A Curated Creativity Menu
Dispatch #49: "My thesis is freedom."
Hi friends,
Despite the calendar’s promise that autumn is coming, Brooklyn has been hot this week. Tonight, ease is salvaged, a cool breeze enters through my window. The news continues its fifty-car-pile-up: genocides, ICE raids, the militarization of nearly every public space, the slashing of arts funding, targeted erasure of our trans siblings, dot dot dot. As one way to cope with hopelessness & terror I’ve started off my mornings watching artists talk about their lives. They speak of their art, their choices, their path – but most of all they speak of freedom.
I am an artist because I want to be free. Because I believe in the freedom I find in creating. It’s not even belief. It’s knowing. I’ve felt it & it has changed me. & when I witness others making art, or when I dive into the work others have made, I feel a contagious & irrepressible sense of possibility.
Creativity is important not because what you might make is beautiful or masterful or even good. Creativity is important for a wealth of reasons, some loud, some subtle. I love this lovely little zine from Evan Chelsee which focuses on the fact that creativity is political & urges us to stop saying that we’re not creative. “When people say ‘I’m not creative,’ what they’re effectively saying is: I have no opinions, or ideas, or things I want to say to the world. I don’t care to add or change anything.”
Creativity is important because it is the greenest place on earth, fertile & open, wild & rewilding. It’s a sacred space inside us that thirsts for our attention. I love artists because, intrinsically, we are after agency. Following hearsay is not enough. Art is about choice-making, collaborating with mistakes, stretching your vision to its edge, & surprising & discovering yourself. What else is life for?
In a country leaning hard toward fascism, seeking to strip us of agency means seeking to strip us of creativity. The creative person is a site of agency, intuition, patience, & deep listening. When told we are supposed to shut up & fall into line, the person who practices creativity is dangerous.
Below is my creativity menu for you this week. I recommend starting your day with the video & seeing how it influences it. But use it however & whenever you like. Enjoy it! Make it yours.
MONDAY: Watch Ellie Harold. Consider: Today, how can my thesis explicitly be freedom? How can every movement, every conversation, be directed at feeling freer? Instead of efforting to lead the dance, how might I to release to a mysterious process? How might I trust that something bigger than me is responsible for my ideas, my intuition, my making?
“My thesis is freedom. That we can be free. And there’s so many ways that we confine ourselves, as artists and as humans, that we have beliefs about ourselves and about others that totally keep us in a cage of limitedness.”
TUESDAY: Watch Katherine Bradford. Consider: What if what I made today [a painting / a poem / a play / a meal / an outfit] was not born from seeing something in the world, but rather from closing my eyes & seeing what was in my own mind? What if what I make seeks not to copy, but to imagine? Not to render as fact, but to render truthfully? Not to pin down, but to invent? What if freedom exists not defining, but in wonder?
“It’s not that I wanted to be a great artist. I just wanted to lead the artist life. I just wanted a chance.”
WEDNESDAY: Watch Julie Mehretu. Consider: Make marks outside of rational thinking today. Write a letter without words, make marks, speak visually. Tell a story without narrative coherence, forget cause & effect, let play & mess-making lead you, make marks. Give thinking a rest. Play with shapes. Play with space. Regress to cavewomanhood. Think with mark-making: a red handprint on a cave wall. What if freedom can happen by stepping sideways? See what you have to say when you stop trying to say it.
“That’s what I’m interested in: the space in between, the moment of imagining what is possible and yet not knowing what that is.”
THURSDAY: Listen to MARO. Consider: How might I involve up to 11 people in my making today? How might I collaborate with 11 people on a single poem? On a painting? On a letter-writing project? On a zine? On one photograph? When might the group be a necessity for unfolding the truth? When might the group be the best way to invite simple playfulness? What if freedom of the self requires the collective?
FRIDAY: Watch Theaster Gates. Consider: Gather the vessels in your home. Start with the most obvious ones, that is, anything that can hold liquid, such as a bowl from your kitchen, some cups. Place them together. You are creating an altar. Now, find less obvious vessels. Something boat-shaped. An unused pot for a plant. Get stranger. A baseball cap turned upside down can be a vessel. A shoe turned upside down can be a vessel. Create an altar of vessels, placing upon it metaphorical vessels as well, anything that can serve as a channel or container for a quality you’d like to call into your life. What is it this altar is calling toward you? Rearrange it. Now what is calling toward you? Feel the freedom in creating new arrangements, & with that, new meanings.
“It’s not really about the material. It’s about our capacity to shape things.”
SATURDAY: Listen to Peace Piece, someone’s ingeniously soothing combination of a Bill Evans tune & a rainstorm. Consider: Mix two seemingly disparate things. Become a bizarre collagist of your living space – set objects near each other that have long been separated. What two equally delicious things can you place side by side & how does their life get renewed by their sudden proximity? Mix two unlikely items of clothing. Mix two separate drafts of poems into a new one. Mix together two clashing instruments & attempt harmony.
SUNDAY: Wild Card! Today, ask three people: When do you feel free? Listen.
Lastly, good folk, I’ll be hosting a reboot of Revision Bingo on Saturday October 18th! If you’re an OG of my offerings, you might remember Revision Bingo from lockdown wherein our online community gathered to get new editing tools, crack our drafts open, & use the ruse of a game to do it! It’s always a blast. Now we’re back by popular demand! There’s no use in staying stuck & frozen about your most beguiling drafts. You may as well get silly & weird & practical – plus, everything’s better with a cool cohort surrounding you. Email insurreallife at gmail dot com today to register!
I’ll leave you with some words from theoretical physicist Brian Greene: “Nothing is permanent…And to my mind, that’s freeing. It frees us from this focus on the permanent as a place where value ultimately resides…to a focus on the brief moment that we have, in which we can understand things & create beauty & experience wonder, regardless of how fleeting that experience may be.”
This moment is inherently valuable. You are intrinsically braided with this moment. Therefore, you are valuable. You don’t need to be affirmed by success, accomplishments, or the acquiring of more things. You are valuable simply because you exist in this endlessly unfolding present. May we all walk this earth like we know it.
With maple syrup,
I am so excited to do this next week with a friend. Thank you so much for creating, curating, sharing. My whole being has been craving this without knowing what it is craving. Looking forward to nestling into human-ing
Honored to be in a newsletter amongst such a great lineup of artists! I love the idea of a morning artist talk; what a great practice!