Journal of Visual Art Practice

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In praise of vagueness: re-visioning the

relationship between theory and practice in
the teaching of Fine Art from a cross-cultural
perspective

Simon Morley

To cite this article: Simon Morley (2017): In praise of vagueness: re-visioning the relationship
between theory and practice in the teaching of Fine Art from a cross-cultural perspective, Journal of
Visual Art Practice, DOI: 10.1080/14702029.2017.1292380

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14702029.2017.1292380

Published online: 23 Feb 2017.

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JOURNAL OF VISUAL ART PRACTICE, 2017
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14702029.2017.1292380

In praise of vagueness: re-visioning the relationship between

theory and practice in the teaching of Fine Art from a cross-
cultural perspective
Simon Morley
College of Arts, Dankook University, Cheonan, Republic of Korea

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The emphasis on textual or oral supplements grounded in objective Received 5 September 2016
metacognitive analysis, and drawing on theoretical ideas and Accepted 4 February 2017
concepts, is now an acknowledged part of Fine Art pedagogy. But
KEYWORDS
many involved in art education would agree that there is often a Fine Art teaching; theory and
problem finding a good ‘fit’ between the theoretical and the practice; east-west cultural
practical. I draw on my experience as an artist and a teacher of comparison; Republic of
Fine Art in the Republic of Korea in order to suggest how a Korea; analogy
positive evaluation of ‘vagueness’ within the cognitive style
displayed by Korean students as part-and-parcel of their cultural
mindset signals the fact that they are familiar with a analogical
cognitive style in which ‘the incoherence associable with images
and metaphors are carried over into the more formal elements of
thought’ [Hall, David L., and Roger T. Ames. 1995. Anticipating
China: Thinking Through the Narratives of Chinese and Western
Culture. Albany: State University of New York: 124]. I relate this to
the research of Barbara Stafford on analogy and suggest that
developing a methodology capable of addressing the benefits
of this looser, ‘vaguer’, cognitive style can strengthen Fine Art
pedagogy by incorporating the analogical language of images.

Consider two sets of lovers, each of whom mutually pledge their devotion. Let us say that the
members of one couple then proceed to articulate precisely what each means by the word
‘love’. The other couple, however, remains content with the simple declaration. It is perfectly
conceivable that the stipulations involved in the first instance can lead to real ideological con-
flict. Such conflict is less likely in the second case. What is the crucial difference? The second
couple may marry and live in relative happiness for the rest of their live even if, were the
‘truth’ to be known, their unarticulated understandings of the word ‘love’ are potentially
divergent. The reason for this is that there is sufficient vagueness in one’s actions and
expressions to allow for a harmonious overlapping of practical import, as long as they do
not receive conscious interpretation. (Hall and Ames 1995, 169)

When the novice is brought into the presence of some component of the environment and
called upon to attend to it in a certain way, his task, then, is not to decode it. It is rather to
discover for himself the meaning that lies within it. (Ingold 2010, 22)

CONTACT Simon Morley morleysimon@hotmail.com

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 S. MORLEY

… an approach that allows for an infusion of meaning, a far cry from the imperious enumer-
ations of (demonstrative) discourse and all its unrelenting classifications and distinctions.
Such a mode of reading allows the full potential of meaning to gradually infuse the reader
as he puts himself at the disposal of its secret urgings and embarks on an endlessly
renewed journey. (Jullien 2004, 33)

Circumstances of birth largely determine intellectual and emotional affinities, and recogniz-
ing and assessing the contribution of the background cultures of students to how they
respond to the teaching they receive on UK academic courses is an obvious prerequisite in
any successful multi-cultural educational environment. But this encounter should also
serve to make us, the educators, reflect on how our own background culture informs the
idea we have of what and how to teach. In a previous issue of the Journal of Visual Art Prac-
tice (Volume 13, Issue 2, June 2014), I drew on my experiences in university Fine Art depart-
ments in the Republic of Korea, and discussed some broad cultural differences between South
Korean and Western-educated students. Working as an artist in South Korea over the past
five years, while also teaching Koreans at MA and Ph.D. levels in English – that is, within
a context where verbal language has greatly diminished authority due to the language
barrier – has especially led me to reflect on how we use theoretical discourse in relation to
the practical business of making art, and it is this that I want to discuss in the present essay.
In my earlier essay, I noted the important role played by cultural norms in how Korean
students respond to teaching. I applied the terminology of the social psychologist Nisbett
(2003), who through empirical research has revealed the presence of two broad psycho-
logical mindsets amongst students which can be mapped geographically as ‘analytic’
(Western) and ‘holistic’ (East Asian). As Nisbett (2003, 211) writes, ‘analytic thought’
follows patterns by dissecting the world into ‘a limited number of discrete objects
having particular attributes that can be categorized in clear ways’, while ‘holistic
thought’ ‘responds to a much wider array of objects and their relations, and […] makes
fewer sharp distinctions among attributes or categories, [and so] is less well suited to lin-
guistic representation’. I suggested that ‘holistic’ cognition has certain advantages that can
be useful within a pedagogic context.
Here, I want to elaborate on the possibility of cross-cultural translation by exploring a
central aspect of the ‘holistic’ cognition available to East Asian students as part-and-parcel
of a mindset that, according to Western standards is judged too subjective and unreflexive,
and is therefore deemed cognitively deficient, especially within an academic context. I have
chosen the adjective ‘vague’ to describe this way of thinking. But I will argue that this
mindset draws attention to occluded possibilities within Western thinking, and so can
provide the basis for an expansion of Western methodologies that make them capable
of incorporating greater awareness of the inherent value of thinking with images.

‘Vagueness’
In common usage, ‘vague’ indicates that something is unfocused, unclear, indistinct,
obscure, ambiguous, indeterminate, fuzzy, blurred, fluid, stochastic or elusive. Etymologi-
cally, the word derives from the Latin vagus, meaning ‘strolling’, ‘wandering’ or ‘rambling’,
or, more figuratively, ‘uncertain’, and it comes to us directly via the Middle French vague,
meaning ‘wandering’, ‘empty’, ‘vacant’, ‘wild’ and ‘uncultivated’. Epistemologically, such
associations cluster around the assumption of a lack or a deficit. We use the word
 JOURNAL OF VISUAL ART PRACTICE 3

‘vague’ metaphorically to suggest weak thinking that is too general, unspecific, uninforma-
tive, incoherent, inexact, obtuse, subjective and emotional. This is because the preferential
mental state is understood to be one of cognitive control and clarity, of possessing unam-
biguous, exact, objective and concrete data. The study of the ‘vague’ in Western philos-
ophy therefore tends to focus on the challenge it poses to any epistemology in which
control and understanding is assumed to be the sought after norm. Thus, for example,
in analytic philosophy ‘vagueness’ signals the existence of so-called borderline cases in
which no determinate logic prevails. In post-structuralist theory, meanwhile, ‘vagueness’
plays a subversive role within its critique of Western ‘logophallocentrism’ and is seen,
for example, as a principal characteristic of the unconscious. But in what follows, I will
be treating ‘vagueness’ in a more positive and less overtly subversive fashion, as a descrip-
tor for cognitive processes that occur when, as the philosopher David Hall and the sinol-
ogist Ames (1995, 124) put it, ‘the incoherence associable with images and metaphors are
carried over into the more formal elements of thought’.
In the quotation from Hall and Ames cited at the beginning of my essay the authors use
the example of two amorous couples, but in the present context I would like to suggest we
think of two pairs of students (or artists) and their works (thereby giving the works a kind
of agency of their own1) and ask the same question. The former student/artist, who is com-
mitted to clear articulation and conscious interpretation, risks creating a potentially divi-
sive and debilitating situation. In this case, the relationship with the work is dominated by
the controlling force of a detached and analytic framework. The student in the second
pairing, by contrast, like the un- or under-analytic lovers, may be able to more effectively
develop a profitable working relationship, because there is sufficient vagueness in the way
in which the student interacts with their work to ‘allow for a harmonious overlapping of
practical import’. But they would not have much to say (or write) to their tutor.
We could also imagine another pairing, this time involving Fine Art teaching styles. The
former pair would represent the student working within the style familiar in the UK, while
the latter is more akin to what I have experienced in South Korea. This means that Korean
students, like other East Asians, are unfamiliar with the metacognitive analytical protocols
considered mandatory in relation to the practical activity of making art. Much of what in a
UK art school situation must be consciously articulated within the teaching experience with
the help of some kind of theoretical framework is allowed to pass below the pedagogic radar,
or it is left at the periphery, as something indistinct and unfocused.

The globalized artworld and teaching

On Fine Art courses in the UK, educators regularly receive evidence like this that non-
Western students are constrained by the cognitive styles they bring with them from
their homelands. The adaption to the requirements of the Western education programmes
upon which they are enrolled is part of a much wider and profounder cultural transactions
occurring globally, as countries accelerate up the superhighways of modernization. Today,
the huge differences between Korea and Britain that existed even just 50 years ago are far
less evident. Indeed, the art world into which non-Western students hope to insert them-
selves is now globalized, and what once signified the culturally specific – oil on canvas
equals ‘Western’, for example – is now simply available for use by all without worrying
over provenance. Biennales and art fairs provide ample evidence that the art world is
4 S. MORLEY

transcultural. But at the same time, such convergences within the global art world often
disguise the persistence of variations within the cultures from which artists come, or
merely exploit them superficially in order to create exotic allure.
The pervasive influence upon art students of stubborn deep-rooted beliefs coming from
geographically situated contexts is especially in evidence in art schools. For example, just
as many of the tacit assumptions that continue to prevail in the West derive from classical
Greece and Rome, and from Christianity, so too it is possible to identify in East Asian cul-
tures (China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan) the residual influence of animist,
Taoist, Confucian and Buddhist beliefs. Of course, there are also significant variations
within such large cultural conglomerates – between Britain and France, or South Korea
and Japan – and plentiful cases of cross-cultural transaction, appropriation, contestation,
emergence, divergence, convergence, amplification, suppression and fusion, occurring
over millennia, and especially over the past 100 years.
My experience teaching Fine Art in Korea leads me to conclude that the Korean ped-
agogic style is much more ‘goal-oriented’, even at postgraduate level, insofar as attention is
directed almost entirely towards encouraging the production of a body of finished works,
rather than towards reviewing the accumulated evidence of a student’s reflection on their
practice – of cycles of convergent and divergent thinking, and critical appraisal of motiv-
ations and contexts. For example, in my department in Dankook University, at BA level
little interest is taken by teaching staff in encouraging and assessing preparatory sketches,
notebooks or journals, or how a student’s work is related to some theoretical discourse.
Instead, teaching concerns itself with monitoring sensory-motor activity and productivity,
with ensuring that a student completes a consistent and well-made group of finished
works. Any discourse in relation to a student’s practice revolves primarily around its
relationship to the subjective and emotional life of the student. The thinking by the
student that is taking place in relation to their work seems to a Westerner (or this one,
anyway) to be happening in a ‘chaotically’ immediate fashion. It is immersed in a soma-
tically emphatic, affect-heavy, intimate, ‘dark’, empathetic and participatory context that
lacks reflection and articulation. It is, as such, ‘un-thoughtful’, or too ‘vague’.
This changes at postgraduate level, where it is acknowledged that a core element at this
level is the theorization of practice. It is now that the influence of the cognitive style with
which Korean students are familiar begins to cause problems. In my previous essay, I
noted that, like many other non-Westerners, Korean postgraduate students of Fine Art
often seem to have more difficulty than their Western equivalents in ‘theorizing’ their prac-
tice. One reason for this is obvious: these artists-of-the-future must quickly locate their prac-
tice within the context of a complex array of Western historical, sociological, psychological,
political, anthropological and philosophical disciplines with which they inevitably have far
less familiarity than a typical Western-educated student. For much that can be accessed by
the latter, due to a shared store of implicit and tacit background cultural knowledge,
remains unavailable to the non-Westerner, despite the fact that before arriving in the
West non-Western students will have gained through the increasing ‘Westernization’ of
their homelands some familiarity with the ideas they are now be obliged to engage with in
depth. This is especially the case, however, because it is not simply a case of knowledge trans-
fer and learning, but rather of basic differences in cognitive styles. Furthermore, the problem
is exacerbated when postgraduate students continue to develop their practice in terms of the
more ‘traditional’ media, such as painting. Indeed, in general, whether the student is
 JOURNAL OF VISUAL ART PRACTICE 5

Western-educated or not, the relationship between the theoretical and painting is much more
problematic than with conceptually based practices, a point to which I will return.

Theory and practice

In the UK over the past 40 years, there has been a major shift in Fine Art pedagogy from
the exploration of aesthetic and expressive principles and towards ideas and concepts
communicated through discursive channels. As a consequence, there has been a major
transfer of cognitive work within courses away from issues of aesthetic judgment, the
training of sensory-motor skills, and the encouragement of individual expressive inten-
tions, towards the promotion of a corpus of theoretical methodologies of an explicitly
intellectual and text-based nature as the providers of keys to the decoding of the
meaning of the visual work produced by students. The addition of a textual or oral sup-
plement, grounded in a process of objective metacognitive analysis, and the prioritizing of
abstract ideas and concepts as heuristic tools, is now an acknowledged academic require-
ment in Fine Art, and this ‘theoreticization’ of pedagogy is part-and-parcel of the absorp-
tion of Fine Art into an academia grounded on a model that is biased towards the
encouragement of specific cognitive abilities. Encouraging and recording of student’s
metacognitive skills, their powers of introspection, and their awareness and understanding
of their own thought processes is a major goal for Fine Art education in the UK, one that
the resources provided by theoretical methodologies are increasingly intended to facilitate
as students progress to postgraduate level. In the most general sense, a theory will deal with
the domain of intentions while a practice is concerned with actions.
Ideally, theory will inform practice by providing direction for action and a rationale for
decision-making. Meanwhile, a practice will inform a theory when the result of an action
generates feedback that enables the adaption of theoretical models to better reflect the new
experience and knowledge. Self-observation and adapting responses are thus the basis for
achieving a good alignment between theory and practice in both a practical and existential
sense.
The successful alignment between what we say and what we do depends on the nurtur-
ing of a certain kind of awareness, and therefore any discussion of theory and practice also
has an ethical dimension. In general, when someone says one thing but then does another,
we perceive there to be a gap that is more than simply semantic. In some situations, when
conscious sleigh-of-hand seems to be at work, we might even want to say that such incon-
sistency is a form of deception, hypocrisy or ‘bad faith’. On the other hand, the recognition
of a good alignment or congruence between what is said and what is done or made leads to
the acknowledgment of a situation we would characterize as ‘fitting’, ‘convincing’ and
‘compelling’, or, using more morally resonant words, as demonstrating ‘integrity’, ‘truth-
fulness’, ‘virtue’, ‘sincerity’ or ‘trustworthiness’. This ethical dimension is rarely con-
sciously acknowledged in Fine Art pedagogy, but attests to the fact that the issues I
explore here are of more than merely epistemological importance.
But many involved in art education would agree that there is often a problem finding a
good ‘fit’ between the theoretical and the practical – the word and the deed – especially at
MA level. The ‘walk’ (the practice) and the ‘talk’ (the metacognitive analysis) are often at
odds, and the obligation of a student to reflect via discourse on their practice does not
always lead to better work. Of course, the two are not independent of each other, and
6 S. MORLEY

they overlap in many significant ways (as semiotic methodologies emphasize). Indeed, one
of the most obvious developments in the art of the past one hundred years has been the
recognition of the extent to which various kinds of discourses colonize the visible, so that
now we recognize the social construction of reality – visuality rather than the visual – as a
necessary premise for any understanding of what it means to make art. One consequence
of this has been the supplementing of essentially aesthetic practices involving sensory-
motor skills, like painting, by more conceptually based practices that, while visual in
output, are less concerned with issues of eye-to-hand coordination. Furthermore, these
newer media are also far less connected to a historical genealogy within whose context
meanings are generated. But whether the practice is painting or video installation and per-
formance, there will inevitably be a disjunction between a practical field concerned with
the visual and with making something, and the discursive field dominated by text and
abstract reasoning.
This bifurcation between the world of the image and that of the word has an obvious
institutional face, extending to the segregation of personnel and spaces. The ‘Theory’ com-
ponent of a course probably occurs in a classroom, which is the conventional domain of
discursive thought, while ‘Practice’ takes place in a studio, or in an empty white-walled
room set aside for Crits and exhibitions. Usually, the staff tasked with teaching ‘Theory’
are different from those teaching ‘Practice’. The former are mostly academics who are
trained in intellectual argumentation, and are used to articulating their beliefs and inten-
tions through verbal texts, or in what the communication theorists Shotter and Katz
(1999) call the ‘monological-retrospective-objective’ mode (the mode in which I am
writing this essay), while the latter are normally artists used to ‘speaking’ through
images and surfaces, or through ‘textility’. Thus, the division between theory and practice
is deeply inscribed within the human, mental, administrative and architectural infrastruc-
tures of an art institution.
As the anthropologist Barber (2007, 29) puts it, in any field concerning human activity
there stand on one side the imperatives of theory, discourse, text, fixity, structure, objec-
tification, reification, system, distance and detachment, while on the other stand practice,
performance, improvisation, flow, process, participation, embodiment and dialogue.
These poles are never autonomous, of course, and they shift and overlap in relation to
each other, but they rarely seem to align satisfactorily. Discourse and theory relies on
the adoption by the user of a detached, intellectual stance in relation to a subject, while
the imagination and sensory-motor skills which artists draw upon is characterized by
the performative rather than the analytic, by bodily engagement, process, improvisation,
participation and deals in relations rather than distinctions.
As a result of their continuing involvement with perceptual modalities and questions of
hand-to-eye coordination, art schools engage with the kinds of sensory-motor activity that
are irrelevant in the academic fields within which discursively articulated theories are
more at home. Consequently, art schools also engage with the ‘aesthetic’ – bodily
sensing – in ways that are also irrelevant or peripheral to those fields. And so, art
school pedagogy cannot afford to ignore the role played by the sensing body within the
intersubjective experience of art.
The nature of the activities with which art schools are typically concerned thus makes it
easier to recognize that the imaginative work of creation can be stifled by the reflexive
work of analysis (as one of my MA in Fine Art tutors once said, ‘Analysis leads to
 JOURNAL OF VISUAL ART PRACTICE 7

paralysis’). It is obvious that theorizing, understood in narrowly discursive terms, is often

awkward and constraining when applied to the domain of practical work, for it risks
leaving out important aspects of both how art is made, and how it is encountered.
In reality, however, what seems to happen in art schools is that students are obliged to
explain or describe what they do within a discursive text-based framework that is incap-
able of comprehending what the anthropologist Tim Ingold calls ‘textility’, and further-
more, are obliged to work with theories that propose that the ‘textility’ of making has
little or no intrinsic epistemological value. They are encouraged to devalue this intimate
knowledge as of little cognitive worth, and instead to analyse the social, theoretical and
historical contexts within which such knowledge necessary for making art is enacted.
But how can we expand methodologies to incorporate the performative, improvisatory,
process-based, participatory, embodied, relational and dialogic? How can we theorize the
world of becoming from within rather than from outside? Perhaps this, a lack of truly ima-
gistic methodologies, is due to the fact that the problem is systemic. That is, by its very
nature, the ‘vague’ knowledge of the practitioner may not be describable within a discur-
sive framework applying the ‘monological-retrospective-objective’ mode. As the philoso-
pher Kasulis (2002, 50–51) points out, using an example from the realm of music, the kind
of ‘intimate’ knowledge involved in being creative is in a fundamental sense non-transfer-
rable or non-translatable:
When operatic singers have trouble controlling their voice, they go to voice coaches not
music critics. The coach has an intimate knowledge of singling praxis and can direct the
singer in her right therapy. The music critic, by contrast, can better interpret the voice
problem to the general public, even though the critic may not know what remedy should
be followed. In short: praxis is best learned from a master within the appropriate locus of
intimacy. Even if the master cannot articulate completely the praxis’ purpose, the master
is best at intimating to an insider what should be done.

Fine Art pedagogy has come to place a great deal of confidence in the ability of the dis-
cursive to provide the means through which to give accounts of how images work, and
how art is made. But we still lack credible ways of theorizing with images, rather than
about images. Semantically speaking, words are precise, but images are rich. That is,
we lack methodologies that can convincingly theorize what artists and art students
are doing from within the practice itself. We need methodologies that can theorize ‘tex-
tility’. For, as Ingold writes (2010, 92), ‘it is a question not of imposing preconceived
forms on inert matter but of intervening in the fields of forces and currents of material
wherein forms are generated’. But how can practice be rendered in a convincing way
within the ‘monological-retrospective-objective’ model of communication that is con-
sidered mandatory within academia? How can we translate the language of the uncon-
scious, preconceptual, intimate and informal characteristics of ‘primary’ process
thinking into that of the conscious and rational thought structures of ‘secondary’
process thinking?

‘Likeness in unlike things’

In Visual Analogy (1999), the art historian Barbara Stafford discusses a cognitive style
based on ‘the vision of ordered relationships articulated as similarity-in-difference’. She
8 S. MORLEY

describes this as the ‘analogical’ mode, a non-logical procedure forging connections across
antitheses, or ‘a metamorphic and metaphoric practice for weaving discordant particulars
into a partial concordance’ (Stafford 1999, 9). Analogizing is motivated by the ‘discern-
ment to discover the relevant likeness in unlike things’ (1999, 3), and the similarities
that analogy generates are not identities or fixed patterns, and an analogical blend is
always emergent. Distinctions cede not to identities but rather to in-betweenness – or
‘nuanced degrees of distinction’ (Stafford 1999, 75). This cognitive mode implies a level
of semantic ‘ignorance’ or non-elucidation, and is inherently visually oriented, thereby
making the visual arts the paradigmatic site of analogical thinking.
Engaging the visual plentitude and semantic ‘vagueness’ of analogy requires the soften-
ing of the controlling force of analysis by embracing the continuous relational flows within
thought. But in the West, argues Stafford, the analogical mode has been largely supplanted
by a preference for ‘disanalogy’ or allegory, which is characterized by ‘unblendable distinc-
tions’ (Stafford 1999, 68), and this had led to a ‘massive cultural implosion into insur-
mountable and unrepresentable contradiction – separated by uncommunicative
emptiness or clogged with conflicting distinctions’ (Stafford 1999, 3).
One of the dominant characteristics of what I will term ‘critical theory’ is precisely this
emphasis upon ‘unblendable distinctions’ and ‘insurmountable and unrepresentable con-
tradiction’. The loosely related methodologies usually taught to Fine Art students begin
with the premise that ‘facts’ and ‘reality’ are fictions manipulated in the interests of the
powerful. It is deemed imperative to engage in the pervasive critique of the ‘perspectival’
or relativistic status of knowledge. A basic premise is therefore is that the co-existence of
incompatible worldviews exposes the situated nature of truth, rendering specious any
possibility of stepping outside the confines one’s own worldview. Any appeal to the possi-
bility of universal, ahistorical, uncontestable, extralinguistic, unmediated access to the
absolute nature of things or minds, must be false. Reality is socially constructed.
In relation to the study of art, formal, expressive and aesthetic concerns cede to ques-
tions of social context, which are understood in terms of the conflict of historically located
power interests. Indeed, the involvement of material practices like painting and sculpture
in the world of commerce is judged to automatically implicate them in ‘ignoble’ activities,
and so serves to render them especially contentious sites for rigorous critique. The goal
becomes to ensure the taming and normalization of the arts as social facts through
their contextualization as ‘texts’ functioning within a wide network of power relations
and institutions. A semiotic model of culture is encouraged, that reduces art to a phenom-
enon within a dense ‘forest of signs’ in which the constructed nature of reality, and the
extent to which perception and meaning are linked is taken for granted. The field of pro-
gressive art practice and criticism becomes a space within which to engage in subversive
critical thinking, grounded in a cognitive style heavily biased towards discursive, intellec-
tual consciousness.
Critical theory stresses that as there are no essences we always only ever see the world
from a certain culturally determined perspective, and so we inevitably project onto the
‘other’ an aspect of our own viewpoint, and then petrify it into a timeless essence. In
Said’s (1978) influential theory of ‘Orientalism’, for example, the West is understood to
locate elements of its own culture in the place of the non-Western ‘other’. Dogmatic
social constructionism is obviously a potentially paralyzing form of relativism. One sol-
ution is to accept the inevitability of ‘Orientalism’, but to argue for a counter-cultural
 JOURNAL OF VISUAL ART PRACTICE 9

version. Thus, in the words of Clarke (1997, 9), ‘Orientalism’ ‘cannot simply be identified
with the ruling imperialist ideology’, for ‘in the Western context it represents a counter-
movement, a subversive entelechy, albeit not a unified or consciously organized one,
which in various ways has often tended to subvert rather than to confirm the discursive
structures of imperial power’. For example, the Western discourse regarding Zen Bud-
dhism during the twentieth century was intentionally counter-cultural, and cannot be sub-
ordinated to the ideology of colonialism.
But recognition of the social construction of reality needs not only to be accommodated
but also contextualized. The limited scope of the critique is most obviously signaled by
recent research coming from biology (Livingstone 2002; Johnson 2007; Metzinger 2009)
and the neurosciences (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999; Zeki 1999; Gallagher and
Zahavi 2008; Ramachandran 2011).2 Such research shows that the human brain has a
homeostatic mechanism for maintaining states of stability that resist change and follow
familiar patterns, thereby feeding the tendency towards recursive cultural norms, but at
the same time, that the brain also possesses neuroplasticity, which means it has a prodi-
gious capacity to transform on the macro- and micro-level in response to stimuli demand-
ing innovative responses. One example of how such research is transforming the study and
teaching of art is the implication of the discovery of ‘mirror neurons’. In a collaborative
paper, the art historian David Freedberg and the neurologist Vittorio Gallese (2007)
argue that the discovery of the ‘mirror neuron’, which
depends on embodied simulation, a functional mechanism through which the actions,
emotions or sensations we see activate our own internal representations of the body states
that are associated with these social stimuli, as if we were engaged in a similar action or
experiencing a similar emotion or sensation. (2007, 198), suggests that

… . automatic empathetic responses constitute a basic level of response to images and to

works of art. Underlying such responses is the process of embodied simulation that
enables the direct experiential understanding of the intentional and emotional contents of
images. This basic level of reaction to images becomes essential to any understanding of
their effectiveness as art. (2007, 202)

This foregrounds the biological foundations for the ability to pre-rationally make sense of
the actions, emotions and sensations of others, and the centrality of empathy to the aes-
thetic experience. They argue that
… a crucial element of esthetic response consists of the activation of embodied mechanisms
encompassing the simulation of actions, emotions and corporeal sensation, and that these
mechanisms are universal. This basic level of reaction to images is essential to understanding
the effectiveness both of everyday images and of works of art. Historical, cultural and other
contextual factors do not preclude the importance of considering the neural processes that
arise in the empathetic understanding of visual artworks. (2007, 197)

As a result of such new insights into the relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, we are
leaving behind the ‘“autonomy of culture” delusion’, writes the art historian Onians
(2011), and instead are adopting more nuanced methodologies ready to acknowledge
both the force of cultural influence and the body upon cognition. As Onians also notes
(2007, 16), in a discussion of the emerging fields of ‘neuroaesthetics’ and ‘neauroarthis-
tory’, we are entering a new period in what he calls ‘Europe’s laborious recovery of an
unconscious knowledge that had hitherto been widely shared elsewhere’.
10 S. MORLEY

A typical postgraduate Fine Art course in the UK provides ample evidence of how a
dogmatic social constructionist position fails to adequately account for what occurs in a
real-life teaching situation. Indeed, in the most obvious sense, any possibility of success
in teaching Fine Art depends on the assumption that art can cross frontiers and touch
on universal levels of meaning and experience. All the members of a multi-ethnic
cohort of students belong to the same human race, and therefore share a core of
common responses to art which serve as a precondition for any dialogue across cultures.
This shared neurological and biological substrate is also confirmed by recent studies in
world art (Onians 2004; Van Damme 2008; Dissanayake 2008; Scharfstein 2008, 2009)
As the philosopher Scharfstein (2009, 361), for example, writes:
It seems immediately apparent (though to the neurologist rather than the anthropologist)
that sensations, perceptions, and basic aesthetic preferences are roughly alike among all
human beings; that basic human emotions, however altered by social habit, are much
alike; and that different cultures invent similar modes of response for the purposes they all
have in common.

Studies in world cultures draw attention to the complex relationship between three inter-
connected factors that together determine the individual’s mental universe: the level of
individual growth and adaption; the level of local cultural norms responding to the
forces of change and producing recursive cultural patterns; and the level of the universal,
which is grounded in the constants dictated by human biology and psychology (Onians
2004, 2006; Elkins 2007; Elkins, Valiavicharksa, and Kim 2010; Van Damme and Zijlmans
2008). The notion of individuality, while it has been critiqued from with a dogmatic social
constructionist model, is actually a biological and psychological fact and not a fantasy of
‘humanist individualism’. Indeed, because the art field prioritizes personal and particular
solutions, Fine Art courses are especially exemplary environments within which the indi-
vidual level of development can be perceived. A student finds specific solutions that with a
greater of lesser degree of success will permit them to develop their work and gain valuable
experiences to prepare them for the life-world. Individual development and change is
possible because no culture is an essential and eternal entity, but rather a continuously
evolving and overlapping field of changes.
Within geographically sited cultures, recursive cultural orientations prevail and
undergo continual change (Kaufman 2004, 2008). For example, key characteristic of
Korean culture is the blending and mixing of cultural influences. Buddhism, entering
Korea via China, blended with indigenous shamanism, for example. But in addition to
long established cultural forces, another newer arrival must also be added – Christianity
(upward of 30% of South Koreans are Protestants). But despite the pervasiveness of
Western economic, political and cultural influences, Korean society remains deeply suf-
fused by Confucianism. This demonstrates the fundamental syncretism and evolving
nature of South Korean culture (Seth 2010), which displays plentiful signs of the
dynamic co-existence of ‘dominant’, ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ socio-cultural formations
(Williams 1977), or what Homi Bhabha, discussing the complexities of cultural transfer
between margin and centre in a postcolonial world, terms ‘cultural hybridity’ (1994).
The universal givens of human existence, which are determined by the neurological and
biological substrate, find expression within specific cultural forms and beliefs, solidify into
recursive patterns of thought and behaviour, and are then subject to continuous
 JOURNAL OF VISUAL ART PRACTICE 11

modifications on individual levels under pressure from within and without. The interplay
of internal and external forces within each student, and the continual possibility of the
emergence of new values, meanings and practices, even as the dominant and the residual
remain conditioning factors, constitutes what Bourdieu (1977) calls the ‘habitus’ of the
student. The internalized meanings and values of any community are always combining
with modes of expression that are the consequence of individual actions, external influ-
ences and genetic constants. The ‘habitus’ of a non-Western student thus includes signifi-
cant residual features of the traditional worldview, which now function alongside more
recent cognitive styles learned from exposure to Western culture. Thus, a typical post-
graduate Fine Art course in the UK will be a record of how each of the students takes
their own unique route to solve problems and get results, how they depend on recursive
cultural norms, and how they draw on a shared substrate of universal grounded in mind–
body–environment interactions.

Cross-cultural dialogue
The alternative to social constructionist relativism is therefore not a naïve belief in objec-
tivity or an eternal essence, but rather the recognition that the art of other cultures can be
appreciated ‘not through identity but despite difference’, as the cultural theorist Kwane
Anthony Appiah puts it (quoted in Boyd 2009, 335. Emphasis added). Art reveals the scat-
tered traces of the common ground of human experience as it unfolds at the level of shared
body–mind–environment interaction. As Appiah continues: ‘We can respond to art that is
not ours; indeed, we can only fully respond to “our” art if we move beyond thinking of it as
ours and start to respond to it as art’.
But, more broadly, as Kasulis (2002, 22) observes, it is evident that within specific cul-
tures, and over long periods of time, some experiences ‘may be considered the most inter-
esting for analysis, the most revealing of our basic humanity, the most fruitful to emphasize.
In another culture, however, they might be considered common, not particularly revealing
about very much’. But through a process of imaginative re-configuring that does not deny
social constructionism but rather proceeds in spite of it, it is possible to ‘reverse the prefer-
ence and focus on what is not normally emphasized in our culture’, and then, as a conse-
quence, ‘we might be able to attain quite suddenly a glimpse into the other culture’.
Thus, the sinologist Edward Slingerland (2014) argues that it is possible to identify
within the traditional thinking of China, which is still a strong influence within contem-
porary East Asian societies, what to Westerners seem novel ways of understanding some
key unresolved problems within how to understand cognition, such as how to relate the
unconscious, preconceptual and informal ‘primary’ process thinking to the conscious
and rational thought that is characteristic of ‘secondary’ process thinking. In particular,
Slingerland notes that tendencies within traditional Chinese culture have important
things to say about trusting in the spontaneous and ‘going with the flow’, and about
how to acquire the mental skills necessary in order to ‘try not try’, as Slingerland puts
it. For example, as he writes (2014, 13–14):
Chinese thought … emphasized what we could call know-how: the practical, tacit, and often
unformulizable ability to do something well. I cannot explain exactly how to ride a bike, but I
can ride one. In fact … consciously focusing on how to ride, or trying to explain the process
in words to others, may actually impair your ability to do it.
12 S. MORLEY

Slingerland emphasises the paradoxical situation of learning a skill without at the same
time enduring the paralyzing effects of analysis and reflection – a paradox that within
an educational context means working out how to develop a pedagogy which encourages
a student to confidently embrace ‘primary’ process thinking. Slingerland suggests that the
Chinese explore this paradox much more comprehensively that the Western tradition, and
it is precisely this paradox that I now want to explore, by focusing on how a form of ana-
logical thinking which has persisted in East Asia, and can shed light on the lacunae in the
way we understand thinking about and making art.

Analogical thinking in East Asia

While the influence and credibility of analogical mode receded in the West, in Anticipating
China: Thinking through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture, Hall and Ames
(1995) emphasize that what they term the ‘correlative’ model of thinking continued to
dominate Chinese culture, and is still pervasive in East Asia. Thinking was understood
to proceed from the recognition that there is no dualistic ‘I’ standing outside reality
and capable of looking in. Perceptual modalities were recognized as integrated rather
than discrete and autonomous, and cognition was therefore considered fully determined
by bodily inhabitation of the world. Knowledge was construed as primarily enactive or
performative – something produced through bodily actions, and in the course of going
about activities, rather than in the disembodied abstract. Thinking was therefore under-
stood on the basis of tendency, and the activity of gathering objective knowledge was
less important than conceiving of order as lying within contingency – within process
and becoming. The antecedent and the consequence were thus regarded as successive
stages in the same process. As a result, there was relative indifference to inferential
cause-and-effect reasoning and logical analysis.
By conceiving of tendencies rather than causalities, the causal explanation based on either/
or was less important than the fostering of a ‘vague field of significances open to articulation’
(Hall and Ames 1995, 169). A particular deployment or arrangement of things was relied
upon, and worked to advantage. Any situation was understood to possess a certain potential
– a propensity that emanates from a particular configuration of reality, and so furnishes the
grounds for efficacious action. ‘Correlative’ thinking also ‘usually involves characterizing
relations deemed meaningful from the perspective of the individual constructing the
analogy’ (Hall and Ames 1995, 44–45), and this leaves room for the kinds of ‘acts of stipula-
tion’ typical of the theoretical, analytic mode while at the same time readily acceding to ‘the
personal, subjective perspective’ (Hall and Ames 1995, 54). Phenomena, concepts and the-
ories were thereby left open to rich and diverse interpretation, and lack the kind of coherence
expected in Western discourses. As Hall and Ames (1995, 124) write:
The relative indifference of correlative thinking to logical analysis means that ambiguity,
vagueness, and incoherence associable with images and metaphors are carried over into
the more formal elements of thought. In contradistinction to the rational mode of thinking
which privileges univocity, correlative thinking involves the association of elements in image
clusters which guarantee to its constituents richly vague significance.

This suggests a model based on what Hall and Ames (1995, 272–3) describe as ‘field/focus’.
The idea of a ‘locus’ – or the placement of elements in such a manner as to realize a formal
 JOURNAL OF VISUAL ART PRACTICE 13

pattern, which is dominant in the West – cedes to ‘focus’, or the construal of vague and
shifting elements within the ‘field’, seen from the perspective of different focal centres.
The ‘field’ and the ‘foci’ are never finally fixed or determinant because ‘fields are
unbounded, pulsating in some vague manner from and to their various transient foci’
(Hall and Ames 1995, 272). ‘Field’ refers to the sphere within which the influence of a
stimulus upon an agent may be discernibly experienced and perceived. As Hall and
Ames write (1995, 273):
At any given moment, items in a correlative scheme are characterizable in terms of the focal
point from and to which lines of divergence and convergence attributable to them move, and
the field from which and to which those lines proceed.

Acts of contextualization then involve ‘this-that’ polarities rather than ‘one-many’, as there
is no metaphysical assumptions of an essential One behind the many, or a Being behind
individual beings. And so, as a result, ‘order emerges from the coordination of so many
“thises” and “thats” as various foci, and the fields they focus’.
Thinking then unfolds in a fluid fashion, one in which the conjunction ‘and’ is more
valued than ‘either/or’. But as Hall and Ames (1995, 168–169) stress: ‘The appeal to vague-
ness does not preclude the stipulations of ideas or principles in certain contexts.’ Analo-
gical thinking works alongside logical thinking. ‘Though never the sole aim of speculation
and analysis, clarity is often of real pragmatic value. Nonetheless, with respect to such acts
of stipulation, one never forgets the intransigent richness and ambiguity of the language.’
Empirical observation and reasoning are not abandoned, but rather are integrated within
the wider acknowledgement of contingency, ambiguity and indeterminacy.

Conclusion
I have been exploring buried or overlooked possibilities that lie within Western culture
through perceiving them as they appear more clearly, more dominantly, and more affir-
matively elsewhere. As the analogical mode waned and was marginalized in the West, it
was maintained as a more central aspect of the dominant cognitive style in East Asia.
Recognizing and embracing the ‘vagueness’ of analogical thinking within cognitive pro-
cesses mean engaging with the ‘fluidities of compossibility’ (Stafford 1999, 14) that are
central to the analogical mode. The aim is to inhabit a creative space lying ‘between
bodily movement and abstract reason, between the textilic and the architectonic,
between the haptic and the optical, between improvisation and abduction, and between
becoming and being’ (Ingold 2010, 100).
Shotter and Katz (1996) describe an alternative to the ‘monological-retrospective-
objective’ mode which they term the ‘dialogical-prospective-relational’. While the ‘mono-
logical-retrospective-objective’ aims at producing explanatory theories, or representations
that are intended to aid in exercises of control and prediction, the ‘dialogical-prospective-
relational’, by contrast, is more practical than explanatory, and concrete and situated. As
Shotter and Katz write (1996, 237):
In not being disciplined by certain shared theoretical interests, it [ the ‘dialogical-prospective-
relational’] is far more disorderly and informal, it lacks a common vocabulary of fixed con-
cepts, and as a result, it can only be used contextually and conversationally, to ‘point out’ and
to ‘make’ distinctions and differences in the ongoing flow of activity in which we are involved.
14 S. MORLEY

In short, the ‘dialogical-prospective-relational’ encourages analogical thinking, with

images. Once ‘the incoherence associable with images and metaphors are carried over
into the more formal elements of thought’ the ‘monological-retrospective-objective’
mode which lies at the heart of academic discourse, and has colonized how we talk
about and interpret art, must cede space to its more mercurial counterpart: the ‘dialogi-
cal-prospective-relational’ mode takes over.
When you think about it, the ‘dialogical-prospective-relational’ is the mode that usually
dominates a successful ‘Crit’ in an art school. Within these classes, students present their
work to other students and to tutors, and learn to articulate their practice from within the
practice itself. The thinking is primarily analogical, not logical. A space is kept open
between the thinkable and the unthinkable. Students can acquire a better understanding
of why the rules and axioms communicated by ideas, theories and beliefs are less impor-
tant than the practical training comprised of the embodied knowledge central to making.
But what goes on in a Crit is under-theorized, and lacks a metacognitive profile within the
dominant cognitive style deployed within art schools. Because of this, the important cog-
nitive work that is done there is undervalued on the level of discourse. ‘Textility’ is sup-
pressed by ‘text’.
Like other non-Westerners, the Korean students who are studying in the UK are
struggling with, but also – hopefully – profiting from their exposure to a cognitive
style with which they are unfamiliar, but not incapable of adopting. Indeed, the rapid-
ity of social change within South Korea means young Koreans are especially adept at
assimilating, adapting, and diffusing new information and new models of thought and
behaviour. They often quickly learn to employ the kind of introspective, cognitively
controlled and verbally articulated, mode in relation to their practice that the
Western pedagogy expects, while it nevertheless seems inevitable that they will find
the discourse-centered theoretical methodologies extremely difficult to engage with
because of their lack of tacit, background knowledge. On the other hand, the language
of image and metaphor – the language of analogy – is far more accessible, not only
because a Korean student is familiar with it from their own culture, but also
because the ‘vagueness’ it embraces permits modes of communication that do not
depend on the precision of verbal language, which is the kind of language most diffi-
cult to translate across cultures. But are Western-educated students and their teachers
profiting, via their encounters with non-Western students and the opportunities to
travel beyond the Euro-American heartland, from beneficial exposure to ways of
thinking that are more capable of incorporating into consciousness the language of
the image, of embodied and spontaneous processes, and where thinking and
making are more closely aligned?
As Stafford notes (1999, 11), an important consequence of working analogically is the
possibility it can create ‘to travel back into history, to spring forward in time, to leap
across continents’. Because analogical thinking is not encumbered by the continuous dis-
tancing and a sense of otherness created by a paralyzing awareness of difference and dis-
tinction, it ‘has the virtue of making distant people, other periods, and even diverse
contemporary contexts part of our world’, Stafford declares (1999, 51). For, ‘only by
making the past or the remote or the foreign proximate can we hope to make it intelli-
gible to us’.
 JOURNAL OF VISUAL ART PRACTICE 15

Notes
1. For more on the ‘agency’ of the artwork, see Gell (1998).
2. Research in the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics takes broadly two directions, both of
which are ‘parallelism’, notes Anjan Chatterjee (Chatterjee 2011). The first, characterised
by, for example, V.S. Ramachandran and Semir Zeki, tends to proceed firmly from within
a framework that regards the goal of neuroscience to be the production of a more truly ‘scien-
tific’ objective theory of art. A limitation within this aspect of the new field is its unwillingness
to approach art as anything other than an affair of visual perception and questions of beauty.
In contrast, a second neuroscientific approach is more interested in wedding brain research
to contemporary art and theory (for example, Gallagher and Zahavi 2008). For a critique of
neuroaesthetics, see Hyman 2010. In relation to the metahistory of the new field of ‘neu-
roarthistory’, see Onians (2007).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Simon Morley is an artist and writer. He is the author of Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in
Modern Art (2003), editor of The Sublime: Documents in Contemporary Art (2010) and co-author of
The Winchester Guide to Keywords and Concepts for International Students in Art, Media and
Design (2014). His writings have recently appeared in Third Text, World Art and The Journal of
Contemporary Painting. He is currently writing an introduction to modern art, and a study of
the global monochrome. He is Assistant Professor at Dankook University, Republic of Korea.
His contact address is: morleysimon@hotmail.com. His artwork can be viewed at: www.
simonmorley.com.

ORCID
Simon Morley http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7516-1373

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