On Creativity

Often we hear an expression like "that shows a lot of creativity." What does this refer to? Initially, the term may seem to be pretty much a straightforward concept. But examined more closely, it signifies an ill-defined but widely accepted notion of a generally admirable capacity by certain people ("creative types") to perceive obscure connections between things, to discern aspects of something that to lesser intelligences are imperceptible, to leap past the traditional, conventional, and hidebound to the new expression—in a word, to be innovative. Why do we not say so? Why do we disguise this desirable skill, discernment, with the fuzzier word "creativity"?

By doing so, do we try to evoke grander qualities in our work than those which mere discernment, insight, or deduction convey? Has this uncritical use of the term "creative" in fact become a form of intellectual social-climbing?

In actuality, we can only know creativity retrospectively. We cannot look ahead and intend to achieve creativity, because to do so would be to jump over the actual work we would have to do. Quite the contrary: in order for us to encounter our own creativity, we must look back on what we have made, and it is there that we see manifested what we name "creativity" for lack of a more precise word. Nor can we establish creativity as our goal any more than we can aim for articulateness or sensitivity or gracefulness as a goal. That would be akin to aiming for height as a goal of growing up. Our goal should be to speak articulately, to dance gracefully, to play the piano sensitively, to paint ... well, painterly? paintfully? Surely we are misguided when we aspire to paint creatively, because to do that is again to look past the work of the artist to the manifestation of the work.

It in not uncommon to speak of wanting to get more opportunities at one's job to do the really creative assignments in distinction to the more humdrum. It is misguided to expect to find the opportunity of doing "more creative" work in one job than in another. The opportunity is always there in every job to do "creative" work. Usually one means to say that some jobs are more suited to more overtly spectacular treatment and qualify for larger budgets which allow more accoutrements, or costlier materials, or custom effects, etc. It is this grander treatment that tests the artists skills, imagination, discernment and taste, intellectual comprehension, and technical grasp of production matters, and which by successfully accomplishing the purposes of the job gives the a greater sense of satisfaction. Thus, it is this nexus of intellectual concentration, sensorial satisfaction, purpose, and moral or social fulfillment that wells up in the "creative" job that make it more attractive than the mundane, the rote, the trivial.

To be sure, what we call "creative" properly refers to these other properties and aspects--discernment, judgment, knowledge, etc.

It is instructive to look at our usage of these terms. The OED defines "creative," but it does not list the word "creativity" at all. The 1969 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary only lists "creativity" as a derivative word under the entry, "creative." The widespread use of "creative" and "creativity" with its sheer honorific sense is a late-twentieth century phenomenon.

What does "creative" mean? According to the OED, it is the quality of being able to create, the ability to bring something into being from nothing. That kind of creating has typically been left to God (or, the gods); and in its alternate manifestation of "procreating," it refers to what parents do. It also designates those who make corporations and knights and refers to the first actor to play a part and thereby give the role its characteristic portrayal. And lastly the OED refers to those whom we deem to be the most creative, the artists, writers, musicians, etc.

Well, now, what is going on here? Why do we want so desperately to be allowed to be creative? Why do we want our children to be creative in school? Why do we elevate their drawings to the status of artwork, and exhibit them in the Salon de la Refrigerator Door? Why do we lament mere routine work and pine for the chance to do a "creative" job? Why is it as certain--and as frequent--as the seasons that there will be lengthy discussions mulling the ways to engender and nurture and expand and gain recognition for and praise for and more money for . . . creativeness? Why are we continuously cautioned, with great alarm, about the threat from antagonists of creativity, to wit, commerce, management, dullards, in a word, Babbitt?

Shall we proclaim that creativity is what happens when we do, say, graphic design work. That creativity is what happens when we take photographs and design layouts and make a new font and draw a picture. Uh, no. Design is what happens when we do graphic design work. Photography is what happens when we take photographs. Typography is what happens when we make a new font. Drawing is what happens when we draw.

Creativity is that abstraction that allows us to speak about the confluence of skills, experiences, discernments, sensitivities, perceptions, deductions, sensorial responses, and emotions that envelop the act of making something. "Creativity" is the fancy word we now prefer which replaces the more correct term "making." There is nothing wrong with making, by the way. Remember, in the beginning, God made the world. Okay, okay, so he created it--same thing, right?

Is this not just a quibble about words? Why do we care about the difference? Precisely when we exalt "creativity," we reify an abstraction that exists only in our intellects, and forsake the reality behind the abstraction. It reminds me of when I was in art school and we all said to each other, "I'm going to the studio and make art." Well, what we were going to do was paint or sculpt or whatever. We were going to do what we were going to do. The old aphorism has it right: heroes are made, not born. That is, they (the heroes) become what they are called later by what they do. We are creative to the extent that we make things.

When I am confronted with a design difficulty, I don't go to a resource called "creativity." I can't; it's not there! Instead, I look at the tangible material things in front of me, elucidate the sticking point, and discern a resolution. When I am painting, at some point I may say to myself, "What now? What's wrong here? Why am I at a stopping point?" I never ask myself, "What is the creative way out of this muddle?" The good or right way out is the

Political Art

Son of God, Prophet of Allah. 

©2008. Oil on canvas. 48" x 24"

Watching Being Watched 

©1981, oil on canvas, 84"x36"

The paradox encountered by political artists is that the visual arts exhibit two seemingly contradictory modes simultaneously. The visual arts, uniquely among the various arts, can be both representational and sensorial. That is, a painting can be both the material thing painted and its content (which is inexactly called subject matter). The visual arts span a wide range between two extremities of "meaning." At one extreme is literature, pure symbolic expression, the one art which possesses virtually no central, essential, informing sensorial quality. There is nothing tangible that is absolutely necessary to the content of a story. A book can be hand- or typewritten, it can be a cheap paperback or a lavish leather-bound volume. Its beauty and fineness of presentation do not alter its content, which still refers to the same things.

Not so the other arts. Music needs-is defined by-physical sound heard by someone. Dance requires a moving body. Music does not refer to some other thing, but refers to and presents only itself. Likewise, dance does not point to other things, but to the organization and presentation of itself. Now the visual arts can be both representational or referential, as in literature, and sensuous, as in music.

It is this singular capacity to be both which ultimately works against the political purposes of art. How are we simultaneously to keep our attention on these two different modes of the work? The dilemma of all representational art is this: one mode has to be dominant over the other. That mode is the sensuous, not the propositional.

Our experience has shown us that, when all is said and done, when time has passed, the formal properties and elements dominate our appreciation and our aesthetic judgment of the work. We marvel at the consummate skill of Rubens, we are gripped by the dramatic lighting of Caravaggio, and we are perplexed at the vast talent of Bouguereau trivialized on salacious themes. The classical pleasure of delecto derives from the application of the paint, the richness of the marble, the suppleness of the dancer's body, the timbre of the instrument, as much as it does from the represented subject.

There is a large body of analysis and criticism which argues forcefully against subject matter and the consequent captive sentiment in pictures, and for the formal and material properties of art. This is the position of formalist and Modernist criticism, and is largely a twentieth century idea. Oppositely, the greater part of preceding art theory and criticism placed a strong emphasis on subject matter. Diderot's promotion of Greuze and similar moralizing painters in the eighteenth century, for example, rested on just this point. The moral tone of Neo-classicism, Romanticism, and Realism relied on the subject to provide a significant component of representations, that is, an action or event which was its moral locus. Even Impressionism claimed to be more relevant than academic painting, and purposely chose as its subject matter la vie moderne.

Without a personal commitment to the particular issue, we view Delacroix's The Massacre at Chios with the same aloof interest as we do one of his Arab Horseman Attacked by a Lion or The Death of Sardanapalus. For me, in a similar way, I have little spontaneous response to the political agenda of Goya's court paintings or The Fourth of May. (But I do feel a strong response to Saturn Devouring One of His Sons.) This suggests to me that certain representations provoke such a visceral response as to remove them from a the ambit of classical aesthetics. This happens in response to the referential subject matter: and only few such subjects and their treatment summon forth such strong reactions.

Inevitably all representations (which music, for example, is not) refer to the world of experience. In that world, our actions are guided by some set of moral or ethical principles. Our decisions are based on consequences. But in art, there is the contemplative sensorial element, there is the capacity to apprehend the works in themselves without recourse to the accuracy of the depictions. (This, in fact, is the conclusion Herbert Marcuse arrived at after seeing Picasso's Guernica.) The timelessness of Shakespeare or Sophocles is said to come from the universality of their themes. (We need glosses to help explain the political references in their plays, but we need no interpretative notes to explicate Falstaff's "What is honor" speech.)

The Roots of "Political Art"

Every action and artifact has at least a minimal “political” component. This is particularly so of representations, because as such, they are intentionally edited and shaped by the artist or author to coincide with an end purpose. Art has always served a political purpose, viz., by magnifying the ruler or deities and by honoring and sustaining the privileged class and its institutions. This occurred in a different social system—one of an artisan class or craft guild economically dependent on a patron class—and usually took the form of officially sanctioned and commissioned art (that is, most of the art which is studied in art history).

But a marked changed of attitude occurred with the Protestant Reformation, gained a widespread support with the revolutions of the eighteenth century, and was hurried along by industrialized capitalism and mass communications.

That attitude exalted individualism and personal opinions and set the individual in an adversarial relationship with such authoritarian institutions as government and Church. By the end of the nineteenth century, the very decision to be an artist included the decision to be either an exiled avant garde artist or a traditional artist.

There are several roots of “political” art. One is found in the hierarchy of genres promulgated in the latter seventeenth century by the French Academy to rank the seriousness of works of art. At the top was history painting, so-called because the subjects portrayed moral action or events taken from Classical literature or Biblical stories. The lesser genres included portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. In the Academy's formulation, such paintings were inferior because they were merely reportorial pictures without moral force or artistic imagination. In the eighteenth century, Diderot advanced the cause of moralizing art when he championed the bathetic portrayals of Greuze and others. Such pictorial exhorting reached its most exalted status in the French Revolution, when David's Neo-classical civic lessons were annexed to the purposes of the Revolution.

The American and French Revolutions themselves are representative of another source for the “political” in art, that is, the decline of the aristocracy and rise of popular democracies and mass education. Liberal democratic government in Western industrial societies was premised upon the involvement of the great numbers of people previously unenfranchised. As education spread, social and political counselors and essayists promoted the merits of an informed electorate.

Implicit in the concept of an informed and educated electorate, and enhanced by the doctrine of a personal rather than authoritative interpretation of moral precepts, was the impetus to political activism By the middle of the nineteenth century, Marxist theory proposed that all of industrial capitalism would face an on-going proletarian revolution until the vindication of socialism. Social reformers of the last century, like Saint-Simon and Fournier, saw a restructuring of society along socialist lines and led by artists, engineers, and scientists. Romanticism, which theoretically was based on the same fundamentals as the democratic revolutions of America and France, placed a great emphasis on the concept of artistic genius and the uniqueness of artistic sensitivity. This was absorbed into the socialist proposals of the last centuries, and artists were thought to be possessed of a particular temperament or insight which made them especially fitted as social critics and managers. This attitude persisted into the twentieth century, propagated by artists and non-artists alike. There is a supposed special sensitivity to matters of the heart or human relations that artists have which other mortals do not have. It is this self-delusion of the artistic community about the nature of artistic sensitivity which has led artists to exile themselves from society and to critique it, and simultaneously to claim to be the visionaries who can right society's wrongs.

Yet another source can be found in the development of the portable easel painting. Once the work of art (more accurately a painting) was liberated from its site and the meaning of its location, the messages of pictures became interchangeable commodities. This interchangeability allowed for the rise of the museum, the institution of meta-meaning, in which artworks qua art and artistic value existed in isolation from their cultural context. The museum in turn reciprocally created the conditions which greatly magnified the independent value of the artist as maker, and thus elevated the value of the artist's genius and sensitivity embodied in the work. And so, it is in a museum that Picasso's Guernica is shown, not in the rubble of a Basque town.

Inevitably, it is in a culture and society that puts portable and interchangeable art on its sanctuary walls that the utter ineffectiveness and irrelevance of "political" art is demonstrated. The "political" in art is ineffective because consumer capitalism so effectively neutralizes its message. The museum or gallery is driven by cultural interests which themselves are driven by economic interests. We hear not infrequently of a museum's refusal to part with, say, a section of an altarpiece in order that the whole altarpiece be restored intact, because of the museum's claimed commitment to presenting a wide diversity of art to its constituency. The museum shows itself impervious to the original meaning and import of works of art. Similarly, when an exhibit of highly politicized works is shown at a relatively elite place (up-scale art gallery) that is frequented by people who are prepared for the political frameworks (museum as meta-meaning and leftist, generally). Such works in museums typically get relatively little public exposure, whereas genuine propaganda, the effective political art, gets a very widespread showing.

Because it is trivialized in the gallery, "political" art is ineffective, and because it is ineffective, it is irrelevant. What political good is something which does not work? Besides, who cares? The disseminators of propaganda or advertising care enough to carry through: an army will feed and clothe and pay the soldier it recruits, a store will sell the customer the product, and the church will take in and succor its lost souls. Will political artists do as much? 

Codex Sinaiticus online

The oldest existing copy of the Christian Bible is the Codex Sinaiticus. Starting July 6, all of the extant pages, separated in four collections, will be available online at this website. 

http://www.codex-sinaiticus.net/en/

Enjoy this wonderful document. And the website is both beautifully realized and very useful and functional.

Canons and Practice

Perhaps it's like this

aesthetics : canon : art :: rhetoric : grammar : language

Both pictorial art and language are "free creative" acts, that is, each of them forms and shapes its products (images, words) completely separately from the things pointed at. Over time and within a relatively contiguous community of recipients, norms of how these forms should look or sound arise and are endorsed and retained—canons, standards, conventions, grammars, preferred pronunciations, and ultimately the cultural phenomenon of taste.

Consider how often, and how unnoticed, it is that certain constructions are almost entirely conventional, not imitative or "representative," yet they do not arrest our attention. Outlines themselves are an invisible convention: we don't think that nothing has a thin black line around it. It's all just edges of shapes and areas. Hatch marks for shading are sometimes an invisible convention: we hardly pay attention to them until something draws our attention to it. In language (I'll use English, which I'm most familiar with), structural words (prepositions, conjunctions, etc.) tend to remain invisible until, through repetition, odd locution, or misuse, the reader or listener becomes aware of them.

Rules and guidelines eventually develop to describe how images or language work, why certain forms or presentations can appear to be defective and others quite extraordinary. I suspect the rules were developed as teaching aids to instruct the student how to work efficiently and what to avoid, as practical lore and folk wisdom based on previous success or failure. That's how the warnings against splitting infinitives and ending a sentence with a preposition took root as hard and fast prohibitions. They were introduced as guides for students, who observed the injunctions with deep reverence, but eventually the wise advice became linguistic fetishes enforced with the power of taboos.   

We are at the 25,000th year of a long history of teaching and refining techniques--and absorbing new modes and practices from elsewhere--about making and using art and language in society, and the guidelines have become very detailed, extensive, and complicated. Knowledge of them has taken on the trappings of esoteric learning, and adepts are honored publicly.  

I've often run into the situation that a non-artist really likes one of my paintings that I think is poor because of this and that—blemishes or clumsiness or poor technique or other things I can easily see but that the other person just isn't attuned to. The other person isn't schooled in the conventions, and thus is less aware of departures from a norm, from those guidelines that form part of the foundations of taste and aesthetics.

Words and Pictures

I've set up a new email list at Yahoo! Groups. It's called "Words and Pictures," and it's a group for people who want to discuss the visual and literary arts, philosophy of art, aesthetics, graphic design and typography, new media, photography, theater, and film. You know, all that. It's an open invitation to anyone who wants to discuss these topics with other like-minded folks. One rule: no trolls or troll-like behavior! (Okay, two rules: no flames and no flammable political rants, either.)

Words and Pictures

or

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Words-and-pictures/

Welcome to all.

The Clarity of Fuzziness

Man Woman Inversion, ©2002, 30" x 22", oil on panel

When you attend carefully to things in motion or in flux, like spoken language, you'll observe that at any discrete moment, the image or sound or feeling is indistinct, lacks a precise edge or boundary, is seemingly incomplete. But when it's taken in the greater flow, in the flux and motion, you easily process and coalesce the whole stream of perceptions and impose an organization so that it seems distinct and precise. Listen to the way people speak: slurred consonants, mushy vowels, missing syllables, warbling pitch, but their utterances seem complete and coherent to you. Likewise, the fuzzy brushmarks in the painting, the brutal chip marks in the stone, the peripatetic vowels in the song.

Words are spoken in long strings of sounds that aggregate and blend together. But because we can move small sections of the sounds around--what we call words--we disaggregate the whole stream. Orthography has followed suit: word spaces were introduced into writing long after entire sentences and thoughts were inscribed on monuments in an unbroken parade of marks. Nowadays, we hear separate words with the reinforcement of having seen the words written as separate entities. (I'm sure you've had the experience of not being able to figure out what the song lyric says until you read the words on the album cover. Then you can "hear" the sung words as meaningful, rather than as a muddle of unfathomable sounds.)

Somehow, our attentive faculties enable us to perceive things clearly as they blur by. But when those transient things are made to be static, when the passage is halted, what we perceive undergoes a metamorphosis. Things in flux become like a snapshot of a friend that makes him look odd or funny, because his face is frozen with one eye squinted and the tip of the tongue sticking out of his lips. We don't see those small details when he speaks, but the photograph records the instantaneous transformations between one stable pose and another. News photographs are particularly susceptible to this kind of freeze-frame exhibitionism. (On opinion and commentary sites, it's very common to see a photograph of an opponent taken at an unflattering moment and a much more complimentary photograph of a favored person, used for rhetorical effect.)

Sounds, by the way, are harder to stop in a "freeze-frame" manner because we hear them across a span of time. If we halt a sound recording at a specific instant, we will hear a continuous, unvarying tone without any way to construct a full context. In a photograph, despite the interruption to the motion, the full visual field is preserved and we can form a complete context for it.

We construct clarity and precision out of fuzziness every day.

Perceptions and appearances

Think of how we experience ourselves, that is, how we think we sound and appear to others, from "within" ourselves, from "inside" our eyes and ears and viscera. We probably have an internal, constructed expectation of how we sound, look, move, etc. But then we see ourselves in recordings and are, perhaps, surprised by our appearance, by the way we look and move and sound. The disparity between what we feel (and thus believe) about ourselves from within as we are talking or moving and how we appear to others (the recording) can be a strong shock. But often the effect is negligible for others, who can never experience the "inside" view we have. All anyone else can know of us is the view from outside, the view on the recording. (Needless to say, I'm speaking about my own experience, but other people have reported similar things, such as how odd or different their voice sounds to them on a recording than what they experience when they speak. It took me a long time to get used to how my voice sounded on tape; as for pictures, I was mostly unhappy with my weight, not so much with general appearance or gestures.)

With the notable exceptions of the sun, moon, and the occasional meteor, I cannot begin to fathom how people can see celestial movements. Yet even the ancients could do that. They looked up at "the dome of the heavens" and saw . . . a dome, the inside of a sphere, in fact, the inside of concentric spheres. They recognized the wandering stars (in Greek, planets), they tracked repeated motions and could infer predictable events like eclipses with surprising accuracy, and they even had the imaginative flexibility to construct elaborate theories, such as Ptolemy's epicycles, to explain the retrograde motions of the outer planets, which they thought orbited the Earth. The analogy that I see in this marvel of perception and interpretation is to how we discuss consciousness and self-awareness (which, btw, are different but closely related notions). 

Consciousness is a creature's functional awareness of its integral body, and self-awareness is the creature's awareness of being aware of itself. As far as we know, only humans have self-awareness—the ability to invent and use the pronoun "I," although perhaps some other species may also be able to form threshold mental constructions of self-awareness. Most animals have the awareness of their own bodies, of their location in space and their sensations of existence—or so we understand (and I think this is a pretty uncontroversial assertion).

Again, this is an analogy, my imaginative projection of a similar attempt to grasp some phenomenon from within its operations. In this analogy, consciousness corresponds to seeing the celestial movements, and self-awareness to recognizing that those motions are a construct that we devise to describe the spatial relationships of celestial bodies.