ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
At this point, and in mother-infant interactions that take place in the 21st century, this
important “interpersonal relationship,” in my view, had or has nothing to do with art.
My hypothesis has a “second tier,” which proposes that when human groups began to
engage in ritual practices (related to the origin of religious behavior, which is a human
universal), already-existing behavioural and emotional components of the motherinfant interaction were (inadvertently) found to create behavioral and emotional concord among members of a group who were engaged (as a group) in these components
(vocal, visual, and movement behaviours that we today call song or chant, visual effects, and dance, presented in temporally organized ways). In this very different context, and with several or many (not just two) people, oxytocin is also released, promoting feelings of unity, confidence, and trust (Uvnäs-Moberg 1998). In addition, oxytocin itself reduces cortisol, a stress hormone, so that anxiety about the occasion for the
ritual practice (e.g., success in hunting, healing illness, maintaining prosperity, fertility and other goods, etc.) was reduced. Hence practice of these art-like components in
ritual/religious behaviours became itself adaptive. In this sense, “the arts” (as behaviours) are an adaptive by-product (“exaptation” or new beneficial effect) of the original mother-infant behaviour.
Essential to my scheme is what is done to the vocal, visual, and movement behaviours
to make them art-like. Like “ritualized behaviours” in some other animals (EiblEibesfeldt 1975), components of these behaviors are simplified (formalized), repeated,
exaggerated, elaborated, and sometimes manipulated in ways that create expectation.
These five “aesthetic devices” serve to attract attention, sustain interest, and create
emotion – both between mothers and infants and, later, among individual humans as
they participate in ritual practices (or arts).
This hypothesis is not easy to summarize and as it is has probably taken up more
space than many readers will welcome. I include this truncated version to make the
point that if my hypothesis about “interpersonal relationships” were to be used to understand New Zealandism or a viewer’s sense of connection with an artist, there
should be a different focus. That is, the author would find examples of simplification/formalization, repetition, exaggeration, elaboration, and manipulation of expectation in the works of the painters that are discussed and propose that because humans
find these devices pleasing, compelling, or affecting, they respond to the art work.
This focus has in fact been used by music educators who observed and recorded children’s (ages 3-12) spontaneous vocalizations during unstructured play, and found that
they made use of these aesthetic devices (Countryman et al. 2015).
Lock’s use of my work gets some things right, but often for the wrong reasons. Protoaesthetic sensibilities are not “taught” to infants; on the contrary, infants “teach”
adults to make the silly sounds and funny faces that they do by responding to them
with appealing smiles, kicks, and coos. Because using these “rhythms and modes”
(not a concept used by ethologists but a neologism invented by me in Art and Intimacy) inadvertently suffuses mothers’ brains with prosocial hormones, infants who stimulate and encourage such behaviours will survive better than infants who might prefer,
say, inexpressive faces, averted gaze, and adult-directed speech.
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