Bytheway - Pedagogická fakulta MU - Masarykova univerzita

Y KENNETH G. HAY
KENNETH G. HAY
CREATIVITY, BY THE WAY...
There are many prevalent myths about artistic creativity.
Perhaps the most prevalent is the image of the isolated artistic
genius, suffering for their art, misunderstood and undervalued
by the society from which s/he springs, but more often than
not, to which they are linked only tenuously. This mythical image
fi rst appears in the Renaissance, if we are to believe Giorgio
Vasari, with eccentric and troubled artistic personalities like
Piero di Cosimo, hiding away from society, living off hard boiled
eggs which were brought to him daily, because he was afraid
of lighting a fi re; or Jacopo Pontormo, so paranoid about dust
interfering with the glassy smoothness of his paintings that he
would sit quite still until it had all settled before applying fresh
varnish to his painting. Such images proliferate in Mannerism,
where maniera, or refi ned style, celebrated and encouraged
eccentricity, and continue through Romanticism, to the Modern
period, where they reach their tragic apogee in Van Gogh.
They are diffi cult images to shake off, and myths have a habit
of lingering. But myths, as Roland Barthes observed, are useful
ways of disguising half-truths, or even total fi ctions, as fact;
and most myths are ideological – they present a partial view
as a complete view.
Contrary to the Romantic view of the isolated artist is another
image, more accurate, because more complete. The artist as
social animal, gregarious, surrounded by colleagues, models,
critics, gallerists; discussing ideas with fellow artists, sitting
in cafés, arguing over the newspapers, inventing Cubism,
writing Manifestos, forming groups and movements. Very little
art, in fact, has sprung, unbidden and spontaneous, from an
isolated artist’s head. Most art comes from other art. Most of
the inspiration to write a sonnet comes from reading and falling
in love with the sonnet form as perfected by others. We learn
what oil painting can do, and want to test its limits for ourselves,
because we have see other paintings. The Italian philosopher
Antonio Labriola called this cultural continuity an endless chain
stretching back into the past and linking us and our ambitions
with the aspirations of our antecedents, stretching out beyond
their time. We pick up the echoes and the rumours of what has
gone before, attune ourselves to hear it well, and then continue
its song.
Creativity, seen in this light is less mysteriously the creatio
ex nihilo – the totally mystical and unprecedented introduction
k.g.hay@leeds.ac.uk
Kenneth G. Hay is Professor of Contemporary Art Practice, Head of the Department of Contemporary Art Practice
within the School of Design and Deputy Head of the School of Design at the University of Leeds, UK. His digital,
sound and other artworks have been exhibited most recently in Korea (Busan Biennale), Malta(2008), Tainan
(2006), Venice Biennale (1996,2003), and the Czech Centre for Experimental Theatre (2003). His publications
focus on issues of inter-semiotic translatability, modernist and postmodernist art theory, aesthetics and Italian art
and culture.
of something absolutely new into the world – as a process of
absorption, transformation and recombination, albeit in a new
way, of elements pre-existing in the work of others. It is a social
process, which grows out of a specifi c context in time and
space. It explores certain formal or ideological parameters
already patent or latent in the work of precursors, within the
context of a given social, geographic, temporal, historical,
gendered etc. perspective, and comes up with a new amalgam.
The impetus to this process is given by equally specifi c causes:
market pressures, philosophical/legal/scientifi c/religious (in
short superstructural) climate; geo-political zeitgeist etc., as
much as it is driven by the power of individual artistic sensibility.
This is not to undermine or underestimate the necessity and
power of individual artistic sensibility. It is just to recognise the
fact, rather than the myth, of artistic creation: that it occurs in
and from a group, at a particular time and place, in a particular
context, accompanied by discussion, critical analysis and
input from others, for a given audience, in a particular social
situation.
One such context is the Ph.D programme at Masaryk
University, Brno. Another is that existing in the School of Design
at the University of Leeds. Yet another is the Cyprus School
of Art, Lempa. All three locations are more than geographical
signifi ers – the three contexts are linked in a complex web of
overlapping personalities and histories: student exchanges,
staff collaborations, research projects, exhibitions, discussion,
cooking, friendships, publications and hospitality. The current
project of staff and students from these institutes affords the
opportunity to explore such notions of creativity together,
to travel and discuss ideas, to exchange staff and students,
histories and contexts, in an on-going and open series of
collaborations, and via the web-site and publication, to extend
the links of this endless chain outwards to the world.
Here, I wish only to examine and critique, two contrasting
views of the creative process, centring upon the most extreme
example of artistic creativity: the notion of originality and artistic
genius, within the context of Ph.D study:
In science, a new contribution to human understanding can
be pointed out with some clarity – a new equation, or a more
elegant reformulation of an existing formula – can lead to
quantifi able and demonstrably new knowledge. How then, do
artworks operate? If we accept that artworks are intellectual
and thereby ipso facto contribute to thought, how are we to
judge them? And indeed, is judgment a relevant issue here?
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