“It was as beautiful a thing as you could witness. He wasn’t enmeshed in the show business of it. . . . There seemed to be some other commitment, something very pure and more personal.”
– Lorne Michaels on Andy Kaufman
Disclaimer: I’m not a mega fan of either Lorne Michaels or Andy Kaufman. As far as SNL, it’s absolutely formative, but I think the fact that it’s become this cultural monolith has greatly overshadowed the thing that made the show so brilliant- the tiny *moments* of magical chemistry that coudl arise from the format of the show.
As far as Andy Kaufman, my memories of him are solely as a cast member on the show “Taxi”, and for some reason I prefer to leave it at that. I was a tiny kid, and so I’m sure I missed a lot of the nuances and issues with that performance, but it’s one of those memories I prefer to leave unexamined.
But that quote above… when I read it a few months ago, it hit something in me.
That’s what art and creativity should be all about- “something very pure and personal.”
I’ve started painting and drawing again in the last five months and it’s very very different in a lot of ways to what I had been doing before, at least from the way I am approaching it. Since getting off social media, my interior, local preferences took a sharp turn in a different direction, and the art and writing and other forms of creativity I gravitated to changed completely when I was left to my own devices to go down my own rabbit holes. It’s astonishing.
I realized that social media, at least in the creative space, is an echo chamber, and it can really trap and absolutely paralyze you. You think you are getting inspired, but you are actually creating really strict margins for yourself.
It’s a wonderful resource for independent artists, don’t get me wrong, but it serves up so much of the same, repeatedly, that you lose sight of the whole breadth of what’s out there. You forget how to do your own digging. And when you suddenly are back to that, the world opens back up and you realize the things that spark something are not similar to the things you are making or want to make. I’ve never felt so happy when looking at art because I’m looking at it purely from a place of appreciation rather than trying to glean something from it. It just makes me feel a sense of pure joy when I see something I like, no matter what it is, and I’m able to follow that.
All the stuff I had clipped and noted and saved to inspire me for over a decade was just variations on the same thing I was already doing. And it created this pressure of doing MORE of something that was already well-formed, if that makes sense. In my head, in my subconscious, I was creating a supercut of all the artists doing a variation on what I was doing, just *better*, and so it created this idea of what I should be doing, aspire to, but not the knowledge or confidence to know when I had gotten to that point, or what I had to do in my creative attempts to get it to where I thought it should be.
When I started finding myself drawn to things outside the realm of what I would ever see online, and followed those breadcrumbs, everything shifted. It set me free to make what I wanted to make and what I naturally make and walk away from projects when they felt done instead of constantly trying to “refine” and perfect everything to some undefined and hazy idea of what was “good enough”.
Nothing I make compares to anything I am looking at or inspired by right now at all- they are sort of in conversation, but not related, so the art I am making can just be its imperfect self, and the whole point of it is in the doing, not the end product. I don’t know what I am doing- I am just doing it and letting it be.
I hate social media. I don’t feel comfortable writing and publishing this, to be honest- any of it. So much crap noise online, and I am just adding to it. Again, I loop back to the fact no one is reading this. And for some reason I am compelled the write it and publish it, and lately I have been thinking a lot about following those threads, not for results, per se, but other reasons that I don’t quite understand (yet).