art statement
Legrady bio
Legrady cv
Legrady's work
on the CCCA
Art Database
Kingston Proze
AGO Book
launch
National Gallery
of Canada
collection
31works
Basics of Inspiration & Creativity
By Miklos Legrady,
edited by Gabor Podor
|
Dictionaries tell us that inspiration, (from the Latin inspirare, meaning "to breathe into") refers to an unconscious burst of creativity in a literary, musical, or other artistic endeavour, as well as in the sciences. The concept has origins in both Hellenism and Hebraism. The Greeks believed that inspiration or "enthusiasm" came from the muses, as well as the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Similarly, in the Ancient Norse religions, inspiration derives from the gods, such as Odin. Inspiration is also a divine matter in Hebrew poetics. In the Book of Amos the prophet speaks of being overwhelmed by God's voice and compelled to speak. In Christianity, inspiration is a gift of the Holy Spirit…. In Greek thought, inspiration meant that the poet or artist would go into ecstasy or furor poeticus, the divine frenzy or poetic madness. He or she would be transported beyond his own mind and given the gods' or goddesses own thoughts to embody. Inspiration is prior to consciousness and outside of skill (ingenium in Latin). Technique and performance are independent of inspiration, and so it is possible for the non-poet to be inspired and for a poet or painter's skill to be insufficient to the inspiration.(1 ) |
Spirituality and art as non-verbal practices.
Spirituality and art are kindred souls; both require effort, discipline, persistence, skill. But some disagree. Lawrence Weiner in a conversation with Benjamin Buchloh said that art is not about skill.(2) They may be misguided, since skill is the mastery of one’s medium, so skill is always skill in communicating one’s vision. Which means a lack of communication skills leads to misunderstandings. Lack of skill in art leads to bad art, a postmodern trend currently praised by nihilists. We note that Weiner identifies as a “non-artist”” He is not an artist according to his own admission. Weiner identifies his work as “non-art”; simply put, Weiner’s work is not art. It is what it always was; sentences written on a wall by his assistants, a type of interior decoration. This finessing of meaning calls attention to exigent rules, definitions and processes. Conventions in art and spiritual practice indicate a need for technical specifications, i.e. limitations, and there is a red line, beyond which the work isn’t art. Without such lines art cannot exist, since if everything is art, there would be no need for a word like art to describe everything that exists. The word “everything” would be perfectly satisfactory.
There is a red line, beyond which the work isn’t art. This concept of limitations and their consequence occupied our thoughts even in antiquity. The 3000 year old I CHING or Book of Changes is one of the Five Classics of Confucianism and under a chapter on limitations we read that unlimited possibilities are not suited to humanity; without limitations, our life would only dissolve in the boundless. To become strong, one’s life needs the limitations ordained by duty and voluntarily accepted. The individual attains significance as a free spirit only by surrounding oneself with these limitations and by determining for oneself what one’s duty is. In a further note the composer Igor Stravinsky writes “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles… and the arbitrariness of the constraint serve only to obtain precision of execution.(3)
In the Japanese tea ceremony the host, no matter how noble, will put aside their costly robes and clean the teahouse without assistance, washing the utensils and preparing the room, and in repeated mundane activity done with great seriousness, a higher state of consciousness enters the ceremony. Similarly in the studio the conscious mind is engaged in mundane matters such as prepping canvas, paint and brushes, while surplus energy is channeled to, borrowed by the unconscious mind. In painting it’s the visual cortex.
Rarely does the work happen in a single stroke. Instead there is effort over time; enlightenment comes through practice. Our creative energy exhausts itself, but when we break off and later return to the fray, we add up work through the repetition of each step. The final product is greater than any single thought or process, a compilation that is greater than the sum of its parts. And when the finished product shows a concept, design, and sophistication that was unplanned, when the quality shows such excellence as to be transcendent, then we can speak of spirituality, one’s personal spirit that breathes life into the work.
Carl Jung spoke of genius as deriving from genus, which is not only type but spirit, as “in the spirit of the culture”, or “the spirit of the times.” In classical Rome a genius loci (plural genii loci) was the spirit of a place. It can be felt in the mood the place evokes, or it can be seen in the influence it has on the locals. Humans also have a mood, a type, a spirit, such as “that feisty spirit of aunt Martha” or “uncle Joe’s communist spirit”. Jung writes of spirit being opposed to matter, being the lightest element while matter is the densest. We speak of alcohol as a spirit and also of some people or events as spiritual. Spirituality is a fine-tuning, a sophistication significantly more complex than simplistic thoughts of the divine or demonic.
Spirituality then has the ephemeral attribute of being lighter than matter. It also refers to a complexity of feelings, an awareness greater than consciousness, greater than intellect, a supra-consciousness occasionally referred to as our better self. We become aware of larger patterns beyond the norm, in the form of archival knowledge that glimmers in a liminal space around our blind spot. Spirituality is a height of human consciousness that extends beyond the personal and the intellectual to include instincts and ancestral memories which we can only experience through a glass darkly. Instincts and ancestral memories have godly attributes, certainly experienced as such by simpler primitive minds but even by the sophisticated literati
Here we turn away from elaboration as we cannot speculate about the unconscious mind or a collective consciousness, or any realm beyond the limits of consciousness, beyond what we can see. If anything, we experience unconscious activity by the traces it leaves behind, like footprints in the mud left by an invisible being. Today’s creative experiences match historical descriptions of being transported beyond one’s own mind and given the gods' or goddesses’ own thoughts to embody; the gods being our inner self and archaic instincts, yet as fatal as the gods of yore. Nor can we say what this inner self is, though we are aware of something
In the late 1960s Robert Motherwell wrote that the greatest accomplishment of an artist’s intelligence is that it takes him beyond the “merely aesthetic” concerns that face every “modern” artist, a problem he called “the despair of the aesthetic; if all colors or nudes are equally pleasing to the eye, why does the artist choose one color or figure rather than another. If he does not make a purely aesthetic choice he must look to further criteria on which to base his value judgment… an ethic beyond aesthetics”. (4)This is cherry picking, an argument lacking the scientific knowledge acquired in the 20th century on the nature of aesthetics as simply elements of language, a non-verbal language vital to human evolution and the ongoing formation of culture.
In this author’s research, aesthetics is not what Motherwell assumes; aesthetics is the grammar and vocabulary of art. It is the non-verbal language artists use to define what cannot be put into words and yet has complex meaning that cannot be expressed otherwise. Hence the non-verbal language of art. We have body language, whose formal expression is dance. Acoustic language, whose formal expression is music, and visual language, where a picture is worth a thousand words. Even in writing, what differentiates text from literature is the mood, the feel, the cadence and sonority of that which is written. Thus rebutting Motherwell’s thought, we would reply that speaking a language, working with aesthetics, is not the point of an artist’s engagement. Language is just a tool to express meaning.
Both Motherwell and Duchamp, whose thoughts he wears, present an intellectual attitude unfamiliar with the depths and value of feelings and sensation. Duchamp obviously so. Practically speaking, not all colors and nudes are equally pleasing, and the above description of anyone’s distinctive methods answers Motherwell’s question of why the artist makes specific choices. Hannah Arendt wrote if men were not distinct…they would need neither speech nor action. (5)There are unconscious factors at work that account for creative choices. There are also depths of coding undecipherable by the conscious mind yet vital to our conceptual and experiential framework.
Motherwell suggests that sensory language is superficial and so one must find an ethic beyond aesthetics, but since then Albert Mehrabian, currently Professor Emeritus of Psychology, UCLA, has unveiled a complex language of communication in which words are but 7%, tone of voice accounts for 33%, and body language for 55%. (6)Aesthetic choices, as linguistics, can express a complexity that the Abstract Expressionists imagined; a postmodern theory that acknowledges only conscious intellectual thought is refuted by biology.
Sources>
1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_inspiration.
2 Art is not about skill: Benjamin Buchloh Interviews Laurence Weiner
and also
Marian Goodman Gallery on Favebook
3 Matthew McDonald, Jeux de Nombres, Automated Rhythm in The Rites of Spring.
Journal of the American Musicology Society, Vol. 63, No.3, Fall 2000, p499.
4 Pierre Cabane, Dialogues with marcel Duchamp, Robert Motherwell, Introduction, p11, Da Capo Press.
5 Hannah Arendt on speech and action, equality and distinction
https://www.driverlesscrocodile.com/starting-out/hannah-arendt-on-speech-and-action-equality-and-distinction/
6 Albert Mehrabian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Mehrabian