miniature obsessions

This strikes me as even more amazing than the watermelon swimmer, if perhaps a bit less original in terms of breadth (it's carved out of a pencil lead...).

It's even signed!




See the rest of them at http://kronikle.kidrobot.com/pencil-tip-micro-sculptures-by-dalton-ghetti/

shrinking humanity

I was struck by this image in a book I was reading yesterday of the Munich Academy of Fine Arts at the beginning of the 20th century. Look at the size of it!!! Regardless of the problems of what they were actually teaching in there, look at the SIZE of that investment in art...


On the same day, there were two items in the Guardian. Firstly, Posy Simmonds:

And then an article about a leaked email promising an 80% cut in university teaching budgets. Am I going out of my mind? Does it really say this? P6 in the national paper:

All but medicine, science, engineering and modern language degrees could stop receiving state subsidies (the email) said.

...'the true agenda of the coalition government this week is to strip away all public support for arts, humanities and social science provision in universities...' (statement by president of National Union of Students).

Are we dreaming? Are we insane?

can robots sing the blues?

This is an image from 3rd April, 2010 in the New Scientist. The article was called 'The nuts and bolts of creativity'. It's an image created by a robot, programmed to approximate the wrist flexes, pressure etc, of an artist drawing a face.

This has had me foxed for a long time. What does it say about how people view the idea of 'creativity'? Creativity equals skill-with-the hand-and-eye - if you copy how the fingers move, the robot is apparently being creative. But what's creative about robotic implementation of an algorithm?

The idea that creativity equals manual dexterity seems to be quite widespread, perhaps particularly amongst people who think they can't draw. What seems to be missed is the fact that a person drawing is trying to say something about how they experience the world. What looks like cleverness isn't necessarily perceived as such by the person doing it at all. They're off on their own trip, trying to do something that makes sense to them internally, privately, existentially. And, at the moment, a robot can't do this, right? A robot isn't trying to make meaning of their experience, their consciousness. Is it? Lord help us....

looseness

I know I've written about the subject of my last post quite a bit in the past, but it seems to be a theme that keeps recurring. I think when I wrote about it at the beginning of the summer, I was taking 'non-action' too literally. At that time I felt a need to actually stop trying to do anything at all; to stop trying to make paintings for a while.

I think that can make new things happen. This time though, when I chanced upon another discussion of non-action, this time in a book about Tai Chi, I find myself in a very different position. I'm now relieved to be regularly doing without question; to be doing gently and naturally, pulled back time and time again, rather than pushing and trying. Liberated, perhaps, by just experimenting with materials, instead of trying to actually make images.

I've been trying to find a way to use acrylic paint that will work for me. I hate the stuff, mostly. Shiny, plasticky, drying in seconds to an invincible hard line. Thinned down it breaks up, and not in ways I find appealing. Thick it shows brushmarks, which I have no interest in. On acrylic paper the fake canvas makes a texture I hate. On paper it seems to go kind of muddy. The day before I was reading the Tai Chi book, I had finally given up and gone back to my gorgeous water colours. I think that's why the passage resonated. The minute that prussian blue flowed out from my watery brush, I felt something inside me let go. The marks that resulted spoke to me, were alive, promised possibilities. Instead of that dead plastic.

Funny business, this painting lark. You might imagine that I'd be working away at 'improving my technique' or some other such thing. Actually, I'm squelching around in my bare feet deep in the mud of cobalt egg tempera (metaphorically speaking, you understand...). And I can't begin to tell you how deeply, existentially, satisfying that turns out to be.

fears and fantasies

In Tai Chi we learn Non Action, the action that is not action. Non-Action is not really a great mystery. Everyone has experienced it to a greater or lesser degree: those times when we have struggled to create something, only to have it recede from us, until we give up. Then, if we are lucky, we tap some inner core of wisdom that allows us to take a deep breath and relax, and what we want seems to flow to us, or through us, like a gift from heaven, or more exactly as a gift from heaven.

We must be patient, we must wait; but wait correctly, through the creative process of Non-Action. We make ourselves accessible - to the flow of chi in our bodies and the current of the Tao in our lives. The method is to eliminate blockages. There is nothing we have to do: that to which we aspire is already there. We must dissolve blockages to let it emerge.

As for the Tao in our lives, we have to learn to stop interfering with its flow. Take writing for example. Inspiration, the muse, is another way of describing the energy of Tao. You can't force it to come, but if a writer can let go of all the fears and fantasies that darken the creative present, learn how to get out of his own way, he finds that he is like a channel for that core of truth in the deepest part of his being.

Lownenthal, W. (1991) There are no Secrets: Professor Cheng Man-chi'ing and his Tai Chi Chuan, Blue Snake Books, Berkley, California pp8-9

Forget the post-modern critique of 'core', 'truth' and 'deepest'. What can we do with these metaphors?

why do it?

I suspect that the reason why many of us never fully make a committment to this creativity thing is because we can't somehow find a way to justify it to ourselves. How could we be so indulgent as to pursue something that appears to be entirely for ourselves, not serving others, not contributing to the greater good?

When you think about it, though, every young person starts off trying to find out 'what they want to do', and that's seen as being perfectly valid. You're somehow allowed, when young, to supposedly choose the thing 'that you really want to do'. You're even allowed to choose something crazy like art or music which won't earn you any money, if that's 'what you really want'.

The mad saddness is that with some exceptions, the vast majority of us really aren't sure, at 16, or even 18. And how on earth could we be, when you think about it? So many people end up in a rather unsatisfactory compromise, usually spurred on by cultural stories about where the money is, and it takes them some years before the fruit of such compromise appears on their tree. By this time, however, they may have mortgages, partners and children. And boy, do the stories change then. Whereas at 18 it was 'feel free to help yourself to whatever kind of life you think you fancy', a decade or so later it's more 'I/you can't possibly do something so viscerally attractive, so sumptous, so deeply, exotically enticing and satisfying. I have to do X, Y and Z, whether I feel like it or not.....'

Whatever the life is that we're living, it's a life that, at some point, we chose for ourselves. So why not choose again, later on, if the fruits on the tree start to taste bitter, or lose their flavour?

NB I know what the socialogical critique would have to say on my ideas about choice, but I might argue that it's middle-class patronising to suggest that people from different backgrounds to my own don't have a sense of agency in just the way that I do...

inner necessity

Jim and I have been having an interesting discussion in relation to my previous post on play. We ended up talking about motivation, the push and pull to create...

I hadn't noticed that in the quote I used Jung talks about inner necessity - or I had forgotten, having recently been reading Kandinsky, who uses exactly this term:

'As a last conclusion it must be established that it is not more important whether the form is personal, national or has style; whether or not it is in accordance with major contemporary movements; whether or not it is related to many or few other forms; whether or not it stands completely by itself: but rather the most important thing in the question of form is whether or not the form has grown out of inner necessity' (Chipp, 1968:158).

The footnote to this quote reads: 'That is, one may not make a uniform out of a form. Works of art are not soldiers. With a given artist, a given form can be the best at one time and the worst at another. In the first case, it has grown out of the soil of inner necessity; in the second, in the soil of outer necessity: out of ambition and greed'.

What a strange thing, inner necessity. What does this mean? It seems different to me from what we think of in relation to motivation -  the stress on necessity for a start. This is not just something you fancy doing, or something you like. And, I would argue, it also isn't the same as compulsion, or obsession, both of which are perjorative and out of control. Nachmanovitch (1990) talks about this:

The creative processes of free play and concentrated practice can be derailed. They can go spinning off into addiction or procrastination, into obsession or obstruction, leaving us outside our own natural flow of activity, in states of confusion and self-doubt. Addiction is excessive, compulsive attachment; procrastination is excessive, compulsive avoidance.

Addiction is any dependency that self-perpetuates or self-catalyzes at an ever-accelerating rate. It accounts for much of the suffering we inflict on each ourselves and each other.... An artist can be addicted to an idea, stuck in a particular self-concept, a particular view of how the work must go, or what the audience may want. Some habits may appear in both addictive and non-addictive forms. Some habits may seem addictive, such as physical exercise or practicing a musical instrument, or doing some other labour of love, yet we may consider them to be positive and beneficial. There is a fine line between the pathological and the creative, between addiction and practice. What actually is the vital difference between 'I'll just have one more drink' and 'I'll just try the Bach fugue one more time'?

Addiction consumes energy and leads to slavery. Practice generates energy and leads to freedom. In practice... we obsess in order to find out more and more. ...In addiction, we obsess in order to avoid finding out something, or in order to avoid facing something unpleasant. In practice the act becomes more and more expansive; we are unwinding a thread outward and building more and more implications and connections. In addiction, we are folding inward, into more sameness, more dullness' (126-127).

Inner necessity seems to me to be like a flame. It can warm, it can catalyse, it can feed. Out of control it can consume. On the whole, of course, we don't care about the consumption of those whose works we value and romanticise - Van Gogh, for example, or that Japanese artist who paints spots in order to maintain a reasonable mental equilibrium. And, indeed, musicians and other celebrities who entertain us whilst burning up on the side.

Inner necessity can possibly also be lacking even in those who are involved in creative making and performing. This interests me. What Kandinsky calls outer necessity. It seems to me that it shows, that often you can feel it, even if only via the haziest instinct. I'm out of my depth mentioning Damien Hirst here - I know nothing about the guy - but is it possible that he moved from outer necessity (which was generating huge sucess and wealth) to inner necessity, when he recently apparently 'withdrew into a garden shed' and came out some months later with a very different kind of painting, which the critics slated mercilessly?