The Cutting Edge or Standing at the Border?
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009The term The Cutting Edge has bandied around the creating business for decades. What does it mean? The cutting edge may mean sharp. At the edge, one has gone as far as possible. There is no more. It is the definitive photograph in its genre, for example. The cutting edge is the flag bearer for the unique until it is replaced.
Or is the cutting edge a military term like avant garde. Is it about cutting someone else with a sharp sword? Is it about dueling? Is it about competition? Is it about cutting yourself? For some the cutting edge may inaccurately be identified by trends. The first person to discover HDR may have created a cutting edge image. Today HDR has become trendy. Trends will always breed mediocrity.
The cutting edge may also be measured by time. Creators know that the answers to creative problems are infinite. The answer is right as far as you’ve gone. Therefore the edge may have been extended, if the photographer had only a few more resources; more money, more time, more to synthesize.
Creators know that creating is a synthesizing process. The more one has to synthesize, the better one may be at coming up with an innovation. Creators believe in vacuum-cleaning the universe for stimuli. We put things together that have never been put together before to create something new.
I am rethinking where the edge is located. And I am seeing that it is not at the perimeter, but rather at the borders where things juxtapose or synthesize. In The Story of B by Daniel Quinn (author of Ishmael) writes:
…Borders are always tricky things, B Said at last. Feral children fascinate because they stand at the border of the animal world. Gorillas and Dolphins fascinate because they stand at the border of the human world. Even though they are lonely arbitrary consequences of the fact we use a decimal system, the borders between centuries and millenniums fascinate. Shakespeare’s fools fascinate because they live at the border of sanity and madness. The heroes of tragedy fascinate because they walk on the borders between triumph and defeat. The border between pre-human and human, between childhood and adulthood, between generations, between nations and peoples, between social and political paradigms — all of these are intensely fascinating… .
Where are the borders between art and science? Back in the sixties, I belonged to a cutting edge group called E.A.T. which is an acronym for Experiments in Art and Technology. E.A.T.’s sole purpose was to put artists and scientists together to collaborate. They were not particularly interested in the results. The process was the whole thing. Physicists, astrophysicists, astronomers, mechanical engineers, and others met with artists at Max’s Kansas City. Each spoke a different language. The artists’ language came from the right side of the brain. The scientists language often came from the left. These combined energies created innovations as scientists and artists danced on the borders of the two lobes.
Maybe the term to describe innovative work should be changed to borderline. Some of the most interesting artists have been borderline personalities; Kafka, Van Gogh, Janis Joplin, Bosch, Hemmingway, Kerouac, to name a few. Each was a master of the border dance.
Ansel Adams’ work sits at the borders between eroticism and naturalism. Picasso’s work often sits at the borders between adult mastery and childhood abandonment. Dali’s work sits on the borders of the familiar and the strange. Outsider art may sit at the borders of humor and hell or between Peter Pan and Dosteyevsky. Georgia O’Keefe’s oeuvre includes skyscrapers and mesas.
