Intensive Seminar in Creativity
After speculating and opining for a while on the principles of creativity, I have an opportunity to develop an non-credit Intensive Seminar in Creativity course for a local arts center where I'll be teaching traditional art classes with this fall.
The course concept brings together critical processes that artists and creative workers of all kinds actually use, and should be teachable and adaptable to many fields: what you do and who you gather in forming a critique process, for example, or day to day deconstruction of working concepts. A very common process every artist I know uses is obvious enough: take a strong, repeating interest of yours and find out everything you can about it. But forming a strategy for accomplishing work based on this kind of interest is more difficult. This course would introduce readings, practices and strategies to foster both imaginative and productive creativity.
And so, in keeping with the key creative principle of naked theft, I'd like to know what ideas, readings, practices, and processes you've used that worked well as a creative strategy. Was there an assignment, an essay, an attack by Mongols, a stress point, a way of working that helped you or a group form a highly effective creative process?
posted by JAB at 12:37 PM
5 Comments:
Here is my theory: Creativity is the product of the interplay between form (constraints) and unexpected violation of form (constraints).
This implies two distinct artistic missions. There is a space. You can decorate it, or transform it.
Most people should decorate. Most people should start small (Pound: "use good ornament, or no ornament"). Since transformation of a form is impossible without prior mastery, most people should strive to master a form first. Most people do not do this, and end up creating things with minimal cultural context, hence minimal intelligibility. In most cases (brilliant culturally innocent folk artists might be an exception), this is a waste of everyone's time.
A few people, who know a form very well, can prosper by using its own forms to subvert it (e.g., Shakespeare's annihilation of pastoralism) in Sonnet 130.
For a longer riff on this them, see this interesting article.
It occurs to me my hero, David Bronstein, the most creative chess player who ever lived, would disagree with some of what I just wrote.
He counselled people to not try to play 'correct' chess, but to 'play for fun', and at all costs, avoid 'boring' chess. An account of a lecture he gave along these lines is here.
Bronstein, of course, was the topic of the the third post of this blog.
Good luck!
Some brilliant violations of form:
Tchaikovsky writes a waltz in 5/4 time
Fred and Ginger dance a waltz in swing time
Dub Side of the Moon
Hayseed Dixie violates your expectations. (This is one of my favorites because it takes the musical structure back to its Scottish/Appalachian origins, and exposes something viewed as modern as actually quite ancient.)
These are all excellent suggestions - there is of course no single path to creativity, but the creation of a game boundary, and then transcending that boundary, is a key technique.
I would try to characterize this as the most radical forms of creativity master old forms, but not only transgress them but break through to create new forms, which prove to be rich sources of explorations for others.
But you are right to recall fun - the balance of work to mastery and play is important to creativity. In the past, I've advised people, if they have the opportunity, to seek out "workplay" as a prime life goal, better in many ways that "recreation." Retirement seems to kill people, which should be a clue. But I find it difficult to maintain the balance necessary. It is devilishly difficult.
Shakespeare really shines in that sonnet, unbuilding his own mastery - also removing motivation from characters (Iago), backing off the heights of purple poesy in earlier works. (Henry VI to Henry IV is from la-di-da toward real language, so I've heard.)
That's a superb list of form mastery/form violation...
Now I would ask about work-play practices in any field - what have you done in your own practice that not only opened new possibilities, but gave up a path to new accomplishments?
Well, what I am about to suggest is difficult to reconcile with the spirit of play, which is why art is difficult.
You have made the point that you have to look at something for a long time before you see it, or even begin to see it.
The late, lamented Latouche felt that six seconds was about as much time as a piece of art deserved. But true creativity is probably impossible without "deep seeing." So one exercise would be to spend a LONG time - perhaps five minutes? - looking at something without talking.
Ezra Pound again, from ABC of Reading:
No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish:
A post-graduate student equipped with honours and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it.
Post-Graduate Student: "That's only a sunfish."
Agassiz: "I know that. Write a description of it."
After a few minutes the students returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.
Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.
The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.
Now, Pound was a fascist and a fool nine different ways, but I think this procedure has some merit.
As long as we are discussing the meditative arts, I believe it might be a good idea (late in the class) to ask the students to reflect for some time (20 minutes?), in a quiet place, uninterrupted, on their intention.
One question you certainly cannot answer for them is what they are trying to accomplish. Are they in this to have fun? Complain? Get rich? Be famous? Why are they trying to "be creative"?
I say late in the class because I did this once, when I was doing creative writing in school. I concluded that I was looking for an outlet to express a variety of existential complaints. I further concluded that I was hoping that, in the process of bitching about these things, people would think me smart, talented, or attractive.
So I quit.
So you might want to save that one for the tail end of the class.
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