“With Blake, we’re presented with a dense theory of art and its relationship to the human creative vision. And Blake, for his part, seemed to create art with theory in mind. But can art grow legitimately out of theory, or must art be named and organized after its creation? Can we set out to create an art of vision?”
I’m not sure of the best way to attack this prompt, but there was something that drew me to it (aside from it being the shortest of the four). I suppose it’s because I consider myself an artist in a few senses, and so the question of what makes a legitimate foundation for the creation of art is something that’s on my mind fairly often.
I’ll ramble a bit here on my own thoughts before moving on to Blake.
I think that art comes from the personal experience/worldview/belief system/etc. of the artist who creates it. There is a common belief (at least in our current culture) about the supposed mysticism of artistic creation - an idea that art somehow springs into the world, fully formed, in a magical moment of sheer inspiration and brilliance. I think this makes the idea of applying theory, or indeed perhaps any structure at all, to the creative process distasteful to some and as much as inconceivable to others. Does the belief that this distaste is based on stand up to scrutiny, though? Not at all in my experience.
Whether it’s writing a seminar paper, doing a sketch, taking and editing photos, writing a poem, a story, a song, or a novel, I have never (with one or two notable exceptions) had the “sprung fully-formed” experience when attempting to create art in my life, and I have had variants on this conversation with other people of an artistic bent enough times that I can say there are at least twenty artists whose experience in creating echoes mine and zero (that I know of) who would contradict my claim. Art doesn’t magically happen. Songwriters don’t just create songs out of thin air. Well, unless they just inhale massive amounts of marijuana or cocaine and then strum on a guitar and sing or beat on a guitar and scream (respectively) until something vaguely coherent emerges. But I digress.
Art is work. It’s work based on what you’ve seen, smelled, felt, tasted, heard, loved, hated, dreamt, buried throughout your life. Whether you invoke this consciously or not while creating, I believe this is where the creating comes from. I know I’m taking a bit of wide view of the word “theory” in this regard - not everyone will deconstruct the entire history of poetry/art and its motivations before sitting down to write a poem - but I believe that at the heart of both Blake’s desire to base his poetry on theory and the generic artist’s desire to base his/her creation on his/her own filtered and interpreteted experience is the same larger aim: to give both some kind of form and an essential uniqueness to some level of what’s being created.
In Tuesday’s presentation, the thing that certainly caught my attention the most (other than making the awesome Blake plates) was Jim’s comment regarding Blake’s idea of how to reconcile desire/innocence within a world of law (ideally in such a way that doesn’t involve volcanoes and/or people blowing up): Blake suggests that one channel one’s desire into Work (with the implication being that the highest form of work is, of course, the creation of art). I like this idea a lot because of the way that it immediately characterizes artistic creation as work, the same as one might consider being a bank teller of a composition instructor to be work.
I think it may be possible to say that without this ability to conceive of artistic creation as work (versus, say, seeing it as frolicking under an oak tree with a chapbook until your Muse smacks you upside the head and you wake up with something publishable) and also without the desire to incorporate one’s own theories, experiences, etc. about life into their art, that there can’t be art. It isn’t the pretty words or the nice music that makes something art; it’s the person or people and the lives behind that creation, and if there isn’t any of that behind a creation, it’s going to fall pretty flat.
I just now thought of how, for the last few weeks and especially during orientation, a very popular piece of advice for incoming grad students was that they should write about and study what it is that they’re interested in, and not necessarily what seems the most professionally viable. So there seems to be an undercurrent of support for this idea (whether it’s conscious support or not) of generating your own hierarchy of what’s important, of what’s interesting, and using that to fuel your writing. So maybe creating with a theory in mind isn’t that outlandish of an idea after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment