What is creativity?

[blazeofglory]

Share your ideas of creativity.

I often wonder as to what creativity is. First ideas occur to me and I think poets, writers, artists, singers and musicians are in a world of creativity.

Today I sat in meditation for a while over this issue and suddenly a flash occurred to me and that got me to understand creativity along different lines.

Needless to say writers or poets are great persons of creativity, and of course there are others who are without arrogance but with lots of humility and meekness are farmers, carpenters, general laborers.

I was myself a farmer, the son of a farmer. I recall the days in my babyhood when I was on my father's farm. When my father worked on his farms there were notes of joys if the crop did well and sadness if they did not do well.

Indeed things of creativity are not simply confined to works of paper and ink, and canvases and brushes. Of course they transcend these limits.

A baby playing on a shore and building up something is a good piece of art and creativity. A baby making his or her mother smile with things done funnily is indeed a thing of art.

Now we are too much obsessed with a world of print or things on screens.

Let us go beyond these limits and keep abreast of things beyond these circumferences and come up to a broader spectrum of creativity. Let us see the beauty of creativity not the copy of it.

[Watershed]

Oh, I agree with you. I'd even go as far as to say that creativity is really just any type of synthesis over most every field. Politicians can be creative in the solutions they come up with or their plans. Many times great political work can be art. Athletes can be artists too, being creative in their physical and strategic performances, and how about the businessmen as well? All types of innovators in all sorts of fields are creative. The people that invented irrigation are creative, as to refer to your life of farming. Inventors are creative, and I like to think of myself as a creative man and as a writer, but I still daydream about types of food to cook, types of business strategies which could be implimented, and types of legislation that could be written.

Art surrounds us, both natural from nature, and within men.

[ClaesGefvenberg]

Now we enter a pet subject of mine: Creativity, and how to promote it. I suggest a look at this previous thread (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18114) on the subject.

/Claes

[PoeticPassions]

Creativity must be incited by imagination. Creativity is the ability to create, which we all possess, with the passion and desire to do so. The passion and imagination incite action, and out of it comes imperfect (but beautiful) creation...

I like what Picasso said, "Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction."

[ecrivan]

I think if you want to knoiw about creativity in writing, a lot has to do with how you perceive things and put them down on paper. I made a mention of starting a narrative based on your own experiences, something akin to Kerouac in the following post.
While writing a crime story, I mentioned something about throwing in an extra character that distracts you from the crime scene. The writer can ask himself what will the hero do when that other person is thrown in....

http://www.writinghood.com/Style/How-To/Writing-Mystery-or-Crime-Novels.72552

[jon1jt]

Share your ideas of creativity.

I often wonder as to what creativity is. First ideas occur to me and I think poets, writers, artists, singers and musicians are in a world of creativity.
.

Creativity is to imagine a world without pooh bear. :p

[blazeofglory]

Creativity is a thing that keeps you close to God. With creativity you get threaded to God and what we call a state of godliness will possess you. God is a creator on a macro level and you on a micro level. Through you he will fulfill his works of creativity.

Creativity is something that indeed fills the gap that lies between you and God man. Man is the image or manifestation of God Himself, not in the least different from Him, and the seeming difference is an illusion.

[blp]

blazeofglory, a lot of discussion went on during the last century on the subject of this expanded view of creativity you're proposing.

One of Sam Beckett's friends tells an anecdote about walking through a Paris market with him and Beckett telling him that the fishmonger was as worthy of respect for his profession as Beckett was for his.

A near contemporary of Beckett's, Marcel Duchamp, invented a new kind of artwork, the readymade, basically by keeping objects around his studio and removing them from their ordinary use: a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool, a urinal turned on its end and signed by a fictitious 'author', a shovel with the words 'in advance of the broken arm' written on the handle. He said these were simply things he liked to have around, like a fire in the fireplace.

Some 30 or 40 years later, Duchamp's descendants, the conceptual artists, showed how everything from changes to the landscape to ideas and acts of meditation could be artworks. Although a lot of this comes freighted with theory/philosophy (Wittgenstein was a big figure for the early conceptual artists), in practice, it often seems to me to be an exploration of childlike, often repetitive play, as if to say, maybe we give up these kinds of explorations too soon: Bruce Nauman walking around a square in his studio in an affected manner; Bas Jan Ader riding his bicycle into an Amsterdam canal or perpetually rearranging a vase of red, blue and yellow flowers (a tribute to Mondrian); Adrien Piper walking down a New York street with a freshly painted sign reading 'wet paint' around her neck; Gilbert and George sending a postcard out describing how they were sitting by their window and suddenly found themselves looking out at a beautiful sculpture - and illustrating this with a picture of themselves gazing at a fall of snow; Lawrence Weiner cutting a section from the wall of a house or throwing a standard dye marker into the sea (eventually the descriptions of these activities became the work and he stopped actually doing them); Dennis Oppenheim creating a book shaped sunburn on his belly by sleeping with the book on his belly on a beach or staring at clouds and concentrating on making them disappear; Robert Rauschenberg erasing a drawing by Willem de Kooning (de Kooning gave his permission and supplied a drawing 'that would be really difficult to erase'). A little later still, Sophie Calle took a job as a chambermaid in a Venice hotel in order to be able to spy on the guests.

A lot of this stuff reminds me of a female saint I read about in a book on meditation (I've forgotten her name, I'm afraid) who decided her way of praying would be to concentrate as much as possible on each of her 'mundane' daily activities. The Meditation of Housework, the book called it, adding that it was one of the hardest meditations.

I guess the thing is, almost anything can involve creativity, whatever that is, but the great risk in our daily lives is that our jobs will become so familiar to us that we'll do them by rote and become bored. This is obviously something that can happen to an artist too, but it's perhaps more likely to happen if you work a biscuit production line or man a checkout.

Funnily enough, an expanded notion of creativity has also appeared in the corporate world recently. It's apparently very important to big banking and business guys now that their minions be 'creative', so they send them on team building weekends during which they are set to work solving the problems of collective cake baking or getting back to civilisation from somewhere remote or rigging a sail or even painting. An artist I know had a lucrative job for a long time drawing pictures at corporate 'brainstorming' meetings – something that was, presumably, supposed to aid the executives' creativity by osmosis.

What strikes me writing this, and it seems to be the answer to something I've been puzzling over for years, is that the conceptual artists' work, as well as the meditation of housework, is actually weighted more towards receptivity than creativity. Warhol, who is close to the conceptual artists in a lot of ways and, certainly, a disciple of Duchamp's, proclaimed himself to like boring things. Warhol is often seen as collusive with the structures of high capitalism, but this receptivity to 'boring' things is more complex than that allows: it's as if he and artists like Nauman are saying that there's real potential in the things we see as dull, maybe even the work of the checkout or the production line. While the execs are chasing creative fullness and satisfaction from acquisition, the artists almost seem to see the notion of creativity as passé; they just want to be open enough and perhaps empty enough to wake up to where we are right now ('a beautiful sculpture').

.


Of course the risk in what I've just said is that the art could seem to be designed to instill a passivity in all those oppressed workers at the bottom of the pyramid, endlessly stitching the same seams or riveted by riveting the same bit of the widget. It's hard to be sure or say why, but I don't think this is a real risk. In practice, minimal and conceptual art seems to operate as a fairly effective reproof to consumerism's insistence that you always need more; not that that was necessarily its precise intent and, anyway, these snakes have a way of eating themselves up from the tail (Andy Warhol T-shirt/poster/mug anyone?).

Oh well. The thing is, for me, this strain of thought provided something of a Damascene moment on my own creative journey. I found out about Calle's work at almost exactly the same time as I saw Chris Marker's film Sans Soleil a sort of travelogue made up of clips from around the world and overlaid with Marker's thoughtful, free ranging commentary, spoken by a fictitious woman about a fictitious filmmaker ('He said that for him this image of three children on a road in Iceland was the image of happiness and for a long time he had wanted to begin a film with it...followed by a long trail of black lead in'.) and also the work of the novelist Kathy Acker, who professed herself to be interested in plagiarism. I realised I was putting too much pressure on myself to make things up and it wasn't allowing me to explore enough of what fascinated me in the world.

[blp]

If you let enough in, eventually something will come out too. That's creativity.

William Burroughs said that, generally, bad writers were writers who didn't read enough.

[ForzaSugar]

Creativity is the ability of finding original ideas/concepts. In my opinion first necessity of creativity is a free mind and a person who has a free mind is a rare person in today's society.

[ForzaSugar]

If you let enough in, eventually something will come out too. That's creativity.

William Burroughs said that, generally, bad writers were writers who didn't read enough.

Writing good stuff is not directly related to creativity. So a bad writer doesn't have to a non-creative person while a good writer is not necessarily creative person. In fact most of art is mimic.

[blp]

Clearly this is not just a mysterious subject, but one utterly fertile for mystification.

[blazeofglory]

Creativity is something that is of course unworldly and mysterious and some power we know little of is at work and man is just a tool and nothing else. Some super natural force shapes our course in the process.

Or else how could man come to this age now wherein we are going ahead advancing scientifically to the extent we remain in now.

Ultimately there will not be distance between you and your maker and same the seeming or outer layer. Once the screened is removed you will see yourself transparently. God and you go arm in arm.

[blp]

Oh well. At least I succeeded in working something out for myself.

[xtianfriborg13]

Creativity is limitless. I think. lol