Monday, February 5, 2007
Why we are artists?
Part of the discussion in the last class revolved around why people choose to be artists and not doctors or lawyers. One of my professors in undergrad once told the class that all artists are manic-depressives. I disagreed whole-heartedly at the time. First of all, to claim that every single anything is a manic depressive seems like quite a stretch. But sometimes I think that this exaggeration my have a kernel of truth. Back to the question of why one chooses art, it may be more of a matter of art choosing the individual. A passage from a book I read by Ernest Becker called The Denial of Death for me sheds light on this. It says that "the key to the creative type is that he or she is separated out of the pool of shared meaning. There is something in their life experience that makes them take in the world as a problem; as a result they have to make personal sense out of it... Existence becomes a problem that needs an ideal answer; but when you no longer accept the collective solution to the problem of existence, then you must fashion your own." This perhaps a little too simple statement sums up for me why I, and perhaps many others become artists. I cannot help but take the world as a problem, and it always appears as a connundrum. So by turning away from the world, one can try to create an analogous one in which one has some control.
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5 comments:
this has been "deep thoughts" with jim paulson...hahaha. kidding jim.
I have seen a documentary in which a psychiatrist who works with art therapy was describing different mental problems and their effect on art.
His personal conclusions were actually that a mentally unstable person can’t create art. Now, I am actually the depressive type and I could tend to refute this idea; but in my real depressive phases, I do not produce, I either stop everything or become totally anarchic about my work.
Anyhow, I had a class on the psychology of creativity at UQAM. It was pretty interesting. Certain psychologists describe a creative cycle as having 7 (I think) phases. According to the documentary, mentally hill people would block their creative process always at the same place, depressive people working on never ending series, schizophrenics refusing to show their work… something like that.
Freudian theory actually says that art in a cathartic process, as well as dreams and other such things. Therefore the more productive, I guess the more stable you get I suppose.
Trying to find the reference for this documentary though I found an article stating the inverse (God if my mom would have read that!). Really I think it is bullpoo. Here is an extract, note that it is placed in the When to Call the Doctor section : “ Several studies have shown relationships sometimes exist between creativity and mental illness, including depression, schizophrenia, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
For decades, scientists have known that eminently creative individuals have a much higher rate of manic depression or bipolar disorder than does the general population. But few controlled studies have been done to build the link between mental illness and creativity. One study that does support such a link was presented at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association by Stanford University researchers Connie Strong and Terence Ketter. Using personality and temperament tests, they found healthy artists to be more similar in personality to individuals with manic depression than to healthy people in the general population.
While creativity itself is not a sign of mental illness, parents should be aware that there is a much higher degree of mental illness, especially depression and bipolar disorder, in creative children than in their less creative peers.”
fuck that study. if that were true then how come you never hear about the "crazy artist" who opened fire at the mall?? the only way creative lunatics differ from "regular" lunatics is that they direct their frustrations inward rather than out. instead of shooting up the mcdonalds, we make art. unfortunately it sometimes leads to self-destruction- but at least we keep it to ourselves!
Lets here it for presumptions of psychological normalcy ladies and gentlemen. Is manic depression a codeword for rebuking 'thrownness'. Oh, and another one "Any fool can make a law, and any fool can follow it". -Thoreau
Now thats blogging with zoloft pep.
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