In 1500, German Artist Albrecht Dürer painted the best known of his many self-portraits. (Dürer painted many self-portraits, the first preserved one when he was thirteen, a silverpoint sketch that retains the power to startle with its mature sensitivity.) In the portrait at left, he shows himself in the guise of a Byzantine Christ Pantocrator, or lord of the universe, and inscribed it with his crisp engravers lettering in line with his penetrating gaze: “Thus I, Albrecht Duerer from Nuremburg, painted myself with indelible colours at the age of 28 years.” My students find it strange that he would presume to paint himself in the image of Christ, but many have found it
a natural part of Dürer’s Northern Renaissance order of things: God created man; creativity in men reflects honors the creator. Not until the 19th century did the English word creativity distance itself from divine, miraculous, heavenly creation.So Dürer, adopting the gaze, the curls, the long straight nose and gesture of blessing demonstrated that his creative powers had a divine source. And yet. He also labored with a brush of few bristles to detail the fur-lined coat that tied him to the aristocracy, demonstrating his status as artist in a far more worldly way. And he dedicated the same tender affection to portraying his own good looks, and a firmer hand to stamping his unmistakably bold initials and the equally bold text, which asserts the immortality of this self-portrait. Self portrait, portrait of Christ, portrait of artists as wealthy and respectable, portrait of handsome and desirable young man, made immortal by his creation; his painting is all of these in turn.
So Dürer, adopting the gaze, the curls, the long straight nose and gesture of blessing demonstrated that his creative powers had a divine source. And yet. He also labored with a brush of few bristles to detail the fur-lined coat that tied him to the aristocracy, demonstrating his status as artist in a far more worldly way. And he dedicated the same tender affection to portraying his own good looks, and a firmer hand to stamping his unmistakably bold initials and the equally bold text, which asserts the immortality of this self-portrait.
Dürer has little competition for fame among German artists in the centuries before or after him. He was right: the colours have not faded since he created himself as creator, as ruler of the universe, as successful. But this portrait does not hold pride of place as most famous among his images; more people must recognize his rhinoceros and few could have lived long without seeing his praying hands in reproduction or in clichéd reinterpretation. Like most of the artists I love, Dürer seldom offers a single clear interpretation. Self portrait, portrait of Christ, portrait of artists as wealthy and respectable, portrait of handsome and desirable young man, made immortal by his creation; his painting is all of these in turn.Dürer, son of a goldsmith, rose to greater fame than his father, and painted himself at 28 as famous. He created himself as an artist, and in so doing saw his relationship to God, whom he believed had created life. He shows himself as son of the creator, as part of the creative trinity, and as a creator in his own earthly right. He demonstrates the Renaissance debate about whether nature or art were superior, and about whether artmaking is an act of presumptuousness or praise.
At the time I wrote my dissertation, which gave birth to today’s thoughts, I was busy creating life myself, round in my belly and round and round with ideas in that strange creative space. Long gestation periods seem to require some chunk of time spent swamped in mourning sickness, a time when doubt, boredom, dis-ease take over, slow the process, await rekindling of the peat, transformation. Somewhere in the quagmire of writing my dissertation, I handed a draft of a chapter or two to one of the more traditional members of my committee. (A proper historian, who stayed inside her specialty, did not have children, who wrote about paintings but certainly never made any. A serious scholar.) Leaving our meeting, I felt relatively unscathed, if still trapped in the mud, and reported to my advisor (a performance artist, novelist, mother, and victorianist of note) that said committee member had called my chapter very creative.
I smiled happily.
“Betsy,” my advisor said, “that was a criticism.”
At a few memorable points in my life, concentrated in that becoming phase of adolescence, I had had related experiences. The pattern goes like this: an idea I felt I had a cozy understanding of went suddenly opaque, mysterious, new, demanded that I find a whole new way to inhabit it.
For my whole life, people had described me as creative and I had smiled happily.
Sitting in my advisor’s dining room I felt those historic smiles freeze over and crack apart on my cheeks. Creative was a criticism. Now, not only did I have a new flaw to add to the catalogue I kept carefully up to date, I also had to process the shame of the fact that I had always worn this one: not just on my shirtsleeves but all over me from the ridiculously contrived haircut to the vintage-shop clothing to the rings on my fingers and bells on my toes. Not only had I been creative, I had flaunted it.
I could feel the tug of the mud sucking against my ankles. Not only was I stuck in a quagmire, the tool that usually dragged me out had metamorphosed into a deadly enemy. Creativity was a criticism.
Dawning: perhaps my dissertation topic, which
included, as subject lines or tropes: 19th c. landscape painting, childhood, the poetics of natural history, hummingbirds, marriage, civil war, folk art, the contrivances for reproduction of tropical orchids, surrealism, photography, early childhood language acquisition, French semiotic theory, psychoanalytic theory, and the kitchen sink, and that just in chapter one, might have gotten a little creative, so to speak. Perhaps I should be more historical. Look at what was showing at the Royal Academy the year my artist, Martin Johnson Heade painted his first hummingbird. (I had done that, too.)Awakening further: those artists who captured my attention most always turn out to be those whom history described as defying categorization. Albrecht Dürer made self-portraits in silverpoint, pen, and oil; he represented rhinoceri, rabbits, adam and eve, st. george, and a Great Piece of Turf. He wrote about his life, illustrated humors, and wrote treatises on mathematics and anatomy. Like Dürer, the artists I fell for were surreal, but the surrealists disbarred them. They were self-taught, but they spent off hours in museums, galleries and libraries. They were straight, but they had affairs inside their gender. They were insane, but they lived productive lives. They shared studio space with prominent insiders, but never got shows. They were landscape artists, but they also painted portraits, still-life, and genre scenes. And, very often, they also practiced science, wrote poetry, novels, or gardened professionally. In short, I liked excessive, transgressive, undisciplined creativity.
Creative I thought, had been praise. Now Creativity had become criticism.
My artists seldom ‘made it’ in the traditional sense. Perhaps they fought for survivable success, received it for the ‘wrong’ reason, or got it after they died. Van Gogh, so creative he went mad, Henry Darger, so tangled inside his creativity he couldn’t share his creations, David Byrne (art school dropout), whose creativity so controlled his collaborators that they rebelled, spread their wings, and flew away to play with the playful Tom Tom Club.
My own creativity couldn’t get me out of this mire. So as so many times when in a mire, I turned to another creative thinker. Collaborating with a book. Georges Bataille had helped me with my trouble with disciplines in the past, and I turn to him here again. Bataille— mid 20th century French librarian, sometime surrealist, pornographic novelist, and philosopher. He wrote about economics, poetry, eroticism, the big toe, milk, eyeballs, potlatch, the Marquis de Sade, Van Gogh, Neolithic Cave painting, slaughterhouses, and, to the point here, transgression.
In “The Accursed Share,” Bataille writes that that transgression emerges from prohibition. Prohibition, like other limiters, inspires creative escape. The mythic architect Daedalus, prohibited from leaving his own inescapable labyrinth, made wings of wax and feather and flew away. Leonardo, faced with a cold monastery dining hall, painted a famous last supper, a painting whose fame we all know though we don’t know the painting. Leonardo, excessively creative (Giorgio Vasari will tell you about it; so Sigmund Freud) invented a new fresco technique that didn’t work very well and the painting started deteriorating almost before it dried. Maybe you can make it out; for all my love of Leonardo I can’t know the least thing about The Last Supper, it’s just too fragmented. (In 1556, less than sixty years after Leonardo painted it, Vasari described the Last Supper as ruined, its figures unrecognizable)
In “The Accursed Share,” Bataille writes that that transgression emerges from prohibition. Prohibition, like other limiters, inspires creative escape. The mythic architect Daedalus, prohibited from leaving his own inescapable labyrinth, made wings of wax and feather and flew away. Leonardo, faced with a cold monastery dining hall, painted a famous last supper, a painting whose fame we all know though we don’t know the painting. Leonardo, excessively creative (Giorgio Vasari will tell you about it; so Sigmund Freud) invented a new fresco technique that didn’t work very well and the painting started deteriorating almost before it dried. Maybe you can make it out; for all my love of Leonardo I can’t know the least thing about The Last Supper, it’s just too fragmented. (In 1556, less than sixty years after Leonardo painted it, Vasari described the Last Supper as ruined, its figures unrecognizable)
Picasso, who started painting as a young child, delved into assemblage, collage, found objects, film, photography, poetry and pottery. Able as a teenager to render any figure that sat before him, Picasso went into a blue period. Then blushed rose, invented cubism, analytical cubism, married politics to surrealism, and developed a new form of neoclassicism. And achieved great
fame. His remarkable proliferation and fame alerted enemies at every side who prove that in fact he did not invent cubism, analytical cubism, or in fact do anything new but only stole from the creative people around him, and who remind us he made too much art, meaning he left a lot of bad art lying around. Henry Darger, orphaned, labeled retarded and institutionalized, ran away, took a job as a janitor, and wrote something like 30,000 pages of (fairly unreadable) fiction, memoir, history, meteorology and fantasy illustrated with hundreds of intricately detailed collages of the major characters. Darger also combined girls and boy bodies, human and animal bodies, violent abuse with hopes for liberation. He may have known his creativity was excessive. He never showed anyone his work, though he described himself as a great artist. After his death, people have agreed, though many feel shock at his undisciplined hybridity, and the way his images transgress typical boundaries and ignore taboos.
Writing about transgression, Bataille intended sexual transgression. Taboos, he said, lead inevitably to desire which leads inevitably to transgression. But I use him here creatively. (Surprise surprise.) Bataille is not so famous as (the imaginary) Daedalus, nor the ‘real’ Leonardo or the beloved and reviled Picasso. I guess his fame is more like Darger’s, as is his shock value.
Perhaps Bataille was more creative than Leonardo or Picasso. At least we know the two of them as visual artists (appreciating Leonardo’s music, engineering, and poetry as hobbies and choosing to ignore Picasso’s poetry insofar as humanly possible). Bataille defies categorization and slips through the fingers of most histories. Indeed, he may have been too creative. (Creativity as Criticism.) It caused him a lot of trouble.
That, I think, was what my committee member meant. Not creative but too creative. Transgressing the bounds, and, no matter how hard one’s willing to work, undisciplined.
Creative means you come up with good solutions to problems. Too Creative means you leave the problem behind and create something new. You paint outside the lines, think outside the box, defy categorization. And might get in trouble. Dürer might have been creative when he painted his self-portrait in a fur-lined coat. He painted himself as Christ, son of God, part of the creator. He showed that making something out of nothing was what gods did, and he showed himself as god. As I said, when Dürer painted that self-portrait, the word creativity (in English, I haven’t looked up the German) had not separated from its divine aspect as we are using it today.
When my committee member used the word, she meant that I was making something out of nothing, a dissertation that did not follow the rules, that defied the rules of art history and created anew. That creativity makes me a bad art historian.
Bataille got a little too creative. He wrote a pornographic novel about eyeballs and bowls of milk that Andre Breton called obscene and that got Bataille thrown out of the transgressive surrealist circle. He was too weird for them. Leonardo spent so much time goofing off with anatomy, engineering, and pyrotechnics that he never finished his paintings, and when he did, he finished them wrong and they did not last. Picasso had every success but made everyone mad with his creative importance.
On the lips of my critic (or faintly fake praiser), creativity meant transgressive, does not know the limits of art historical practice, refuses to paint inside the lines. It meant undisciplined. Translated by my advisor into language I could understand, creative became a bad word, and became the reason I teach an academic subject at an art school, the reason I show more art in (alternative) galleries than publish articles in academic journals, why the garden proves as viable a canvas as a stretched and gessoed cloth.
So. Creativity myth number 13: creativity is good. Color me a believer. In indelible color.
fame. His remarkable proliferation and fame alerted enemies at every side who prove that in fact he did not invent cubism, analytical cubism, or in fact do anything new but only stole from the creative people around him, and who remind us he made too much art, meaning he left a lot of bad art lying around. Henry Darger, orphaned, labeled retarded and institutionalized, ran away, took a job as a janitor, and wrote something like 30,000 pages of (fairly unreadable) fiction, memoir, history, meteorology and fantasy illustrated with hundreds of intricately detailed collages of the major characters. Darger also combined girls and boy bodies, human and animal bodies, violent abuse with hopes for liberation. He may have known his creativity was excessive. He never showed anyone his work, though he described himself as a great artist. After his death, people have agreed, though many feel shock at his undisciplined hybridity, and the way his images transgress typical boundaries and ignore taboos.Writing about transgression, Bataille intended sexual transgression. Taboos, he said, lead inevitably to desire which leads inevitably to transgression. But I use him here creatively. (Surprise surprise.) Bataille is not so famous as (the imaginary) Daedalus, nor the ‘real’ Leonardo or the beloved and reviled Picasso. I guess his fame is more like Darger’s, as is his shock value.
Perhaps Bataille was more creative than Leonardo or Picasso. At least we know the two of them as visual artists (appreciating Leonardo’s music, engineering, and poetry as hobbies and choosing to ignore Picasso’s poetry insofar as humanly possible). Bataille defies categorization and slips through the fingers of most histories. Indeed, he may have been too creative. (Creativity as Criticism.) It caused him a lot of trouble.
That, I think, was what my committee member meant. Not creative but too creative. Transgressing the bounds, and, no matter how hard one’s willing to work, undisciplined.
Creative means you come up with good solutions to problems. Too Creative means you leave the problem behind and create something new. You paint outside the lines, think outside the box, defy categorization. And might get in trouble. Dürer might have been creative when he painted his self-portrait in a fur-lined coat. He painted himself as Christ, son of God, part of the creator. He showed that making something out of nothing was what gods did, and he showed himself as god. As I said, when Dürer painted that self-portrait, the word creativity (in English, I haven’t looked up the German) had not separated from its divine aspect as we are using it today.
When my committee member used the word, she meant that I was making something out of nothing, a dissertation that did not follow the rules, that defied the rules of art history and created anew. That creativity makes me a bad art historian.
Bataille got a little too creative. He wrote a pornographic novel about eyeballs and bowls of milk that Andre Breton called obscene and that got Bataille thrown out of the transgressive surrealist circle. He was too weird for them. Leonardo spent so much time goofing off with anatomy, engineering, and pyrotechnics that he never finished his paintings, and when he did, he finished them wrong and they did not last. Picasso had every success but made everyone mad with his creative importance.
On the lips of my critic (or faintly fake praiser), creativity meant transgressive, does not know the limits of art historical practice, refuses to paint inside the lines. It meant undisciplined. Translated by my advisor into language I could understand, creative became a bad word, and became the reason I teach an academic subject at an art school, the reason I show more art in (alternative) galleries than publish articles in academic journals, why the garden proves as viable a canvas as a stretched and gessoed cloth.
So. Creativity myth number 13: creativity is good. Color me a believer. In indelible color.
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