Thoughts on Originality

by Mr. Brainwash. Derivative? Original?

"Originality: Don't worry about your originality. You could not get rid of it even if you wanted to. It will stick to you and show you up for better or worse in spite of all you or anyone else can do." - Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

Originality. Style. These are buzz topics within the world of art. In the contemporary art world the role of the artist is no longer about making pictures alone (or perhaps not even making pictures at all - depending on your definition of art.) Artists are now obligated to reinvent the wheel each go. It is something that has consumed myself and countless other aspiring artists. Are my works derivative? Does my artwork reveal too much of my influences? Does it fully look like me?

I think to some degree all artists feel that their artwork may very well be more of an extension of their own being than a byproduct of their labor. It's easy to get trapped in the game of equating the quality of your artwork with self-worth in general. And so in the same way the question of originality boils down to the same fundamental root. The question of finding a style is really the same as finding one's self, and maturing fully into one's being, in general. This takes time. People need time to grow into their somebodyness in the same way that artists need time to nurture their own vision.

On reflection of the obsession with personal style, however, we can see that it's really only a post-modern problem and it's one that is existential in nature. Artists of the past were more concerned with the central motive of their artwork than they were originality of style. The focus was beauty, not novelty. Artists of ancient Egypt, for example, made artwork undeviating from a strict visual canon for hundreds of years.

And is it a spiritual ideal worth aspiring for? The root of suffering, in the context of Eastern spirituality, is a result of our identification with ego, which is to say our identification with the illusion that we exist separately and operate independently from the whole cosmos. The idea of self vs other is the root of all conflict, fear, and violence and the essence of all eastern spiritual practice is to reduce our affiliations with things that separate our identity from the whole. In doing so we may reach a state of clear consciousness, where we are not grasping onto I, Me, or Mine but are still within the flow of reality that pulsates within and without all things simultaneously.

Style is not a consideration of the religious artwork of the East. For example, Buddhist Thangka paintings are based on centuries old traditions of imagery. The composition of these paintings are mathematical and hold strict to an established canon that hasn't deviated in form for hundreds of years. (Though there is some variation in Thangka painting depending on the country of origin.) These artworks are also often created in collaboration by a number of monks who work selflessly towards the completion of the image. The focus is on the inspiring power of the imagery alone, and not on who made it.

Would a sunset no longer be beautiful because it doesn't have it's own style?

The striving to create a visual style that is MY style, one that separates the artist from the rest of the artworld, is essentially a game of ego. And it is an irony that creating a individual and self-distinct style is a central focus in the world of visionary art, where artists claim to be illustrating experiences of dissolving into the selfless whole of all being. In any case, it is impossible to deviate from the works of others too greatly, because every artist has their own unique set of sensibilities, habits, and practices and the only way to truly copy an artist would be to become them entirely with their full range of past experiences intact. As the great 20th century art teacher Robert Henri stated, no matter how hard you try to get rid of it, as long as you have a self identity it's going to be visible in the creation of your artwork.

GETTING OFF THE PLEASURE WAGON: THE UPS AND DOWNS OF FESTIVAL CULTURE

GETTING OFF THE PLEASURE WAGON: THE UPS AND DOWNS OF FESTIVAL CULTURE
by Jake Kobrin. August 2013

To begin, I’m pretty new to the festival world. I’ve been orbiting the festival world for only a year now. (However, through self-election, I’ve been very involved over this past year.) And I love it. Almost every festival I’ve been to, I’ve had some of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. There’s an incredible amount of love and good intentions, uninhibited creativity, genuine open-heartedness, and a great wellspring of talent. The festival world is a remarkable outlet to experiment and explore who it is you are and want to be without any fear of judgement, and I would fill up several pages of text if I were to list everything that’s amazing about festivals.

But I’ve found a recurring experience in going to festivals. I have a blast. And then I come back home. And I get down because I had all of these intensely pleasurable experiences and it leaves me craving more experiences like those when I get back into the mundane drive and grind of life. So I count down the days until the next festival and I do it again. It’s the same cycle.

And I’ve found that I am by no means alone in that. In fact, it seems that a lot of the festival culture stops at being at the festival, and does rather little to implement practices that extend out to the rest of life. And so what you find is a big group of people who go to festivals and keep going to festivals and do festival-like things outside of the festivals in a continuous loop of experience. And as I make more friends in the festival community, I’ve actually found that a lot of people are fairly unhappy outside of festivals and parties, and only find joy when they’re getting their kicks. This isn’t the case for everyone, but it’s a common enough scenario.

The problem is, pleasure is a transient experience. No matter how high you get, you come down eventually. And the come down (whether that come-down is when you get back home or something else) hurts. So what you get is a kind of hungry ghost syndrome. You get a lot of people who keep instigating pleasurable experiences, and reaching for more pleasure when they come down. And it’s not sustainable.

There is a kind of essential human suffering. It’s the first noble truth in Buddhism, what the Buddha called Samsara. Everybody suffers. There is a saying that all beings have ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows. You get sad, you get anxious, you crave chocolate chip cookies, you get jealous, etc. Does anyone not have anything like that? And everyone has their own way of dealing with that sorrow. A lot of people mask it with television, or alcohol. And a lot of people use festivals, and the pleasurable experiences that festivals may bring, as a way to temporarily escape or ignore it. And although there is wise and constructive use of entheogens and other related substances at festivals, there is also a huge amount of drug consumption that is not founded on the intention of introspection and resolution but is more along the lines of “a gram is better than a damn.”

But the problem is that masking the sorrow doesn’t make it go away. In fact, nothing can make it go away. It’s an essential part of life. You will get down. It will happen. And as much as I would love to live in festival world (and plenty of people mold their life to be basically that) it’s not sustainable, and the more you grasp at those experiences, the harder the come down is going to hit you. There’s nothing wrong with pleasure at all, but the attachment to pleasure, and pleasure in avoidance of pain, will bring greater suffering and isn’t actually doing much to transform that suffering into a sustainable joyful experience because it will eventually change.

If you can’t avoid suffering, then, the key is to change your internal relationship to those difficult experiences. You have to initiate a process of internal exploration and cultivate an outlook of compassion towards yourself and those experiences. There’s also a necessary non-attachment to the arising of those emotions and experiences. By getting some distance from your experiences (by saying those experiences are not me, they are merely my experiences) you can more easily feel compassion towards them. There is a whole vast array of practices towards this that are centuries old, generally speaking the whole category of insight meditation. I highly recommend reading any books by Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass, and Thich Nhat Hanh to start. AVipassana meditation retreat is also a fantastic way to delve into these practices, as well as meditation groups, or daylong workshops.

It’s not only on the meditation cushion that these practices matter, however. The important thing is what you carry from your meditation practice out into the rest of your life. You don’t even have to ever sit in meditation, even, if you can manage your internal relationship in any situation – even at festivals. There is no such thing as a good or bad condition to practice. It merely requires mindful attention.

I think that festivals are a potent pocket of light in the world, but I think that light is short lived, and could be kindled in a more sustainable way in the lives of those who choose the party-path if the right practices are followed. I know from experience, however, that masking sorrow with pleasure only brings greater suffering eventually, and I would invite everyone in the festival community to see if they are acting from a place of celebration or if it’s a mask. It can be hard, but opening to and forming a wise relationship with the shadow is the only way to deepen the reach of the light. You have to illuminate the darkness that is inherent in all lives.