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The Art of Creation & Destruction

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Artists & the Art of Destruction | Part- 1 

The artist, from the outside is seen to live an enchanted life of creativity, something out of the pages of a storybook, as a whimsical or even an eccentric carefree character, but an insider view reveals something far more complex. The artist is not only gifted with the light of creativity, it is also the possessor of a dark and a destructive side. The artist instinctually knows that at all times it has one foot in the light of heaven and one foot in the dark of hell, with its torso, heart and head treading the fine line of this in-between space, balancing what must pour out, what must remain contained and concealed within and what must be annihilated. A fall into heaven will destroy its creativity and the fall into hell its creations and its own being. 

The artist must become aware that it is synchronously a creator and a destroyer. This is perhaps the most challenging realization it has to grapple with as its role, an understanding that must be incorporated as the creative’s conscious embodiment of itself, as its identity and its way of being, acting and negotiating with the world.

At the outset, many resist this bifold act of creation and destruction, where tension and friction are inherent modes of this conjoint dynamic. Here, the artist cannot prefer or choose one over the other. Preference for one over the other will be met with an insurmountable inner resistance and its pain. In the world of the artist, the artist must learn how to dance with both.

Because of this dynamic, the artist is a site of constant tension. It experiences itself as such and it is subconsciously aware that it is this state of tension that is giving way to all of its creations. It innately knows that friction and tension create the world and its content, what permits it all to come into being and to exist; that birth and death are synonymous. 

And so, the artist must aim at learning how it can coexist with this tension. Not only the artist needs the know-how and mastery of its craft, but to also know how to harness the power of this inner tension, to breath and walk through it, to build a home of it that can uphold its being on it. The creative must be willing to die and be buried within it in order to give rise to its creations. 

The first act for any creative or artist in negotiating with this tension is to build inner fortitude, to accept this as the condition of their being with all of its unrelenting demands. The creative must come to see this, not as a burden, but as a form of power invested within them that needs to be expressed. And take note: this power will express itself in those who have been endowed with it, wether it comes to express itself constructively or destructively. Only those who learn how to express this power in a balanced manner, as controled and directed power, while holding the reins of its helm will be spared from self-destruction, destruction of their creations and the world around them. 

If this seemingly paradoxical relationship between creation and destruction is not grasped, accepted and negotiated with, the artist is bound to experience intense forms of angst, distress, doubt, inadequacy and internal agony in all of its “trying” endeavours. What the creative will be left with is a feeling of inner entrapment, as if to be imploding or collapsing on itself, as if itself is being destroyed within and by the world.  

There is perhaps no greater psychological understanding for all creatives then to grasp this oppositional dynamic, which is the way-to-creation and as power-to-create.  Awareness and mastery over this seemingly oppositional and dual perspective, which is actually a continues process within a single spectrum, is the only way for the artist and creatives to create. It is the only way for creatives to survive the reiteration of this creative/destructive dance, its calls, flux and motion. It is the only way to overcome the resistance and to transmute the tension to creative-power and power-to-create.

A firm grasp over this dynamic will allow the creative to meet the demands of its creations that calls on it to be created, as well as the regorous mandates of the art-form and its craft, and not to leave out the eventual animation of the created content, which will take on a life of its own, with its own intrinsic power to create and to destroy, without the need of its creator’s directive and input in what it will articulate, do, be and become in the world.

If in doubt, think about Einstein’s brilliant work, where his beautiful and elegant equation of E=mc² came to be the foreground for creation of the Atomic Bomb that killed 226,000 people in bombing of Japan. Creatives must understand this to also have the strength to withstand their own creations. 

In sum, artists are the sons and daughters of both Light and Dark, invested with both creative and destructive power. The artist is the inheritor of these qualities in equal amounts; it is made of this dynamic, which is the very thing that compels it to create as its inner mandate. In a sense, to be an artist is to express, reiterate and enact this inner makeup. And no human can be anything other than what she or he is, in what their makeup and disposition is in this creative-destructive dynamic which is the makeup of all artists and creators within their being and psyche. The sooner the artist can come to accept this, the sooner it can be who it is made to be and what it is made to do —to simultaneously  be a creator and a destroyer, breathing life into life.

  • PART 2: in one of the following sections for this series on “Art of Destruction, I will be posting an article to discuss how many creatives find themselves in a constant wrestling match with this constructive and destructive power and how its tension is often misunderstood and misinterpreted as “unidentifiable inner resistance”, which is generally due to the individual’s inability or lack of willingness to differentiate between what this process can entail and include, as well as what it must exclude.  Many creatives confuse the surface for the depth in what is internally being demanded of them. Forgetting or not paying attention that the depth is related to the necessary processes for creation, where as the surface is related to consumption of creations, as products, which is about pleasure, wealth, fame, name, beauty, luxury, comfort and power. When a creative conflates the process with the product it cannot grasp the difference, it finds itself in the grips of resistance, always feeling dissatisfied, static, inert, misunderstood and undermined, as it finds itself unable to transmute tension into power of creation and its completion. If the focus of the artist comes to be about creating a surface, as results and products for its own consumption. enjoyment and pleasure, time and time again it will find itself without direction or foundation, rhyme or reason for its inner urges… I will talk more about this in an upcoming article for this series.

© Parisa Yazdi (2015)

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