Creativity within Constraints: Wanda Gág and the sōsaku hanga movement / Lowdown issue #1
Welcome to my new new newsletter: every Friday I write about a theme that I've been exploring in my art.
The hopelessness of the present political moment - and in fact how things have felt for over five years now - has left me feeling stuck still (both personally and creatively) in a way that has been embarrassing to admit.
Kate Wagner captures this feeling beautifully in a new piece for her Substack, the eternal present, concluding that “all I know now — right now — is that looking down at that screen isn’t just a form of wasting my life away: it’s killing my future. Maybe it’s killing yours, too.” Or, in other words, as she notes in the newsletter’s subtitle, “we need to destroy phone”.
Wagner’s premise is that while we seek in our phones a distraction that may soothe and comfort our anxieties, it simultaneously destroys our abilities to imagine any future beyond the horrible present and the endless scroll. That this is the point of social media now, not a design flaw. Perhaps the limitations of the dumb phone can help free our imaginations and believe that things can be different to how they are now, and fight for them too.
I know that my own ability to create is severely limited by seeking inspiration and the promised (but fake) freedom in expression and medium from the screen. Pinterest and Instagram and Behance and Cosmos (and its spin-off digital archive of free public domain images, Public Work) promise an endless supply of ideas. The freedom promised by the internet is now merely its limitless ability to pull random images, free of any context of their making, and present them to you. The ways that modern design research methods can result in something copied (albeit perhaps unknowingly) rather than created reminds me of the way that AI threatens our rich cultural landscape by filling it with churned-out images and writing that are mere soul-less amalgamations of the art that has been fed to it.
There is some seed of thought in all this about constraints and limitations and the space for creativity that they can provide. It’s related to the necessity of sometimes being bored - a feeling that constant access to a smart phone can help avoid. When I use a single magazine to make a collage, the tiny selection of images helps because I know what my limitations are. My approach to making dinner becomes much more creative when I can only use the scraps in my fridge. And sometimes, the lure of clicking through the internet can leave me staring at my screen for hours on end, a promise of creating anything I can imagine resulting in doing absolutely nothing at all.
During a recent trip to Philadelphia and DC, my wife and I made two art discoveries: Wanda Gág in the exhibition Art for Life's Sake at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and creative Japanese woodblock print artists in The Print Generation at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art. Both Wanda Gág and the members of the sōsaku hanga (creative print) movement made art that is dynamic and expressive and full of life, despite limitations of medium: Gág made most of her works in only lithographic crayon or black ink on sandpaper (a cheap and widely-available medium in the countryside where she lived), and the Japanese print makers were working within a centuries-old medium that traditionally involved many processes, many done by different workers. Sandpaper gave Gág a warm colour and texture with depth and a slight glitter that was otherwise unachievable. Matsubara Naoko (above) directly carved into wooden plates without planning or sketching on them first, while it seems that Yoshida Chizuko (below) painstakingly recreated brush strokes and drips of paint by carving them into the woodblock, then printing them.
My hopelessness is soothed - if not remedied, for truly it is hard (and perhaps not even desirable) to be optimistic at the moment - by looking at art like this, by putting down my phone, by reading full articles (not screenshots on social media), by absorbing myself in a book, by making a collage with found materials. I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know that it demands creativity and imagination and a belief that things can look different from the doom-filled posts on social media for us to build it.
I’ll leave you with some words from Wanda Gág in which she is fighting to capture hills. Despondency and excessive screen time gets in the way of things: determination and dedication and discipline and dreaming can put us back on the right path.
Just now I am wrangling with the hills. In looking at a peaceful, rolling hillside, one would never guess that it could be composed of such a disturbing collection of planes.... It's the very devil to reconcile all these seemingly conflicting fragments to the big forms on the entire hill. I am determined once and for all to get at the bottom of the principle which governs all this.