Creative Response

It was a smart move for Clemson to define creativity outside the bounds of poetry - it gives us the opportunity to express ourselves in the ways that we've developed. Outside the door of one of the CSM professor's offices in Lee Hall there is an atrocious poem written about air conditioners dutifully produced to meet the requirements of the creative response. After professors read a few of those maybe someone decided we needed to rethink things. I was impressed with the variety of creative responses - clearly we all had different ideas of what that meant. In this blog, though, I'm going to talk about creativity.

If someone tells you to be creative it's usually very difficult. I think creativity is the child of necessity - it is the response to problems that don't have intuitive answers. It is assumed that creative people shop at Michael's, but I beg to differ - creative people do shop at Michael's, but people also shop there because they like to do crafts. And I think there's a difference. My dad is one of the most creative people I know - he spent a couple years at GM designing piston bowls to improve the efficiency of car engines. He's a mechanical engineer, and they're notorious for not being creative, but creative just means you create things. And he does, he's just creative with numbers and figures more than he is with words. And so I guess I'm a little disgusted that a public university would require students to write poetry when the majority haven't touched it since they finished high school. I'm curious about the debate that went on among the faculty - who came up with the idea, and who opposed it?

So, that's just to reaffirm that I'm glad I was able to use the tools I work with in studio - research and mapping, as well as modeling and drawing, to be creative in creating a demographic landscape out of a pliable material rather than write a poem about the traumas of Rwanda. Not that I don't enjoy poetry, it's just not the end-all definition of creativity.