Author: ke$hav

I was rewatching the classic movie Pocahontas with my cousin this past weekend, and as the song “Colors of the Wind” played, it got me thinking;

The song isn’t really about the colors of the wind so much as it is a commentary on cultural diffusion, the colonist character’s opportunity to learn a deeper natural wisdom from a culture he considers otherwise inferior. But the patterns of imagery in both the lyrics and visual imagery of the song – fruits bright colors, the wolf an azure blue, mountains’ rich oversaturated earthy tones – led me to think about the language of color, so to speak.

I turned to one of my favorite painters, Wassily Kandinsky, as he has written much about color and experimentation. Kandinsky argues colors have two effects: a superficial physical reaction to color, which associates a color with the physical phenomenon of the world. For example, bright red might evoke memories of fire, and the physical sensation of heat. The second level of reaction to color is psychological – beyond the physical sensation a color may induce, we also experience visceral emotional responses to colors. Kandinsky argues as we grow accustomed to the mundanity of our daily surroundings, we filter out both the physical and psychological sensations of our everyday stimuli. As a painter, Kandinsky strove to abstract the shapes and colors of everyday life into a panoply of psychological stimulus, re-introducing the wonder of everyday life. This painting, Kandinsky’s version of a city, demonstrates his mission.

So Pocahontas’s “Colors of the Wind” functions as an allegory, not only for a particular moment of cultural interaction, but also for a more universal observation on the role of culture in the first place. Culture functions as a means of codifying human experience in order to understand and appreciate both the external world and internal psychological states. Perhaps the role of art within culture, then, is to induce a collision of sensibilities and revivify our sense of wonder.

A common appraisal of the oft-overlooked lyricism in contemporary hip-hop is the idea that rap verses are modern poetry. Rap artists qualify for the structural paradigm of poetry self-evidently. A typical rap verse maintains a tight internal structure, rhyme scheme, and meter. But poetry is more than a series of rhymes. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, poetry can be defined as:

“imaginitive or creative literature in general”

This definition problematizes the traditional argument for the inclusion of rap lyricism into the canonical body of poetry. Sure, rap rhymes and follows a consistent structure, but the lyrics generally serve a commercial interest – selling an idea of a specific lifestyle. Moreover, the genre of rap comes along with a set of expectations over what content rap ought to present its audience. Therefore, rap lyric construction is an inherently formulaic process. This repetitive, formulaic process of song construction directly contradicts the notion of imaginative, spontaneous, and original creation that connote poetry. So, in an industrial moment like the mid 2000’s, when rap artists were expected to write songs about conspicuous consumption and the luxurious lifestyle their musical success afforded them, was there a space to be spontaneously creative?

I think Kanye West’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” is a highly creative, self-reflexive twist on the mainstream rap formula. West’s song conforms to genre expectations wholeheartedly. The chorus, “Wait till I get my money…/then you can’t tell me nothing” Demonstrates the typical attitude of a young, successful rap artist egotistically flaunting their wealth. Yet the story of the poem follows West’s inner struggle to maintain a functional, grounded personal life in the face of industrial and public pressure to live like a pop icon. Moreover, West inflects this struggle with images from his past, using Biblical motifs to problematize consumer culture with the Christian ethics of his life before fame.

The opening lines of the song show Kanye balancing the his elevated wealth with his desire to stay grounded:

“I had a dream I could buy my way to heaven/When I awoke I spent that on a necklace/I told God I’d be back in a second”

In three lines, Kanye tells a compelling story. He begins with a dream to make it big, but once he gains riches, he struggles to maintain his value system, conspicuously consuming under pressure to be a rap icon, and compromising his original values. Rather than use his wealth for good, he spends his money on a gold cross chain – an ironic transvaluation of Christian ethics to worshipping the almighty dollar.

In later lines, Kanye notes presents a highly self-aware and playful image of the opposing forces that tug at him:

“So if the devil wear Prada/Adam Eve wear Nada/I’m in between, but way more fresher.”

Kanye references a popular movie, Biblical imagery, and his internal struggle to negotiate the pop-culture world and his personal world in one compact, formulaic rhyme structure. He breathes a fresh take on a tried and true formula to not only stamp his personal identity on a commercial structure, but also to problematize the culture of mainstream rap. Kanye’s greatest creative success is in transforming a formula into a mode of personal expression.

As a humanities and screenwriting student, I’m currently overwhelmed with a series of writing deadlines. Sometimes a good idea only gets you so far until the inertia kicks in and the inspiration stops flowing. Writer’s block provides a stiff barrier to inspiration and simultaneously sequesters self doubt into the writer. Writer’s block isn’t limited to writing. Any creative act reaches a dull point, a point where the ideas stop flowing and the artist isn’t sure how to proceed. As I am currently battling writer’s block in order to complete my creative assignments for the term, I thought it would be fun to share some thoughts I’ve had about this universal problem, and some strategies and philosophies I have developed to combat it.

To begin, I’d like to quote something a friend recently told me. Writer’s block isn’t a loss of inspiration, rather, it is a loss of willpower. How can you be uninspired when you have a whole lifetime of experiences, and an entire world to engage with? Inspiration is always waiting around the corner, but sometimes, taking those extra steps forward become daunting. So the next question to ask is, what causes us to lose our willpower? And what can we do to get it back?

I think the biggest thing that holds us back from our creative pursuits is fear. Fear of not being good enough. Fear that the words I write on the page are flawed, that whatever I produce will not live up to the literary giants that I inspired me to follow in their footsteps. This fear is paralyzing. It is also, ultimately, quite foolish. No one got it right the first time. Many established authors say they weren’t proud of a draft they produced until the tenth rewrite. What does this tell us? Imperfection should not be feared or avoided, but instead accepted as inevitable. Because only through a wholehearted embrace of the imperfections in our work can we gain clarity, understand the flaws in our vision, and enhance our artistic shortcomings in order to become perfectly, uniquely imperfect.

I believe this mindset is essential to overcoming writer’s block. Knowing that I’m going to mess up takes alleviates the pressure to always be at the top of my game. I don’t wait for inspiration to find me, I find inspiration through uncompromising, persistent work. And I remember that first and foremost, I’m doing this because I enjoy it, not because there’s any pressure to be great. So I write every day for a couple of hours, I have a time of day I like best (for me, it’s either late night or early morning), designated spots to work at (my room, full of inspiring posters), and sometimes, a writing buddy – someone to stop me from packing up early when I feel like quitting early.

On a day when I don’t feel like writing, I trick myself into doing it anyway. I read over something I’ve already written or drawn, planning to revise rather than create. But revising is just another part of the creative process, and this inevitably leads to a couple of hours of work. So, the point is, don’t check out. Don’t give up. And most importantly, don’t be afraid to fail. Everyone fails. Everyone writes something bad. Writing something bad is the first step to writing something good.

My friends and I enjoy checking out the Museum of Art on campus – it holds a wonderful collection of paintings. The one section of paintings that has tripped us up over the years is the modernist section – full of the infamous non-compositional, abstract series of paintings.

Here’s an example of something on display (White Territory, Mitchell, 1970)

What the heck is going on here? Does it mean anything? Or to quote the classic insult towards abstraction: “My kid could do that! That’s just FINGERPAINTING!”

So why do we put these paintings in museums and position them with so much cultural reverence?

I was so invested in this question that I took a class on abstract art a few semesters ago. The ace in your deck of visual analysis strategies are the following question:

-how is this painting guiding my eyes?

It’s important to know that European abstract art (this is an important distinction to make, there exist many forms of abstract art throughout the ages, each with their own projects, and I don’t want to generalize. The painting I’ve pictured above represents the influence of European modernism that confuzzles many in the museum setting) is very self-aware of the history of painting. European art had become highly realistic, highly focused on recreating landscapes and portraits. Artists felt that after a point, there was going to be nothing left to paint. Moreover, with the invention of photographs, the whole purpose of painting realistically was called into question.

So painters decided to approach their craft from a fresh perspective. They decided to go back to basics. Asking fundamental questions like, what makes painting special and unique? Why do we mix colors the way we do? How do we guide a viewer’s eye across the canvas?

Let’s look at one famous artist’s trajectory: Piet Mondrian. This is an early painting of his from around 1900:

This is one from a few years later:

by 1930, this is what he was painting:

Quite the change in style? Clearly, Mondrian knew how to paint. But did he straight up forget how to along the way?

Well, no biographical evidence suggests he lost his edge. It would seem he was trying to do something new. Let’s trace the changes along his path.

That painting of the house is hauntingly good. But looking closely at it, it’s already clear he was moving away from realism. The color saturation looks off, the reflection is stylized to look extra wavy, the symmetry is unbalanced to make the whole painting feel askew, unnerving almost.

Mondrian was playing with the fundamentals of how to elicit emotion in a viewer. He wanted to know how BASIC he could get while still influencing someone to think when looking at a painting.

So we move to the second painting, a series of curves and shadows. They could be a haunted house, a dark forest, or something else. But maybe it doesn’t matter what Mondrian actually paints. Maybe his goal in the first place is to make a viewer feel something. So does it matter what subject he chooses if his end goal is to elicit emotion, rather than represent a specific object? This is the question painters like Mondrian were asking.

Finally, we move to the last painting. There’s a lot of philosophy behind this one that is dense – a Hegelian notion of the dialectic – the synthesis of two binary compositional decisions, be they space, color, or something else, combining to form artistic unity. This is a little heavy handed, but simply put, Mondrian is now beyond emotion and asking an even more basic question: how does a painter control the space of the canvas in the most basic way?

Note the use of the three primary colors, black and white. Note the giant red square, which decenters the painting, preventing true symmetry, forcing our gaze to the fringes of the painting. Would the effect of this painting be the same if we flipped it sideways?

To be completely honest, I haven’t spent enough time reading to answer this question satisfactorily. But enjoy returning to the problem of abstract painting when I’m experiencing writer’s block, to remind myself that sometimes, returning to a basic approach can add a sense of clarity to what I’m trying to achieve with my own art.

Behind every movie is a script – a combination of scene description, or visual tips for the director to consider when filming the written scenes, and the spoken dialogue. Unlike other forms of prose such as a novel or a poem, a screenplay follows a series of rules – they must be structured like so:

 

If a screenplay doesn’t follow the above format, production companies are highly unlikely to even look at what’s written on the page, as this format is integral to facilitating the filming process. Moreover, there are a number of other rules that go along with screenwriting. Scene description, for example, must be a succinct summary of visual actions that would be seen on-screen. Unlike text from a novel, which offer an inside look into the characters’ minds, scene description is meant strictly to describe actions and images – no more, no less.

Another important aspect of screenwriting for Hollywood is the structure and thematics of the content itself. Screenplays must be 90-110 pages long, must have a clear act 1, act 2, and act 3 (beginning, middle, end), must have a psychologically defined protagonist (a main character who wants something badly), and an antagonist (something that gets in the main character’s way of getting what they want).

All of these structures and rules feel stifling and formulaic – it’s almost like the act of screenwriting is no different than writing a really long essay. Is screenwriting a technical craft rather than an inspired art form? This is a question I, as a screenwriting sub-concentrator pondered when I began my intro to screenwriting class last year. So I read successful screenplays that went on to become movies, and what I discovered is that the screenplays that inspire a company to put in the effort to transform script into film are something really special. They’re an opportunity for a skilled craftsman (and craftswoman) to breath some artistic vision into a classic storytelling formula

Let’s look at Shane Black’s debut script Lethal Weapon

 

 

A classic action movie which catapulted Mel Gibson’s career, created a prolific career for the writer, and started a million dollar franchise. I want to look at a piece of scene description from a major fight sequence, in which Riggs, the protagonist, takes on a horde of evildoers:

“Okay. Okay. Let’s stop for a moment. First off, to describe fully the mayhem which Riggs now creates would not do it justice. Here, however, are a few pointers: He is not flashy. He is not Chuck Norris. Rather, he is like a sledge-hammer hitting an egg. He does not knock people down. He does not injure them.
He simply kills them. The whole room. Everyone standing.”

He directly addresses the reader, like he himself has been telling us this story all along. He openly acknowledges an action scene from a film should not be described, but observed on-screen. Instead of a series of visual directions, Black opts to describe the feeling of the fight, giving the director free reign to choreograph the fight as long as they understand Riggs’ efficient and lethal fighting style. And the pace of the writing has a beautiful flow – quick, punctuated, action-oriented sentences, written with such confidence and wit. Lethal Weapon exemplifies a fresh take on a formula, its an inspiration to screenwriters everywhere to take on the challenge of expressing themselves in their manuscripts, give Hollywood the same old formula…only with a unique, personal spin.

My name is ke$hav prasad. I am Screen Arts and Cultures student at school here. I want to be an artist. So this year, I decided to devote some time every week to blog about art, because I believe in order to become a better artist, I ought to be having better thoughts about art.

Since this is the first time I have ever blogged, I figure the best place to start is with an important question: so what exactly is art, anyway?

What is the first thing that comes into my head when I hear the word “art”?

I’m thinking of some pissed off, starving bearded dude hunched over a wide canvas, paintbrush in one hand, glass of bourbon in the other, eyes ablaze with a transcendental vision into the unique quality that makes us all human.

But that’s not me. That’s not most artists. Most artists have not recused themselves from society in order to painstakingly craft some ideal opus, they’re day-to-day professionals, just like everyone else, who use their creative skills to produce content for others – be it posters, advertisement videos, a building’s interior decor…and the list goes on.

But…is all of this everyday stuff “Art”? You are getting paid to create something per someone else’s request, after all. That seems like the opposite of being creative. (yeah, this shit keeps me up at night)

So let’s take another approach to this question. Let’s turn theory into practice and look at a car commercial side by side some clips from the films of Martin Scorsese – established and celebrated American “auteur director” (you can tell by the use of the french word in his title that this guy is a fucking artist, all right).

I want to begin with Scorsese. I’ve chosen the opening sequences of two famous Scorsese gangster films: Goodfellas and Casino.

Goodfellas Opening Scene

 

Casino Opening Scene

Both of these films are critically acclaimed, cast famous actors, and are on many movie critics’ lists of classic crime movies. Upon closer analysis, however, note that each film’s opening sequence is almost identical to the other’s. Open with a violent explosion followed by an off-screen monologue from a gangster explaining the events of the film to come. The opening scenes are told through flashback. Both movies are even inspired from books by the same author – Nicholas Pileggi. It’s almost like the movie industry saw Scorsese’s success with Goodfellas and decided to churn out a second movie and recreate a hit for profit.

Is this example too convenient? Ok, let’s look at The Departed.

The Departed Opening Scene

Another Scorsese film that won on Oscar for best picture. Opening scene also depicts gangster violence, this time from the Irish Mafia rather than the Italian Mafia. Still using an opening monologue from a gangster, still describing events to come.

Analysis of Scorsese’s filmmaking style reveals the director tackles the basic challenge of storytelling with a similar strategy across his body of work. This analysis also demonstrates that storytelling, and in this case filmmaking, is still a formulaic and repetitive process. There must be a psychologically defined character at the beginning of a movie in order to draw in an audience. There must be some on-screen action in order to excite us. In other words, there must be a pattern that gets repeated.

Now let’s look at this Epic Volkswagon Commercial

Woah.

This is an ad? This is one of the most compelling series of visuals I’ve ever seen. For a minute and a half, I haven’t seen a single image of a car, but instead a compelling series of shadow puppets dancing across the screen. It’s fresh, original, unlike any other car commercial I’ve ever seen – but that’s probably the point of the ad. Create an advertisement that feels unique in order to distinguish Volkswagon from other car companies using the tagline “hand-crafted: it’s amazing what hands can do”. This artistic statement only serves as a means of product differentiation.

The purpose of the comparison between so-called “Art” and a commercial is to demonstrate that all media requires repetition. As a media student, I’ve learned that any piece of visual media needs to use some repetitive pattern in order to make sense to its audience. Therefore, “Art” can’t be entirely original or unique, it has to draw on some formula or repetition, otherwise it won’t connect with its audience.

So what is that inimitable quality that elevates a piece of media to the rank of “Art”? What gives it that wow factor?

I would argue, based on what we’ve learned from this analysis, that “Art” is…a breath of fresh air. A way of looking at the patterns and routines of our lives and presenting them to us in a way we haven’t thought about before, in a way that feels unique.

Scorsese may be using a formula for storytelling, but every time, he picks a unique character, a unique setting, and a unique way to tell the story that excites us and compels us to keep watching even though we know how all crime movies end.

And even though we know we’re about to watch a car commercial, Volkswagon surprises us with an original, emotionally involved look at what distinguishes their cars from the competition.

In both cases, what excites us about both the films and the advertisement is that “wow” factor, that breath of fresh air that leaves us reeling, awed by that fresh perspective into our daily routine.

I invite you, my readers, to follow me on my quest to find breaths of fresh air in the routine of my senior year, as I attempt to become an artist myself.