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tags:wabi-sabicreating
rel: Wabi Sabi for Artists, Poets, Philosophers and Thinkers
The methods, strategies, and procedures we use when creating things largely determines the character of things we create.
Thought
Inherent to this is error and edit. I can attempt, as an outsider, to craft even a copy of a song I’ve heard or even of a whole genre. What will often result is something different than what was intended. How much of style is this idiosyncratic error?
Basic Operations
- Assimilation
- Example of the Beatles who prior to the group’s formation, each member immersed himself in the past and present of rock and roll and related genres. Even when recording their original tracks they’d play these canonical riffs between composing sessions.
- Copy and Repeat
- Part of practice and new skills.
- Echoing of specific themes persist, and manifest as expressive quirks and inquiries which keep re-appearing in what we create.
- Combining
- Synthesis - where the idea of two things becomes unclear and dissolve into the new thing created
- Juxtaposition - where the identities remain distinct.
- Deconstructing
- Taking all of the features of the inventory or something and interrogating each: Could, or should this element be changed and if so, how?
- In a binary mode, things are changed in a way the opposite things would typically be expected.
- If thick, make thin? If opaque, make transparent? Straight? Curvy?
- Subtracting
- de-muddling: get rid of what is unnecessary (anti-infinite digression). Jettison the vague, ill-defined and whatever else obscures a clear perception.
- reduction: reduce. Shrink down. Resist the urge to do more.
- refinement: prune, and polish. Turn it over and over till a dazzling thing is revealed. Subtle fashion - pins
- abstraction: removal of details. Isolate salient elements and consolidate them in a concentrated form.
- disintegration: monitor and curate deterioration. Let surfaces gradually fall away and reveal interesting underlying structures (like the skeletal remains of an earlier civilization found at the site of the Roman forum.)
- Practice
- Many of our creative practices are similar to the methodologies of scientists. In both the aesthetic and the scientific realm, hypotheses are developed. They are tested.
- Questioning
- Ask questions repeatedly and incessantly. “Can I go deeper?” “What is missing?”
- Provocation
1961 Piero Manzoni packaged his feces into a metal cannister labeled “artist’s shit”. Through conventional eyes at the time it was a not-so-veiled “fuck you” aimed at the art establishment which included fellow artists.
Unsticking Brain Glue and recursive methodology. Instead of purchasing paints he needs at the art supply store, take a roundabout route. While wandering amongst the hills, fields and valleys of the countryside, he collects rocks, soils and other elements whose colors appeal to him. He then mixes theses down and grinds them, combined with oil. If another idea isn’t present, he’ll paint pictures of tubes of paint.