Brain Stretching: Art and Big History
Paula Metallo · 2011
‘The particular combination of art and geology is nothing new. It was customary for geological surveying teams to include at least one artist. One great example is the artist, geologist and writer, Clarence Edward Dutton. His accomplishments remind us that we have fallen into an age of specialization. In order to deal with a universe expanding at an incredible rate we have a tendency to rely more and more on specialists with narrow shafts of knowledge and skills. And while specialists are necessary, the tendency to depend on them to the exclusion of all is dangerous. Somebody must integrate and synthesize what we know about ourselves and the world in order to prevent social, cultural, and even personal fragmentation’. Richard Shelton wrote this as the introduction to the book Art and Geology (1986). It clearly describes, already twenty-five years ago, the objectives of this article to express in what ways Art can be a means of describing pattern and encourage openness to stretching the brain to comprehend inter-connectivity, and how Big History has the tools in hand to help implement a whole picture, interdisciplinary approach to learning. Art, as well as ideas about art, can be shaped by new places – just as people can be shaped by such experiences. Relating to and exploring other ways of seeing things ultimately lead to the addition of a new weft in the fabric of our human existence. Educator Micheal Schneider describes the progression in A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: Today we are emerging from the grip of literalism, mere quantitative measurement, and analysis. Where we saw ‘things’, nouns and objects instead of ‘processes’. The Hopi language retains this vision, having no nouns. (I am not wearing a shirt, I am ‘shirting’). Likewise our word ‘cosmos’ refers to ‘outer space’. But the word derives from the Greek Kosmos (signifying ‘embroidery’), which implies not a universe like a huge room filled with disconnected noun-things but the harmony of woven patterns with which the universe is embroidered and moves (Schneider 1995: xxiv–xxv). To me, the most fascinating aspect of modern culture and Big History is the awareness of interconnectedness, the weaving of everything together on our planet and beyond, providing a new place to contemplate.