Trying at the moment to work from my gut, and trying not think to many steps ahead. Trying, trying, trying to not try so hard. We have a discussion about what blocks the imagination, taking as a starting point the word resentment. Which interestingly turns out to mean re-feeling (French: sentir, Latin: sentio). This makes me think about presence. If we are re-feeling, we are cycling past emotions. And I can see that this can happen with re-feeling in the direction of the future also – being in that stuck place of ‘this will happen, that will happen’ – which will always be cyclical because it doesn’t exist. There is only now. And now. And now. Etc.
My internal narrative when unhelpful, when not-present, is often littered with questions about validity – what’s good, what’s good enough, what’s excellent, what’s not, what’s ok, what’s correct. When you write it down it’s pretty ugly. Again in improv ideas are generated on the foundational premise that there are no bad ideas. Keith Johnstone (aforementioned improv forefather) would coach actors with ‘be boring’ or ‘too original!’. I trained as an actor at École Philippe Gaulier, an eccentric but unrivalled master of engendering the essential quality of presence in the actor. Famous for ordering actors to ‘leave the stage immediately’ seconds after their entrances, because he could ‘see a little idea coming’, it was a school of hard knocks. We once asked him about talent. He said ‘There is no such thing as talent. Only what you authorise in yourself to do’. I think about this nearly every day.
We discuss results of an automatic writing exercise on what blocks the imagination. The discussion is framed as ‘Where do we need new creativity, new imagination?’. We think about the ‘we’. Tim – ‘the lofty idea of the artist as solo genius, artist as hero, that model, Rothko – is really unhelpful’. We think about the ‘new’ – are there new ideas – probably not. We think about the ‘need’ – is the work doing the job it is meant to be doing?
What is that job exactly?
Jonathan reads a provocation from Ben Okri in the Guardian about the artist’s responsibility towards only working on the subject of the climate emergency. What does existential creativity look like in our art practice? How do we translate that or interpret it? Also read out – an extract from Douglas Hine’s ‘At Work in the Ruins’ – about the problem of seeing art only as a tool for getting across a message.
Art is not a cheap alternative to an advertising agency or a sophisticated extension of the communications department, and the urgency of the message doesn’t change this.
I really enjoyed Luisa’s response to this ‘our art practice is to protect thinking’. I take from this that we need to give our audience space. To not be conclusive. To leave space for a dialogue – even if the artist has left the room, or the planet – we are in conversation with them through the work. We remember how shut down we were at school when preached at.
Hine quotes in turn playwright Anders Duus –
Our job is to complicate matters
I think this has really helped me think about how I approach meaning. I’ve worked in a discipline where storytelling is at the centre of things – and clarity is essential in script/playwrighting. I suppose I am still telling stories but maybe in my art practice in a different way, giving space for the audience yes, and also space for the intangible, as Hine puts it, for the ‘messiness and strangeness of life’.
Alex Murdoch, Artist 