Beyond the metaphor of dialogue, the interviewed artists actively practice their creativity in relational and dialogical forms� This means, concretely, that artists create while talking to someone or having their recipient in mind during the process� Siri Hustvedt talks about a continuous dialogue among artists that can unfold in already existing frameworks or at a more imaginative level� The artistic role models that inspire artists, in Hustvedt’s case the books or paintings that have been meaningful to her, contribute to establishing an ongoing conversation with a given tradition, with a domain, with a group of peers� However, artists need a wall to play against and this can be a real recipient, someone that gives feedback and can be trusted� Hustvedt mentions her husband, fellow-writer Paul Auster, who happens to be her ideal recipient and active help in her process of writing� The ideal reader is a basic concept of literary criticism (DeMaria 1978), and is foreshadowed in Barba’s archetypes of audiences, which will be discussed further on� What is imperative to emphasise here is the artists’ awareness of the artistic field as a dialogic partner and their active choices in the process of artistic composition� Barba, for instance, is very attentive to establishing collaborations with other artists and partnering with scholars in the field of theatre and perfor-mance, in order “to take into consideration how the environment in which you work looks at your profession”�
During the slow and careful sedimentation required by artistic creativity, re-cipients are present in several forms� Artists express it differently: from the indis-tinct “someone” (Nisticò, Nord) to more elaborated description, when artists tell us that they talk to an audience (The Mira Quartet, Benjamin Koppel: “there is no music without audience”) that gives the work of art more meaning (Valeur)�
Olesen says that “in reality it’s the audience we want to tell stories to”, while other artists in other situations might want to engage in a conversation with them-selves or with society at large� The most important point is that the process of creation needs both the presence of recipients and their absence� We find clear signs of an ambivalent relationship to recipients - on the one hand, artists need their presence, but on the other, they need to establish what we could call an in-duced absence� The interviewed artists include recipients in their artistic project, no matter how wide or narrow the audience involvement, as Barba’s “most re-fined artistic experiment for only 20 spectators” confirms� At the same time, they must suspend their awareness of composing for a recipient if they want to be free of critical judgment� Ramsland writes and Nord draws as if recipients where not there� This means that, while composing, artists try to suspend issues of recep-tion or recognirecep-tion as much as possible� Benjamin Koppel says that jazz musi-cians focus on their instrument and what comes out of it� They carefully listen to their instrument and not only to “what one imagines the final result should be”�
They concentrate on what is here and now - the dialogue with the medium and with an ideal recipient� Attention to the final product, to its actual reception and even issues of public recognition are put on stand-by� Hustvedt tries not to walk the “slippery slope of recognition” and Anders Koppel mentions the anxiety that recognition can give to a performer: “the same applies to rehearsals� If you only see yourself at Carnegie Hall next week, playing there […] then everything goes completely into spasms”� In her study on writers, Perry finds that they are able to manipulate the presence of the reader in the creative process, inviting real or fic-tive readers into their creafic-tive flow when the timing is appropriate (2005, p� 34)�
One more issue is raised by some artists (Ramsland, Hustvedt, Varley): the fact that sharing works of art with others can be a sensitive matter if this happens too early in the process of making� Kvium defines it a sort of shyness or modesty in throwing oneself into such a task where one actually is exposed as an individual, because artists put something of themselves in the work and this can be “a very fragile construction”� Works of art should not be shared too early, they are fragile (Ramsland) and their makers are “sensitive about their own work” (Hustvedt)�
Therefore, they not only carefully choose who is going to give them feedback amongst their most trusted peers, but also they choose the timing for this to hap-pen in the most giving way� Kvium describes the paradox implicit in dialogues
with critiques, either inner criticism, or fictive or even real critics and arguments on what is dangerous during the creative process: vanity and too much apprecia-tion� If artists choose to get criticism from someone who is too much like them-selves or too positively affected by the work of art, then they will miss out on the necessary resistance, in order to challenge solutions and achieve learning�
Vanity is not healthy in the creative process� In the creative process one must actually de-mean oneself, so one has to be as neutral as possible and one needs to have as few appre-ciative voices entering the creative process as possible� Because otherwise there is great danger that in some way [the process] is disturbed� And I’m quite sure that you have to take a whole lot with you into the workshop, fictional characters, but if you choose a lot of fictional characters that in some way are related to yourself, then you get nothing out of it� So you have to actually have some critics in� You have to have some artists, for example, in my case, creating a work that is at least as powerful, but can be quite differ-ent, because they are the ones who can formulate questions asking you to justify your [choices]� So you have to defend a thesis� Then you should really also defend each work, and above all to yourself� Does this work well enough? Does it create enough room for me? Is it interesting even for me now that I am finished? Do I want to look at this?
If the answers to these questions are too easy or the investigation is resolved too easily, then Kvium maintains that there is no point in bringing the artwork out of the workshop� It will not be challenging enough, either for the artist himself or for the audience, be they general public or peers within the arts� The latter, in his opinion, can be distant artists, even dead ones, with whom one engages in a qualitative conversation about the artwork� The voices of these models must be invited into the artist’s workshop in order to qualify and challenge the act of creation and bend it towards unexpected directions� The act of creation is often described as a movement from the inside to the outside (Hustvedt) or introvert/
extrovert (Nord, Ramsland)� The fact that this can be therapeutic or cathartic (Hustvedt) does not exclude attention to the audience’s experience (The Mira Quartet, Ramsland) and the overall function of the artistic product� This leads us to the topic of the artworks’ impact on the “outside” and the purpose of art, as perceived by the artists�
According to Ramsland the purpose of art is “to confront”, “to bring forward”�
For Kvium it is the getting rid of feelings and the “re-writing” of new societal rules, new cultural values or even a new understanding of art itself� Valeur con-ceptualises it as a fight, a striving for perfection, or as a seduction (“the audience must be seduced”) and Dehlholm as the hope of stimulating the audience’s curi-osity� Some artists, finally, perceive the arts as a commitment to “something big-ger than oneself” (Valeur)� Designer Rosan Bosch clearly states: “I want to use my creative abilities to actually create a more engaging, motivating world”� She is not
alone in this almost political sense of agency� Her former collaborator, designer Rune Fjord, underlines the alternative values that artistic creativity brings about:
“to make room for the creative process, I think it just creates a richer world […]� In the end it is not all about economic growth� So when faced with the last day of my life, then it’s some other things that count”� With a similar rhetoric, writer Michael Valeur expressly labels his purpose as almost political: “I make almost political literature, sometimes in between where I want to go out and change the world”�
All the above topics contribute in sketching the stage of artistic creation that con-cludes the act of making and deals with the artworks’ life outside the workshop or studio, as the artists perceive it� One fundamental element of this stage is the artist’s understanding of the artworks outreach from the workshop or studio to their recipients� The artwork’s establishment of emotional and intellectual rela-tionships with recipients brings up the broader topic of emotions within artistic processes� We will now look at the emotional and cognitive implications of ar-tistic composition� What emotional journey is implied in the act of arar-tistic crea-tion? How do artists navigate through thoughts and feelings?