Brian Eno has been making the press rounds of late as his new album has been released. One of the more interesting things about Eno these days is not necessarily the music (although it’s quite good) it is the thinking around the music and his willingness to share his creative process with others.
This brings us to the most recent conversation at the Serpentine Gallery.
Eno engages us with what is a difference in the perceived notion of creative process (my words – not his) versus what has been happening in studios or wherever art is being made these days. Eno compares this approach between Architect and Gardeners.
“My topic is the shift from ‘architect’ to ‘gardener’, where ‘architect’ stands for ‘someone who carries a full picture of the work before it is made’, to ‘gardener’ standing for ‘someone who plants seeds and waits to see exactly what will come up’. I will argue that today’s composer are more frequently ‘gardeners’ than ‘architects’ and, further, that the ‘composer as architect’ metaphor was a transitory historical blip.”
While this seems at the time obvious it is also at the same time a little bit oblique. This positioning straddles a creative space that artists work in, that non-artists tend to not know (but often believe they understand). It is that space between knowing what is going to happen at the end of an artwork, and fully understanding every step, versus not knowing what is going to happen to get the final destination.
The Architect and Gardeners” presentation is available at the Edge.org website.