Art as a part of cultural theory and praxis only begins to become objective, when it starts to influence and change the imagination of the receiver. It can begin in a small way, but can become ever larger if it proceeds to snow ball and transforms people’s ways of seeing, thinking and feeling, etc and to evoke or establish different types of mutations and transformation of desire, identity and wish fulfilment etc in the creation of these counter worlds.
A Multicultural aesthetic for example will wish to change or reinforce some aspect of cross cultural desire, identity and wish fulfilment etc. It could start with something as basic as sexual curiosity about other races and could end in a greater welcoming of human friendliness, understanding and a growth of empathy across the cultural divide.
Within creativity, the individual ‘I’ also becomes the prime mover of everything as he or she creates imaginative illusions and illuminations that can be world challenging. To begin to draw or sketch is to place oneself like a conductor at the centre of your own kind of orchestra in a unique universe. Your persona can become that of the king of all you survey. As captain or conductor of your ship, team or symphony you can play god as you MAKE YOUR WORLD. Your persona can be that of lover, rebel, conserver, charmer, prophet, prince or princess, the stranger, narker, revenge figure, conscience, etc.
This is the power of creativity to use the facility of play-acting and innovation with our inner selves and aspire to personalise the whole world within our imagination. This is a kind of liberation, as it brings with it an awareness of essential inner causality.
We all need a wide choice of ideological navigating tools within culture to find our way through a thick bushland of various, social, cultural and political and conservative ideological assumptions, which surround us.
Below, I’ve listed some of my aims as a militant and radical Humanist and unorthodox Marxist. They are a source of stimulation and are my criterion for judging stages of creativity and are not meant to be followed dogmatically. They are suggestive signposts. Developing a mature intuition as well as deep theoretical insights is important for orchestrating all aspects of artistic creativity.
On Ideas and How To Use Them Creatively.
On my aims
- To create a hybrid cross cultural vision that moves between western and eastern culture. This must examine new and old personas, conceits, narratives, story telling, myths, images, etc. This cross over should also attempt to merge the best of both Eastern and Western cultural worlds in an important new synthesis.
- To try to use the freshness of this vision with new and old and appropriate language.
- It must also address the issues and themes of desire, identity, wish fulfilment, fantasy, etc, on conceptual and emotion levels.
- Within the art works the process should strive to show what Peter Fuller called ‘moments of becoming.’
- To also read ‘being anew’ as George Steiner suggests is the hallmark of important cultural models.’ ‘Being’ means the real, concrete, structure of life, nature and reality, which exists out there independent of concepts. This is the strange ‘thingness’ of life and its enigmatic processes that is helped and obscured by philosophical presumptions to also attempt to transform these ‘things in themselves’ into anthropocentric ‘things for us ’via a personalisation process. To pursue the aim that nothing human is alien to us. A highly humanised vision spontaneously condemns a society where people are divided between who they ‘are,’ and who they could have ‘become’ with richer inner lives.
- To also keep a critical distance from one’s own creativity. To apply ‘tough love’ in assessing ones creative efforts, learn to practice patience and waiting when it comes to creating qualitative presence from amorphous fantasies. If you train your memory well then these creative answers will seek you out at select moments of your life and make their own suggestions. Memory and even dreams will seek you out and talk to you through your creativity.
- As John Berger suggests to remind the viewer what it means to be human by mainly emphasising essentials, or important things in life; what they might have forgotten, when standing before the art work. Reading the book, listening to music, or watching a DVD video, etc. You must tap into the imaginative areas of important human presences that your audience has temporarily forgotten. Just as when listening to a great phrase of music, they must shout ‘yes’ inside their imagination ‘yes, that’s it.’
- To show ‘the pleasure of the possibility of change in all things’ that was the unfulfilled aim of Bert Brecht. As a forgotten part of a radical Marxist aspect of aesthetics that was lost with Stalinism, etc. This pleasure should also contain ‘complex seeing’ and ‘complex feeling’ as advocated by the great German poet and playwright.
- We must also respect intuition. We must wait and prepare ourselves for the arrival of a cultural presence that fits our level of maturity at the time. We cannot deal ideologically and artistically with a subject unless we have fully internalised it from many angles. Great talent also needs a heightened form of a unique memory as well as skill. Train your memory to recall the affective mechanics of desire, identity, wishes etc, in your own way.
- Treat all the above as playful creative experiments. Watch yourself observe yourself and memorize the results. Train your memory to make discoveries about the essential human condition.Watch people closely. This is the secret of Shakespeare’s creative methodology and remember that it doesn’t matter if you fail, you will still gain some insight into how yours and others inner being functions. But if all of the guide lines function correctly then you will create a kind of art that processes the energy of life itself and it may develop a quality of enchantment and even magic. The goal of artistic universality lies by passing through these and other particulars listed above. Its grand aim (hopefully) is to name peoples old and new experiences, change people’s inner lives and pass on these insights over generations within this invaluable artistic counter-world of artistic culture. You must create art as if everything important in the world totally mattered to you, otherwise you create trivia.
