aesthetics of joy

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!

Joymaker is a new series spotlighting people who seek to create joy in their work.

It takes a kind of joyful madness to hand-apply 100 lbs. of raspberry jam to a gallery wall. And that’s exactly what attracted me to the work of Naomi London, a visual artist based in Montreal, who tries to bring a voice for joy and play to contemporary art. London uses joyful forms, visual metaphors, and textures (such as polka dots) to give her audience a sense of delight.

I’m fascinated by the shiny, sticky surface of this enormous red wall. While a red wall might typically take on a violent or alarming quality, the material makes it totally disarming, even childlike. I wonder if it stayed sticky throughout the installation, and slightly fluid, shifting its mottles in a slow gravitational creep towards the floor. Or whether it stayed firm, drying like a giant fruit roll-up. I didn’t ask Naomi these silly questions, but I did ask her some others:

How do you want people to feel when they engage with your work?

I’m very interested in the notion of play in art. I’m hoping that when people see the Jam Wall they can appreciate the unexpected beauty of the colour, as well as the playful absurdity of using this material.

Can you talk more about this connection between joy and absurdity?

I associate absurdity very much with play, and play is joyful. Other connections include humour in the absurd, e.g. the odd rhymes and tongue twisters of several early Dr. Seuss books. I find that there is pleasure in being in a ‘non-logical place’ in your head, which is how I think of the absurd. It’s about the unexpected, fun, and delight that can be felt when exploring things that deliberately don’t make logical sense, but are full of wonder and joy. There is an importance in the purposelessness of the absurd, which is something that makes is joyful (to me) and thus also linked to play.

What is the role of joy in your work?

I think that joy, beauty, humour and play have been underrepresented in contemporary art over the last few decades. I’ve been interested in trying to address joy and happiness in my work for past ten years or so. I’m currently working on a sculpture installation project in homage to my mother, (who died just over two years ago). Even though it is a memorial work of sorts, I hope that it still somehow evokes a sense of joy.

I’m making a series of balls which are made exclusively out of fabric inherited from my mom. (She was a talented seamstress and made almost all my clothes during my childhood.)

What one object most symbolizes joy to you?

I think I’m torn between seeing the first tulips in early Spring and my favorite large white mixing bowl that I use when I bake a cake.

What’s inspiring you right now?

Colour, and the unexpected use of saturated colour: chartreuse yellow + green, fire engine red, brilliant orange.

What other designers, artists, or creators should Aesthetics of Joy readers know about?

There is an interesting website run by a researcher/academic in Rotterdam:  The World Database of Happiness. The layout of the site is dry aesthetically but I think that its wonderful that the subject of happiness is being studied in this way.

I like the work of Franz West very much. Another artist whose work I really like is Ana Rewakowicz.

You can see more of Naomi’s work here. (In particular, make sure to check out Polka Dot Wall, a site-specific installation I find very joyful.) Images courtesy of Naomi London.

When my brilliant friend Mimi O Chun posted this picture in her Instagram stream with the description “Rothko tribute,” she received a veritable ton of likes and comments, many urging her to turn the concept into a series, or even a full-fledged art bakery. Though Rothko himself was not a terribly joyful sort, these colorful, charming cookies are, and I couldn’t resist sharing the image with you all.

So, let’s hope this becomes the first of many in the Dead Artist Baked Goods series, as Mimi puts it. Though similar in feel to this first installment, I’d like to see some Albers cookies; I also think that Pollock would be pretty fun to make. Whose art would you like to see made into sweets?

Mimi O Chun on Instagram and Twitter

As you know I’m fascinated by language and color, and the dialogue between the two. And I’m captivated by tools, extenders of human capability that give myriad forms to the efforts of our hands. As a tool of communication, this is perhaps inefficient. But as a tool of expression, it is powerful. The typewriter is a piece by artist Tyree Callahan.

What I love most is how Callahan maintained the convention of case in the typewriter keys. You can see how shifting would affect the color, in most cases increasing the intensity, a nice if imperfect analogue for the upper case. Callahan has entered the piece for a West prize. You can learn how to vote for it here.

And along a similar vein (but with a completely different tone), there’s this cocktail typewriter, which translates from language to color to flavor. (A fun, but potentially dangerous tool in the wrong hands!)

{via Colossal}

These last few weeks I’ve been steeped in color. Literally, with the effusion of bright summer hues in the city, and figuratively, as I’ve been devoting many a spare moment to researching it. Color is the subject of chapter two and, as evidenced by the colorful nature of this blog, a nearly endless topic when considering design and joy.

Right now I’m reading a very thoughtful, scientific little book from the 1980s called Colour: Why the World Isn’t Grey, which covers everything from why rainbows appear to why flames are orange to why the sky is blue. As the author Hazel Rossotti demystifies these phenomena, she’s reminding me that some color seems particularly mysterious.

Intangible color – the color of the horizon, of an oil slick on a rain puddle, of a match-strike – has a trickiness to it. We perceive the color, but it is either too distant, too evanescent, or too changeable to feel certain in our impressions. The color feels deceptive, yet tantalizing. Though we know that pursuing it will leave us empty-handed, sometimes we go after it anyway. Like burying one’s nose in a magnolia flower only to find the thrum of fragrance all around, but pale within, we find our rainbows and sunsets accessible only from afar. I suppose we should feel grateful that their photons journeyed such a long way to our eyes in the first place.

Maybe there’s more joy to this kind of elusive chroma, or if not more, then certainly a distinct kind of joy – a delight mingled with longing. And that’s of course what joy should be from an evolutionary perspective. Not perfect satiation, but satiation plus motivation to continue seeking that “passage from lesser to greater perfection,” as Spinoza wrote. With its spiritual airiness, intangible color feels something like a promise, a reminder that still greater beauty is out in the world to be discovered.

With these thoughts on my mind, I wanted to share a few works that create a similar kind of intangible color, despite being constructed from tangible materials. The first, above, is a recent piece by Andy Gilmore, whose kaleidoscopic works I’ve long enjoyed and have posted in the past. This piece seems to vibrate in those light spaces where the hues fade out in steps. It’s almost as if it’s moving, and therefore impossible to fully take in all at once.

Below is a kind of 3D counterpoint to Gilmore, from artist Gabriel Dawe’s Plexus 4 and Plexus 5 series. These are similarly vibratory, almost spatial rather than material, like a dense chromatic fog. You almost feel as if you could walk right through them, though in fact they’re constructed from thousands of strands of thread. Like many natural examples of intangible color, these installations seem to radiate their own light, making them even more ethereal and compelling.

I hope you’re out enjoying a colorful weekend somewhere, intangible or otherwise…

Xx Ingrid

I had never heard of critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton or The Quest of Happiness until a tip from Annette deFerrari, the artist/illustrator behind this excellent diagram of Plutchik’s emotional taxonomy. Annette sent me this quote:

“My experience,” said an old gentleman to me, “has been that I could never succeed in getting the special kind of happiness I had wanted or hope for, but that other kinds of happiness which I did not want and had never hoped for were supplied to me, in the course of life, most lavishly and abundantly. I therefore ended by discovering, though it took me a long time to make the discovery, that the right way to enjoy the happiness within my reach was not to form an ideal of my own and be disappointed when it was not realized — for that it never was – but to accept the opportunities for enjoying life which were offered by life itself from year to year and from day to day. Since I took things in this temper, I have enjoyed really a great amount of happiness, though it has been of a kind entirely different from anything I ever anticipated or laid plans for when I was young.”
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton, The Quest of Happiness, 1897

I’m so glad to have found this quote because this is such a foundational idea in my thinking about joy. In a way, you could say that joy is not something you seek, but rather something you discover. While we go in pursuit of happiness, joy finds us.

Why is this important? Because it suggests that joy is dictated not just by what happens to us but also by our expectations. While it’s important to plan for the future and put ourselves in circumstances that we believe will make us happiest in the future, we can’t control exactly what will result from our efforts. And at the moment-to-moment level, we don’t know how others around us will behave or what opportunities or challenges will crop up without warning. When our expectations are very specific and narrow, we increase the chances of disappointment. When we’re more open to a range of possibilities, we create the possibility of savoring “the happiness within our reach,” or joy.

Thinking of happiness as a longitudinal measure of our emotional wellbeing, there are really two components: How happy are the individual moments, strung together like links in a chain, that make up our lives? And how satisfied are we with the trajectory, the broad sweeping arc that line is taking? The latter is a macro decision, and we address dissatisfaction with this arc by making changes to the path – changing jobs, moving cities, adjusting work/life balance, and so on. The first question is micro; it relates to each moment. Are we enjoying the experiences that our trajectory has put in our path? Are we attuned to the joys in front of us, or always comparing them with the hypothetical joys on another path? Or the anticipated joys at the end of the journey?

There’s a dance between these two components of happiness, the arc and the moments, and it seems human to err on one side or the other. This is another articulation of that idea, by Jessa Crispin, clipped from Liz Danzico’s Bobulate blog:

I was having a conversation with a writer the other day, and he stated that the best things are always by-products. Happiness is a by-product, and I loved that he said that. You can plot your journey to success or happiness or wealth or whatever it is you’re looking for, but if you’re too focused on the end result, you’re going to miss anything good going on around you.

I love that idea that happiness is a by-product, because it points out that the trajectory is not just superimposed on the moments by our will; the moments also alter the trajectory. All of us have instances where a moment was a revelation, dramatically shifting the course of our lives. Seen this way, happiness is like an accretion of accidents, and our job is to put ourselves in the way of joyful accidents and be poised to recognize them when they happen. And this is where habits of mind like our expectations, openness, and attentiveness come in.

I’ve been reading Maslow lately, and found myself really touched by this this statement, which seems to me also along the lines of this discussion:

The great lesson from the true mystics, from the Zen monks, and now also from the Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologists—that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s back yard, and that travel may be a flight from confronting the sacred—this lesson can easily be lost.

This idea of “the sacred in the ordinary” (or “the joy of the mundane” or “the delight in the everyday”) is I think the fundamental belief that lies beneath my work, on Aesthetics of Joy, and everything else I do. I’ve spent so much of my life dazzled by inconsequential things, but I think why I try to show here is that these actually are the things with the most consequence – for our happiness, our wellbeing, our sustainability. The ability to be fascinated is perhaps the most essential quality for a joyful life.

As 2010 winds down, I’ve found myself feeling a bit tormented by all the things that didn’t get done. Things I’d wanted to achieve, but found themselves back-burnered by more pressing obligations, or the simple limits on what one person with two hands can reasonably expect to complete in a year. Then I looked at my photos: there were celebrations in Maine and trips to the wilds of New Zealand, visits with old friends and new ones in Sydney, a family gathering in Santa Fe, and all kinds of escapades in between. And looking at all these images, with so many different family and friends, I just felt happy. It may not have been the year I planned, but it was a good year.

So, as the new year begins, I wish you the ability to recognize the “happiness within your reach,” the by-products of your great plans, the sacred in your ordinary. In other words, have a very joyful new year!

Art by Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson (just the perfect sort of ethereal beauty for a thoughtful, liminal day such as this one!)

This clever little rainbow by Dutch artist Helmut Smits made me smile. Not quite the reaction of the “double rainbow” guy, but still, there’s something joyful about rainbows…

I love the opportunistic quality of this incredibly simple piece, the way it takes advantage of an existing motion to create something beautiful. For people who regularly sit behind the wheel of a car, the movement of windshield wipers is almost invisible — of course, it’s designed to be that way. Like a kite exposing the movement of the wind, or these speed blend tires embellishing the motion of bike wheels, it’s amazing how a little color can expose the hidden beauty of an ordinary arc.

{via @etsy}

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

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?).