Do affluence and advertising stunt creativity? 20 April 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Advertising, Affluenza, Entitlement, Imagination, Modern culture.add a comment
I noticed an article posted to a friend’s Facebook status this afternoon that sounded worthy of reading. It’s titled Letting the Joneses Win and addresses both American affluence and, tangentially, creativity. Meredith Whitmore wrote the article to talk about her reentry into the United States after five years abroad in East Africa and China.
Living life outside the reach of American advertising, for example, was much more serene. It was also freeing since I had space to ponder things beyond how my abs look, the kind of car I drive or the clothes I wear. In fact, I’d been living in areas where many people wear the same clothing almost every day—without their friends (or Stacy London) staging an intervention.
So reentering our consumer-driven, image-mindful country felt like jumping naked into a glacial lake. (Well, at least my shock and audible gasping were probably pretty similar.) I came home to American friends who were ashamed to carry the same attractive, perfectly useful purse for more than a few months — forget about wearing a sweater twice in one week.
As terrible as it may sound, during my first days back I wanted to smack several people and yell, “Get over yourselves!” Instead, you’ll be relieved to know I bit my tongue and tried to smile a lot . . .
But in parts of the Third World with few resources and even less income, I have watched boys play with Coca-Cola bottles for an entire hour. And they didn’t feel at all deprived. Resourceful to the core, they could have fun and be creative with lots of things we wouldn’t even consider in the West.
Churches need to learn to trust their artists 19 April 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Art and faith, Christianity, Imagination, Painting.4 comments
A few years ago a friend offered to create a work of art for his church. The church accepted the proposal, and the over the past few years they’ve slowly worked on the idea. Recently the church — without the artist — decided on an image as a basis for the project.
It’s not unusual for the pastor (and a board of elders behind him) to want to control the content of artworks in their building. I regularly come across similar tales which evidence an obvious lack of trust in the artist heading up or contributing such a project, especially if the artist is a part of your congregation.
A visual artist — a painter or sculptor or printmaker — is more than just a craftsman. At it’s most basic, art is two things: Craft and concept. What the pastor-slash-board did in the aforementioned circumstance largely takes away the imaginative creativity, the concept, of an artwork. Hopefully an artist is gifted with ideas as much as with a particular craft. Further, they often communicate (i.e. interpret their surroundings) in different ways than than non-artists, which is part of their gift to culture.
In one sense, I can understand how the shepherd of a flock would want to protect his congregation from, well, unsightly or worldly things (as if they aren’t exposed to said things on a daily basis via other media or venues). The elders might want to avoid anything that would cause controversy; heaven forbid we be moved out of our comfort zones by a brutally honest painting of certain Scriptures.
Another scenario could be that the leadership already had an idea in mind and wanted to play artist from behind the scenes. Regardless, the way the project unfolded was disheartening to the artist, and I can certainly sympathize. Would it have been so bad for church leadership to look at a sketch of the artist’s idea and give their feedback based on that?
Below is Jim Jangket’s most recent work titled Last Judgement. I can only imagine how horrified some church leaders would be if the thought of this creative commentary hanging in their building.
Modern Christianity is much too sanitized for our own good, which is another idea for another time but also effects decisions about what kind of art is or isn’t allowed into a church building.
IAM Encounter: The better poem, or painting, or sculpture . . . 4 March 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Imagination, Intentional observation.add a comment
Nicholas Wolterstorff, former professor of philosophical theology at Yale, spoke during the first plenary of Encounter 09. He also worked out of a keen interest in the arts, and it was his book Art in Action which served as the theme for this year’s conference. Wolterstorff is the type of man that I would love to sit down with for a few hours.
One part of his lecture stood out to me in particular. He relayed a story about visiting a poetry reading some years back. Following the reading, the poet took questions from the audience; one of the questions probed why the poet changed one word in the poem.
His answer, “Because it made it a better poem.”
Wolterstorff was impressed by this answer. The response didn’t try and justify the change, it didn’t give a long explanation of why he changed that particular word. Just that “it made it a better poem.”
Wolterstorff’s point here was that artists don’t always need to be able to verbalize exactly what makes a good painting, sculpture or poem. Artists, arguably, possess a certain intuition that helps them know which negatives to develop, which paragraphs to cut and which pots to just throw away. It takes time, perhaps a lifetime, to observe and thus articulate certain things.
Of course, there are basic tenets to every craft which serve as a jumping off point for an artist. Hopefully the artist will be able to make note of the importance of proportion, line weight and color theory when talking about a work or body of work. But there is more to art than formality.
For me, it boils down to a somewhat ethereal choice between my unfinished or even finished sculptures. The small thunderhead above was definitely a go, but two other larger works I finished in the Fall — and put just as much time into — I’m not happy with. Now, I may be able to modify them in such a way that I’m willing to exhibit and sell them (you can only do so much with wood and clay; poets have it easy if they want to make changes later), but if I so decide that they just don’t have it that is part of my own process and artistic intuition.
Is ADHD really just “Creative Kids Syndrome?” 19 September 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Art education, Imagination, Modern culture.8 comments
NPR’s Morning Edition played a story yesterday about Pacific Lutheran University student Emily Algire. Algire was diagnosed with ADHD as a child, much to the confusion of her very organized mother.
The NPR spot reminded me of my August post wherein Sir Ken Robinson cites Gillian Lynn, who choreographed Cats and Phantom of the Opera. I didn’t elaborate on this story in that post — as it was getting long — so here it is in brief.
Gillian Lynn, who grew up in the 1930s in Kent, England, was suspected to have a learning disability by her school. The school wrote to her parents in order to state their suspicion. Lynn couldn’t concentrate. She fidgeted in school. “Now they’d say she had ADHD,” Robinson notes. “But this was the 1930s and ADHD hadn’t been invented, you know, at this point. It wasn’t an available condition. People weren’t aware they could have that.”
As a disclaimer, I’m compelled to say that the following isn’t intended to slight or make light of anyone’s personal struggle with ADHD. I’m not personally afflicted with said condition, and actually know very few people who are (in fact, I can’t name anyone off-hand). I’m by no means a doctor and have done extraordinarily little reading on this subject. Herein I’m merely theorizing as an outside observer.
However, I often wonder if ADHD isn’t something realized on account of our very rigid public education system. Yes, I said it: I’m not sure ADHD is real. That’s it. Those of you with passionately divergent opinions, let it out. Civilly, please, and with solid rhetoric. References to medical journals are great so long as they’re in plain English.
Even though I didn’t and don’t suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder, I found the public school process to be a generally less than ideal manner of education. I’m an artist, a designer, a creative person. I work with my hands. Most K-12 classes are book and lecture-based affairs. You sit, you listen, you take notes and then you do your bookwork.
I know I didn’t and don’t have ADHD because I did fine in school despite being a hands-on learner. My grades hovered in-between A and B on the common scale. But I was most definitely bored. I was uninterested. At the same time, however, I was a self-starter. After I’d get home from sitting in classroom lectures for six hours I would — of my own volition — draw or make attempts at other kinds of art. I drew animals and eventually began drafting floor plans of houses (I have no recollection how I got into this, as it would still be three years or so before I took a formal drafting class.). I would sit for five or six straight hours creating. Tracing paper, t-square and compass in hand I devised Georgian mansions and modern vacation homes.
I took as many classes as I could in high school that lent themselves to the creative process, but it wasn’t nearly enough. I understand the need for math and English and history, but aren’t there better ways to teach it to people like me who thrive in a hands-on setting? How hard would it be to mix in more (or any) field trips to a history class or a simple engineering project as a math assignment at the high school, or even junior high level? Maybe we need different kinds of schools and different kinds of teachers for different kinds of learners. Maybe the system needs to better identify different kinds of learners — instead of lumping every kid into the same kind of classroom environment — and set students off on tracks that help them flourish instead of just get by. Once in a while I hear about this latter kind of track-based school, though it very much appears to be the exception rather than the rule.
My thought is that a lot of people diagnosed with ADHD simply learn differently than public education allows for in most instances. This was the case for Gillian Lynn. Lynn and her mother went to see a specialist. After the specialist outlined to the mother all of the problems the child was having in school, he told Lynn he needed to speak to her mother privately. The doctor and the mother left the room. As they left, the doc put some music on for the child.
The two watched Lynn from the other room. As soon as they’d left, the girl was on her feet moving to the music. After a few minutes the doctor turned to the mother and said
“Take her to a dance school.” From what I can tell, Robinson is working on a book titled Epiphany for which he recently interviewed Lynn. She recounted to Robinson in an interview how wonderful it was to be in a room with a lot of other people like herself upon arriving at the dance school. “People who couldn’t sit still. People who had to move to think.”
Robinson goes on to list Lynn’s achievements. She founded her own dance school, choreographed some of the most renowned musicals, became a millionaire. “Someone else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.”
Is it really so bad that some people just aren’t wired to sit through a lecture, let alone five or six consecutive lectures in a ordinary school day? Or is it just that, for the sake of ease, the public schools in America won’t tolerate anything outside of the status quo? What will it take to change the bureaucratic behemoth that is public education so that it teaches everyone equally well according to the pupil’s standards, not some government regulator’s standards?
Some people have to move to think. And that’s OK.
Photo from Wikipedia.
Good art, bad art contrasted, add propaganda 11 September 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Architecture, Art, Criticism, Imagination, Sculpture.5 comments
Art as propaganda is usually frowned upon. However, Alain De Botton rethinks the negative reaction this combination so frequently elicits in our modern culture in the following quote from The Architecture of Happiness. The blurb also harkens back to the idea of art embalming our personal and cultural virtues.
Yet the term “propaganda” refers to the promotion of any doctrine or set of beliefs and in and of itsel should carry no negative connotations. That the majority of such promotion has been in the service of odious political and commercial agendas is more an accident of history than any fault of the word. A work of art becomes a piece of propaganda whenever it uses its resources to direct us towards something, insofar as it attempts to enhance our sensitivity and our readiness to respond favourably to any end or idea.
Under this definition, few works of art could fail to be counted as propaganda: not only pictures of Soviet farmers proclaiming their five-year plans, but also paintings of peas and lustre bowls; chairs; and steel and glass houses on the edge of the California desert. Taking the apparently perverse step of giving each of these the same label merely serves to stress the directive aspect of all consciously created objects — objects which invite viewers to imitate and participate in the qualities encoded within them.
From this perspective, we would be wise not to pursue the impossible goal of extirpating propaganda altogether, but should instead endeavor to surround ourselves with its more honourable examples. There is nothing to lament in the idea that art can direct our actions, provided that the directions it points us in are valuable ones. The theorists of the idealisating tradition were refreshingly frank in their insistence that art should try to make good things happen — and, more importantly, that it should try to make us good.
Let’s contrast that with the wit of Jeremy Clarkson, courtesy of the Art Market Blog. In the article cited by Art Market, Clarkson talks about how there’s a glut of British galleries. A few choice words from the spot:
Even Saatchi struggles. Obviously unable to secure a nice painting of some bluebells by a local artist, he has filled his new gallery with all sorts of stuff that to the untrained eye is food, bedding, waste and pornography . . .
Inside, guests could feast their eyes on a pickled shark, a room half-filled with sump oil and a severed cow’s head full of maggots and flies.
The high-profile nature of all this provides some hope for the owners of provincial galleries — they need only trawl their local butchers and fishmongers to fill half the space — but it’s not so good for you and me . . .
The trouble is that thanks to Saatchi — and to a certain extent, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen — there’s a sense that you can put anything on your walls at home and it will do. But it won’t.
I, for instance, have a very nice little picture in my sitting room. It’s of some cows on a misty morning by a river. I know this because it was painted by someone whose deftness with a brush meant he could represent cows and mist and a river.
Unfortunately, it gives off a sense that I’m not moving with the times. So really I should take it down and nail one of my dogs to the wall instead . . .
Real art, like real jeans, never goes out of fashion. You’ll never hear anyone say: “That Mona Lisa. She’s so last week.”
Clarkson is a journalist and broadcaster in England, but his artistic observations here are keen — and humorous. Is what he suggests true? Will works like Hirst’s shark be looked at in the future as “so last week.” Or will it even be looked at? When I look at the photograph of the fish in the box I figure it’s in a natural history museum, not an art gallery. It’s a technical work, not so much an imaginative one. Anyone with a workshop or resources such as those apparently available to this superstar of a an artist can put together a white box with a big fish in it if they want to, right?
Does public education kill creativity? 12 August 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Art education, Imagination, MFA, Modern culture.4 comments
Sir Ken Robinson ponders the damage that our current incarnation of public education does to a child’s creativity in this humorous twenty minute video.
I’ve transcribed a couple of sections here for your reading pleasure, if you can’t find the time to watch the spot it its entirety.
Creativity now is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status . . .
Kids aren’t frightened of being wrong. Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original . . . and by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. We run our companies this way; we stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make, and the result is that we’re educating people out of their creative capacities.
Robinson, a Brit who moved to L.A. five years ago, doesn’t fail to point out that basically everywhere you go with a public education system you see the same hierarchy, where mathematics and literacy are at the top and the arts are at the bottom.
We all have bodies, don’t we. Did I miss a meeting? Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side. If you were to visit education as an alien and say ‘What’s it for, public education?’ I think you’d have to conclude, if you look at the output . . . I think you’ve had to conclude the whole purpose of public education through the world is to produce university professors . . .
In my experience professors, not all of them, but typically they live in their heads . . . They’re disembodied . . . They look at their body as a form of transport for their heads. You know; don’t they. It’s a way of getting their head to meetings.
Sir Robinson goes on to point out that there were no public education systems before the 19th century, and that said education was created to meet the needs of industrialism. He further notes that academic ability has come to dominate our idea of intelligence. The end point being to get into the university. Intelligence is diverse, he rightly points out, as well as dynamic.
I’ll finish by exhorting you to watch the video; there’s a lot there that I haven’t transcribed. Pay close attention to the anecdote near the end of the video talking regarding Gillian Lynn, who choreographed Cats and Phantom of the Opera.
I found the video via Diving Into the Clay.
Adding: One last quote: “Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip mined the earth for a particular commodity, and for the future it won’t service. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.”
Improvisational realism 29 July 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Abstract art, Art, Ceramics, Imagination, Photography, Sculpture.3 comments
As I get into some larger and more realistic clay sculptures of thunderstorms an interesting paradox presents itself.
Working from photographs in order to sculpt a storm requires approximately 63% extrapolation. The photograph shows me one angle of the storm which I’m able to adequately reproduce, but there may be roughly three sides not visible to the photographer from that particular angle. A storm is large enough that a person isn’t able to photograph it from all angles. If you’re far away to see the entire cell, you probably won’t have time to drive around it before it’s dark out, the storm merges with other clouds nearby or actually dissipates.
It’s somewhat of a thrill to sculpt, even from a still image, such a dynamic form. Recreating these supercells in clay (or, perhaps, wood) is basically 37% abstract rendering and 63% conjecture. I have no idea what the other side of the storm looks like, nor do I know the shape of the anvil from the top. The work requires me to imagine what the other side of the thunderstorm looks like.
In the short time I’ve been working in this way I’ve really come to enjoy this process, the paradox of realism and imagination. A week or so ago I described it in my own mind as improvisational realism, as I worked on the sculpture above. I’m eager to keep working in this vein, although there are a number of technical details that will need to be worked out a long the way.
I’ve already cracked the anvil on the pictured work. While turning it over onto a towel in order to hollow out, it laid at an angle which bent the moderately moist edge too far. I attempted to repair it and am praying that it doesn’t crack when fired. The thin edge of the anvil protruding from such a solid piece of clay is asking for trouble as it is. This particular shape was formed through subtractive and additive processes; toothpicks were used to add strength while the work sets up. It will probably take at least five, probably ten of these forms before I find the best way to fabricate them. It doesn’t help that I’m using a clay body (Steve’s White) essentially devoid of grog. The next one will, instead, be a mixture of clays from the reclaim bucket (low-fire white, raku and a mid-fire buff) that will contain a significant amount of grog in comparison, probably better for sculpting these fairly tenuous forms.
I have roughly five hours in this one already.
Revolutionary revolving skyscraper 27 June 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Architecture, Imagination, Modern culture, Sculpture, Sustainable living.1 comment so far
It revolves, but I wouldn’t refer to it as revolutionary.
Florence based architect David Fisher’s novel idea for a skyscraper leaves me scratching my scalp. The structure will be constructed by factories in Italy, already gearing up for the project, as pods which will be transported to Dubai. Authorities in Dubai haven’t yet signed off on the deal according to The Independent, nor has financing been firmed up. Says the architect:
Today’s life is dynamic, so the space we are living in should be dynamic as well. Buildings will follow rhythms of nature. They will change direction and shape from spring to summer, from sunrise to sunset, and adjust themselves to the weather. In other words, buildings will be alive.
I admire the man’s desire to think outside of the box, but this project isn’t anything more than gimmicky in my opinion. I like it as sculpture, but as a building it seems to placate an impatient, technology saturated culture. Actually living in the thing — it’s being built as condos — seems impractical.
For instance, what happens if I want to watch the sunset from my 40th floor home? Will I have to walk along the outside wall as my floor turns in order to see the clouds change colors? What if there are interior walls that go clear to the exterior wall and I can’t stroll along like I want to? Can I turn the revolving feature off?
One idea I like in this project is the plan to put wind driven turbines in between each floor to generate energy. I’m worried about possible noise from such a feature, but a self-sufficient building is a good design to pursue on this scale. Solar panels will also be used on the “roof,” although I can’t tell where the roof is on the morphing tower.
I suppose, however, I’m not the target market for this kind of dwelling anyway. I’m confident it will be way out of my budget, and moving to the desert isn’t something I plan to do on purpose either.
Work with your hands 24 February 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Art education, Craft, Disposable culture, Handmade, Imagination, Modern culture, Salvage.1 comment so far
Clive Thompson’s Wired column in the March issue is a great testament to working with your hands. He starts the piece by talking about his struggle in trying to put a steampunk clock together; his soldering skills were deficient.
“Why am I so inept? I used to do projects like this all the time when I was a kid. But in high school, I was carefully diverted from shop class when the administration decided I was college-bound. I stopped working with my hands and have barely touched a tool since.
As it turns out, this isn’t just a problem for me — it’s a problem for America. We’ve lost our Everyman ability to build, maintain, and repair the devices we rely on every day. And that’s making it harder to solve the country’s nastiest problems, like oil dependence . . . . “
Wasn’t it just last week I talked about the importance of innovation, wondering where it had gone in America? And a couple weeks before that, didn’t I mention a verse in the Bible that exhorts us to “work with our hands?”
Apparently there is a bit of a do-it-yourself (DIY) revolution here in the states as we speak (or type). Scientists, according to Thompson, have discovered how important it is to use your hands — to be mechanically apt — which uses a different part of our brains than “sitting and cogitating.” I recall something in the news last year that pointed to the success of places like Lowes and Home Depot, typical stops for DIY-ers purchasing products for the projects.
I wonder about the accuracy of applying the word “revolution” with respect to the popularity of steampunk and profit margins of big-box home supply stores. Regardless, this resurgence is good news.
Personally, I feel the need for both sitting and cogitating (which is largely what this blog amounts to) and working with my hands. In a culture supersaturated with electronic media, computers and computer related employment opportunities it can be very difficult to get hands-on time with anything. Our jobs are done in front of a computer and our recreation regularly involves televisions, computers and video games. We are a quite sedentary society, which is unhealthy physically and mentally according to the neuroscientists Thompson cites. We use electronics to a fault, perhaps, instead of treating them as tools they act as a crutch. “Notably,” Thomson concludes, “all this is happening outside our broken education system. America is healing itself at the grass roots — rediscovering the mental joy of making things and rearming itself with mechanical skills.”
