WHAT SORT OF CREATIVITY?...
| " Now the (creative person) has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us" (p108) |
" so that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life..." |
AND WHOSE REALITY?....
This project had two questions which circled each other. What are the minimum core conditions for creativity; and what does it mean to bring foundation students work to the sophicated atmosphere of an artistic institution like Schloss Solitude? This is interesting because:
- The two contexts offer very different material and discursive environments
- It is about working with people who do not yet have privilege or resources or experience
The point here was to use these productive intersections to explore different kinds of places and positions, theories and practices, writings and makings...
What, then, was the students' reality? Their installations engaged directly with the boundaries between their bodies and their immediate space; and whilst a few made meditative spaces, 'oppositional' to the external world and providing still time in which to interpret that world (as in Virginia Woolf's model), these students also offered at least two other sorts of creative spaces:
- Some were much more interwoven with the social fabric; in both connected and distracted forms - unbothered by seperating out physical and creative worlds or aligning public/social and private/contemplative boundaries
- Some made deliberately transgressive, awkward or personally challenging ownroooms - deliberately disrupting any sort of assumption of a simple and transparent relationship between external reality and its internal intepretatio
THIS IS A REALITY THAT IS ALREADY BEYOND THE BINARY OPPOSITIONS OF HOME/WORK, PRIVATE/PUBLIC, WORK/PLAY...IT CHALLENGES THOSE OLD-FASHIONED AND STEREOTYPICAL GENDER/ CLASS / RACE DIVISIONS NOT AT A THEORETICAL LEVEL, BUT THROUGH INTUITIVE AND DIRECT PRACTICE.
AND I LEARNT A LOT FROM THE PROCESS...