DAY TWENTY FIVE

This is the post I intended to write yesterday, before I allowed things to follow their own path. 

 

The question asked then was about purpose - why do you do what you do creatively, why do you make what you do? This question has been asked many times, sometimes presented as a challenge or a prompt for reflection.

 

Someone once asked of writers, are you looking to entertain, move, educate, or inform your readers? And are you writing for yourself, for a particular audience, or for humanity at large? Words to that effect. These are good questions but rather paint the choices as mutually exclusive. Why can't you do all of them at once?

The mission statement of the British Broadcasting Corporation for example, drawn up 100 years ago by John Reith its founding Director General is to inform, educate and entertain i.e. to do all those things, and sometimes it does them all at once - David Attenborough's nature programmes are a good example of this. I find it interesting that unlike the very similar (and one might think derivative) earlier comment, the BBC's mission does not include moving people. I suspect that would have been a bit hard for the staunchly Presbyterian Reith to swallow. And besides, the chaps at the Beeb in the 1920's (and producers and managers were almost invariably chaps at the time and for many decades after) were probably all too stiff upper lipped.

 

Turning the question around what is it that you look for from other creators and makers? What makes something memorable for you? 

 

Speaking for myself I think that though I can often be impressed intellectually by a piece of work, by the skill, the artistry, the concept, the execution, whatever it may be, that somehow feels a little false, pretentious even. I'm more, and more genuinely, impressed by something that touches me emotionally, and second best to that, is something that is unpretentiously designed to entertain. Least of all do I like pieces which set out to educate or that are in any way didactic. (Strange my posts should so often take the form they do in that case).

One shouldn't generalise too much, different media and different forms of expression lend themselves to greater or lesser degrees of emotion. Dance, which I wrote about in this post is almost wholly about emotional expression for the audience, belying the phenomenal amount of skill required to do it. A piece of furniture on the other hand is, usually, primarily about function, although what first catches one's eye may well be the balance and harmony in the design, or the beauty of the materials or execution. Indeed if it doesn't look right all questions of utility or usefulness might go out the window, but the main point is that it is difficult to foreground an emotional intention or response in a piece of woodwork, beyond what might be called aesthetically pleasing.

 

In communication in general, just ordinary conversations, long after you've forgotten the actual words or the intention at the time, I suggest that you will still remember the emotion of the moment, if it was in any way siginficant, and so I think it is with creative acitivities of any sort.The most memorable pieces of art or craft work for me are always those which have made me feel, either as a maker, or as an observer.

 

Onwards...once more with feeling.

Picture Credit: Taken by the author. Installation at Limerick School of Art and Design Graduate Show 2014, Artist Unknown.