Why Maris Should Never Be Seen

in the hit tv show

frasier the character of niles’s wife

maris is never shown on screen

she is a enigma an unanswered question

throughout the entirety of frasier she

is never shown

and as an audience member you want to

see her you want her to come through the

door

you want someone to finally embody this

character that’s mystified you for so

long

but no one ever does she remains just

around the corner

behind the shower curtain just out of

shot

the creators of frasier limit what the

audience see

never letting us see her and therefore

invoking this

imaginative response to this character

forcing us to imagine for ourselves

what we think marist looks like now why

do i think this is important

because we live in an age where the

majority of us right now

have access to the internet via our

phone

or laptop and therefore have access to a

insurmountable amount of answers

there’s not many questions that you can

enter into google that you won’t get a

reasonable answer for

but there’s no code there’s no question

there’s no phrase there’s no words you

can put into google

that will sum up and give you the image

of maris

she remains a question mark something we

are forced to imagine for ourselves

and this happens a lot in art in one of

my favorite plays

by tennessee williams a streetcar named

desire

tennessee williams limits what the

audience sees

by the setting so whatever happens

offstage we don’t see

so when blanche and stanley leave the

stage we want to follow them we want to

see where they go what they say to each

other

but we can’t tennessee williams limits

what we seize

and therefore forces us to imagine for

ourselves

in one of the greatest novels of the

20th century the great gatsby

f scott fitzgerald makes the narrator

nick carraway

instead of the title character jay

gatsby so in the pivotal scenes between

jay gatsby and

his love interest daisy when they go

into the room on their own after years

of wanting

each other we want to follow them we

want to see what they say to each other

but we can’t because nick the narrator

isn’t in the room with them

whatever nick doesn’t see we don’t see

and i found this absence of answers in

r inspiring and the key thing about

these examples

is that the artist takes away the power

from the audience

we as the audience and the reader have

no power over what they tell us and what

they don’t tell us

and what they don’t tell us forces us to

be creative with our response to the r

and i thought about this in a practical

way how i could use

this limitation in how i experience

other types of art

and i started to think about how we

experience paintings when we go to an

art gallery

the paintings tend to be on a white

background

hanged up next to a plaque a plaque

given the information about the artist

the date it was made

what’s the title of it why it was made

what’s the meaning behind it

and other than being educational i think

these plaques

almost give too much information they

overcast your initial judgment of the

painting

whatever you originally thought of that

painting is now changed because of the

title

or because of the context or because you

what you know happened at that time

thinking about this i showed my friends

this painting

i asked them what they thought about it

what the meaning was behind it

what they saw in the painting some of

them said that they saw

buildings some said they saw squares

some said they just saw a puddle or just

mud some were confused and didn’t know

what i was asking

but then when i told them the title man

with guitar and the date

and the artist pablo picasso all of a

sudden they started to see

aspects of a face characteristics of a

guitar

from their previously varied responses

to the r all of a sudden they had this

one-size-fits-all response to it

they started to see very similarly what

each other thought

as if believing that what they should

see was what the title suggested

rather than their previous initial

response

now as an english student i wanted to

see if an author had ever done this

practically if an author had ever

limited how they made something and how

they produced they are

whether they varied their art choice of

where they varied their word choice

and i came across this book green eggs

and ham

by dr seuss one of the most timeless

childhood stories

of the 20th century now this book

only contains 50 words now if you’ve

read it

you probably think it likely there’s a

lot of repetition there’s a lot of rhyme

but what dr seuss does here by limiting

his creative output

limiting the words he uses he creates

one of the most successful childhood

stories

so much so that it influenced a

hypothesis in 2016 called

the green eggs and ham hypothesis how

constraints facilitate creativity

by catronell hort trump now this was

conducted in riders university in

america

and the study took 64 undergraduate

students and it split them into two

groups

and they were tasked with writing a

rhyme that would go inside

a greeting card like a happy birthday or

a get well soon

and group a was tasked with writing a

rhyme however they were told

that they needed to include a certain

amount of nouns and a certain amount of

words

that was their constraint in group b

however they were given no constraint

they could write whatever they wanted as

long as it was something to do with

happy birthday

and what they found was what they

expected they expected that group

a would create more imaginative more

memorable responses to the prompts

for example in group b someone came up

with happy birthday to you all

i hope you have a ball whereas group a

arguably made a more more creative

response by saying

today was the day you left the womb one

day closer to the tomb

arguably a much better response and a

much better insight into what a birthday

is

in the second study they did they wanted

to see if self-imposed constraints work

in the same way so if you could

consciously limit yourself and still

have this creative output

and they again found the same results

that the group with the constraints

made the better and more creative and

more memorable responses to the rhymes

and hort trump concluded that the search

may be tougher

but it is ultimately worthwhile when

persistence pays off

in the end constraints may turn out to

be liberating

now i’m an english student but i have

done

art most of my life but i found that

when i came to uni

i wasn’t inspired i wasn’t motivated

maybe to finish the art i was making

so i decided i was going to put this

into practice i was going to limit

my creative output and see if it made me

create more art

so i gave myself some rules on the

drawings i was going to do

i decided i was only going to use one

pen

i was only going to draw faces which

wasn’t that hard

and i was also only going to draw the

black aspects

of a picture so not the gray not the

almost black

just the black and what i started to

produce were these weird

abstract portraits that featured only

the minimal aspects of a face it was a

type of art that i’d never done before i

wasn’t necessarily comfortable with it

i’d used to be doing oil paintings and

sketches

and as i got more into it i got more

inspired i found out that i was looking

at art in a different way

when i gave myself this obstacle to

overcome

i became more inspired and i started to

see different pictures

pictures with some of my favorite

artists in

and i started to see them differently i

started to exaggerate the black

aspects i started to see things in a

more novel

creative way than i had if i had no

limitations

after i finished that project i started

on another one

and this time i would i wanted to look

at the art not in how

i saw it but how i was going to draw it

so i thought about the techniques i

would use now if you’ve ever done art

you know there’s different ways of

shading there’s cross hatching or

stippling

i decided that i was going to draw in

little lines

that were going to accumulate to suggest

a face

and this was the limitation i gave

myself

and i found that when i saw the

paintings and saw the pictures i was

going to draw

i started to look at them differently it

was as if my mind changed as to what i

needed to see

and i started creating these line

drawings

and what happened i believe is that when

i had an obstacle

in front of me it made me see the things

i wanted to create differently

so when i asked the question why maris

should never be seen it’s because

if there was a reboot of frasier

and marist did walk through the door we

would all have the same maris

previously we had different ones that

we’d imagined in our heads

if we saw where stanley went and what

days he did behind closed doors

we would all have the same

interpretation

so we have to ask ourselves whether the

answers are always what we want

or whether that creative endeavor that

we go on when there’s an absence

is better makes us work harder

because how are we to imagine anything

if the information is always provided

for us

it’s as if we need something to limit us

it’s as if

in order to first think out the box you

first need

a box thank you