With Johnson, we believe that the problem in defining art as language or not
“lies not so much in the idea of music [or art in general] as language, but rather in overly narrow and restricted views of linguistic meaning as involving literal concepts and objective reference that is alleged to be completely independent of the nature of our bodies” (Johnson 2007, p� 260)� Art is meaningful in ways that written and spoken languages cannot be, because it adds to everyday communi-cation a wider, more systematic and purposeful practice of embodied expression of meanings and emotions�
According to Dewey, art, because it is expressive, is language (Dewey 2005)�
Dividing his considerations on expression between the act of expression and the expressive object, Dewey explains expression as a consequence of experience�
Almost in the same terms in which our artists discursively construct the concept of creativity or creation, Dewey explains the rise of experiences as originating from a need -“a hunger and demand” (Dewey 2005, p� 61)- of the interacting features of an individual organism and its environment� From this need, a move-ment outward and forward (impulsion) generates multiple impulses that are spe-cialised and particular, and that incites experiences�
Figure 2. Dewey’s concept of experience.
When they occur, experiences are neutrally charged and are not necessarily transformed into expressions� In order for this to happen, Dewey argues that some preconditions must be present: obstacles to be faced and changes to be achieved� When experience meets obstacles and resistance, individuals have two possibilities� The first one is interpreting obstacles as hindrances that are going to impede all kind of actions and that will allow the insurgence of hostility and irritation� The second one consists in looking at obstacles as “favouring agencies”
(Dewey 2005, p� 61)� In this case, the individual becomes aware of impulsions and of the intent implicit in them, filling one’s agency with purpose and mean-ing� Changes may occur in the transformation of what is old into something new, or better, in Dewian terms, a “re-creation”� Playing with the word’s double meaning of regeneration and leisure, Dewey attributes to the act of re-creation the fundamental role of expressiveness� A double change applies to both new impulsions and old or “stored” ones:
Yet what is evoked is […] transformation of energy into thoughtful action, through assimilation of meanings from the background of past experiences� The junction of the new and old is not a mere composition of forces, but is a re-creation in which the present impulsion gets form and solidity while the old, the “stored,” material is liter-ally revived, given new life and soul through having to meet a new situation (Dewey 2005, p� 63)�
Even though he does not say it explicitly, Dewey regards expression as an inten-tional act� He does not mention the word “inteninten-tionality” that phenomenologists would later be so keen on using with different nuances (Hustvedt 2012a, p� 341), but describes a “conscious” and “on purpose” activity (Dewey 2005, p� 65)� What is more, indispensable preconditions for expression to happen are all voluntary changes: expression only occurs if individuals feel an urge from within arising from interactions with the environment, only if individuals allow a movement outward of the inner impulsions, only if there is an observer who engages in a dialogue with the expressed�
Figure 3. Dewey’s concept of artistic expression.
EXPERIENCE
obstacles resistance
OBSTACLES (nothing happens)
FAVORING AGENCIES
CHANGES (re-creation)
Acts of EXPRESSION
More specifically for the arts, expression through artistic forms demands the necessary presence of a medium, of emotions and of a purpose� Medium is what gives shape and form to the indistinct acts of expressions or impulses� The mere act of discharge is not per se an artistic expression: “only where material is employed as media is there an expression of art” (Dewey 2005, p� 66)� The medium gives form to emotions that are inherent to the act of artistic crea-tion� According to Dewey, “unless there is com-pression nothing is ex-pressed”
(Dewey 2005, p� 69), therefore the act of creation always implies an emotional effort, an “excitement” or an “inner agitation” (Dewey 2005, p� 64) that the indi-vidual negotiates with the environment, either at the source of the experiential process or at the end of the expressive process� What the interviewed artists report as a drive, a need, a necessity, Dewey interprets as the artistic expres-sion of a negotiated demand� The reason for the reported difficulties in defin-ing artistic creativity can be attributed, in Dewey’s terms, to a different way of
thinking that does not merge with the ordinary way of thinking� Artists think in terms of artistic medium� Art is the language they favour and that they have worked –often over many years– to develop and refine� Thinking and commu-nicating artistic processes in logical-verbal terms does not necessarily work for them� According to Dewey, “desires, impulsions and images […] proceed from the subconscious” (Dewey 2005, p� 68), which might be the reason for what some artists describe as not fully conscious: the sources of creative processes
“issue from a self not consciously known” (ibid�)� Whether these processes are conscious or not is still very much debated� According to Weisberg (1993) the unconsciousness of the creative processes should be reconsidered and sepa-rated from the myth of genius that closely relates to it� Dewey agrees with the rejection of the myth of divine inspiration and attributes the myth to the un-graspable element of the expressive process� A third position, beyond rejection or acceptance of the unconscious, seems to be that of Hustvedt: “art requires an artist, and that artist is, or was, a living, breathing human being with an em-bodied self that functions both consciously and unconsciously within a larger world of meanings” (Hustvedt 2012a, pp� 340-341)� Here, both dimensions are acknowledged as part of the artistic creation� According to Niels Rønsholdt
“there is nothing magical in the creative process”, but perhaps, in some cases, something that escapes full consciousness and logical formulation� A similar view is echoed in Kvium:
I’m pretty convinced that Beethoven would not actually be able to formulate his creative process, and I know for sure that even if you sat down as a researcher, a musicologist and found out his entire system from top to toe, Beethoven would probably be amazed by [it], that even if you get sufficiently deep below Beethoven’s way of working, so would music theory never ever be able to create a Beethoven work and in between the two outer points we actually get in a strange way a picture of some of what is called creativity and it is one that is not a rational process�
Kvium calls Beethoven into the debate on creativity, maintaining that neither the great musician nor a musicologist would approach the depth of creation verbally or logically� Finally, theories and conceptualisations do not serve the creative enterprise by creating artistic geniuses, but they might hint at what artistic crea-tivity is, in the dialectic between the unutterable and attempts at explications�
One of the consequences of the conceptualisation of the arts as language is that this language can be learned and therefore taught� As Gardner (1994) has observed “the mastery of any symbolic system takes years” (p� 45)� The symbolic system of the arts is no exception, as some of the artists interviewed for the pre-sent study confirm� How this releases creativity and creative artistic composition will be discussed in the next chapter�
Chapter 3: Artistic process and composition
In order to address the fundamental curiosity that moves the present book, this chapter will bear in mind the following questions: How do artists create? How do the artists themselves narrate the story of their artistic processes? How do they prepare to step into the creative process? Which are the compositional strategies they make use of? The focus of the present chapter will be on artistic creation or composition, where composition is to be understood as finding or shaping form by means of a medium�
Artistic composition is defined differently by the interviewed artists: “diar-rhea with discipline” (Hustvedt), “thinking with body”, “body intelligence”, “non-verbal communication”, “working with the process” (Varley), “sustained hard work” (Kvium), “vomit […] that one cannot control” (Anders Koppel), “dynamic and relational” (Klejs), a compulsive need (“it’s about waiting, as a lion waits for the weak gazelle to attack, it’s a question of life or death, one must wait for that hunger to emerge and be there at the point of no return”, Rønsholdt)�
In the field of creativity studies, artists and artworks have often been investigated as examples of the purposeful creation of novelty (Kaufman & Baer 2005, Connery, John-Steiner & Marjanovic-Shane 2010, Feist 1999, Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi 1976, Locher 2010, Moran & John-Steiner 2003, Weisberg 1993)� Artistic creativ-ity, though, has rarely been given privileged or exclusive consideration, almost as if it were not describable or definable unless in comparison with other kinds of creativity, such as scientific or technological creativity� An advantage of these studies is their wide comparative scope able to embrace the complexity and variety of creative phenomena� Examples of these contributions are Csikszentmihalyi’s and Gardner’s studies on creative individuals ( Csikszentmihalyi 1996, Gardner 1993), which set out to describe creative traits across a multiplicity of domains and contexts� However, few essential studies have focused specifically on artists as creative professionals and the arts� Weisberg’s case studies in artistic creativity are ground-breaking for approaching artistic creativity as a describable phenomenon that can be interpreted by means of analysis of works of art and artists’ composi-tional processes (Weisberg 1993)� Weisberg’s work is also fundamental because it has the purpose of looking at creativity beyond the myth of creativity� Often due
to the artists themselves, who are keen on building grandiose narratives about their persona and their work, this myth survives still today, instrumentally used by the arts and culture industry for the purposes of profit�
The Romantic idea that creativity comes by itself as a gift of talent and genius is challenged by some artists, who cite issues such as craftsmanship, apprentice-ship, slow learning and development� As we have seen in the previous chapter, most of the interviewed artists define artistic creativity as the process of making art in a given context, by means of craftsmanship, emotional and cognitive skills�
Actress Julia Varley clearly states that the artistic process of creation “is hard work” and writer Morten Ramsland openly protests against the Romantic idea of creation: “Well really the most important thing is time� It requires time and space� I believe that the idea that you wait and creativity will come is a bit of a Romantic notion and that a lot of people go around dreaming they are creative somehow only they don’t have the time or the space� Really to be creative requires that you invest time and space in it”� This significant statement introduces some of the points we are about to discuss: artistic creativity is a matter of meaningful voluntary effort of expression and explicit commitment to the process of creation�
Two of the interviewed writers told us that since they were very young they had a tendency towards writing, but where Ramsland’s fascination for the written word risked being dangerously frustrated during his first school years, Hustvedt expe-rienced a positive flourishing of her artistic preferences and felt that writing came easily to her development (“it came easy to me”)� In both cases, writing became a profession only as a consequence of the deliberate decision of embracing “the full catastrophe” (Kabat-Zinn 1990) of artistic creation� Significantly, Sternberg (2003) emphasises the fact that creativity, as linked to development and learning, is to a large extent a matter of decision: “the decision to be creative, the decision of how to be creative, and implementation of these decisions” (p� 91)� The artists’
narratives suggest that, even in the case of very early preferences for a medium, a large part of creation is due to hard work and life-choices� These choices direct the artists’ attention to the progressive building of cognitive, manual, sensory, in some cases relational skills as the outcome of a deliberate resolution�
In this perspective, issues of biological or genetic background become of sec-ondary importance� Visual artist Michael Kvium tells us that he has always been interested in the visual dimensions of things, but he defines creativity as being 90% concentration, not genetic disposition� This might be also due to artistic pride and self-image, of someone working hard for his success, someone who is making his own career� What is meaningful here is the artist’s awareness of this paradigm shift and the emphasis on the artist’s own emotional, psychological and technical skills� This might have direct consequences for the way we look
at creativity as learning and the way we look at artists as inspiration for creative processes� If creativity is not only a matter of biological talent or ability (or of genius), then we should look closely at the elements of this will, the motivation to take the decision to be creative and finally the life-conditions that enhance or support this decision� We suggest that artistic creativity is to be found at the intersection of handicraft, concentration, hard work, continuous practice on the one hand and processes, building of metaphors and extra-ordinary perspectives on the other� In other words, artistic creativity might be a matter of awe (the pun is here intended): Ability, Will, Environment� Both the acronym (A-W-E) and the word awe, intended as amazement, surprise, wonder, well express one of our main findings in the present study�
In the present chapter we will look at these topics by directing our attention to the living narratives of the interviewed artists� These retrospective narratives shed a light on a variety of processes of artistic creation� We have divided these stories in temporal stages that look thematically at what happens before, during and after the artistic interaction with a given medium� We will start by looking at how artists prepare for this meeting� How do they establish a dialogue with materiality and medium?