Consistency and process
Heya 👋
I’ve been thinking about the idea of systems and process for creativity recently. Mainly to what extent they are useful and to what extent are they a restriction.
Throughout history art has often, to some extent, been defined by a carefully constructed set of rules. Whether it be the Golden Ratio used by Renaissance artists and others or the unwritten codes of the genre.
But the idea of systems and process took on a new form from the 1960s and 1970s onwards.
Sol LeWitt was a conceptual artist who used a series of mathematical systems to create his work. Even now, after his death his work is installed using his carefully designed set of instructions.
Today, Charles Gaines is a great artist who has built on the work of LeWitt and others. Using mathematical and numeric generative systems he creates illustrations, photography, sculpture, music, drawings and paintings.
The latter is defined by the use of “soft, numbered marks in ink on a grid, with each drawing built upon the calculations of the last”1.
He says his work produces “an experience of sentiment that’s produced by rules”2.
At first it seems like a contradiction in point, but in some ways it makes a lot of sense.
As Jerry Saltz pointed out in his book ‘How to be an Artist’, LeWitt once said “The idea becomes the machine that makes the art”
Meaning, “serious artists tend to develop a kind of creative mechanism — a conceptual approach — that allows them to be led by new ideas and surprise themselves without deviating from their own artistic principles”3
It got me thinking about a show I went to see a few years ago at the Barbican featuring a collaboration between Steve Reich (a conceptual composer) and Gerhard Richter (a visual artist). Together with Britten Sinfonia they combined “original music and digital visuals, algorithmically derived from Richter’s paintings”4. The effect was mesmerising — a never ending stream of newness, reflective of culture, but derived from a system.
In some ways, what these artists work shows is that often, to truly understand and create something we must first define what it is, and what it’s not.
Starting each project by defining the limitations and eliminating preconceptions. Determining what a brand, product, or in this case artwork has or has not, and determining the things that can’t change.
For an artist, this might be format, rules, subject matter. For a brand, this might be a colour, sound or other recognisable and distinctive brand assets.
Planning is a job fraught with balancing the limitations of process and consistency. Too much of either, we risk leaving not enough room for creativity and chance encounters. Not enough, we risk spending too much time focusing on unhelpful routes.
But a certain amount of limitation, when properly put to work, can be liberating. It can help create consistency, whilst leaving room for new ideas to form.
Until next time 👋,
Harriet