As far as the definition of creativity is concerned, artists have rarely dealt with it explicitly� Among the vast production of letters, diaries, logbooks, essays, inter-views, quotes and so forth, containing artists’ reflections, very little attention is given to creativity� As an example of both approaches –abundance of written self reflection and lack of reflection on creativity– see the massive volumes of Art in Theory (Harrison & Wood 1998, 2003, Harrison, Wood & Gaiger 2000)� Art-ists prefer talking about their own or other artArt-ists’ creations or about more gen-eral issues of ideology, sociology and philosophy� When Barron and colleagues collected the words of Creators on Creating, selecting mostly artists with a few scientists, psychologists and philosophers, artists did not pay any specific atten-tion to creativity as a subject of enquiry or conversaatten-tion (Barron, Montuori &
Barron 1997)� More recently, Camille Colatosti (2012) has edited a collection of
interviews with contemporary artists on the broad subject of “being an artist”�
Surprisingly, the volume does not find any specific attention to creativity or the role of creativity in learning either�
When our artists are explicitly challenged with defining creativity they warn us about the many different definitions that creativity can have� As designer Rosan Bosch maintains, creativity is “a word that has many meanings”� Theatre director Kirsten Dehlholm also cautions: “Creativity, I’m sure there are many, many ways to describe it� But no, I’d say… you sense it when you are creating”�
The tacit dimension of the artist’s knowledge about creativity is here clear, you know all about it when you are in the process of creating and you know it through the senses� We also read a sort of embarrassment or shyness in approaching such a wide concept as creativity, which, as all fundamental concepts, holds many meanings� An even more nuanced description of creativity’s complexity is to be found in Barba’s interview:
Creativity is not a concept; it is not a one-way definition� It can only be defined in re-lationship to the context� There is a moment or a situation where creativity consists in speaking very much [laughs], and there are situations where you keep silent and you feel an inventive tsunami, taking place within you or among the people involved in the process� There are situations where fantasy and improvisation are creative symptoms�
But if you are a pilot or a surgeon, I don’t think that this sort of creativity will be appreci-ated� I associate creativity with a particular individual characteristic: stubbornness and a personal need towards the obstacles and transform them into unexpected solutions�
Creativity is the ability to operate in negative conditions –tiredness or lack of ideas, financial penury or insufficient knowledge– and not let yourself be suffocated by the adverse circumstances� I associate creativity to tenacity, to the capacity of the individual of not letting the “normal” way of thinking stop him from persisting and persisting�
Here, Barba introduces the notion of context-relatedness that we also find in Hustvedt, when she mentions artistic situatedness: “Art can be situated as a form of dialogue� It is always made for another, an imaginary other� It is a gift to some-one else� The artist is never alsome-one� Even if you are alsome-one in a room composing, painting, building sculptures, or writing a book, you are haunted by the presences of others� You are never alone”� Both artists emphasise the fact that creativity can-not be defined in a void, but needs a context in order to be correctly approached, just as opera singer Nisticò does, making it a question of dialogue and collabora-tion: “collaboration with other people […] is very important, you are never by yourself”� As Barba mentions, the kind of creativity that can function for an artist in a given context is not necessarily the same kind of creativity that we wish or expect from other professions� Different domains embrace different approaches to creativity, for instance we do not expect the surgeon that is operating on us
to be experimenting in the context of a difficult operation� A consequence of Barba’s context-relatedness is that creative tasks should be appropriate to a given context� Dealing with appropriateness or usefulness is what creativity studies find essential to the definition of creativity and which is strictly connected to the function of novelty: without either appropriateness or novelty the creativity formula is not complete� Cropley and Cropley (2010) look at the two conjoint requisites of creativity - novelty and usefulness - and suggest that if novelty and usefulness are to be found separately, other kinds of phenomena arise� Novelty without usefulness should be rather labelled “pseudo-creativity”, and usefulness without creativity should rather be seen as a phenomenon of “quasi-creativity”
(p� 303)� The form of appropriateness that Hustvedt indicates is very specific - artistic creativity is situated in a dialogical context� Later on in the interview she brings up another relevant idea, the fact that creativity is not specific to a domain, for instance, to the artistic one, but can and should be found in other fields: “the sciences are a hugely creative field as well… if you aren’t a creative scientist, I don’t think you are going to get very far”� As mentioned above, this is an active field of discussion within creativity studies and we believe that Hus-tvedt’s statement is very pertinent to it� The fact that an artist herself does not fall in the temptation of labelling creativity as exclusive to the field of the arts, but rather admits the broad scope of creative practices across different domains, is significant of an inclusive view on creativity� According to Bosch “everybody is creative”, the sentence “I am not that creative” is not an option for her, because it is not describing the natural human tendency towards creativity: “you cannot say that somebody is not creative, if you are not creative you will be in terrible trouble as a human being� I believe everybody will always be creative� […] It’s kind of a part of our DNA of being [humans] or our genes, that’s part of being human, being creative� It’s our way of surviving, our way of being”� Intuitively, Bosch hints at the adaptive role and almost ontological dimension of art: it is part of who we are as human beings� However, this statement can be problematic if not followed up by the context-relatedness discussed above: can creativity be detached from context and content? Or rather, as in socio-cultural perspectives, are individuals creative in contexts and with contents, within specific domains?
Going back to Barba’s assertion above, we wish to underline his association of artistic creativity with a state of “stubbornness” and a “need”� This is an oftrecurring notion to be found in Ramsland, to whom creativity is impulse, en-ergy, drive and non-verbal� Nisticò also mentions a need and Hustvedt an “urge”�
Hustvedt describes this as part of an organic and almost living process: “When I sit on a chair and look at the sky in the garden, my internal narrator, the in-ner speech that accompanies me in my daily life, will continue to comment, but
when I am actively gardening, when I pinch and weed and prune, the narrator ceases to speak� It may be my simple absorption in the living world of plants�
I know that if there are cut flowers in a room, my eyes go directly to the blooms”�
Cognition seems here to be embodied and lives by organic processes that can both switch off and on the internal narrator� Life flows in and out and the writer is drawn towards living objects�
But what is this drive or compulsion urging the artists towards?