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    The Art of Awareness: Motivations and Orientations in the Creative Arts
    The Art of Awareness: Motivations and Orientations in the Creative Arts
    The Art of Awareness: Motivations and Orientations in the Creative Arts
    Ebook178 pages4 hours

    The Art of Awareness: Motivations and Orientations in the Creative Arts

    By Don Asker

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    About this ebook

    This book weaves the threads of everyday life and those moments where one is at one’s insightful and creative best. It explores the capacity for both deep reflection and alert, ‘in the moment’, sensory engagement. It underscores the possibility for becoming aware of and challenging the behavioural patterns developed over time that can focus and sometimes limit our lives.

    For those who have at heart a desire to find value in everyday life, and discover latent potentials and creative capacities this book offers both useful examples and some simple challenges, forged from practical experience.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAustin Macauley
    Release dateJul 26, 2018
    ISBN9780463779170
    The Art of Awareness: Motivations and Orientations in the Creative Arts
    Author

    Don Asker

    Don studied science before dancing, dance making and other forms of creative exploration took over. He sustains an improvising practice and his body-centred research interests include memory, the metaphors and myths shaping human experience and the connections and relationships between people and all things of the country. He is based at Kiah in the Towamba River valley in south coastal New South Wales, Australia.

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      Book preview

      The Art of Awareness - Don Asker

      About the author

      Don studied science before dancing, dance making and other forms of creative exploration took over. He sustains an improvising practice and his body-centred research interests include memory, the metaphors and myths shaping human experience and the connections and relationships between people and all things of the country.

      He is based at Kiah in the Towamba River valley in south coastal New South Wales, Australia.

      ***

      Dedication

      To Jane Mortiss whose thirst for adventure in nature has been infectious and Colin Mackenzie who over the decades of our friendship has shared his views on arts and culture in such frank terms that I have had to rethink the power and place of the poetic in everyday life.

      ***

      The Art of Awareness

      Published by Austin Macauley at Smashwords

      Copyright 2018 Don Asker

      The right of Don Asker to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the

      Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with the written permission of the publisher, or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      The Art of Awareness

      available from the British Library.

      www.austinmacauley.com

      The Art of Awareness

      ISBN 9781787103177 (Paperback)

      ISBN 9781787103184 (Hardback)

      ISBN 9781787103191 (E-Book)

      Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.

      First Published in 2018

      AustinMacauley

      CGC-33-01, 25 Canada Square

      Canary Wharf, London E14 5LQ

      ***

      Acknowledgments

      First and foremost I thank all those creative people who have given me inspiration, and food for thought through their practices and conversations. There are far more than those mentioned in this book, but special thanks to Andrew Morrish, Helen Herbertson, Ros Crisp, Simon Ellis, Janette Hoe, Natalie Cursio, Greg Dyson, Richard Murphet and Mark Pollard, all of whom have in their individual ways, and I should add probably unwittingly, contributed to my motivation to write this book. Of course they are in no ways responsible for inaccuracies or inadequacies of the writing for which I take full responsibility.

      I am indebted to Dr Warren Lett, who many years ago reminded me of the riches of reflection and the complexities of ‘meaning’.

      ***

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      Contents

      By way of introduction

      Viewpoints

      Learning from the past and critically engaging with the present

      Small fish in small towns in a big country

      Artists as social commentators and activists

      Becoming attentive

      Re-orientation within and without

      The pause – perspectives on the space between

      Reflection

      Musings on the art of learning to walk

      Making sense of lived experience

      Dis-organising practices:

      Loosening the reins with unlikely partners

      Finding one’s own voice: shifts in being

      Intuition: working with what comes naturally

      The bearing of thought

      The phenomenology of the body

      Curiousity, consciousness, hauntings and the present sense

      Moving as palimpsest

      References

      Endnotes

      By way of introduction

      This project is written from a number of stances: as storyteller, as documenter of events, and as reflective practitioner. It focuses on experiences of creative practice, and reflects on processes of making sense or meaning in every day life. I explore the idea of creative practice being a conversation between person and environment that brings to the forefront of consciousness intrinsic aspects of one’s self. In so doing I find my ‘voice’ becoming framed differently, sometimes speaking for example with social awareness, sometimes with emphasis to somatic experience, and often with ecological concern. The complex interaction of creative practices, art and everyday life becomes an alchemic firmament in which values and purpose in life are forged and tested.

      There are two main threads or themes in this collection, the notion of awareness, and the idea of viewpoint. Awareness as I discuss it starts with sensory perception and through experience and memory builds our means of recognition and thought that allow sense making. Viewpoint is not simply geographical, and reflective of from where in space I am observing. Viewpoint is about the viewer, the subject and reflective of experience, education and socialisation.

      I want to take this a little further and suggest that a viewpoint is shaped by our particular interests and values and reflexively informs our orientation and approach through life. Viewpoint is temporal, in flux, though often informed by assumptions and bias. My interest in the interconnection of things, or ecology, may not be at the forefront of another person’s mind say a leading resource developer like a miner, so values are subjective things. But like the developer or miner I unconsciously subscribe to a host of values that come with membership of Australian society. There can be conflicts, and I am daily aware of making compromises. Some of my food is sourced from multi-national food corporations though I am aware of many negative, exploitative aspects of corporate culture. I pay taxes that contribute to Australia’s military roles in the world, some of which I believe are highly questionable. I am a member of a society that has one of the worst records of indigenous treatments by subsequent waves of colonising and immigrant others.

      Through the individual articles the themes of awareness and informing values are allowed to assume their own form. This makes for flexible definition and interconnection with questions of being, knowing and our ways of doing things, all of which are implicit in our creative practices and day-to-day lives.

      In the academy notions of inquiry within practice proliferate with many artistic practitioners drawn to problematise or explore aspects of interest within their work. Terms like practice as research and practice led research reflect the inflections within methodologies and also the complexities that arise as emphasis on creative processes result in different modes and concepts of knowledge dissemination. This is exciting territory, and has the potential to shake longstanding concepts concerning art, artist and culture. The tendency is towards in depth inquiry and in many cases involves collaborative work. Although relationships of individual practitioner/researcher to the field and influential others are often explored, there is sometimes less inclination to ask why things are being done in particular ways, or to examining core aesthetic or motivating values. The practitioner can find himself or herself in quite a rarefied atmosphere.

      Taking a step back from our practice, turning our gaze, our sensibility to attend to the details of our everyday life can be both grounding, and insightful. Such a broadening of scope may well be difficult to achieve, after all we generally find there is barely enough time to foster particular approaches within our practice. But softening our gaze, listening to the background noise, changing our gait, taking alternative paths, having different conversations with others, can remove some of the certainty and break or crack some of the moulds that may be overly restrictive and ultimately limiting of our practice and our way of interacting in the world. For example I found myself making some assumptions about a colleague. I tended to see the dynamics of the life of an immigrant from Malaysia turned Butoh practitioner who is also a designer as reflecting the politics of a post colonial democracy, prevailing attitudes to gender and sexuality, and individual freedoms in Australia. But I really shouldn’t stop there because such a way of considering my colleague is only one of many framings or perspectives I might take. I might ask what impact does my colleague’s experience have on my own stories? What is my colleague saying? What is my colleague attending to? Why? How? As I do this I find myself conscious of my own arrogance and the superficiality that is so often attached to judgement. I use the term arrogance because it seems to fit the bill - the tendency to quickly lose touch with the emotional and relational detail arising in our engagement with others, and somehow be content with facts that eschew empathetic resonance with others.

      I can similarly bring my attention to reflect on myself, take notice of what I am doing, where this is happening, and how I experience that. In so doing I start to make myself more vulnerable and open to question, not I should add with any negative intention, but rather to open up the possibilities that might currently be outside my consciousness. Such an attitude can permeate every moment- to-moment experience and will manifest as a shift in degree of openness, breadth of focus and capacity to reflect.

      ***

      In a year of local floods, extreme cold, interspersed with storms and several wild fires, my appreciation of the fragility of day-to-day experience, especially my sense of increasing Lisa Roberts Krill vulnerability and insecurity, has been kindled. On a planet where global issues of food resource sustainability, population growth, development, wealth distribution and religious persecution provide a less than positive picture for the future, many people have found ways and means to signal their particular concern. Sometimes this is in partnership with others like Lisa Roberts1 who has brought her animation skills and interests in krill as subjects to couple with those of scientific researchers monitoring human impact on climate and biodiversity in Antarctica. She and the scientists appreciate that dissemination of data is crucial to effect change. Lisa’s dancing krill animations provide a visual and immediately impacting engagement with a big and complex issue.

      ***

      Many people are literally dancing the data - expressing aspects of their selves and lived experience through dance. It reflects awareness that each of us is an embodied self, and has the capacity to shape an identity or reveal a self that is complex and partially understood Recognising our relationship to others, other differently embodied selves, enables mutual recognition and generates collective awareness and responsibility.

      Raimund Hoghe in a walking and gesturing presentation Another Dream at the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts 2003 (MIFA), put himself in a theatre but did not offer a narrative or reveal spectacular

      1: is 2 in current proof

      ***

      Raimund Hoghe Photographs ©Rosa-Frank.com physical ability. Instead he showed himself as a vulnerable man in a suit who walked and stood and lit candles to music. I later learned Raimund had collaborated with Pina Bausch and worked on other big productions. I came to puzzle over his presentation and found it raised interesting questions for me at the time. In fact my empathy for Raimund grew long after he had left the country. Tracing the interactions linking artist to the dynamic of the broader community can reveal territory we might otherwise remain blind to – and open the way for personal/social change and possibility.

      ***

      Chambre Séparée

      Photographs ©Rosa-Frank.com

      ***

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