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ART AND CREATIVITY Reading:
Rilke is one of the most famous German poets. He lived from 1875 to 1926 and wrote this in 1902: "You ask if your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others. You send them to magazines. You compare them to other poems, you get upset when certain publications turn down your attempts. Now, (since you have charged me to give you advice), I beg you, give up all that. You are looking to the outside, and that above all is something you should not do. No one can advise you and help you, no one. There is only one way. Go inside yourself. Explore the reason that makes you write, Test if it reaches its roots into the deepest part of your heart, establish if you would have to die if it you were forbidden to write. This above all else, ask yourself, in the darkest hour of your darkest night, must I write? " Meditation:
This is about the main character, a teacher by the name of Josef Knecht: "He looked at the clock. In an hour he had to face
a class. He decided to devote the next hour to meditation, and went into
the quiet Magister¹s garden. On his way a line of verse suddenly
sprang into his mind. Message: Art and Creativity I¹ve been asked to prepare a message on the subject of Art & Creativity: How and why do people create works of art? How does a person get started and what makes a person keep on with it? I don¹t think creativity is in any way the sole property of endeavors in what are formally called ‘the Arts‘: Everyday life requires as much creativity as one can possibly bring to it . I started to try to line up a group of people to speak on this topic., as part of a truly Unitarian, free and responsible search for truth and meaning, as stated in our principles, but I have let everyone else off the hook this time because I felt compelled to speak about two books that I found to be especially eloquent about art and creativity. Letters to Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke and The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse . My qualifications to speak on this subject include an undergraduate degree from Antioch College in Studio Art & Printmaking. After that I worked in a lithography print shop, then at quick copy and paste-up for offset printing. I studied painting and drawing at the Boston Museum School and eventually got an MFA in painting from the University of Washington in Seattle. My paintings and drawings have been in exhibitions and galleries. I have sold about 30 paintings, drawings and prints, so far, and completed several site-specific commissions. Currently I have paintings on exhibit at the Beaufort Fine Arts Gallery in Beaufort. I worked for about 12 years as a graphic designer and illustrator. Now I am in another line of work that I find very challenging, stimulating and rewarding -- that is teaching art at Newport Elementary School! To explain why I found a guide to life that worked for me, and words to express thoughts and ideas about art, in two German literary works, I’d like to describe how I grew up. My Dad was a professor of romance Languages who became a cultural officer in the US Foreign Service. Although his languages were French, Russian, Turkish and Spanish he was assigned to Germany twice. As a student and teacher of language he saw a wonderful opportunity for my twin brother and me to learn language by immersion. I ended up spending 6th, 7th, 8th and part of 9th grade in a German Gymnasium in Heidelberg, 10th grade in a French-speaking Lycee in Kinshasa, Congo, and 11th grade in another German school in Bremen, Germany. My childhood and school years were dominated by words. The alienation my brother and I experienced at school as we learned German was mitigated by having a very secure and interesting family life, and, for me, by reading great books--in English! World literature, not the bible, has been my spiritual guide and friend. I think I was strongly influenced in what I read by my dad. My dad had a big influence on me in another way. His job as a cultural officer was something that he regarded as a mission that my mother and us kids shared in, a mission to bring peace and understanding among nations through culture. His job involved running an American Library, lecturing on American writers and other topics, promoting a stream of American musical performers and intellectual lecturers on government-sponsored tours, and being a sociable American witness to local culture. I have not lost the belief he instilled in me that cultural life is central to all human life and sharing cultural things will bring peace and understanding to people. When I returned to the USA for my senior year of high school and college and found German writers like Rilke and Hesse on the reading lists for art and literature courses, it is not surprising that they especially resonated with me. Rainer Maria Rilke¹s advice to the young poet was important to me in that complicated time of life at the end of high school. Some young people seem to effortlessly find themselves on career paths, perhaps forced by circumstance, or perhaps by some special gift, but many have to forge a path, they have an opportunity to make choices. I planned to go to college and study either writing or art and somehow make a cultural life for myself. That still left me with choices to make. The study of art began with making art, and I ended up just staying on that track instead of committing to more practical applications such as art education, art history, museum studies, graphic design, etc, probably partly due to these lines by Rilke: Ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night, must I write? … if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “ I must” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then you will be near to being natural. Then try, like the first human, to say what you see and experience and love and lose. The stillest hour of your night…. Could mean late at night, could be a metaphor for a time when you are alone and concentrating, or it could be metaphor for an emotional low point in one’s life. In which case one is given an opportunity to turn sad thoughts into a constructive purpose, use that time to examine deeply your own ideas and motivation. Rilke writes that a work of art is good if it springs from necessity. That necessity does not have to be an outside force, it can be something you manufacture. An obvious example is: you take a class, then you suddenly need to get an assignment done, next, you can think think up assignments for yourself…. Some souls may be naturally driven to make art, some may study and work to create that drive, either way can be effective, and either way leads to the other. I think his advice to the young poet is still an inspiring read today. His recommendations about how to know your self are clear and effective. There’s more ..but… Now I would like to describe this other book, The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. Hesse lived from 1877 to 1962 and he is not so obscure but that another book by him, Siddhartha, which essentially tells the story of Buddha, was on the reading list for an 11th grade literature class at Croatan High School. The Glass Bead Game was first published in Switzerland in 1943. Here is the description from the inside front cover “….Something like chess but far more intricate, the … Glass Bead Game, is thought in its purest form, a synthesis through which philosophy, art, music and scientific law are appreciated simultaneously. The scholar-players are isolated within Castalia, an autonomous elite institution devoted wholly to the mind and the imagination. Part romance, part philosophical tract, part futuristic utopian fantasy, its theme is one that preoccupied Hesse earlier, the conflict between, and the need to synthesize, thought and action, intellect and flesh. “ The book is set in the future. There are some interesting passages where the present day is described as ancient history. The Glass Bead Game is supported by the government. Each year a public game is held which is major entertainment for everyone. In addition to maintaining the game, Castalia also trains teachers for regular schools and allows some non-Castalian students to study at their schools. The Glass Bead Game players eventually commit to celibacy and poverty. They live their whole lives in the Castalian system, devoting themselves to the life of the spirit and intellect.
I think this is one reason I found this book to be especially inspiring; Hesse makes the game seem really real, vital and important but never describes it exactly, so you, the reader, form your own personal picture of it. In this passage the main character, Josef Knecht, who eventually becomes the Glass Bead Game Master writes about the game (p. 103-104): “Some years later he told his friend and later assistant, Fritz Tegularius (who had , at school, taken the review course along with him), of an experience, which not only decided his destiny as a Glass Bead Game player, but also greatly influenced the course of his studies. The letter is extant. The passage runs: ³Let me remind you of the time the two of us, assigned to the same group, were so eagerly working on our first sketches for glass bead games. Do you recall a certain day and a certain game? Our group leader had given us various suggestions and proposed all sorts of themes for us to choose from. We had just arrived at the delicate transition from astronomy, mathematics and physics to the sciences of language and history, and the leader was a virtuoso in the art of setting traps for eager beginners like us and luring us on to the thin ice of impermissible abstractions and analogies. He would slip into our hands tempting baubles taken from etymology and comparative linguistics, and enjoyed seeing us grab them and come to grief. We counted Greek quantities until we were worn out, only to feel the rug pulled out from under us when he suddenly confronted us with the possibility, in fact the necessity, of accentual instead of quantitative scansion, and so on. ³ Now, I was following along there, but I didn¹t understand that last bit about “Greek quantities” and “accentual or quantitative scansion.” I think that’s the point, it’s sort of a literary trick, the author stimulates you to complete the idea from your own imagination. Hesse describes the students ‘sketching’ their plans. One tries to imagine what those sketches might look like. Later in the letter Josef Knecht says: I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate the spirit of the game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments and proofs, but into the very center, the mystery, the innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created. I found this book to be full of wisdom about creativity, meditation, scholarship and life in general. Scholarship, which can be taken more generally to mean simply curiosity and learning, not necessarily taking place just in schools, is definitely a key element . In art that would begin with learning to use materials and tools, learning techniques of drawing and other techniques. With the learning comes ideas, the more stuff learned, the more ideas. After that, learning to analyze and manipulate the formal elements of art: composition, color, line quality and reference, leads to endless possible combinations of ideas. It’s a relief to imagine that some of the ideas of art that are so paradoxical now will one day all be resolved in a Great Glass Bead Game in the future. I understand the plurality and paradoxes in the world of art by thinking of them as elements of the Glass Bead Game. I have here two pictures to demonstrate what I mean . The first is by Agnes Martin. I like her work a lot,
though it is by no means my favorite or something I think about very much.
I guess I chose it for today because it is very clearly related to meditation.
She was born in Canada in 1912, lived in the U.S until her death in 2004.
Hers is an example of what is called conceptual and/or minimalist art.
In this book you can read 20 pages before you get to the pictures. Here
is a picture of one of her works that looks like a Glass Bead game. Some people might say, “ What’s so great about her?Anyone one could make that.” To that I say, “Go ahead! Make something like that and try to get into the collections of the major museums of the world.” How did she do it? She created the body of work and also created this whole aura around it. She was able to show the work at the right time and place to those who recognized its deep appeal. It was a like move, or play, or element in the Glass Bead Game. The story of her monastic sojourns in the New Mexican dessert, the meditation and care that goes into the preparation of the surface and then the making of the marks, -she draws her straight lines without a straight edge or measuring,- that story got connected to these works. I suspect it is somehow visible in the works themselves, though I can’t really say how. I do know I would like to be in the presence of one of her paintings for a few hours and see. This second picture is by an artist named Guy Peellaert. It appeared in this book called Rock Dreams published in 1973. On the cover you see Elvis, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and David Bowie lined up at a lunch counter together. (This was way before the days of Photoshop, by the way, so these are probably mat-knife cut , hand-collaged, hand-painted, air-brushed and re-photographed images.) I had to look at the cover to remember this artist’s name. When this book came out the appeal of these pictures was magnetic to me and many others. It was as if complicated, shifting images related to music that I had only vaguely imagined in my own personal mind’s eye had become real on the page. This one picture was seared into my brain and actually hurt my feelings quite a bit. The caption states it is a portrait of British rock star Donovan, subtitled ‘Fool on the Hill,’ the title of a Beatles song. I identified strongly with this picture. The idealistic, effete, romantic artiste sits on the hillside holding a flower, with a look of cathartic inspiration on his face, only the hill, when you look at it, is actually a disgusting garbage dump. It all looks so sad, seedy and ridiculous…. And yet . . .well, it¹s just a picture, …I’m impressed that the picture had so much power to make a person think and feel and attach itself so strongly and personally to a life for all these years. Visual Art is a form of communication and expression. It can be a complex inquiry into the nature of existence, a simple command to buy a product, a silly entertainment or an infinite number of other things. There is so much to learn about it, these two books, these two artists, are a small part. In closing ‘I’ll read a few last lines from the Glass Bead Game where Josef Knecht writes to his beloved music master about becoming a teacher and how he thinks he finally understands the meaning of the Glass Bead Game. The music master writes back: “To be candid, I myself, for example, have never in my life said a word to my pupils about the meaning of music; if there is one, it does not need my explanations. On the other hand I have always made a point of having my pupils count their eighths and sixteenths nicely. ‘ End Closing Words: By Shakespeare, From Midsummer Night’s Dream, spoken by, Puck, the sprite. At the end of the play If we shadows have offended, |