Admiring The View

How our natural vantage point shapes our creative identity

When you visit a gallery, how do you tend to appreciate the works of art you have come to see?

You might have never even considered it.

Maybe you are someone who stands as far back in the room as possible, in an attempt to take in the whole scene (especially with works such as Monet’s Lilies series, or one of Pollock’s larger pieces).

Perhaps you are someone who wants to get their nose dangerously close to the canvas, ignoring the subtly placed exclusion line, in an attempt to see the minute detail of the brushstrokes or textural detail emanating outwards from the canvas.

You might be someone who ardently reads the further detail and text, set away to the side of the works, or makes use of audio commentaries, to provide you with additional context to the work and the artist.

Or maybe, just maybe, you are someone who has to be constantly on their guard, for fear of seemingly being drawn to touch the mind-bendingly smooth sculptural pieces on display - “excuse me, sir - please do not touch the Hepworth!”

(Just me, then?! Whoops.)

I suspect most of us demonstrate a little more nuance than these nakedly binary approaches to artistic appreciation. However, in my ongoing - and yes, sometimes tortuous - reflections on my own creative identity (yes, I’m such a tortured artistic soul…cry for me), I think there is something to be said for engaging with this element of natural vantage point and how our approach to making and appreciating is affected by this knowledge and understanding of self.

In her essential book The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp writes:

‘Each of us is hard-wired a certain way. And that hard-wiring insinuates itself into our work. That’s not a bad thing. Actually, it’s what the world expects from you. We want our artists to take the mundane materials of our lives, run it through their imaginations, and surprise us. If you are by nature a loner, a crusader, an outsider, a jester, a romantic, a melancholic, or any one of a dozen personalities, that quality will shine through in your work.’

I’ve mentioned Tharp’s book before, and I will doubtless do so again on multiple occasions. There are any number of books, apps, podcasts, blogs and goodness knows what else which focus on similar aspects of developing creativity and the myriad other aspects which are associated with this area of discourse. What I find so compelling about The Creative Habit, though, is the no-holds-barred approach Tharp takes.

Written in 2000, at the very nascent beginnings of the internet, Tharp was a then-sixty-something choreographer and producer of forty-odd years’ experience, who had studied with Merce Cunningham in the 1950s and 60s. It is fair to assume, one might have expected someone like me to find little in common with her approach to creativity.

On the contrary, however, I find her writing to be so captivating; her ideas so compelling; and her encouragement to look deep within to be of such transformational importance, that I return to the book on countless occasions, especially when I am feeling at the end of myself.

The quote above is found in chapter 3 of the book, titled Your Creative DNA. I think it is a wise comparison to relate our inherent artistic tendencies to something which is fundamentally an essential part of who we are, and how we are made up.

I find myself thinking through the many challenges Tharp must have contended with throughout her career, and am reminded of how important it must have been for her in the era she was working in, to have a complete and utter focus on what she was doing, and why she was doing it.

This book is very much the antidote to the criticisms which are often meted-out towards the creative community as “wishy-washy”, liberally-minded, let’s-just-hug-it-all-out. Her approach, her opinions and her writing hit hard, often with a deep sense of challenge, whilst also emphasising how vital it is for creative people to do what they do with a thorough yet consistently-growing sense of artistic purpose.

Later in the chapter, she moves on to say:

‘…a little self-knowledge goes a long way. If you understand the strands of your creative DNA, you begin to see how they mutate into common threads in your work. You begin to see the “story” that you’re trying to tell; why you do the things you do (both positive and self-destructive); where you are strong and where you are weak, and how you see the world and function in it.’

Whilst there is SO MUCH good stuff to unpack in this statement, I think what I appreciate the most about it is how relevant and relatable it is to me and my practice, yet she has not made reference either to dance and choreography (her world); music, composition and performance (my world); or anything else for that matter, because it is so very applicable across disciplines.

There are some core messages in here which I think elevates her writing and approach beyond the tired, obvious, creativity-self-help-speak we are so often served up. You know the sort - “you just have to believe in yourself”, etc.

These include:

• You may have heard me mention previously about the artistic freedom I have found by becoming aware of and deepening my understanding of what I am not, which is present here.

• This idea of a continuous mutation of our creative DNA, to the extent that we ourselves become aware of the common threads in our work, let alone outside observers.

• A sense of story and storytelling through our work.

• Why we do it.

• How we see the world and function in it relates directly to the first quote, in that we are looking for artists to ‘take the mundane materials of our lives and run it through our imaginations’.

I will always maintain as creative people, our best work is always likely to come when we are most aware of and “in tune" with ourselves (not a phrase I like especially, but it’s late and I can’t think of anything better). Note, not “happy”, per se, but more sure of ourselves, who we are, what we do, and why we do it.

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In the early twentieth-century, with film and cinema still very much a nascent medium, the introduction and development of the close-up changed the way that viewers could interact with and relate to the characters in the film. This new approach gave us a vantage point which enabled audiences to have a greater sense of and appreciate the subjects’ emotion, whilst being able to directly relate their experiences to their own lives.

When we go to see a theatre show, we are often asked to choose where we would like to sit to experience the performance. If money was/is no option, we get to choose our vantage point.

In the musical community - and this is something which I can attest to myself, having explore numerous different methods of audience arrangement - we continue to experiment with AAA: alternative audience arrangements; encouraging audiences to engage with musical performances in a variety of ways, often which seek to challenge the ingrained perspective that performers are exalted onto a gilded stage, with audiences set lower down and further back from the performer.

Sculpture is a fascinating medium, in that it offers continuously-changing vantage points, in that one can walk around it and experience it from all angles, in stark contrast to a canvas-based artwork hung on the wall.

As technology continues to develop and evolve, the vantage points at which we access and engage with artistic work potentially begin to shift, and at such a pace, in ways I’m sure Twyla Tharp could not have imagined in 2000. VR headsets such as Apple’s Vision Pro present the opportunity to have what might, in time, come to be seen as the ultimate vantage point, in which users have a barely-believable amount of power and control to view and experience things however they like.

Of course, these methods detailed above primarily reflect the way in which audiences are able to access certain things, whilst for us as artists, a regular healthy check-in is such an important thing to do, to avoid the answer being: ‘it just is, because that’s the way it has always been.

Either way, the lines which stand out most to me from the quote above are ‘why you do the things you do’, and ‘how we see the world and function in it’.

Does this resonate with you?

Are you an artist or someone working in the creative industries?

Or perhaps you are a keen audience-goer across creative disciplines. How do you find this relates to you and your experience?

Let me know in the comments below…