Barranco Hondo, Tenerife. 25 July, 2023.
More time passes… the business-business is done in principle but not in fact and one stares at the Atlantic Ocean, waiting and thinking and planning. But mostly just staring.
Yesterday I told Alberto: my vision is almost complete, and then it will be like the old joke about sculpture: take a piece of marble and just cut away the parts that don’t look like a horse.
This is of course a lot less true of a house, and of land, than it is of a sculpture. I’m no Matta-Clark, I need the additive approach, and also we have no choice but to improvise. But we’re getting close!
So then this morning, early, sharing my room with a dead mouse (bio!) – I got to thinking, as one does, about where people lose their creativity.
I firmly believe every human has vast creative capacity, and a pretty good ability to express that. Some exceptions are surely present but we can call them anomalies, call them differently abled if we like. A baseline human can fucking draw! Can sculpt!
But what? Well, children’s stuff. And then some people have exraordinary talent and most don’t, but 99% of actual pictorial art you encounter in the art world today is by people who are not the extraordinary talents. They have normal talents, as do I, and bless their hearts they work to develop those talents.
But what about the rest? Why don’t people just continue making funky drawings and making faces in the mud and imagining worlds that might not, technically speaking, exist? (But might!)
My intuition, and it’s strong in these parts, tells me there are three ways out of healthy human creativity.
ONE: Your parents beat it out of you.
TWO: Poverty beats it out of you.
THREE: The institutions of modern life beat it out of you.
I will generously include “rich twats who are bad people from a young age and appear to have no human spirit” in the third category because there are many institutions that are comfortable, gilded, and also soul-destroying.
Now, dear phantasmagoric readers, I have to run, the ocean needs staring at.
Remember: Jeder Mensch Ein Künstler! Jeder! Fucking! Mensch!
Beuys Don’t Cry, B&W analog photograph of original sculpture, ca 18x24cm, mixed media on copper plate, Tübingen 1992.