Article

Arts & Humanities in Higher Education

12(2–3) 284–298
Imitation, interaction ! The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1474022212473526

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with music
Erkki Huovinen and Avigail Manneberg
University of Minnesota, USA

Abstract
This article describes a project in which undergraduate students of beginning drawing
were brought together with free improvising musicians to explore interaction in
collective real-time art-making. Following a series of guided rehearsals, the students
were free to choose their own strategies for interactive group projects. We discuss
these strategies based on video documentation as well as the students’ written reports
and discussion comments. Overall, the students gradually shifted the emphasis of their
work from temporally differentiated, imitative parallelisms between drawing and music
toward more conversational and socially oriented strategies as well as more global
strategies of representation employing common mental images. These findings are
discussed with a view to future pedagogical work incorporating music with visual art,
arguing that interactive contexts not only provide understanding of the temporal, pro-
cessual, and social potential of visual art, but also hold a key to the students’ exploration
of their own budding artistic autonomy.

Keywords
imitation, improvisation, interaction, music, visual art

Introduction: Interart analogies and gestures

In contemporary culture, visual images are typically embedded in contexts invol-
ving other media, especially sound and language. One consequence of this is that
traditional visual arts education is increasingly difficult to uphold as a self-con-
tained enterprise, detached from the constantly shifting ways in which contacts
between various media are forged around us. Paul Duncum (2004) summarizes

Corresponding author:
Erkki Huovinen, Kaarikatu 7, FI-20760 Piispanristi, Finland.
Email: huovinen@umn.edu
Huovinen and Manneberg 285

this by stating that art education, to be relevant to contemporary social practice,

needs to become multimodal by embracing interaction between communicative
modes. In Duncum’s perspective, multimodal art pedagogy should focus on
approaches such as media education and multiliteracy education which basically
emphasize students’ interpretational skills in the face of multimodal art products.
To complement such a reception-oriented approach, multimodality may also be
explored in more hands-on terms by bringing processes of art-making in various art
forms into contact with one another. The gradual overall shift – perhaps even a
‘paradigm shift’ (Kester, 2011: 10) – in contemporary art production toward col-
laborative practices should further urge us to study the connections between dif-
ferent art forms as they are forged in real-time artistic interaction.
In our work with college-level visual art and music students, we have applied
interartistic, collaborative activities because of their suitability for acquiring impro-
visational experience. The importance of improvisation for collaborative success in
general is well understood (Sawyer, 2007), as is the fact that successful collabor-
ations typically involve complementarity between non-homogeneous individuals
(Moran and John-Steiner, 2004). Interartistic collaboration by definition takes
place between individuals with different skill sets, and such differences between
participants tend to generate unexpected situations calling for improvisational
solutions. Apart from providing a pathway to exploring the multimodal practices
of the contemporary art world, interartistic work provides a model situation in
which to practice exchanging ideas in improvisational collaboration.
Historically, connections between various art forms have often taken the form
of structural analogies. In the Baroque period, for instance, painting was often
compared to musical harmony by theorists in both fields to clarify notions of
proportion and color (Spitzer, 2004: 137–206). In the historiography of the arts,
interart analogies have traditionally focused on structural parallels in such large-
scale aspects as symmetry or balance of overall design (Stechow, 1953; Thomas,
1991). Artists themselves have likewise looked to other art forms for inspiration
and influence as is clear, say, from the well-documented musical influences in
twentieth-century modernist painting (Maur, 1999; Vergo, 2010). A typical artist
to be mentioned in these contexts would be someone like Paul Klee (1879–1940),
who was fascinated by applying procedures akin to musical structuring and was
often very explicit about the specific musical influences on his paintings (Düchting,
1997). Not surprisingly, Klee’s work has inspired empirical studies showing how
individuals are largely capable of matching his paintings to the musical works that
influenced them (Peretti, 1972; Wehner, 1966). In recent decades, the new audio-
visual media have furthered the ‘musicalization of the visual arts’ (Naumann,
2011), possibly sensitizing the public to a wider range of possible relationships
between the two media. Throughout these developments, a recurrent interest has
remained in direct analogies – in the sonification of images and the visualization of
sounds (Schneider, 2011).
In the present article, we will not be concerned with correlations between fin-
ished (and canonized) products of visual art and music, but rather with the
286 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 12(2–3)

processes of poietic interaction observed at the intersection of these two art forms.
Notice, however, that taking a processual view to multimodal artistic interaction
does not preclude discussion of how the two media are coordinated in terms of
structural features. Such coordination could even find a relatively stable basis in
such visual gestalt properties that appear to have uncontested analogies in musical
sound. To invoke an influential work of music theory drawing on this idea, Lerdahl
and Jackendoff (1983: 39–46) state that, other things being equal, musical notes will
be grouped together in auditory perception by their relative similarity in pitch and
proximity in time – quite like visual figures are grouped by the similarity of their
forms and their spatial proximity. Such perceptual analogies could suggest possi-
bilities for shared understanding and coordination of artistic gestures between
visual art and music.
At the same time it should be clear that, even if musical and visual formations
may internally share comparable perceptual organizations in some of their par-
ameters, this does not determine the spontaneous cross-modal associations made
between the art forms. As demonstrated by the research on intuitive graphical
representations of musical sounds, there is room for creativity in understanding
the relationships between musical and visual gestures (see e.g. Walker, 1978).
Research on children’s graphical notations of music also shows that such
notations are not always differentiated in terms of capturing one or more musical
parameters in their temporal unfolding. Even more often, children use
global notations that represent the music in a holistic way. For instance, their
‘notation’ of heard music might consist in something like a human figure or a
picture of a musical instrument that would not contain a representation of
music’s temporal progression (Reybrouck et al., 2009; Verschaffel et al., 2009).
This demonstrates that abstractly representing the unfolding of the musical
sounds is only one way of conceptualizing the relationship between visual
forms and music, and one that perhaps unduly emphasizes not only parametric
differentiation, but any kind of ‘representational competency’ (Sherin, 2000) as a
preferred goal.
Furthermore, it is an empirical question to what extent any imitative parallels
between media are spontaneously summoned for achieving interartistic communi-
cation in situations of collective art-making. On the one hand, live interaction
between art-makers representing different art forms might especially easily come
to rely on gestures that through their gestalt properties become shareable across
artistic media or, perhaps, on some more global parallelisms between the media
(e.g. harmonizing the overall ‘mood’). One reason for pursuing such imitative
relationships might be promoting social cohesion among the participants. On the
other hand, it is also conceivable that interactive art-making situations might better
support polyphonic, conversational, or oppositional modes of artistic production,
providing outlets for individualistic expressivity. Consequently, the role of imita-
tion in interactive multimodal art-making suggests itself as a diagnostic tool for
understanding participants’ tendencies toward social cohesion and individual
autonomy.
Huovinen and Manneberg 287

In the following, we will discuss a pedagogical project in which undergraduate

students of beginning drawing at the Department of Art of a large Midwestern US
research university were brought together with a group of classically trained musi-
cians, enrolled on a course in free improvisation at the School of Music of the same
university. The goal of this exploratory project was to study the adult drawers’
strategies of relating their work to another artistic medium by engaging them in a
series of exercises in collective improvisation with the musicians. In particular, we
were interested in the emergence and role of imitative strategies in the interaction:
to what extent would the interplay be organized by relying on differentiated as
opposed to global relationships between the two artistic media, and how might
such strategies be transformed with increasing experience of cross-artistic impro-
visation? Instead of simply describing the strategies deployed, our goal was to
assess the personal, social, and artistic significance attached to such strategies by
the participants themselves.

Method
The study consisted of five weekly two-hour sessions on consecutive weeks.
The first three weeks were devoted to guided rehearsals, followed by the students’
self-designed group projects during the last two weeks. Our main interest was in the
directions that the group projects would take. It was deemed necessary to precede
these projects with guided rehearsal sessions which would launch the students’
thought processes on collaborative art-making, challenge their most immediate
solutions, and reduce some of the stress that would otherwise potentially affect
the group projects. The goal for the first week’s rehearsal was simply to introduce
the students to working together. The next two rehearsals’ instructions
were decided on only after each previous rehearsal, with the purpose of breaking
the most obvious patterns observed in the students’ interactions. Throughout the
rehearsals, both of the instructors in class (i.e. the authors of this article) refrained
from giving the students any evaluative guidelines or feedback concerning the
exercises.
The participants were 22 undergraduate students taking a course in beginning
drawing (17 females, 5 males), with a mean age of 21.4 years (SD ¼ 7.9), and 10
musicians taking a course on musical free improvisation (2 females, 7 males, 1
genderqueer), with a mean age of 25.6 years (SD ¼ 5.5). Six of the musicians
were graduate students and two of them undergraduate students in classical
music performance. The drawers reported having an average of 7.8 years of
experience in making visual art (SD ¼ 8.5) and 5.6 years of active musical training
(SD ¼ 4.4), while the musicians, on average, had 1.4 years of experience in visual
art (SD ¼ 2.5) and 15.0 years in musical training (SD ¼ 5.9). Half of the drawers
and all musicians with one exception reported having no prior experience in impro-
visatory ways of making visual art (croquis drawing, action painting, etc.). Three of
the musicians and twelve of the drawers reported having no previous experience of
musical improvisation (prior to their present course).
288 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 12(2–3)

Rehearsal sessions
Week 1: Introduction. The first week’s exercise was intended to introduce the
drawers to the idea of collaborative drawing with musical input, and to establish
a baseline against which the subsequent weeks’ activities could be planned and
assessed. The drawers sat in pairs, on opposite sides of small desks, arranged
around a group of musicians who would improvise ten pieces of music during
the session. The drawers were asked to ‘engage in collaborative art-making with
the musicians, responding to the musical sounds and to your partner’s gestures,
thus creating one collaborative drawing for each of the musical performances’. We
will here summarize just two salient overall features of the resulting drawings. First,
nearly all of the drawings were abstract rather than figurative. It appeared that the
drawers tended to interpret the task as calling for visual forms imitating the
abstract musical sounds. Second, in an overwhelming majority of cases, the draw-
ing partners kept their drawings separate on two ends of the paper without intrud-
ing on each other’s space, and thus without much contribution to the drawing
process of their collaborator. Such relative lack of interplay among the drawers
reaffirmed that the main focus in the subsequent rehearsals was to be on promoting
collaborative interplay.
Week 2: Group collaboration. Accordingly, the second rehearsal was designed to
make the drawers more sensitive to others’ work as well as to gradually move
toward a more bidirectional influence between the drawers and the musicians.
To this end, the drawers were asked to work in groups on one larger (12 ft" 4 ft;
3.6 m " 1.2 m) paper attached visibly on a wall. The seven musicians present in the
session formed changing ensembles of four to five players at a time, improvising
eight approximately 5-minute pieces of music during the session. Meanwhile, 20
drawers worked in two separate and alternating groups of ten students, creating
one large drawing on the wall for each of the musical improvisations. The drawers
were advised to ‘make quick, collaborative drawings on a large paper, engaging in
interaction with other drawers as well as a group of improvising musicians’, while
the musicians were told to ‘relate the music to what the drawers are doing’. After
each piece, all of the participants described the drawings on response forms.
The drawers’ initial reaction to working as a group was described by the
spectators (i.e. the participants not working on the particular piece) as a com-
bination of individual drawing styles, random shapes, generalized abstractions
and related physical gestures linked to the musical rhythms. Generally, the
drawers’ action was now more physical than in the previous week’s exercise,
and it was noted by the spectators that the drawers’ bodily movements tended
to reflect the musical sounds. Clearly, however, sharing a common space was
more difficult for some of the participants than we had anticipated: words like
‘frustration’ and ‘confusion’ recurred in their written descriptions of the process.
It appeared that the drawers as well as the musicians were afraid to intrude on
one another’s private spaces, and therefore remained somewhat confined within
their own spheres of action. A commonly expressed idea was that the drawers
Huovinen and Manneberg 289

were looking for common ground in visual expression to receive reassurance for
their drawing action.
The open-ended setting led the participants to spontaneously ponder the ques-
tion concerning roles in creative group work, and in particular who should ‘lead’
and who should ‘follow’. In a concluding discussion, many of the participants
expressed their confusion about this aspect. One of the drawers noted her
change of roles during the session: having started out by reacting to the music
and the other drawers’ gestures, she gradually learned to concentrate more on
expressing her own ideas and working on creating an image. Another drawer
was interested in ‘leading’ but simultaneously felt he should be ‘following’ because
of his feeling of responsibility toward his group. Still another drawer mentioned
that whereas she had primarily tried to connect with the musicians by following
them, she had more of a ‘give-and-take relationship with the drawers’. In general, it
appeared that the drawers assumed a following role with respect to the music, while
their influence on the musicians was limited to confirming the existing character of
the music (as in the musician comment: ‘The music reminded about the sea, and
then I saw one girl drawing the same, and . . . I just continued to play in that
image’). As noted by one of the musicians, the drawers appeared to be divided
into two groups according to whether they generated ‘ideas’ (concrete images) or
produced ‘reactions’ (gestural imitations of the music).
Week 3: Conducting game. The ‘following’ role that our drawers mostly assumed
with respect to the music in the group collaboration exercise reflects a typical
direction of influence in interartistic collaborations in which music more often
than not is previously fixed and thus cannot be influenced in the live situation.
In the third week’s session, we wanted to challenge this assumption by using a game
in which the drawers, with their musical gestures, would be ‘conducting’ the musi-
cians. Each round in the game was played by a group of 4–5 musicians and 8–10
drawers while a similar group of participants was left as spectators. Each drawer
participated in every other round, and the musicians were rotated quasi-randomly
to achieve constantly varying instrumental combinations. The active drawers were
arranged in pairs and they were given one musician that they should primarily
conduct. The two drawers in each pair, using charcoal and/or white crayon, took
turns at the large (12 ft" 4 ft; 3.6 m " 1.2 m) brown paper on the wall, as a part of a
larger group of drawers working on the same paper, all with the common task of
‘conduct[ing]’ their particular musician ‘with [their] drawing gestures’. It was
explained to the participants that the musicians would now be following the
drawers, and that the latter might thus ‘focus on trying to make the music inter-
esting’. Each drawer was asked to conduct ‘until you feel that you have made some
kind of statement and it’s time for your partner to carry on with the task’. Then,
the drawer would simply step aside, letting her or his partner continue conducting.
After each piece, all of the students described in writing what they found most
relevant or unique about the interactions in the piece.
The greater part of the responses described the conductor–musician interactions
by noting similarities between the drawers’ gestures and the resulting musical ones.
290 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 12(2–3)

Indeed, the participants seemed to interpret the notion of ‘conducting’ largely in

terms of gestural imitation. Five of the spectators mentioned seeing ‘circles’,
‘swoops’, ‘curvy lines’, or ‘wavy lines’ correspond to ‘circular’ or ‘fluent’ music,
‘trills’, or similar physical movements such as a drummer’s hand movement on the
skin of a bongo drum. Five spectators noted how ‘long’ or ‘short’ gestures corres-
ponded to one another in drawing and music, and four found similarities between
the ‘smoothness’, ‘softness’, or ‘angularity’ of visual and acoustic gestures. Given
that drawing a particular kind of visual shape often requires a similar bodily move-
ment by the drawer, many of the comments were equivocal between referring to the
drawers’ bodily movements or the resulting marks on the paper.
Another structural aspect that was mentioned by several participants was the
spatial height of the visual marks on the paper. In six out of nine cases, this was
correlated with height in musical pitch, thus following the usual western metaphor-
ical mapping of musical pitch. The descriptions also referred to purely temporal
aspects of the drawers’ movement, with even less reference to the resulting picture
than in the above examples. Not surprisingly, fast and slow drawing movements
were most often correlated with the speed or tempo of the music. Of the 13 remarks
mentioning some connection between drawing speed and how fast the music was,
11 were made by the spectators, however, which suggests that such superficial
similarities in the physical movement were less often applied as a conscious focus
of the collaboration by the active participants, being more often something that
just emerged as an easily perceptible connection to an outside observer.
Despite such common strategies, the descriptions concerning a given interaction
between the conductors and a musician were far from uniform. For example, five
different spectators correctly matched a trumpet player with her two conductors,
but their descriptions concerning the precise analogies between the performers’
gestures differed quite markedly from one another. Two of the spectators explained
the collaboration using the metaphorical connection between spatial height and
pitch height, whereas three of them mentioned speed or tempo as one kind of
connection between the conductors and the musician, as well as some other simi-
larity (‘long strokes’ ! ‘long, deeper tones’; ‘circular shapes’ ! ‘circular’ sounding
music; differences in ‘pressure’ and ‘intensity’ ! differences in ‘quality of sound’).
Only the last mentioned observation roughly corresponded to the trumpet player’s
own explanation, according to which she had matched lighter strokes of charcoal
or crayon with softer sounds. While the trumpeter herself also mentioned matching
a ‘smiley’ figure with music in a major key (conventionally considered to express
‘happiness’), such representationally based connections were not mentioned by any
of the drawers in this whole session.

Group projects
Week 4: Independent video projects. Having exposed the participants to three dis-
tinct kinds of simple interaction in drawing–music collaboration, we devoted the
fourth week of the project to group exercises in which five smaller groups, each
Huovinen and Manneberg 291

consisting of four or five drawers and one or two musicians, ‘explored improvisa-
tory group interaction’ in their own time, documenting their work on video and in
written reaction papers. The forms of interaction as well as the venues for perform-
ing the projects were left open to be decided by each group. In the following, we
will review what seemed the three most salient general directions taken by these
collaborations.
First, some of the groups did continue exploring the imitative ‘conducting’ style
exercises, but none did so without introducing further guidelines for interaction to
bind the participants’ work more closely together. This can be readily seen as a
corrective to what many of the participants had, in their previous week’s written
responses, experienced as a ‘chaotic’ element in their performances of the conduct-
ing game. In an exercise which the participants of Group 4 agreed had been their
most interesting and difficult one, it was required that two drawers working side by
side would ‘try and make the same gestures, maybe even have one drawer follow
the other’, each side of the picture being in turn followed by one of the two musi-
cians (on clarinet and trombone). More of the drawers’ attention was thus drawn
to their mutual visual coordination and to observing whether the increased visual
coherence would also result in more unified musical textures. Group 5 went still
further in coordinating the drawing–music interaction by requiring each of the
drawers to pick ‘three to four basic shapes and [draw] them while the musicians
picked three to four notes and attached them according to the [visual] shapes’.
Here, the heightened sense of connection between the media seemed to give the
drawers a sense of empowerment, as is evident from the following comment by a
female drawer:

This exploration was interesting because it gave the drawers control. I found that
when I drew a circle, the viola would play a specific note. With the discovery I began
trying to compose a piece of music, while also creating a piece of art. This was inter-
esting because it was hard to tell whether the piece of art or the piece of music was the
main focus. This exercise truly forced the artist[s] and musicians to work together for a
true collaborative piece.

Second, some of the groups dropped the emphasis on temporal coordination,

looking for more global ways to harmonize the overall mood or referential context
of the music with that of the visual art. In Group 2, the introduction of colored
paint was seen as ‘beneficial because musicians could share the same or similar
feelings with each other at better level compared to the sessions without colors’.
The members of Group 3 seemed to agree that their most ‘interesting’ and ‘fasci-
nating’ exercise was one in which a violinist – as he himself put it – ‘would play an
improvisation with a specific image in mind and the drawers draw whatever image
they interpreted [the] improvisation to be’. In this group, everybody was ‘surprised’
to see how close the drawers could come to guessing the musician’s imagery of ‘a
day in the forest’. In such exercises, then, the correspondences between music and
drawing were describable in relatively static terms, using labels for the overall
292 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 12(2–3)

musical style, pictorial mood, or referential image, rather than for episodic actions
or gestures.
Third, some of the groups chose to carry out their exercises in special locations
that often seemed to contribute to the feeling of meaningfulness experienced in
the collaborations. Group 1 (including musicians on the alto saxophone and the
Indonesian metallophone gende´r) performed at a campus mall, attaching the three
drawers’ papers on a cylindrical billboard. The video shows how a local outdoor
evangelist suddenly grabs the student’s saxophone, playing it for several minutes,
and how, to passers-by, the students ‘became one of his acts’, as the gende´r player
later put it. In such conditions, the drawers’ attention seems to have been liberated
from strict control of the drawing–music interaction toward the overall spatial and
social atmosphere. A drawer wrote:

The results were unexpected. The collaboration meshed with flow of people through-
out the mall area and some people even began to stand by and watch. I was very
influenced by the social factor and incorporated many faces into my drawing, while
the other artists collaborated more abstractly. During the collaboration, I felt that
my drawings took on both the tone of the social atmosphere and progression of the
music.

In contrast to ‘structured, consistent and realistic’ indoor work, the outdoor

situation was experienced as ‘raw, emotional and random’, but all of the group
members appeared to value their experience exactly for these qualities.
Week 5: Class performances. For the final week’s session, all of the participants
met together in class again. The previous week’s groups were now given 15 minutes
for negotiating plans for 10-minute music–drawing acts which were then immedi-
ately performed in class. In their subsequent reaction papers, the students generally
seemed to regard these performances as the pinnacle of the course. As one musician
suggested, the participants had now ‘reached a new level of comfort’ in their work.
We will here discuss two of the performances that were often noted as particularly
successful.
One of the groups decided to integrate a male drawer with some theater back-
ground into the musician group. He would contribute by shouting out remarks such
as ‘More!’ and ‘Beautiful!’ After what some spectators called an initial ‘shock’, this
evoked bursts of approbative laughter, and it was later observed that the use of the
human voice made the drawers ‘more responsive to the sound directly’. In this per-
formance, both the drawers and the musicians were also split into smaller groups
with predetermined reactive relations: the ‘first group of drawers controlled the
musicians, the musicians controlled the second group of drawers, the next group
of musicians was controlled by the drawers, and so on’. The resulting ‘interaction
chain’ was evident to the spectators, and their written descriptions often took on a
narrative mode, for instance by explaining the action as a succession of ‘joinings’ and
‘stoppings’. Both the expressive, even disruptive, function of the voice and the tem-
porally progressing interactive plan of the performance thus contributed for a
Huovinen and Manneberg 293

departure from such overall cohesion that had previously characterized the students’
work.
Apart from revealing the social potential of collective improvisation in a manner
that had heretofore remained unnoticed, this performance seemed to sensitize the
spectators to the active role of making choices. In a manner that might at first seem
paradoxical, the stronger social aspect was accompanied by an increased awareness
of the autonomous potential to work against the other art form at will: ‘it was
visible how each drawing was affected by, or not affected by the music’ (our
emphasis). Similar comments highlighting autonomy and contrast – absent in the
previous sessions – generally made their appearance in this final session. Even the
lack of changes in activity was now seen to result from voluntary artistic choice, as
in this musician comment on one of the less eventful performances: ‘It could be that
the drawers had a specific picture in mind when they heard the piece begin, and
were sticking with that idea, and by not reacting to the changes the musicians
made, the drawers were providing contrary material for the overall artistic
experience.’
Another performance that was often specified as ‘successful’, ‘amazing’, or
‘favorite’, was a rerun of the image-guessing game by previous week’s Group 3.
In the performance, two musicians played solo improvisations attempting to depict
specific scenes that the drawers would then try to draw. For instance, a violinist
chose ‘the idea of a racecar on a racetrack that ends up getting in a wreck and taken
to the hospital and dying’, which he imitated in sound with ‘shifting through gears,
screeching tires, and ultimately wrecking, [and] an ambulance followed by taps to
signify death’. The following comment by a female drawer in the audience repre-
sents well the enthusiasm that this elicited in many of the students:

The final performance was by far my favorite performance. I thought that the manner
in which the musicians told a story through their instruments was absolutely amazing.
As I was listening, I got a full image in my head of what the musician was trying to
say, and found it to be even more interesting to see that the other drawers had drawn
the same images that I had imagined in my head. I found this to be the most astound-
ing performance because it proved that the musicians could manipulate how the
drawers drew . . . In addition it proved that the drawers could understand the way
the musicians were thinking, without any exchange of words throughout the process.

What is interesting in such reactions is that especially the visual art students’
enthusiasm was here sparked by a performance in which drawing seemed reduced
to the function of providing labels for the images conveyed through music.
Although two of the more experienced musicians critically noted that ‘the idea
that one could conjure a visual image from a soundscape wasn’t a particularly
new or creative idea’ (female, 30), and that it had ‘very narrow scope’ (male, 28),
similar observations were conspicuously absent from the drawers’ comments. Their
attention seemed to have been surreptitiously drawn from the qualities of the
drawing or the process of interaction to the accuracy of guessing. An explanation
294 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 12(2–3)

might be gleaned from the comments of the senior member of the drawer group:
‘Overall I liked the idea because the drawers could actually draw what they thought
it was instead of just drawing abstract lines that really don’t have a purpose or
certain connection with the drawer.’ The students’ rediscovery of symbolic repre-
sentationality might thus be seen as a reinstatement of order in which the artwork
could be subjected to conceptual control. Similarly, the racing-car violinist himself
noted that the group had enjoyed the performance so much ‘because for almost the
entire five weeks the drawers drew only abstractly and never anything really con-
crete’, and the guessing game had finally allowed them to draw something concrete.
Notice, however, that at no point during the course had we, as instructors, indi-
cated that figurative drawing should be avoided. The performance thus seemed to
reveal the participants’ preconceptions concerning expectations of ‘abstraction’
supposedly imposed on them by the educational context.

Discussion
The presence of music in contexts of visual art-making can challenge students to
view their visual medium from new perspectives. In particular, the mere presence
of a temporal artistic medium helps to draw participants’ attention to the pro-
cessual aspects of their visual work. By marking the progress of time, music
assumes a deictic function (Reybrouck, 2009), pointing to gestural delimitations
within the simultaneously unfolding visual work as well as imbuing the resulting
visual gestures with experienced meaning. Thus, music may affect the students’
subjective grasp of the syntactic and semantic significance of their own visual
gestures. Music may thus increase the experienced meaningfulness of the art-
making situation, whether or not one wants to view the art-making process as
a product in its own right (Pesonen, 2008). In addition, the availability of
these ‘in-time’ processes of meaning-making may also redirect attention to the
‘out-of-time’ characteristics of artistic signification (for the terms, see Reybrouck,
2005). Our students’ rediscovery of symbolic meaning in the last session not only
assigned music a role as a source of broader imagery, but also highlighted the
tension between process and product approaches to art-making. While this ten-
sion is already inherent within any art form in itself, pitting a traditionally
product-oriented art form against a more process-oriented one helps to bring it
into students’ focus.
Throughout this study, we avoided giving our students any normative guidelines
concerning the stylistic features that should be applied in their art-making. Also,
while the use of the term ‘conducting’ in the third week’s exercise may admittedly
have suggested the idea that the musical gestures could somehow be directly similar
to the drawing gestures, this was never given as an aesthetic ideal. Our impression
was that the students were first quite spontaneously drawn to seek security through
direct representational relationships between visual and musical forms, whereas
attempts to create contrasts between the two media could only emerge when a
level of security had been attained.
Huovinen and Manneberg 295

It seems clear that the presence of music as an additional stimulus initially

overwhelmed some of our student drawers. In demanding the drawers’ attention,
music perhaps didn’t suggest to them anything beyond its own (quite natural)
abstractness. Resorting to structural parallelisms might thus be seen as a symptom
of the will to understand an externally imposed abstract stimulus by establishing a
regulatory rule between the two media. The experienced success of the final ses-
sion’s guessing game – in which the drawers simply guessed the extramusical
images that the musicians tried to convey – may have been due to the fact that
the game at once gave the drawers the permission to discard their previous, rela-
tively more academic, attempts to understand music, in favor of more global
representationality. Given that even small children typically possess some strategies
for hearing music as meaningful through extramusical images (e.g. different pitch
registers heard in terms of different sizes of animals), this outcome indicates that
our adult drawers had initially simply suppressed such global strategies of repre-
sentation because of assumed expectations.
A pedagogical implication is that cross-artistic work might be usefully begun
from common mental images. Taking such images as the starting point for
explorations of interart relationships has the potential to imbue the art-making
with direct experiential meaning, allowing inexperienced drawers quick access to
working within and across artistic media. Indeed, even artistically oriented adults
may have to be told that they are allowed to draw on their real-life experiences in
relating their work to other art forms. If the goal is not just to understand music
by drawing figures structurally parallel to it but rather to open up the relation-
ship between the two media for constantly shifting explorations, the students may
have to be told that they don’t need to apply an intellectual understanding to the
musical sounds in order to relate to them artistically. This was well demonstrated
by the excursion of one of our participant groups to a nearby mall. There, the
‘raw, emotional and random’ atmosphere appears to have taken the participants
closer to another kind of solution to the music–drawing equation, beyond the
meticulous harmonizing of the structural relationships between the media: con-
sciously attentive co-presence in a space that imbues the art-making with mean-
ingfulness and integrates the artistic work to the overall meaningful fabric of the
outside world.
However, one could also adopt a more positive view toward the use of imi-
tative strategies. Recent philosophical, anthropological, literary, and cognitive
theory has revived the notion of imitation, seeing the human being’s pervasive
tendency to imitate as a key to the essentially relational nature of being human
(see e.g. Currie and Ravenscroft, 2002; Garrels, 2011). Psychologists, for instance,
have shown that behavioral mimicry increases liking between interactional part-
ners (Chartrand and Bargh, 1999) and that having a goal to affiliate with others
increases unconscious mimicry (Lakin and Chartrand, 2003). If imitation is
accordingly seen as the fundamental ‘social glue’ (Dijksterhuis, 2005) facilitating
human interaction, our participants’ cross-artistic imitations might be taken as
attempts to forge group cohesion in the most characteristic manner in which such
296 Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 12(2–3)

cohesion can be achieved. Indeed, the outbreak of more individualistic strategies

of art-making in our last session only seemed possible for our students when it
could happen in an already established social context – against an understanding
of imitative cohesion between the participants.
The spontaneous emergence of imitative relationships between the artistic media
has further significance in the context of the long tradition of imitation pedagogies.
As practiced since classical rhetoric, and found today for example in classes of
literary composition, imitation pedagogies take their starting point in analyzing
and imitating canonized models identified by the teacher (Vandenberg, 2011). The
ideal of mastering the achievements of the past is also embedded in René Girard’s
(2008) mimetic theory of innovation – a remarkable attempt to salvage the notion
of imitation from being opposed to innovation. However, if Girard is right in his
startling claim that ‘the only shortcut to innovation is imitation’ (2008: 239), this
might not only be seen as a call to redeem the classical notion of imitation that did
not question its models; as Girard himself notes, our present forms of mimesis
easily take on a ‘parodic and derisive mode that is a far cry from the patient, pious,
and single-minded imitation of the past’ (2008: 245). What our study suggests,
however, is the possibility that contemporary adults are capable of spontaneously
immersing themselves in respectful, non-derisive mimesis occurring in contexts of
‘innovation’. The question raised is whether a mimetic conception of innovation
could also prove viable in imitative contexts that lack a centrally imposed top-
down element of traditional models.
Both the visual arts and music students participating in our study seemed to be
equally challenged by having to initially sacrifice their artistic autonomy to a social
process. Our experiences nevertheless indicate that students may quickly learn to
value the ‘connective motivation’ (Moran and John-Steiner, 2004) provided by
collaborative practices, quite independently of the judged quality of the artistic
products. If we allow that interpersonal communication might itself be understood
as art (Baxter et al., 2012), it is conceivable that such communication could provide
a robust starting point for multimodal art education in the contemporary world.

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Author biographies
Erkki Huovinen, currently visiting professor at the University of Minnesota, School
of Music, holds a PhD in musicology and a Master’s degree in Philosophy from the
University of Turku, Finland. His research interests span the fields of aesthetics,
psychology of music, and creativity in the arts, with a recent emphasis on philo-
sophical questions concerning artistic creativity and empirical research on music
reading. Huovinen is also a free-improvising multi-instrumentalist musician.

Avigail Manneberg is a Minneapolis-based artist and educator who grew up in

Israel, where she received her B. Design from the Bezalel Art Academy in
Jerusalem. In addition to her MFA from the University of Minnesota, Avigail
lived in Berlin in 2009 with a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)
Fellowship where she worked at the University of the Arts (UdK) in ceramics
and video art. She has exhibited all over the United States and internationally,
including in Finland, Berlin, Cyprus, Beijing, and Israel. She works in varied
media, such as drawing, painting, video, sound and fabric art.