NOVELTY

Normally all interpretations of novelty proceed from the premise that the original or novel (that which could be attributed to an individual) cannot occur or have significance except by the proximity of the signifying unoriginal and convention (that which is attributable to the social). Such propositions are highly influenced by paradigms of language such as signification and communication and philosophical concepts of universality. They conflate an appeal by an artist or designer to the discriminatory sense of their audience, in respect of an object or concept or quality, both with the environs of that appeal and with a priorly rehearsed reception, a memory, which somehow has a space in which the new object, concept or quality exists. Appeals to the new are therefore deemed to be a matter of directing attention by means of a contour provided by the usual, a silhouette in which the new is to be found. The instinctual approval for this model is on the commonsensical basis that our experiences in life are always pretty much the same, the idea that the alien is so shocking we wouldn’t make sense of it and...that we know what we know.

This characterisation of novelty as socially rather than personally perceived and wrought overlooks a second commonsensical observation that for people, things rarely get to be much more than similar and that what I experience now is not what it was two seconds ago and even less like what it was like two hours ago, two years ago and so on. From this observation we might deduce that people are readily geared for the experience of the new as much as of the old. That the new is only marginally new is no different to the old never being much more than the experience of similarity but to say that the experience of similarity (the silhouette) defines the new or even permits it would be to presume that the mind and perception only function by means of a mechanism of substantive analogies (within which is a ‘bootstrap’ problem).

Even if it were so, that the new is only defined by the old, the substantive analogies which an artist or designer uses may not necessarily be public in the sense ‘cultural’ they may be public in the sense ‘physiological’ or ‘material’. That is to say that what strikes me as new is likely to strike someone else as new, but is unremarkable in being new because lots of our experience is. It is also to say that experience in one realm (say sight) which might be deemed unproblematic is transferable as product into another (say culture) where it might be deemed problematic. Newness is therefore rarely one-dimensional. The form of newness pertinent to the individual practitioner is located in the self, it arises through embodied sensibilities, it is extensible to language and the social but it is a priori personally wrought. If an artist or designer notices the new and accords it deliberate attention then that newness is most likely to succumb to the artist or designer's cultural knowledge and become secondarily public in the sense ‘cultural’. Newness in art and design practice is then a phenomenon wrought by the roving hand, mind and eye interacting with material stuff. Newness in art and design is a matter of a cultural reading of work which may alter an approach to practice. The two forms of newness are different.