I was with a class of Arts researchers from various disciplines yesterday when the visual artists brought up some of their difficulties in defining the conceptual motivation for their creative work.
Graphic designers had been assigned clients and projects, and wondered how in that rigid context to best explore a creative problem or frame a research question.
Other visual artists had motivation for exploring particular techniques and/or aesthetics, but had been firmly advised to nominate a conceptual framework to underpin their creative research.
I have a personal view that magic happens when concept meets active outworking. Does one neccessarily have to precede the other? In my experience, conceptual development can help one find rich contexts in which to create. But concepts live in the ether, and art objects are made with the hands. As a conceptual composer-performer, at some point I must place my hands on my guitar and approach a microphone and sing. At that precise moment, I switch from concept to craft. This is not to say that that my craft is not informed and directed by pre-emptive conceptualisation. But primarily I call it craft, simply because craft is what I have in my hands. With what else can I make an artistic expression?
A colleague of mine wears a badge which says “without craft, there is no Art.”
Can craft precede concept? I wonder if in some cases that may be so, if one can analyse the context in which this artistic activity is taking place. Is typography not an exploration of the act of reading, the art of communication, the ability of traditional and non-traditional letter forms to communicate messages in (arguably) an increasingly visually conversant society? Is branding not the creation of what in theatre and film is known as mise-en-scene, the summation of all design aspects to deliver a desirable effect upon the viewer? And what does that very desirability tell us about the times in which we live? How is painting in Aotearoa influenced by the distinctive qualities of the light we enjoy? How does duplication of an artwork affect its perceived value? And if - say in the event of printmaking - each numbered print is lovingly made by hand, is the original actually duplicated or is each print a unique expression?
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot “Little Gidding” (the last of his Four Quartets)
Roman mosaic of the Nine Muses. Sourced from
http://www.romansociety.org/imago/searching-saving/show/575.html
Dwelling in a tower as likened to eeking out a creative existence is a metaphor borrowed from Leonard Cohen. Cohen’s narrator in Tower of Song (1988) cuts a lonely figure. His, or of course her – first-person point of view doesn’t discriminate - “hair is grey” and “friends are gone”. Also long since departed is sexual potency and pleasure: the narrator admits that he/she “ache(s) in the places where (he/she) used to play.” Denied the security of home ownership, there is daily rent to be paid. Musical icons such as Hank Williams live nearby but don’t appear to offer any neighbourly assistance, in fact when spoken to they don’t even answer. The songwriter appears obliged by this “gift”, having “had no choice” in the matter. A dubious pleasure of the gift is in being virtually raped by a cohort of “angels from the Great Beyond”, or in other words perhaps – driven to inspirational ecstasy by the muses of antiquity. Even earthly relationships are infected by the “little pins” of malevolent magic. “You could say that I’ve grown bitter”, Cohen’s narrator challenges the listener, and this would stand to reason. And yet, although perhaps imprisoned in the Tower, his/her song falling from its window like Rapunzel’s hair, Cohen’s weary narrator is still able to contemplate a future of “speaking… sweetly.”
The creative life is indeed sweet. Also it can be cruel. For an example of this dichotomy one only needs to examine Cohen’s “twenty seven angels” as possible signifiers for the Nine Muses - creative catalysts of the ancient Greco-Roman world view. The muses were thought to be the offspring of a coupling of King Zeus/Apollo and Mnemosyne the goddess of memory. This mythologcal procreation between divinity, memory and creativity is a rich metaphor for depicting the role of Art in establishing culture in the collective memory of a society of people, building community through shared experiences. But wondrous as their inspirations could be, the muses could also be as vindictive as the voodoo pin weilding ex-lover of Cohen’s narrator. When unsuccessfully challenged to a singing contest by the bard Thamyris, the muses blinded him and took away his memory (Tripp, 1974). A parallel parable is found in the Old Testament of the Christian bible, where Jacob is said to have wrestled all night with an angel professing to be God (Genesis 32: 24-28). During the fray Jacob was wounded in the hip, but when dawn came he was rewarded not only with the blessing he had originally sought but also with a new name: Israel. The efforts of Cohen’s narrator are neither so successful as that of Jacob, nor so woeful as that of Thamyris. Outnumbered and vanquished by angelic wrestling opponents, Cohen’s narrator is found tied to a table, and yet still singing.
So is creativity a blessing? Is being “born with the gift of a golden voice” (Cohen, 1988) truly a gift? Perhaps that depends on the willingness – or otherwise – of the artist to partake of the multiplicities of experience that come with interacting with creativity. Aside from the aforementioned sacramental bondage by agents of the “Great Beyond”, Cohen offers several other metaphorical depictions of what creative existence might entail: being “crazy for love”; “paying… rent”; “standing… where the light is strong”; envisioning a “mighty judgement coming” but conceding that one “may be wrong”; hearing “funny voices”; being force-marched “to a tower down the track” and yet leaving a presence “long after” one’s absence, or indeed death.
That last aspect, the lingering of a creative practitioner’s ideas and presence, long after their flourish of creative genesis, and long after the sharing of the fruits of “the gift” through some form of publishing, is arguably one critical determining factor in defining creative work as Art as opposed to entertainment. As Shakespeare rather starkly asserted, “When all the breathers of this world are dead. / You shall still live, such virtue hath my pen,” (Sonnet 81). This is precisely the dichotomy of cultural currency versus longevity that Paul McCartney perhaps encodes into the blithe domesticity of “will you still need me… when I’m sixty four” (1967), and Thom Yorke so ascerbically lampoons with “this is our new song / just like the last one / a total waste of time” (1994).
Whether or not conceptual longevity may be assured beyond the grave, the contemporary artist must certainly wrestle in the ‘here and now’ with societies which may not care to become interested parties in their creative efforts. The story of the late English folk songwriter Nick Drake epitomises this wrestling match. In the relative commercial failure and posthumous critical acclaim of his three studio albums spanning 1969-1972, and also in his premature death from an overdose of the antidepressant Amitryptylene in 1974, we almost find an allegorical tale prophesied by Drake’s own song Fruit Tree (1969). In it, the narrator consoles the uncelebrated fruit tree – analagous with the fruit-bearing artist in a uninterested world, assuring that “they’ll stand and stare… / they’ll all know / that you were here / when you’re gone”.
Drake’s analogy is comforting in terms of its acceptance that one tree’s ultimate glory may lie in the thriving of other trees derived from its seeds and nurtured beneath its canopy. In the same way, Art begets Art as artists are inspired by previous generations of artists, taking up their inspiration and moving forward. All creative beings share the urge to “stand” by Cohen’s “window / where the light is strong.” In other words, our hope and our responsibility lies in “turn(ing) our faces up to the sun” (Tweedy, 2009), the selfsame sun under which there is “nothing new” (Ecclesiastes 1:9, NIV).
© Dan Adams 2009/2012
Cohen, L. (1988). Tower of song. On I’m your man [CD]. New York, NY:
Sony Music Distribution
Drake, N. (1969). Fruit tree. On Five Leaves Left [CD]. New York, NY:
Universal Music Group
McCartney, P. (1967). When I’m sixty four. On Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band [CD]. London, UK: Parlophone
Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). Sonnet 81 “Or shall I live, your epitaph to make;”
Shakespeare’s Sonnets. London, UK: Nelson, 1997. p273
Tripp, E. (1974). The meridian handbook of classical mythology. New
York, NY: Plume
Tweedy, J. (2009). Country disappeared. On Wilco [the album]. New York,
NY: Nonesuch
Yorke, T. (1994) My Iron lung. On My Iron Lung [CD]. London, UK: Capitol
I once consulted a wellknown professional vocalist about managing the stress and overstimulation of performing professionally. She gave me two insights - a good vocal warmup regime, and a directive to meet the rest of the cast at the Downstage bar after each performance, to socialise and to drink one beer! The former was intended to increase my confidence that my voice could sustain a ten consecutive night season. The latter was to help me to psychologically wind down from the exaltation of performing.
I’m interested that peak performing and sub-optimal performing can both be detrimental to health. At that particular time of my life, after a great day of rehearsals in which I sang at my best, the music would be running round and round in an unstoppable loop in my musical imagination, and it was very hard to switch off, to rest. This may be because for the first time in my life I was professionally employed as a composer and performer for full working weeks, thus immersed in music to a degree that I hadn’t experienced in my working life before.
I wonder if having a split day-job and musical nightlife enforces a kind of settling down of mental stimulation. And if, perhaps, this suits me best. A truly fulltime creative life - something that is a rare find in New Zealand - requires the practitioner to establish one’s own work/life balance so that one’s artistic impulses are appropriately focused and contained.
So rather than thinking of that lawn mowing, or teaching, or waiting tables, as an irritant taking us away from the artistic life to which we aspire, we might look at it perhaps as the yin to our yang.
The year was 1994, my final year studying a Bachelor of Music majoring in Composition at Victoria University of Wellington. New Zealand composer Jack Body took us through a “self portrait in video” project. What I produced then was an earnest attempt to be artful. What is more interesting to me now - seventeen years later - is the outtakes which I’ve edited here. Today, watching myself watch myself (if you get what I mean), I feel I am observing far more. I am watching youth. Watching friendship. Watching the vhs era. Watching a motivated student respond to the creative freedom of being given only the broadest of briefs.
[Thank you Jack.]
dickens at sound check
Emaciated Buddha. Bangkok, Thailand. 10 December, 2004.
an open letter. editing a song lyric.
an online tutorial I made for songwriters. Editing can make the writing more clear, and yet also more alive with potential meaning and open to different interpretations.
Violinist.
Today I was reminded of a Ryan Adams quote I read in a recent Sunday Star Times magazine (2 October 2011 issue).
“I learned to focus on the way my hands feel when I play the guitar, which has always been one of the most comforting feelings of my life.”
I have been recording in short bursts over the past three days, interspersed with the duties of being a dad and contributing to our home life. It has gone remarkably easily, with two songs in the bag and another three underway. This unexpected momentum gave me pause for thought. What was it that was creating this conducive headspace, uncluttered by self-imposed pressure, fatigue, self-doubt, distractedness and the like?
I’ve thought of a few things, which I’ll mention perhaps in order of sequence, but not of importance:
1. I have been given a room. Its dimensions are modest - perhaps as wide as twice a single bed, and one and a half times as long. I can leave home and then be recording in there in little over ten minutes. In this room is a laptop wired to two microphones on stands, a guitar and a pair of headphones. Other instruments are stowed in a nearby garage. There is no chair. The laptop sits on a chest of drawers at a comfortable height for me standing. As I stand, I remember that I am at work. Standing also allows my body to move freely in response to the music I am making. At the end of the session, I simply power down, lock up, close the door and leave, to resume that other life.
2. I first record a guide track, singing and playing the whole structure. There is no pressure at all, for as soon as its purpose is complete, this guide will disappear. I roll or stumble on through. I enjoy the music. I remember what this particular song is about, possibly glimpse what music itself is about (for me), perhaps even what life is about.
3. I am now warmed up as I begin re-recording layers. Where time permits, I allow each take to run the entire length of the song. That way I’m keeping sensitive to the larger shape, and not obsessing over minutiae.
4. I tell myself that the task is easy, and the result is exquisitely beautiful. I assure myself that I am in the capable hands of an autopilot: my hands know what shapes they need to make - they have done this countless times prior to this moment.
5. Secure in the hands of my autopilot, I can now allow my mind to relax and drift to wherever it needs to go. I let go the fear that distracted thoughts might sabotage my performance. If I choose, I may focus my thoughts inside the music, or outside. Whatever way it doesn’t matter. Sometimes I close my eyes and picture where my fingers need to go next, imagining them perfectly in place at the upcoming moment.
6. I am listening more to the guide track than to this ‘real’ take I’m recording. Because of this, I am not off-put by occasional blemishes in my playing. I quickly recover, and go on following the guide through this beautiful landscape, mimicking that guide, contributing to the large shape. I am not so much aiming for perfection as trying to bring out the musicality of each moment, and maximise the resonance in what I am creating.
6. And this is where I remember Ryan Adams: “focus on the way my hands feel when I play the guitar”. Playing acoustic guitar, I can sense the resonance I’m creating in the instrument by the feel of vibration coming through my hands and stomach. Although I am primarily listening to the guide recording, I sense what is going on between me and the instrument - perhaps more acutely than if I were obsessing solely over what I can hear I am making.
This may sound counter-intuitive. And certainly it won’t apply to all recording situations. And of course, I will only be able to verify the validity of these observations when I finally have the finished recordings to put alongside my previous ones.
But I sense that there is something in this, for me.
[I would like to acknowledge George Packard for this idea of the capable autopilot and the conscious positive self-talk.]
