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