aesthetics of joy

I posted Leah Rosenberg’s delightful work earlier this month, and couldn’t resist a follow-up post of this amazing rainbow cake she made for her show. The cake was 7′ feet long and made in 13 7″ sections, each with a different configuration of stripes. This really adds another joyful dimension — variation and surprise — as she writes:

So over time throughout the night, as it was cut & consumed (from both sides towards the center of the cake) the colors and stripe pattern of the slice of cake that you had would be different from the hours prior.

She must have been baking forever, but how beautiful! I also love how pure and serene the long white cake looks before it was cut. You’d never guess the riot of color that lay inside.

Check out more photos from the show here.

I’m a little behind on things here, but please forgive me as it was due to a joyous occasion: my cousin’s gorgeous wedding in the wonderful town of Santa Fe. Unplugging for the weekend’s festivities, I nearly missed this review in Sunday’s NYT of a beautiful photography show ending today at the Laurence Miller Gallery. The show features nearly 50 images by the photographer Philippe Halsman, who distinguished himself by asking his (very famous) subjects to jump. Times critic Roberta Smith writes:

There is a sublime silliness to Halsman’s images that can make you laugh or at least smile regardless of how often you see them. They may offer incontrovertible proof of Schiller’s claim that “all art is dedicated to joy.” Evidently the simple act of getting off the ground requires giving in to something like joy. You have to let go.

Two big ideas here. The first is the notion that the images can make us smile over and over again. This is the essence of joy — its repeatability — which is it what makes this emotion so powerful, and so sustainable. This renewable quality tells us that we’re dealing with a joyful phenomenon, not a novelty or a one-liner or a joke,  that there’s something here that is likely to be universal and timeless.

The second big idea is joy’s inexorability — that there are some circumstances, actions, or gestures that bring joy out of us, voluntarily or not. When “you have to let go,” something has circumvented your conscious emotional control and tapped directly into your unconscious. And that too is a powerful thing.

Lately I’ve been reading the book Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath, about the psychology of behavior change. In the book, the authors reference a construct developed by psychologist Jonathan Haidt to explain the way our rational and emotional sides deal with each other. The emotional brain is like an elephant while the rational brain sits on top like its rider. The rider (our rational side) provides direction, while the elephant (emotion) provides the motivation and force that gets us to act. The rider looks like the boss, sitting up on top of the elephant, reins in hand. But the elephant is so massive that unless it goes along voluntarily, it’s hard for the rider to get his way.

I think this applies to our expressions, too. The rider provides a self-awareness and self-consciousness of our words, manners, facial expressions, and gestures that constantly reins in the elephant’s natural reactions, modulating to keep them in line with social convention. The rider trains the elephant, creating a filter that channels, and sometimes dampens our natural responses, as is culturally appropriate. But jumping jostles the rider off his perch, and it’s a tremendous relief for the elephant! (Even scowly Richard Nixon looks like he feels free in a Halsman photo.) In jumping, we are unburdened by self-consciousness, for any concern for how we look or what’s appropriate. We are all pure, elephantine joy.

Halsman himself said:

When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping, and the mask falls, so that the real person appears.

I love this idea that the real person is the joyful person. What a powerful thing to think that despite all our anxieties and preoccupations there is always a true self inside, a joyful elephant, accessible in the most stupidly simple way imaginable.

It also fascinates me that it’s not just one joy portrayed here in Halsman’s images. The gesture is simple, but the range of feeling here is decidedly complex. There is the transcendent, floating joy of Eva Marie Saint, Audrey Hepburn’s childlike joy, Edward Steichen’s triumphant joy, Richard Nixon’s joy that feels barely liberated from repression, Dali’s giddy joy, and Marilyn Monroe’s pure, effortless euphoria. Together, these images represent a kind of catalog of human expressions of joy, a bodily language of delight.

There are other movements, too, that may have a similar effect. Certain gestures — jumping, certainly, but also spinning, gliding, sliding, hopping, skipping, floating, and swinging, among others — have a way of disrupting our self-conscious masks. These too are aesthetics of joy, sensations that play with our proprioceptive sense, deliciously pleasurable in the way they tweak our expectations of how our bodies should feel in relation to the world.

Happy holiday weekend, everyone. I hope there’s some joy in your next three days!

Images: Laurence Miller gallery
NYT: “The Joys of Jumpology”
Even more jumpology images…

In case you missed it, this Idea Lab visualization from Sunday’s NYT Magazine made me smile, and made me think.

It’s interesting to me the way aesthetics can transform the emotional tenor of content. Though the subject matter has a negative slant (partially genuine, partially comic), the circular shape, colors, and stripes emanating like rays of light from the center make the whole thing kind of delightful. But why? I think it’s because our emotions react to aesthetics before they process content. Even when the aesthetics and content are dissonant, the aesthetics guide our reactions, I guess because in most circumstances, aesthetics are an accurate shortcut to understanding content.

What are other good examples?

Really love this work by SF-based artist Leah Rosenberg. The pieces are made from sheets of acrylic paint layered over time. Stacked, they look like water-curled pages of old books, dyed in technicolor. The paint becomes form, rather than just surface. She writes:

My paintings are time and process-based works that combine elements of layering, systems of accrual, and color. I allow and encourage the build-up of paint to act in a three dimensional manner, at times to the point of doing away with the support altogether. These layers of paint function as a way to mark the passage of time, but also reveal the paints’ inherent materiality as it begins to take on its own shape. I select the colors based on personal systems, sometimes based on the text from a book that I am reading or lyrics of a song, other times reflecting a telephone call home to Saskatchewan, or the colors of the clothing worn by people who visit my studio throughout that day.

I love this idea of the shape of time accrued — the way each layer is a visualization of a moment, a chunk of time distilled into color and given shape by the ones that follow. Like a sedimentary rock in luminous, abundant color. And, not to overthink things too much, the pieces just look so wonderfully tactile.

Leah is having a show in SF at 18 Reasons, 593 Guerrero St., which opens Thursday, May 13. If you’re in the Bay Area, check it out (and send me some pictures, will you?).

I’m  still trying to put my finger on what exactly is so joyful about Bzzzpeek, a site where you can play recordings of what children think animals sound like in different parts of the globe. Is it the sweet, earnest quality of the children’s imitations? The general cuteness of the site design? Or just the charm of being able to travel the world via quacks and ribbits? I don’t know, but the moment it appeared in my inbox (thank you, Jon), it brought a smile to my face.

The deeper question here is why we feel the need to imitate animal sounds when we have words to describe the animals. Before we had language, “Moo,” was a good way to alert neighbors to a food source. Now, when we can say, “There’s a herd of cows grazing just over the grassy knoll,” “Moo” seems terribly obsolete. Of course, there are still a few functional reasons to make animal sounds: birders do it to attract different species to look at, pet owners do it out of some empathic desire to connect with their pets. But why do children do it? I wonder if there’s some innate pleasure in imitation, or if there’s some other reason why we simply enjoy making animal sounds. Thoughts?