Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 713
Dropping off “Magisterial” at the framer
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on
One of the great traps at times of blockage is that we may accuse ourselves of a deficit of concentration and focus, a deficit of discipline. We then take a paternal or militaristic attitude toward ourselves. We will force ourselves to work, we will go on a schedule, we will take vows. The most dangerous trap is to get into a contest of strength between “will power” and “won’t power.” Discipline is crucial, but we do not attain it by stiffening up. We attain it by sitting still and penetrating the emptiness within, making of that emptiness a friend rather than an adversary or bogeyman.
When you are stuck, meditate, free associate, do automatic writing, talk to yourself and answer yourself. Play with the blocks. Stay in the temenos of the workplace. Relax, surrender to the bafflement; don’t leave the temenos, and the solution will come. Persevere gently. Use intelleto, the visionary faculty. Stay close to the zero mark; indulge neither in great highs or great lows.
The depths are obscured in us when we try to force feelings; we clarify them by giving them adequate time and space and letting them come. What we experienced yesterday as the pride of creativity or the self-deprecating feeling of incapacity we see today as the signal to surrender.
Like the rules of the universe, the whole matter of personal creativity is baffling and paradoxical. To try to control yourself, to try to create, to try to break free of the knots you yourself have tied is to set yourself up at a distance from that which you already are. It is like looking around this way and that for your own head.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Pearls from artists* # 418
A Remedios Varo Plate from “Science and Surrealism”
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
… both Surrealism’s birth and infancy coincided with probably the most momentous period in the history of physics. The first Surrealist text, written by Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault and titled Magnetic Fields, deployed the spontaneous technique of ‘automatic writing,’ which supposedly allowed direct access to unconscious material. It appeared in 1920 but was written in the previous year, coinciding with the expedition led by the English astrophysicist, Arthur Eddington, to observe the solar eclipse from the island of Principe off the west coast of Africa. It was this journey that proved predictions set out in Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (1916) about the gravitational deflection of light by the sun. Eddington’s experiment led not only to Einstein’s instant, mythic status as the ‘new Copernicus’ and the swift popularization of Relativity, but more specifically its appearance in the early theoretical writings of Surrealism’s principle spokesman, Breton, which helped lay the foundations of the movement. Breton’s subsequent manifesto texts of 1924 and 1929, extending his discussion of what he deemed the narrow, restrictive logic of Western though, can be situated within the same historical context that bore the revolutionary discoveries of quantum mechanics, culminating in 1927.
“Sibylline Strangeness: Surrealism and Modern Physics,” by Gavin Parkinson in Science in Surrealism, published by Gallery Wendy Norris
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