vision and creativity part 5

[Isaac]

What I'm proposing is that one begin with an all-inclusive definition of what art actually is...

• "Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature."
• "Art gives form to feeling."

The long and the short of it ;-)

[Rob C]

• "Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature."
• "Art gives form to feeling."

The long and the short of it ;-)

But hardly exclusively. The same could be said about a kick in the ass.

I suppose, if it were to come from David Beckham, there woud be those who'd claim it was art...

Rob C

[Isaac]

But hardly exclusively.

Ingrate! Ray asked for "inclusive" not "exclusive".

[Ray]

• "Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature."
• "Art gives form to feeling."

The long and the short of it ;-)

Sounds like a good definition, Isaac. Let's examine it in relation to the following scenarios.

(1) Let's say I have a new house, or an old house which I'm renovating, and I'm pretty excited about painting the walls and choosing a color scheme which pleases me. I decide on a blue ceiling in the living room, suggestive of a clear blue sky. I decide to paint one wall a matte black, and another wall a pale green, and other walls yet a different color.

I'm satisfied with the result. It gives me a degree of pleasure. Now, according to your definition, I've succeeded in objectifying my feeling, and I've even subjectified nature by painting a ceiling the same color as the sky. Therefore, my painted walls could be considered as art. Right?

(2) A professional painter of walls, a tradesman, is dissatisfied with the boring nature of his job. One day, for the thousandth time, he finds himself painting yet another house pale cream. He feels so despondent that he vows to hand in his resignation at the end of the day, but he doesn't have another job to go to. His mental state is distracted. He's not able to do his usual impeccable job. The walls show a few brush marks here and there, and there are patches of the slightly different shades of undercoat that show through the final coat. There are also a few dribbles of paint here and there, which have trickled down the wall. But the painter doesn't give a stuff. He's going to hand in his resignation and he doesn't care whether or not he gets a good reference from his employer because he's not going to seek another job as a house painter. That may be shortsighted of him, but that's another issue.

The point is, his lousy work on this occasion is an expression of his feelings. He has objectified his emotional state of mind. He's created a work of art. Right? 

[Rob C]

Sounds like a good definition, Isaac. Let's examine it in relation to the following scenarios.

(2) A professional painter of walls, a tradesman, is dissatisfied with the boring nature of his job. One day, for the thousandth time, he finds himself painting yet another house pale cream. He feels so despondent that he vows to hand in his resignation at the end of the day, but he doesn't have another job to go to. His mental state is distracted. He's not able to do his usual impeccable job. The walls show a few brush marks here and there, and there are patches of the slightly different shades of undercoat that show through the final coat. There are also a few dribbles of paint here and there, which have trickled down the wall. But the painter doesn't give a stuff. He's going to hand in his resignation and he doesn't care whether or not he gets a good reference from his employer because he's not going to seek another job as a house painter. That may be shortsighted of him, but that's another issue.

The point is, his lousy work on this occasion is an expression of his feelings. He has objectified his emotional state of mind. He's created a work of art. Right?  

Of course he has; I created a series of my own around this very theme. I say it's art so it is art.

Only thing: I didn't have to resign from anything, so maybe that doesn't count.

;-)

Rob C

[dreed]

Part 5 is lacking in cohesion.

It might as well have said "creative people are people too, you know" and left it at that.

There's only one part of it that I see as being related to creativity: "4: Take chances with your work". That's it.

If you give a (young?) child a pile of Lego bricks, will they care what they create? Will it even look like anything? They create it using rules that exist only in some universe that doesn't exist except for inside of their head.

If you give an adult (maybe even 16+) that same pile of Lego bricks, what you will get will be significantly different. That matured mind will produce something based on the world that they live in or know to understand and will not require nearly as much talking or leaps of faith in creativity as that of the younger child.

Look at the drawings that young children do - they often express the world they see in a vastly different way to adults. A picture of a person  may not look like a person at all. They don't understand that when you draw a person that there are rules that should be obeyed and thus just represent the person as they wish.

So my understanding of what it means to be creative in photography is to look at what others do and think "how can I do that differently?". Sure when I'm on vacation, my photographs of some famous thing are going to look mostly like those of others but that's me not trying to be creative. Being creative is going outside on a rainy day in a trench coat with an umbrella in one hand, camera in the other hand and thinking "how can I make this boring road be an interesting subject?". It's going to some "famous" photography location such as Oxbow Bend in Wyoming and producing a photograph that doesn't look like a clone of those already taken. It's using photoshop to change an image from something you captured in real life into something else ("The Makings of Belmont Castle".)

How do you teach that?

Tell an adult that they need to think like a child and forget all of the rules that they've learnt about how the world looks and behaves.

Anyway, they're just my ramblings on this topic to add to the others here that are worth $0.02 or less.

Has anyone ever tried to clone out the light poles (and just the light poles) from an image, leaving just lights (either dark or glowing) floating in the air? (Just a random creative thought.)

[hjulenissen]

So do you produce art as a result of "divine inspiration" and "talent"? Or as a result of discipline, training and analysis? Do you use your right brain or your left brain half? I certainly have seen interviews of authors whose results I admire, to the effect that they dislike the inspiration/alcoholic/hermit myths, rather "write one page today, then go pickup the kids".

-h

[Rob C]

So do you produce art as a result of "divine inspiration" and "talent"? Or as a result of discipline, training and analysis? Do you use your right brain or your left brain half? I certainly have seen interviews of authors whose results I admire, to the effect that they dislike the inspiration/alcoholic/hermit myths, rather "write one page today, then go pickup the kids".

-h

But writing isn't photography: they are vastly different disciplines. A visual artist may be next to illiterate and it make no difference to the quality of his/her visual work and expression.

For example: my wife's grammar and spelling abilities were impeccable, as was her speech and accent. My grammar isn't too bad but my spelling is ever a problem, and I've no idea how I sound - all I know is I can't sing, so God help me and an audience if I ever have the misfortune to have to speak publicly. But, my wife would never write, she wouldn't even text or send E-mails to the kids, telling me with utter conviction that one minute on the telephone would inform her whether they were all right or not, regardless of their actual words. I, on the other hand, always enjoyed putting pen to paper and would avoid telephone conversations whenever possible. I still do.

Photography and writing for me, in amateur mode, have nothing to do with planning and/or previsualisation of anything: it's all about instant reaction to some stimulus that triggers me off. That's where the old question of that now (in these pages) notorious Terence Donovan quotation comes up: it's very, very difficult to plan anything ahead - with no schedule forced upon one, it all depends on reaction to external inputs.

I guess it might take dedicated street shooters to see the point for what it is.

Rob C

[Manoli]

... t's all about instant reaction to some stimulus that triggers me off. That's where the old question of that now (in these pages) notorious Terence Donovan quotation comes up ...

Careful Rob, that's a 'red rag to a bull' topic.
And, in the context of this thread, was it not Donovan who eschewed the notion of photography as art ? " Craftsmen, yes. Artistry, no. "

[Isaac]

The point is, his lousy work on this occasion is an expression of his feelings. He has objectified his emotional state of mind. He's created a work of art. Right?

Wrong ;-)

His lousy work is the result of his feelings, not an expression of his feelings.

He was just trying to paint the walls and did a sloppy job; he wasn't trying to "give form to feelings" at all.

[dreed]

So do you produce art as a result of "divine inspiration" and "talent"? Or as a result of discipline, training and analysis? Do you use your right brain or your left brain half? I certainly have seen interviews of authors whose results I admire, to the effect that they dislike the inspiration/alcoholic/hermit myths, rather "write one page today, then go pickup the kids".

Why can't you produce art as a result of any/all of the above and more?

[Isaac]

Photography and writing for me, in amateur mode, have nothing to do with planning and/or previsualisation of anything: it's all about instant reaction to some stimulus that triggers me off.

So what you saw and reacted to today doesn't influence how and where you'll look tomorrow?

[Rob C]

So what you saw and reacted to today doesn't influence how and where you'll look tomorrow?

Influence is something else; it's a part of you that slips into second gear to the level that it's only there in your subconscious - you don't refer to it at the time of the new challenge - I hate writing challenge - art isn't challenge, it's fulfillment.

If you consciously refer backwards - how else? - then you end up repeating yourself into infinity. It happens a lot to photographers and, it seems, to musicians too.

It becomes comfortable.

Rob C

[Isaac]

Influence is something else...

What you saw and reacted to today can be the straightforward conscious reason for where you plan to be and what you plan to look for tomorrow.

You work the idea until you're done with it.

[daws]

Through most of history, the people who made art never thought of themselves as making art. In fact it’s quite presumable that art was being made long before the rise of consciousness, long before the pronoun “I” was ever employed. The painters of caves, quite apart from not thinking of themselves as artists, probably never thought of themselves at all.

What this suggests, among other things, is that the current view equating art with “self-expression” reveals more a contemporary bias in our thinking than an underlying trait of the medium. Even the separation of art from craft is largely a post-Renaissance concept, and more recent still is the notion that art transcends what you do, and represents what you are. In the past few centuries Western art has moved from unsigned tableaus of orthodox religious scenes to one-person displays of personal cosmologies. “Artist” has gradually become a form of identity which (as every artist knows) often carries with it as many drawbacks as benefits. Consider that if artist equals self, then when (inevitably) you make flawed art, you are a flawed person, and when (worse yet) you make no art, you are no person at all! It seems far healthier to sidestep that vicious spiral by accepting many paths to successful artmaking -- from reclusive to flamboyant, intuitive to intellectual, folk art to fine art. One of those paths is yours.

- David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

[Ray]

Wrong ;-)

His lousy work is the result of his feelings, not an expression of his feelings.

He was just trying to paint the walls and did a sloppy job; he wasn't trying to "give form to feelings" at all.

I see. So you're making a distinction between a deliberate, conscious attempt to give form to one's feelings, as opposed to a situation where one's true feelings might just leak out despite a half-hearted attempt to do a regular and conventional job.

For example, if the house painter had decided to let it all hang out, and instead of even attempting to do his regular work, had dipped his brush several times into whatever cans of paint were open and, in a fit of fury, splattered the paint over the walls several times, then that would be art. Right? 

I see a problem here in needing to know the personal details relating to the execution of a particular work, in order to determine if the work is art. Suppose that a number of people consider a particular, semi-abstract photo to be a work of art because they like the relationships between the OoF shapes and the general sort of eerie pattern which seems quite unusual and original. The photo sells for a good price, and the photographer reveals during an interview that the photo was in fact an accident. As he was walking through the rainforest, the shutter accidentally tripped.

Does the buyer now claim his money back on the grounds he has been deceived into thinking the photo was a deliberate expression of the photographer's feelings, and therefore 'art' according to Isaac's definition? 

[leeonmaui]

Aloha,

Vision and creativity part 5 or Everything you guys say is true, even if its not.

The older I get the more everything looks like art to me, I was in my bathroom the other day, a pile of clothes, was next to the clothes hamper, I noticed the textures and colors in the pile, laid down randomly in accordance with a daily sequence and some gravitational law. It occurred to me it was a very personal  grouping, and that it represented in some fashion (no pun intended) a bit of me, I got a camera out and played around a bit; on a self portrait of sorts. While I was working I was thinking of how different piles of accumulated clothes could represent different people, with different jobs or tastes or whatnot, and you could guess or contemplate on that person from the vantage of just what they had in their laundry that week. Would a perfect portfolio of these images hung just so in a fancy gallery be art? Or more suitable as imagery for a tide advertizing campaign; Tide! what's in your laundry!

 And of course the next portfolio would be 40 x 60 inch photos of peoples garbage, after all; you are what you eat.... 

[hjulenissen]

But writing isn't photography: they are vastly different disciplines. A visual artist may be next to illiterate and it make no difference to the quality of his/her visual work and expression.

I am not suggesting that the practical craftmanship (such as litteracy) needed for writing are similar to those needed in photography. I am suggesting that the "process" of creating art may be similar across different kinds of art.

Perhaps a photographer needs to pick up the camera every day, decide to make at least one good photography and be over it (similar to the writer in my example) instead of pondering over philosophical divine inspiration thingies.

-h

[hjulenissen]

Why can't you produce art as a result of any/all of the above and more?

Me myself, I am not much of an artist. That probably explains why I do not produce much in the way of art. I do strive to produce images that I (and occasionally those around me) find "pretty" or "interesting".

-h

[Rob C]

Me myself, I am not much of an artist. That probably explains why I do not produce much in the way of art. I do strive to produce images that I (and occasionally those around me) find "pretty" or "interesting".

-h

That judgement I leave to you, but on the basis that what you just wrote is true, then it underl¡nes the fact that some people are born artists and others not, because different people can make pictures every day of their lives and get nowhere, but others find that each time they do it, they get something worthwhile. Now, is that a display of natural ability as artist or luck? I think it indicates born artists.

And then it's the matter of judgement. Whose matters? I think that in the end, the voice that matters is inevitably your own. When you discover you have done something that pleases you, and manage to do so time after time, then I think you have, in essence, discovered your own particular gamut of satisfaction and self-expression. And unless you are in it for the money, nothing else matters at all. Why should it? I suppose that now I think abut it, that's one of the reasons that I feel so glum about guru-disciples: they, the gurus, can't be you and neither can you be they.

With reference to your other post about a shot a day keeping the urge at bay: are you describing the work ethic of the hack?

Rob C