“Our culture has beheld with suspicion unproductive time, things not utilitarian, and daydreaming in general, but we live in a time when it is especially challenging to articulate the importance of experiences that don’t produce anything obvious, aren’t easily quantifiable, resist measurement, aren’t easily named, are categorically in-between”
Ann Hamilton
I’ve read and reread Ann Hamilton’s essay, “Making not knowing” a couple of times now. I have a now dogeared copy that I printed from a PDF that found online. Scribbled notes are growing all over the thing. It’s one of those wordy finds that filters into my heart and head combing out the tangled half thoughts and feelings into an articulate wisdom leaving me nodding away, moved with the reverberations.
In a culture that is just as obsessed with productivity as it is productivity shaming, unrealistic expectations for our productivity in creative work has become increasingly unrealistic. The need to ‘produce and show’ on social media has become a performance that is as toxic as it is soul corrupting.
The simple truth is that creativity is not efficient and it is quite often unquantifiable because not all work- especially creative work is visible. A lot of it is internal. It happens in thinking, walking, daydreaming and and other ways that seem unproductive. Creativity is also uncertain. The clearest of paths can shift and change and take a massive U-turn. All these marvellously convoluted miasmic aspects of creativity are what shape us and hone us in our work.
So do yourself a favour and take some time out to read Ann’s essay. It’s pretty darn pertinent: ANN HAMILTON MAKING NOT KNOWING
“One doesn’t arrive — in words or in art — by necessarily knowing where one is going. In every work of art something appears that does not previously exist, and so, by default, you work from what you know to what you don’t know. You may set out for New York but you may find yourself as I did in Ohio. You may set out to make a sculpture and find that time is your material. You may pick up a paint brush and find that your making is not on canvas or wood but in relations between people. You may set out to walk across the room but getting to what is on the other side might take ten years. You have to be open to all possibilities and to all routes — circuitous or otherwise.
But not knowing, waiting and finding — though they may happen accidentally, aren’t accidents. They involve work and research. Not knowing isn’t ignorance. (Fear springs from ignorance.) Not knowing is a permissive and rigorous willingness to trust, leaving knowing in suspension, trusting in possibility without result, regarding as possible all manner of response. The responsibility of the artist … is the practice of recognizing.”
― Ann Hamilton