The arts and the creation of mind

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Notes

The book reviewed here is Elliot W. Eisner, The Arts and the Creation of Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), xiv + 258 pp., US$35.00 (hbk), ISBN 0‐300‐09525‐6.

James Haywood Rolling, Jr., is a visual arts teacher at The School at Columbia University, 556 West 110th St., New York, NY 10025, USA; e‐mail: [email protected], and an adjunct faculty member at New York University and Teachers College, Columbia University. His research involves interrogations of the certainties and norms of modernity, examining the archaeologies underlying the (re)constitution of individual and social identities as they are ensconced in Western visual culture.

1. ‘Language helps the child to interpret his experience for others. It is no doubt the case that the language is given sense by the experience, but the process is not all one way. The experience if given sense for the child by the language he uses to communicate it to others’ (Radford 1992: 54; as cited in Wolcott and Gough‐Dijulio 1997: 147).

2. To interpret is to rename and repackage content for redistribution. Interpretation is preceded by criticality, a sifting for the substance beneath the surface. Interpretation has nothing to do with the intention of the author of the text, since by definition a text has no author or originator (see Barthes 1977) but rather an archaeology—layers of sedimentary meaning embedded within other meanings with nary a trace of all those many who may have trafficked and occupied its domain.