Artsy: Rage is an emotion that’s more commonly associated with breaking things down than building them up; it might seem more like a destructive force, rather than a creative one. But for Louise Bourgeois
, the emotion was key to her artistic production. “You have to be very aggressive to be a sculptor,” she once said. “It’s the anger that makes me work.”
5 comments:
What an interesting article about two things that I have never really connected in my head. Think of rage, I can see how it can motivate people to do things, to put their energy into something else. this is why it makes sense that anger has been found to make you more creative. Something interesting that the article mentions is the fact that the creative boost that anger gives you doesn't last long. This makes the most sense to me because. anger is a burst of rage, and these burst don't last long. Towards the end, the article asks an interesting question about bottled up rage and if that can last longer. It didn't really do much to answer this question, but in my opinion, no one can maintain rage forever. Rage will still hit you in bursts, so for those who have bottled up anger, they might experience more bursts. I do think however, that after a certain amount of time, some anger can fade and disappear. so even if anger was bottled up and released, there could never be a lifetime of rage to use.
I thought this article was very interesting and made me think about aspects of creating that I had not previously not considered. I usually think of my creativity coming more from pain than from anger because, as the article says, female anger is rarely accepted and acknowledged as a valid feeling. It is, however, completely valid and can be incredibly useful for creating work that is powerful, such as Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View is. I find that creating art, no matter what form it is in, can be incredibly cathartic and it has always allowed me to express feelings that I do not quite know how to talk about with people. I used to write a lot of poetry and I always felt a lot better when I had gotten my feelings onto a page where I could begin to think about them and process exactly what I was feeling. Without realizing it, I think a lot of my work does come from anger I feel, even if I do not acknowledge that that is its source and I think that drawing on these kinds of feelings to create art is incredibly important if one wants to make something meaningful and powerful.
This article caught my interest from the title and I was intrigued by its content but I had a question after reading the title and before reading the article. This question bothered me from the beginning to the end and the question is: what happens when the anger/rage is gone?. I wanted that question answered but it wasn't and it bothers me a lot more than I expected it to. I understand the importance of expressing anger and having a voice but at the same time, I want to say that there are other ways to produce good work without rage being the driving force. I appreciate the good work that has been created from anger and some of them have been phenomenal. Built up anger and rage can be very dangerous and detrimental to one's life and health, so it is very important that it is expressed in ways that are beneficial to the world. I still believe that rage should not be the only fuel driving creativity because it empties at some point.
I really liked this article because it made me, and my art feel very validated. I don’t like to say that I’m a very angry person, but in reality—I’m probably angrier than most. I’ve dealt with a lot of trauma in my life and I’ve gone through many stages of dealing with that trauma, and each have let out different sides of me when it came to art. During grieving periods, I would make art that was very “exact” or “by the book” (historically accurate costumes, replicating patterns perfectly, etc. – no room for anything abstract). During depressing periods, I would make art that made me feel better, or memorialized things I was sad about (painting, charcoal, freestyling new mediums). In the past few years however, I’ve found myself angrier when I make art. I’m angry towards the trauma that robbed me of happier childhood memories. I’m angry that people who haven’t experienced trauma can’t seem to understand the importance of it until it happens to them. Since this angry period has started, I’ve been making art with a lot of meaning, open for interpretation, made to make people feel uncomfortable or have some sort of realization (obscure costume designs made to fit political interpretations of texts, dresses out of nontraditional materials – hair, cardboard, etc., ironic sculptures with deeper meanings— a shoe made out of hands, etc.). I really like this article because it validated what has so far been my favorite period of my own art. In particular, this quote really resonates with me: “Creativity, they reasoned, is the product of two separate cognitive processes: persistence and flexibility.”
When I saw the title of Abigail Cain’s article “How Rage Can Lead to Creative Breakthroughs” I clicked. I clicked because I’m a person who rarely gets in touch with their angry side, to the point where it can be a problem, I have too much patience. In the beginning of the article Abigail says “Rage is an emotion that’s more commonly associated with breaking things down than building them up” which, when Abigail describes rage and anger in that way, already convinces me that it can be a creative force even though “it might seem more like a destructive force”. I’m a person who heavily believes that sometimes you have to break things down before building it up, or that breaking things down can bring better more (some times personally-)satisfying results. They described creativity as a product of two cognitive processes: persistence and flexibility, and anger can give you that. I think I can achieve both of those things without anger, after reading this article, I can say I agree that anger can be a way to be creative, but there are other ways too. I don’t need to change my ways, but I will be more open to being angry and using it for creative activities.
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