aesthetics of joy

Do you read Erin Loechner’s wonderful Design for Mankind blog? She has long been finding some of the most beautiful, joyful findings on the web, but lately her blog has gotten even better as she’s adopted a “slow blogging” philosophy and taken time to share more about her approach. I respect the open and vulnerable way she puts her thoughts out there, and the community she has built around values that I share, namely that design (and specifically aesthetics) can change the world.

Back in February, Erin asked me to share some of my perspectives on “Why Design Matters” with her readers, and I realized I never linked back to it to share with you. It was fun to see how she translated my discursive ramblings and related them to her point of view. You can read the post here.

A couple of weeks ago, these beautiful images caught my eye on Design for Mankind, and I was struck by the philosophy of the artist, Evonne Bellefluer. She says, “I don’t think art should be about communicating some ideology. Art, like fashion, is meant to be enjoyed … something I look to to make me happy.”

I smiled to read that because of course that is an ideology, and not just any ideology, but the one I embrace in Aesthetics of Joy. Art can serve many legitimate purposes, among them provocation, representation, union, dissent, exploration, catharsis. Art can incite and art can woo, both credibly. But rarely can art be purely joyful without interrogation of its claim towards seriousness. And yet what higher purpose could art strive for than to improve wellbeing simply through beauty?

Erin quotes Evonne as saying, “I had a conversation with a friend the other day who suggested that my art didn’t belong in a gallery setting because it had nothing to say.” Must everything talk to our conscious minds to be meaningful? This ignores the reality that most of our brain is unconscious mind, which processes the deep, wordless notions of euphoria, yellowness, buoyancy, and belonging in chemical silence. We are much more sensation and emotion than we are ideas.

Erin’s blog always makes me think. Here’s one more post about slowing down. I hope it sparks something for your too.

Link: “On Intention” on Design for Mankind
Images: via Evonne Bellefleur on Behance

About a month ago I promised more rainbows, and here they are. This rainbow, produced by the artist Michael Jones McKean for the Bemis Center in downtown Omaha, Nebraska, is a kind of controlled magic. Like Berndnaut Smilde’s indoor clouds, which I wrote about back in April, McKean’s rainbow attempts to bring something elusive and ephemeral into our grasp. I love these lines from the artist’s statement:

Whether a majestic arch in the sky that appears after a short spring shower or a small, homespun rainbow created with a garden hose on a sunny day, a rainbow operates as an egalitarian visual experience. It is by nature temporary, undetermined, and wonderful. The Rainbow exists somewhere between real and representation, actual and artifice.

It’s an interesting thing, this space between real and representation. Is McKean’s rainbow (or Smilde’s cloud) as joyful as a real rainbow? It takes advantage of the same physical phenomena. It is materially identical to a natural rainbow. And yet, part of the joy of real rainbows is that they can’t be summoned — they are by definition elusive, serendipitous. And actually, this is part of what makes them, in McKean’s words, “an egalitarian visual experience.” No one owns the means of rainbow production. We are equally entitled to its mercurial visitations.

More from McKean:

Although the symbol of a rainbow has been co-opted, politicized, branded and commodified, an actual prismatic rainbow still has an ability to jolt us from the everyday. It feels hopeful, yearning, optimistic, ghost-like and meaningful. Whether perceived immediately as an artwork or not, the experience holds the power to connect diverse publics through an intangible, shared encounter.

McKean isn’t the first artist to attempt to manufacture rainbows. In fact, while researching my last post on Andy Goldsworthy, I discovered this:

Rainbow splash
hit water with heavy stick
bright, sunny, windy
River Wharfe, Yorkshire
22 [23?] December 1980

Perhaps it is only human to try to extend and expand the joys we observe in the wild, to conjure it in whatever ways we are able. And you know, I’m not sure I’d want to be human if we didn’t.

Images: photos of McKean’s piece, certain principles of light and shapes between forms, courtesy of the artist. The last image of Goldsworthy is from the Goldsworthy archive.

Via: Designboom, with thanks to Maggie

PS: For those worried about wasted water in McKean’s rainbow project, read below. And cheer up!

The artwork will solely utilize captured rainwater and will be powered with renewable sources. Leading up to the exhibition, extensive modifications to the Bemis Center’s five-story, repurposed industrial warehouse took place — creating a completely self-contained water harvesting and large-scale storage system. Throughout the project cycle, collected and recaptured stormwater will be filtered and stored in six above-ground, 10,500 gallon water tanks.

certain principles of light and shapes between forms

This may have already crossed your transom, but even so I wanted to share it because it is so beautiful. The project, called 21 Balançoires (21 Swings), is an installation in Montreal by the Canadian design collective Daily Tous Les Jours. The swings play sounds when in use, and through cooperation, different harmonies can be produced. One special set of melodies only appears when all twenty-one swings are in use.

There are layers of joy in this piece. It starts with a familiar form, the playground swing. We may think this is joyful simply because of nostalgia for childhood. There is that, but it’s not the whole story. Dig deeper, and ask: How did the swing get so popular in the first place? The answer arises from the movement; the soaring, freeing, swooping arc that gives the sensation of flying and that millisecond of weightlessness before the gentle fall. Layered on top is the music, and the light, and the abundance of it all — the line of swings stretching on and on, an endless playground.

The collaborative aspect adds another dimension. The music echoes that wonderful feeling when you find yourself perfectly in sync with others, when the hidden harmonies of the world are revealed. One of the teenagers in the film puts this nicely when he says: ”I find it adds to the beauty of life, because a single sound isn’t really nice, but together they make a beautiful melody.” And actually, we frequently use these kinds of musical metaphors to describe our feeling of symbiosis with others: we resonate to someone, or sing the same tune, or feel in harmony with each other.

It’s a success for public art in my book, not just to be pleasing or interesting, but to celebrate the interactions between people, promoting cooperation and harmony. Are there installations like this in your cities? If so, please share them!

via Colossal, with thanks to Sera

The $50 off a print at Lux Archive goes to Kate, who wrote:

I live in Canmore Alberta, a mountain town situated in the Bow Valley. Around these parts fall includes the turning of the larch trees, a unique coniferous tree that loses its needles ever year. The turning of the larches motivates hundreds of people to venture into the rocky mountains to witness these glorious pillars of light. So much so that Parks Canada had to close the road to Moraine Lake at the base of Larch Valley, as the park reached capacity. It is like an ecological pilgrimage.

This year, which I am sure people exclaim every year, the larches are particularly magical. I don’t know if it is due to the above average weather we have been having or what, but it seems all the larches turned golden yellow at exactly the same time. It truly is wondrous to see such natural coordination, a sight that really lifts the spirit and induces dropped jaws in awe.

Thanks, Kate, for that beautiful image! It made me think about the energy and synchrony of nature, to burst into beautiful color all at the same moment, to create such a spectacle. That in turn made me think of an artist who works with the energies of nature to create arresting, but similarly evanescent, beauty.

Andy Goldsworthy has been a favorite of mine since I discovered his winding wall up at Storm King. There is a documentary about him, Rivers and Tides,  that I highly recommend. (I watch it at least once a year, usually at moments when I’m feeling creatively worn out.) In the film, you get to see him in the process of making these works, how he learns from the materials and adjusts to them. It is all about energy for him, harnessing the energies of his materials, their color and form and heat to create something that is perfect, but only for a few moments. I think this is what I resonate to most about his work — that it is a monument to the idea that what really matters in life is to go out every day and try to make something significant. So many people strive to make something lasting, something that will outlive them. So many people toil for posterity. But Goldsworthy creates for the now, for the exact moment he is in, and creates the most perfect thing for that moment. It doesn’t matter that it’s not lasting. Beauty, not durability, is the measure of success.

And this of course is the nature of joy: fleeting, in the moment, significant, but not permanent.

I’ve been reading a lot of poetry lately, and I find his pieces have a kind of poetry to them. They are succinct yet lyrical, and take their meaning as much from their context as from their content. Goldsworthy’s notes likewise have a poetic quality, as he writes about the piece above, entitled Elder leaf patch / edge made by finding leaves the same size / tearing one in two / spitting underneath and pressing flat on to another:

Diary: 10th Oct

Helbeck Woods
Wet earth but no longer raining
fairly calm to begin with but
now very windy – blew work
away

rain
again.

elder purple patch
the colour of the stain left
by sycamore leaves.

Images: Most from the Andy Goldworthy Digital Catalogue. A treasure trove!

Fall is my favorite season. I know, I know — wasn’t I just lamenting the end of summer a few weeks ago? But while I miss summer’s energy and abundance when it goes, there is no salve like the surreal vibrancy of fall, of trees lit up like firecrackers in the crisp, drying air. In fall, I feel most awake, most attuned to the world, and perhaps most inclined to savor, as we slip towards the dark of winter. Though the colors of the trees are actually harbingers of decay, revealed from their normal hideout under a scrim of chlorophyll, they feel like a celebration.

As it gets cooler, things calm down, and I find I get a little more time to spend at home. Especially at this time of year, I think its important to make sure home is a place you want to be, and having beautiful, colorful art on the walls is big part of that. So I’m delighted that Lux Archive, a site that offers affordable, limited edition fine art photographs, has offered a special discount and giveaway for Aesthetics of Joy readers. Lux Archive has a beautiful range, with lots of pieces that bring the joy of the world into clear focus. Back in February I posted an amazing image of a cardinal in flight by Paul Nelson, which is part of a remarkable series called Wild Birds Flying available on the site. The amazing fall color images for this post are by David Reinfeld, and I love how each image seems to replicate a leaf structure at large scale — the branches like veins, the leaves like cells — affirming the lacy, fractal structure of our amazing world. There’s more: the airy, beachy images of Kerry Mansfield, the exploded flowers of Fong Qi Wei, and this deliciously bright and absurd dog on a giant watermelon.

For 20% off on prints at Lux Archive, use code JOY20. And for a $50 coupon for one reader (that covers half the cost of a small print), write your favorite thing about fall in the comments. I’ll choose one that’s particularly joyful and award the coupon next week. Make sure to leave your email in your comment so I can contact you.

I’ve never done giveaways on this site, but I liked this one because I thought it was generous and might bring joy to some of you who are seeking it. Enjoy, and if you buy a piece, let us know which one so we can enjoy it with you!

Images: David Reinfeld, courtesy of Lux Archive. For more David Reinfeld, see here.

If all ghosts looked like this, perhaps we’d be less afraid of them. These colorful phantasms are the work of artist Brice Bischoff from a series called Bronson Caves. Looking at the piece above, I initially thought these had been done with explosions of colored powder, a technique that has been used in similar works. But for these, Bischoff used a long exposure to photograph dances with large sheets of colored paper. The photographs become records of movements, which gives them a dynamic quality even as stills.

See the rest of the series here, and have a colorful weekend, wherever you are!

Via designboom

While prints are a good way to cover a desert of empty walls without breaking the bank, nothing quite matches the texture and emotional appeal of an original. Enter Buy Some Damn Art. BSDA works with up-and-coming artists to offer original works for sale at reasonable prices. Sales start every Tuesday, flash-sale style, with six to eight pieces by a single artist at a time.

These paintings by Kristen Rego caught my eye; you may have to fight me for one of them. They sort of have a Rosita-Missoni-goes-to-Bushwick vibe, no? I love the cadence of soft gradients and intense, vibrating stripes. Says the artist:

This series began as a secondary practice in the studio. While painting, I began recording each color I mixed on the paper bag to better understand my palette. By the time I reached the bottom, a composition revealed itself. Each line of paint worked together as a whole to create an unexpected illusion. This unintentional break through caught me off guard. It became something to investigate further.

Investigate further (or purchase) here.

Images: courtesy of BSDA

Gray Malin’s À la plage series is like a cross between Massimo Vitali and Richard Misrach, combining the joy of things viewed from above with the sensorial pleasure of beach aesthetics. Malin says:

People and objects become patterns creating repetition, shape and form. These photographs are a visual celebration of color, light, shape—and summer bliss.

What Malin’s done is use perspective to transform a beach into a pattern. Clever, right? In fact, it’s a pattern I was just expressing my love for in my previous post. Polka dots! Essentially, Malin has made patterned canvases from two things we love: polka dots and the beach.

The weekend’s almost here. I hope there’s a beach in your near future, and that you make of yourself the most joyful kind of dot.

Images: Gray Malin. You can purchase many of these here.
Via: Because I’m addicted (with a hat tip to Em!)

Glasgow-based artist Jim Lambie creates installations out of vinyl tape that make spaces come alive with an intense energy. Tracing the contours of a room’s perimeter, his work seems to magnify the lines of the structures, surfacing patterns from static-seeming architecture. It’s almost as if he’s liberating the movement from the space, giving it voice through color.

The kinetic force of Lambie’s work may stem from his origins in music. He has said:

You put a record on and it’s like all the edges disappear. You’re in a psychological space. You don’t sit there thinking about the music, you’re listening to the music. You’re inside that space that the music’s making for you.

This is true about music: it’s something you inhabit rather than something you regard. It’s also true that music has an inherent movement, a temporal thrust, a pace and vibration. Music, with its long oscillations, jostles the air around us, scatters its molecules and sends them pinging against our eardrums. We don’t see it, but music transforms a room into a thoroughly kinetic space. Lambie’s color similarly fills the space with vibrations.

While I object to the comparison with Pollock, I feel sympathy with Jonathan Jones of The Guardian when he writes in 2008:

Like Pollock he pours colour and line in ways that liberate energy and suggest the inner structures of the cosmos. Above all, Lambie is a pure artist – his art is totally self-sufficient in its worth and power. It is distilled energy, concentrated life. Marvellous stuff.

Right now I’m steeped in the study of energy – photons, pulsations, valences, spectrums – and thinking a lot about movement at all scales, from the quiver of electrons to the whirl of the planets. But it all comes back to aesthetics for me: how we feel this energy through our senses, and once felt, how it affects us. Lambie’s work is just poppy and irreverent enough to seem like play, but that hides its power. This is potent stuff: bracing, fervent, and vital.

Via: Bjorn’s Randoms

In the summer of 1997 I went to Switzerland. I was seventeen and awed by everything there: the impossibly green mountains, the richness of the food, the brightly colored money. But by far the most magical experience I had was ice skating through a cloud.

The peaks of the alps are so high that clouds at times will huddle in small hollows on a mountain’s surface. (Little do we suspect, from a distance, this intimacy between clouds and mountains – that despite their seeming aloofness they are passionate lovers sharing high-altitude secrets.) In the town of Leysin, the skating rink sat in one of these catenaries, past the town on a downslope. A covered structure, open on the sides, the rink was positioned so that a breeze would draw wisps of cloud through the space. We looped through them, in and out of the whiteness, enchanted.

To be so close to a cloud, to be literally inside it, is a fleeting kind of joy. Artist Berndnaut Smilde brings something like this to galleries, carefully controlling the humidity and temperature to bring real clouds into being for a few minutes. Watch this video to see the process in action. Indoors, the cloud seems to be many things at once. It’s a luminous piece of sky, yet also an interloper. It feels more precious than it would “in the wild.” And yet it also feels out of place, confused even, like a lamb split off from the flock. It teeters on the edge of joyful and eerie, a conjurer’s trick that we embrace cautiously, with visceral awe.

Joyful and eerie: it’s an odd pairing. How is it possible that joy can come to us bound together with fear? And what determines whether what we end up feeling is wonder or trepidation?

It’s a contradiction many have wrestled with. The philosopher Edmund Burke called it the sublime, and wrote of conflicting impulses towards attraction and fear. Psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Dacher Keltner describe it as awe, an emotion combining the perception of vastness or great power with a need for accommodation, a need to understand the phenomenon and bring it into line with our worldview. Awe creates an awareness that something forceful is at play, something with uncertain mechanisms and consequences, and our natural instinct at encountering such unknowns is to feel fear. But because we are human and inherently opportunistic, and because we are not certain if the unknowns are threatening, we also feel curiosity. It is a state of repulsion and attraction all at once.

Aesthetics have a big say in which force wins out. Imagine you are standing in a field, alone and far from shelter. A great black cloud-like apparition looms on the horizon. It is coming towards you, and doing so abnormally fast. How do you feel? Now imagine yourself in the same field, but replace the cloud with a colorful double rainbow. How would you describe the difference in how you feel? Both are strange events, both vast, both require accommodation. But through the color, form, and mass of each, your unconscious assesses threat level and tips your emotional state towards anxiety or towards wonder.

It’s easy to see why we would feel awe and fear at potentially dangerous things – this feels sensibly adaptive. An emotion that primes us to take cover has probably saved enough necks to earn its right to a spot on the genome. But why have wonder? Why have an emotion specifically attuned to things that are strange and intense, yet benign?

I believe we have wonder because it lets us know when the laws and limits of our world have been transcended, and opens the way to new frontiers of possibility. Wonder is a signal that there has been magic in our midst. It pokes a hole in our worldview, and tempts us to investigate, becoming a powerful spark for curiosity that paves the way towards new discoveries.

As a culture we tend to undervalue wonder, but the craving for it is deeply valid. It is not a distraction from purposeful work – it may instead be the catalyst for starting it. A desire to witness magic is an impulse towards the expansion of the mind, towards the improvement of the human condition. At the root of our love for rainbows, comets, fireflies, and miracles is a small reservoir of belief that the world is bigger and more amazing than we had dreamed it could be. And if we are to be creative and hopeful, then feeding this reservoir is vital.

So go look for impossible beauty, implausible joy. Seek it out even if it doesn’t seem to have an immediate purpose. And then just be curious. You don’t have to control wonder; you only have to seek it, and be open to what it shows you.

Via: Smilde’s Nimbus II spotted by @brainpicker

Images: from here and here