In one way or another, we all bring some kind of order to the mass of information floating around in our heads. We use histories or narratives to understand our lives. In particular, we try to make sense of the past – that of our own personal life and also that of the culture in which we live. The two are not separate because who we think we are is largely conditioned by the culture in which we find ourselves. It isn’t easy to decide how much derives from our own inherent character (from ‘nature’) and how much is inherited from our conditioning, through the influence of family, friends, social groups, cultural norms, traditions and so on (from ‘nurture’).

As individuals we adopt ‘world-views’. A world-view is the larger point of view we have, and from which we interpret the world. It is a collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by us and the groups to which we belong. World-views are usually limited to readily identifiable historical, geographical, ethnic and other groupings. However, we need to think about the world-view you will bring from your country of origin and how it relates to the ones you will inevitably encounter in your new cultural context.

The pressure on the individual to conform to a world-view is called ‘socialisation’ or ‘social conditioning’. The collective name for such influences is ‘ideology’. Another word with a similar meaning to ideology is ‘mythology’ – not in the sense used when we talk about the Greek or Indian ‘myths’ or the old stories about the gods, goddesses, heroes and heroines, but rather in the sense of stories that are not true. ‘Myths’ are made-up stories that are used to control thought, and they are manufactured to maintain the status quo or to keep order in society.

It is very hard to break free of the ideology or myth into which we are born. When you study as a student in the West, you will bring in your suitcase not only material things but also a set of inherited world-views, ideologies and myths. When you live and study in the West, you will inevitably meet world-views that are different from your own, that are even in conflict with your own and that will make you question the value and truth not only of what you are learning but also the value and truth of what you already know and believe. At this point you can make one of two choices: you can close yourself to the alternatives and refuse to change your world-view, or you can open yourself up to this encounter with a different world-view and profit from the broadening and strengthening of your mind that will be the result.

We are thinking here about the study of art, media and design, but in fact we could be thinking about any body of knowledge inherited from the past. What’s important is to recognise that how we see the world now is very much to do with how we see the past, and this in its turn determines how we imagine the future will be. In a sense, all history is contemporary history. One simple example from English history will show you what this means. The Battle of Agincourt (1415) is traditionally seen by the English and their historians as a great victory, but for the French (against whom the battle was fought) and their historians, it is considered a terrible defeat. But today France and Britain are close political allies, and are bound together culturally in many ways that had gone unrecognised before.

Societies rewrite the past over and over again so that they can understand where and who they are now, and where they might be heading. Traditionally, a French person may have had a different idea of what art and design are from a British person, and this is even more the case if we compare the British and French to the Chinese. But, in the contemporary cultural context, what the world-views described by the words ‘British’ or ‘French’ or ‘Chinese’ mean are far more complex than was once the case. Indeed, in the West, this complexity is much greater than in other parts of the world. Western societies are multicultural, and many different world-views coexist within the same geographical and political areas. For example, in contemporary Britain one in eight residents was not born there.

But not so long ago in the West, and still today in other places, everyone who lived in the same geographical location had more or less the same world-view. There were only a few exceptions – people like artists and spiritual visionaries, for example, who could see things a bit differently. But nowadays things are much more mixed up. As a result, the multicultural and globalised character of the Western societies in which you are studying means that you will probably live and work next to people with very different world-views from your own. They will have different versions of what happened in the past, different beliefs about the important questions in life and different ideas about the meanings of contemporary events.

This can result in personal confusion, doubt and anxiety. Or, alternatively, such multiplicity can be recognised as something to be welcomed. A lot of people don’t like the idea that their world-view is just one among many others. They want their world-view to be the world-view. Others feel that, because there are so many different world-views, it makes life seem rather meaningless: how can you really believe in something if you have to accept that it is probably contradicted or even ignored as insignificant by someone else? But actually, this multiculturalism means that Westerners are in some ways much luckier than people in earlier times because today it is more obvious than ever before that we live in a world made up of many different and clearly constructed world-views – these world-views are not ‘God-given’ or an absolute version of what is real. This is what we call ‘relativism’.

But, at the same time, we should recognise that all these different world-views may have more in common than we might at first think. Indeed, an important lesson that art teaches us is that certain fundamental human experiences are shared by all: birth, ageing, death, fear, love, anxiety, loneliness, hope, longing, imagination, time and space. It is only the ways we choose to represent these experiences that differ between cultures and periods of time.

CREATING YOUR OWN WORLD-VIEW

While memorising information and being familiar with critical and theoretical methodologies are very necessary, they are only the starting point. They are definitely not where you, as art, design and media students, should stop. What they provide are models, standards, norms or authoritative views. But, from the raw material they provide, you should then go on to create your own personal world-view, and to select the critical and theoretical methodologies that best suit you. You can then cautiously depart from the ‘norm’ – or the standard version of what is real and true.

The inner world you create from the fusion of your own world-view with the new ones you encounter will have two aspects – breadth and depth. Breadth is produced by how much you engage with the present cultural context, which means not only with what is going on within your own chosen field but also with anything else that is happening that may be relevant within other fields, such as music, psychology, politics or physics. Depth, on the other hand, is generated by how much you engage with the past or with history.

Educational courses hope to provide you with the basis for such integration. Depth implies that there are some things you recognise and wish to conserve from the past. For one reason or another, some of these are ‘nearer’ or more important to you than others. As you look back in time, some phenomena will stand out while others will be forgotten. This sense of something ‘nearer’ has two aspects. Firstly, it is cultural: we see the past as a line going back in time (at least, we do in the West) and consider that some things on that line are ‘nearer’ to the present than others, and so are more likely to be remembered and to have value. Secondly, ‘nearer’ has a more personal dimension: some things seem closer and ‘clearer’ because they carry an ‘energy’ or personal relevance that seems especially important, and as a result they make us want to keep hold of them and think about them.

In order to be critical about the world-view you have been taught through socialisation, you need first to be quite knowledgeable about just how many different kinds of ‘received wisdom’ or world-views there actually are. For example, let’s look at the field of recent art history. The big textbooks usually assigned to students produce a kind of consensus or agreed-upon view, but this breaks down once you scratch the surface – that is, when you look more deeply. For instance, in one such history, the paintings of the American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock (1912–56) will be seen as representing a model of truly expressive art or of the liberated individual; in another, they will be seen as explorations of the pure essence of painting as a medium no longer tied to the requirement that it represent or depict something; in another history, meanwhile, Pollock’s paintings are chaotic masses of random drips made by a neurotic alcoholic (although this is probably not a view you will be taught at a Western art and design institution); in yet another history, a more politicised model of interpretation will sideline or ignore all these expressive or formal issues in order to describe Pollock as an artist whose work was exploited for cultural propaganda during the Cold War; and yet again, in a more nuanced way of telling the story, an author might ask whether Pollock’s work really is absolutely central to the understanding of what is important and influential in art, or whether in the end he is actually rather marginal, and that instead it is perhaps Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887–1968) and his heirs, such as Andy Warhol, who should be put at the centre of the story of modern and contemporary art.

But in a more general way such survey books are of limited value. This is particularly evident if we think about how they usually have difficulty including non-Western art and design in their narratives or stories of art. Sometimes, non-Western elements just get added on at the end as afterthoughts, or, while the story of art continues on its (Western) way, non-Western art and design are left behind in earlier centuries, as if they don’t continue into the present. Other times, non-Western art and design are simply brought in now and then to add exoticism to a story focused on art and design that the West thinks is important. Indeed, the problem of non-Western art and design highlights a major stumbling block to the shaping of the past as a cultural activity. For, as the art historian James Elkins argues, the very notion of ‘art history’, or the whole idea of giving the past a recognisable shape (which is essentially ordered and linear, where one thing leads to another and there is very often a picture of progress towards something better), is a Western idea. This means that, from a certain perspective, it can be argued that any attempt to create a history that tries to incorporate non-Western art will inevitably employ a Western model or world-view and therefore be a kind of covert or hidden ‘imperialism’.

Where you decide to stand in relation to all these different histories, stories or narratives should depend not only on what you are told by a teacher or a book but also on what you think is most useful and interesting to you as a student. Which of the stories spark your imagination or inspire you?

The metaphor of a mental ‘landscape’ is useful. Inside your mind is a landscape that lays out and describes the thinking going on in your head. Everybody’s ‘landscape’ is different to a greater or lesser extent. People who share the same world-view see similar ‘landscapes’, while those with different world-views see very different ‘landscapes’. Our imagination is like one of those paintings by the seventeenth-century French painter Claude Lorrain (1600–82), or a traditional Chinese landscape painting in which things may look quite ‘natural’ but are in fact constructed out of a combination – a collage – of borrowings arranged to create a pleasing effect. Either we can choose to think that this landscape is somehow ‘natural’, and so lapse into passive acceptance, or we can look at it in a more critical and reflexive way. That is, we can see how this landscape is a fabricated picture that is to be viewed in the context of many other such pictures. There is no such thing as a mental landscape that is somehow completely a reflection of some objective historical ‘reality’.

You could be literal about this. Why not draw the shape of your own mental world as it looks to you as a student artist or designer – your imagination as if it actually were a landscape? This landscape could take any form you like – from the classical to the surreal, Western or non-Western. You’ll need to think a little about what’s important (or at first, even just what you can remember), and then about where to put it in the landscape. The most obvious way to do this is to put the most recent artists or art movements in the foreground, and the older ones further and further back towards the horizon and the sky. But you may find that some of the older artists or movements are so important to you that they somehow need to be made to stand out in your picture – as a tower, or a mountain, or a mighty tree. Also, of course, you shouldn’t necessarily limit yourself to artists. Why not include other people that are important to you – authors, philosophers, composers, rock bands, scientists?

So what does your mental landscape look like? It will certainly go through continual changes as you acquire new knowledge and insights. One week it could look very messy – like a jungle – while another time it may well resemble a desert (after some devastating critique or tutorial, maybe). You’ll also find that, when you compare your mental landscape with those of other students, they will have similarities but also big differences (if they don’t, there’s something wrong). In addition, depending on where you come from, how old you are and what kind of character you have, you will produce a different kind of landscape. Some students’ landscapes will be rather empty, perhaps, while others will be much too crowded. Some will have a lot of detail in the foreground but very little in the background (that’s normal). Actually, it’s often the case that the things you can ‘see’ the most clearly are not quite in the foreground. They are just a little beyond, in a sort of front-to-middle zone. This is because what’s up close may be way too complex to comprehend or make sense of, so we prefer to focus on the middle distance. The recent past is the most difficult to incorporate into a mental landscape.

The important thing is to keep thinking about how your ‘landscape’ or world-view looks, and to modify it as you encounter and learn about more and more of the recent and distant past. To understand what this task entails, it is useful to think in terms of what it means to belong to a family. By looking at the distant and recent past of art, design and media, as well as what’s going on in the present, you are looking at aspects of your culture’s family tree. At first, it may seem as if you have a very large family – so large in fact that it is impossible to make any sense of it. This may cause anxiety and a feeling of insignificance.

Another way of dealing with this awareness is to say you owe nothing to anyone else – to any past art and design or other contemporaries – that you are working from inside yourself, that you are ‘original’. This cannot possibly be true. All your ideas come from somewhere outside you – from the culture to which you belong. But how you select from this vast cultural ‘menu’ will be coloured by your own personal traits, by the society in which you grew up and by your own unique character. To use a different analogy, that of the family, we all know that there are always some relatives with whom you feel more affinity, and so you want to spend more time with them and enjoy their company, while others leave you cold. Sometimes you recognise in them your own traits that you don’t especially like, while there are others you do like. A cousin or nephew may, when you’re young, seem completely uninteresting, but as you and they grow older you begin to like them. This is the kind of evolving relationship you should have to your chosen field.