Art That Demands Unlearning

Why creativity is just as much about how we consume the world as what we produce

I happened to listen to an interview with the Malayalam writer Anand, who seems to have created a collage of advertisements, cartoons, and news clippings from the Emergency period in India. This was apparently displayed at the Kochi Biennale some years back. He spoke about how dissent was creatively expressed at a time of extreme censorship.

This (extreme censorship) is something I cannot imagine going through now.

I believe Anand’s collection of these artefacts was also a form of sense-making — a way of grappling with things beyond him. It was perhaps an attempt to gain some agency over a situation that was beyond one’s control.

This made me remember my own visit to the Biennale. I went to an art exhibition and spent about three hours there. It was a collection of paintings, murals, and large, room-sized exhibits crafted from everyday objects.

While I support the avant-garde in literature and the arts, my acceptance of it is mostly intellectual. I do not always have a visceral connection to it.

What interested and inspired me more were the notes written by art critics alongside these exhibits. I found these notes almost as novel as the artworks themselves. I could see the same thing the critic was seeing, but my “programmed” brain still wanted to see the logic or the utilitarian part of it. I think I have worked hard to suppress or dismiss my original thoughts, so that I do not follow them through their alleyways.

A note displayed to accompany an artwork at the Kochi Biennale (clicked by the author)

Art seems to demand a lot of unlearning.

But there is also an aspect of seeing things through a different filter that can make an everyday thing a work of creation.

The closest thing I can relate to is found poetry. I am growing fond of this, and in terms of art sensibility, it is a giant leap for me from thinking that there is no “craft” in converting readymade material into poetry.

In essence, art can also be about how things are consumed, not only about how they are produced.

The immediate popular examples that come to mind are Marcel Duchamp’s *Fountain, and [Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/52692/two-poems-from-the-day), a book of “poetry” created by transcribing the entire contents of The New York Times* dated September 11, 2001.

I found some interesting things at the Biennale. For example, there was one exhibit with grotesquely half-blown glass pieces displayed on the roots of a mangrove tree. They looked like glass rags hanging on tree branches. That thought itself was satisfying, even before I could try to “interpret” the art in it.

I can now imagine the genesis of art as beginning in the conscious collection of materials — as momentary sense-making exercises that artists undertake — until these fragments reach a tipping point and emerge as a composite expression, a creative work of art.

My notes, including this one, are also a kind of momentary sense-making exercise, much like Anand’s deliberate curation and collection of artefacts.

These actions — observing, note-taking, recording things for the future — are important because they facilitate creative possibilities. I don't have an ulterior motive for doing these. But I believe something powerful can come out of this.

While collecting and recording these thoughts may be a sense-making exercise for now, the ultimate catharsis may come in the form of something created and expressed as a whole. In Anand’s case, it was the collage. I am not sure what this would be for me. But I am beginning to see these notes as raw materials for some future expression through a work of creativity.