Tom Hartvigsen TMA112: Webspinna Battle

Artist Statement

For the last couple of weeks I have had a hard time coming up with artistic ideas. This is manifested in the absence of posts for the last two assignments, Medium Specificity and Textual Poaching. I brainstormed for hours but could not think of anything. Perhaps my creativity has been constrained by mid-semester stress. I believe that stress is part of it but after this week’s discussions I can also see that perhaps I am not looking in the right areas to generate ideas.

In the reading “The Ecstasy of Influence,” John Lethem talks about how we all “plagiarize” as artists, or rather we are constantly borrowing ideas from others and adding upon them to create something of our own. He said, “Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.” In my brainstorming sessions I was doing the wrong thing. I just sat at my desk and was trying to create something out of the void. I should have been looking at other art for inspiration.

In addition to receiving inspiration from other’s works, we learned in class that inspiration also comes from limitations. Such limitations helped Pepe and I come up with the idea to do Napoleon vs. Pedro for the Webspinna Battle. Two days before we had to perform we still had no idea what we were going to do. We knew we had to dress up so one of us asked, “Well, what do we have for costumes?” Pepe said he has a couple of masks and some other things, and then I’m like, “I’m a poor college student, I barely have 5 t-shirts let alone anything for a costume.” Then inspiration struck. I wear my costume every day. I have an afro! I could be Napoleon Dynamite and Pepe could be Pedro. It would be the perfect combination. Hence the limitation of the requirement to wear a costume and the limitation of not having much for a costume turned into the inspiration for our entire project.

Obviously our idea was not only inspired by limitations, but as Lethem discussed in his article, we stole from something that already existed. Our duo could not exist if Jared Hess never came up with the idea for Napoleon Dynamite. It turns out that even Hess likely took the inspiration for Napoleon Dynamite (at least in the name) from another artist without being aware of it. Supposedly he met a Napoleon Dynamite on his mission. He did not realize that Napoleon Dynamite was already a stage nickname for Elvis Costello (http://www.mtv.com/news/1488386/napoleon-dynamite-director-inspired-by-his-own-mamas-llamas/). Of course, Hess also took much inspiration from his own life experiences. As artists, this is what we do, we take things and rearrange them into something new. If we don’t have our own experiences then we borrow them from someone else.