Creativity and Conceptual Art*

To appear in D. Goldie and E. Schellekens (eds.), The Philosophy of Conceptual Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2006. ABSTRACT:Creativity and Conceptual Art If there are three types of creativity--combinational, exploratory,and transformational--then it might seem at first sight that conceptual art must fall into the third category.For it is very different from orthodox, traditional art. This paper argues, however, that it'sbetter thought of as a form of combinational creativity.The notion of "art" may be transformed, but the works themselves are generated by making unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas. CREATIVITY AND CONCEPTUAL ART* Margaret A. Boden Centre for Cognitive Science/Dept. of Informatics University of Sussex *This paper forms part of the research supported by AHRC Grant no. B/RG/AN8285/APN19307: "Computational Intelligence, Creativity,and Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Investigation". 1: Introduction If one has a viewabout the nature of creativity in general, it should apply to all forms of art (and to science too, though that isn'tour concern here). In particular,ifone believesthat there are several different types of creativity, one must say howthese map onto various examples of art--whether these are general movements, specific art forms, or individual artworks. With respect to conceptual art, do all examples of this genre spring from the same type of creativity? And if so, what is it? My own approach to creativity does distinguish different types, as I explain in Sections 2 and 3. In section 4, I argue that the one which prima facie seems most appropriate isn'tapposite, in fact. Section 5 spells out the categorization I favour.Finally,inSection 6, I relate this viewpoint to the evaluation of conceptual art. 2: What is creativity? Acreative idea is one that is new, surprising, and valuable (Boden 2004). The term "idea" is a shorthand, here. In art, the newidea sometimes is an "idea" in the normal sense: a concept, if you prefer.But it need not be. It may be a method for producing artefacts (a newtype of paint-brush, a revolutionary camera or developing-technique, or a novelway of casting bronze). Or it may be a general style of painting, or sculpting. Or it may be a musical composition, or passing harmony; or a newdance-step or choreography...and so on. In Sections 4 and 5, I'll mention a wide range of creative "ideas" drawn from conceptual -1- art. Besides the ambiguity of "idea," each of the three criteria of creativity is ambiguous. That'slargely why disagreements about creativity are often carried on at cross-purposes. There are twoimportantly different senses of "novel." On the one hand, an idea may be newtothe person who had it: it'safirst-time occurrence within their particular mental biography. Let'scall this P-creativity,where the "P stands" both for "person" and for "psychological". On the other hand, an idea may be--so far as is known--newwith respect to the whole of human history: that is, it'sH-creative. From the psychological point of view, which seeks to understand howcreativity happens and howit'seven possible, P-creativity is the more important concept. For every instance of H-creativity is a special case of P- creativity.(If it'sthe first ocurrence in human history,then it must also be the first occurrence in the mind of its originator.) From the historical point of view, H-creativity is the focus of special interest. But since every H-creative idea is P-creative too, we can always ask what type of P-creativity was involved. This applies to the twentieth- century emergence of conceptual art, just as it does to anyother artistic movement. The second criterion, surprise, has three meanings. One may be surprised because something is statistically unusual, so contrary to commonsense expectations--likeanoutsider winning the Derby.Orone may be surprised because one hadn'trealized that the newidea had been a possibility all along--likediscovering a beautiful village tucked awayinahollowbetween twospurs of the Motorway.(Its location had always been marked on the map, but one hadn'texamined the whole map closely.) Third, one may be surprised by something that one had previously thought impossible, and which one still sees as utterly counterintuitive.Here, think of the events categorized by the religious as miracles, or imagine the impact on non-physicists of the introduction of wireless, or television. The third criterion, being "valuable," has manydifferent meanings. For various reasons, these can'tbewholly pinned down. What'svaluable in music isn'tnecessarily valuable in, or evenapplicable to, architecture. What's valuable in a baroque fugue may not be valuable in the blues. And what'sthought valuable in the 1960s may be scorned in the 1970s. As that remark suggests, values can change (sometimes, virtually overnight) as a result of shifts in fashion--some deliberately engineered for commercial purposes, some arising from unpredictable events (such as what an admired "celebrity" chooses to wear to a party). There may be some universal or near-universal values: symmetry and shininess, perhaps? (Boden in press, 8.iv.c). But eventhese can be deliberately transgressed, and their opposites admired in their stead (think of the highly asymmetrical architecture of Daniel Libeskind). One class of values merits special mention here, namely,what ecological psychologists call "affordances" (Gibson 1966, 1979). These are naturally evolved tendencies to behave tow ards a perceivedfeature in a particular way.Some are positive:affordances suggesting opportunities for locomotion, for feeding, for stroking, for courting...and so on. Others are negative,such as affordances eliciting fear or disgust. (The latter have presumably evolved to prevent us, and other animals, from eating rotting and/or contaminated food.) The "crafts" in general depend on the elicitation of positive affordances, which is whytheyare universal, relatively unvarying, and--unlike"art"--capable of speaking for themselves (Boden 2000). In other words, craftworks can be appreciated without specific cultural knowledge, whereas artworks cannot. Even if an artwork does exploit inborn affordances (as manydo), it'sprimarily interpreted as a moment situated wuthin a particular cultural context. The defining characteristic of a newartistic movement is that certain aspects of a wide range of artworks are now valued within a certain culture (or sub-culture) which weren'tvalued before. Usually,many--evenmost--of the previous values are retained. Occasionally,howev er, almost none is retained. As we'll see, the latter applies to the -2- twentieth-century movement known as conceptual art. 3: The three types of creativity The three types of surprise listed above correspond to three types of creativity: combinational, exploratory,and transformational (Boden 2004: chaps. 3-6). They're distinguished by the types of psychological process that are involved in generating the newidea. The exercise and appreciation of each of these forms of creativity depends upon specific cultural knowledge. Someone from a different culture may not evenbeable to recognize the novelty involved, and afortiori theymay not be able to understand/appreciate it. In the context of conceptual art, it'sworth pointing out that "someone from a different culture" needn'tbeaforeigner: theymay be your next-door neighbour.Ifso, they'll have toundergo a learning process if they're evertounderstand the novelty and to judge the aesthetic value. Combinational creativity involves the generation of unfamiliar (and interesting) combinations of familiar ideas. In general, it givesrise to the first type of surprise mentioned above.Just as one doesn'texpect the outsider to win the Derby,because that doesn'tnormally happen, so one doesn'texpect ideas X and Y to be combined, because they seem to be mutually irrelevant. Everyday examples of combinational creativity include visual collage (in advertisements and MTV videos, for instance); much poetic imagery; all types of analogy (verbal, visual, or musical); and the unexpected juxtapositions of ideas found in political cartoons in newspapers. Exploratory and transformational creativity are different. They're both grounded in some previously existing, and culturally accepted, structured style of thinking--what I call a "conceptual space." Of course, combinational creativity too depends on a shared conceptual base--but this is, potentially,the entire range of concepts and world- knowledge in someone'smind. A conceptual space is both more limited and more tightly structured. It may be a board-game, for example (chess or Go, perhaps), or a particular type of music or sculpture. In exploratory creativity,the existing stylistic rules or conventions are used to generate novelstructures (ideas), whose possibility may or may not have been realized before the exploration took place. (You may or may not have had some reasons to expect to find a village nestling between the Motorways.) It can also involvethe search for,and testing of, the specific stylistic limits concerned. Just which types of structure can be generated within this space, and which cannot? Transformational creativity is what leads to "impossibilist" surprise. The reason is that some defining dimension of the style, or conceptual space, is altered--so that structures can nowbegenerated which could not be generated before. Imagine altering the rule of chess which says that pawns can'tjump overother pieces: they're nowallowed to do this, as knights always were. The result would be that some games of chess could nowbeplayed which were literally impossible before. The greater the alteration, and the more fundamental the stylistic dimension concerned, the greater the shock of impossibilist surprise. However, not every dimension will have been changed. (Otherwise, whycall it a newform of chess?) So there will be both structural continuities and structural discontinuties between the untransformed space and its seemingly impossible successor.Ifsome feature of the game which you enjoyed before the change is retained, you'll find something to enjoyinthe transformed version. You may,howev er, besoaverse to jumping pawns--perhaps they makeyou feel giddy?--that you decide to revert to old-style chess nevertheless.

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