Art and the Value of Creativity without a Map
Monthly Feature, March, 2016. April Claggett
Art and the Value of Creativity without a Map
Monthly Feature, March, 2016.
By April Claggett
When I approached the gallery director at UMass Dartmouth with the idea of organizing an art exhibition whose theme was the 2100 Project, her response made me realize something. As I began the 2100 elevator speech, a dark cloud fell across her face, because she was not too keen on hosting shows with strong ideology and clear political implications, based on one graduate student’s idea. Naturally, she envisioned didactic art - art with instructions on what to think - which I explained was not my vision. Next, naturally, she assumed it was to be art using all 'green' and/or recycled materials and started listing local artists who I should contact. No, that’s not a requirement for my vision, either. When an artist chooses to respond to the kinds of issues that 2100 is also undertaking, I'm sure there are many ways of making art and many forms it may take. Moreover, from my perspective it's critical that the investigative process of the artist, and its outcome, be unprescribed. And, I believe the art process itself has many parallels with the human process at the heart of the 2100 Project.
First let me briefly outline some thoughts about didactic-political art. Here are three often overlapping objectives of this kind of art:
To express a sentiment about the issue.
To me, this is the best kind. It’s always valid to learn how something made one person feel. The legitimacy of that cannot be challenged. As my friend Lee says, "There are no holes in emotional logic." As viewers, we may be made to feel in response.
To raise awareness about the issue.
This kind of art gets the issue on peoples' minds and often is accompanied by information or facts to guide thoughts. This can be a weakness because the veracity of the information could be easily questioned and thereby cause a block in reception. As the recent "war on science" has shown, information can be dismissed as having its ideological factions and sponsors. If the message speaks to your view, you tend to listen; if it does not, you tend to disclaim the message.
To suggest a way forward by taking a stand.
This would be the most overtly ideological kind, and unless it is masterful, will simply alienate many. Personally, I don’t want an art experience to be a directive.
So, for the 2100 Project Art Show (tentative date and location: October, 2016 at the UMass Dartmouth Crapo Gallery), I don’t have in mind any particular kind of art or even subject matter. Not even the explicit themes framed on the 2100 website: social justice, environmental health, biodiversity, and the like. Art in the show may well fall into the above shortlist of politically-motivated and motivating art objectives, or it may not appear to be related at all. Similar to what I believe about art, the 2100 Project features responses to our pressing global concerns that are not monolithic or discipline-specific, and much of the emphasis is on seeking.
In this article, my thoughts are based upon the so-called and deplorably-named "Fine Arts." These were, traditionally, categories like painting and sculpture, but since the divisions among creative media have been dissolved by the course of art in the twentieth century, perhaps it's better to describe the kind of art I'm considering as "non-applied art" - in other words, not advertising, design, or "art" created for a potentially scaled-up retail environment. The key concept is non-utilitarian, although "non-applied art" does have a purpose.
I would like to contend that making art, "non-applied art" in particular, is an activity that fosters human capability to ultimately be a part of the solution to pressing global concerns. Simply put, that capability is creativity without a map. Creativity is required to solve problems, indeed. Many disciplines utilize and develop it. Computer programmers have to figure out how to get computers to do something. They use pre-established languages to create new patterns and build networks to expand utility. I think the arts are special because in their pure state, there is no pre-determined goal or functionality which guides the investigation. Artists often find that their process is such that they actually create problems during their work, which they then have to resolve through process. The painter Philip Guston says, "Destruction in painting… is crucial. There’s some mysterious process that I don’t even want to understand… I know there is some working-out that takes place in time, but it’s not given to me to completely understand it..." In fact, he calls it 'illegal' to understand.1 Similarly, the painter Richard Diebenkorn advises to "attempt what is not certain" and consider that which appears picturesque as "utterly expendable."2 Artists discover solutions by backing into them.
The inefficiency of making art and the non-guaranteed outcome are antithetical to sound business practices. Most people need to engage with the marketplace in order to earn their livelihood, in which case they will use the pre-designed standards or tools or computer applications to expediently do work or make things. They use cultural and technological maps; hence, what they do will fit the expected box and fulfill the expected role. Understandable, but whatever we humans are doing seems to be leading us to a destination, a near future in which a host of pressing global concerns are too big to solve. We should be hopeful that artists are preserving the human capability to think in a different way.
The following observations on the power of an "art experience" are based on my study of painting, but backed up by personal experience, namely a still-vivid moment in front of a solitary small painting. There we were: the little painting and I, the beheld and the beholder. The beheld is inanimate, but the beholder strangely feels more alive in front of it. The beholder feels the power of the thing, and we have words for this: we are 'moved', 'touched', 'struck'. We are, of course, not literally moved or touched, but what happens to us is deeply somatic. What happens, happens to our bodies. In my case, I was moved to tears, literally crying, in the Uffizi. The small painting seemed to greet me, moving forward out from the neutral background of space and time, and vibrated to me, as if it 'fit' me. It was a kind of love, and all the traffic of events that comprised my individual life prepared me for this particular, frankly embarrassing, experience of openly weeping in the Uffizi.
The viewer responds viscerally to the registration of the artist’s body upon the work. Philip Guston says he wipes out whole sections of his large paintings when, no matter how 'good' they look, "it is as if I hadn’t experienced anything with it."3 If the painter hasn’t experienced anything, then the viewer won’t either. It makes sense that a culture that discourages people from knowing their bodies and trusting bodies, discourages people from using sense information - feelings - to induce action, and fosters disengagement within our bodies and between our bodies, also does not encourage the arts.
Art doesn’t have to be 'beautiful' to touch us and to move us, and of course we need not physically cry. The continuity between the beholder and the beheld may be based on attributes one might not classify as beautiful: the unleashed imagination of Picasso, the conceptualized despair of Gonzales-Torres, the cheeky irreverence of Banksy. These impactful encounters produce small cracks in the surface of our world through which we are pulled into a much vaster space. They puncture the armor of our neutrality - which inspired philosopher Roland Barthes to choose the Latin word 'punctum' to refer to that aspect of an image so poignant as to feel like a bruise, a prick, a wound, an injury.4 Or as scholar Elaine Scarry puts it, "they lift us, letting the ground rotate underneath us several inches, so that when we land, we find we are in a different relation to the world than we were a moment before. It is not that we cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease to stand even at the center of our own world."5
This 'decentering' is at the heart of how I relate the experience of art to the hope for a sustainable future. Art makes the world felt. We may feel wounded, but we feel alive, and recognize the wounds and the aliveness of others. I believe we are going to have to feel in order to heal. We are going to have to relinquish our present mapped position, and be moved. Certainty is armor that prevents feeling, so we can go around like in Guston’s bad painting "as if we didn’t experience anything."6 Certainty, as Diebenkorn says, is 'valued delusion' and recognizing this certainty as a 'mistake' allows the artist to move beyond our present position.7 The artist in the art process throws down her armor, distrusts her ego and summons the courage to destroy its products, and, no map in hand, attempts what is not certain. And if we as viewers are willing to be 'moved,' we may find ourselves in a new relation to the world.
April Claggett is an MFA candidate of Painting and Drawing at UMass Dartmouth. She is in the preliminary stages of organizing the 2100 Project Art Show. April has a background in Biology, Art History and Learning Skills.
1Philip Guston, short video. 2Richard Diebenkorn, "Notes to myself on beginning a painting," can be found in many locations such as here. 3Philip Guston, short video. 4Roland Barthes, Camera lucida. 5Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just. 6Philip Guston, short video. 7Richard Diebenkorn, "Notes to myself on beginning a painting," can be found in many locations such as here.
When I approached the gallery director at UMass Dartmouth with the idea of organizing an art exhibition whose theme was the 2100 Project, her response made me realize something. As I began the 2100 elevator speech, a dark cloud fell across her face, because she was not too keen on hosting shows with strong ideology and clear political implications, based on one graduate student’s idea. Naturally, she envisioned didactic art - art with instructions on what to think - which I explained was not my vision. Next, naturally, she assumed it was to be art using all 'green' and/or recycled materials and started listing local artists who I should contact. No, that’s not a requirement for my vision, either. When an artist chooses to respond to the kinds of issues that 2100 is also undertaking, I'm sure there are many ways of making art and many forms it may take. Moreover, from my perspective it's critical that the investigative process of the artist, and its outcome, be unprescribed. And, I believe the art process itself has many parallels with the human process at the heart of the 2100 Project.
Felix Gonzales-Torres, Perfect Lovers, 1991
April Claggett is an MFA candidate of Painting and Drawing at UMass Dartmouth. She is in the preliminary stages of organizing the 2100 Project Art Show. April has a background in Biology, Art History and Learning Skills.
