Is creativity and art a bolt from the blue? Like a lightening strike from Zeus? Or is there more to it? We romanticize art inspiration as something that comes out of nowhere, a moment of insanity crafted into a solid object. But creativity is less lightening and more a Taco Bell menu: same four ingredients continually re-worked and re-purposed to create a fried Doritto taco filled with the same ground beef and mix but this time an extra three ounces of melted cheese and two more dollops of secret sauce. Familiar enough to be comfortable, new and different enough to give it a try.
Artists too work with the same ingredients, creating different combos, with the same delicious results.
“Real-life creativity is far more likely to take the form of a tweak than a leap: evolutionary rather than revolutionary . . . But that’s okay, because it means that it lies within the power of nearly everyone to make the world a little better one small step at a time.” – — My Creative Space: How to Design Your Home to Stimulate Ideas and Spark Innovation by Donald Rattner
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There are a couple of ways this looks. Some art movements combine the familiar to create a new way of seeing. And some art movements pick up any object and by declaring it art, make it art.
Both the Dada and Surrealists experimented (for not a very long time) with what they called Ready Mades. Under this rubric anything was fair game: a shovel, a bicycle wheel, a bottle drying rack, all declared to be ART. But were they right?
Collage, combining a number of disparate things and juxtaposing them against one another to create an interesting work, was first just fun, but quickly became ART.
In 1841, Ada Lovelace asked the question, “What is Imagination?” Her answer “the combining faculty,” which “seizes points in common, between subjects having no apparent connection.”
That explains collages, even Dada art like Fountain (the urinal signed R. Mutt) or Object to Be Destroyed (1923/1964) by Man Ray: who attached a photograph of an eye to the art of a metronome meant to be absurd, meant to be useless.
But Lovelace didn’t juxtapose things that were useless.
She observed that by 1801, weavers who created the elaborate patterns from the Jacquard loom, achieved their art by using punch cards. Each card was threaded with silk or wool and helped create the desired patterns. In about 1834, Charles Baggage showed Lovelace his new Analytical Machine Lovelace examined the machine and thought, if punch cards can organize threads to create silk patterns, could they also organize patterns of algebraic calculations? She created the first cards to organize long sequences of calculation – the first computer program.
My generation spent night after night in the University computer lab programing with Fortran punch cards, one line of code per card, just like Lovelace’s invention. Years later, on a visit to the campus I admired the new three story computer lab, now the Interactive Learning Pavilion (of course). As I gazed up at the open outdoor stairs, I noticed the slats holding up the banister were all different, punched with random rectangle cutouts. A tribute to 200 years of computer history. Babbage’s son, Henry built part of the machine, the CPU and printing mechanism by 1910. But it wasn’t until 1991 that a team at the The Science Museum in London built a fully operational Difference Engine No. 2, Lovelace’s invention was the one with immediate application – and legs.
Not every smash up is a hit. Some combinations, like a computer screen embedded into the refrigerator are less inventive and more a solution in search of a problem. Others, like peanut butter cups, are not only successful, but delicious.
What is normal? What is more interesting when slid up close to something completely unexpected? Don’t wait for lightening, try something unexpected tonight.
For more on how to live your second act through art – http://bit.ly/4cwBB0O
