00I of potential hindrances to our creative development continued…
…I was just saying how the pursuit of accurate imagery reproduction as a path to creative process could lead to an expectation and judgement snare.
Our fascination with the ability to make things that look real is linked with a conditioned desire for clearcut judgement and expectation. Even a 4 year old could tell you that something is good based on how accurate it looks and it sure can be a relief to know what to expect or what is expected of us. Copy work is all nice and clear. It tells us what to do. We know exactly what we are going for, we can see with our own eyes precisely whether we’ve succeeded and we can all agree and feel right about that (it really does make sense that we accept a step-by-step-to-finished-product approach to art in primary and secondary education).
Bill Callahan © Oliver Mark / Agentur Focus.
Songwriter Bill Callahan once said, ”Covers are called covers because you often just pull the song over yourself to hide.” When we imitate something that already exists, we don’t have to contend with all of the not knowing involved in the creative process; we can ride a certain degree of guaranteed success.
If you’ve been reading all along you are aware that these articles are about sussing out the mysterious and intangible aspects of personal creative expression. There are many doubts, inexplicable impulses, confusions and incomprehensible facets involved. It’s fun but it’s not easy in the way society expects it to be fast, efficient, productive and admired. And it’s super difficult to resist our want for admiration in a culture that is hyper-judgemental.
Honestly, we as a general public have got some sort of mean-ass addiction to judgement. We rarely describe any experience beyond whether it was good or not. Ask anyone how the movie or the meal was and they’ll likely give you something rather dismissive like a “it was alright” or “it was nice” or “it sucked.” Rarely do you hear something about how part of the movie got someone thinking about a connection to a life experience or how the salmon seasoning left a subtle tingling sensation. Describing an experience offers a chance to open something up while judging has more of a closing effect (another time I’ll discuss how this connects to how we consider or talk about art).
Okay, so any creative pursuit is going to bring on the expectation and judgement from outside and inside of us. Imitation offers an existing specified set of expectations and judgement that may only take personal growth so far before we feel we have failed or we get stuck or bored. What happens when we trade our untrained, spontaneous and alive mark-making for predictable muscle memory skills? Imitation alone may not alter perception and open up complex possibility. But what if it’s just part of a more expansive process?
Perhaps after reading all of this you are still curious about finding your creative essence through the path of imitation. That’s definitely a thing and I promised I would get into that. There are a great many (x-discipline) creators out there who incorporate some imitation in their work. The full Bill Callahan quote above actually goes like this: “This is a milestone for me. To really learn a song written by someone else. Covers are called covers because you often just pull the song over yourself to hide. This isn’t a cover. It’s my song now, until someone else claims it convincingly. Step up.”
Nature is a haunted house—but Art—is a house that tries to be haunted.
-EMILY DICKINSON