Rule 8

In 1968 artist/teacher Sister Corita Kent wrote a set of “rules” for students at Immaculate Heart College where she worked (the list is often misattributed to John Cage). 

When teaching art classes I’ve always tried to use the spirit of this list, and recently I’ve been really hung up on Rule 8: “Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.”

At least in media-production-land, programs studiously avoid this, commonly sequencing courses so that there’s some kind of analysis or theory-lite course first, training first-year students into the habit of doing a post-mortem before they create. Then in quite a few of the following production courses (and definitely in the upper-division and graduate ones) they are often forbidden from proceeding until they’ve proven that they’ve thought through the analysis before they’ve filmed a frame.

I’ve spent decades away from that process and I still fall back into the habit sometimes.

(thumbnail photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash)