2-6: Matthews – Universality and Cultural Variation

"I have argued that development is universal. Some writers show samples of children's artworks which show a similar pattern of development; yet other researchers offer evidence showing differences purported to be the result of cultural variation. A version of the traditional stage theory - that children progress from the tadpole to the conventional figure and finally produce realistic drawings of people and objects - is often used as a baseline against which to measure 'cultural variation'. This leads to confusion, because the use of this model as a baseline inevitably gives rise to apparently irreconcilable differences between descriptions of children's art. Of course we will see many variations in human figure drawing from time to time and place to place, The question is what causes the children to select the images they do select. Clearly, they do not select anything or everything from the pictorial environment. That structural principles are universal can easily be misunderstood to mean that children pass through the production of similar artworks, but universality does not mean homogeneity. In fact, the mechanisms which drive development mean that development cannot be homogenous, The structural principles are based upon the limits and possibilities of the human visual systems and the other actions of the body, but they drive processes of representation and expression which are dynamic, non-linear systems, and which are very sensitive to initial conditions. This means they will give rise to a multiplicity of variations from the same deep structural principles.

An example of an interpretation purportedly showing fundamental cultural variation, occurs in a study made by Rosemary Hill (1996), and commented on by Maureen Cox (1997), of the Warlpiri people at Yuendumu, Australia. In one observation, a child makes a travelling zigzag in the sand whilst describing the wanderings of travellers through the desert. The commentator tells us that such journeys through the desert are very impoltant to these children; who are told stories about important journeys in their folktales. The inference is being made that this drawing is quite unlike anything we would see in other cultures (Hill, 1996). First of all, we have seen that the travelling zigzag is a Second Generation Structure discovered by most children. Secondly, an interest in trajectories, passages of movement and unfolding events are common to nearly all children and are represented in their drawings and other forms of representation. Children from all over the world will be told just as many and just as important stories about journeys. Like the Warlpiri children, they will represent these in action representations.

Another example, from the same study, is these children's use of a curved closure, a horse-shoe shaped region for the representation of the human figure. Again, the U-shaped region is an important graphic structure discovered by most children. It is an inevitable outcome of stuctural variation, when children start to make further specifications about the shape of a closed region. For example, we saw Hannah use it to represent a bridge. The Warlpiri children have used it to represent a human figure, but some children from other places also use it as the basis of the representation of animals or human figures.

Used to support the thesis of cultural difference is the finding that the Warlpiri children integrate their traditional modes of drawing with different images they acquire from school. However, given the interaction between the structural principles unfolding in children's drawing, and what is available within the pictorial environment, we would expect a mixture of styles and images to appear in the art of many cultural groups.

Other writers argue that children's art can only be understood as a reflection of adult ideas within the cultural and artistic zeitgeist of the time. It is certainly true that to understand the nature of children's drawings and paintings we should be aware of the artistic and intellectual context in which these are produced, and we should be cautious how we use and understand the term 'art' in relation to children's work. However, according to some writers, the qualities we imagine we see in children's art are only illusions we project into it because of our understandings about adults' art. Brent Wilson, for example, argues that the 'expressiveness' of children's art is really an adult's construction derived from modernist ideas of self-expression and abstraction (Wilson, 1997). It is true that even displays of emotions and feelings are shaped to a certain extent by culture. Even the experience and expression of pain, for example, may be influenced by cultural beliefs. How adults construe the child's displays of emotion is crucial to development. However, few people would want to argue that the expressiveness we see in children's laughter or tears is only the product of adult imaginings. Similarly, although I strongly support the idea that how adults conceptually construe a child's painting is crucial to development, to say that the expressiveness we see in a child's painting is only a product of our cultural paradigms about art is grossly misleading.

I have opposed the position that children's acquisition of representational systems is a product of an introduction into arbitrary, conventional semiotic systems. Rather, I have argued that expressive and representational modes are impelled from within the infant. Using ideas derived from Colwyn Trevarthen, I have stressed that children's interaction with media is organized by patterned bursts of emotion driven from deep within subcortical structures. The infant's use of visual media is built upon the expressive use of the body in earlier infancy and is a part of the same continuum. The infant quickly learns to detect and exploit the expressive characteristics of his or her body actions and it is upon these expressive actions that the first use of visual media is based.

The theory that children's art is a reflection of adult art sometimes incorporates another false idea; that children only learn to develop imagery by copying adult exemplars. As we have seen, one has to explain why children are attracted to certain stuctures and not to others, and how they incorporate these into their own stuctures. Children simply do not copy what is already there, but bring something new to these exemplars. First of all, the selection by the child of one or other image is the result of those searching schemes; and even within a single image this input is subject to the constraints of the attractor systems which sweep through children's actions performed upon all media. As we have seen, other people's pictures are, in fact, very important to the development of drawing, but the way these special objects interact with children's development is complex. Availability of other people's images does not, in itself, explain development. The child's interaction with a pictorial environment is just part of the cultural flow between the child and ambient culture. The model of development I have described is one in which an unfolding programme generated from within the child interacts with what is available in the environment according to attractor systems which select and structure input. [...]" (Matthews, 1999, p. 156-157)

"It is hard to conceive of a child's encounter with visual media outside of a social context of some kind, and research does indeed show that children's art is influenced by the images they see around them (Wilson, 1985, 1997, 2000, this volume). Nevertheless, it is crucial to grasp that a simple imitation model is insufficient to account for the process of development. The interaction between the social group development and the individual development involves systems we understand very little.

If we were to link these questions with other vexing ones about the differences between the races and cultures to which the children belong, the result would seem to be a complicated puzzle! Will there be a significant difference in the way you learn to use tools depending on whether you are a Chinese child living in Singapore or a young Caucasian living in London, or whether you belong to some other ethnic group from another place? If so, what are these differences? Are these differences of content (or "subject matter"); or are they differences in structure (by this term I mean the combination and permutation of lines, shapes, forms, colors, and actions as entities in themselves), or both? The effects of acculturation in children's art, as revealed by research, demolishes any simplistic "universalistic" model of development (sec Kindler, 1996a, 1996b, 1997, this volume; Kindler et aI., 2000; Wilson, 1985, 1997, 2000, this volume). On the other hand, there is ample evidence to show (contrariwise) that, especially in infancy, some aspects of children's drawing throughout the world are essentially the same, certainly in terms of structure and often in content too. How can both these apparently contradictory data be simultaneollsly true?

There is a striking resemblance between Robert's drawings (both in electronic paint and in pencil) and those of some of his Chinese Singaporean peers, both in terms of shape and in terms of the actions that produced them. If some aspects of development seem universal, and other aspects seem to vary; what is it that develops, and what is it that varies? Does it make sense even to ask this question? That is, can we separate nature and nurture? How do we describe development in such a way as to resolve what appear to be irreconcilable conflicts among different interpretations?" (Matthews, 2004, p. 266)

"As Alan Costall (1993, 1995, 2001) points out, we still require a developmental explanation of children's art. If traditional staged models have proved inadequate, then, so too have accounts which merely invoke "cultural influence" while failing to offer any explanation of the mechanisms through which the child might select from society's images. Clearly, children do change as they get older! One week the infant cannot walk; the next week she can. How has the child achieved this? One day, the child produces a particular type of drawing; the next day, a rather different one. How - and why - does the child move from one mode of representation to another?

New approaches to development begin to address these questions. Early drawing processes described in the observations made earlier involve the children generating complex ideas about representation and expression. These ideas are neither preformed in the brain, nor are they stumbled on or learned after abandoning (perhaps with some coercion from adults) a series of false trails until the "correct" solution is reached. Rather, right from the beginning of life, the infant discerns and exploits the expressive and representational possibilities of her body actions, which are then amplified and extended with various media (Bruner, 1964, 1972). These media may include drawing, painting, and other "art" materials, but they essentially consist of anything she can get her hands on (Kress, 1997), even spilt milk or regurgitated food (Matthews, 1984, 1994, 1999, 2002, forthcoming). This is a self-generated, seamless continuum of expressive and representational modes in which children work out how symbols, signs, and representations encode ideas, thoughts, feelings, objects, and events." (Matthews, 2004, p. 278-279)