Experimental Restrictions of Freedom
To what extent is creativity dependent of constraints?
Carlos Vergara’s proposal for Um domingo de papel organized by Frederico Morais as part of Domingos da Criação, MAM Rio, 1971. Unknown photographer. MAM Rio collection.
If there is one basic thing that progressive art thinkers can agree on is that freedom of expression in general, and in art making in particular, should never be curtailed in any society. UNESCO defines artistic freedom as "the freedom to imagine, create and distribute diverse cultural expressions free of governmental censorship, political interference, or the pressures of non-state actors.” The freedom to create any kind of art, which is a form of exercising freedom of expression is key to a functioning democracy. The cases of movements that fight government censorship unfortunately abound, but very present in many of our minds in the Latin American art scene and art news media in recent days is the San Isidro Movement, protesting the Cuban regime’s crackdown on artistic freedom, and the recent arrest and subsequent release of artist Luis Manuel Moreno Alcántara after his going on hunger strike to protest the regime’s confiscation of his artworks.
What this basic, and generally agreed upon principle of artistic freedom referenced above does not mention— and something that dictatorships worldwide never seem to have learned and that historic and practical reality bears out— is that restrictions in art making, be legal, physical, economic or other, can be an even greater incentive to make art.
50 years ago, in 1971, during some of the worst days of the military dictatorship in Brazil, the critic and curator Frederico Morais, who was at the time in charge of the education programs of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, organized a series of events entitled Domingos da Criação (“Creative Sundays”). Domingos da Criação were participatory gatherings in the grounds of the museum where anyone could join in collective activities around a particular material such as paper, earth, thread, fabric, and the body itself. MAM Rio is located next to a beautiful green area, Praça Pistoia, that in turn overlooks Praia do Leão (Leão Beach), and the activities took place amidst those outdoor settings. By the second Sunday nearly two thousand people attended. The events were veritable happenings, experimental and cathartic in nature, and brought together many individuals who later would become leading artists of their generation. The ability to have an open space of free expression was explosive amidst the repressive political environment of the time, illustrating the notion that art and politics are always inseparable practices, a relationship that Brazilian curator Mario Pedrosa in 1970 referred to as “experimental exercise of freedom.”
One of those Sundays was titled Domingo do Papel, an activity organized by artist Carlos Vergara where he gave a giant roll of craft paper to participants to wrap themselves up in. Of the Domingos series, Vergara said:
This action by Frederico was the greatest democratization of art that took place in Rio de Janeiro. Why? First because the artists came at the same level as the people and then they did things together. And it was a political action, don't forget that the beginning of the 70s were known as the leaden years of the dictatorship, but the most political of all was this breaking of distance between artist and audience. (*)
It is relevant to note that Domingos da Criação was presented as a museum education program — something that must have made these events rather harmless to the scrutiny of a would-be censor. In a project that further explores the connection between education and performance, educator Jessica Gogan and Frederico Morais himself have recently published a comprehensive book detailing and reflecting upon the stories behind this foundational series of programs for contemporary Brazilian art. While they were not explicit forms of protest art, Domingos da Criação certainly were political acts—as Vergara describes them, or, in Pedrosa’s elegant terms, experimental exercises of freedom.
The relationship between freedom and structure has always been a constant interest to me as an educator for a number of reasons. In art teaching, limiting variables is helpful to help students understand process and trigger creativity. For example, when you tell a student to draw anything they want, the infinity of options can feel daunting to some, and it can create a type of anxiety that sometimes is defined as “writer’s block”. If instead you provide carefully defined structures for someone to follow with some limitations ( limit a palette to two colors, ask them to draw on an unusual surface, restrict the time limit, and so forth) then you are able to stimulate the student’s imagination and they are likely to find very creative solutions to those constraints.
This is what Jazz star Branford Marsalis was likely alluding to when he once said: ‘You don’t play what you feel […]. ‘There’s only freedom in structure, my man. There’s no freedom in freedom.”
Marsalis also is alluding to a defining strategy of great art making: creating within a self-imposed structure, a pre-established language. The story of modern art can be told fairly well by examining the many self-imposed technical principles that artists created for themselves, starting perhaps with Seurat’s Pointillism, going through Cubism, most of geometric abstraction, the constrained writing techniques of the Oulipo poets, indeterminacy, minimalism, and up to and beyond endurance works such as some of Marina Abramovic’s pieces or Tehching Hsieh’s one-year performances.
The principle of freedom in structure is also proved by the countless of examples of artists who due to physical illness or a particular disability developed their practice to function within parameters that they can master. Matisse and his cutouts are a classic example of an artist producing art in their final years while coping with illness and limited mobility. Today there is a wide range of influential contemporary artists who produce work that directly engages with, or works around, their disability, such as Joseph Grigely, Christine Sun Kim, Carmen Papalia and many others.
But the other way to use the principle of constraint to tell the story of 20th century art is of course through the imaginative use of limited physical resources. This group is also so vast that even a long list would be unfairly exclusive, but examples can vary as widely as the emergence of Arte Povera in the 1960s to the futuristic city models (or “extreme maquettes” as he called them) of Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez, made with the most modest materials.
So much is imagination triggered by restrictions that when those conditions are lifted the results might not be as satisfying. Terry Gilliam, the famous film director and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe once discussed how in their early films they didn’t have any budget for special effects, so they would instead use rudimentary means for some scenes compensating with humor (using puppetry, cotton balls for clouds, and a paper airplane for an air travel scene, for instance), hilarious solutions that had a great effect with the public. Later on, he added, when they were already financially successful and could indeed afford a large budget for sophisticated special effects, they made elaborate skits using those resources, but they were not as funny anymore.
However, here it is important to be careful about romanticizing the idea that the deprivation of physical or financial resources, to put it bluntly, “triggers inspiration”, and I should add that it can be a dangerous idea if it were to be used to bolster the conservative argument that the arts don’t need funding. To say that inventiveness thrives under some constraints is different from saying that art can thrive under total constraints. To this point, some psychology studies have proved that creative freedom is dependent of the right balance between loose and tight constraints. In her book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, psychologist and author Michele Gelfand studies this phenomenon that she describes as “The Goldilocks Principle”, which, as she writes, “when applied to tightness-looseness, can explain how everything from nations to neurons can achieve optimal levels of functioning.”
Yet another art anecdote might help illustrate what happens when restrictions are entirely lifted— in this case through the filter of curating. The late Mexican curator Carlos Ashida (1960-2015) was a key player in the period of the 1990s when Mexican art experienced an important resurgence. Based in Guadalajara, Ashida and Patrick Charpenel co-founded and ran an influential art gallery named “Arena México” and helped launch the careers of many important Mexican artists. At some point he was named director of the Museum of the Arts of the University of Guadalajara. As it is the case of many high-profile curators, he did not lack critics. Specifically, local Guadalajara painters felt ignored by the museum and wanted to see work by local artists instead of international contemporary art exhibitions. So much was the pressure that at the end of his tenure Ashida decided that his last show would be a free-for-all, allowing every single artist to participate without any curatorial screening whatsoever. The exhibition, titled “Summa Pictórica”, took place in December of 2000 and it was a sprawling hodgepodge of hundreds of amateur paintings.
News item about the Summa Pictórica exhibition, Periódico Público, Guadalajara, January 27, 2001
By completely opening the door to each and every self-identified artist, and by renouncing all curatorial structures, Ashida’s audacious move made him temporarily into a conceptual artist and all the exhibitors into unwitting participants of his art project. Ashida, who was being assailed for his strict curatorial standards, proved his critics wrong by showing them that when you do an exhibition without any curatorial criteria and without any other filters or constraints the result is just an absolute mess. If an exhibition includes everything, it ultimately amounts to nothing.
Thus there is probably a case to be made that creativity is dependent of constraints, whether these are internally or externally imposed. But if this is true, then follows a disquieting question: how about the constraints that we are not aware about? If we are operating under a certain influence that we are not conscious about, are we truly practicing artistic freedom?
Consider two recent perspectives on the subject of freedom:
In his book Free Will, Sam Harris argues that free will is an illusion, that we think we decide things when in reality we are fulfilling an outcome already preordained by biology and external circumstances. I can “decide” when to eat, but I have to eat at some point: the fact that I need food to survive prevents me to dispense from food permanently. Moreover, Harris argues that we can’t exercise my free will on those things that we are not conscious about. In this sense, as he puts it, “To declare my freedom is tantamount of saying “ I don’t know why I did it, but it is the kind of thing that I tend to do so I don’t mind doing it.” In terms of art making, we might be unconsciously fulfilling a script (say, being a contrarian) without fully examining why we act that way.
And to take this back to the political realm: the historian Timothy Snyder , author of The Road to Unfreedom, and someone in the U.S. who is helping us make sense of the media climate during the post-Trump era, argues that unfreedom— thinking that we are free in our actions, when we really are not— has a political cause, such as living in a lie expressed by a leader. “You can’t lie your way to freedom”, he argues. “If you are acting on the basis of a lie you are not really free, you are the creature of someone else […] We have a problem in this country in that we have defined freedom as doing the thing that you feel like doing and saying the thing you feel like saying whether it is true or it is false, but when you take part in these false stories you are not actually free.”
These perspectives, which of course relate to larger ethical, philosophical and political problems, may nonetheless help us understand certain unresolved questions around artistic freedom. For example, the following question: if we as artists, curators, etc. are not aware about the constraints imposed upon us by a political or an economic system, how can we exercise our artistic freedom against it? This might be a question for all of us, especially those who believe to have freedom in freedom, or those who might also have large budgets to create special effects. We might have to create a 21st century version of Domingos da Criação to liberate us from the unconscious constraints that imprison our imagination.
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(*) Carlos Vergara in interview in Um domingo com Frederico, a documentary by Guilherme Coelho, 2011.