Art Creativity Article Victims Of Art by Silvia Hartmann

Creativity/Art Essay

Victims Of Art

The "Artist - Story Teller - Audience" Challenge Of Art

by Silvia Hartmann

Some amongst you might have been wondering what we've been up to this whole past year.

No new books or projects, all quiet on the South Eastern front, you might say.

Well, apart from the usual business stuff (which is challenging, always, and also often interesting with all its ins and outs, and to which the MM list bears testimony!) I would say that we're still primarily working with the Art Solutions.

This came up in the research for ET2, Energy Magic, and I don't think any of us who touched that then really ever did recover from it.

It is such a HUGE, globally applicable thing, I guess its natural that it takes some time to get one's head around what that is and what you can do with that.

Art Solutions is in essence a simple device to get your creativity under control.

That might not sound so dramatic, but it actually is.

Creativity is not rolling around insanely without clothes on in oil paint for a 1960s style happening.

It is an overall problem solving/delivery device with which humans are born and that is essentially content free; it doesn't matter therefore if you apply it to quantum physics, brain surgery, chemistry, maths, astronomy, classical music or literature, psychology - WHATEVER.

Creativity's the energy mind at work. Our ultimate built in oracle we consult far too infrequently, and when we do, we really don't get it most of the time what it is trying to tell us.

For those who have "a creative streak", they know well enough how truly frightening it can be when your creativity gets out of control, gets away from you, and you lose a sense of what is real and what isn't.

I don't think there's anything more terrifying for a human being to experience, I honestly don't.

At any rate.

I started the Art Solutions process originally with my favourite modality, which is the spoken word, which becomes the written word and thereby morphs into this thing called "literature" or "writing".

Now that is interesting and has its own challenges, of course; but in 2004 I decided to try the principles of Art Solutions on a different modality, namely graphic art, to get an indication of the differences and similarities of the Art Solutions process in action when viewed through these different types of lenses, if you will.

In the middle of 2005, I moved on to have a go at the audio version of Art Solutions, armed with the experiences and basic outlines as to how the same process works in these other two modalities.

Music.

Wow.

That was difficult. It *is* far more difficult for me than the other two and one of the really fascinating aspects of the same process, but applied to music, is how much more DIFFICULT it is for the person who is doing this to retain perspective.

What I mean by this is that a feedback loop develops between the artist and their art *in music* that is much more severe in its repercussions than in visual art or literature.

Anyone who "makes" a poem, a picture, a sculpture, an invention, an equation or a song will have a RELATIONSHIP with their produce. LOL. Produce. What a wonderful word ... and I really meant to write produce, and not product, which is a different thing :-)

So, the artist will "react" TO their own creation.

But the reactions I am finding with people and music is exponentially more powerful than with the other modalities.

Now I'm working with a small sample of experimenters here, but they've proven quite representative in the past because of their innate diversities so I'm going to form a tentative observation.

For example, although someone might cry over a painting or sculpture, this is a rare occurrence and it wears off after a while, even if the original experience was dramatic during the creation process.

With the music, the artists reliably burst out into tears EVERY SINGLE TIME. Like clockwork. It is although it is *closer in structure* to that which it is describing/interacting with than the visual or kinaesthetic modalities of visual art or sculpture.

On that scale, the verbal versions of expression seem to be halfway - more dramatic than the visual arts, but noticeably less dramatic than with sonic arts.

With the extremity of response in the sonic arts, it has the advantage that it highlights certain things that occur with all the other forms of artistic endeavour as well, but are not as noticeable.

There is an essential difference between being the original creator of the work of art, and the secondary recipient of it - even if we're talking about one and the same person.

When someone writes a poem, they are the author; but only THEN and only for THOSE flowing moments when the poem is being received, and written down.

As soon as that process is over, and even though the artist wrote it, they then SWITCH PERSPECTIVES to become A RECIPIENT of their own art.

A victim of their own art, you might say ... :-)

Even if you read a poem out aloud, re-paint the painting many times on the pavements of your city, or sing or play a song that you once created, you still switch perspective AWAY from being the artist, which only happens to be in action during the original creation process, and become a "story teller" instead.

That is a third position which binds the other two - a kind of bridge between the artist, and the audience, and all of those are the same person if you are an artist!

As you can imagine, this can be rather challenging - especially if one is dealing with data that is originally derived from the energy mind and actually DESIGNED to bring about the dreaded six letter word ...

CHANGE.

Art is an evolution in essence, a forward movement, an unfoldment. For the better or the worse; as you're doing "it", you can't know, you won't know what it'll do, what impact it will have.

Even with the special controls Art Solutions uses to contain "the genie in the bottle" and make these changes more controllable, more manageable, less frightening and to keep them at a level where our poor conscious minds can come along on the journey and doesn't shatter into a thousand million pieces, like a fragile ice covering on a frosty morning when someone tries to walk on it, you still have the end result of something that *does some thing*.

And anything that *does* some thing creates ...

CHANGE.

You feed that back on the artist when they become the audience, the recipient, after the fact by making them face up to their own creations and all hell is let loose.

Amazing.

I believe somewhere deep down that it is this very feedback process which is a DIRECT path to self healing those aspects of our systems that are in need of some attention and some help.

I further *know* that you can't do that AT ALL unless you can handle the emotion/energy issue - or, you can't do Art Solutions without EmoTrance or something that does exactly what ET does (and I don't think there's anything that does that as yet).

Thing is that it only takes ONE work of art that frightens/disturbs/appals/terrifies/upsets the artist when they come at it from the recipient position to FEED RIGHT BACK on the original creation process in a natural Art Solutions manoeuvre, which will then build in a core "non desire for change" - a rejection of evolution.

When that happens, the artist has become the victim of an audience that simply cannot take the artist's truths - and they're one and the same.

It's a feedback loop from which you can't break out until and unless you have a mechanism to deal with the extreme emotions that are being evoked.

It's in music where this is most apparent, so direct, so directly there. It is absolutely FASCINATING how the act of attempting to "write a score" renders otherwise intelligent and courageous adults into whimpering children, full of self doubt and so reversed, they can hardly stand up - even though it was THEY THEMSELVES who wrote the score in the first place.

Or perhaps, exactly BECAUSE they were.

As I said, the process is structurally EXACTLY the same, regardless of whether we're dealing with literature, visual arts or really any form of application of human endeavour.

Seems to me that working with art as a personal development tool, or even an enlightenment tool, is a relatively safe way to address some very basic concerns about self and self reflection, in a limited environment, like a protected playground with safety parameters to keep the kids from hurting themselves too much.

Seems to me also that this natural progression and experience was curtailed and derailed in human beings - but even if you want to do something as simple as "bringing your energy system online and repairing the major reversals" you have to go back to kindergarden, and start playing with sounds and colours, and the artist/story teller/audience experience shift progression.

On the bright side, if you know how to do ET to get through the original storms, doing the "Art 101" might just be what the energy doctor ordered for human beings to get to grips with themselves - at a very, very BASIC level at that.

Fascinating stuff.


SFX



Silvia Hartmann