Advantages of Being Multiplex

The complexity of high ability, multitalented and creative people shows up in many ways, such as enjoying - and being challenged by - many interests and passions. The book is about how to more fully realize your creative abilities.

Creativity Research Journal, 2020

What happens in the mind of an artist as she creates a new work of art? In Creative States of Mind (2019), visual artist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist Patricia Townsend approaches this long-standing question from two complementary perspectives. On the one hand, she fleshes out an experiential account of artistic creativity by drawing from her own and other artists' personal reflections on the creative process. More specifically, and very commendably, she uses interviews (conducted by herself) with thirty-three professional artists to identify several experiential themes/states that figure prominently in art-making. On the other hand, Townsend draws from psychoanalytical theorization -especially from the socalled British Independent tradition (including, for example, D. W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, and Christopher Bollas) -to investigate the psychodynamic mechanisms and processes that underlie the specified creative states. On the whole, Townsend's analysis is based on a loose method of triangulation: she brings the interviews, her own experience, and psychoanalytical theory into a mutual conversation that aims to both apply and refine the distinctive contributions of each source to the understanding of artistic creativity.

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2017

The question of art in the context of the more general concept of creativity has to be addressed from the foundations of science. The subjective notion of creativity, which still persists in the humanist attitude to things, has to be resolved and broken, indeed abrogated as it were, as an infantilic, or exilic dream. Admittedly the idea of a creative generator ensconced in the human soul does not stand the test of empirical query. It may turn out to be true if possibilities of other dimensions of resources and energy were assumed to be true-the question whether a "spirit"like medium is part of the dynamics (as the ancients had suggested) is one which may not be yet encompassed by the perceptual instruments available to science. It is difficult to visualize gravity as described in the physics of relativity for example-for which there is a mathematical model, already in place in the hypothesized model of the "curvature of space" for example. Einstein's explanation of gravity could be encountered as a mathematical possibility, although as easily as a tangible working mechanism. For the arts empirical analysis is headed in two directions. One is titled ambitiously, as neuroaesthetics, and the other broader term involves studies on the psychology of what is called creativity-or in short "creativity studies", which is again a broader rubric for studies on a greater variety of design and creative pursuits, and activities for the contemporary industry. Semantically, again the term 'innovation' is used more loosely with science and technological creativity or design. But these were very relevant issues to my enquiries as a student of the arts, and since an artist or designer, when one makes this choice, of wanting to create something 'artistic', under the social precepts of the genre and given one's temperament-one already proposes a trajectory for oneself, that is one's life and career, in an unremitting passion for designing something novel and unique-a desire to express oneself, to make the object of expression better and more perfect following an insatiable commitment that consumes everything else, like a fire, autonomous and ungovernable as it would seem. If there is ever a model of an artist's autobiographical reflection for one's personal diary then these would be the problems one had to face and understand. Creativity or art is no longer therefore assumed to have its origins in a story-because the priorities and contexts for an investigation have changed. The creative process is a function of the behaviorally engaging hominid, just as there is improvisatory behavior in other species in different chains of mutation. The animal sensitivity to the crude and enormous expanse of landscapes, the ocean, the rugged terrain of mountains, canyons, gorges, and then towards food, and shelter-and toward moments on a social frame, or toward emerging technological urbanscapes, or interplanetary vistas. From a behavioralist perspective there was perhaps only one reference that finally seemed to me to be more pertinent for understanding the creative process. Since creative life seemed to be a full reflection of a total mental-physiological reflex system to tasks at first the Aristotelian

2019

In this paper, I look at Kant's third Critique and the persona of an artist that is at the heart of his account of beautiful art. My analysis shows that the genius has four-fold capacity: (i) to summon aesthetic attributes so as to give substance to otherwise ineffable aesthetic ideas, that is, rational and moral ideas and concepts derived from experience, (ii) to arrange these attributes in a formal order so as to create beautiful art and inspire aesthetic pleasure, (iii) to touch other artists by awakening their genius, so as to establish schools of style, (iv) to initiate reflection in the audience, so as to contribute to their cognitive engagements with the world.

Fluxus Poetic Multiplicity, 2019

This essay attempts to redefine the poetics of one of the most influential experimental poetic and artistic movements in post-World War cultural scene; the “Fluxus” movement, sometimes identified under the rubric “Neo-Dada” (MF 40), in terms of the work of two of its most prominent poetic figures; Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004) and Dick Higgins (1938-1998). It will discuss their aesthetics as indicative of the general poetics of this movement, and also as instances of the even larger experimental endeavors of contemporary poetics in its characteristic multi-disciplinary and cross-generic registers. Canadian critic Linda Hutcheon’s cultural concept of the “ex-centric” or the “off-center” (POP 60), defined in her book A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1981), is, this essay argues, of key significance for a compound understanding of the poetic impact often ascertained by this kind of experimental innovation, as well as the actual inner workings of such impact. The “ex-centric,” in Hutcheon’s definition, both elaborates and crystallizes the kind of cultural philosophy of composition offered respectively and distinctively in Mac low’s and Higgins’ work as well as in Fluxus’ as a whole. The work of Fluxus, in general, as well as of Mac Low and Higgins in particular, manifest, as will be discussed, anarchist inclinations, remaining open to whichever mechanisms or values deemed relevant to the artistic process chosen, be them canonized or otherwise. In this sense, Higgins’ and Mac Low’s multiplicity of practices, both in terms of techniques of composition and suggested means of reception, challenges notions of centeredness and imposition, in either the production or the perception of their art. Yet, this essay will also redefine those poets’ aesthetics in the even larger terms of contemporary postmodern aesthetics: a cultural attempt to recreate an aesthetic totally dependent on the “process,” of production rather than the production itself or more specifically, dependent on the “concept” rather than the “object” or the “subject” in the work of art. In other words, when a work of art is always in process of completion, with each, and every, time it is presented, it is then never really finished, and never will be. This is an aesthetic of the “means”, rather than one of the “product”.

Psychology of Art and Creativity, vol.2 , 2015

IJRDO - Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research

This essay investigates the relation between soul and Art, anddelves into personality and social context, the two startingpremisses of ANTOA. This new theory based on five markersin total, of which the fifth item, message, symbol and value,is also taken care of. As tool of consideration. Is Art indeed anominous screen, a special gauze thru which the soul peepsat the outside world?Can we use ANTOA to attach meaning to a soulful renditionof inventive, immersive and imaginative activity? The latterfurthermore establishing a set of social relations, discussingthe inter-relational affairs in a given social net. That reelisoff in a certain geographical region with socio-political andlinguistic preferences.While freedom of speech and symbolic dialect needdefending, very little reflection takes place. An abstractpainting of no meaning becomes a creator of social webs?Of an invisible yet closely knit social fabric around us?I then ask if such a screen or filter, identified as dividerbetween ...