When Art Happens

6 June 2016 Giacomo Goldoni London College of Communication When Art Happens I cannot recall when the last time was that my imagination offered me something constructive, nor the last it assisted me in any way. I am talking about imagination, not creativity; creativity is something else — something providing us with intermittent glimpses of the outside world in its grand and transcendental wholeness. Science is not able to recount it, the bible cannot either. Art glimpses at it sometimes. Imagination, on the other hand, is the source of all the anxieties mankind can envision. It originates inside us but draws inspiration from the outside world in all its smallness and mundanity. It is when life has made its cycle once again, that I had the sudden and eventual impression there is something that is not being said about the world. This is when I have started questioning the function of imagination in my life. Think about someone who has been blind for life, getting what they call a sight restoration [we see things in such a rooted ocularcentric perspective we are not able to understand how one could live their life without, so we call it restoration]. Think about how this someone has been acquainted for all this time to being in the delicate world of dim lights and discreet, insightful touches. Someone who may have developed a wide dictionary of perceptions us sighted are not in the position to acknowledge, as our language of colours does not allow even the smallest description of it [as we do not have “colours” to portray sounds nor to depict smells; and with this I am to mean the closest possible category to colour that was never developed for the blind’s world]. Think about how this person’s imagination led them to wonder what a sublime thing the world is, according to their touch and feel. We told them it is even better once they would have got to see it with their own eyes. The disappointment they might feel when this happens to become true is limitless. Imagination worked against them, just like it works against someone who has being seeing for all their lives, but has being perception-blind for most of it, us sighted for instance. Because imagination is the fruit of our own thinking, it stays in the box, and never escapes it. It can reach such wide and profound taste of anxiety within its fields of knowledge — the possible — but it cannot provide us with insights into something lying outside our perceptive zone, something we have never experienced. Creativity, instead, is an apparatus that happens to be there every time we would think outside this box. It just happens. Creation comes from somewhere inside the world but outside our sheer understanding of it, imagination from what we think we understand of it. Creativity is uniting and intact, imagination is fragmented and divorcing. 1 6 June 2016 Giacomo Goldoni London College of Communication My concern here is to set up a gap between two concepts, imagination and creativity, that are unfortunately too often mistook for the same thing. I will start to make my way within such distinction by talking about Platonism and Neoplatonism and their conception of the transcendental. I will then jump to the present discussing how creativity is intended nowadays, proposing few ways we think it is possible to reach it and eventually presenting the Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy of what is potential, relating it back to my conception of creativity. It is with an eager gaze that one looks at the era, during the Italian Renaissance of fifteen century, in which prominent individuals such as Lorenzo de’ Medici used to endorse artists and thinkers in order to promote themselves and their ancestries, as well as encouraging the share of fresh creativity and culture within their dominion. During one of these gatherings (the Neoplatonic Academy taking place in a Florentine Medicean villa in 1462) Platonic ideas were explored and further elaborated, making them very influential for Renaissance artists. The rescuing of classics from the Greek and Roman ages was fuelled by the humanist movement at the basis of the Renaissance (Pieranti, 2016, pp. 1-16). Such revisitation of Neoplatonism took inspiration from an already existing analysis of Plato’s texts done after his death by Plotinus. Neoplatonism aspired to revamp Plato’s theory with a Catholic twist. In one sense, it backed up the existence of God by establishing him as the source of platonic ideas — demiurge as originally intended by the philosopher. In his thorough compendium about the notion of imagination evolving within the history of philosophy, Richard Kearney presents Plato as following the Hebraic doctrine in which Adam and Eve were punished for their longing for the creation of a world of their own; break of the law which caused them living on earth (1998, p. 39). In this tradition, God has a central position — the one of dictating what is good and what is not. Mankind’s choice lies in either following God’s plan or not, a decision taking place inside men’s souls (Kearney, 1998, p. 74) but not yet being completely arbitrary as always judged in the terms of God’s design. As Kearney proceeds (1998, p. 82), defining the similarities shared by the Genesis with the Promethean myth, imagination is for Adam and Eve a way of emulating God’s attitude as a creator. Because of its artificial origin, however, imagination ‘can never fully escape the feeling that is merely an imitation of the original act of a divine maker’ (Kearney, 1998, p. 82). It is stressed here how imagination’s influence on mankind is a misleading one and how it has been given a negative connotation since it has ever been talked about. 2 6 June 2016 Giacomo Goldoni London College of Communication Plato’s hostility towards the notion of imagination has its roots in distinct grounds. Just as for the current situation, he found himself in a historic scenario suffering from a profound decadence, being exacerbated from the philosophic practice of Sophists and their rhetoric. The latter consisting in the persuasion of others (Abbagnano and Fornero, 2007, p. 102), or, as argued by the philosopher in his text Gorgia, the persuasion of those who do not have a strong knowledge on topics they are taught about (Abbagnano and Fornero, 2007, p. 107). Plato’s pessimistic view of society and his battle against Sophistic rhetoric brought about his assessment of the mundane world as detrimental. While for the Hebraic tradition, worldly matters are significant inasmuch as they follow the laws of God, Plato specifies that everything belonging to the world as we know it is a particular, in one way corrupted, copy of its double therefore lacking the aura of originality their doubles own, the latter being part of the transcendent realm of forms. In such dimension, forms or ideas are in their purest condition and from them are originated all the particular manifestations existing on earth. Plato envisages ideas as belonging to a structured composition existing from eternity whose aim is the common good or common goal (Abbagnano and Fornero, 2007, p. 113). In fact, there is no explicit reference to God in his texts (Abbagnano and Fornero, 2007, p. 113). Although these were already at the disposal of Renaissance artists and philosophers, their following reading had a religious perspective because it took into consideration Plotinus’ Neoplatonic studies of Plato without making distinctions between the two thinkers (Abbagnano and Fornero, 2007, p. 12). To return to the Florentine milieu of Medicean villas and Neoplatonic gatherings, the illustrious artist Michelangelo Buonarroti, not happy with his education, used to attend Medici’s garden very often; there he could come into direct contact with an extensive collection of classics (Pieranti, 2016, pp. 1-16). Michelangelo embodied the ideal Neoplatonic artist, intended as who makes his destiny on his own but whose fate is also highly influenced by God’s hand (Abbagnano and Fornero, 2007, p. 6-7). This showed in his body of work with his sculptural practice of the not finished. This technique was described by Leon Battista Alberti in De Statua (“On Sculpture”), as peculiar of artists who ‘by removing the superfluous reveal the figure of the man they want which was hidden within a block of marble’ (Alberti, Grayson and Alberti, 1972, p. 121). As a way of example, Schiavo che si ridesta (“Awakening Slave”) [Fig. 1] is one of the six statues destined to the Tomb of Pope Julius II. Both the monumental tomb and the slaves can be considered as partially completed. While the tomb’s unaccomplishment was caused by an unfortunate sequence of events, the statue incompleteness is the result of the not finished application. As for both Alberti and 3 6 June 2016 Giacomo Goldoni London College of Communication Michelangelo, the artist’s duty is to remove the matter so for the transcendental idea to be able to reveal itself, escaping the cage it is imprisoned into and reaching the purest ideal form. The Awakening slave is indeed caught in the dynamic act of escaping the mundane world. It is not a coincidence these statues are called Prisoners - they are Michelangelo’s attempt to liberate what he felt was the world’s deepest inspiration, from the matter that already carried this inspiration in itself as potential. (Fig. 1) Schiavo che si ridesta by Michelangelo Buonarroti 4 6 June 2016 Giacomo Goldoni London College of Communication Where is creativity positioned in the world, then? Perhaps it hides at the end of the night, when things take a distinctive form of hectic, invigorating entirety that cannot be explained the day after. At three o’clock in the morning [study reports this to being the most creative hour in the day] we think in the dark, outside the prudent light usually inhabiting our brains. This sense of togetherness of things keeps growing and infiltrating our minds at night, not functioning under the rigid rules of daylight. You can try to bury such sparks of truth, or deem them as infantile. You can as well let them free to develop while they emerge unexpectedly from somewhere within or outside the world. As for Kearney (1998, p. 104), Plato gives an account on these ‘moments of ecstatic vision’ attributing them to the liver’s ability to ‘mirror divine images’ and ‘come upon truth immediately’ becoming the ‘privileged recipient of divine inspiration’. He follows, ‘they are at all times involuntary and unpredictable — and this in sharp contrast with the playful manipulations of the artist or sophist’ (Kearney, 1998, pp. 104-105). Imagination is indeed a “playful manipulation” of the real world, a remix of it having no quality of novelty to it. Nowadays, people argue that moments of serendipity as these have something to do with chance or are something close to the divine. Both Amy Tan (2008) and Isaac Mizrahi talk in this fashion about creativity in relation to their bodies of work. Tan describes how every now and then she feels she gets helped from the universe, illustrating further with the description of coincidences she comes across when she writes her books (Tan, 2008). Tan cannot explain how sometimes things get together, as if something was driving them (2008). Mizrahi as well believes that most of his design ideas are generated by mistake or come from tricks of his eyes (2008). In fact, sometimes we are provided with ideas by the misjudgment or misinterpretation of a concept. The wrong understanding of it often seems to be directed at finding something else and original. Perhaps, it is creativity hiding behind that concept, hinting in the direction of something else. Perhaps the experience of chance and coincidence is our way to understand the world as preordained and creativity as a glimpse at the transcendental. Additionally, creativity seems to happen more often when the original framework of ideas is taken out of context and liberated to freely create new associations within other fields. As the French director Jean-Luc Godard claims in his filmic self portrait JLG/JLG - autoportrait de décembre (1997), what is created by the spirit lies within the correlation of two things very distant from one another that suddenly clash. ‘The more distant and just the relationships between these realities […] the stronger the image will be’ (JLG/JLG - autoportrait de décembre, 1997). Also, 5 6 June 2016 Giacomo Goldoni London College of Communication Tim Brown (2008) delineates social norms to be the boundaries that adult people automatically set to themselves when asked of creating, especially when they are outside their zone of trust. The solution he presents is to subvert such editing we do of ourselves by acting as quick as possible, having our thinking ‘advanced as a result’ (Brown, 2008). Alternatively, Adam Grant (2016) defines the act of procrastination as functional to creativity inasmuch as it makes possible for the mind to unconsciously elaborate the incubated notion we are after through different “lens”, within a different environment. All this seems to imply that creativity does not depend on something we can ever control. In the society of today, a huge contradiction is reiterated — digital images and cinema are condemned for their fertile production of conundrums of distrust, however, imagination is encouraged to flourish even more so. The American scientist David Bohm (1998, pp. 33-49), in his treatise On Creativity, denounces that the present state of the art lacks any kind of will in giving a serious analysis of the world and is, instead, favourable to an infinite playfulness and stimulation leading nowhere. Similarly, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, referring to cinema, aims for ‘a new poetics that denies imagination as a distortion of the here and now’ (Murray, 2010, p. 92). He wants cinema to be taken out of its illusory space of dogmatic narrative, and to expose itself. The word Dogma from the ancient Greek was to mean “proclaim”, “thought” and “opinion”. Nowadays it is employed to talk about any form of unquestionable doctrine. We can associate it, so to speak, with rules abided by the mainstream cinema. Or we can also think of it as a list of principles, part of a dogmatic framework, as it is for the Danish movement Dogme 95, founded by Thomas Vinterberg and Lars Trier. In 1995 the state of the mainstream cinema was not much different from the stage it is at now — ultimately driven by money and heading towards aesthetics of virtuality and illusion that are often realised for the sake of themselves. As a response, Vinterberg and Trier’s Vow of Chastity aimed at bringing cinema back to a more authentic communication with its audience, denouncing mainstream cinema to have brought its own ‘cosmetics’ to an unbearable point (Trier and Vinterberg, 1995). Despite the goal being accomplished only to little extents in the industry — not counting the many independent’s movies that were created in the name of Dogme 95 and the influences it had pretty much only on the non-mainstream culture — the movement’s dogmatic approach could have helped the production of work outside the norms. Theoretically, as Mette Hjort points out in relation to Dogme 95 creativity or better problem solving could have been highly stimulated by the need to 6 6 June 2016 Giacomo Goldoni London College of Communication escape the rules Vinterberg and Trier set up to themselves (2003, p. 34). Hjort is although sceptical about the project’s final realisation, at least for what it concerns creativity. He believes Dogme 95’s weak points to be its nonfulfillment ‘of the need to make room for the very indeterminacy that makes choice, and hence creativity, possible’ (Hjort and MacKenzie, 2003, p. 35). Creativity cannot arise from rules, whatever the nature of them, nor it can be harvested as a quality, unless it representing a sensitivity to pay attention to creativity. The rules were not only too difficult to be followed but they also impeded creativity’s chance of indeterminacy to manifest. Given these points, we can try to free our sensitivity up to creativity so when it goes past us we are apt to internalise it or, on the other hand, we can nourish creativity by drawing attention away from it, by letting go of things and hoping to see them coming back later in a different anatomy. Within this latter line of thought, in his self portrait Godard compares art to fire, because — just like the phoenix — ‘it is born from what it burns’ (JLG/JLG - autoportrait de décembre, 1997). This hints at the certain level of forgetfulness artists necessitate in order to create. The undesirable antithetical scenario is well explained by Jorge Luis Borges in his short novel Funes el memorioso. In his novella the Argentine writer talks about a man who, by way of an accident, happen to remember every single detail of every single thing surrounding him in every very moment they were perceived. By remembering everything Funes is ‘almost incapable of general, platonic ideas’ (Borges et al., 1994, p. 114). In other words, a dog in a certain position at a certain time for Funes does not represent the same dog of the following second in the very same position (Borges et al., 1994, p. 114). Eventually, by not being able of leaving things behind he is not able to think and make sense of them because the only remembering of each stage will take him all his time. A second insight coming from Godard’s self portrait, is the conception of art to be found in the exception, not in the rule (JLG/JLG - autoportrait de décembre, 1997). With imagination, on the contrary, we need to be aware of it as a product of culture, operating within it and being part of the very process of rational reasoning only applicable to what is known. In this sense, Plato only has a positive portrayal of imagination and images when they are used as an illustration that helps to grasp the real. In Kearney’s words, when images serve ‘as instrumental means for mediating between our sensible experience and our rational intelligence’ but do not represent an end in themselves (Kearney, 1998, pp. 99-100). Accordingly, David Bohm claims imagination to be deceptive at worst and to be ‘conductive to its own pleasure, 7 6 June 2016 Giacomo Goldoni London College of Communication comfort, and superficial satisfaction’ at best, especially when it is employed as an end in itself (Bohm and Nichol, 1998, p. 4). In the analysis of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notions of primary imagination and fancy imagination, Bohm describes the former as a type of creativity whose inspiration does not come directly from perception nor memory, as it is for the latter; fancy imagination is in fact influenced mainly by memory and social conventions, he continues (Bohm and Nichol, 1998, pp. 41-42). However, by the combination or re-mix of things taken from the material world, imagination will never provide with something that is not the exact copy of it. Or else, something being so distant from the world to be deemed unreadable. Let’s take a collage of photographs as an example. There, the so called liberty of expression eventually results in a technical titillation — an overwhelming climax of reality, therefore turning back to the rigidity it was to avoid. To get back to the introductory discourse about blindness, imagination is the reason why, being most of the world’s population sighted, the vocabulary of perceptions beyond vision has never been explored nor expanded within the language of words. Because it stayed still within its box, to put it another way. It is the reason why we are so scared of becoming blind — because imagination would never mutate from its well established position and it would remind us of how mesmerising things were in their visual form, not making us forgetting and appreciating the new one. In fact, the opposite is also true about blind people becoming sighted, as reported by Oliver Sachs in his study of a blind born who had his sight restored. After an initial moment of delight ‘a devastating (and even lethal) depression can ensue’ (Sacks, 1995, p. 131). He continues, ‘it became clear that the opportunities [sight] afforded him were less than he had imagined’ (Sacks, 1995, p. 131) to eventually end up with Virgil — the blind born — overwhelmed by the difficulties in finding a new way of functioning within the world of lights. A month after the restoration, ‘he felt more disabled than he had felt when he was blind’ (Sacks, 1995, p. 114), so that he found a way to go back to his previous state. Imagination is divorcing because it leads to the non-acceptance of the self in its weaknesses conversely leading to wanting a hyper self. Someone we will never be. In darkness blind people can see. So we need to ask ourselves whether we still need to consider them disabled or perhaps understand that they can consider themselves ordinary, as Sachs puts it, and realise that us calling them disabled embodies a proportion of our own fears projected onto them through our imagination. With this in mind, I find myself in agreement with the solution advanced by David Bohm in his monograph on creativity. Particularly, within his conception of art intended as in its Proto-Indo-European etymology of “to join, put together” (Bohm and 8 6 June 2016 Giacomo Goldoni London College of Communication Nichol, 1998, p. 82). Bohm wishes that artists, as well as scientists, could escape their small fields of expertise to try and perceive the world in its totality, for them to develop skills in understanding of ‘how things fit or do not fit’ (Bohm and Nichol, 1998, p. 82). In a world — ours — in which everything we need to know about ourselves seems to be contained inside our DNA, how can we think of creating something new? Perhaps we just need to discover it within what we have, aligning our mind and souls to the noise the world does not produce, the colours it does not manifests, the smells it does not stink of. To align our hearts to the totality of it instead of its fragmented mixture. As Bohm concludes, the act of creative perception ‘must evidently be intrinsically unknown and indefinable, not capable of being attributed to some particular faculty that may be involved in perception’ (Bohm and Nichol, 1998, p. 56). About science and its relation with art, he describes the process of achieving an idea for the scientist as something he ‘may “feel” stirring in him in ways that are difficult or impossible to verbalise […] like very deep and sensitive probes reaching into the unknown’ (Bohm and Nichol, 1998, p. 37). Everything is already there, but just a little bit further than we can grasp. It is potential, but not actual and perhaps this quality of non-actuality is significant to stay as it is for it to arise. In relation to what was previously said about creativity originating from procrastination, it is interesting how it links back to Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy. In Agamben’s essay On Contingency there is a passage in which the Italian philosopher takes the analysis of God’s potentiality in the terms of potentiality and impotentiality Aristotle provided us with, and defines God as someone with unlimited potentiality in himself, but with no potentiality in his will (1999, p. 253). In fact, ‘If God had the potential to be, he could also not be, which would contradict his eternity. On the other hand, if God [was] capable of not wanting what he wants […] then this would be equivalent to introducing a principle of nihilism into God’ (Agamben and HellerRoazen, 1999, p. 253). God’s will is therefore devoid of potentiality because he is only capable of doing what he wants, which is being. Agamben continues describing the act of creation as the act of diving into the nothing from which God created the world, understanding our own impotentiality, then ‘annihilating this Nothing and letting something, from Nothing, be’ (Agamben and Heller-Roazen, 1999, p. 253). In this perspective, mankind has a pure form of potentiality but is capable only insofar lacks in its will (Agamben and Heller-Roazen, 1999, p. 254). Such potentiality of creation from the void is not unaccomplished, quite the opposite, it is the ability of willing nothing, or in Agamben’s eyes the formula of potentiality. We need to want nothing to be able to come out with something. 9 6 June 2016 Giacomo Goldoni London College of Communication Agamben’s metaphor for the condition of impotentiality, or the potential of not seeing in this case, is represented by us closing our eyes, but being still able to distinguish shadows and lights just like the blind (Agamben and Heller-Roazen, 1999, pp. 180-181). Agamben’s legitimate conclusion aims at our acknowledgment of the fact that because we can experience darkness then we know the existence of light in its pure potential. In my own understanding of it, in the moment when we close our eyes to not see, neglecting our potentiality of seeing, something is yet always being seen. The shadows of lights happen to be there because it is impossible for us to perceive nothing. Thus, while God - or whatsoever creation was to happen — they could not choose to either happen or not because in the end they did. Mankind’s potentially has a freed will about its potential fate. This despite our fate being already written as part of the creator’s will and already manifested itself through us. In this regard, Elizabeth Balskus has an interpretation of Agamben’s example of Bartleby the scrivener that leads back to the idea of procrastination, and of letting go of things as crucial for creation. She compares the fact that for Bartleby the best writings would emerge from not wanting to write anything specific, to the piano performance by Glenn Gould. By not playing the piano for long time and thanks to the ‘the skill and technique acquired by not playing’ it, the performance of Bach by Gould would have resulted better than any other (Balskus, 2010, p. 165) in Balskus’s opinion. There is a sense of impotentiality about art and philosophy that I love. Everything can be said and developed within it, changing every single time for each different person. Their understanding is deemed to the potentiality of their not understanding or within the nurture of their wrong understanding [the full grasping of a concept lies often in the missed comprehension of a different one]. I do believe that one day you will get a glimpse of what you are going to write, paint, film or photograph before they will really be there. And suddenly you will understand — because that form of art will be existing outside you, causing you to chase it until it becoming actual in your experience. This essay cannot have a conclusion. I will get to see it, suddenly, at the end. When it will it manifest. My own completion lies already in every word I chose to put after the other, and nowhere within them. This is why I am going to leave it in a potential state. Just as Bartleby, I simply prefer not to 10 6 June 2016 Giacomo Goldoni London College of Communication Reference List: Abbagnano, N. and Fornero, G. (2007) Le Basi del Pensiero: dall’Umanesimo a Hegel. 3rd ed. Milano: Paravia Bruno Mondadori Editori, pp. 6, 7, 12; Abbagnano, N. and Fornero, G. (2007) Le Basi del Pensiero: dalle origini alla Scolastica. Milano: Paravia Bruno Mondadori Editori, pp. 102, 107, 113; Agamben, G. and Heller-Roazen, D. (1999) Potentialities. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, pp. 180, 181, 253, 254; Alberti, L., Grayson, C. and Alberti, L. (1972) On painting and On sculpture. [London]: Phaidon, p. 121; Balskus, E. (2010) Examining Potentiality in the Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Macalester Journal of Philosophy, 19 (1 - Spring), pp.158-180; Bohm, D. and Nichol, L. (1998) On creativity. London: Routledge, pp.4, 33-49, 56, 82; Borges, J., Borges, J., Kerrigan, A., Reid, A., Bonner, A., Temple, H. and Todd, R. (1994) Ficciones. Grove Press, p.114; Brown, T. (May 2008) Serious Play conference - Tales of Creativity and Play [video file] Retrieved from: https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_brown_on_creativity_and_play; Grant, A. (February 2016). 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(February 2008) Where does creativity hide? [video file] Retrieved from: https://www.ted.com/talks/ amy_tan_on_creativity; Trier, L. and Vinterberg, T. (1995) DOGMA 95. [online] Pov.imv.au.dk. Available at: http://pov.imv.au.dk/ Issue_10/section_1/artc1A.html [Accessed 24 May 2016]. 11