“Material for our work surrounds us at every turn. It’s woven into conversation, nature, chance encounters, and existing works of art. When looking for a solution to a creative problem, pay close attention to what’s happening around you.” – Rick Rubin

There’s a reason why people like Rick Rubin have meant so much to creatives in contemporary times. He took something liminal like creativity, with all its profound author-genius associations, and turned it into something more tangible and practical than a sudden act of God. He widened its scope to let it be, yes a praxis, but also a perspective. For Rubin, it’s a way of being in the world, of carefully adapting your stimulus until you have the input necessary to produce. His viewpoint is nothing new as years prior, it was Rilke whose musings reminded us of how daily life primes the creative act. 

For Rilke, creativity was prepared in solitude, embracing the seasonal fluctuations, spending time in the natural world. In Letters To a Young Poet, he said, “Seek those which your everyday life offers you…use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.” 

Writers like Rubin, Rilke, Didion, De Botton and hooks have been saying eternally how creativity is interwoven in one’s ability to notice, to be, to make sense. As hooks says, we must “theorise the meaning of beauty in our lives”. They all share the understanding that creativity is not just a phase that one dips into — rather, it is an ability to cultivate, curate and finally produce. But stepping back isn’t so easy. When everybody seems to have already done something of value, and you want to make your mark, how do you bridge the call to observe with the desire to build it yourself?

Imagery courtesy of Pexels

Accepting the role of “audience member” is difficult, especially if you’re creatively inclined. We’re constantly witnessing perfectly curated lives and projects online. The glamour of getting swept up in the control room is endlessly tempting. There’s a desirable finesse in rearranging and advising, standing at the back of the booth and strategically wielding the tools around you. It’s no wonder that everyone is taking up DJ’ing, pottery classes, or collage. We are a generation of busy-bodies. But for all of our targeted intentions and clever ideas, a desire for control sometimes overpowers our ability to absorb the information around us. This is where creative block happens, where one may begin to feel useless. 

Unprecedented throughput has resulted in a productivity level that was previously thought impossible. In our electric renaissance — where any word, image or idea is immediately available — observation is often deprioritised by activity. So much so that choice overload and decision fatigue has become a norm, and ‘doing too much’ has become a means of coping. We want to bear the title of custodian, facilitator and producer. It looks good in our bios and even better in our niche. This desire to participate is (mostly) genuine. But at what point do we recognise that sometimes our best contribution is simply to connect the dots, and transform it in the process, not through change but through mere understanding? 

Any self-sustaining culture requires not only an artist but also an audience. Likewise, for a product to survive, it must be received, relished and reinterpreted a thousand times over. For this to work, you must become desperately comprehensive, reading at a sign-level. Most of us are quite good at this. We know how to consume. We also know how to repackage, plug and play in a new context, with a new meaning and a new profit margin in mind. Perhaps this is a side effect of information overload or an evolution of computers. It is not a bad thing. Honestly, it’s a brilliant thing. But its dangers are underscored by its inference that we are only as good as our functional roles, our ability to produce and reproduce at hyper speeds. 

But the most meditative people know that creative power lies not just in productivity, but also in passivity. For example, the curator’s ability to, yes rearrange, but then also to be quiet. To let the work speak for itself. When seemingly every cultural product is a result of thousands of references, conflictually meshed together in a web of if-you-know-you-know, hanging a gallery wall is a brave way to build a narrative, honour another’s work, and still individuate a point of view in the process.

Imagery courtesy of Unsplash

When culture can be as simple as selling an aesthetic, creativity can be rediscovered in one’s ability to curate life’s feed, filter out the noise, verify the picture, and prove that ‘I am not a Robot’. Personal collections, prints and journals piled on the surface of your Marketplace desk, a dewi-decimal bookshelf or a categorised Dropbox — these are human curations that challenge any algorithm and go beyond content created for an engagement market. This is why we palm stickers onto lampposts, ponder at exhibitions, log our novels on Goodreads, and leave reviews on Letterboxd. Without these memos and windows, you could imagine how easy it would be to lose ourselves among the many expressions of a fluctuating social experiment. 

There is significance in receipts and archiving. Creativity is, also, the art of noticing — an instinctive ability to draw the external back to the centre. Perhaps we just don’t always see the value in this curatorial, lived act because our ancient libraries and babel archives now float in are.na accounts, four-hour playlists, and saved folders. Regardless, each little piece of knowledge tucked away for later contributes to an ecosystem of living ideas, seed for dormant land. 

Without this, we wouldn’t be able to build something new. To create is to collect, and thus to transform — to search for something bigger than the sum of its parts and then make it whole. In the process, we make evident our membership to both the audience and the operation. In spectatorship and reinterpretation, we affirm the value of mythmaking in a holistic practice that can, hopefully, result in new citations. 

Much like a writer pulls threads together in the hopes of weaving a narrative bound by gold, participants in a rapidly evolving culture know too well that if you are struggling to make, then you must at least pay attention. Watch closely. Put the pictures on the wall and then draw the line. Read and read and read until the synapses spark at the connection of red and blue. Take a long walk. Build the story based entirely on your own misunderstanding, then let the collection of those formative moments become a mirror to you, a reflection of your hybridity, your capacity for collaboration. Until finally, when you’re ready, you can’t help but carve out your own meaning on its surface. 

Written by: Drew Haller

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