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A Sociology of Creativity The Deleuzian Canvas

A Sociology of Creativity The Deleuzian Canvas. Nick Fox University of Sheffield Paper presented to the BSA Conference, LSE 2011. http://www.shef.ac.uk/scharr/sections/ph/staff/profiles/nick_fox.html. Introduction. Sociological Approaches to Creativity

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A Sociology of Creativity The Deleuzian Canvas

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  1. A Sociology of CreativityThe Deleuzian Canvas Nick Fox University of Sheffield Paper presented to the BSA Conference, LSE 2011. http://www.shef.ac.uk/scharr/sections/ph/staff/profiles/nick_fox.html

  2. Introduction • Sociological Approaches to Creativity • A Deleuzian Perspective on Creativity and Health • The Creativity Assemblage • What Can a Creative Body Do? • Case Study: Cezanne and Painting

  3. Exhibits at the Royal Academy summer exhibition

  4. What is Creativity? I looked for an answer to this within: • Psychology: a personality trait independent of cognition • Psychoanalysis: a sublimation of unconscious desire, often sexual • Anthropology: material culture • Marxism: a representation of class interests • Evolutionary theory: successful adaptation

  5. Sociology and Creativity 1 Sociology tends to focus on the contexts of creative production ‘ ... aesthetic and scientific practices connect even in their most intimate moments of genesis with concrete social and institutional conditions ’ (De Fillippi et al 2007)

  6. Sociology and Creativity 2 Creativity is a social process: ‘... anything that people can examine and judge, including communicated ideas and processes judged independently of the outcomes they produce. ... a subjective judgment made by members of the field about the novelty and value of a product’ (Ford 1996)

  7. What did I learn? • Not a lot • All the theories skirt around the question of the creative process • The missing body: need for an embodied approach to creativity

  8. Mark Rothko at work

  9. A Deleuzian Perspective • Gilles Deleuze: don’t ask what the body is, but what (else) it can do. • Positive desire is the productive, creative, experimenting motivation of life. • What (else) a body can do is influenced by the body’s relations and affects (q.v.).

  10. Relations and Affects • Relations: the physical, psychological, social, political and philosophical connections with objects, ideas and people. • Affects: the things that affect a body or are affected by it.

  11. Assemblages • Relations and affects together establish ‘machine-like’ assemblages, that set the limits of what a body can do. • Generally speaking, the more relations a body has, the more it can do.

  12. Duchamp: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1923 .

  13. Deleuze and Creativity • Creativity is the positive desire of the organism: the capacity to engage ‘productively’. • A body’s relations and affects determine the creativity-assemblage, and the limits of a body’s creative power. • Creative products (artistic, crafts, science, writing, cookery, sexuality, organisation etc) are the ‘becoming-other’ of the body.

  14. Jackson Pollock: Untitled no. 3

  15. The Creativity Assemblage • A body’s creativity is affected by • Physical relations: eye-body co-ordination, properties of art materials, skill; • Psychological and emotional relations; • Past experiences; • The social context of ‘art’: norms and values; • Relations of power (‘Royal’ or ‘Major’ art).

  16. Marc Chagall: ‘I and the village’

  17. Creative Assemblages canvas –– paint –– implement – model canvas - paint – implement – subject – ideas – experience - technique e.g. canvas – paint – model – sexual desire – belief about women – ideas of beauty

  18. What can a creative body do? • The free, creative expression in young children may be stifled by ‘Major Art’. • Creativity is universal, but the body may need to be ‘freed’ to be able to create. • We can read the limits of what a body can do in the art products.

  19. Exploring Creativity • ‘Given a certain effect, what machine [assemblage] is capable of producing it?’ • ‘And given a certain machine, what can it be used for?’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 3)

  20. Cezanne’s Body of Painting • The youthful work • The mid-life productions • Later work (P.S. Why is Cezanne always the case study? Cf. Deleuze, Osborne ... )

  21. Still Life with Leg of Mutton and Bread, 1865

  22. The Lac D’Annecy,1896

  23. Mont Sainte Victoire from Les Lauves, 1906

  24. Conclusions • The Deleuzian perspective offers a theoretical underpinning for those working on creativity. • It provides a methodology for exploring the embodied creation of art objects. • http://www.shef.ac.uk/scharr/sections/ph/staff/profiles/nick_fox.html

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