Why do people give up on being creative?
Manifesto Part 2: Reject Dogma
Hi,
This is part two of a series exploring the Everyone's Creative Manifesto. You can read the first part here.
Reject Dogma
When I think back on my time in art school, I feel like I can sum up the general advice of my instructors with one incredibly common phrase:
"You have to learn the rules before you can break them."
In the context of art school, this makes sense. This philosophy shows that while we don't deny the possibility that rules around creativity may eventually need to be broken, there is value in the rules that empower, not restrict you. There are lessons and tools to be found in rules that give us the ability to say something when we do break them. But to do that, we say you need to understand why the rules exist in the first place.
Rules in creativity are the results of other people's experiments. Rules give you a shortcut to understanding how to achieve a "better" result (more aligned with your goals for the work, not objectively better) by letting you apply the insights found from lessons you didn't need to learn through trial-and-error.
As a student, full of ideas and ambitions that reach far beyond simple practice and study, these rules feel like lead boots. It's hard to describe how frustrating it is to be told that an idea you have won't work because it doesn't adhere to a best-practice that you fundamentally and profoundly don't care about. Especially when you're in art school, where the boundaries of good and bad flip depending on perspective or context, it feels like someone is trying to force you into a shape you don't want to be in. It hurts.
It's a cliché to say "you'll understand when you're older," but this is one of the clearest examples of that experience. When I was 17, 18, 19 years-old, I thought the adherence to "rules" in art making was corporate, regressive, authoritarian and only served to demonstrate how out of touch my instructors were with the authentic core of what it means to be an artist. On the cusp of my thirties, with more than a decade of experience working in creative industries and having taught art at a college myself, I've so profoundly flipped on this opinion that it's hard for me to remember ever feeling differently.
But I did feel differently about rules back then. And while my ideas have shifted since then, when I think about it now, I realize that sometimes...sometimes I was right about rules.
When Rules Become Laws
Rules, best-practices, guidelines - however you want to phrase it, the point of the rules that you "need to learn before you can break" is to provide structure to your creative practice. Rules (think about "rulers" for a second) give us a reference to measure against. When we define boundaries for ourselves, we can compare how something fits within those boundaries. We can measure our progress, our mistakes and learn how to work differently next. Rules enable growth, experimentation and innovation. It's counter-intuitive, but we can't really be creative without rules.
Laws, mandates, commandments - however you want to phrase it, the point of these boundaries is to control people. Sometimes, laws are the best tool we have to keep social order (sometimes but not always), but in creative work laws serve to restrict the things that we can say, do or express. Laws are put in place to deny people their voice, to force them to say things they don't want to or to punish them for overstepping. Laws are created to hoard ideas and try to convert self-expression into a productive asset we can use for trade. Laws and creativity are so fundamentally opposed because they enforce values and ideals onto people against their will. There can't really be creativity with laws.
When we let our rules become laws, the best-practices and fundamentals of our craft mutate into authority - and authority stifles creativity. The irony of this position is that blind adherence to the rules is similar to complete ignorance of the rules. The rules of creativity don't exist to create finite results, and over-adherence to rules misses the point of their existence altogether.
It's easy to see how this happens, but we can't let ourselves lose perspective and turn rules into laws. That isn't something we can just "not do," though. It's an active decision. We need to decide not to enforce our rules onto others. We need to commit to only offering them to them instead. That's the difference between teaching someone and dominating them.
Laws as Dogma
To be clear, I'm not talking about actual legislation when I'm talking about laws. Or, more accurately, I'm not only talking about actual legislation. Most of the on-paper laws surrounding creative work are problematic (more on that another day when I come for the entire concept of copyright) but the issue at hand here is bigger than what governments try to do to control creativity.
The laws I'm talking about are dogmatic beliefs that mutate out of the helpful rules we started with. Somewhere along the way, someone learns the rules and realizes their utility but then forgets the follow-through. They forget the part where you can break the rules. This dogma comes from within creativity. It's the authority we hold up over others to elevate ourselves. It's the judgment we pass down on those we disagree with or dislike. It's the wall we build and the gates we keep.
An Example of Creative Law
I started to realize this issue most acutely when I began working professionally on branding. I'm not a trained graphic designer (my formal education is in illustration and animation) and I found myself entering an extremely dogmatic creative space. None of this was very aggressive (though graphic designers can be some of the more intense professional artists you might meet) but there was something there, found just under the surface.
As I tried to learn more about design, I started to find references to so many rules about what you can and can't do with brands. The way to set type, choose colours, format files, design documents - all these very specific jobs had incredibly rigid rules that I would find designers online lamenting the neglect of. I didn't know any better, so I assumed these were standards I needed to adhere to but... why? Am I going to get in trouble? Go to jail? Because I wanted to do something unconventional with a logo?
That's when I realized... this is all bullshit, isn't it?
I'm not trying to say that the fundamentals of graphic design are all bullshit, but what I am trying to demonstrate is how rules can morph into laws without you even realizing it. It often happens in our own heads, and we do it to ourselves. Recognizing this, I now get to both use and break these rules consciously, without worrying about going to design jail.
Rejecting dogma isn't about rejecting the rules. It's about keeping things in perspective. If the biggest takeaway I had from my art education was that "you need to learn the rules before you can break them," then I need to remember that breaking the rules is the ultimate outcome of that lesson. You can't stop at just learning the rules. That's what a machine does. Nothing happens after that if that's where we stop. We need to keep going.
Practice Makes Perfect, Perfect is Boring
The point of "Reject Dogma" isn't to be an anarchist. It isn't a rebellion against artistic power structures. It's more internal than that. It's a promise to ourselves to never stop learning. It's a commitment to experimentation and growth. When we reject the dogmatic principles that constrain the limits of our creativity, we are saying that the limits are unknowable and that we're going to keep pushing to find them in spite of that.
When we reject dogma, we're also committing to never enforcing creative laws.
The result of this is, in my experience, many more mistakes, false-starts and failures. It means that every time I feel like I'm finally figuring something out, I decide to try something else instead of settling into a resolution. It means I've never really perfected anything and that I don't expect I ever will.
It means that I get to have a lot more fun.
Love,
Simon 🐒