Context and Seeing...

I've been listening a lot to Marc Ribot recently...

http://www.marcribot.com/

I've always liked his music since I heard his session work on Tom Waits 'Raindogs' years ago. I like the way he will drop a pentatonic scale into a soup of dissonance at the drop of a hat. I like the fact that he never sits still in his music and creative thinking. At one moment you could be listening to a beautifully structured jazz piece, and other times you might be hearing screeching noises as he rubs a balloon up and down the strings (yes he does do that! Find it on Youtube!!).

At the heart of his music though is a thorough training in classical and jazz music, whether he's a Blues/Rock sideman on a The Black Keys record, doing country with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss or performing with one of his various avant-garde jazz ensembles. This foundation shows through in everything he does. He can break rules with the guitar because he knows the rules thoroughly.

One of the most common things I have found when teaching a session on creativity with young creatives whether it's photography, guitar, or fine art, is a complete lack of the essential ingredients required to make the kind of fantastic creativity that Marc Ribot does. The terrible thing about this is
that it's generally not their fault. The educational system of the UK has failed them in the last thirty years.

The recent English Baccalaureate farce revealed that the Government has no idea of the roots of art, culture, and science as a backbone of democratic thinking and culture. It has long been a standy position of both Labour and Tory governments to start emphasising science and technology as the way forward when they have left the economy in ruins or they know they are not in a position to make it any better. Art becomes sidelined as the flaky and erratic sibling of science, not to be trusted and not a commercial viability that will help the UK economy. Alan Turing was a mathematician but he was also a creative. I would suggest that he was also an artist. Successive governments would be wise to consider the notion that art, science and philosophy fit together to make a whole culture, not just one or two of the components. The ancient Greeks knew this. When the current government chose the term Baccaulaureate as a buzz word they ignored it's true roots of the 'Laurel of Berries' awarded to scholars. I find it very sad.

If we take art and make it a 'lesser' subject than science (which was the position of the English Baccalaureate) then we remove the essentials of creative experimentation (and by default, artists who criticize govenment decisions). That is a very useful stance for a weak goverment in trouble. Unfortunately it ignores facts such as major turnover industries like the worldwide gaming industry relying heavily on artists who understand direct observation, bone and muscle structure, and classical concepts of dimension and measurement. Like Marc Ribot and his guitar, artists drawing up layouts for digital arts have to understand the rules before they can break them. The gaming industry is not the only industry that utilises these skills by far but the ignorance apparent in the failure of  the government in being able to understand the value of the creative industries in the UK is appalling.

One of the alarming things in this regard that I have noticed over the last ten years is the lack of literacy and numeracy amongst Uni students. Worse than this is the lack of understanding of the notion of context. If the question is not offered as a multiple choice question then there is no understanding of the act of building and constructing the answer through diligence and research.

Likewise, life and still life drawing seems to have disappeared from the young artists toolset and this is very alarming because young artists are no longer taught to 'look'. If they are not looking carefully and with scrutiny and do not understand the notion of context then what do they have as an asset? I could be cynical and say that any UK government would find them to be the perfect voter but my business is not voters.

My business, QoE Creative, is about encouraging context and looking carefully at mixing art and science to form a whole. We will soon be announcing scientific as well as arts events. I'm looking forward to seeing what can happen in that context and looking forward to taking our interdisciplinary adventures into increasingly interesting and fruitfully creative areas.