What is Transformative Art?

I don't make a regular habit of reading scientific journals but today, after doing a bit of web sleuthing, I came across an incredibly provocative article in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience about the meaning and practice of Transformative Art.  It’s by an Israeli neuroscientist named Son Preminger and I can’t recommend the article highly enough, particularly if you’re open to the possibility of transforming the way you think about artistic experience. (You can find it here.) The article is not overly technical and it is remarkably well written, given the conceptual complexity and difficulty of discussing the meaning and value of art in terms of neuroscience.

What drew me to read Preminger’s article was my experience listening to the Apology Line program tapes made by Allan Bridge from 1983 through 1995.  (If you're not familiar with Allan's work, you can learn more about it here.) I’ve been trying to better understand Allan’s artistic legacy, having spent the last 6 months listening to hundreds of hours of his audio recordings, in preparation for our work on the upcoming ApologyLine podcast.  It’s more than 40 years since Allan first set up his answering machine, and more than 25 years since his death, when the Apology Line fell silent, and yet the Apology recordings have lost none of their power or fascination and, if anything, they have only grown richer in meaning over the intervening years.  How many works of art can claim that sort of enduring power?

It struck me that one key to Allan’s artistic triumph is that the Apology Line exercises a transformational power on its audience.  That, quite literally, was Allan’s stated intention in undertaking the project – to help callers to the Line turn over a new leaf.  How that worked in practice is a fascinating subject, which we will explore in detail in our podcast.  But as a general matter, how does Art come to possess such a transformational power?  Is there, in fact, such a thing as Transformational Art?  Not that I had ever heard the term used before, but I felt certain this concept must have been previously explored, either in the realm of art criticism or aesthetic theory.  Thanks to a little bit of Google searching, that’s how I came across Preminger’s article in a neuroscience journal.

This brief blogpost is not the place for me to summarize the full range of Preminger’s thoughts on the subject. Besides, as I said above, her article is really worth reading for yourself.  Instead, what I simply want to do here is highlight a few ways in which the Apology project can be perhaps best understood as an exemplary work of Transformational Art.

·      Art as an engineered experience.  Preminger as a neuroscientist has a somewhat unique way of describing and thinking about an artist’s work.  In her words, “artists can be viewed as experts in controlling and manipulating humans' perceptions as well as the emotional and cognitive experience that they induce.”  This seems true of painters, writers and moviemakers alike.  And it seems particularly apt when it comes to a conceptual artist such as Allan Bridge, who very deliberately crafted the Apology Line as a means to foster anonymous confessions that would lead to personal insight and growth, both for the callers and listeners to the Line.

·      Art May be Deliberately Constructed to Promote Transformational Experience.  Once we recognize that a work of art is specifically designed in order to control and manipulate human perceptions as well as the emotional and cognitive experiences that accompany them, it follows that certain artistic experiences may be created with express intention of fostering human transformation.  Or as the neuroscientist Preminger more precisely puts it: “Given that brain and cognition have the capacity to be molded by artistic experiences, art can be created in a way that takes this knowledge into account and utilizes it to generate transformative experiences with particular artistic or rehabilitational goals in mind.”  This describes the workings of the Apology Line quite precisely.  The original inspiration for creating Apology stemmed from Allan’s earlier experience building a sculptural machine called Crime Time which directly served a rehabilitational purpose for Allan himself, as it proved instrumental in helping him stop shoplifting.  From the outset, he conceived of the Apology Line as a way to serve a similar purpose for a more general audience of callers and listeners.

  

·      Transformational Art may be most effective when designed as a repeatable experience.  Preminger notes that the viewer’s experience of art is most typically part of a singular encounter rather than repeated. Of course, if there’s a painting you particularly love or a favorite movie, you may go back to see it many times.  But when the artist or moviemaker creates the work in the first instance, they will usually craft it to be self-sufficient on a single viewing.  Preminger, on the other hand, suggests that one of the hallmarks of Transformational Art is that it is deliberately designed to be repeated in order to achieve its desired transformational effect.  In her words, it is “art could be viewed as a medium that by instigating repeated experiences may induce long-term changes and serve as means for modification, improvement, and rehabilitation of various cognitive functions.”    One of the truly remarkable aspects of the Apology Line is how it exercised a continuing hold on both callers and listeners, many of whom were repeat callers and actively participated in the Apology community for most if not all of its 15-year duration.

 One more point I want to make about how Apology fits so aptly within the category of Transformative Art.  This isn’t something derived from Preminger’s article but something I realized myself as I have continued to contemplate the nature of Allan’s work.  When he first set out to create the Apology Line, Allan approached it very much in the framework of the traditional art world.  He collected recordings on his answering machine and then played them back in a series of gallery and museum exhibits.  This was avant garde conceptual art but nonetheless it was work that he managed to present through the art world’s established gatekeepers. But gradually, by producing his program tapes and playing them back over his answering machine, Allan weaned himself away from the art world and found a way to reach his audience directly.  As a result, Allan’s connection to the established art world became tenuous and the Apology Line’s classification as a work of art became increasingly problematic. Was it art, online therapy or a sociology experiment? -- even today it’s not easy to say.  And that is one more bit of evidence of the Apology Line’s transformative power – it was a transformative work of art that managed to transform itself along the way, breaking outside our conventional categories and providing us with an utterly singular transformative experience.

We hope to share this transformative experience with a new audience of listeners when our podcast launches later this year.  Click here to join our mailing list.

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My cousin Susan emailed me after reading this blogpost and pointed out that I failed to mention musicians in the discussion above, specifically in the paragraph where I discuss how writers, painters and moviemakers all demonstrate the various ways in which artists become adept in controlling and manipulating human perception, emotion and cognitive experience.  Of course, Susan is absolutely right; this is an obvious omission, inasmuch as music is paradigmatic of how effective art can be in shaping all three -- perception, emotion and cognition.  If I recollect correctly, Preminger specifically notes that music's transformative potential is significantly enhanced since we are much more likely to listen again and again to a favorite song or sonata compared to how often we are inclined to reread a favorite novel.

It's also worth noting that Susan's deep appreciation for music's transformative power is very much shaped by her practice as a music therapist.  All art therapists (whether musicians, painters, actors, etc.) are on the front lines in creating and performing transformational art, inasmuch as their art practice is done with a very clear and specific rehabilitational purpose in mind. 

There is this difference, though, between Allan's work on the Apology Line and the work of an art or music therapist.  In a hospital, school or rehab setting, an art therapist directs his or her practice towards the benefit of a specific student or patient population.  Allan's art practice was much more of a free form operation, in which he served as a general and wandering practitioner of transformative art.  His efforts were directed towards anyone who took the time and trouble to drop a dime and call the Line.  And in some respects, the transformative effects of Allan's work extended equally well to those who left messages as well as those who just listened to the program tapes, as I hope you'll have a chance to hear for yourself once the Apology podcast goes on air.