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Imperfect Is More Than Perfect

Imperfect Is More Than Perfect

Imperfect Is More Than Perfect

How is it possible that there are so many great ideas for art which never end up manifesting in a final product? How is it possible that we, as artists, want nothing more than to create perfectly and yet so often we fail to create at all? In this month's piece, we will attempt to answer these questions while exploring the themes of doubt and perfectionism.

by

Emil Voss

2 min read

2 min read

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This piece is going to be different than usual. In this piece, I would like to ask you to see a reflection of yourself - in me. In this piece, dear reader, I would like to invite you all to join a conversation about what it means to create imperfectly and to, nevertheless, love your creations. In fact, the hook that you just read is my seventh attempt at jotting down anything that would come close to satisfying my increasingly unhealthy habit of perfectionism. "What was wrong with the first six?" you probably ask yourselves. Truthfully, I do not know, but I doubt you would like them. Whether you will like this one is also unclear to me, but I've decided to take my chances. For what it's worth, I find it quite freeing. While at this point you might already start to feel bored by this unrequested outpouring of honesty, I do trust that my current predicament feels eerily familiar to many of you.



Self-doubt driven by endless comparisons against an imagined perfect final product is something that all people who express themselves through their creations seem to battle. After all, creating is not as easy as just sitting down and grinding through it all until the perfect final product magically appears in front of our eyes. Upon reflection, there seems to be a much deeper, more intricate desire to express exactly and precisely, in all of their magnificence, the beautiful ideas which sit at the very root of why each one of us creates. This desire in the back of each artist's mind seems to be conditioning us to hold ourselves and our work up to such high standards that we so often fail to even comprehend how we could start such an act of creation in the first place. So we don’t. Instead, we seem to argue that the perfectionist in all of us simply demands better.


Get Out © 2016 Universal Pictures


Better ideas, better circumstances, more funding, more practice. Whatever it may be, the result seems fairly certain. As a result, we just stay rooted in place, paralysed by the prospect of not being able to meet the expectations, which we ourselves have set for our creations.


Think about it… How many projects have lived and died in your heads without ever seeing the daylight, because they were not perfect enough. What is interesting here, however, is that it would also be naive to argue that a sense of perfectionism is not beneficial to artists at all. Like in most other areas of life, the urge to be better than one was the day before is truly key to achieving success. What we fail to realise a lot of the time, however, is that to become better does not equal becoming perfect. In fact, it is worth noting at this point that the concept of perfection is indeed a fiction, rendering it obviously unachievable. It is no wonder, then, that we who aim to shoot for perfection unavoidably end up finding the trigger too heavy to pull in the first place.



To find the cure for this sick hunger for that which is outside of reach, one does not need to look any further than Jordan Peele’s brilliant 2017 panel at Film Independent. Peele, who famously directed the horror classic Get Out (2017), mentions here an idea which, with its simplicity, risks embarrassing all of those struggling to break through creative self-doubt: “If you're not having fun writing, you’re doing it wrong! […] The process of having fun when doing the work is visible to the audience”. While at first this advice seems cliché and perhaps even naive, if given some serious thought, its genius starts to appear. The point here is not to completely abandon the will to improve as an artist, but it is rather to find joy in creating while being honest with one’s imperfections. It is then through creating that one truly opens the doors to improving.



To find the cure for this sick hunger for that which is outside of reach, one does not need to look any further than Jordan Peele’s brilliant 2017 panel at Film Independent. Peele, who famously directed the horror classic Get Out (2017), mentions here an idea which, with its simplicity, risks embarrassing all of those struggling to break through creative self-doubt: “If you're not having fun writing, you’re doing it wrong! […] The process of having fun when doing the work is visible to the audience”. While at first this advice seems cliché and perhaps even naive, if given some serious thought, its genius starts to appear. The point here is not to completely abandon the will to improve as an artist, but it is rather to find joy in creating while being honest with one’s imperfections. It is then through creating that one truly opens the doors to improving.



All of these ideas seem to be summarised extremely well in a quote from The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, which I recently encountered: ‘The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given.’ After applying this lens to the concept of artistic progress, it becomes immediately obvious that failure, or in Benjamin’s words “catastrophe”, should not be understood as the possibility of creating imperfectly, but as exactly this fearful state of paralysis, or the status quo, within which artists so easily get stuck. If we fear not being good enough, what better thing to do is there than to resist the glistening allure of perfection and simply create imperfectly. There is, after all, no benefit in lamenting our inability to achieve an imagined perfection. Instead, it seems more constructive to accept the slow and irregular nature of one’s artistic progress and simply have fun along the way.


Get Out © 2016 Universal Pictures


All of these ideas seem to be summarised extremely well in a quote from The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, which I recently encountered: ‘The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given.’ After applying this lens to the concept of artistic progress, it becomes immediately obvious that failure, or in Benjamin’s words “catastrophe”, should not be understood as the possibility of creating imperfectly, but as exactly this fearful state of paralysis, or the status quo, within which artists so easily get stuck. If we fear not being good enough, what better thing to do is there than to resist the glistening allure of perfection and simply create imperfectly. There is, after all, no benefit in lamenting our inability to achieve an imagined perfection. Instead, it seems more constructive to accept the slow and irregular nature of one’s artistic progress and simply have fun along the way.



Better ideas, better circumstances, more funding, more practice. Whatever it may be, the result seems fairly certain. As a result, we just stay rooted in place, paralysed by the prospect of not being able to meet the expectations, which we ourselves have set for our creations.


Think about it… How many projects have lived and died in your heads without ever seeing the daylight, because they were not perfect enough. What is interesting here, however, is that it would also be naive to argue that a sense of perfectionism is not beneficial to artists at all. Like in most other areas of life, the urge to be better than one was the day before is truly key to achieving success. What we fail to realise a lot of the time, however, is that to become better does not equal becoming perfect. In fact, it is worth noting at this point that the concept of perfection is indeed a fiction, rendering it obviously unachievable. It is no wonder, then, that we who aim to shoot for perfection unavoidably end up finding the trigger too heavy to pull in the first place.


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