The Artistic Tower of Babel: Inextricable Links Between Culture and Graphic Development

The Artistic Tower of Babel: Inextricable Links Between Culture and Graphic DevelopmentAuthor(s): Brent WilsonSource: Visual Arts Research, Vol. 11, No. 1(21) (Spring 1985), pp. 90-104Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20715589 .

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The Artistic Tower of Babel: Inextricable Links Between Culture and Graphic Development

Brent Wilson The Pennsylvania State University

Trouble in Eden: Some Inexpedient Child-Gardening

In this century the artistic obligation to be original has been so strong and so

pervasive that, until recently, it has almost

always been seen as inhibiting artistic

individuality. This poisoned finger of in fluence was thought to be especially damaging to the tender blossoming of child art. Franz Cizek, the Austrian art teacher some call the father of child art, was among the first, but certainly not the last, to dream of isolating children from such injurious influences. Franceses Wil son, his British disciple, recorded a talk

given by Cizek in a convent in Dobling to the teachers of that city. She quotes him as saying:

"The influence of environment may be

very harmful. As far as art goes it is

sacrilege to force a style upon a child. A

child, like a flower, must grow out of its

own roots if it is to come to fruition.

Children live nowadays altogether too so

phisticated a life ? they see and hear too much ?

they are taken to cinemas and

theatres, and all sorts of alien influences

play upon them." (F. Wilson, 1921)

She continues:

And here the Professor alluded again wistfully to that island of his in the middle of the sea ? "far away where no ship could touch it." There he would have his garden of God, with children growing in it like flowers, "out of their own roots," and not other people's.

Whether he knew it or not, Cizek was a true disciple of the 18th-century phi losopher Jean Jacques Rousseau; like Rousseau, he saw society as the source of harmful influence. In his view, nature and the natural were the ways through which priceless innate individuality might

be preserved. The child was endowed with an inborn creativity and an intrinsic artistic timeclock, which if allowed to un wind at its own speed and in its own natural manner, could maintain the crea

tivity of child art until adulthood. The sure route to a creative adulthood was by a

path that avoided society's conventions for a period of time sufficient to allow

patterns of natural artistic goodness to

gain the strength necessary to withstand

society's individuality-robbing assaults of

subject, style, and standardization. It is probably because of the persistent

power of the developmental ideas of Rousseau and Cizek, and of Viktor Low enfeld, Herbert Read, Gustaf Britsch, Henry Schaeffer-Simmern, Rudolf Arn

heim, Blanche Jefferson, and a host of others, that I have been asked to present a contrary position, the inextricable link between culture and artistic develop ment. I will tell you some of the ways in which Cizek and company got it wrong, that in their formulations of artistic and creative growth they did not adequately understand the basic character of human

development, nor art, nor symbol sys tems, nor society, nor individuality, nor

creativity. And that, ironically, in their overzealous attempts to control what they took to be society's weeds in their child

gardens, they actually destroyed some

budding artistic flowers and disturbed the roots of so many more of the very blooms of individuality these Romantic gardeners sought to harvest.

Universal Flowers or Cultural Flowers?

The major assumption underlying the Ro mantic version of artistic growth was this: children universally possessed the ge

90 VISUAL ARTS RESEARCH ? 1985 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois



netic materials necessary to single-hand edly invent from scratch (or at least from their perceptions of the phenomenal world) a full-blown artistic language. The often contradictory expectations for this "self-invented" graphic and plastic lan

guage have been great. On the one hand, in the words of Jefferson (1970, p. 28), "every child is required and expected to work differently from every other. There

fore, if each child is not working in a

personal and original way, it is not art." On the other hand, these individual artis tic utterings are sometimes thought to form a universal language immediately understood by all (Motherwell, 1970). Thus we see imposed upon child art the re

quirement that it return us to the pre Babel time when everyone spoke the

pure tongue of Adam, while at the same time transcending Babel and its polyglot of cultures and languages to arrive at a state where each individual creates ex n/7o his or her own original graphic or

plastic language ? a wonderland in which

everyone speaks a unique language of their own invention that is universally understood.

The Romantics do have some notable shreds of universal evidence upon which to hang their theory. There seems to be little question that children's graphic and

plastic images are affected by a set of universal tendencies or biases (Feldman, 1980). In other words, when they draw and model, children (and many adults) produce the simplest possible configu ration while still meeting their artistic ends

(Arnheim, 1974); they anchor lines and

shapes perpendicularly (Piaget & In heiden 1956); they avoid overlap (Good now, 1977); and they balance forms (Arn heim, 1974). These biasing factors

probably account for Cizek's discovery, sometime around 1885, that the children in Bohemia drew "the same things, in the same way, as those children in the

carpenter's family [with whom he lodged] and the small boys in the Florianigasse [of Vienna, whom he observed fighting for fence-space on which to draw]" (in

Viola, 1936, p. 12). More recently, Olivier

(1974) has shown that children's draw

ings are composed of 30 graphemes; that there is a distinct developmental progression involving rotation, transla tion, and modulation; and that there are

syntactic operations involving intersec tion, inclusion, and repetition. Krampen (1984) has provided cross-cultural evi dence to suggest that these graphemes are universal. And Kennedy (1984) has shown that blind subjects are able, through perceptual means other than vis ual, to invent graphic equivalents for the

objects of their experience. The universalists are not the only ones

with evidence on which to hang their theories. There is a growing body of data

relating to patterns of cultural influence in the drawings of even very young chil dren (Alland, 1983; Wilson & Wilson, 1979, 1983,1984). At this point in time, it seems safe to claim that any adequate theory of graphic or artistic development will have to take into account the effect of universal graphic biasing factors as well as the graphemes that appear to be the

building-blocks of graphic configurations. But that same theory would also have to take into account cross-cultural differ ences in the art of children.

One possible starting place for a theory of artistic development would be to con sider the graphic symbolic realm, and by extension the artistic, to be a language (or languages). An analogy for this (or any) language might be a cultural path of symbols that has been blazed long before any individual hiker walked along it, and one that will remain beyond the lifetime of those who follow it, will con tinue to refine its main course, and some times will alter its direction a bit or chart new "shortcuts." The languages or sym bol systems of art, moreover, are subject to the rules that govern other symbol systems such as those derived from

speech or numbers. And so, assuming that drawing is a language, we must see if it follows the characteristics of other

symbol systems: (1) The system itself

Culture and Graphic Development 91



provides the symbols that individuals

adopt, place in combinations, and some times extend. (This being the case, we could not expect to find graphic or artistic

symbols to result merely from the inven tion of graphic equivalents of perceptions of the phenomenal world.) (2) The graphic configurations of a culture are as con

ventional, regular, and predictable as the words of a given language. (Artists and children alike employ these graphic con

figurations, and neither artists nor chil dren are any more likely to invent a

graphic language from scratch than they are to invent a verbal one.) The question is whether there is evidence to support these claims.

Islamic Torsos, Bottle Bodies, Ladder

Mouths, Back-mounted Arms, Two

eyed Profiles, Moon Faces, and Other Assorted Features

Years ago, as I began to study children's

drawings from the late 19th century, I detected pervasive stylistic qualities that made these youthful productions seem as much of their time as the Gibson Girls of the same period. Yet I also discovered

striking cross-cultural differences in chil dren's graphic productions.

Islamic Torsos

Seven years ago Nabil El Husseini re turned from Egypt with my first collection of story drawings from the Middle East. In these productions I found that the humans drawn by most 9- and 12-year old Egyptian children consisted of a rec

tangular-shaped torso with a fused neck. When I later went to Egypt to collect my own samples of children's drawings, I found that although the drawings of vil

lage and urban children varied markedly in other respects, about 70% of both

groups of children produced figures with variations of this torso type (Wilson &

Wilson, 1984). This manner of depicting the human form might seem quite unre markable were it not for the fact that

fewer than 4% of American, Australian, European, Japanese, and New Guinea children produce the same form. This

torso-type is common in the drawings of Middle Eastern children, however. For

example, Kayed Amr (1982), a Palestinian student of mine, found that rural, urban, Bedouin, and Palestinian children living in northern Jordan produced about the same proportion of these torsos ? 65% at age 9 and 85% at age 12. I have observed this feature in the drawings of children from other countries with Islamic

populations ? Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Tur

key, Iran, India, and Kenya (although I have not determined the percentages). The feature occurs with such regularity that I have called it the Islamic torso. One of my future quests is to determine just how closely the torso form follows the boundaries of.Islam by ascertaining its

strength in Morocco to the west, India to the east, and the extent to which it pen etrates south into Muslim Africa.

Bottle Bodies, X-formed Legs, and Back mounted Arms

With the Islamic torso it is possible to see how one preferred body configura tion extends across an entire region of the world. It is possible, as well, to see the dominance of a preferred configu ration within smaller areas. For example, Sully (1896) reported on 61 English chil dren's drawings of humans collected prior to 1895. Eighty-one percent of the bodies of these figures had been formed with an oval shape, a circular shape, or a circular or oval shape with a flattened

portion that gives the torsos the look of a bottle or a bell. If we look for them we can find the same configuration^ regu larities in the drawings of any group of children.

In the standardization data of the orig inal Goodenough Draw-a-Man test,1 col lected in three regions of the United

States (New Jersey, Louisiana and Ten nessee, and California) between the years 1917 and 1923, there are some charac teristics that appear to extend across

92 Brent Wilson



Figure 1. Human figures with "bottle bodies" drawn by English children late in the 19th century.

many of the drawings in the three re

gions, and there are other features that are unique to particular groups of chil dren. For example, in the human figures drawn by some groups of Spanish speaking California children, the legs of

nearly 100% of the figures were drawn

by attaching to a waistline two intersect

ing, diagonally oriented rectangular shapes. This complex way of making legs could not have been easy to master. In fact, in some drawings it can clearly be seen that the child first drew the figure, got it "wrong," erased it, and tried it

again. (I observed Egyptian children go ing through the same struggles to mas ter the Islamic torso [Wilson & Wilson, 1984, p. 231].) It is also worth noting that although these crossed legs are found attached to a variety of rectangular and amorphous upper-torso shapes, the

preferred upper torso is a triangular form sometimes shown with a fused neck.

Although strikingly different from the

Spanish-speaking children's drawings, another group of California children's

drawings from the Goodenough data were

typical of an early 20th-century national

depiction of a man, except in one regard: some of the students of the Coronel School in Los Angeles mounted arms to the back-line of their profile figures (the profile itself is a convention) in a most

atypical fashion. Twenty-nine percent of one group of boys mounted the arms in this manner, and 10% more combined a back-mount with a more standard arm mount. What is fascinating is that this method of mounting arms is character istic of the figures drawn by Italian chil dren during the 1880s (Ricci, 1887). Dur




ing the 1920s the Coronel School had a

large population of Italian immigrant chil dren, so it is possible that the back mounted arms migrated with the Italian children and were then passed on to the other children who attended the school.

I could continue with illustrations across time and cultures by pointing to the moon faces derived from the numeral 4 that Arabic writers use, employed by over 70% of some groups of Egyptian village children but only a few middle-class

Egyptian city children (Wilson & Wilson, 1984); the ladder mouths drawn by one third of the English children in Sully's sample (another 23% used a single straight line for mouths, but there were no "smiley" mouths such as those found in nearly 100% of some samples of Amer

ican children's drawings today); the two

eyed profile prevalent in European chil dren's drawings made in the late 1800s, now apparently absent yet still found in some Egyptian children's drawings (Wil son & Wilson, 1982b, 1983, 1984); the horizontal oval heads of Egyptian chil dren; or the exquisite comic-book-de rived figures that seem to be replacing the traditional "more childlike" figures of

today's young Japanese children. Here is evidence that the configurations in children's drawings are as distinct as the accents, the local dialects, and the words of the languages that the children speak. But are these differences to be found in the graphic "syntax"

? that is, in the

regular or conventional ways that "graphic words" are related to one another?

Figure 2(a). Human figures with legs formed

by two intersecting diagonally oriented rectan

gles drawn by Mexican-American children in

Los Angeles during the early 1920s.

If

Figure 2(b). Human figures with back-mounted

arms drawn by children at the Coronel School

in Los Angeles during the early 1920s.

94 Brent Wilson



From Configurations to Compositions

In addition to the cross-cultural differences in the depiction of objects, we have col lected some initial data that indicate that these patterns extend to the enormously more complex realms of spatial depiction and pictorial composition. For example, only 10% of Egyptian village children em

ployed any kind of plane to indicate spatial depth, while 50% of Egyptian urban mid dle-class children used the plane to show

depth. The urban children had access to

pictures that showed planes in perspec tive and the village children did not. We also found that one of the preferred

ways by which the village children showed the relationship of objects was to arrange them vertically

? apparently, as Free

man (1980, pp. 223-231) claims, to indi cate that one object was behind another. While 50% of Egyptian village children

frequently stacked four or more objects on top of one another, only 18% of the urban middle-class Egyptian children

composed their drawings in this manner.

Perhaps the most intriguing finding from our Egyptian studies was that 39% of the

village children composed symmetrical pictures by placing flanking images on either side of a central image. Sometimes a smaller compositional pattern of this

type would even be nested within a larger compositional pattern of the same type. Only 7% of the urban children produced this compositional pattern. When we move from within-cultural

comparisons to cross-cultural compari sons, the differences are even more ex treme. We found, for example, that Amer ican children frequently composed sequential pictures by changing the im

plied location of the viewer, while few of the Egyptian children used this cinemat

ographic technique (Wilson & Wilson, 1979) ?and I should note that for the

Egyptian children we studied, television was as common as for American chil

dren. Why is it that some potential influ ences become actual influences while others do not?

Modeling the Expressive Qualities of "The Cry"

Although we do not know what causes some influences to take hold and others to be ignored, I would like to illustrate

just how difficult it is for children to ignore even the expressive and stylistic features of a graphic model. In a 1979 study, Carothers and Gardner investigated chil dren's ability to produce the expressive and repleteness features of graphic models. Their findings suggest that it was not until middle childhood that children noted and reproduced these features. As we had noted children at ages three and four modeling their drawings after dom inant cultural-stylistic features, the Ca rothers and Gardner findings are prob lematic. Why would children model some

graphic features and not others? Might the children in the Carothers and Gardner

study have ignored the expressive fea tures of the graphic models used in that research because those aspects were

actually minimal and inexpressive? When I set out to find what would happen if children were given the opportunity to model their drawings after a stylistically distinct and dramatically expressive work of art, Edvard Munch's lithograph "The

Cry'' seemed ideally suited. This print is

replete with sinuous, undulating lines, a

thrusting diagonal bridge railing, and ten sion between two mysterious figures in the background and a shrieking figure in the foreground.

Children in kindergarten through fifth

grade were given individual reproduc tions of the Munch lithograph. Unlike the children in the Carothers and Gardner

study, our subjects were not asked to make their drawings look like the picture. Only the narrative content of the print, not the expressive elements, were dis cussed with the children. They were then asked to think of the picture as a story and to make a drawing that showed what was going to happen next. We wanted to see whether the children would repro duce the expressive qualities of the work




even when they were not asked to do so. The children's drawings were ana

lyzed to determine: (1) the degree of

expressiveness of any of the features of the work that they might have pro duced ? the sky, distant land, bridge rail

ing, distant figures, closer figure, etc.; and (2) whether added elements were treated expressively.

The most important finding of the study was that children in all age groups treated the reproduced features expressively. To illustrate, 63% of the kindergarten chil dren treated over 40% of the reproduced features of their drawings expressively; and at the upper end of the age scale, 52% of the fifth-grade children treated over 83% of the reproduced features

expressively. There was, however, an other finding that I think is more impor tant. Although the younger children re

produced fewer features of the print, they added more features to their drawings. For example, 68% of the kindergarten children added at least three features to their drawings and treated all three of these added features expressively. In

comparison, only 15% of the fifth-grade students added three features and treated them expressively.

It is notable that some kindergarten children reproduced the expressive and

stylistic qualities of the print although they did not reproduce its literal features. Is it possible that the ability to produce expressive qualities actually precedes the

ability to produce the configurations of

objects? At the very least the study illus trates that it is impossible for most chil dren to ignore the features of a highly expressive graphic model.

Graphic Symbolic Worldmaking

As I complete my task of outlining the contribution of culture to graphic and artistic development, it is important to remember that children frequently em

ploy the graphic symbol system to make art (or quasi art) and that they make art

in order to build for themselves (and sometimes for others) tangible, semiper manent, somewhat iconic models of and for self and world ? past, present, and future. (The worldmaking to which I refer is that found in Nelson Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking [1978].) Our studies of the spontaneous drawings of children have taught us that graphic narratives are one of the most advantageous means

by which children form working models of the realities of their worlds (Wilson & Wilson, 1982a, pp. 23-37). By drawing some characters, placing them in a set

ting, showing what the setting is like and what the characters are like, and then

depicting what happens, what happens next, and how things turn out, children can review almost anything that has hap pened and imaginatively preview things that might happen. We have assumed that the world views

of one culture would not necessarily be the world views of another, and that by studying the narrative drawings of chil dren in particular cultures we would be able to see the process of graphic sym bolic worldmaking unfold. We also as sumed that we would be able to see the contributions and constraints that either the possession or the lack of particular graphic capabilities would have on the

worldmaking process (Wilson & Wilson, 1983). Stated another way, some groups of children possess enormous, marvel

ously complex, varied, expressive, and flexible graphic "vocabularies and gram mars," while other groups possess only a simple and inflexible graphic language. What are the consequences for world

making in these contrasting situations?

Worldmaking in Two Egyptian Styles The result of possessing a graphic sym bol system with severely limited capabil ities for worldmaking can be seen in the

drawings of two groups of Egyptian chil dren. Our studies (Wilson, El Husseini, 8i Wilson, 1982) of the graphic narratives of upper-middle-class urban, working class urban, and village Egyptian children

96 Brent Wilson



Figure 3(a). In showing "what happens next"

a fifth-grade child models the expressive and

stylistic features of Munch's "The Cry."

PH

Figure 3(b). Although this kindergarten child has reproduced few of the literal features of

Munch's "The Cry," she has employed zig-zag lines that give her drawing some of the ex

pressive qualities of Munch's print.

revealed stories filled with instances of

helping others, reciprocal aid, and gift giving. It is no wonder that the Egyptian children employ these themes since the stories they hear abound with such things: a dog warns a bird of an impending attack

by a snake, and later the bird recipro cates by warning the dog of a hunter's aimed gun. Beautiful variations (original ones, we think) of this theme are found in the drawings of some groups of Egyp tian children; but not all groups employ the theme regularly. We found that the village children pos

sessed an extremely restricted graphic language. As a group, for example, they composed their drawings of human fig ures from three primary body types and two primary head types. I have already illustrated one of the three or four primary

static and inflexible ways they composed their pictures. These village children had

only one major source for their graphic configurations and their artistic style

?

the drawings of other village children. The middle-class urban children had ac cess to this same Egyptian children's

style and access, as well, to graphic models from English and American school books and Arab-language periodicals that showed them ways to move their draw

ings toward an Egyptian version of visual realism that was not even a stylistic op tion for the village children.

Cizek, the Romantic, might assume that the "naturally-pure" village children would present a more essential version of the Egyptian world view than the "me

dia-corrupted" middle-class children. In some ways they did. Although less than




half of the 12-year-old village children

produced sequential stories, the stories

they did produce were of the timeless tension-free rhythms of village life ?

tending the crops, going to market, to

school, etc. Less than 5% of the 12-year old village children employed the para

digmatic Egyptian aid-giving theme, while over a third of the middle-class children did. Ironically, the children most subject to influences ? foreign influences at that ? produced the most paradigmatic Egyptian themes.

The village children's graphic lan

guage, their simple inflexible style, and their general lack of ability to produce plot tensions in their stories made it im

possible for most of the children to sym bolize a world other than a benign one. In contrast, over half of the 12-year-old

middle-class children's drawings in cluded the trial theme ? showing a world of tensions, tests, and threats.

As I puzzled over the plight of the

village children I thought, "Well perhaps their drawings are as they ought to be;

perhaps the only reality [Kreitler & Kreit

ler, 1972, pp. 325-358] they need to sym bolize is the reality of the rhythms of

village life; perhaps they have no need to dream visions of worlds that might be." Then I remembered that many of these children might be joining the mi

grating hordes of Fellahin who have al

ready strained Cairo beyond belief. Their lives may actually be filled with more trials than the lives of their privileged city cous

ins, in which case their graphic symbolic worldmaking was not preparing them for the probabilities of their futures.

In short, I think that the absence of a

reasonably well-developed graphic sym bol system may severely limit children's abilities to engage in important graphic symbolic worldmaking activities. The cul

ture-specific graphic "languages" found in the art of adults enhances rather than restricts the worldmaking possibilities of

children. No worse fate could befall chil dren than to be shipped to Cizek's island

in the sea where they could see only the art of other children.

The Alternative Worldmaking Conventions of Japanese Children's

Graphic Narratives

Of all the graphic narratives we have

collected, those of the Japanese children show the most astonishing graphic and narrative prowess. Nearly all of the 6

year-old Japanese children we have stud ied are able to draw coherent sequential stories (in some other countries only about half of some groups of 12-year-old chil dren are able to produce coherent se

quences [Wilson, El Husseini, & Wilson,

1982]). Japanese children seem as adept as their elders at absorbing influences and turning them to their own advantage. It is possible to detect in their drawings several once prevalent and now less common Japanese children's styles; strong traces of the interplay of images and calligraphy that one might see in

poetry scrolls and woodcuts (perhaps now filtered through popular imagery); characters with grotesque masklike fea tures that may have originated with the

Gigaku Masks of the eighth century or the carved wooden figures that guarded temples (again with contemporary pop ular modifications); a more recent tradi tion of Godzilla monsters; and perhaps most pervasive of all, the influences of

Japanese comic books. In the story draw

ings of 6-year-old children we see an

early version of a media-derived large eyed figure that gains muscular contours and the ability to move marvelously as it

proceeds upward through the grades. But it is the worlds formed by these

distinct stylistic casts of characters that I wish to focus on. In the Japanese children's drawings, more than in those of any other cultural group we have stud

ied, it is possible to see a dimension of their world view that consists of a preoc cupation with struggles against over

whelming odds, of struggles that end in

success, and as often as not, of struggles that end in failure. (It could be that these

98 Brent Wilson



drawings reflect the tremendous pres sure placed upon the young Japanese student to succeed at one level of school

ing in order to enter the next level of

schooling, and the next, and the next, from advantaged positions.)

A 9-year-old child has no difficulty in

presenting the struggle theme by em

ploying one of the typical Japanese chil dren's styles: figures with squarish heads and rubbery limbs, and an implied viewer location that is always the same ? a

medium cinematographic shot. (Against great odds the race is won.) In contrast, a 12-year-old child's entry in another race is a paradigmatic ideal-type figure bor rowed from the comics. Moreover, during the race this figure is shown from a medium distance, close-up, and extreme

close-up. And we are treated to lines that express the anguish of an athlete forced to compete beyond capability

? and who fails, tragically, after repeated effort.

I do not wish to say that one graphic story is presented more successfully than

the other. To the contrary, the 9-year old's drawing has a straightforward sim

plicity that conveys its message effec

tively and with utter clarity. I think the

story is beautifully drawn, as is the 12

year-old's story. But because of its greater complexity, and its relentless depiction of the competitor's feelings and the effects of a weak heart, the older child's narrative presents a vastly more complex world than that of the younger child.

It is possible to claim that both graphic narratives deal successfully and even

movingly with the preoccupying Japa nese theme of struggle/success or strug gle/failure. But I cannot simply leave it at that, because there is such an impor tant point about cultural influences to be made from the drawings. In these draw

ings we are able to witness two distinct

culturally related graphic traditions that exist side-by-side. The 9-year-old should be satisfied with her drawing. But for how long? Think how the 12-year-old might feel if he or she was able to imagine

<-i > j_^ > ̂ ^^^ J ir^^^r-t:^^^,

Figure 4. "Tfre Race" /n six frames, drawn by a third-grade Japanese child.




fisElf^fT\\ rZ^^T^i (?-^^-- \

Figure 5. "The Race" /'/? fwe/ve frames, drawn by a sixth-grade Japanese child.

100 Brent Wilson



the mental and physical anguish of the race and yet had only the graphic means of the 9-year-old with which to convey this anguish; if his or her graphic sym bolic abilities were not sufficiently devel

oped to convey the complexities of the media-stimulated imaginative world. In all likelihood the child would not attempt such a complex expressive narrative. When means fall short of visions, vi

sions cease to be given symbolic form. In the worldmaking quest, the world

maker is confronted with ever more com

plex and seemingly more real ready-made symbolic worlds ripe for adoption, ad

aptation, modification, and extension. But as David Feldman's (1980) work sug gests, the higher levels of cultural-sym bolic functioning are sometimes difficult to achieve. Although their attainment may not require special tutoring, they do re

quire practice to develop. If the higher level models are present but the skills needed to produce like images are not

developed, then the unresolved discrep ancy between model and production will

usually result in a cessation of world

making in that symbolic mode. We do not

usually keep working at something when

repeated comparison to cultural models informs us that we are failing.

In Japan, the 9-year-old's drawing style is probably a dead-end, inasmuch as the

prevailing cultural models of the popular media demand that another different and more complex style be employed. The 9

year-old has three options: adapt a Jap anese children's style to achieve more of the media look; discard it and develop another (which is difficult to do); or cease

development somewhere near the middle of his or her Japanese cultural options.

Patterns of Influence

Children's drawings rely on cultural

graphic models. Where the models are different, the drawings are also different. If we were to conduct a large, compre hensive study of the drawings of the

children of the world we might expect to find: (1) specific large-region similarities

resulting from cross-national influences such as Islam (the Islamic torso); (2) general multiregional similarities resulting from cross-national influences of the

popular media (the cinematographic technique of shifting from long shot to

close-up in sequential drawings); (3) gen eral multiregional similarities resulting from an absence of strong and specific adult graphic models, which leads chil dren to rely on conventionalizations of

intrinsically biased configurations (the two-eyed profile); (4) specific within-cul ture similarities resulting from the crea

tion, employment, and perpetuation of

culturally related configurations (the Egyptian moon face, for example); (5) specific small-area (school, neighbor hood, etc.) similarities resulting from the influence of a child's fortuitously devel

oped image or a unique adult image borrowed by a child and passed on to other children (the California children's crossed legs). In short, the study of chil dren's images might involve investiga tions of patterns of stylistic antecedents and consequences in much the same manner as art historians study the influ ence of Cezanne's paintings and African masks on the Cubism of Picasso.

The Interactions of the Universal and Cultural

In any drawing by any child it is possible to observe the consequences of two ma

jor factors. The universal graphemes and universal intrinsically biased graphic fea tures (perpendicular arrangements, avoidance of overlap, etc.) may be seen in relationship to a set of culturally spe cific graphic and artistic models. These models subtly inform children regarding how they should arrange, combine, and modulate the graphemes to form the "words" of their graphic language. They also show children how to place their

graphic words into sentences, para




graphs, and finally into narratives that

represent their worlds. As we attempt to understand the re

lationship of these genetic and cultural factors, there is a particular theoretical attitude that seems especially desirable.

Commenting on one of the most recent in a long list of books concerning the

sociobiological controversy (read nature/ nurture), Gould (1984, p. 32) had this to

say:

We must... go beyond reductionism to a

holistic recognition that biology and cul ture interpenetrate in an inextricable man

ner. One is not given and the other built upon it_Individuals are not real and

primary with collectivities (including soci eties and cultures) merely constructed

from their accumulated properties. Cul

tures make individuals too; neither comes first, neither is more basic. You can't add

up the attributes of individuals and derive a culture from them.

We must seek to understand the emergent and irreducible properties arising from an inextricable interpenetration of genes and

environment.

And finally, he comments on the necessity to embody a holistic vision that views change as interaction among components of a complete system and sees the com

ponents themselves not as a priori enti

ties, but both products of and inputs to the system. Thus the law of "interpene

trating opposites" is about inextricable

interdependence of components.

Children's images are at once geneti cally and culturally derived; without the contribution of both, the images could not have come into being.

The Creativity Issue

Perhaps one of the reasons that artistic

borrowing has caused art educators such concern is because copying is thought to reduce the possibilities for the creation of novel and individual works of art. Both

individuality and creativity need to be considered in relationship to the symbol

systems through which they are worked. Thomas McEvilley (1984, p. 70) para

phrases Roland Barthes's view of indi vidualism and influence in this manner:

It is not an individual who speaks, he [Barthes] said, but Language that speaks through the individual. In the same sense

it is not the individual who makes images, but the vast image bank of world culture that images itself forth through the indi vidual. That image bank (like language) can be viewed as a vast transpersonal mind aimlessly and relentlessly proces

sing us through its synapses. To that extent art based on quoting postulates the artist as a channel as much as a

source, and negates or diminishes the

idea of Romantic creativity.

Although there is always the danger that one will become a slave to one's artistic sources, without them there would be no art. And if the essence of artistic

creativity is seen to be the extension and relation of forms in an inventive manner, then the one who borrows the most, theoretically at least, has the greatest number of images to extend and relate. And at some point those extensions and relations may become original.

Children, like adults, can be the origi nators of new graphic configurations and

composition types (although it is doubtful that they could be the originators of a new artistic style). There is always, of course, the problem of determining, in a

specific case, the point at which minor or inconsequential novelty ends and con

sequential novelty begins (Hausman, 1984). (Consequential novelty is a more

culturally and historically important ex tension of an existing image, style, or idea than can be seen in a minor exten sion or elaboration.)

Certainly, it is the cultural significance of novel images that determines their power to influence. Sometimes novel im

ages are reproduced time and again and elaborated upon only by their originators; and sometimes they are borrowed and modified by others. When the latter hap pens, they then have the possibility of

102 Brent Wilson



entering an influence network. As I have

just indicated, these influence networks may extend to only a few people, or they may extend to children in all parts of the world. If the influence network is small, the image will probably die out quickly; and if the network is large, the image will

probably persist until rival images enter the same large network. If children draw, it is because they have access to one or

more graphic-symbolic influence net works. The number, character, and com

plexity of the image pools and influence networks available to children, then, is

very important. The drawings of the Egyptian village

children should remind us that the sup posed freedom to create art, when image options are meager, actually results in

very little freedom at all, and much less

creativity. The Romantic dream of artistic

individuality can only be realized by fol

lowing a conventional path for at least a

long enough time to realize that the route seems to end short of the unique places we have learned to imagine in the course of taking our conventional developmental steps. There is no magic way to circum vent the route from universal to unique (Feldman, 1980), as the Romantics have for so long wished to do.

The culture-directed developmental path leads children to draw from the available image pools. These graphic im

agery models can be elaborate or re stricted, expressive or restrained, slowly or rapidly changing. But whatever they are, they will determine the look, com

plexity, and content of children's artwork, and expand or limit the artistic world

making possibilities of children. Just as children in this post-Babel world live with the advantages, and the disadvantages, of a multitude of verbal languages, so too do they live with the opportunity to learn several graphic languages. We art educators should realize that many of the culturally based graphic languages of childhood do not carry children nearly as far as they or we need to go.

Note

1. The Florence Goodenough collection of standardization drawings for the Draw-a-Man Test are housed in the Penn State room of Pattee Library at The Pennsylvania State Uni

versity. The collection was donated by Pro fessor Dale Harris.

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Brent Wilson The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802

104 Brent Wilson



Documents

The Artistic Tower of Babel: Inextricable Links Between Culture and Graphic Development