Art & Development

Coffee cups, and military strategy

I am often told that my art work is about design, which surprises me. I rarely think about design as I’m making my work, and further, I couldn’t make work in a design-free vacuum. Design is the matrix of material forms in our lives. Typography is the very medium of visual-textual communication. As one would apply formal and conceptual considerations to materials, so too should typography be thoughtfully selected. Materials provide visual, textual, material content, as well as design meaning.

The importance of design ought be self-evident. This week, the New York Times provided positive and negative reminders to appreciate design.


“Leslie Buck, Designer of Iconic Coffee Cup, Dies at 87”
Margalit Fox NYTimes.com, April 29, 2010


“We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint”
Elisabeth Bumiller, NYTimes.com, April 26, 2010
Above: An epic fail of an infographic. (Unless the point was to convey “quagmire.”)

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Art & Development, Research

Pop teeth

Artists are consumers themselves. They have their own elaborately constructed systems of valuation as subsets within larger realms of consumer value. No art is absolutely pure, or created in a vacuum outside those larger realms. (Gibson Cuyler on Libby Black’s Be Here Now, Art Practical 13, April 22, 2010)

Strange that this must be re-stated, but it’s often the case that criticism and radical opposition are considered equivocal. (Johanna Drucker argues that critics and academics best accept our complicity and move on to responding to the actual art in Sweet Dreams.)

To broach capitialism or material culture in one’s artwork is to risk easy, politically loaded readings. The work might be interpreted sympathetically as anti-capitalist commentaries, leftist/Marxist/politically correct indictments of globalization/consumerism/mass media/environmental destruction. On the opposite extreme lie allegations of consumerist gluttony, environmental sinfulness, aesthetic hedonism, artistic slumming, or naked ambition. Tsk-tsk! should art, which could signify genius and the sublime, muddy itself in base, money-grubbing popular culture.

I’m interested in work that doesn’t deny the facts of the world: capitalism, labor, production, material culture, popular culture. I think artists have the right to beg/borrow/steal from these themes without having being pigeonholed into positions of critical subversion or immoral kowtowing. It’s possible I’m a waffler. That I’m exploiting ambiguity by not taking a stand. If you were really cynical, you could argue that the only crime worse than politically incorrectness in contemporary art is being boring and didactic.

I’m looking at the catalog for Pop Life, the recent survey of Pop Art after 1970 at the Tate Modern. As I’m developing Irrational Exuberance (Asst. Colors), a shop-like exhibition of work on paper, sculpture and installation coming up at Sight School (opens May 14), it’s neat to think about Keith Haring’s Pop Shop and Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin’s The Shop. I also listened to the Tate’s podcast of Emin talking about The Shop, wherein Emin clicked for me: her personality, class, background, enmeshed in the world, results in work that is likewise enmeshed in the world and her life.

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Research

a life in three dimensions

Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style is a fantastic treatise on marrying typographic form and content. It’s also a great reference, sort of like a Chicago Manual of Style for graphic designers. Pragmatic, thorough and gorgeously designed, it’s a significant contribution to the field of graphic design.

For most mere mortals, that is enough of an acheivement. I just learned that Bringhurst is also a poet, essayist and linguist, with several published books. I’m giddy with excitement. Language, meaning, cognition, type and form: a nexus of thought that’s concrete enough for me to grasp, and theoretical enough to allow speculative experimentation.

This title sounds lovely: The Solid Form of Language. It explains “a new way of classifying and understanding the relationship between script and meaning. Beginning with the original relationship between a language and its written script, Bringhurst takes us on a history of reading and writing that begins with the interpretation of animal tracks and fast-forwards up to the typographical abundance of more recent times.” (Typotheque)

In my early twenties, I suffered from too many interests, so I decided to let my non-art activities fall to the wayside. This meant accepting that my musical development would slow: I’m never going to shred. It’s OK. I just didn’t have the capacity to be great at everything I was interested in.

Now, in my early thirties, I’m re-thinking this all-or-one-thing model. I think it’s entirely possible to excel and find fulfillment in more than one arena. (Excuse the pun.) Not to be a generalist, but to be a specialist in related realms like art, criticism and design…. Bringhurst provides a neat example.

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Research

Computational Linguistics

Pondering the current research interests of Mark Johnson, who co-authored one of my current obsessions, Metaphors We Live By (U. of Chicago Press, 1980 with George Lakoff. From his page on Brown University’s Cognitive & Linguistic Science department:

Mark Johnson’s research interests

Interdisciplinary research and training:

The things that I’m most excited about currently is research that lies at the intersection of Linguistics, Computer Science, Statistics and Neuroscience. Computational Linguistics and machine learning are good examples of topics that lie at this nexus….

Why computational linguistics?

My area of research is computational linguistics. Linguistic theory focuses primarily on the structures involved in natural language, but in my opinion the structures alone are just a small part of the story. Language is active and dynamic; the processes of language learning, comprehension and production are what really bring language to life. That is, I believe that modern generative linguistic theories of syntax, semantics and phonology are on the right track as far as they go, but that they are missing a large part of the story because they focus on static representations, rather than the processes which create and manipulate these representations. Put rather crassly: representations just sit there, processes actually do something.

There are many different ways to study these processes, but to me one of the fascinating challenges is to develop theories that are consistent with and build on the structures that standard linguistic theory provides. I also think that we want theories of these linguistic processes which are clear and explicit, in much the same way as certain generative approaches to linguistics formulate clear, explicit and precise grammar fragments in order to present and test their hypotheses. Manipulating information-bearing symbols is what computation is all about, so we want to understand the processes of language in computational terms.

Computational linguistics is a truly interdisciplinary subject. It is a scientific discipline with important industrial and engineering applications (just like some areas of physics or chemistry). Intellectually it draws primarily on linguistics and computer science, and these days it draws heavily on statistics. But it also has growing contacts with psycholinguistics (the experimental study of human linguistic behaviour), language acquisition (the experimental study of how humans learn language) and I think it should also have more contact with neurolinguistics (how language is realized in the brain)….

Johnson goes on to talk about the end of the boolean search and the move towards the semantic web, which M has been talking about lately in his pursuit of interaction design…

I once associated language with futility in my work, but I’m now starting to think that art functions like a shared currency—like language. I think this underlies my belief that the work of art mediates a relationship between the artist and viewer; that something (meaning, interaction, interdependence) is being conveyed through something else (images, objects, experiences). The ways that images and phenomenological art experiences unfold in the brain have probably got similarities to the ways in which language is intertwined with cognition. I don’t mean this in a strictly semiotic way. Is it possible that, just as metaphors are not just ways that we speak but are fundamental to how we think, that art-viewing-experiences are not just means of participating in a discourse on art, but unique ways to exercise perceptual cognition?

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Research

Josiah McElheny on Josef Albers

Josiah McElheny is a great contemporary artist and thinker. His latest contribution to Artforum elegantly sums up some of my thoughts about art experiences; that art, too, is a visual as well as cognitive experience.

Surprisingly, though, [Josef Alber’s Interaction of Color] is not really a pedagogical treatise on the modernist use of color. Instead, it is an argument against color systems of all types: It proposes a practice of looking at and working with color that understands it to be constantly in flux. The reader, attentively going back and forth between text and image, is confronted by disturbingly mutable visual and cognitive experience, by the deep instability of color….

[Albers wrote:] “By giving up preference for harmony, we accept dissonance to be as desirable as consonance.”

…”[P]references and dislikes—as in life so with color—usually result from prejudices, from lack of experience and insight.”

…[Albers] argues that perception is contextual; he wants to encourage ‘thinking in situations.’ When he says that ‘interaction’ can be restated as ‘interdependence,’ he implies that what color is is defined by where, when, and how it is—otherwise it is relegated to the abstract, symbolic, theoretical….

In our active, physical engagement with [Alber’s color] tests, we are made aware of the slippery nature of looking—even identifying simple difference is fraught—an experience recalling Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language games.

—Josiah McElheny, “The Spectrum of Possibility.” Book review of Josef Alber’s Interaction of Color: New Complete Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Artforum. April 2010. p. 55.

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Activist Imagination

Spring Cleaning, Part 3: Student Art

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Art & Development

Spring Cleaning, Part 2: Knickknackery

I’ve been increasingly enamored by the seduction/repulsion of some objects—how things, devoid of animate life, can have such an impact on people.

I find all of these things great in their own ways. The line between irony and sincerity can be blurry, though I aspire to avoid cynical irony.

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Art & Development

Spring Cleaning, Part 1: Dad’s Garage

Can I just say, my dad had a roto-tiller?
That he built a play structure out of a barrel, a 2×6, and an old rotor he pulled off of a car?
That when I as 8, he gave me and my sister a huge saw and had us cut down a small tree?

I took it for granted that dads have workbenches. Of course, this is a dwindling phenomenon in the U.S., squeezed out by manufactured obsolescence and injection-molded everything (even car motors are socked away from view when you lift a hood of a new car).

In the face of disposable, virtual culture, I’d like to share some photos of my dad’s workbench and tools, and raise a wrench to tinkerers worldwide.

Yup, that's a tofu carton.

Of course Dad built his own workbench. No fancy slides for his drawers. Just a scrap of door frame moulding and some nails do the job.

Knick-knack drawer!

Making use of architecture!

Filled to the rafters.

In my opinion, it was a bad idea to stop making tools in baby blue.

Caboodle!

Machine caboodle!

More bits and bobs in a Danish-but-so-Chinese cookie tin. You know you're Asian when your breakaway boxcutter is pink.

These transparent handles are so iconic. If they're not part of a design museum collection, they should be.

Dad's drill is so old the forward/reverse switch is one of those square bobbers on the back side of the handle. It sounds like forks in a blender but still packs a hefty punch.

That's what you call graphic and industrial design. Note the drill is operated with a chuck key.

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