DATE: 02/27/2008 08:41:02 / MOOD: other
Life is like an onion. How true, how true.
Creativity is like an onion, only more so.
There's a layer (children's drawings, "child-like" awareness, outsider art?) where
everything if fresh, raw, direct.
There's a big fat layer of "art school" or "you're talented!" where that first creative impulse
was (mis)directed toward "things people like to look at" (i.e. portraits, landscapes, etc.)
Not
that there's anything wrong with representation. What's "wrong" (if
anything) is that a sort of generic creativity kicks in... people
(paint) what looks like a "painting" to them. That process is not
particularly creative, it's more social. They want to paint things that
people around them
identify as paintings.
Another layer of this is the "viral cool" version of that. If the individual described above is
your
classic nerd in watercolor class (pictured as a suburban mom in say
"Art School Confidential") this person is your "cool" artist. They are
full of contemporary themes and content -- ecology, anti-war, graffiti,
Internet worship, gaming, tattoos, anti-establishment, etc. SOMETIMES
this kind of inspiration (when married with a stubborn "inner brat" for
instance) can yield personal work that transcends the contradictory
desire of its creator to be both cutting edge (identifiable as cutting
edge is oxymoronic) and original. In other words, if the creator is
"cool" enough they could do almost anything, work that might even be
"uncool".
A good
example of this is Miranda July. Her persona is "queer" (not in a
sexual sense)... the weird girl in the back of the room... a modern
Emily Dickinson. However, she's putting on that she's uncool. Anyone
with "performance art" on their resume is cool (now she's got it all
novels, films, etc.) She's faux-uncool, and it MAY be genuine, like a
smart outsider artist, we might be getting access to that "raw"
childlike creativitity. But then, probably lots of people by now are
copying her--are they getting to that level of creativity? Probably not.
View Entry 
