Chapter 6 of potential hindrances to our creative development:

[Looking back on the last 4 articles, I’m wondering if I may have gone a little too far out. I have to remind myself that the aim of these writings is to help expose what we need to unlearn to reveal our creative abilities. What often ends up happening is in offering an encounter with new ideas, old weedy ones get pulled out but then the new ideas can grow a bit wildly. On the off chance that I have majorly confused anyone, I’ll do my best to pull back the trees I may have introduced and free up your wingspan.]

00VI: Art is learning to take the idea in our head (imagination means ‘picturing it’) and executing that idea in material form.

The X-Files. American science fiction drama television series. 1993-2002.

If we buy in to this statement, perhaps the most blatantly obvious sign that it has added an unnecessary burden to our creative exploration is that we feel we cannot make ‘the picture in our mind.’ If this is the case, then anything we make outside of ‘this picture’ is potentially frustration, failure and disappointment. Another prevalent hang-up is that we cannot begin to create anything without having an idea, picture or plan in our head first. Both of these hidebound attitudes seem to point to a deeper assumption regarding the angle and scope of the imagination. 

Imagination as a tool of the mind must be understood to have more than one function or capacity. For most of my life I only gathered its more utilitarian application. Like using it to pre-visualize a perfect game as an athlete. Imagining myself making seamless plays draws mainly on my memory and familiar feeling in my body— what I know very well. This exercise definitely led to greater consistency and accomplishment on the court as I executed my vision or plan. This success driven approach is what is desired in business and perhaps it shapes most of the value and perception of creativity (like when someone argues we need creativity in schools because it’s useful to the workforce).

As a continuation of what author Ursula K. Le Guin said in Part 3,  

“I hear voices agreeing with me. “Yes, yes!” they cry. “The creative imagination is a tremendous plus in business! We value creativity, we reward it!” In the marketplace, the word creativity has come to mean the generation of ideas applicable to practical strategies to make larger profits. This reduction has gone on so long that the word creative can hardly be degraded further. I don’t use it any more, yielding it to capitalists and academics to abuse as they like. But they can’t have imagination.

Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making. It is not a weapon, though all weapons originate from it, and their use, or non-use, depends on it, as with all tools and their uses. The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.”

This may sound a bit negative but Le Guin is simply pointing out that we are so much more than money-makers and spenders and to reduce creativity and imagination as mere supports for efficient productivity is pretty much flicking aside our superpowers.

Mary Wollstonecraft. 18th Century philosopher and feminist and author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Mother to Frankenstein author, Mary Shelley.

On the same level, philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the following in a letter back in 1794: 

“The imagination is the true fire, stolen from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay, producing all those fine sympathies that lead to rapture, rendering men social by expanding their hearts, instead of leaving them leisure to calculate how many comforts society affords.”

Due to my success with pre-visualizing my athletic performance, I assumed I could follow the same path to a work of art. I now know that with a more creative pursuit, it’s almost like I completely flip the tool of my imagination; because I am after something unfamiliar. This is why I proceed with the intention of finding ideas as they unfold in the present moment so that I am guided to something so fresh I could never have pictured it in my mind. I have a far better chance of bypassing some thick habitual barriers this way. And even if I do receive an image flash of an idea, I’ll treat it like the call or signal of a beginning versus an end point to get to.

From the website: https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/big-ideas/synergetics

This reminds me of the concept of “Synergetics” that came from inventor and visionary Richard Buckminster Fuller.  It’s generally defined as the behaviour of whole systems unpredicted by the behaviour of their parts taken separately:

“Synergy is the intelligence of a highly complex system. The nature of which is always unknown to the individual members. We are always entering a new environment and we don’t ever know fully what the new environment is because the only environments we know are the past ones. There is always then operating the development of cellular life on any level, a new way of organization higher than any existing form and we are not aware of it until after its happened.”

If I already know precisely what I am going to make and I want to hold myself to that, there’s a good chance I’m being propelled by past knowledge and experience. I’m not saying it isn’t possible for someone to make art directly from something they have pre-visualized. But we may want to ponder something else my mentor pointed out which is: “…anyone who claims to do that kind of translation is shifting the thing in their head to match what they’re making in the real material world.”

Any way we look at it won’t matter if it’s the path to our creative expression. I only mention certain likelihoods to alert anyone who is being told they have to create or make art this way and are blocked by this. As was my experience up until my first year of art school— so many instructors drummed it into me that I had to sketch out and plan (to death) what I was going to make.

Art by David Shrigley.

This always comes back to each of us needing to choreograph our own dance between the known and unknown in a personal creative field. It’s just a matter of being sensitive to our own resistance and adjusting by dropping whatever is in the way. Everything I say here is on the level of perhaps. Our reality is more fluid than we can imagine. Composer, music theorist, artist, and philosopher John Cage once said:

“You say: the real, the world as it is. But it is not, it becomes! It moves, it changes! It doesn’t wait for us to change…. It is more mobile than you can imagine. You are getting closer to this reality when you say it ‘presents itself’; that means that it is not there, existing as an object. The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.” 

If considering the world in this way totally freaks you out, allow me to remind you that art offers a safe space to dip your toe in some enigma. Keep the facts that you hold dear to function in the consensus reality and then maybe let something offshore (in material, movement, sound, etc.) be the portal to your totality. You might like the things you can’t see as much as the things you can.

All art begins as a calling forth of life in its still concealed mysteriousness.

-LOU ANDREAS-SALOMÉ

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