This whimsical series of photos by Jan von Holleben has me totally charmed. There’s something so sweet about the landlocked restaging of childhood fantasies of flight: Peter Pan, Superman, The Red Balloon, etc. It looks like it would be such fun to be one of the kids in the photos. It also highlights a connection I hadn’t noticed before — the link between childhood and a fascination with flight.
So many characters in children’s stories fly: superheroes, fairies, wizards. Many toys fly as well, from balloons to paper airplanes, kites to whirlygigs. There’s something enchanting, liberating about flight and I wonder if children are more fixated on flight or just less inhibited about imagining it. As we get older, the characters in our stories tend to keep their feet more firmly on the ground, and even our dreams seem to have less flying in them, or at least that is the case for me. As a child I used to spend many nights leaping through the air in REM sleep; now, I covet a dream where I even get a few feet off the ground.
It’s also interesting to me how these photos illustrate the joyful gestures of flying. If we take away the props and the settings, what’s left are splayed-out, arms-up gestures that stretch the body wide and open. With no context, you could still understand the form as those of bodies in flight. There is an exultant quality to these bodily shapes; they are delight in contour, revelry in sinew. Joy thrives in this unthreatened openness, this delicious expansion of a physical being into its space. It makes me wonder how we might incorporate more of these kinds of gestures, in stills or in movements, into everyday life.
Really liking the colorful flatness of these spreads from Fireworks, by Mike Mills, plus one last set of rainbows (from his 2008 installation in Milan) to round out the day.
Spotted this installation near the corner of 33rd and Lex a few weeks ago. Despite the bitter cold, people kept stopping to play. Does anyone know whose work this is?
On Sunday night I finally saw Avatar. I think I was one of the last people in New York City to do so. I saw it on the Imax at Lincoln Square. I can’t imagine what it would be like on a regular screen or without the 3D, but I’m sure it pales in comparison — just the sheer scale and immersiveness of the experience were dazzling.
There’s so much to say about the joy of this experience, (and also where it fell short), but the most compelling aspect for me is the world James Cameron has created in Pandora. I’m sure I’m not the only one who felt a little bummed to be back in the real world after the film was over, and found the transition from sacred trees to streets a little jarring. It’s a transition from a joyful world to a mundane one, from a place filled with magic and wonder to a city that feels dull and sublunary by comparison. And the difference is all in the aesthetics.
Cameron takes a seemingly ordinary rainforest (already a lush, joyful environment) and imbues it with light, movement, and magic. Everything native to Pandora glows: the trees, the seeds, the mosses, the waters — even the animals. The peculiar luminosity is celestial; the lichens become like a carpet of stars, the tree of life like a cluster of comets. (It kills me, by the way, that I can’t get still images to illustrate these things — evidently the Avatar PR machine is more interested in gunships and battles than the beauty of the setting. Did I miss something? Or wasn’t that just the whole point of the movie?)
Anyway, bioluminescence has long been a source of wonder here on Earth, whether in fireflies or glowworm caves or tropical bays of phosphorescent plankton. But in our world, it’s a rare pleasure, one that many people never experience firsthand. Cameron has taken this joy and scaled it up, creating a world ablaze with ethereal light. Pandora’s light is magical because of its inexplicable beauty — like the earthly bioluminescence it emulates, it operates through chemical light-making processes that seem mystical in contrast to the logical workings of electricity — like a hidden flow of energy.
“A hidden flow of energy” is Cameron’s actual explanation for the bioluminescence in the film. The scientists in the film state that the organisms function like a neural network, all connected to each other symbiotically. This connectedness is another joyful theme, since joy is very much about unity, coming together, and inclusiveness. The aesthetic illustration of this is the bond formed when the Na’vi encounter certain other organisms — the animals they ride to hunt, their mates, or the tree of life. The fusion of the illuminated tendrils calls to mind a kind of neural embrace, where disparate elements craving contact find each other and communicate wordlessly.
These energy flows are magical, and they manifest in other ways besides communication and light. The mountains of Pandora float in midair, like karst formations reflected in still water, and are described to be constantly moving. Creatures float as well. The seeds of the tree of life drift like glowing white-violet jellyfish, giving the impression that Pandora’s atmosphere is rich with this energy, changing its density at will from the thinness of air to the thickness of water. And of course, in the end, (spoiler alert) it’s a mysterious energy flow from the tree of life that saves our hero and Pandora itself.
It’s not just the behavior of organisms, but also their forms that display joyful aesthetics. Cameron uses the lushness of the rainforest, amplified in scale and density, to create a sense of vitality and renewal. He uses lots of spiral and circular forms, such as the small creature that spins on its fan-like wing (a living whirlygig), or the giant spiral-shaped plant that retreats into itself when exposed to touch (no doubt inspired in behavior by the real-world touch-sensitive mimosa). Swooping curves rule in Pandora, whether it’s chalice-like flowers, dangling curls of vines, or the delicate tendrils of the Eywa seeds. Cameron’s artists also play with scale, making some things giant, like the beautiful broad leaves the break the Na’vi’s fall as the leap from the sky, and other things tiny, like the seeds or the spinning creature. All of these are recurring aesthetic motifs in joyful things, both natural and manmade.
Ultimately, it’s these aesthetics of joy that make the Na’vi’s world so mesmerizing, and make us feel that this place is valuable and desperately worth saving. The aesthetics of magic and renewal give an impression that there is salvation for us in this place, not in the (clumsily-named) mineral unobtainium, but in the mystical goodness that underpins such manifest joy. For me, these aesthetics of delight in Pandora’s design do far more than the clunky dialogue and heavy-handed plot to suggest the moral. All of these wonders were inspired by things in our own world. Cameron has said he was inspired to create a bioluminscent Pandora by his experiences night-diving. The rainforest, though perhaps not as fantastical, is still a lush world rich with undiscovered species. Many of the animals on Pandora are hybrids of familiar organisms, like fearsome land-mammal with the rhino body and the hammerhead shark face, which call out these remarkable features — no less remarkable for the fact they occur separately in our world. And science lately is filled with new discoveries about the ways that flora and fauna communicate with each other chemically, much like Pandora’s hidden energy flow.
The more I think about Pandora, the more I think about the beauty of the world that inspired it, which is really the point here. Yes, the technology is a great leap forward, and yes, the 3D experience is revolutionary. But in 5 years this will be common, in 15 it will be primitive. I think the artistic achievement is much greater than the technical one, and more lasting, in the way it abstracts our world away from us, and filters it through a joyful lens, allowing us to discover its rare pleasures anew. Though at first it seems our world is at a disconnect from the magic of Pandora, actually, our world is filled with Pandoran moments, (or Pandora is just an amplification of earthly moments). What is joyful in Pandora is what makes it worth saving, and a good illustration of what makes our own world worth saving too.
These abstract paintings by Gerhard Richter make my heart sing. They seem of a piece with these paint-over-photo works I posted back in October. I think I could stare at the one above for hours just finding stories in these swirls.
It’s an arty weekend for me, catching up on all the things I missed in late 2009. Today, the Bauhaus at MoMA; tomorrow Georgia O’Keefe at Whitney. I’ll have thoughts early next week. Happy weekend!
My studiomate Rikki sent me a link to these joyful spinners months ago and I’m just now getting to post them. The installation is Les Danseuses by Swiss design group Atelier Oï, and it was displayed in the Vitra showroom in Zurich. (It looks particularly gorgeous in these photos.) They remind me of flamenco dancers or whirling dervishes, and they make me wonder what other wonderful things you could create with a bare ceiling fan mount as a starting point.
Something about the display reminded me of these striking images from Prada’s “Waist Down” exhibit from a few years ago.
The displays are delightful acts of transformation. Arranged this way, the pieces cease to be skirts — they are visual metaphors: a cabbage leaf, a tutu, a circular painting, a textile doughnut. Then, while digging up the images, I found that the Prada exhibit, designed by OMA, used an identical spinning device to the one in the video above to show some of the skirts, right down to the mirrors on the floor reflecting upwards.
Which came first? The Prada exhibit occurred in the mid-2000s, while the Les Danseuses is dated 2009. Is it a creative homage or just a case of “great minds think alike”? I dunno, but for me the edge goes to OMA for execution. I guess when your raw material is Prada, it’s pretty tough to make it look anything but beautiful.
What else could you put on a spinner? And what else spins? I’m envisioning some kick-ass joyful store displays using record turntables, toy tops, and a merry-go-round…
It’s been three years since I last let myself read fiction. In these years of study and transformation, there have always been factual gaps that needed filling, lacunes in knowledge, crevasses into which curiosity swelled, all-consuming. Narrative felt like an impermissible indulgence, empty calories, dangerously unproductive. Countless times in the last year I browsed the tables at bookstores only to demur, to put myself off with a quiet promise of “December,” as if that month would be the break fast of fiction, a buffet of stories with world enough and time to read them.
As soon as I heard the subject matter, my first choice to dip my toe back in was obvious: Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. The book’s impetus is the famous 1974 tightrope walk by Philippe Petit between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, one hundred and ten stories above the ground. A magical, subversive, absurd act of transcendence, arrogance, and grace — Petit’s walk has captivated me from the first moment I knew about it. Any work similarly inspired by this exquisite moment had to be my kind of book: joyful, at least in some measure.
In reality, the walk is only a minor player in the book, and Petit is effaced by his function and by characters far more emotionally grounded and present. Let the Great World Spin is really about their mundane poetry, their strange connections, their peculiar urban unity of grit and joy and loss. But the walk runs like a thread through the book, tugging a reader (sometimes reluctantly) into the repeated introductions of new narratives, cold loose ends that spark and warm as they loop back into familiar territory. I wish the walk itself was more powerfully entwined in the lives of the characters in each individual vignette. And I wish we did not know whether or not the walker would fall. But these are minor quibbles in an adept journey.
I won’t spoil the story for anyone who might like to read it. But I will say what I am most struck by is the twin impulse towards joy in both Petit and McCann. Petit’s motivation was transcendence, even as a consequence of transgression. From the moment he first encountered them, he saw the towers as an opportunity to create art, to give not just New York but the whole world a momentary gift of joy through the stretching of our concept of what is possible in the world. They were a joyful canvas, those towers, a base on which to layer joy upon joy, by taking a stroll in the sky and not falling out of it. I can only think of a handful of acts that are comparable in the way they transformed our emotional sense of possibility. First transits, such as the walk on the moon, or first discoveries, such as of electricity, telephony, and flight, come to mind. But the analogy is imperfect. Those discoveries were linear demarcations of befores and afters. They expanded possibility in a permanent way, heralding irrevocable change. Petit’s walk was transient because it was confined to one man’s extraordinary ability. It expanded the world of human potential, then contracted it again. It bore no actual relevance to anyone else’s daily lives, and yet, magical thinkers that we are, it captivates us, even those of us like me who were barely a germ of an idea in two strangers’ brains at the time of its occurrence.
This timeless magic makes it the ideal catalyst for McCann’s sort of joy, which is joy in redemption. Petit’s act of creation, though it predated 9/11 by 27 years, seems the ideal antidote to the towers’ destruction. Aesthetically, Petit’s climactic moment is one of rising, hovering, and dancing, of lightness, buoyancy, and air. The towers denouement is falling, crumbling, and burning, fire and ash, earth and bone. The image of Petit’s unlikely defiance of gravity burns in sharp contrast to the towers equally unlikely fall. Chronology is no matter, as aesthetics of joy can be permanent in our souls.
Of course, the real redemption is in the art that juxtaposes the two, that offers to replace this pitted hole in our world with a new image. This is McCann’s task, as he observes in the reader’s guide that accompanies the paperback edition:
But stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted sideways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.
I love the confluence at the end of this statement — between instinct, humanity, redemption, and joy. A central premise of my thesis is that joy is fundamentally human, an instinctual gift of evolution that rewards our struggles and propels us forward with the promise of its rediscovery. By this logic joy is also directly related to the survival instinct. We exist to seek joy, and we strive to continue to exist so we can seek more of it. Joy is an essential motivator, not just for creation, but for life itself.
Petit’s walk was an affirmation of the possibility that joy could come of out nowhere, on clear dull day, and transform us. McCann’s book, for me, is a testament to the persistence of that joy and its relentless tendency towards renewal.
Virginia sent me this a couple of weeks ago with the note: “This little guy is in the Bargello in Florence and always seems like the epitome of joy.” I couldn’t agree more.
Baby fat, sweet little wings, and the upswept gesture all give him an infectious kind of aura. It is always interesting to me when sculptures manage to achieve such lightness in heavy materials like bronze and stone. But my favorite part about the statue is the way he balances on a scallop shell. It makes the proportions odd and surprising, and sets a foundation for the composition that is just a little bit magical.
Taking a momentary break from self-imposed writer’s isolation period because I could not resist sharing this. Did you know that joyful mobile-maker Alexander Calder also designed jewelry? Of course, he’s designed many joyful things, besides mobiles — his Circus for one, which was at the Whitney last year, and a variety of toys. But it was a delightful surprise to me to learn that he created about 1800 pieces of jewelry in his lifetime, many for his wife, Louisa.
I love the radiating gestures of the pieces — like a sun, stars, or fireworks. Also, isn’t it interesting how the image of Louisa’s dressing table (below) kind of looks like a mobile?
Remember these? I found one lying (improperly) discarded on a subway platform back in September and labeled it “joyful litter.” Now, the NYT explains: it’s a public art project by artist Reed Seifer.
These mystery letters remind me of the ones my best friend Annie and I used to send to each other when we were kids during summers while we were away at camp and visiting relatives. I still keep them in a box and take them out every now and then. The envelopes are covered with stickers and PPPPPPPSs and all sorts of made-up acronyms.
The letters were sent by artists Lenka Clayton and Michael Crowe to all 467 households in the town of Cushendall, Ireland to inspire reaction and discussion. It’s an odd but joyful project, to try to reach out individually to everyone in a community, forging connections between strangers. And the letters themselves are delightful and quirky, each one layered with texture and meaning and no two exactly the same.
There’s something joyful about an odd little piece of trivia, especially when endearingly illustrated in such child-like fashion. Learn Something Every Day presents a new fact daily, and you can submit your own facts for Young to sketch up.
What I am trying to express in my work are moments of everything.
Landscapes, Formations, Light, Smell, Taste…
But they are not just a reflection of a current feeling or a sudden urge.
My paintings are about particles, about the whole or arrangements, they are related, disrupted or intractable, they are left and right, above and below –
they are everything —
For me, Möller’s paintings conflate macro and micro beautifully, reminding us how similar everything looks at extremes of scale. It’s akin to the Eames’s classic film Powers of 10, which transports us through scale shifts of extraordinary proportions. I love how the forms in these paintings could be sea creatures or land masses or sub-cellular structures, but whatever they are they feel vibrant and alive. A wonderful example of how a piece does not need to be riotously colored to invoke joy.
Painted by street artists El Tono and Nuria in Cordoba, Spain, these doors look like portals to somewhere special. And they probably are.
Cordoba is known for its courtyard gardens, of which the occupants are famously proud. I remember when I was there meandering the winding alleys, a good-natured young man a few years older than me and speaking no English insisted on leading me somewhere. I was 21 and wary, but he was headed the direction I was going anyway and so I followed at a distance. After a few minutes of walking this way, me suspiciously noting street names, him laughing at my suspicion, we arrived at a house with door wide open, framing a lush garden with an old woman sweeping the tiled floor. His home! After I greeted his mother and admired the courtyard, I was free to go, giddy and bewildered by the surprises that lay behind those foreign doors.
I dare you not to giggle while watching this short film from the People in Order series by Lenka Clayton and John Price. The film presents people in age order from 1 to 100 years old.
The drum device is pure aesthetics of joy — an exuberant bang that runs like a unifying thread through the ages. It also distinguishes them: the four and five year-olds’ delicious pleasure in generating noise is a powerful contrast with the defiant staccato of the their 96 and 100 year-old elders — pithy reverberations that seem to say, “We’re still here!” Each age has its mind, distilled into gesture and sound.
Last week I had a post on DeepGlamour about the glamour of glass. As a complement, I was thinking about doing a piece here that explored glass’s joyful side. Glass finds glamour mostly in the context of architecture, formed in cold sleek panes. Joy requires it to be liberated from two dimensions, let loose, tinged with bright hues, and blown to the edge of implausibility. I immediately thought of Dale Chihuly and his prolific body of vibrant glassworks.
There is so much joy in Chihuly’s candy-colored glass balloons, the coral reef-like swimming pool floor (I would have fingertips like raisins before you could get me out of that), the organic sculptures mimicking a tropical flower pistil or the frilled maw of a giant clam, and the floats that bob like dinosaur eggs among the lily pads at the various botanical gardens where he showcases his work. But while I was poking around his site, I found something that to me was even better, and that totally changed the direction of this post.
I found drawings. And these drawings, done with equal parts love and haste, made my heart race right out of my chest.
These drawings, studies on the road to art, are for me more joyful than the sculptures they prefigure. Unconfined by the persnickety requirements of a brittle, fragile medium, they are pure expressions of Chihuly’s relentless exuberance. They reveal the desire that motivates the transformation of glass from amorphous liquid to novel form.
It’s heat and human effort that mold the glass, but more than that, it is the creative energy that bleeds off these pages. After the accident that cost him his left eye in 1976 (and a subsequent surfing accident that left him physically unable to hold the glassblowing pipe), Chihuly stepped back and assumed more of a directorial role in his process. These drawings, therefore, are the most direct connection between his eye, his brain, and his hands. For a designer, this is likewise true, as we are usually the initiator, and not the ultimate maker, of our work. While we need drawings or instructions that communicate our technical intentions to a fabricator, there’s no substitute for an expression of brute emotive force that will stir something inside the maker as well.
Indian summer is the gift that keeps on giving in New York this year. Perhaps to make up for the drizzly summer, we keep getting these gorgeous sunny, mild weekend days. This Saturday I walked through the park and met my friend Emily on the steps of the Met. We set out in search of the Vermeers, which are quietly luminous and very worth the trip. But we soon discovered what felt like the real find of the visit: visible storage.
I’ve been going to the Met for a long time, since I was a child, but I was surprised and delighted to find this wonderful set of displays. It feels like you’re getting a behind-the-scenes tour, with all the paintings and artifacts crammed in together in row after row of glass partitions. The closeness of everything forces new connections, new relationships between items. Without the artful arranging, you’re free to see things in a new way. It feels a little like a treasure hunt, and was easily the most exciting part of the visit.
The roof is still open for drinks, and we arrived just in time for the spectacular sunset above. It’s always hard to believe when the blue sky turns pink and purple, and the art took a back seat for a moment as everyone turned towards the city and watched the beautiful spectacle unfold.
I love the spontaneity and texture of these paintings layered over photographs by Gerhard Richter. I h0pe they brighten your Friday and that you have a lovely, joyful weekend!
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