At 8:55 PM +0100 23/8/03, Christopher Walker wrote:
><snip>
>It seems to me that at every point along a creative
>process one is making choices ( this, not that) and many people speak
>of a feeling of uncovering or revealing some pre-existent thing.
>That pre-existent thing however does not exist until it is
>manifested, and it only _seems_ inevitable at that point
><snip>
>
>Choices, certainly. But there would be choices made in finding one's way (by
>iteration) through a maze. At the end of your journey, you'd have discovered
>a solution that was there before you started.
I'd still suspect that the apparent inevitability doesn't exist until
the artwork had completed itself; the maze isn't there until you walk
it. I seriously doubt the idea that the artwork exists in some
Platonic ideal state before you make it. I know the feeling of
sculpturing something down from a rough block of stony language into
some pre-existent form; but I think it's illusionary, something that
reverberates back from completion; and this despite certain things I
think about what happens when one adopts a formality in making
something (and I think all works are formal). I think writing a poem
much more like Mandelstam's idea of a plane that is cobbled together
in flight. Or is that a model of evolution I read elsewhere? Much
more subject to chance and other extrinsic things than artists might
like to admit, although of course made with intentionality and
consciousness, even if the intention is merely to make the work.
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Blog
http://alisoncroggon.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
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