Originality

—Creativity—

My buddy Dave shared a video animation from the New York Times called Allergy to Originality that plays with the idea that most art has always been derived from previous art. I thought I would share some related thoughts.

For some time, now, I've been keeping journals of ideas about creativity and being an artist. Some of the entries are my own thoughts. And some entries I copy from writings by other artists. I've been collecting journals, essays, letters, and other writing from a variety of creators of the past and present. When I find a passage I like, sometimes I copy it word-for-word, and sometimes I alter the words. My own writing merges with the copied writing until I no longer know for sure what I wrote and what other people wrote. Sometimes I can say it better. Sometimes they can say it better. Sometimes I reiterate the same or similar thoughts with multiple ways of saying it.

In this way, I am compiling and merging a lot of ideas about creativity and art making into a form of writing that is not normal or legal to publish, but is moving in the direction of clarity, for me. There are no quotes and no citations. It's everything I was taught not to do. But, to me, it makes more sense. In a similar way, I've been collecting pictures of other people's art work off the internet and not noting their names. I just want ideas, and I don't care who made it.

I think of this as simultaneously a very ancient thing to do and a very post-modern thing to do. Although I am a big fan of Mark Twain, and I respect and understand why he was a strong activist for copyright laws, I also think he would appreciate my motivation. The text, in modern times, became sacred. It became unalterable. Copyright and authorship guaranteed that a text ought not mutate and change in my hands. Someone would write something, and then we were stuck with it, not able to watch it move around throughout many dimensions of meaning.

Words, too, become sanctified. Derrida wanted to replace deconstruction with desedimentation but it was never going to catch on. Nietzsche can't have known that our translation of übermensch would stick us with the ridiculous word superman. Words seem to move in the direction from description into metaphor, on to ritual, and finally into convention. In our contemporary, American culture, words seem to be utterly pragmatic and idiomatic. We never define our terms, we are unaware of the meanings of words, and etymology is the last thing anyone would think to teach. Politics and marketing have made rhetoric the sole purpose of language. My project stirs up language and gets me back to meaning.

At my night job, we have a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking. I can read my journals out loud and turn them, very accurately, into digital text. I can probably transfer my journals into a word processing file at the rate of about half a book per hour. Once I've completed that process, I can rearrange the writing again, putting everything in a logical order, and make it into an ongoing notebook. I may add drawings to it. This could never be sold, but I suspect I could document it by photographing or scanning it.

I said this seems very post-modern. And we might suspect that the World Wide Web would lead to something similar happening collectively. While my project is the activity of an individual, it would seem that a multitude of people would naturally evolve texts into new texts over and over. In fact, I actually see the opposite happening on the Internet, and in another post, I'll talk about how information seems to me to move toward single texts instead of many mutating texts. As maybe it should be; my inclination is the artist's inclination, and though we require it, we don't require it from everyone, all the time.

I see a lot of younger creators today creating art specifically designed to match the formulas of art already in existence. Sometimes they quote or riff on conventions, but often they try hard to validate their work through mimicry. That doesn't interest me. Appropriation and "mashing up" other people's work doesn't interest me. What interests me is taking the writing of famous creators of the past, or of anyone, and editing it into my own text, as if I were editing my own writing into my own thesis project, as a way to keep the meaning from disappearing. As texts become petrified or sanctified (terms Twain enjoyed using) into immutable volumes, they forget their own meanings. But by tearing them up, reusing them, recombining them, and making them my own, I not only reclaim meanings of creativity, but put meaning through the paces of multiple phrasings and re-phrasings. I'm not looking for the perfect way to say it, but finding all different ways of saying it, letting the individual voices of others and my own voice melt together and ultimately distill back into my voice again. It seems like, on paper, the equivalent of how we all learn. It's just that I'm being mechanical and self-conscious about it.