The Creativity Room

Have you ever been audience to an art work that was well intentioned, well executed and interesting but for some reason you found yourself looking at the rest of the audience more than the piece itself, guiltily waiting for the chance to get away?

Maybe you’ve also met people that seem to be talking about something really interesting and important but you find it hard to listen to them?

Sometimes it can be hard to put your finger on, but some art just doesn’t ring true. All the ingredients are there for a great work, but there’s a strange hollowness, a sense of irrelevance or perhaps tedium at the work’s core.

Most artists want to make work that is meaningful. Most people want to live meaningful lives and contribute to other people’s lives in meaningful ways. We know meaning when we see/hear/feel it, but not always how to generate it.

The paradox of meaningfulness is that, a bit like really good, funny comedy, you can’t really set out to be meaningful.

“Hmm, what’s a really meaningful topic I could make a meaningful art work about? How about the plight of a homeless, schizophrenic homosexual suffering from AIDs in the midst of a never-ending civil war somewhere in the third world? …”

There are two basic things wrong with this sort of well-intentioned, earnest plan to create something meaningful:

1. No matter how much research you do, the work, unless it is a documentary and uses the words, images and experiences of the people involved, will never ring true. You are not homeless, oppressed, sick, or whatever it is you think is interesting.

2. The work will most likely suffer from a dreary kind of seriousness and carefulness that comes from a strong respect for the subject matter and the people involved but isn’t at all interesting to an audience. When a black homosexual man suffering oppression because of mental illness makes a film about his own life, you can be sure there will be a lot of irreverent humour, political incorrectness and sweet humanity in the story that is very hard to fake up if you are an outsider trying your darndest to respect someone different from yourself. Even if you are just dealing broadly with a theme, if it isn’t YOUR theme, you’re likely to get a bit lost in seriousness.

Just like your originality, your meaningfulness can only come out of your own experiences, your life, your soul.

We are here to dance to our own music.

Sounds easy enough …

Still, there are some common difficulties in executing this dance: To begin with, as we grow up we learn not to reveal our deepest selves to too many people. We learn not to tell embarrassing stories about our failures. The gift of art is that it gives us metaphor and aesethetics. These two things act as a kind of bridge to support the revelation of ourselves, not entirely naked; clothed in imagination and colour.

Another difficulty we often encounter is that we think we (especially the white, western, urban we) have nothing interesting to talk about. We no longer live in a culture that wants to hear its own stories. We have become accustomed to films that deal with extreme situations – world wars, the holocaust, crime and triumph over extreme adversity. Why would anyone want to hear about the way my mother used to make jam when I was 7 years old?

On top of this, how do I even know what my song is so that I can dance to it?? All the schooling, training and learning we do teaches us to do things a certain way, and to be interested in certain themes, material and stories. To be a true artist, you have to be prepared, time and time again, to embark on a journey into unknown territory, pretty much alone. You have to be on a constant search for self-knowledge and to take the risk of expressing what you find to others.

The key to all this is trust. John Daido Loori, in “The Zen of Creativity” says

If I was asked to get rid of the Zen aesthetic and just keep one quality necessary to create art, I would say it’s trust. When you learn to trust yourself implicitly, you no longer need to prove something through your art. You simply allow it to come out, to be as it is. This is when creating art becomes effortless. It happens just as you grow your hair. It grows.

One of my teachers, Margaret Cameron, said it like this “Your work is what is right in your face.”

One thing is for sure: what you find and share on your journey through your self, your life and your art is going to be damn interesting and meaningful to those around you, harbouring secrets in their own souls and struggling to hear and dance to their own music!

You have the right to play.

You have the right to have and create fun.

You have the right to have flights of fancy.

You have the right to believe in magic.

You have the right to be idealistic.

You have the right to an enchanted life.

One thing that I could not do without, one thing that is indispensable to my art and my life, is time alone. A walk in the hills with my dog, a quarter hour sitting on the beach, even half an hour in my bed before I turn off the light – this is what recharges my batteries and supports my clarity, energy and playfulness.

This seems like such an obvious thing to write about, yet it is so easy for me to forget, or to go for too long before I realise “wow do I need some time out!”.

Many years ago, I went away for a weekend by myself … a great thing to do, I thought, and in reality so much more challenging than the fun, creative time I had been expecting. I came right face to face with my own fear of not liking myself.

Now it is quite the opposite – it is when I am far away from all the things and people that seem to constitute my identity that I feel happiest and most able to love myself.

On the way back down the hill I am often filled with clear inspiration of what it is I want to be spending my time on, whether it is re-investment in the project I’m already working on, an idea for how to push something further, a clear intuition that there’s something that isn’t serving me anymore and I need to let go of, or a whole new idea for a fantastic new project.

I can’t recommend it too highly. We are all different in our needs for time out. So figure out how much you need and go get it!

Contradiction is one of the most valuable sources of inspiration and creative proliferation.

Contradiction encompasses opposites, oppositions, paradoxes and polarities. It can be as simple as this image I took of the old Christchurch Women’s Hospital with all its beds outside in the garden. It can be an opposition of beliefs, an uncanny image, a juxtaposition of things that are usually kept separate, like a mixing of gender, or an adult concept strangely inserted into a children’s story or picture.

The exciting thing about a close look at what seems like an opposition or contradiction is that often we find that the two elements aren’t actually opposed at all, or that they have a relationship like yin and yang, each containing the seed of the other. Or perhaps we realise that these two elements aren’t locked in an eternal struggle with one another, or even a productive, electrifying dialectic, but are actually just two of many, many options, perspectives or elements to be found in a certain situation.

When we allow ourselves to acknowledge that the world is not neatly packaged into clear, black and white, digestible chunks, but is full of surprise, turnabouts, the unexpected, then our art becomes richer and less didactic. Likewise, allowing our lives to take unexpected turns often leads to a greater breadth of experience and delight in life.

So whenever you feel stuck, with your work or any situation in your life, reach for the nearest contradiction or opposition and see where it leads you.

I was driving to work at the library today, with my ipod on random shuffle. As I entered the park, I found myself listening to one of the tracks from Catalyst 7, a CD of spoken word/poetry recorded over music.

Every time I hear this sort of thing, I feel insanely inspired to get busy with some creative work, not necessarily poetry, just something that feels soulful, expansive and pleasurable.

I highly recommend getting hold of some spoken word (with or without musical accompaniment) if you would welcome this sort of surprise inspiration in your day.

Do you have favourite collections of spoken word/poetry that you can recommend?

Catalyst is a literary journal that has been published in my home town for a number of years. I’m featured in two of the volumes. The poetry is mostly written and read by New Zealand writers and all the music is composed and performed by New Zealand musicians (they have published two CDs so far, and I’m not sure whether there is a disc with the latest volume, Catalyst 8, which was launched last week. I’m also not sure how easy it is to buy these CDs now.)

Here’s a link to an amazon.com search for poetry on CD.

We live in an age where the whole world’s creative efforts are available to us in high quality bites on the internet. Do you ever get that sinking feeling that everything you might ever dream up has probably already been dreamt up by one of the other 6.75 billion inhabitants of this planet?

At the same time, ‘original’ ideas are probably the most applauded and sought-after components of both artistic and non-artistic products.

These facts lead us into a mistaken quest for ‘originality’. Usually we feel successful in this quest if we manage to create something that feels ‘original’ in the same way the last ‘original’ thing we came across felt to us. Perhaps we have made something truly weird, or something shocking, or something that merges two genres or concepts in a way that we have come across before. Maybe what we’ve made is pretty obscure, and its meaning – and meaningfulness – is hidden behind a kind of conceptual-cool mirage.

But true originality doesn’t involve trying hard. It isn’t the result of a series of stabs in the dark. Rather, true originality, the kind that leads to artistic products that leave a deep and personal impression on your audience, comes from your own origins.

What I mean by this is that to make original work, what is needed is not an accumulation of experience of other ‘original’ ideas or a searching outside of ourselves for something truly new and fresh. It is actually an emptying out of all the accumulated layers of ideas, images and opinions from ‘out there,’ and comes from our own immediate truth.

No two people have the same mind, the same experiences, the same historical and social context. No two people have the same personality, beliefs, values, desires and fascinations. To be original, you just have to be who you are. That is the simple truth. Your life’s work is to create the first thing you think of, the thing that is staring you in the face, the thing that is you-and-only-you, the thing that is so obvious to you that it seems like it must be the least original idea there ever was. That is the truly original, meaningful and effective thing that you can create.

So if you ever find yourself worrying about originality, do whatever feels least original, the biggest cliche, even if it means straight-out copying of something you have seen. I once set out to copy Cindy Sherman and ended up having a ball of a time making photos and film that were definitely all about me.

I recently attended the Melbourne Arts Festival. Out of six dance and theatre performances, all from internationally acclaimed companies, one really stood out. Yet even this piece, which was relevant, contemporary, original and asked devastating questions about the extinction of the human race, didn’t really sink beneath skin level. I started to feel that we are stuck in a time of “problem focus,” where activism, media and a lot of the people out there who want to “make a difference” still think that pointing to the problem is the best way to make change happen. Yet we are all so scared now about all the problems we have created. I am starting to head away from creating art and wanting instead to create events, in a workshop kind of format, where people are no longer passively sitting and consuming the art. Instead they are creating together, feeling empowered and focusing on solutions, community and communication. What is the purpose of art then? Perhaps we should be satisfied with the Nietzschean idea of the Apollonian art – art that reconnects us with beauty in its highest sense, the healing potential of beauty, and allows us to connect with our higher selves, the selves that may be physically mired in the dirt of our problems but have our sights set on the bright light of the sun.