Nothing new under the sun

Sachs' investigation of Stephen Wiltshire's drawing and Temple Grandin's discussion of her visualization-based drafting process challenge the conventional understanding of what it means to be an artist. We take for granted that an artist (I will, for the sake of simplicity, stick to visual art) renders an image from his imagination, and that art, therefore, is a product of imagination. Certainly, most of the art that fills the world's galleries is taken from life, inspired by or modeled on a scene that took place in reality. But art is not an automatic reproduction. It is created with style and intention. Art speaks; it has a message. Even photography can be more than pure journalistic record-keeping. A photographer frames an image and makes it his own. He manipulates his instrument to emphasize what he judges to be the salient features of a scene. Through the enumerable choices made in shooting and developing, a photographer communicates, and documentation is turned into art. But is Stephen capable of more than documentation? Is he an artist?

I argue he is on both counts, and there are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, he is driven to draw. His compulsion seems to stem, in the most general terms, from a need to make order out of what he perceives and, in rendering it, to communicate that order. I don't mean that Stephen is trying to reach out to the larger public — Emily Dickinson wrote the vast majority of her poems without any apparent intention to publish them; they were a way of communicating with herself — but he is solidifying his perception of the outer world into something tangible. Second, he interprets.  He adds details and ornamentation to buildings for both aesthetic (the chimney on Sachs' house) and symbolic (the flagpole in his yard) purposes. Jessy Park's psychedelic coloration is similarly interpretive and has an individualized style that parallels the warm lines of Stephen's later drawings. 

The additional perspective we get from Grandin is problematic. Her mode of piecing visual images together to make something new seems to be echoed in Stephen's creative alterations and additions. Is it truly art if he is only mechanically stacking visual images like building blocks? I think this is a false distinction. Grandin's process merely literalizes the common method of all human creative output. Nothing comes from nothing. An artist takes in what is pre-existing and makes a new pattern out of the old pieces. The pieces themselves are eternal, though we add new meanings to them as our memory of associations grows. So to strip Stephen of his artistic mantle would be an act of supreme arrogance on the part of the neurotypical. It would require belief that the neurotypical artist can make something out of nothing in a manner beyond the ken of an autistic one.