think it is these influences, game theory, homo ludens, chance and synchronicity contribute to and encourage a world view based on process. You could probably cite many other contemporary memes from that era, so I certainly wouldn’t limit the influence to just these. At the 2010 Symposium, Peter Kardia (née Atkins) quoted Sol LeWitt who suggested that the initial idea is the most important factor, with the actual materialisation of this idea as something that can be carried out without any further critical engagement. Though he doesn’t state it quite so directly, I think Kardia is saying that it’s a statement he strongly disagrees with. Of course, some ideas begin with that one great inspiration, but they are as, and possibly more likely to arise from the process of simply working on something, and that something eventually becomes an idea.

The Guggenheim Museum defines as follows… “Process Artists were involved in issues attendant to the body, random occurrences, improvisation and the liberating qualities of nontraditional materials such as wax, felt, and latex. Using these, they created eccentric forms in erratic or irregular arrangements produced by actions such as cutting, hanging, and dropping, or organic processes such as growth, condensation, freezing, or decomposition” which needless to say is an uncannily accurate description of the things we got up to in the Locked Room – perhaps they had spies – was there a Guggenheim mole in the Locked Room? But I think the “process” I’m talking about goes much further than that. I would describe it as a way of working that does not at the outset have a predetermined outcome. At the beginning, the work undertaken is an entertainment of possibilities without any precise definition of objectives. Necessarily, real life intervenes and more often than not, an end result is required. But at least initially, that end result is a product of play through modelling, manipulation and improvisation, carried out with the hope that one might end up with a far superior solution than the one first anticipated.

To me, that was the genius of the course, it promoted however unintentionally a way of working that could be applied to any discipline, the course became one that emphasized process over result and it’s the biggest thing that I took away from those years. It’s a strategy that still motivates and structures the way I work and what I do, right up to the present day.

Tom McPhillips
18 April 2018