3.6 The Timeless Moment and Flow
I present Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of Flow to argue the scientific possibility that transcendental engagement can occur with glasswork, both in its making and its viewing.
In an interaction with the work, as the experience of making, or in the experience of viewing, there is a potential for the timeless moment – the possibility of escaping the persistent linear beat of the temporal. This is not spiritualism, but a recognised psychological event. This event is the deep engagement of the maker in the act of continual reassessment. It consists of an aesthetic experience for the viewer where the formal elements of a work, or the physical aspect of its processes, overwhelm logic and language to defeat time. Romantics feel it in the landscape.[1] It is the instant that appears eternal, or the compression of a span of time into the immediate. As viewer it is evident in the work that transcends as it goes to the centre of who you are and what makes you ache.
This is Romanticism, the dominance of felt experience over intellect. Of all experiences offered by a work this is the most esoteric. It is also credible justification of a work’s validity as art. To vanquish time is the final romantic aspiration. In its disconnection from the material world, it is transcendence and it also exists in a situation where the maker or the viewer is, as Stephen Procter says, “In a state of oneness [where] there is no time, because there is no transition.” [2]
In such a situation what we are doing overwhelms our ability to hold onto time or self. In those moments time and identity are lost. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi with his concept of flow [3] provides one rational explanation for such situations. The flow experience is the phenomenology of the inner state when, regardless of culture, action is governed by unthinking automatic behaviour. The corollary of such an occurrence can be seen in our production where the intellect dissolves in hard repetitive work that some call porridge time – times when artist Clare Belfrage says, the brain turns to porridge.[4] It is the mediative state of being in the moment when totally focussed within our body and its function. When negotiating the material of the world, flow, as with meditation, is being in the moment. Charles Butcher says of his working process, “try staring into a black box for three months, every day, eight hours a day – staring into it as you cold work it. You go into your mind”, and of working in isolation “being boring and mundane”, but Butcher says it “occupies the body and [he] goes into [his] mind”.[5] The long, hard, demanding and repetitive work required by a process like cold working can drive one’s thoughts far into one’s consciousness, opening deep questions of self.
Embodied Skill and a Paradox
Flow emerges across a wide range of activity and it is evident in sporting as well as artistic endeavour. In making, flow occurs when skills have been embodied and are being concentrated in a consuming activity in which challenge and skill are in optimum balance. A flame worker can experience flow when embodied skills in the fingertips are intuitively channelled into instantaneous problem solving with glass made fluid by heat.[6] Like speech, the activity is a process too fast for calculation. An activity where time can disappear would be one requiring the utmost focused attention – total concentration – while providing constant and immediate feedback.
As an activity it requires embodied skill. As anthropologists Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam say, “Fluent response calls for a degree of precision in the coordination of perception and action that can only be achieved through practice”.[7] In this statement the paradox of flow becomes apparent. Just as to lose the self in the response to a work requires an aesthetic sensibility; to reach the state of flow in the making of a work, freedom of response requires the disciplined acquisition of skill to the level where it is embodied. Then in the flow state a maker can be lost to all but the activity that consumes him or her, and it is then that the rhythm of the hand may be seen in the balance of the finished work. In an archetypal craft process the hand that moves of its own accord in apparent automatic spontaneous process that is in reality the result of years of technical emersion leading to highly trained competencies.
Golden Moments
Of embodied skills, Stephen Procter says, “Our best work is undertaken without consciousness of the self, but rather consciousness that all the participant parts are focussed into unified action, so that we arrive at a point beyond the initial self-conscious effort. Here the materials begin to sing and that piece begins its life”[8].
This is what artist Brenden Scott French refers to as that ‘golden moment’ that is “less about the material, the kiln and the process and more about creating”.[9]
A Logical Explanation
According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the dissolution of time and identity is the result of limitations in the nervous system’s ability to process information.[10] When there is total engagement in a process, there is inadequate attention left over to monitor how the body feels. Awareness of hunger and tiredness fade, body and identity disappear from consciousness because there is only enough attention to do that which requires all this concentration, and to do it well. However, as with deep meditation, the feeling of self returns stronger after such an event and this event also brings with it such a profound sense of enjoyment that people are willing to put a great effort into the experience.
The concept of flow is also relevant in situations where a work engages the viewer completely. The formality of the visual array with its ambiguity and paradox provides an abundance of information to the senses, but there is also conceptual engagement. There is an interaction of subject and object through constant feedback that continually restructures the balance between the two, and that overwhelms all but that interaction. In such a circumstance self and time could be consumed in the event that is the work’s manifestation. At its epitome, this is to experience the sublime – that which is too vast in its openness to be comprehended. In viewing, flow is linked to the state of ecstasy – that reality where life is more intense.
Object and Event
However there is another perspective on the timeless moment.
It is as though one’s experience of (the work) has no duration … because at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest … It is continuous and entire presentness, amounting … to the perpetual creation of itself, that one experiences as a kind of instantaneousness: as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it. [11]
The closure implied in this Michael Fried quotation is contested when openness envelops ideal form and the Platonic ideal of Modernism is superseded. The ideal of Modernism is replaced by a dynamic interaction between the spectator and the work within the specific context of viewing. In this relationship the work is open to a range of possibilities as it moves through visual form to potential, from object to event. As Nicolas Bourriaud expresses it: “The encounter with the work gives rise not so much to a space … as to a time span … going beyond the act of ‘rounding off’ the work by looking at it”[12].
These engagements involve both technical competencies and physical commitment. They support a phenomenological engagement with the glasswork as an event rather than as a focus on object – romantically open rather than classically closed. It is a logical explanation for what could be considered illogical, providing scientific explanation for experiences such as the timeless moment. Where I credited the inert and lifeless with life, and presented the contained object as open, I now present the glass object as a process. Through glass, the work reconfigured in our response presents us with an experience of the unpresentable. This is an event generated through our engagement with tangible material and visual form. That event becomes a means for accessing internal worlds. In an area dominated not by logic but by aesthetics, transcendental engagement is scientifically possible both when making glasswork and when viewing glasswork.
[1] Honour, Romanticism, 73. Philipp Otto Runge’s letter to his brother Daniel.
[2] Procter and Tazzyman, Lines Through Light, 33, and Peter Minson, personal interview, 20/02/09 and 23/02/09, 11.
[3] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1st ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1990, 49.
[4] Clare Belfrage, personal interview, 10/12/09, 4.
[5] Charles Butcher and Cobi Cockburn, Personal interview,18/01/2010, 4-5.
[6] Peter Minson, personal interview, 20/02/09 and 23/02/09, 5, Mark Eliott, personal interview, 03/04/09, 8.
[7] Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold, eds., Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007, 12.
[8] Christine Procter and Itzell Tazzyman, Lines Through Light, 90.
[9] Brenden Scott French, personal interview, 20/10/09, 1.
[10] www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html
[11] Charles Harrison, reprint of Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, first published Artforum, summer 1967, 844-845.
[12] Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 59.
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I present Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of Flow to argue the scientific possibility that transcendental engagement can occur with glasswork, both in its making and its viewing.
In an interaction with the work, as the experience of making, or in the experience of viewing, there is a potential for the timeless moment – the possibility of escaping the persistent linear beat of the temporal. This is not spiritualism, but a recognised psychological event. This event is the deep engagement of the maker in the act of continual reassessment. It consists of an aesthetic experience for the viewer where the formal elements of a work, or the physical aspect of its processes, overwhelm logic and language to defeat time. Romantics feel it in the landscape.[1] It is the instant that appears eternal, or the compression of a span of time into the immediate. As viewer it is evident in the work that transcends as it goes to the centre of who you are and what makes you ache.
This is Romanticism, the dominance of felt experience over intellect. Of all experiences offered by a work this is the most esoteric. It is also credible justification of a work’s validity as art. To vanquish time is the final romantic aspiration. In its disconnection from the material world, it is transcendence and it also exists in a situation where the maker or the viewer is, as Stephen Procter says, “In a state of oneness [where] there is no time, because there is no transition.” [2]
In such a situation what we are doing overwhelms our ability to hold onto time or self. In those moments time and identity are lost. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi with his concept of flow [3] provides one rational explanation for such situations. The flow experience is the phenomenology of the inner state when, regardless of culture, action is governed by unthinking automatic behaviour. The corollary of such an occurrence can be seen in our production where the intellect dissolves in hard repetitive work that some call porridge time – times when artist Clare Belfrage says, the brain turns to porridge.[4] It is the mediative state of being in the moment when totally focussed within our body and its function. When negotiating the material of the world, flow, as with meditation, is being in the moment. Charles Butcher says of his working process, “try staring into a black box for three months, every day, eight hours a day – staring into it as you cold work it. You go into your mind”, and of working in isolation “being boring and mundane”, but Butcher says it “occupies the body and [he] goes into [his] mind”.[5] The long, hard, demanding and repetitive work required by a process like cold working can drive one’s thoughts far into one’s consciousness, opening deep questions of self.
Embodied Skill and a Paradox
Flow emerges across a wide range of activity and it is evident in sporting as well as artistic endeavour. In making, flow occurs when skills have been embodied and are being concentrated in a consuming activity in which challenge and skill are in optimum balance. A flame worker can experience flow when embodied skills in the fingertips are intuitively channelled into instantaneous problem solving with glass made fluid by heat.[6] Like speech, the activity is a process too fast for calculation. An activity where time can disappear would be one requiring the utmost focused attention – total concentration – while providing constant and immediate feedback.
As an activity it requires embodied skill. As anthropologists Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam say, “Fluent response calls for a degree of precision in the coordination of perception and action that can only be achieved through practice”.[7] In this statement the paradox of flow becomes apparent. Just as to lose the self in the response to a work requires an aesthetic sensibility; to reach the state of flow in the making of a work, freedom of response requires the disciplined acquisition of skill to the level where it is embodied. Then in the flow state a maker can be lost to all but the activity that consumes him or her, and it is then that the rhythm of the hand may be seen in the balance of the finished work. In an archetypal craft process the hand that moves of its own accord in apparent automatic spontaneous process that is in reality the result of years of technical emersion leading to highly trained competencies.
Golden Moments
Of embodied skills, Stephen Procter says, “Our best work is undertaken without consciousness of the self, but rather consciousness that all the participant parts are focussed into unified action, so that we arrive at a point beyond the initial self-conscious effort. Here the materials begin to sing and that piece begins its life”[8].
This is what artist Brenden Scott French refers to as that ‘golden moment’ that is “less about the material, the kiln and the process and more about creating”.[9]
A Logical Explanation
According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the dissolution of time and identity is the result of limitations in the nervous system’s ability to process information.[10] When there is total engagement in a process, there is inadequate attention left over to monitor how the body feels. Awareness of hunger and tiredness fade, body and identity disappear from consciousness because there is only enough attention to do that which requires all this concentration, and to do it well. However, as with deep meditation, the feeling of self returns stronger after such an event and this event also brings with it such a profound sense of enjoyment that people are willing to put a great effort into the experience.
The concept of flow is also relevant in situations where a work engages the viewer completely. The formality of the visual array with its ambiguity and paradox provides an abundance of information to the senses, but there is also conceptual engagement. There is an interaction of subject and object through constant feedback that continually restructures the balance between the two, and that overwhelms all but that interaction. In such a circumstance self and time could be consumed in the event that is the work’s manifestation. At its epitome, this is to experience the sublime – that which is too vast in its openness to be comprehended. In viewing, flow is linked to the state of ecstasy – that reality where life is more intense.
Object and Event
However there is another perspective on the timeless moment.
It is as though one’s experience of (the work) has no duration … because at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest … It is continuous and entire presentness, amounting … to the perpetual creation of itself, that one experiences as a kind of instantaneousness: as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it. [11]
The closure implied in this Michael Fried quotation is contested when openness envelops ideal form and the Platonic ideal of Modernism is superseded. The ideal of Modernism is replaced by a dynamic interaction between the spectator and the work within the specific context of viewing. In this relationship the work is open to a range of possibilities as it moves through visual form to potential, from object to event. As Nicolas Bourriaud expresses it: “The encounter with the work gives rise not so much to a space … as to a time span … going beyond the act of ‘rounding off’ the work by looking at it”[12].
These engagements involve both technical competencies and physical commitment. They support a phenomenological engagement with the glasswork as an event rather than as a focus on object – romantically open rather than classically closed. It is a logical explanation for what could be considered illogical, providing scientific explanation for experiences such as the timeless moment. Where I credited the inert and lifeless with life, and presented the contained object as open, I now present the glass object as a process. Through glass, the work reconfigured in our response presents us with an experience of the unpresentable. This is an event generated through our engagement with tangible material and visual form. That event becomes a means for accessing internal worlds. In an area dominated not by logic but by aesthetics, transcendental engagement is scientifically possible both when making glasswork and when viewing glasswork.
[1] Honour, Romanticism, 73. Philipp Otto Runge’s letter to his brother Daniel.
[2] Procter and Tazzyman, Lines Through Light, 33, and Peter Minson, personal interview, 20/02/09 and 23/02/09, 11.
[3] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1st ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1990, 49.
[4] Clare Belfrage, personal interview, 10/12/09, 4.
[5] Charles Butcher and Cobi Cockburn, Personal interview,18/01/2010, 4-5.
[6] Peter Minson, personal interview, 20/02/09 and 23/02/09, 5, Mark Eliott, personal interview, 03/04/09, 8.
[7] Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold, eds., Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007, 12.
[8] Christine Procter and Itzell Tazzyman, Lines Through Light, 90.
[9] Brenden Scott French, personal interview, 20/10/09, 1.
[10] www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html
[11] Charles Harrison, reprint of Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, first published Artforum, summer 1967, 844-845.
[12] Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 59.
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