Ways of Seeing: Bigger and Closer
By Nigel Paine
The retrospective exhibition of David Hockney’s work at the LightRoom in Kings Cross is a fascinating exploration of the painter's obsession with looking and understanding. The exhibition, entitled "Bigger and Closer not Smaller and Further Away," is a radical departure from the traditional format of an art exhibition. Rather than displaying Hockney's works on the walls, the walls are the exhibition!
Hockney projects a narrative of his work on four, neutral blank walls, accompanied by commentary taken from interviews with him over the last 40 years. The exhibition is the inaugural event at the LightRoom media space that is perfectly suited to huge immersive experiences.
Hockney has always believed that looking is a key to understanding; and he laments the fact that most of us do not look closely at anything, as the world flashes by us at breakneck speed. This means we do not see, so we continue to use old assumptions and, therefore, we do not learn.
There is a similar hypothesis in Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking Fast and Slow”. He shows that we have to actively engage our slow brain to master new and complex ideas and stop our fast brain taking over and jumping in and offering-up easy, glib but often incorrect assumptions and solutions.
I loved this exhibition. It is breathtaking in its scope and ambition and is so insightful and revealing, not just about the painter, but about our place in the world. I could not help gathering a number of striking insights that I want to share with my L&D colleagues:
The learning power of new and different spaces. Look at the same familiar things from a different perspective, and we are presented with astonishing new perceptions and connections. Part of our role, at least, is not to reassure and simplify, but to complexify and discomfort. At that point new perspectives emerge, and we can assist individuals to change their behavior in response. Forcing change on people who cannot see the need to change is always traumatic. Helping people change who have understood the imperative, and now look at their role and their organization in a different light, is much easier and has more lasting consequences. It is deep learning.
You do not need 50-foot walls to make interesting, immersive or challenging spaces, but so few try anything different in their presentation or paradigm of learning and are greeted by indifference or luke-warm appreciation as a result.
There is a desperate need for more fieldwork in our world. Hockney literally stood in fields to watch and understand, and we need to get out into our environment and observe our business landscape in all four seasons of business life. We need to enter the workflow and ask smart questions about what is going on, and what prevents people from doing their best work. And we need to listen to the answers very carefully in order to understand what is going on in the organization. Taking orders and accepting received truths is neither seeing nor understanding. David Hockney does not send people out into the world and explain what they see on his behalf. He gets on, and he gets dirty!
Get people out of the familiar and into new spaces. That is often a prerequisite for understanding and exploration. And this is where reflection works best and where conversations can be illuminating and transformational.
The need to get close to what is going on, not further away to build perspective. This is messy and inconclusive, nothing is neat from close-up, but the immersion is instructive and can lift insight to new levels and give you a more realistic assessment of what you have to achieve.
The power of framing. Hockney's paintings often use frames within frames to create a sense of depth and perspective. In one sense it is the frame and its imposed structure that delivers meaning and context. L&D professionals can use their unique learning frame on business issues to create a new sense of context and opportunity.
The importance of gathering stories. Hockney’s raw and spontaneous accounts of his own work and his processes of working and why he chose particular media such as his obsession with polaroid pictures at one time; construction scenes with thousands of Polaroid pictures to give a vast number of perspectives within one overall frame, and his new wonder at the creative power of iPads for drawing, often combining 16 screens to create giant landscapes, and recording the actual brushstrokes he used to build up the image. Therefore, you have a static picture and a dynamic creative act at the same time.
Rather than speak for people; and thereby neaten and simplify their story, I would encourage you to let them speak. What is lost in edited narrative is made much more real because the voices are authentic. Reflect what is really going on, rather than build a fictional account that looks better but is relatively empty and hollow.
There are so many challenges to make L&D fit for purpose in our current destabilized and uncertain climate, that it is essential to confront the reality of working life and recognize the genuine problems and challenges in order to do something about solving them. This is hugely preferable to solving fictional problems by coming up with simplified and ineffective solutions.