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| Christian Steciuch |
What do you think about the hourglass-shaped sculpture that lies between Founders Memorial Library and the Holmes Student Center on the NIU campus? During Spring, vines can be seen growing up its sides. Is the sculpture interesting? Pleasurable to view?
Did you know that its title is “Balance of Equality” and it is a tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. and the principles and values that he stood for? Did you know that its artist, Dann Nardi, won a $75,000 prize for the work in 1991, almost 30 years before the Black Lives Matter movement?
Does knowing this information influence your liking and interest in the sculpture?
Christian Steciuch, a CISLL graduate student affiliate, thinks that it might.
Steciuch, a Ph.D. student in Psychology, was last year’s winner of the CISLL Outstanding Student Scholar Award (COSSA).
Steciuch is interested in factors that affect the understanding and appreciation of artwork.
Although art may not be typically associated with language and literacy, it is if we think of literacy in a broader sense.
“There are many similarities between understanding artworks and understanding the written word,” explained Steciuch. “In both cases, the reader or viewer must activate and integrate ideas from the explicit work and their world knowledge in order to create a coherent mental representation of the piece.”
Without the background information about the MLK sculpture, one might only activate the ideas of “hourglass” and “time” assuming the viewer even recognizes it as an hourglass. But with the added information, the viewer may activate and consider other ideas that could lead to a richer interpretation of the sculpture, connecting it to such concepts as race, equality, balance, growth, Martin Luther King and, perhaps, the forward-thinking nature of NIU.
“I am particularly interested in how background information in the form of accompanying text influences reactions to art,” said Steciuch. “By accompanying text, I mean information like who is the artist, when and where the artwork was created, the title, and other information that is typically conveyed beside paintings in a museum.”
He is currently planning his dissertation, which examines the role of inferences in appreciating art.
“Prior research has shown that accompanying text typically increases the viewer’s liking and interest in the work. One possible reason is that the text may trigger inferences about the artwork that would not be drawn without the accompanying text,” explained Steciuch.
His dissertation will ask questions like: Does the amount of accompanying text affect liking and interest? Which types of inferences matter? If accompanying text does affect the viewer’s reaction, what types of reactions are affected? And do these effects depend on the processing style of the viewer?
To assess processing styles, Steciuch, along with fellow graduate students Ryan Kopatich and Daniel Feller and NIU professors Richard Siegesmund (Art Education) and Keith Millis (Psychology), recently created a psychological inventory that measures people’s preferences for thinking about artwork.
“We found that some individuals do not like ambiguity in artwork. It elicits negative reactions. Others enjoy more complicated artworks, and still others seek out contextual information, like historical events, to make meaning from art objects. It is possible that accompanying information may increase appreciation by decreasing ambiguity and by providing a meaningful context,” described Steciuch.
Earlier this year, Steciuch published a paper in the American Psychological Association journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, which showed that when people move past their gut reaction to abstract artworks, their pleasure and interest goes up.
“Prior research had shown that when people are asked to create a title for abstract art, their interest in the artwork increases. In our paper, we showed that a similar finding occurs when the person is merely told that viewing art has cognitive benefits to the viewer. When people think about an artwork, they make connections in their mind, and for many, this is a positive experience, resulting in greater appreciation,” explained Steciuch.
Perhaps accompanying information serves to increase interest in a similar way—by activating ideas that the viewer can integrate with the art object.
We will need to wait for Steciuch to complete his dissertation for further answers. But in the meantime, maybe you’ll appreciate Nardi’s sculpture just a little more than you did before reading this spotlight.
About the author: Keith Millis is on CISLL’s executive board and is a Professor of Psychology at NIU.
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