By Matthew White
Social distancing has me struggling to write. If you are one of those people who’s pumping out new ideas right and left because you finally have the opportunity to sit down, alone, and brainstorm, I’m jealous.
I’m a social creator. Because I have not had the opportunity to sit down with friends and sift through my thoughts, I’ve been stuck on ideas that don’t feel significant enough to produce something from them. To me, there is something impactful about the process of dialogue that strengthens the transition of thoughts into words.
One way that I’ve been trying to get around this is to just write. To follow rabbit trails. Sit down and let my thoughts flow into each other to try and meld them together. But as much as writing about what I’ve been thinking helps me to solidify the core of those ideas, I also don’t know if any of what I’m saying feels relevant. I’m experiencing a creative disconnect because I feel isolated from my social circles - because there has been little opportunity to explore ideas with other people, they feel raw and rough, and ungrounded.
My creative process is a social one. My best work is often done when I’ve allotted time with someone else to either discuss an idea, or to paint or draw or create – otherwise I have a strong tendency to doubt the validity of what I’m working on. Finishing is hard when you aren’t confident that your concept is valuable or impactful. It helps immensely for me to have another person or group of people involved in the development of an idea, even if it’s just their presence prompting me to try and be excellent.
My process is also very conscious of ideas in the context of my culture. Is what I have in my head relevant to the people around me? Can other people take this and apply these ideas into their own creative processes?
So, for me, the last few weeks have shown me that creativity is ultimately a social endeavor. One of these rabbit trails has been considering the the idea of identity while sheltering in place. While nothing super concrete has come of this yet, one thing that did stand out for me is the inability of identity to exist in isolation – everything that we do and all the ways that we construct our identities are based on our understandings of ourselves in the context of our communities – local, national, cultural, whatever.
For people who create, I think there is a good chance that part of your identity comes from your creativity. It’s part of the way that you present yourself to the world, or to your self. One of the ways identity is created is through the aesthetics that you present to your community - almost as social markers of how you’d like the world to understand what it is that you are.
This can be anything from the clothes you wear to the choices you make when you speak. A man who wants to present their identity as masculine might make the choice to wear a lot of graphic tees as an expression of identity. Or a queer person might blur the lines between masculinity and femininity, and make aesthetic choices to present themselves how they feel to be most true to their identity. These visual markers help us to show people who we are, and where we fit in.
It might seem a little superficial, but I think it’s also an important part of how we understand one another. Each of these markers forms a vocabulary of identity we use to display ourselves to the rest of the world. The art that we create is another manifestation of this vocabulary. It varies person to person, but still exists as a way for each of us to understand one another.
In this way, art cannot be isolated from its social context. The things that we create cannot be “purely” technical – not if they want to hold any meaning. If you want to create something that makes an impact, it needs to speak to some kind of social or artistic idea. Even that which presents itself as apolitical does so in consideration of that which is political - there is still an understanding of what it is that makes art deeply rooted in cultural context.
In this sense, as much as I might say that what I create is a product of my own ability, nothing that I come up with is really mine – it’s information from however many sources that has been synthesized through the lens of my own experience to create a “new” perspective. Art might be uniquely tied to an individual, but it will only be as unique as the culmination of that person’s own experiences – all of which are a product of the culture(s) that they inhabit.
So, for me the process of creation has been difficult. The culture that I am used to creating in is not accessible to me anymore - at least for the time being - and it’s not looking like it will be back any time soon. The internet is a good tool for learning and ingesting information, but it cannot replace the process of in person dialogue – we lose body language, we lose physical nuance, we lose the ability to generate excitement and feeling through touch, or even the knowledge that touch is possible. We lose components of communication that are essential, and that cannot be replaced digitally.
We also lose that cultural understanding that comes with interaction. If I want to be writing about something relevant to me as a queer person, its really hard to dive into that without participating in that cultural setting. The synthesis of information that happens so easily in community is stunted by online communication,
This is why creating has been so challenging for me the last few weeks. Being in a new kind of environment for creation has been off-putting. I’m having to learn new ways of engaging with my own brain that feel less effective.
I believe that to excel in art is to synthesize well. Great art is that which understands, considers and provides new perspectives. It shows us representations of ideals, or criticism of ideology. It can be a form of knowledge transfer, showing other people new ways of understanding how their world works, or might work, or should work in an ideal world. To be away from opportunities to be a part of the world means we have less opportunity to understand it.
Ultimately, for me (and everyone else, I think) this act of synthesis is a social skill – and one that works better when you are able to take part in these social settings. Understanding how the world works depends on one’s ability to look at the world and reconsider it. It’s a matter of being present in the world, in your culture, in your community, and taking part, learning. Without this, you are just seeing the world through a window - your perspective is only as broad as the frame you are looking through.
I’m learning that good creativity is that which is generated in conjunction with immersion. If you want to write about, paint about, sculpt about something, you can’t really do that effectively without first taking the time to soak yourself in that thing – take time to understand it, to socialize, to bring enough of it into your brain that you come out of it feeling like there is no other choice but to put those thoughts onto paper.
And for me, right now, I feel like I’ve lost that connection.