By Live Blog Co-Curator Andy Field

In its simplest terms imagination is the ability to conceive of things that aren’t actually there. I sit at my desk staring through the dark at a house on the other side of the street and though all I can see are drawn curtains, I can imagine people; people sleeping, people quietly moving through the house, people arguing, people breaking in and people breaking up. I can imagine dramatic scenarios, complicated sequences of events, whole lives woven around and through each other. None of this is real yet, but it could be. I could make it real. 

For as long as I can remember this has been my default way of making anything. Days spend pacing up and down corridors and walking down barely-noticed streets, nights lying with my eyes closed; all the time putting imaginary things together, playing out scenarios, making pictures that only I can picture. As I type these words I’m already three paragraphs ahead, stopping occasionally to restructure ideas and reshape phrases that haven’t even been written yet. 

For this reason the actual doing of anything often feels like it’s already in the past tense, like a déjà vu. Sometimes it feels frustrating, when clumsy reality isn’t capable of the replicating the things your imagination can so easily achieve. I think this is probably why I became so interested in ‘imaginary’ performances and the possibility that an idea could still potential carry a resonance for an audience even if it is never realised. Why, for example, is an imagined idea any less real than a memory? At the very least, imagining work in this way is a useful creative exercise, as Ant Hampton’s Fantasy Interventions workshop so beautifully demonstrates. 

On a more pragmatic level, this kind of imagining is also, somewhat inevitably, the first resort for the majority of awards and funding bodies looking to support new work. Understandably they want to know what it is they are going to be giving their support to. They too want to imagine it. They want to be able to play it out in their own minds, or at least to try to. This tendency and the frequency of rejection, results in most artists I know having dozens of almost-fully-formed projects littering up corners of their mind and their hard drive, like the apologetic look of an unrequited love from the other side of a crowded bar. At least some people have tried to make something out of this creative detritus, upcycling it into full-blown exhibitions.

But I wonder if there isn’t something self-defeating about this emphasis on having such definite imaginary forms prepared before you’ve ever set to work. For me, it is undoubtedly those things that are most unanticipated that often become the most important part of any work. I worry if in privileging the ability of saying what something is prior to ever making it, we unduly emphasise a particular way of working that can, at its worst, be monomaniacally dictatorial, like the narrator of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, sociopathic ally obsessing over every last detail of the performance of his imagined scenarios. 

It would be nice if ‘I don’t know’ didn’t so often seem like a quiet apology when explaining what you’re doing to a funder or a producer. If occasionally our ability to imagine was secondary to our ability to make messy, unpredictable, human things happen in real spaces with other people. I remember once standing on a cliff edge at night, staring down at the space where a lake should have been if it hadn’t been so dark. I remember being encouraged by others to jump into nothing and I remember doing it and I remember the exhilarating not-knowing of falling through the dark. And I’d like it if some of the time I was a little more willing to do the same when I’m making art.