The Groove 139 - Why You Should Invite A Different Take on Creativity
WHY YOU SHOULD INVITE A DIFFERENT TAKE ON CREATIVITY
Part of being creative and innovative, whether you are running an S&P 500 company, teaching a class, or standing in front of an easel in your studio, is the ability to invite different perspectives to sit at your table. It doesn’t matter if that table is real or imaginary, what matters is your willingness to listen to different voices.
I don’t know if you feel the same as I do, but to me, we live in a time where the slightest deviation in thinking from the group where you’ve been placed by geographic, cultural, or societal boundaries seems to be met with a full dismissal or a categorical “no” outright. That’s the fastest way to kill creativity and to strangle progress.
So this week I thought about a phenomenal artist and teacher whose ideas on creativity sometimes differ profoundly from mine and other times overlap: the German-born Josef Albers, the first living artist to have been given a solo show at MoMA (1964) and a respective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1971).
Here are three pivotal ideas that Albers championed in his lifetime:
Remain Forever A Student
Josef Albers teaching at Black Mountain in 1944.
This is one of Albers’s tenets that resonates with me the most. If you aren’t learning, if you aren’t curious, if you don’t see that there are as many ideas, angles, and perceptions as the 8 billion people who populate this planet, then you are missing out big time.
Albers taught at Bauhaus in Germany until the Nazis closed the school in 1933. The artist then moved to the United States, aided by the architect and MoMA curator Philip Johnson. Johnson gave Albers a job as head of a new art school, Black Mountain College, in North Carolina. Later in his life, Albers became the head of the department of design at Yale University.
Considered one of the most influential art educators of the 20th century, his students included Robert Rauschenberg, Ruth Asawa and Cy Twombly, all of whom remembered his innovative and unusual ways of teaching. "When you're in school, you're not an artist, you're a student," Albers frequently said.
Aligned with this open-ended approach to learning, Albers insisted that his goal as a teacher was "to open eyes." For him, the fundamental building block of an art education was developing the capacity to see more acutely. But that is certainly not just for art students. This should be a goal for everyone.
An indefatigable artist, he continued working until his death at age 88 and credited his vigor and undiminished appetite for work to the fact that he had tried “to remain a student… That's my secret -stay a student, and you don't get old.”
As hundreds of studies have demonstrated, the number one trait present in the most creative people in history is curiosity and willingness to learn. Being forever the student is indeed the best position to assume if you aim to grow and evolve.
Be Obsessed with One Subject
Josef Albers’s variations on his famous Homage to the Square, 1954. (R) 1957, (BL) 1969, (BR) 1972. Oil on panels. Permanent collection SFMOMA.
This one is a tough one for me to reconcile with being creative, especially when I gravitate toward so many interests and have been remixing so many things in my business and life, but Albers was more complex than that and that’s why he’s so fascinating.
Albers moved from a figurative style of picture making to geometrically based abstraction, and in 1950 he arrived at what would become his signature work: “Homage to the Square”, a series that he kept exploring until his death in 1976. But it wasn’t only the squares for the sake of the squares, his real concerns were line, shape, texture, and color.
Though deceptively simple, the series transformed how other artists approached color theory. Albers introduced the differently colored squares and made more than a thousand of these paintings, ranging in size from 12 to 48 square inches.
Even in what seemed such a repetitive effort, Albers found joy, excitement, and his own creative groove.
He chose squares because he thought they didn’t exist in nature (although he later learned that salt crystals can form in a square shape), but his insistence in mining the subject had to do with all the infinite color combinations he used to help students and other artists approach and study color experimentally. “Because there is no final solution in any visual formulation,” he added.
Imagine if you were to master an area out of the sheer desire and joy of seeing where it takes you, exploring it repeatedly until you get what you want and even then, go for more.
Or perhaps never getting the answers but discovering hundreds of different ways to use your knowledge, which Albers did in his classes and when he wrote “Interaction of Color,” an entire book about color theory published in 1963 that is still used today by designers and artists all over the world.
Eschew Self-Expression
The exhibition Anni et Josef Albers: L’art et la vie at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris inn 2021.
Here’s another point where Albers and I differ, yet I had a lot to mull over while reading his ideas and I’m happy to think through which elements can serve me in my life and business.
While I consider that the broad concept of creativity includes the unique expression of who you are with all your experiences, thoughts and feelings, Albers had said a few times: “I do not consider self-expression as important. It's not important as a method of teaching. And it's not important as an aim of any art branch.” Whoa.
When elaborating on this point, he said “that everyone wants to be different from the already different ones. And then they ended up all alike. And we are tired of that. And the youngsters feel that now.”
Somehow, he makes sense. A lot of what I’m seeing in recent fashion, social media posts, and even art is starting to look indistinguishable. In the race to be self-expressive and unique, everyone is becoming the same.
But then Albers gave us a few pointers to understand him in a better way: "I don't believe that 'self-expression' is the aim of art. Art is performance, and it's the change of performance, not expression, that excites me.”
For Albers, the term self-expression was almost like a synonym with being too spontaneous or visceral (after all he was reacting to the looseness of the Abstract Expressionists) instead of following a more controlled and thoughtful approach to the creative process.
While that’s a difficult lens to see any creative endeavor from, it’s also a challenge to step up and reformulate what we consider to be creative. Should every instinctual move be recorded and released as part of what we put out in the world?
To this end, Albers wrote: “But where do those features remain in the liaison of ’expression‘ and ’self,’ in today's too frequent art term ’self-expression‘? Let us remain aware of how often it happens, the formulation of an ’expression‘. And see how many, today, practice self-expression--all the time--and have nothing to say…”
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