Wiggle Room

By: Maria Fee

Indeed, there are times when artists lament how job pressures keep them from true creativity. We don’t always possess the luxury of pursuing interests, concerns, or longings. Instead we are given assignments, commissions, and roles to embody. We must pay bills, make deadlines. Therefore, reality spurs motivating factors besides predilection to rouse artistic action. But does this really make the work any less creative?

In Shop Class As Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford disputes the romantic concept that freedom or “the unleashing of the self” engenders creativeness. Crawford maintains that creativity is actually a by-product of being present. It takes discipline, “the mastery… cultivated through long practice,” to shape good work. In other words, it’s really submission to given materials that allow artists to be inventive, effective, and authentic. For Crawford one must “dwell” in given tasks to gain any credence in it.

Along this line of thought my writer friend, Garnette, introduced a creative concept he employs which he calls wiggle room. We witness wiggle room every time an actor sparkles despite vacuous B-movie material. Wiggle room utilizes inventiveness and imagination within our specified perimeters and shortcomings. Artists are called to access what Crawford calls “patterns of experience;” the knowledge gained from “confrontation with real things.” Our embodied experiences, no matter how low or mundane, become foundational for good work. We must rely on experience to make our projects ring true. Here is where Crawford connects work with philosophy. While philosophy seeks the good—a way to live life; it is our work that become the context to employ the good. For Crawford we must make use of philosophy, “the desire to know” and examine, in order to embrace and propagate good work.

Perhaps, then, our real problem with creativity is submission. Do we really want to surrender our time and energy on a seemingly unworthy project? Jesus seems to think so when he took on the disastrous human project. Surprisingly, because of the taint, few are interested in investing in his mission to redeem humanity. In The Death of Adam, Marilynne Robinson, bewails how we lost our ability to take pleasure in human presence. She writes “we ceased to enjoy human act and gesture, which civilization has always before found to be beautiful even when it as also grievous or terrible.” Despite the circumstances of sin, Christian artists need to employ wiggle room. We need to be hands on with the work given no matter how inconsequential it seems. Christ came to redeem humanity by becoming present, therefore, calls us to also be substantial, to confront real things, in real time.

Artists, let’s make wiggle room a redemptive part of our work.