Each creator’s creations are their coping mechanism for all times — for the loneliness of being, for the eager for connection, for the dazzling incomprehension of what all of it means. What we name artwork is solely a gesture towards some genuine reply to those open questions, directly common and intimately felt — questions aimed on the elemental truths of being alive, animated by a yearning for magnificence, haunted by the necessity to discover a manner of bearing our mortality. With out this elemental longing, with out this genuine gesture, what’s made just isn’t artwork however one thing else — the type of commodified craftsmanship Virginia Woolf indicted when she weighed creativity against catering.
The 12 months he turned fifty, and a 12 months earlier than he gave his irreverent answers to the famous Proust Questionnaire, David Bowie (January 8, 1947–January 10, 2016) contemplated the soul of creativity in a tv interview marking the discharge of his experimental drum’n’bass report Earthling — a radical departure from the musical model that had sprinkled the stardust of his genius upon the collective conscience of a technology, and a testomony to Bowie’s unassailable devotion to continuous inventive progress.
Nested into the interview is his most direct recommendation to artists and the closest factor he ever formulated to a private inventive credo.
In consonance with E.E. Cummings’s splendid insistence that “the Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself,” Bowie displays:
By no means play to the gallery… All the time keep in mind that the rationale that you simply initially began working is that there was one thing inside your self that you simply felt that in the event you might manifest not directly, you’d perceive extra about your self and the way you coexist with the remainder of society. I believe it’s terribly harmful for an artist to meet different folks’s expectations — they often produce their worst work once they try this.
Echoing Beethoven’s life-tested perception that although the true artist “may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun,” Bowie provides a mighty antidote to the best enemy of inventive work — complacency:
Should you really feel secure within the space that you simply’re working in, you’re not working in the suitable space. All the time go a little bit additional into the water than you’re feeling you’re able to being in. Go a little bit bit out of your depth, and if you don’t really feel that your toes are fairly touching the underside, you’re nearly in the suitable place to do one thing thrilling.
Complement with John Lennon on creativity, Nick Cave on the relationship between art and mystery, Paul Klee on how an artist must be like a tree, and Wassily Kandinsky on the three responsibilities of the artist, then revisit Virginia Woolf’s account of the epiphany that revealed to her what the creative life means.
