Meditation 2: What Is Creativity?

Marina Abramovic, performance artist, sets the scene. In “Rhythm 0” (1974), she places 72 objects on the table — a rose, a feather, perfume, lipstick, knives… a gun with one bullet — as she summons the public. “I’m an object. Do everything you want and I’ll take full responsibility.” A grueling six-hour piece that unveils a truth about human nature: someone almost pulled the trigger.

I’ve been captivated by Marina Abramovic, lately — her work, her interviews.

“I hate the studio so passionately (….) I expose myself to life, and from that, ideas come as a surprise”.

Abramovic tells the story of how at a young age she was exhilarated to discover the god-like freedom as an artist to be able to make “art out of dust”. Her body became her medium, pushing its limits while all-immersed in the here and now of the work, thriving on the electrifying exchange between her and the public.

In 2010, she stages “The Artist is Present” at the MoMA. Her most difficult piece to date, she says, as she sat for an approximate 730 hours over the course of 3 months with museum visitors that waited hours on line to get the chance to share in the experience to connect with her. Over half a million people asking to be present with the artist.

The outcome was as unexpected as the turnout, with attendees from all walks of life, across all ages responding to a same call. Many overcome by overwhelming emotion, in tears, some even breaking down, as a result of the stare down between them and the host: silent, hair pulled back, bare faced, expressionless, clad in minimalistic robes (red, black, or white, depending on the day).

Surely, an encounter of much more than meets the eye.

Is this art?

For Marina Abramovic, most definitely, as art has to do with a particular frequency, attainable only through the communion with her spectators. A back and forth — a live feeding through the senses, of sorts.

Art can be many things. Vast like the sky, vacuum-like, dependent on perspective, art can feel full and sometimes empty. Meaningless or ever-significant. Art is controversial. It holds the potential to hit close to home as it touches on culture and appropriation. Art pertains to identity. To be an artist is fundamentally political. A freedom of expression. Understood as a right, anyone can be an artist. Art has come to be anything.

Art, and the creative act it supposes, is at the very root of self. Art is language coauthored by us in a collective endeavor.

“We think that things are fixed. That we receive the phenomena of the world, and that we are not a part of creating that which we behold. But we are…”, as reminded by the hailed “light and space” artist James Turrell, via his seductive, sensorially immersive, installations that play on perception. The experience is eye-opening: we rediscover the world and our relation to it.

His monumental, ongoing project, Roden Crater — a volcanic formation in the desert of Northern Arizona, engineered on the inside as a laboratory for light observation– is an impressive example of his devotion to his art, but also to the land. Not exactly “land art” (in reference to a movement that developed in the 60’s-70’s), Turrell considers his creations rather as structures that aim to bring us closer to the sky in a journey towards letting in the ephemeral into our earthly experience.

There’s a deep spiritual quality to Turrell’s work, also true for Marina Abramovic, as she pulls her inspiration from Nature, Eastern philosophy, tribal rituals in various continents, that feed her continuous quest to nurture the present moment. “Why are we so afraid of spirituality, why are we so afraid of even using the word… as if it was spooky…?” wonders Abramovic. It somehow devalues the art and the artist, discarded as “new-age”,

where both her and Turrell share an affinity for practices concerned with the mediation of energy as it comes to life, incarnated by way of the synergy with others — the viewer completes the artwork.

They exemplify a conscious effort to push back the boundaries of what we may consider art-worthy as it extends to life, far beyond museum walls. The masses response to extra-mural, all-encompassing experiences, speaks for itself. There’s a palpable thirst to explore the fabric of existence.

Art is life is art.

Indeed, the panorama in the art world today is very different as collaterally the line between real and artificial is increasingly blurred.

Despite their means to an end specific to each, both Marina Abramovic and James Turrell have in some way become the art itself; vehicles for exposing something much larger than themselves, unravelling the laws that bind the universe before our eyes, as they agree on the mark of true art (the artist as an enabler).

Live it. Be it.

The need to create as “vital as breathing” says Abramovic, it surpasses the end result.

This relays the old dichotomies between ‘artist’ and ‘artistry’, ‘shape’ and ‘matter’, ‘color’ and ‘form’ etc., at the forefront of art; essentially a staging between the tangible and the intangible, the visible and the invisible. A fine balance that if overridden by craftmanship– ‘tool’, ‘technique’, ‘esthetics’ — overpowers the natural combustion that occurs in art processes. An in-between state, akin to a chemical experiment, unstable by definition.

So, while the artist may be accountable for the scaffolding within a curated environment, the response is ultimately out of his/her hands as the whole is ignited by a mysterious force that inspires awe and raises awareness of our supporting role. That is, only if we are willing to let go: to be present, still, acceptant of the transitional character of matter caught in ‘space’ and ‘time’. This does not equate to passivity.

Activity as creativity at work through the elements. A circular energy that draws in crowds joined in the know, manifesting in the now.

“The public is like a radio antenna, when something is not good, and something is not strong, they don’t pick it up. It’s just too low. But if it’s high frequency, they pick it up”, affirms Marina Abramovic.

The artist as a Conductor. Creativity as frequency.

“How do you know if it is a good work of art?”, asks Abramovic. “That energy that makes you turn to look at the work of art… that’s a pretty good work of art (…) I measure with the body, with that kind of feeling of electricity”.

It’s all about what’s behind the object… just out of reach. The bleed into the subliminal.

— — —

Marina Abramovic has become an institution (MAI) — a Conservatory for performance arts; its preservation and divulgation through strict and rigorous teachings, coined “The Abramovic Method”. James Turrell has excavated a luminous, site-specific underground world one almost needs a radar to find. Unique, parallel spaces devoted in their own right to a serious but tricky business reminiscent of the ongoings of Hogwarts’ (school of magic), where there is a discipline to be had in light of an all-mighty power to channel these elements that make up our world: water, fire, wind, earth.

Two last artists come to mind in the summoning of the esoteric. Walter de Maria, late pioneering American land artist/sculptor with his “Lightning Field” (1977); an installation comprised of metal rods on an open field that serve as a conduit for the electric activity in a storm — a befalling of wrath? Cai Guo-Qiang, contemporary, Chinese artist/painter, known for his gunpowder renditions both on paper and in the sky. His now infamous “Sky ladder” (2016), dedicated to his beloved grandmother on her 100th birthday, made into a film, presents a poetic approach to the opening of the heavens– “a stairway to heaven” that relates to a subconscious desire to connect with the grandness of the universe and perhaps get closer to unravelling the enigma of origin.

… “to touch the sky”… “the sky’s the limit”… “diamonds in the sky”…

What ultimately opens up for us below, is the possibility of threading art with nature: a primal source artists’ repeatedly tap for inspiration.

Art as nature as creativity.