“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” – Albert Einstein
I recently had an invigorating chat with old university friends about creativity, performance and art…
I was then questioned via twitter; “what do the words ‘creativity performance art’ actually mean in combination? 🙂
Until now I haven’t had time to compose a reply.
Of course Creative Arts is what I studied and thoroughly enjoyed an age ago at uni, before digital dialogue was common place; my notes and essays now slumber in the garage with my Valentinos’ tickets & mortarboard. But, without getting academic and theoretical, is there a utilitarian answer?
Creativity:
putting ‘stuff’ together in a new or another way, to resonate a novel or appropriate difference…
Performance:
To do, to function, to present, to accomplish, to entertain, to interact…
Art:
putting ‘stuff’ together in a new or another way, to resonate a novel or appropriate difference…
…to illuminate the familiar, to resurrect the lost, to prize grace out of joy, to make firm that that is in flux, to capture, weave or play with, to engage, disturb, entertain, please, refresh, challenge…
In our current societies, often the audience, readers or recipients are an integral part of creative work; each reader brings their own experience to an action or thing…
Variables are objective, meaning is subjective…
Science might be objective, imagination might be subjective…
Breath might be objective, love might be subjective…
Death might be objective, hope might be subjective…
I like the popular circus, sequins and saccharine as much as the next person but I fear it’s over-celebrated. I guess it’s individualism, commerce and consumerism that drives our cultures and the appetite for a more wholesome creativity, query and discipline might be obscured and smothered in peanut butter, candy crush and eastenders.
To work-over Wallace Stevens’ reflections in Opus Posthumous:
After one has abandoned a belief in truth, creativity is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption. But as one attempts to find a fiction to replace the lost truths, one immediately encounters a problem: a direct knowledge of reality is not possible. The world influences us in our everyday perspectives, “were we to place a jar on a hill in Tennessee, we would impose an order onto the landscape”.
I think AN answer to the posed question; “what do the words ‘creativity performance art’ actually mean in combination?; might be living more openly, acting more honestly, and being more…
The interaction between things is what makes them fecund… (Wallace Stevens)
Jules P Richards 