RISK AND FAILURE

“It’s not about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward.” ROCKY BALBOA

A FINAL THOUGHT ON THE CREATIVE PROCESS. All creative work involves risks, the most daunting of which is the risk of failure.

To open your eyes to new things, to try new combinations, means leaving the tried and true, safe and sure. Sometimes your creativity will result in something great, and sometimes in epic failure, and if you practice really hard, it will most often result in something good enough. 

Experimenting with new forms of creativity might make you feel uncomfortable at times, and that’s good. Your current work methods are familiar and generally work for you (even if not as well as you’d like). When we move away from what’s comfortable onto a new pathway, our footing is unsure, we can stumble and fall. This discomfort is part of growth. You will make mistakes. We all make mistakes. These are not the kind of mistakes one makes every week or so, more like every few minutes, and even the most experienced creative people still make them. 

But stick with it and you’ll learn how to identify missteps as they begin to happen and correct them more quickly. It’s all part of the process. 

PROCESS AND PROGRESS

ARTISTS DEVELOP THEIR CREATIVE PROCESSES throughout their entire career. Art activists are no different. This is a lifelong journey we are on. Once you understand the concepts and begin to practice them, you will adapt them to your particular work in a way that makes sense for you. You will discover your creative process. 

A good creative process is what’s behind any successful art activist piece. But it’s important to remember that process is just that: a process, and the point of a process is progression toward a goal. Among activists and artists there are those who will say “It’s all about the process.” But it’s just as easy to fetishize the process as it is to fetishize the product. There are real outcomes we’re striving for—ultimately, we want to change the world. This means we need to step off the curb and take action. 

EXERCISE: TRACK YOUR PROGRESS

Time: A few minutes, every day 

Major milestones are few and far between on our creative journeys. Weeks can go by where it feels like you’ve done nothing and aren’t going anywhere. Being able to refer back to where you were a week, a month, or years earlier will make it easier to identify and celebrate your progress. Try this exercise for a month. If it works for you it can become part of your practice. If not, well, you will have a better idea of what you accomplished in this short period of time.

1)     Start a daily log of the work you do as an art activist. It can be in your sketchbook, or you can use a special book or diary just for this.

Each day, write brief entries on what you’ve done, no matter how insignificant it seems. If you went out and created or performed a piece, or organized a creative brainstorming meeting with friends, great, write it down. But if you did research by watching Home and Garden TV, write that down too. If you did absolutely nothing related to artistic activism that’s OK too. Again, turn down the pressure.

2)     Every once in a while, look back at what you’ve written. Look back at a particular week or month and see where you were. When you have enough entries, look back at a year or more.

It’s often only by looking back in time, and seeing what we were doing and thinking then, that we realize how far we’ve come and what we’ve accomplished. One year later, you may be able to recognize how a Home and Garden TV show sparked an idea for your current, fabulously successful piece. No matter what you’ve done, it’s time to celebrate how far you’ve come.

CONCLUSION

No creative or meaningful endeavor comes without risk, and this absolutely applies in art activism. You have to leave the Shire, Bilbo Baggins. Exploring uncharted creative paths is intimidating for everyone.

Staying inside our comfort zone just isn’t going to lead us to the results we’re after. Stepping out of our comfort zone to try something new means that we’re likely to make missteps along the way, but it’s the only way. You have to keep going – and quite crappily for awhile. Continue to refine your crappy process until it’s pretty alright.  Refine it further still until it’s pretty great. Keep stumbling forward. That’s how the great ones do it.