My Opera
The Two Worlds of Creativity
Sunday, January 29, 2012 5:07:32 PM
It was only recently that I begun to research what I somehow knew since childhood; there are two kinds of creativity: individualistic and vernacular.
Individualistic would be what we normally celebrate in architecture, music, films, photography, art, etc. It is what we reward the most; financially and trough other social mechanisms. It developed during classical antiquity in ancient Greece and got an other big push (which lasts until our very time) in Renaissance. It is the creativity of a single author or a group of people, but in any case we know who they are and we give them credit for whatever they had done. That is to say, we know them by name. We celebrate and sometimes even worship them. We recognize them as authors of their work. Works by the most celebrated authors tend to have very individualistic approach that separates them from all the others.
The vernacular creativity is different in that respect; usually we don’t have any idea about the author, but even if we do, his or hers work is not much different from all the others. There might be slight variations in style or execution, but not much really. What is more important; wether they are educated or not they don’t consider them selves as authors but in best case as craftsmen. Most often they consider them selves as carriers of tradition. All the folk singing, dancing, storytelling, housing, manual crafts, and a lot of folk art fits into this category. These are forms of art that often serve folk rituals and are passed on from generation to generation. Together they form a special kind of memetics (genetics of ideas) that make a nations mental DNA. I think that is all that there is to nationality anyways and it is the only real thing you can be patriotic about (being part of that process and heritage). Everything else that is about nationality is completely arbitrary and it is usually just a product of government’s propaganda.
And here is a striking idea; vernacular art is most often underestimated. “Real” artists look down upon it and don’t bother much studying it. Of course, many will say it is “interesting”, but only in a way the child’s drawing can be interesting to them too. They will not study vernacular paining the same way they would study Michelangelo’s or Rembrandt’s. In most cases, they wouldn’t study it at all.
Which is quite a pity, isn’t it? There is a lot of wisdom in vernacular arts and crafts. They didn’t just pop up, like most individualistic art. Vernacular art is a product of a long process of trial and error, very much like evolution is. Whatever remained trough the decades, centuries and generations, stayed there for a reason. There is not much bullshit about it. I was very lucky to be a satellite member of a team of students at Faculty of architecture in Ljubljana, which studied vernacular architecture from all over the world and you wouldn’t believe all the amazing things this research brought about.
So I decided to pay more attention to this second world of creativity and learn from it. If you think about it, the best artists always extracted great wisdom from vernacular vocabulary. Dvořák might be just one example. Plečnik, in architecture is an other. His approach to buildings is surely very individualistic and innovative, but at the same time he drinks from the centuries old fountain of Slovenian vernacular building and wood craft, which ties him to this geographic and national territory. His memes were passed on to his students, and their students and so on... Hopefully something remains. In a similar way Vlado Kreslin (a folk-rock musician) includes memetic DNA of folk music into his own original creations. His music influenced Siddharta and many other bands who build on his legacy. You could say that Siddharta’s music is very much Slovenian and Slovenian only (the quality might be absolute and international, but the style is not). It could not have been done in Germany or Venezuela exactly for the reasons I describe above. When Siddharta inspires new younger bands, this process will hopefully continue as long as we return to the roots every now and then.
I also believe this genetic process of passing on ideas (or sometimes mixing them), is very important even within the rigid system of individualistic creativity. The reason why Italy might be such a leading force in fashion and design is that they have an unbroken chain of designers who were students of a teacher, who was a student of a (repeat this 20 times or so) student of Michelangelo or Leonardo... In countries where these chains were broken, most often by political revolutions, nations suffer not just from identity crisis, but from lack of productivity. It is just too damn hard to start anew every couple of generations. A lot of time, energy, money and resources are lost on beginners mistakes.
That is how I came to believe that traditions and vernacular arts are extremely important and one should study and learn from it. It is not so much that people intuitively know what is right (that can be achieved by more rational methods), but trough the time some things just work better than the others. When these qualities collectively build on top of eachother trough the decades we might end up with quite refined results (much like with genetic algorhythms in math). So this is what I am after - that accumulation of the unschooled and primitive impulse. It is ignored for too many times.
Individualistic would be what we normally celebrate in architecture, music, films, photography, art, etc. It is what we reward the most; financially and trough other social mechanisms. It developed during classical antiquity in ancient Greece and got an other big push (which lasts until our very time) in Renaissance. It is the creativity of a single author or a group of people, but in any case we know who they are and we give them credit for whatever they had done. That is to say, we know them by name. We celebrate and sometimes even worship them. We recognize them as authors of their work. Works by the most celebrated authors tend to have very individualistic approach that separates them from all the others.
The vernacular creativity is different in that respect; usually we don’t have any idea about the author, but even if we do, his or hers work is not much different from all the others. There might be slight variations in style or execution, but not much really. What is more important; wether they are educated or not they don’t consider them selves as authors but in best case as craftsmen. Most often they consider them selves as carriers of tradition. All the folk singing, dancing, storytelling, housing, manual crafts, and a lot of folk art fits into this category. These are forms of art that often serve folk rituals and are passed on from generation to generation. Together they form a special kind of memetics (genetics of ideas) that make a nations mental DNA. I think that is all that there is to nationality anyways and it is the only real thing you can be patriotic about (being part of that process and heritage). Everything else that is about nationality is completely arbitrary and it is usually just a product of government’s propaganda.
And here is a striking idea; vernacular art is most often underestimated. “Real” artists look down upon it and don’t bother much studying it. Of course, many will say it is “interesting”, but only in a way the child’s drawing can be interesting to them too. They will not study vernacular paining the same way they would study Michelangelo’s or Rembrandt’s. In most cases, they wouldn’t study it at all.
Which is quite a pity, isn’t it? There is a lot of wisdom in vernacular arts and crafts. They didn’t just pop up, like most individualistic art. Vernacular art is a product of a long process of trial and error, very much like evolution is. Whatever remained trough the decades, centuries and generations, stayed there for a reason. There is not much bullshit about it. I was very lucky to be a satellite member of a team of students at Faculty of architecture in Ljubljana, which studied vernacular architecture from all over the world and you wouldn’t believe all the amazing things this research brought about.
So I decided to pay more attention to this second world of creativity and learn from it. If you think about it, the best artists always extracted great wisdom from vernacular vocabulary. Dvořák might be just one example. Plečnik, in architecture is an other. His approach to buildings is surely very individualistic and innovative, but at the same time he drinks from the centuries old fountain of Slovenian vernacular building and wood craft, which ties him to this geographic and national territory. His memes were passed on to his students, and their students and so on... Hopefully something remains. In a similar way Vlado Kreslin (a folk-rock musician) includes memetic DNA of folk music into his own original creations. His music influenced Siddharta and many other bands who build on his legacy. You could say that Siddharta’s music is very much Slovenian and Slovenian only (the quality might be absolute and international, but the style is not). It could not have been done in Germany or Venezuela exactly for the reasons I describe above. When Siddharta inspires new younger bands, this process will hopefully continue as long as we return to the roots every now and then.
I also believe this genetic process of passing on ideas (or sometimes mixing them), is very important even within the rigid system of individualistic creativity. The reason why Italy might be such a leading force in fashion and design is that they have an unbroken chain of designers who were students of a teacher, who was a student of a (repeat this 20 times or so) student of Michelangelo or Leonardo... In countries where these chains were broken, most often by political revolutions, nations suffer not just from identity crisis, but from lack of productivity. It is just too damn hard to start anew every couple of generations. A lot of time, energy, money and resources are lost on beginners mistakes.
That is how I came to believe that traditions and vernacular arts are extremely important and one should study and learn from it. It is not so much that people intuitively know what is right (that can be achieved by more rational methods), but trough the time some things just work better than the others. When these qualities collectively build on top of eachother trough the decades we might end up with quite refined results (much like with genetic algorhythms in math). So this is what I am after - that accumulation of the unschooled and primitive impulse. It is ignored for too many times.
