Art Monday September 19, 2005
For many years, I’ve been interested in the psychology and sociology of the activity of art-making – in which I include photography, subject to technical parameters but in many respects no different from the work of a painter or sculptor. I’ve considered it in various ways: psychoanalytic, personal-developmental, sociological in relation to established society, Jungian, Alice Miller therapeutic, and so on. Why do I take photographs? Why do you take photographs? You can ask the same question of any artisan, artist or writer. Quite often, money is not part of the equation for the artist, hence the ‘struggling artist’ syndrome, the person driven by conscious and also unconscious motivations, with little reference to grown-up survival needs.
Artists can’t help doing it, and the rationale is elusive. Watching contemporary musicians like Coldplay, Razorlight, and reflecting on bands like Oasis, it seems to me that it’s a tragic and exploitative situation that misleads and deceives people – young people especially – because they don’t understand the place the artist has in society, and the fragility of their own psychological inclinations. Commercial success is tenuously related to inventive and genuine talent, in the sense that you may or may not be recognised (abitrarily), and the success you do enjoy may or may not correspond to quality and ability (the vacuous stuff peddled as music).
The role of the artist is quite interesting. As a freelance photographer available for commissions you profer your experience and expertise in relation to people, institutions, groups, whatever, where you are an outsider with specialist creativity useful for a project: not a member of their group, but intersecting with it in relation to creative activity. What’s it like, being in that position? You intersect with the person/group, in a negotiable space, discovering a common understanding in relation to the project in question, and the elusive goal of ‘creativity’.
The artist lives an alienated life, in the sense in which a part of them is unconventional and creatively-rebellious. It doesn’t mean they are anti-social, or dysfunctional; it means that in the flux of life part of them is untouched, that looks out from a distance at the proceedings of so called normality. I went to a Creativity conference once, attended by teachers, artists and community workers, where everyone agrreed with the following points:
- The example of children is inspirational and instructive, for understanding creativity: spontanous, no pre-conceptions, oriented towards fun
- Creativity is inherently and by definition rebellious
Society is actually provisional, the ensuing and on-going result of infinite social decisions over thousands of years across thousands of different cultures. How we conduct ourselves, what we value and aspire to, and what we establish as our frameworks of expectation and legal organisation is actually quite arbitrary. I personally find the world a terrible mess, where thousands die from malnourishment when others enjoy such obscene wealth, average wage-earners find it difficult to comprehend. Where philosophically flawed, strange ideas are enshrined in irrational institutions with enormous and accepted power, that we call ‘religion’. Where the ‘meaning of life’ is devalued and people are damaged and killed in various circumstances, within social and political contexts that don’t care and are oblivious to human suffering. Where jungle-like competition is the law by which you enjoy material security, or not, and if you don’t like this fact you suffer.
Enter the artist. In recent years, the Labour government has recognised what it calls the Creative Economy, and how vibrant and world-class the British activity is. They’ve produced White Papers, researched the different sectors, funded numerous and various projects, and commissioned people to research and understand the creative process. They do this in relation to political and economic concerns but that’s OK; artists themselves are characteristically oblivious to these grown-up issues. But no government will understand creative process because they are inherently Establishment, not creative, brokers of power and influence by definition, lacking the intuition, fluidity, and rebellious qualities of innovation. Scientists and academics have also moved into this field, sometimes funded by the government. I heard a Radio 4 programme recently, for example, featuring brain experts discussing electro-cerebral activity and researchers convinced they can locate and pin-point the design of creativity, as a psychological architecture or operation similar to computing. It’s grim; you only have to listen to the complacent way these people speak, the tenor of their voice and the intellectual context by which they justify themselves to realise – intuitively – they are to creativity as the teachers in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times were to the human spirit: concerned with “facts, facts, facts”, and a Victorian attitude to the ineffable and beautiful.
The artist has a special ability to stand outside habitual individuality and social convention, and imagine something new and vital. This is so deep, and psychologically instinctive, it cannot be laid out like dead butterflies captured in a net. In some respects, it’s an attempt to reconcile an internal schism: it may actually be a survival mechanism for people so afflicted, a tension that nurtured, respected and valued, may bear recognisable fruit. The artist may have a deep feeling of loss of youth, health, or success, and tries to reconcile his fragility by photographing beautiful images, enjoying the power to do so because he can, and because he believes in constructing a personal narrative – in the sense in which artistic output is conceived in narrative terms – as a counterpoint to a cruel world. The images may be the opposite of the artists’ life, which is imperfect and flawed, and they love perfection in the image as a compensation for looking out the window onto meaningless urban sprawl, or the stream of depressing stories and ignorance in the News At Ten. And you don’t have to conceive this in grim art-therapy terms, like necessary medicine or therapuetic healing, implying dis-ease: Carl Jung reformulated aspects of the Freudian thesis, like the inherent nature of the Id, into a positive and healthy configuration – thus, the unconscious psyche is a forward moving dynamic, balancing and homeostatic, seeking creative expression with symbolic activity. It’s not dark and shadowy like the Freudian conception of Id, where artistic impulses are classically reduced to sublimated libido. The problem with such theories is the way they are firstly so limiting, and secondly so definitive: a psychological model to which you are inescapably doomed, like Sisyphus condemned to roll the stone up the mountain. Nowadays, we understand the extent to which theory is actually narrative, amenable to deconstruction. Of course, there are psychic strata that we understand as ‘unconscious’, and there are aspects of the Freudian model obviously correct – but the same applies to the Jungian model, with a positive and life-affirming conception of the unconscious and an understanding of ‘libido’ that encompasses both sex and art, as aspects of the same thing: creativity.
But people don’t photograph or paint motivated by artistic theory, because the underlying drive is not intellectual. It’s an expression of trying to resolve and regenerate, inherently related to a comprehensive vision of human life itself: philosopher Henri Bergson understood this in his book The Creative Mind. He said, “To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly”. In other words, Life is creativity, and the artist is, at best – removed from dreary economic, academic and social parameters – a microcosm of a more general principle that also manifests, perhaps less obviously, in other areas of human life. At best, the artist assumes a mantle by specialising in this process, and is thus capable of contributing something to others. On one commission, for example, it was interesting and fun to interact with my commisioner concerning creativity and aesthetics, touching a part of them you wouldn’t normally expect to be there considering their (managerial) job. But actually, although the artist or photographer specialises in this, it’s a wider concern than his own specialism; he’s developed it, but other people can understand it. That’s quite fun.