aesthetics of joy

Yesterday while riding the Q train into Manhattan, my friend Maggie and I made a joyful discovery! She noticed it first — flashes of graffiti that looked cute, almost childlike. Then as we watched, the recurring images resolved themselves into an animation, a kind of underground zoetrope.

I was too slow with the video camera to catch it, but courtesy of YouTube, you can see it above. A little googling revealed that the work is called Masstransiscope, and was installed on a disused subway platform by independent filmmaker Bill Brand in 1980. Evidently it fell into disrepair, but was restored in 2008.

The piece is pure joy. It has no other purpose than to be a surprising bright spot in a morning commute, an interjection of whimsy into the dark underground. Does that make it frivolous? It reminds me of a post I wrote last summer about public art, which speculated on the purpose and value of art commissioned for communal spaces. The post was a response to an article that disparaged recent works in this field as amusing but “relatively empty experiences,” and in it I argued that joy is a very valid, and indeed, an important purpose for public art.

Recently, I read something that bolstered my conviction on this point. In Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton references a theory advanced at the turn of the 20th century by German art historian Wilhelm Worringer. One component of his theory explains our collective taste in art as a kind of craving for what we lack as a society. In de Botton’s words, a society “would love in art whatever it did not possess in sufficient supply within itself. Public art, then, serves a critical rebalancing function, especially in cities. Color, light, and playful forms restore harmony to a dense gray city. Lighthearted art creates moments that break the stress of urban living. Soft sculptures create ease in a hard, concrete landscape. They are emotional oases, and in my view, they are essential to a vibrant, healthy city life.

I think there’s food for further thought here. Some things have no justification on rational grounds. They could seem pointless or even wasteful, but our increasing awareness of the importance of emotion may illuminate their value. What else seems frivolous or unnecessary, but might actually be vital because of its emotional function?

Feeling arty today, inspired by a semi-monthly art outing tradition I have with a couple of friends this afternoon. Most of the time this blog focuses on explaining joy, but today I just feel like sharing some. These paintings are by Berlin-based Barcelona artist Yago Hortal.

Ok, I changed my mind. I was going to just post some art, but as the title of this post suggests, I can’t help but noodle this a little more. Why do colorful swirls of paint make us feel so stimulated and uplifted? Why does art move us so? This question is especially significant in abstraction, where there’s no subject matter to react to, no inherent narrative, just pure sensation dancing about on our rods and cones. I’ve offered up a bunch of ideas on this blog about color, curves, and so on — why specific aesthetic elements may have evolved to make us feel joy. Recently I’ve come across a theory that puts our desire to make and view art in a more macro evolutionary context. In his book The Art Instinct, philosopher Denis Dutton contends that art arose as a (rather sophisticated) way of attracting a mate. He connects art with evolution through sexual selection, the aspect of evolutionary theory that deeply troubled Darwin before he was able to explain it, because it fostered the success of traits at cross-purposes with survival. (The peacock’s tail is the classic example here: Large and brightly colored tails may make a peacock more vulnerable to predators, but they’re selected for anyway because peahens prefer them. Research suggests this is because they indicate a peacock carries a lower parasite load than his dull-plumed buddies.)

Making art may once have said, “I’d make a good mate because I’m clever and creative,” selecting the desire to make and appreciate art, music, literature, and performance into the human genetic makeup. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the link between art and sex is persistent, that our current appreciation of art is akin to artist-lust, that a gift of a painting is foreplay. Evolutionary theory doesn’t offer explanations for our reasoned behavior in the present; it merely gives us origin stories, roots that help explain the common ancestry of our universal predilections. Rather, for me, it’s interesting to know that when we view art, somewhere deep in our brain may be the trace of a neural connection that links such apparently purposeless beauty with the desire that fuels our renewal. That our joy in art is not detached contemplation, but visceral, emotional, and vital.

Yago Hortal via but does it float

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…

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?).

Several things have conspired to get me thinking about the joy of spinning these last few weeks. First there were Kate Spade’s joyful pinwheels, free for the taking and adorning the outsides of their New York shop windows. If any brand out there has embraced the aesthetics of joy and run with it, it has to be Kate Spade. Recent campaigns and store visuals have included cheery colors, hula hoops, polka dots, and artist Rebecca Ward’s colorful striped tape installations — whether by intent or intuition, they have a feel for visual elements of whimsy and delight.

The pinwheel idea seemed particularly clever to me because of its interactive component. Because they were offered up free to passers by, they tended to pop up in all kinds of places. I have one on my desk from the Soho store, which is a few blocks from my office. I have another at home (below), brought to my birthday party by a coworker (photo adorned by late night graffitoists).

In fact, Kate Spade had a contest encouraging people to send in pinwheel sightings, which were then tweeted, resulting in sweetly surprising images like this:

And this:

And then, in the subway recently, among a bag ladies prized possessions, I spied:

There’s a nice visual for me in the idea that the pinwheels are like seeds blown off a dandelion, scattered to the wind. And in fact, they do resemble the seeds with their long stems and wind-philic tops. The wind is of course the critical element in the pinwheel, a form of negative space (or force) that completes the design. A still pinwheel is an elegant thing, maybe even delightful, but it’s the almost-magical spinning movement that brings out the joy.

As I was pondering this, I received an email from a reader about a piece I’d missed in the NYT arts section, entitled, “Junkyard Poet of Whirligigs and Windmills.” A delicious headline if ever one existed, and the piece did not disappoint. The “junkyard poet” in question is Vollis Simpson, an accidental artist who at 91 is still making extraordinary sculptures from fan blades, propellers, and other scrap metal.

Originally a farm equipment repairman, Simpson began making things from scrap as a hobby, but has lived to see his work become highly regarded in the art world. This quote, in particular, struck me because it notes the universality of the emotion triggered by the spinning movement:

…he went to work, eventually coming up with a 55-foot high, 45-foot wide, three-ton whirligig of whirligigs that now towers outside the museum. Built atop a sign pole salvaged from a gas station, topped by a bicycle rider, cats and angels, and incorporating oil filters, milkshake canisters and waffle-iron parts, it prompts incredulous grins from passing tourists and draws locals to watch its wild spinning during thunderstorms…

…In Ms. [Rebecca Alban] Hoffberger, who has become a major figure in the national movement to champion the art of the self-trained, he found a “rabid fan” (her words) who once brought two busloads of his relatives up from North Carolina to admire his masterpiece. She calls Mr. Simpson one of the “true visionaries,” whose wit and genius for color and balance never fails to move people.

“You put one of his freshly painted pieces, moving as he designed it, anywhere in the world, and people will stop what they’re doing and stare and smile and say, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Ms. Hoffberger said.

I have to give the NYT a little bit of a tough time here for not including a video slide show with this. Fortunately, we have YouTube to let us get a sense of these things the way they were meant to be experienced (minus the wind in your hair feel and the grassy aroma).

Lots of joyful things spin — Ferris wheels, Merry-go-rounds, tops, dogs chasing their tails. When it’s experienced physically, there’s something about the movement, the way it disrupts our balance and creates a transient loss of control, that triggers an unconscious sense of freedom. When it’s experienced visually, it becomes a display of unseen forces (centripetal, mostly), that is enchanting — I’m thinking here of tops and gyroscopes, spinning children and the undulating skirts of dervishes. I wonder, too, if there isn’t something happening with our mirror neurons that makes this a vicarious pleasure, that as we watch there is a part of our brains that feels it is spinning too, which leads to that visceral soaring feeling and Duchenne smile.

The wind adds another layer, another unseen force to the mix that makes pinwheels and whirligigs feel delightful. As humans we are used to power being emitted by things we can see — a hand or a motor — but the mercurial fluctuations of an invisible wind make things seem to be moving by themselves. Depending on the  other elements of the design (color, form, texture) and its context, this can be spooky (Hitchcock-esque) or, as in these examples, it can feel magical and joyful.

Images: policeman image and girls with pinwheels, via @katespadeny. Vollis Simpson images, Jeremy Lange for NYT.

NYT: Junkyard Poet of Whirligigs and Windmills

Yes, that is Desmond Tutu in the midst of all those children jumping on a bed! For a project called Play Jump Eat, Kelly Wainwright of Messy Monkey Arts managed to coax not just the Reverend Archbishop, but also fishermen, surfers, schoolkids, and others to let go of their inhibitions and be photographed in odd situations, bed-jumping.

Jumping on the bed is an example of a joyful pleasure at its most democratic: an activity that is accessible to nearly everyone. It’s a childish pleasure, one we associate with being small in the expanse of our parents’ beds, but it can be rediscovered at any time. (Confession: I sometimes can’t resist a jump or two in a hotel room.) There’s just something so totally liberating about jumping; it’s a slightly transgressive, freeing feeling that brings laughter and optimism up to the surface. Even just looking at these photos evokes a vicarious burst of delight!

I hope the full series will eventually be posted online. Read more about the project here.

{Via @vpostrel}

Update: Kelly pointed out to me that prints are available here and that a portion of the proceeds benefit the Tertia Kindo Arts Project, a children’s dance school. The comments also made me realize that I failed to credit Inge Prins, the photographer on the project. Lovely work!

Matt sent me these whimsical images of public structures “fixed” with legos. The pieces are done by artist Jan Vormann, in an attempt to “support Mayor Bloomberg in his everyday-struggle to make this city even more amazing!”

Between these and the precious potholes I featured a couple of weeks ago, I’m starting to see a theme around the idea of “joyful repair.” Add to these some of the initiatives at Droog’s takeover of Governor’s island last fall, such as Heleen Klopper’s Woolfiller, and there really seems to be a pattern. I see this as an emerging desire to salvage damaged things, to fill in gaps and holes with something beautiful, whimsical, and colorful. Of course, these are not serious attempts at repair (Woolfiller excepted), but they get us to pay more attention to our environment, and the condition of the world around us, in a joyful way. There’s something compelling about the motivation behind the work — the need to make something whole, and not just whole, but somehow better and brighter than it was. These pieces suggest that a repaired thing can be not just as good as, but better than a new thing, and for me, this is what makes these provocations go beyond humor and novelty to be truly, deeply joyful.

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?

Morgan Blair‘s Diamond Collection. Like a pile of technicolor paper airplanes….

{via mandr}

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.

On view at the Marian Goodman gallery in New York until tomorrow.

{via Artkrush}

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.

Get Let the Great World Spin on Amazon.
Read more about it on the author’s site.
See Man on Wire, the documentary about Philippe Petit’s 1974 walk.

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?

{via Birds of Ohio}

I love how the stripes feel like they’re coming to life in these colorful tape installations by artist Rebecca Ward.

{via @design_sponge}

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.

Read more, here.

{via @swissmiss}