“Tradition is not solely, or even primarily, the maintenance of certain dogmatic beliefs; these beliefs have come to take their living form in the course of the formation of a tradition. What I mean by tradition involves all those habitual actions, habits and customs, from the most significant religious rite to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of ‘the same people living in the same place’.
… We become conscious of these items, or conscious of their importance, usually only after they have begun to fall into desuetude, as we are aware of the leaves of a tree when the autumn wind begins to blow them off — when they have separately ceased to be vital. Energy may be wasted at that point in a frantic endeavour to collect the leaves as they fall and gum them onto the branches: but the sound tree will put forth new leaves, and the dry tree should be put to the axe. — T.S. Eliot, Writer
The word tradition is often a term or an idea societies like to hold dear. It implies the need to retain cultural habits and rituals that help define who we are as peoples from various backgrounds and geographies. But tradition, despite it’s positive associations can also hold individuals and society as a whole back from progress and necessary change.
The root word for tradition comes from the Latin word traditionem meaning “delivery, surrender, a handing down, a giving up.” But the word is also a doublet of the word treason. In other words, tradition also infers the betrayal of the present. Clearly, tradition has its place. We value our experiences or at least our memories of them. It’s how we pass down necessary knowledge and practical “know how.” But we must also be adaptable to life as it presents itself in the now, and thus, we must be cautiously selective in what we keep or use and what we should discard. In other words, if we forget our traditions, we forget our history and lose our skills and wisdom but if we obsess over the past, we deny the present and struggle to live free.
As a society today, we often simultaneously discard the hard-earned methodologies of the past and at the same time long for the “good old days.” In certain trades, valuable practices such as apprenticeships and foundational training which take time and discipline have sadly disappeared. However, we often desire or even mimic the past while having little understanding or respect for it; we want to skip the prep work but hope to duplicate previous successes. Unfortunately, that kind of disjointed approach to creating art both denigrates the craft and weakens the fundamental abilities and understanding required to be a true artist. It’s the reason why today’s ideas are fatiguingly repetitive despite all its flash and dash and the hopeful applications of new technology. Fancy icing can never make up for a cake poorly made. I think it’s vitally important to learn one’s craft well and have control of its techniques for only then can one be free of them; we learn the rules before we can break them.
“When one know’s one’s craft well, when one has learned well how to imitate nature, the chief consideration for a good painter is to think out the whole of his picture, to have it in his head as a whole, so to speak, so that he may then execute with warmth and as if the entire thing were done at the same time.” — Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres, Artist
Despite our technological advances, what’s new now feels old and we’re beginning as a society of artists to lose bit by bit our ability to see. When we discard the foundational work — the research, exploration, deep analysis and sustained periods of practice — we don’t develop our sensibilities. And it’s our sensibilities that make us uniquely creative. If artists lose their ability to see, what hope has society in seeing, given so few are endowed with the gift or opportunity? If the musician can’t hear, what kind of music can he make that would be worth hearing?
Hence, to study art’s history — the artists, their techniques and their circumstances and influences — is extremely important. That way, we understand what works and how it works, and whether methodologies in the past have merit in dealing with todays’ problems. It’s why good artists study and learn anatomy, good design and composition as well as study the work of past creators. It’s why they should have interest in complimentary arts like film, poetry, and dance as well as the physical and social sciences. What good is an animator who doesn’t have any real grasp on any of the elements that describe human life and all its mechanics? How can he possibly create an illusion of life when he understands so little of it?
The counterpart (or complement) to honouring tradition — the need to discard that which no longer works, and adapt to and discover the new — is also crucial to the survival of our art. Instead of using our new found technologies to merely duplicate what’s already been done, we should be using them to find news ways or better methods to create new things formed from innovative ideas. This way we don’t denigrate the past but build upon it. We pay tribute to it thru incorporation, working from the inside out. There is so much to be learned from the past, so much still that we’ve fail to understand which could help us see and understand things better in the present. In many ways, history demands progress. We often claim it’s silly to reinvent the wheel, but we don’t become experts by starting where the masters left off. We begin our studies by learning how they started. Without understanding the how and why we end up focusing only on the what, obsessed only with results, focused only on success. When we do that, meaning, and the joys associated with learning and doing, are absent.
So, when you go about your work, your art, do you remember to periodically ask yourself if you’re actually contributing to progress or merely repeating the old? Are you honouring tradition or merely aping it? If we don’t ask such questions, we’ll never understand anything more than what’s merely on the surface.
“Questions elicit answers in their likeness. They rise and fall to the questions they meet.” — Krista Tippet, On Being.