Chasing uselessness

Occasionally I run across something so weird it's almost charming.

This happened just yesterday, and has to do with a topic I've looked at here at Skeptophilia a couple of times before; the question, "What is art?"  My conclusion was the rather unhelpful "If you think it's art, it is."  Admittedly this is coming from someone with the aesthetic sensibility that God gave gravel.  I can barely draw a straight line with a ruler, and most of my attempts at doing anything artistic look like they were produced by a four-year-old, or perhaps an unusually talented chimp.

An art-history-major acquaintance of mine, who also happens to be a bit of an intellectual snob, says I'm basically just lazy, that if I took the time to learn about various schools of art and trends and philosophical underpinnings, I'd understand that there is good art and bad art.  Me, I think this makes no sense at all.  If I can compare it to music -- a topic I do know something about -- I can understand all about a piece of music's structure and harmony and theory and whatnot, and even the historical context in which the composer wrote it, but still dislike it intensely.  If it sounds unpleasant, for me it hasn't worked.  Unless the composer's intent was to have listeners go, "Wow, this is terrible," in which case they succeeded brilliantly.

It reminds me of journalist Edgar Wilson Nye's acerbic quip that "Wagner's music is better than it sounds."

In any case, back to art.  My point is that I'm hardly in the position to criticize another person's artistic creations.  If anyone actually is.  It all boils down to individual taste, and that is, um, individual.  Which may be tautological, but still makes a point that some people need to hear.

The topic comes up because of a strange but wonderful Japanese art form called Thomasson.  If you know anything about the Japanese language, you probably noticed right away that the name doesn't sound very Japanese -- and you're right, it isn't, although it's been "Japanified" to Chōgeijutsu Tomason (超芸術トマソン) to make it work with the phonetics and writing system.  But the name comes from American baseball player Gary Thomasson, who was signed to the Yomiuri Giants in 1982 for a record-breaking sum of money.  Thomasson then spent his entire two-year stint with the Giants never scoring a single hit -- in fact, he came close to breaking the all-time strikeout record.  Finally he was benched, and ended up being little more than a (very expensive) dugout ornament.

So in the art world, a "Thomasson" is something that was created with some kind of purpose in mind, but clearly accomplishes nothing -- and still is carefully kept up as if it actually made sense.  Like the pieces in the Museum of Bad Art that I referenced in my earlier piece (linked above), you can't set out to make a Thomasson deliberately; they just kind of happen.

The term was coined (and the art form promoted) by artist Katsuhiko Akasegawa, when he saw a staircase that led up into a wall -- but which was still, for some reason, maintained:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jr223, Hanshin Iwaya east, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Once he started noticing them, he found Thomasson everywhere.  Doorways opening onto blank walls, or ones that open ten feet above the ground (with no balcony).  A doorknob protruding from the side of a building.  Guardrails, gates, or fences that accomplish nothing, like this one:

Aficionados of Thomasson have come up with about a dozen categories, including Muyō bashi (無用橋, "useless bridge"), a bridge in the middle of a field that doesn't go over any obstacle; Jōhatsu (蒸発, "evaporation"), where a sign or an image has lost pieces to the point that it has become undecipherable; and Kasutera (カステラ, "Kastella," a brand of square-ish Japanese sponge cake), where there's a cuboid protuberance from the side of a building that serves no purpose.  (A sunken cuboid indentation in a wall is called a "Reverse Kasutera.")  The whole thing caught on in a big way, with thousands of people photographing and cataloguing examples of Thomasson they'd found.  In fact, a Thomasson Observation Center opened in Shinjuku, and has had several large and very popular exhibitions.

Well, this brings up a variety of responses from me.

First, I kind of feel sorry for Gary Thomasson.  How would you like to have your name forever associated with things that are weird and useless?

Second, since they're not created to be art (even bad art), are they actually art?  Discuss.

Third, I was immediately reminded of the very odd hobby I wrote about a while back, which is called being a "Randonaut."  The idea here is a little like a cross between geocaching and tripping on shrooms.  You log into a website that converts the output of a random number generator to latitudes and longitudes (you can set it to come up with coordinates fairly near you, so you don't end up with a spot in the middle of the Indian Ocean or something).  You then go there, look for anything peculiar, and report it back to the website.  Some Randonauts participate because they think what they find is an indication we're living in a computer simulation; others simply want to experience something "liminal" or "numinous."  (Check out the link if you want more information.)

Fourth, people are really strange.  I mean.

Anyhow, that's today's dive into the deep end of the pool.  As hobbies go, looking for Thomasson has got a lot to recommend it.  I think the whole thing is kind of cool and whimsical, and I definitely will keep my eye out for any examples that might come my way.

Given how prone people are to doing odd and pointless things, I'm sure I won't have any trouble finding it.

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In with the bad

A post I did a couple of weeks ago, about my view that creativity is a relationship (and thus inherently subjective, in the sense that each person will contribute something different), prompted an interesting discussion with a friend that centered around the question of whether there is actually such a thing as bad writing, art, or music.

My initial response was that the answer had to be no.  The most we can say with confidence is that there is "writing, art, and music I don't happen to like."  What comprises that list will differ for everyone, so there's no such thing as "objectively bad" creativity.  I had an experience a few days ago of exactly this; I had picked up a copy of French composer Olivier Messiaen's opera Saint François d'Assise, considered by many to be his finest work, and I found it to be so discordant it was virtually unlistenable.  I would never jump from there to saying "it's bad"; it's merely not something I enjoyed.

But my friend's question went further than that.  Setting aside simple matters of taste and preference, are there works that just about everyone can agree are bad?  What about considerations of execution -- skill and craftsmanship -- such that we can look at a work and say, "Okay, that's poorly done?"  The problem is, even that may not be so easy.  Loyal readers of Skeptophilia may recall that a few months ago, I did a piece on a fellow named Paul Jordan who decided to poke some fun at the art establishment by producing paintings that were made to be deliberately bad, and found that they were taken seriously -- and received glowing reviews from major art critics, and multiple offers for being featured in solo art exhibits.

It's wryly amusing that there's actually a Museum of Bad Art, in Dedham, Massachusetts, devoted to artistic works that are (in their words) "too bad to be ignored."  I have to wonder what the artists whose works are featured there think of their inclusion.  Maybe it's like a scientist winning the IgNobel Prize; perhaps, as writer Brendan Behan famously said, there's no such thing as bad publicity, and it's better to be known for doing something dramatically awful than it is simply to be ignored.

What's curious, though, is that the people running the Museum of Bad Art themselves seem to have a hard time explaining the criteria they use to determine whether a piece qualifies.  Marie Jackson, the Museum's Director of Aesthetic Interpretation, said, "Nine out of ten pieces don't get in because they're not bad enough.  What an artist considers to be bad doesn't always meet our low standards."  Kitsch doesn't qualify, nor does anything that is judged to have been a deliberate attempt to produce bad art.  (One has to wonder what they'd have done with Paul Jordan's paintings.)  MOBA curator Michael Frank explained, "We collect things made in earnest, where people attempted to make art and something went wrong, either in the execution or in the original premise."

But what does it mean that "something went wrong"?  Simple lack of skill isn't enough; according to honorary curator Ollie Hallowell, it has to have an "Oh my God" aspect to it.  But even that suggests something curious.  The fact that MOBA only accepts art that's "so bad it's good" implies there's a category below that, of art that is "simply bad."

Imagine being an artist, and having your work rejected from the Museum of Bad Art on the basis of not being good enough.  It recalls Dorothy Parker's quip about a book she was reviewing: "This book was not just plain terrible.  This was fancy terrible.  This was terrible with raisins in it."

Bone-Juggling Dog in Hula Skirt by Mari Newman, one of the pieces that did make it into the Museum's permanent collection

So we're back to there being an inherently subjective aspect to all this.  There's clearly a difference between someone who lacks skill -- someone attempting to play the piano who makes mistake after mistake, for example -- and someone who has technical competency on the instrument but who doesn't play expressively.  Likewise, having basic technical writing skill (using grammar and punctuation correctly, for example) doesn't guarantee good storytelling.  But beyond simple considerations of mechanics, how do you even begin to determine objectively the quality of a particular work?  Could bad storytelling, for example, be couched in perfect grammar?  If so, what makes it bad?  I thought the Twilight books were positively dreadful, but if you thought reading them was a life-altering experience, I'm not nearly arrogant enough to tell you that you're wrong.

What's bad, apparently, is as subjective as what's good.  Exactly as we should expect.  So this is a further illustration that you should simply enjoy what you enjoy, and continue to create fearlessly.  Marie Jackson of MOBA says that her Museum shouldn't be looked at as simple ridicule, but an impetus for us creative types to continue to put ourselves out there.  "I think it's a great encouragement to people... who want to create [and] are held back by fear," Jackson said.  "When they see these pieces, they realize there's nothing to be afraid of—just go for it."

Maybe.  I don't know.  If I were an artist, I'd have to work to wrap my brain around being included in the Museum of Bad Art.  As a writer, I certainly don't enjoy feedback like I got from a "friend" a long time ago about the first three chapters of a novel I was working on: "This is somewhere between a computer crash and a train wreck."  (The chapters eventually got worked into my novel The Hand of the Hunter -- if you read it, I can only hope you won't agree with her.)  But I have to be realistic about the fact that my writing won't resonate with everyone.  

After all, that's the nature of creativity.  You win, you lose.  Some things work and others don't, or (more commonly) work for some consumers and not for others.

Even if there's no real objective standard for creative quality, to that point I agree with Marie Jackson: the critical thing is not to get caught up in whether or not you're "good enough," but to keep creating.

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The Jerdanowitch method

Art lovers, ever heard of the Disumbrationist Movement?

Begun in 1924 by painter Pavel Jerdanowitch, it shares some features with Primitivism, in that there is little effort to make the image realistic.  Depictions are brash and bold, with dramatic lines and use of primary colors, but flat, with no particular attention given to perspective and depth.  Instead, the focus is on emotion.  Here's one example, Jerdanowitch's Aspiration:

Aspiration was selected in early 1926 for reproduction in the prestigious journal Chicago Art World, and Lena McCauley, of the Chicago Evening Post, said it was a "delightful jumble of Gauguin, Pop Art and Negro minstrelsy with a lot of Jerdanowitch individuality."

And perhaps the most famous -- although I was unable to find a color image of it -- Exaltation:

Exaltation won a spot at the Exhibition of the Independents at the New York City Waldorf-Astoria, and the French art magazine Revue du Vrai et du Beau contacted Jerdanowitch to ask for permission to reproduce it, along with a request for an interview, more biographical information, and an essay describing his own interpretation of the painting.

Pretty impressive, considering how competitive the world of fine art can be.

Okay, now let's do this again, shall we?

In 1924, a novelist named Paul Jordan-Smith got good and pissed off because his wife, the talented artist Sarah Bixby Smith, kept getting bad reviews and rejections from shows and museums.  Jordan-Smith had never painted before, but grabbed a canvas and some paints and brushes, and slapped together a painting that looked like it had been done either by a four-year-old or a very talented chimp.  He signed it "Pavel Jerdanowitch" -- a Russianized version of Paul Jordan -- and took a brooding photograph of himself to accompany the submission:

Jordan-Smith as himself (left), and as Pavel Jerdanowitch (right)

He said that his new school of art was called "Disumbrationism" -- which means, more or less, "removing the shadows" -- and submitted it to a show.

To his amazement and amusement, it got in, winning high praise, and he found himself with multiple requests for more.  He was happy to oblige.  Other works included a piece called Illumination, which is a bunch of eyes and lightning bolts (this one was accompanied by the text, "It is midnight and the drunken man stumbles home, anticipating a storm from his indignant wife; he sees her eyes and the lightning of her wrath; it is conscience at work") and a piece called Adoration that depicts, I kid you not, a woman bowing before an idol shaped like an enormous erect penis.

All of Jordan-Smith's works were slapdash (to put it mildly); none took longer than an hour to create.  He kept thinking that at some point the critics would wise up and realize they were being taken for a ride.

It never happened.  He kept getting rave reviews and demands for more.  Eventually, he tired of the hoax, and in August of 1927, made a full confession, which appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times.

But even after that, Jerdanowitch refused to die.  Some of the critics -- perhaps out of an embarrassed attempt to save face -- maintained that Jordan-Smith's paintings did have artistic merit, even if the painter himself had set out to ridicule art snobbery in general.  In 1931, Boston's Robert C. Vose Gallery staged an exhibition of Jordan-Smith's work, including a new work called Gination:

About this one, Jerdanowitch/Jordan-Smith wrote:

It depicts the appalling effects of alcohol on Hollywood women of the studios. It is a moral picture.  Note the look of corruption on the lady's skin.  Everything is unbalanced.  While good gin might not have just that effect, boulevard gin brings it about in short time.  The picture is painted in bold strokes and with a sure hand.  I believe it is the most powerful of my works.

While I think the whole Disumbrationism hoax is fall-out-of-your-chair funny, I also think it points out something more important; art snobs really do need to get off their damn high horses.  What someone thinks is good art (or music or writing or any other creation) is a deeply personal thing.  It's not that I have any issue with a specific critic saying "Here's what I like/dislike, and here's why;" what I object to is that they append -- sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly -- "... and if you disagree with me, you're wrong."

I have zero tolerance for taste-makers and others cut from that same cloth (such as genre snobs, people who say shit like, "Romance books are virtually all poorly-written trash" or "Science fiction is for geeky teenagers and adults who never progressed beyond that stage" -- both statements which, I hasten to point out, I actually saw in print).  Who the hell set you up to be the arbiter of worth?  As a novelist, I've had to steel myself to accept the fact that not everyone will like what I write, such as the person who said about my novel Sephirot, "This is a sophomoric attempt to blend fantastical fiction with poorly-understood philosophy."

Yeah, that stung at first, but -- okay.  You didn't like it.  I probably don't like some of the books you adore. 

It's why these things are called "opinions."

So I think of Disumbrationism as bursting the bubble not of artists, but of people who appoint themselves as the Gatekeepers of Taste.

Although it is a little ironic that Paul Jordan-Smith lived until 1971, and is more famous for his hoax paintings than he is for any of his novels.

Life's tough for creative types, and the critics and snobs make it tougher -- often without contributing anything of value themselves.  To me, the important thing is that we continue to express ourselves through our art, music, and writing.  We should work to improve our skills, of course; our ability to convey what we intended will improve if we have better facility with the medium we're working in.

But keep in mind what the brilliant French Impressionist Edgar Degas said: "Art critic!  Is that a profession?  When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people's compliments and to put ourselves into their hands, I think, what a shame!  Should we even accept that they talk about our work?"

His contemporary, Paul Cézanne, put it more succinctly: "Don't be an art critic.  Paint.  There lies salvation."

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The appearance of creativity

The word creativity is strangely hard to define.

What makes a work "creative?"  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that to be creative, a the created item must be both new and valuable.  The "valuable" part already skates out over thin ice, because it immediately raises the question of "valuable to whom?"  I've seen works of art -- out of respect to the artists, and so as not to get Art Snobbery Bombs lobbed in my general direction, I won't provide specific examples -- that looked to me like the product of finger paints in the hands of a below-average second-grader, and yet which made it into prominent museums (and were valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars).

The article itself touches on this problem, with a quote from philosopher Dustin Stokes:

Knowing that something is valuable or to be valued does not by itself reveal why or how that thing is.  By analogy, being told that a carburetor is useful provides no explanatory insight into the nature of a carburetor: how it works and what it does.

This is a little disingenuous, though.  The difference is that any sufficiently motivated person could learn the science of how an engine works and find out for themselves why a carburetor is necessary, and afterward, we'd all agree on the explanation -- while I doubt any amount of analysis would be sufficient to get me to appreciate a piece of art that I simply don't think is very good, or (worse) to get a dozen randomly-chosen people to agree on how good it is.

Margaret Boden has an additional insight into creativity; in her opinion, truly creative works are also surprising.  The Stanford article has this to say about Boden's claim:

In this kind of case, the creative result is so surprising that it prompts observers to marvel, “But how could that possibly happen?”  Boden calls this transformational creativity because it cannot happen within a pre-existing conceptual space; the creator has to transform the conceptual space itself, by altering its constitutive rules or constraints.  Schoenberg crafted atonal music, Boden says, “by dropping the home-key constraint”, the rule that a piece of music must begin and end in the same key.  Lobachevsky and other mathematicians developed non-Euclidean geometry by dropping Euclid’s fifth axiom.  Kekulé discovered the ring-structure of the benzene molecule by negating the constraint that a molecule must follow an open curve.  In such cases, Boden is fond of saying that the result was “downright impossible” within the previous conceptual space.

This has an immediate resonance for me, because I've had the experience as a writer of feeling like a story or character was transformed almost without any conscious volition on my part; in Boden's terms, something happened that was outside the conceptual space of the original story.  The most striking example is the character of Marig Kastella from The Chains of Orion (the third book of the Arc of the Oracles trilogy).  Initially, he was simply the main character's boyfriend, and there mostly to be a hesitant, insecure, questioning foil to astronaut Kallman Dorn's brash and adventurous personality.  But Marig took off in an entirely different direction, and in the last third of the book kind of took over the story.  As a result his character arc diverged wildly from what I had envisioned, and he remains to this day one of my very favorite characters I've written. 

If I actually did write him, you know?  Because it feels like Marig was already out there somewhere, and I didn't create him, I got to know him -- and in the process he revealed himself to be a far deeper, richer, and more powerful person than I'd thought at first.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ShareAlike 1.0, Graffiti and Mural in the Linienstreet Berlin-Mitte, photographer Jorge Correo, 2014]

The reason this topic comes up is some research out of Aalto University in Finland that appeared this week in the journal ACM Transactions on the Human-Robot Interaction.  The researchers took an AI that had been programmed to produce art -- in this case, to reproduce a piece of human-created art, but the test subjects weren't told that -- and then asked the volunteers to rate how creative the product was.  In all three cases, the subjects were told that the piece had been created by AI.  The volunteers were placed in one of three groups:

• Group 1 saw only the result -- the finished art piece;
• Group 2 saw the lines appearing on the page, but not the robot creating it; and
• Group 3 saw the robot itself making the drawing.

Even though the resulting art pieces were all identical -- and, as I said, the design itself had been created by a human being, and the robot was simply generating a copy -- group 1 rated the result as the least creative, and group 3 as the most.

Evidently, if we witness something's production, we're more likely to consider the act creative -- regardless of the quality of the product.  If the producer appears to have agency, that's all it takes.

The problem here is that deciding whether something is "really creative" (or any of the interminable sub-arguments over whether certain music, art, or writing is "good") all inevitably involve a subjective element that -- philosophy encyclopedias notwithstanding -- cannot be expunged.  The AI experiment at Aalto University highlights that it doesn't take much to change our opinion about whether something is or is not creativity.

Now, bear in mind that I'm not considering here the topic of ethics in artificial intelligence; I've already ranted at length about the problems with techbros ripping off actual human artists, musicians, and writers to train their AI models, and how this will exacerbate the fact that most of us creative types are already making three-fifths of fuck-all in the way of income from our work.  But what this highlights is that we humans can't even come to consensus on whether something actually is creativity.  It's a little like the Turing Test; if all we have is the output to judge by, there's never going to be agreement about what we're looking at.

So while the researchers were careful to make it obvious (well, after the fact, anyhow) that what their robot was doing was not creative, but was a replica of someone else's work, there's no reason why AI systems couldn't already be producing art, music, and writing that appears to be creative by the Stanford's criteria of being new, valuable, and surprising.

At which point we better figure out exactly what we want our culture's creative landscape to look like -- and fast.

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Nonsense from the sky

I was recently chatting with a friend about how little it takes to get woo-woos all stirred up -- and how impossible it is to get them to simmer down afterward -- and that got me thinking about A Book from the Sky.

If you've never heard about this strange publication, you're not alone; it never got a great deal of attention outside of China (except for one other subset of humanity, q.v.).  It's the creation of award-winning Chinese artist Xu Bing, who has made a name for himself pushing convention and working paradox and surreality into his creations.

A Book from the Sky (天書; Tiānshū) looks, to someone like myself who knows no Chinese, like nothing more than page after page of artistically-laid-out Chinese calligraphy:

Cover page of A Book from the Sky

The first clue you might have that something is amiss is that the characters for the book title -- 天書 -- don't appear on the title page.  In fact, they appear nowhere in the book.

In another fact, none of the characters in the book are actual Chinese characters.  Chinese scholars have gone through the whole thing painstakingly and found only two that are close to real Chinese characters, and one of those is only attested in a supposed ninth-century document that might itself be a forgery.  (Whether the inclusion of that character was deliberate, or is merely an accidental resemblance, isn't certain, but I suspect the latter.)

Now, let's be clear about one thing right from the get-go.  Xu himself states up front that A Book from the Sky is nonsense.  Here's his description, from his own website:

Produced over the course of four years, this four-volume treatise features thousands of meaningless characters resembling Chinese.  Each character was meticulously designed by the artist in a Song-style font that was standardized by artisans in the Ming dynasty.  In this immersive installation, the artist hand-carved over four thousand moveable type printing blocks.  The painstaking production process and the format of the work, arrayed like ancient Chinese classics, were such that the audience could not believe that these exquisite texts were completely illegible.  The work simultaneously entices and denies the viewer’s desire to read the work...

[T]he false characters “seem to upset intellectuals,” provoking doubt in established systems of knowledge.  Many early viewers would spend considerable time scrutinizing the texts, fixedly searching for genuine characters amidst the illegible ones.

The aftermath of the release of A Book from the Sky reminds me of an incident from my freshman lit class in college.  The professor, a well-meaning but very old-school gentleman named Dr. Fields, had us read Robert Frost's famous "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."  Afterward, he read us a quote from an interview with Frost in which the poet was asked about symbolism in the poem.  Frost responded, basically, "There isn't any.  It's about a man stopping by woods on a snowy evening.  That's all."  But then Dr. Fields, wearing his most patronizing smile, said, "Of course, we know that a poet of Frost's caliber would not have a poem with no symbolic literary elements, so we will proceed to analyze the symbolism therein."

So the woo-woos have decided that "an artist of Xu's caliber would not have a 604-page book with no meaning at all," and have been trying since its release all the way back in 1991 to figure out what it "actually means."

Here are a few of the weirder claims I've seen:

• it's written in the script that was used in Atlantis and/or Lemuria, which is why we can't decipher it, because there aren't many Atlanteans or Lemurians around these days.
• the document was communicated to Xu in a series of dreams generated by telepathic aliens who are trying to pass along to humanity their superior wisdom.
• it's eeeeeeevil, and if we did translate it, it would release demons, and boy then we'd be sorry.
• it's somehow connected to other examples of asemic writing (writing that looks like it should be meaningful but isn't), like the Voynich Manuscript and Codex Seraphinianus, and maybe one of them holds the key to deciphering the others.

Okay, respectively:

• neither Atlantis nor Lemuria existed.  I keep hoping this particular nonsense will go away, but somehow it never does.
• if this is superior wisdom from telepathic ultra-powerful aliens, you'd think they'd communicate in a language humans actually could read.  Like, oh, I dunno, maybe Chinese, which Xu, being Chinese and all, just happens to be fluent in.
• at this point, I'm thinking releasing demons wouldn't be any worse than what we're currently dealing with, so as far as that goes, let 'er rip.  Bring on the demons.
• of course it's connected to other asemic writing, because... hang on to your hats, here... by definition none of it has meaning.  If it was decipherable, it wouldn't be asemic writing.  It would just be plain old writing.

For cryin' in the sink, y'all need to put more effort into your crazy claims.  Because these ones suck.

Me, I think A Book from the Sky is exactly what its creator claims it is -- a beautiful but meaningless art piece intended to poke fun at the art establishment and people who need to find meaning in everything.  As the famous line about Freudian symbolism goes, "Sometimes a banana is just a banana."

But that's never going to satisfy the woo-woos, because they (1) can't resist a mystery, and (2) never admit they were wrong about anything.  So I'm sure they'll keep plugging away at it, trying to figure out what Xu's work "actually means."

Oh, well.  As long as it amuses them.  And if it keeps them busy, they'll have less time to send spit-flecked emails to me about what a sheeple I am, so that's all good.

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Life out of round

All my life, I've been pulled by two opposing forces.

One of them is the chaos-brain I described in yesterday's post, which I seem to have been born with.  The other is a ferocious attempt to counteract that tendency by controlling the absolute hell out of my surroundings.  I know a lot of this came from the way I was raised; throughout my childhood, nothing I ever did was good enough, and any compliments came along with an appended list (notarized and in triplicate) of all the things I should have done differently and/or could have done better.  

The result is that I do a great deal of overcompensation.  I became fanatically neat, because organizing my physical space was a way of coping with the fact that my brain is like a car with bald tires and no brakes.  My classroom was so organized and clean you could just about eat off the floor (and keep in mind that it was a biology lab).  As a teacher, I strove to make use of every moment we had, and faulted myself whenever things didn't go well or there was an eventuality I hadn't planned for.

I didn't expect perfection from my students, but I did from myself.  And, in some parts of my life, it served me well enough.

The problem is, that approach doesn't work when you apply it to the arts.

I'm not even talking about the "learning curve" issue, here.  Even when I've attained some level of proficiency, I still expect nothing less than perfection, excoriating myself for every scene in a story that didn't come out the way I wanted, every slightly lopsided piece of pottery, every missed note when I play music.

In theory, I'm one hundred percent in agreement with the quote from Ludwig van Beethoven -- "To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable."  Or, more accurately, I believe that for everyone else.  It's much harder to treat myself so forgivingly.

The result has been an overwhelming case of impostor syndrome, coupled with fear of criticism -- which will, in my warped way of looking at things, only confirm what I've thought about myself all along.  I'm at least working on getting my writing out there under the public eye, despite the inherent risks of poor sales and/or bad reviews, but it's been harder in other aspects of my creative life.  I'm still at the stage where I had to have my arm twisted (hard) to induce me to join as a flutist in a contradance band, and it's damn near impossible to get me to play the piano in front of anyone else (including my wife).  But I'm harshest about my own skill when it comes to my artistic work, which is pottery.  I keep very little of what I make, and most of what I do keep are the pieces that are simple and purely functional -- bowls and mugs and the like.  The vast majority of the sculptures and other, more unusual, pieces I make end up given that dreadful label of "not good enough" and are smashed against the concrete wall of the back of our house. 

All along, I had the attitude -- again, directly consonant with my upbringing -- that this is how you improve, that constant self-criticism should act as some kind of impetus to getting better, to ridding your work of those dreaded mistakes, to attaining that fabled ability to create something with which others could not find fault.

It's only been recently that I've realized that this approach is completely antithetical to creativity.

I got to thinking about this after watching an online pottery workshop with the wonderful New Hampshire potter Nick Sevigney, whose pieces are weird and whimsical and unexpected.  A lot of his pottery has a steampunk feeling, a sense of having been put together from a random assemblage of parts.  It was a revelation to watch him piece together cut slabs of clay, not caring if the result was a little uneven or had a rough edge.  In fact, he embraces those seeming imperfections, turning them "from a bug into a feature."

So I decided to see if I could do a few pieces that riffed off of his approach.

I'm most comfortable on the potter's wheel, so I started out throwing three medium-sized white stoneware bowls.  I've gotten pretty good at getting that smooth curve and rounded profile, with a perfectly circular rim, that is what most of us shoot for when creating a bowl.  

Usually, that's where I'd stop.  If it passed my critical assessment -- not lopsided, decent weight, evenly thick walls, nice smooth surface -- I'd keep it.  Otherwise, into the scrap bucket it'd go.  But here... that was only the first step.

One of the techniques Nick does is taking a piece, cutting chunks out of it, adding texture to the chunk, then reattaching it.  You'd think that because you're putting the piece back where it had been, it'd fit perfectly; but the problem is that adding texture (usually using stamps or rollers) stretches and flattens the clay, so inevitably it ends up larger than the hole it came from.  Nick just forces it to fit, warping the piece's profile -- and instead of worrying about that, he often adds some circular marks that make it look like the piece was inexpertly riveted or screwed back on.

He leans into the unevenness hard.  And the result is something magical, like a relic you might find in a demolished nineteenth century mad scientist's laboratory, something stitched together and broken and reassembled upside down and backwards.

So I took my three smooth, undamaged stoneware bowls and gave it a try.

One of the results

The hardest part -- unsurprising, perhaps, given my personality -- was making the first cut.  Even knowing that if I didn't like the result, I have more clay and could always make another plain, boring, but "perfect" bowl, I sat there for some time, knife in hand, as if the Pottery Gods would smite me if I touched that sleek, classic profile.  Slicing and pressing and marring and deforming it felt like deliberately choosing to ruin something "nice."  

But maybe "nice" isn't what we should be shooting for, as creatives.

Maybe the goal should be somewhere out there beyond "nice."  The point, I realized, is not to retread the safe, secure footsteps I've always taken, but to take a deep breath and launch off into the shadowlands.

So I cut a big chunk from the side of the bowl, got out my texturing stamps and rollers, and set to work.

I was half expecting to give up after a few attempts and throw the whole thing into the scrap bucket, but I didn't.  I found I actually kind of liked the result, as different as it is from what I usually make.  And what surprised me even more was that once I got into it, it was...

... fun.

I've never been much good at "having fun."  In general, I give new meaning to the phrase "tightly wound."  Letting loose and simply being silly is way outside my wheelhouse.  (I know I shortchanged my boys as a dad when they were little simply by my seeming inability to play.)  But I've come to realize that the spirit of playfulness is absolutely critical to creativity.  I don't mean that every creative endeavor should be funny or whimsical; but that sense of pushing the boundaries, of letting the horse have its head and seeing where you end up, is at the heart of what it means to be creative.

I was recently chatting with another author about times when inspiration in writing will surprise you, coming at you seemingly out of nowhere.  When it happens, the feeling is honestly like the ideas are originating outside of my own brain.  There are two examples of this that come to mind immediately, cases where characters to whom I'd never intended to give a big role basically said, "Nuh-uh, you're not sidelining me.  I'm important, and here's why."  (If you're curious, the two are Jennie Trahan in my novella "Convection," and most strikingly, Marig Kastella in The Chains of Orion, who kind of took over the last third of the book, and became one of my favorite characters I've ever written.)  When that happens, it means I've loosened my death-grip on the story, and given my creativity space to breathe.

And it always is a hallmark of things going really right with the writing process.

So I guess the point of all this is to encourage you to stretch your boundaries in your own creative work.  I won't say "lose your fears" -- that's hopeless advice -- but try something new despite them.  (Either something new within your chosen creative medium, or something entirely new.)  Be willing to throw your creative life out of round, to press it into new and unexpected configurations, to turn in a new direction and see where you end up.  There's good stuff to be found there outside of the narrow, constricted, breathless little boundaries of what we've always been told is "the right way to do things."  Take a risk.  Then take another one.  The goal of creativity is not to play it safe.

As French author and Nobel laureate André Gide put it, "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore."

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NEW!  We've updated our website, and now -- in addition to checking out my books and the amazing art by my wife, Carol Bloomgarden, you can also buy some really cool Skeptophilia-themed gear!  Just go to the website and click on the link at the bottom, where you can support your favorite blog by ordering t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, bumper stickers, and tote bags, all designed by Carol!

Take a look!  Plato would approve.

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An anodyne against despair

Yesterday, I was discussing with a friend how important it is to find things that lift your spirit. The world has been replete with dismal news lately, and it's all too easy to decide that everything's hopeless -- to become either cynical or despondent.  I know I have to fight that tendency myself, especially considering the topics I frequently address here at Skeptophilia.

It's essential to take a moment, every so often, to step back and recognize that however terrible current events have been, there is still great love, compassion, and wonder in the world.  So I thought I'd take a day off from the continual stream of WTF that the news has become, and consider a few examples of what beauty we humans are capable of.  Think of it as an anodyne against despair, a way to inoculate yourself against losing hope.

Dalai Lama Mandala I, pen/ink/watercolor, by Carol Bloomgarden [Image used with permission]

First, take a look at this video by the Dutch artist Thijme Termaat. He spent two and a half years creating a progressive set of paintings, condensed it into a three-minute video, set it to a piece from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, and named it Timelapse. Take three minutes and be amazed.

When I was in Boston a while back, I went to the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, and I lucked out and saw some work by the incredibly creative Rachel Perry Welty. The piece that absolutely captivated me was a twelve-minute video called Karaoke Wrong Number, wherein she took four years' worth of voicemail messages she'd received by accident (i.e., the person had called her number but thought they were leaving a message to someone else entirely), and lip synced to them.  I stood there and watched the entire piece three times in a row -- it's mesmerizing.  The incredible thing about it is that she's able to shift her facial expression and body language to match the voice and message of the person -- it's funny, wry, and at times absolutely uncanny, and illustrates Welty's sheer creative genius.  (You can watch a five-minute clip from it at the link above.)

If you don't mind crying, take a look at Kseniya Simonova's stupendous feat of drawing in sand on a light box that brought the whole audience to tears in Ukraine's Got Talent.  It shows the effect of the German invasion on the people of Ukraine during World War II, and packs an emotional punch like nothing I've ever seen before -- especially considering what's happening in Ukraine right now.  It's a perfect example of an artist's ability to distill pain into beauty.

If after that, you want to see something that is pure whimsy to cheer you up, you need to watch the amazing musical marble machine created by Martin Molin of the Swedish band Wintergatan.  Molin created a wild Rube Goldberg machine, powered by a hand crank and 2,000 marbles, that plays a tune he wrote. It's one of those things that you watch, and you just can't quite believe it's real.

If you want to blow your mind further, have a look at this short little video showing one of the crazy three-dimensional sculptures of Japanese mathematician and artist Kokichi Sugihara.  Sugihara specializes in creating optical illusions out of paper -- in this case, a structure that seems to induce marbles to roll uphill.  The weird thing to me is that even when he shows you how it's done -- which he does, about halfway through -- you still can't see it any other way.  It's so cleverly done that our brains simply can't handle it.

Last, for sheer exuberance -- if you're like me, it'll make you laugh and cry at the same time -- check out the short film "Where in the Hell Is Matt?", made by Matt Harding.  Harding set out to film himself dancing in as many different spots on Earth as he could get to, often joined by children, adults, and dogs, all simply expressing how wonderful it is to be alive.  It's set to the heart-wrenchingly gorgeous song "Praan" by Garry Schyman.  The music and the spirit of Harding's project could not blend together more perfectly.

So there you are.  Even when things are bad, people are still creating beautiful, funny, and whimsical things.  They still care about bringing joy into the world, despite the constant barrage of pain, discouragement, and bad news we're subjected to on a daily basis.  I don't know about you, but when I see things like this, it reminds me that humanity isn't as hopeless as it may seem at times.  It recalls the last lines of the beautiful poem "Desiderata," by Max Ehrmann, which never fails to bring me to tears, and which seems like a good place to conclude:

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.  But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.  Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. 

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.  You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. 

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.  Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.  And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.  With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.  Be cheerful.  Strive to be happy.

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Faith of our fathers

One of the things we noticed on our tour of southern Europe -- not that it was any kind of surprise -- was the omnipresence of churches.

They often are built on hills, and overlook the landscape; many are beautiful, and a few -- like the Duomo in Florence -- are architectural wonders.

It's an interesting experience for a non-religious person like myself to walk into some of these buildings.  One of the first places we visited was the fifteenth-century Basilica de Santa Maria degli Angeli et dei Martiri in Rome, which is unprepossessing from the outside, but the inside is nothing short of stunning.

The churches of Europe are renowned for housing works of art, and one in the Basilica that struck me as beautiful (if somber) is The Head of St. John the Baptist by the modern Polish sculptor Igor Mitoraj:

On the façade of the same church was another haunting sculpture:

This sort of painstaking artistry was evident in churches wherever we went.  There was the Church of St. Spiridion on the isle of Corfu:

And the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence:

But nowhere blew me away quite as much as the Church of La Sagrada Familia (the Holy Family) in Barcelona.  It was begun in 1882 by the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, who is a fine example illustrating the quote from Aristotle, "There never was a genius without a tincture of madness."  Gaudí knew it was such an extravagant plan that he'd never live to see it completed; in fact, it's still under construction today, and the locals call it "The church that will never be finished."  Like many of Gaudí's creations, from a distance the exterior looks like something out of Dr. Seuss:

Only when you get closer to you begin to see the intricate details of the sculptures in every recess:

All of this is suitably amazing... but then you step inside, and it takes your breath away.

Gaudí was a master of using light as part of his vision for the place, and the stained glass of La Sagrada Familia is the most beautiful I've ever seen.

According to the guide, Gaudí was intent not only on creating a monument to his religion, but creating a place that celebrated the natural world -- somewhere that all people, of every religion (or no religion at all) could wonder at and be uplifted by.

But still, I couldn't help remembering that places like this are built because of beliefs I don't share any longer.  In a very real way, I feel like an outsider when I enter these sacred spaces.  When I was a kid, growing up in a staunchly Roman Catholic family, every Sunday we sang the hymn "Faith of Our Fathers:"

Faith of our fathers, living still, in spite of dungeon, fire and sword,
O how our hearts beat high with joy, whene'er we hear that glorious word!
Faith of our fathers, living still, we will be true to thee till death.

As a child I sang those words with tremendous gusto, but it didn't really work out that way, did it?  I left the church at age 21 and after a period of searching, I kind of gave it all up and for the most part, never looked back.

But there's a part of me that still resonates to the desire embodied in places like La Sagrada Familia.  I don't think I'll ever go back to the beliefs I tried like mad to hold onto in my youth, but there's a mystery and grandeur in these buildings that plucks my heart like a guitar string.  It goes beyond just desiring the sense of community you find in a church; there's a part of me, perhaps, that craves ritual as a sign of belonging, that needs beautiful symbols to help explain this strange and often chaotic universe.

There's no doubt that religion has much to answer for.  Not just big ticket items like the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the Islamic jihadist movement(s), but suppression of dissent, institutionalized bigotry, misogyny, cruelty, homophobia, abuse of power, and simple self-righteousness.

But religion has also been the impetus for the creation of great beauty.  It's doubtful Gaudí would have envisioned a masterwork like La Sagrada Familia had he not been religious, and the same can be said of works like Michelangelo's Pietà and Bach's Mass in B Minor, to name only two of hundreds.  It's obvious I'm of divided mind on this topic, and it's beyond me to figure out how to square that circle and resolve the seeming paradox.  I rejected religion's fundamental claims forty years ago, yet its draw for me has never really gone away.

A long-ago friend once said about me that I was a failed mystic -- if I'd had the balls, I'd have been a monk.  The comment stuck with me all these years because it hits so close to the mark.  To paraphrase the poster on Fox Mulder's wall, I Wish I Could Believe.

But until that unlikely event occurs, I can still appreciate the profundity and depth of what the religious impulse has created.  And nowhere has that been realized more beautifully than in Gaudí's Church That Will Never Be Finished, in the city of Barcelona.

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