Passive Creativity: Research Report

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By Daley Tocher
01:35, 9 May 2006 (PDT)

Abstract

Starting with the onset of the 20th Century, a new value was placed on the creative interpretation of art in nearly every medium and discourse. For the most part, this was a conscious shift brought about by artists and critics alike. Starting with visual art in the very beginning of the 1900’s, and with literature in the 1920’s-40’s, this goal of incorporating the viewer/audience into the creative process became such an established piece of the artistic process that it is one of the core focuses of the interactive and digital art that have emerged in the recent past.

Description of Subjects

Marcel Duchamp as chief in breaking the barrier between art and onlooker. New Criticism as a literary theory welcoming the reader into the creative process. TS Elliot as a literary critic. William Faulkner as a literary and legendary figure. Aaron and Translations as examples of digital art that incorporate randomness.

Analysis and Evaluation

So where did it all begin? Art, that is. Very hard to say. What might be easier, at least to Marcel Duchamp, was where it might end.

“The public will keep on buying more and more art, and husbands will start bringing home little paintings to their wives on their way from work, and we’re all going to drown in a sea of mediocrity. Maybe Tinguely and a few others sense this and are trying to destroy art before it’s too late,” (Tomkins 15).

Perhaps in that pretentious fashion infamous to both visual artists and the French, Duchamp embodied the blend of creative artist and creative philosopher that the world needed. The man emerged onto the art global art scene with a new form of art in 1913. It was then that he unveiled his first “ready-made”, that is art which the artist did not necessarily craft. Essential to understanding the profound meaning of this gesture is understanding the stage that visual art was in at the time. Photography had achieved enough quality to replace painting and eliminate the need for photorealistic aspects of painting. To survive, paint of canvas stopped trying to imitate the real world and depict emotion in ways photos could not. Taking this a step further is Duchamp, who suggested that anything at all may be incorporated into the artistic process to produce feelings; the new artistic goal. Art did need destroying, but what it needed even more was a good, planned, and structured rebuilding. Duchamp, arguably the most creative visual artist in the past 100 years, was among the first to incorporate prefabricated elements in his art; an act that shook the high gallery art world at its foundations. The word art comes from the Latin for craft: the verb. What Duchamp did with the ready-mades was to produce art without literally producing anything. He still titled it, and placed it in galleries, and called it art. This effectively was the first major historical step in inviting the viewer of art into the creative process.

“The onlooker is as important as the artist. In spite of what the artist thinks he is doing, something stays on that is completely independent of what he intended, and that something is grabbed by society – if he’s lucky. The artist himself doesn’t count. Society just takes what it wants,” (Tomkins 18).

Though chronologically first, the visual arts were not the only field to adopt this rather enlightened outlook on artistic creation. In the field of literature, sharing in the creative process between the writer and the reader was a somewhat slower process than in the visual arts. The critical literary theory that best incorporates this notion that differing critical interpretations of a work can be as significant as the artist’s original intent is embodied by the New Criticism movement. Though modernist in flavor and continually refined as a theory as late as the 1960’s, New Criticism draws much of its foundation from the critical styling of T.S. Elliot as far back as the 1920’s. In his Tradition and the Individual Talent, Elliot says:

“Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry,” (Elliot 2398).

Though from a different standpoint, this is the same argument that Duchamp made through his art. While Duchamp spoke for the viewer ignoring the artist as a person by simply removing the artist, Elliot argues the same about critics of writing through writing. Later New Critics would summarize this point by declaring a work of literature as autonomous, and that everything needed to understand and speak about it could be easily found within the text itself. Freeing the reader of examining biographical information allowed a more free interpretation of the work, and hence a more creative one.

Though reaching his pinnacle after Elliot, another writer who embodied this ideal (arguably with more subtly, and hence more effect) is William Faulkner. An avid disapprover of interviews in general, anecdotes of a drunk Faulkner sending his interviewer on intellectual goose chases are abound. During his 1950 Nobel acceptance speech (where his inebriation is also believed to be in full swing), he affirms this core attribute of New Criticism with his opening line:

“I believe that this award was not made to me as a man but to my work,” going on to say, “So this award is only mine in trust.”

Recap: in the last century when art has been faced with a sensitive period, rather than sheepishly following whatever a prominent artist proposes, a new critical paradigm emerges than incorporates the viewer and in turn puts more creativity upon them. That given, the dilemmas that Duchamp faced in visual art and that the New Critics faced in writing have lost their immediacy as problems.

Enter: the digital world.

Just as visual art was at a turning point when artists began to reach the end of their creative ropes concerning traditional 2-dimensional interpretations and modernism in writing is no longer modern, we have entered a new media revolution. The birth of the computers and the web were met by artists, but to a large extent, ones who merely saw the technological advancements as advancements in publishing. It largely wasn’t until Web 2.0 that artists began to fully utilize the internet itself as a medium for creativity. Concerning the artistic movements of the past in other mediums it seems only logical that this turning point would also adopt a stance of inviting the user to participate in the creative process.

One prevalent example as to how new media art shares creativity between artists and viewer is by the inclusion of an algorhythemic randomness… a program crafted by an artist that is the actual maker of the artwork. Take for example Aaron, the downloadable painting A.I., or John Cayley’s Translations, a randomized music/poetry/visual art website. In both cases, the fact that no two viewers are ever witnessing identical pieces of art creates a fundamentally new personality to the art every time it is view. Philosophically, one must then make the mental leap that the viewer and the artist himself are literally never viewing the same piece of art. While Duchamp and the New Critics proposed a theoretical separation of the artist from the art, technology has made this a logical reality. If the artist and the onlooker never witness the same art, then what is the artist except for another member of the audience? The creative criticism created by all parties on the work of art is then of equal merit.