Photo: Tom Sachs, Creativity is the Enemy. 2008, synthetic polymer paint and screws on plywood. 38.5 x 58.75 x 5 in. Source: www.tomsachs.org
Tom Sachs is a New York based sculpture artist, possessing a signature style that applies nostalgic criticism to the sixty-year-old relationship between the search for identity and the products people use to claim individuation. Memorable pieces include a Glock pistol out of Tiffany packaging, a model of a fictitious Holocaust camp with a Prada logo at its center, a foam-core replica of the Unité d'Habitation housing complex, and a series of Apollo-11 mission sculptures including a scale lunar excursion module. One of his studio films, entitled "Ten Bullets," has also received some media attention, memorializing corporate training videos while establishing best practices for his colleagues at his studio, Allied Cultural Prosthetics.
In "Ten Bullets," and in the piece displayed, the phrase "Creativity is the Enemy" is mentioned several times. When I first read the term, I was fundamentally confused; after all, I was watching a video that was made by an artist. What kind of artist is hostile towards creativity? Why would someone take as fundamental an element as 'creativity,' the lifeblood and animating spirit of art, and look through the scope and lay his cross hairs against it?
Before continuing, I'd like you, my dear reader, to meditate on the phrase. See what ways the idea of shunning creativity, or neglecting it, or declaring open war on it, can fit with your normal understanding of creativity. Writing this, I recognize it as being counter-intuitive, but I ask you to at least play with the idea and its myriad possibilities: Creativity is the enemy.
For myself, the phrase initially indicated that deciding upon creativity, as in, making a work that is forcibly creative, was a significant mistake. To sit down to a work and declare, "I am going to write a creative play," dooms the piece from the very beginning. By trying to alter a work, whether it's a piece of writing, a sculpture, or even an artistic technique, just for the sake of being creative, an artist jeopardized the quality of the work by straying from a cohesive idea. I reasoned that trying to push creativity in places where familiarity was required, the glue that would hold the piece together would disconnect its parts at the joints.
In an article in Huck magazine, Sachs responds to the phrase:
Well the idea of ’creativity is the enemy’ is to do the work that is set out before you and not to improvise unless it’s absolutely necessary. I think there’s a capriciousness that happens in art that’s very indulgent, and I like to make the innovations and creative acts within my work incrementally. There are some cultures that worship innovation, and I believe in innovation, and I believe that innovation is one of the characteristics that define my work. However, it only works when it’s on a really solid foundation.
Could this, however, simply be the result of an artist whose inspiration has largely been the culture of mass-production, of having well-established codes, formats, and methods in the creation of a particular object? If one's creative force comes from a culture that valued repetition and similarity - that valued standards for reproduction - then wouldn't that inform the value placed on technical creativity? After all, a personal visit to the Museum of Modern Art revealed plenty of artistic pieces (none of which come to mind by name, and for that, I apologize) in which the piece itself is an experiment on technique. It would seem to me that toying with the standards of creation, whatever the medium may be, is a standard practice among artists.
However, perhaps I have missed the point. "Creativity is the enemy" is unlikely to be a genuine scowl against inventiveness itself. It seems that it is a warning between artists, a reminder that deviating from tried and true techniques is not an adequate way to identify uniquely as a creator. It's possible that the phrase is a challenge to take things that are created "correctly" (in as loose an interpretation as I can use of that word), and configure them in a particular way so that the end result creates a new and fresh idea out of smaller, comprehensible ones. In Tom Sachs' Hermés McDonald's meal, there are specific proportions of accuracy to both the high-fashion logo and the fast-food containers. It doesn't help to change these dimensions for the sake of creativity. Accurately depicting the logo and the shapes of the food allows the viewer to immediately recognize what is occurring in the piece. Deviating from that for "creativity's sake" detracts from the piece rather than adds, and can lend some truth to creativity being called the enemy.
If we take this as truth, however, we have a new question to consider. Sachs' advice applies to a kind of "Found Art," the kind of art that takes existing things and places them in novel configurations. One would suppose, however, that this perspective stifles artistic fluidity, that thinking of things only in terms of items that already exist chokes innovation and prevents an artist from developing anything new. Well, part of this series is to continue this question in greater detail. My next topic will be devoted to exactly this concept, that art is a reconfiguration of existing parts, and give a discussion on remix culture and its significance in art.
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What does the phrase mean to you? Any discussion, disagreement, agreement, or alternative view on the topic would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you, sincerely, for reading.
-TD
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