Freedom Rules
- Thomas Allen
- Nov 19, 2021
- 6 min read
A line of gunpowder lit in the open burns and fizzles with little effect; pack it into a confined space and it becomes explosive. Similarly, the potential energy of the creative process is dissipated by too much freedom of choice, requiring limitations in order to take off.
Outside of the visual arts, one of my favourite exercises in coaxing creativity by imposing restrictions is the univocal lipogram. This is a poem written using only one of the five vowels; words containing any of the four other vowels are prohibited. To illustrate, this is a univocal lipogram I wrote limited to the vowel ‘o’:
t
Body Clock
t
Oh blood of broody womb,
Lost worlds,
Worlds forgot.
Nobody born,
No foot to follow foot.
t
Who knows my loss, my sorrow?
Only God?
Or Moon?
Good moon, holy orb,
Glows, grows, morphs.
t
Blood flows
From hot to cold,
From my body’s bowl
To frosty world.
Why go?
t
“Cry only for fools of old,”
Told God from stormy sky,
“Not for tomorrow’s loss.”
t
The process of writing such a poem is rich with serendipity. In the search for alternative ways to say things, or even for loopholes in the rules, you are led to unexpected places where surprising images jump out and meanings assume a seductive ambiguity.
The rules feel like something tangible that you are pressing against, offering the resistance that a block of clay offers to a sculptor. They are the material out of which you pull and tease shapes.
In my artistic practice, I find myself naturally creating frameworks within which to work – parameters that focus my artistic explorations. One example is my choice to use only imagery that I would consider archetypal, imagery that a hunter-gatherer several thousand years ago could interpret as easily as a London commuter could today. This rule prevents me from depicting cars and telephones, but I might instead portray pathways and people communicating.
As with the univocal lipogram, I sometimes find my will to go in a particular direction is frustrated. But then, diverted from the beaten track, I am led down poetic pathways. It becomes an enlivening exercise in discovery.
Another example in my artwork is patterns, which are usually controlled by very simple rules. Take, for instance, the chequered pattern (in the hero image at the top of this post) that has become a common motif in my work: the rule is that no two adjacent squares – or quadrilaterals – can be the same colour, so they alternate between black and white. Now add into the mix some triangles and a third colour, red, and we have an anomalous set of squares that have a knock-on effect across the rest of the pattern as the chequers are filled in – a bit like pushing around a crease in a rug.
It reminds me of Conway’s Game of Life, in which cells in a digital grid, governed by a few simple rules, exhibit emergent behaviours as ‘cellular automata’.
A frame from a session of Conway’s Game of Life in which ‘cellular automata’, governed by a simple set of rules, display emergent behaviours
The anomalous red squares in my chequered pattern add another dimension by introducing uncertainty, opening up a gap for my own agency, as artist, to direct their flow across the pattern. I am not robotically filling in the chequers according to the rules but am making choices within parameters. So there arises a tension between my own agency and the agency of the rules.
The relationship between constraints and freedom is complex. In limiting the set of choices that can be made in the creative process, the artist’s agency is being curtailed. Yet, paradoxically, it is those very constraints that enable the artist’s agency in the first place, by delivering the imagination from the paralysis of excessive choice. We’ve all heard of writer’s block, when the overwhelming potential of a blank page makes it impossible to choose a direction. The free-ranging imagination needs tethering to a point, and it is around that point of contact that ideas condense, images coalesce and narratives build.
There is a parallel, here, with Aldous Huxley’s concept of the reducing valve – the idea of a mechanism that distils the unconscious mind into one’s conscious experience, narrowing a broad field of information into a comprehensible selection1. The constraints we set give coherent form to our experiences.
So those constraints or rules have agency, they play a role in shaping our reality.
This ties in with my thoughts about the decentring of human agency in the creative process (see my blog post The Mangle of Art Practice). In terms of my own artwork, a set of rules becomes an actor in the creative process, exerting an influence on the form of a finished piece. So the artwork does not result from my agency alone; it emerges from the ‘inter-action’ between myself and the rules (as well as other actors, such as the materials, which have agency too).
Also, the relationship between constraints and freedom slides along a scale, depending on the complexity of the rules and the level on which they are operating. The rules that determine my chequered pattern are very simple and affect just one element within my work; meanwhile, my rule of using only archetypal imagery is more open to interpretation and applies across my whole body of work; and beyond that is the cultural framework within which I am working – the social constructs that are conditioning my work in ways I might not even be consciously aware of.
As I modify the constraints that I personally impose on my practice, altering the parameters in which I am working, my practice evolves and the style shifts. And so it is that an artist’s oeuvre can be understood through the lens of limitations: for instance, Picasso’s various periods – ‘Blue’ period, ‘Rose’ period, ‘African’ period, etc. – were manifestations of different sets of rules or frameworks within which he was operating at different times.
Indeed, art history can be viewed through this lens too. A culture creates within social constructs that impose limitations on artistic practices on an unconscious level, be it prevailing ideals of beauty or what even constitutes art. These rules might only become visible when one culture is contrasted with another – hence the value of cultural diversity (my blog post In Spirit Invertebrate speaks to this).
New artistic movements emerge from the cross-pollination of cultures, as artists are exposed to alternative creative frameworks that reveal the unconscious influences of their own culture. In swapping visual effects and stylistic quirks, artists are shrugging off old rules, only to adopt new ones.
Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave, woodblock print, 38x26cm, 1831 – Hokusai has used the conventions of European perspective to push Mount Fuji far into the distance
A nice example is the artistic dialogue between Japan and Europe in the 19th Century: in Japanese artist Hokusai’s famous woodblock print The Great Wave, Prussian Blue (an artificial pigment invented in Germany) was not the only thing he borrowed from Europe; Hokusai also applied the conventions of European perspective seen in prints imported to Japan by Dutch merchants2. So he had started working within the constraints of linear perspective. These prints, along with others from Japan, later made their way to Europe, where they were admired and imitated by artists such as van Gogh, who subsequently incorporated bold outlines and flat planes of colour into their paintings, feeding into the Post-Impressionist movement.
Rules are essential to the creative process but they threaten to become stifling as they grow and establish, so there is a balance to be struck. Like plants in a garden, they require pruning and occasionally uprooting. Rules are there to be broken, but there is no escaping them.
(Hero image: Thomas Allen, detail from Encrypted End-to-End, charcoal and sanguine on paper)
Footnotes
In his 1954 book Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley suggests that ‘Mind at Large’ must be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system in order for biological survival to be possible.
History of the World in a Hundred Objects, Episode 93, BBC Radio 4, Neil MacGregor.
Vincent van Gogh, Almond Blossom, oil on canvas, 73x92cm, 1890 – The bold outlines and large areas of strong colour in this work show the influence of Japanese prints
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