I’m spending quite a bit of time lately contemplating the emotional lives of cities. Between my talk at makeCalgary on designing joyful cities and a related installment in the works for my Core77 column, the topic of how our urban environments make us feel is top of mind at the moment. But it’s rare to see the city reflect our own emotion back at us. This project, Emotional Cities, is a novel exception, using light installations to project the collective emotional state of the city. City dwellers can input their mood on a web site via a simple color-coded schema. The original installation was in Stockholm (above) and a subsequent version was temporarily installed on the Palace Albania in Belgrade.
The project blog is unfortunately a bit dated, so it’s unclear whether it’s still going, but it’s a beautiful experiment nonetheless. I wonder what the effects are of knowing what everyone else in your city is feeling. If it’s a purple day (the lowest of the doldrums, on the Emotional Cities scale), do you feel dragged down? If it’s a red day (the happiest), do you feel a boost?
I can imagine we’ll see more of these types of projects in the near future, as the technology to create light installations is becoming more accessible and platforms like Twitter and Facebook are offering a robust and constantly updated data set on emotion and mood. It would be fun to see more buildings that become, as Emotional Cities says, like thermometers for the feelings of a city.
Seems it is a week for thinking about time. Perhaps it’s the heat, which slows the afternoons to a thickness, reminding us of the elasticity of hours. Or perhaps the long days of summer leave us more light to read and think. Whatever the reason, in the past few days for me have brought a confluence of aesthetics of time.
This visualization is a fitting place to start. A piece by the designer Nicolas Troncoso, Colordar represents the average temperature of Helsinki over the course of 2010 by color. There is something satisfying and joyful about seeing the year represented this way, the intensity of the summer and winter tempered by the mildness of the transitional seasons. Of course there is a natural relationship between temperature and color, evident in the way we refer to colors as cool and warm, that makes this visualization feel perfectly natural. It is another type of color language, akin to the ones I have written about in the past, distilling the ambience of time. It might be fun to do this with other geographies (equatorial, desert, polar) as well, nested as concentric circles for comparison, to see space, temperature, and time all at once.
If color here is an output of our experience of time, in other ways color serves as an input, a language that communicates time to our body and brain. We know that the color of light changes through the course of the day, the short-wave bluish rays of the early hours giving way to the longer wavelength light that gives the sunset its rosy hue. But what research now suggests (as reported in a recent article in the NYT) is that these color signals are the basis for our body’s regulation of Circadian rhythms. In other words, our eyes tell time by color.
As the color-receiving cone cells in our eyes absorb different wavelengths of light, they regulate the production of melatonin, a light-sensitive hormone that controls our alertness. (Melatonin is often indicated as a natural remedy for jet lag.) We’ve long known that melatonin levels vary based on exposure to light, but recent research shows that the color of the light makes a dramatic difference. In one study at the University of Basel in Switzerland, thirteen men were asked to sit in front of a computer in the evenings before bed. Both groups of participants sat for five hours in front of a computer screen. But one group looked an old-style fluorescent monitor emitting a range of colors of light from the visible spectrum, while the other group looked at an LED-backed monitor that emitted twice as much blue light. For the blue-light group, melatonin levels took longer to rise, and stayed lower throughout the evening. Other studies have found similar results, one indicating that men exposed to bluer light had melatonin levels 40 percent lower than those exposed to incandescent light.
These discoveries force us to question the consequences of our increasingly illuminated world. As we replace our old CRTs and incandescent bulbs with more efficient light sources, we’re also inadvertently increasing our exposure to the bluer light these devices emit. And as we introduce more and more screens to our world, we add still more blue light to our days. (Through this lens, reading by the cozy glow of an iPad or Kindle is very unlike reading a book with a bedside lamp.) If the world communicates time by its color, our devices speak to our bodies in tongues.
This may be alarming news, but there’s also a positive story here. Blue light increases alertness, and has been shown to have effects on cognition and alertness. One study showed that elderly nursing home residents exposed to just 30 minutes of blue light showed improvement in cognitive abilities in just four weeks. This could be useful from a design perspective, for everything from helping shift workers manage their schedules to promoting alertness for those operating vehicles or machinery (a fact called out to me by Dr. Charles Spence, the director of the Crossmodal Research Lab at Oxford University). Even for sleep-deprived office workers, better lighting could mean more energy and a break from the need for caffeine. One of the researchers behind these studies, neurologist George Brainard, hopes that designers will rise to the challenge and get to work on creating screens and lights that adjust their wavelengths to reinforcing our natural rhythms.
In the end, I come back to the mechanism itself, and the latent poetry of it. Light is merely energy, and blue light, with its short waves, is high-energy luminance. Vibrating and alive, these rays excite the molecules of pigment in our retinas, a revelie that calls our cells to the attention of the day. There’s a beauty in this energetic language, one that reminds us that blue has an inherent joy. Though typically perceived to be a calming color, blue is revealed by these studies to have an intensity we don’t often give it credit for. The brilliant sky of a clear day moves us with a force that speaks directly to the chemistry of our blood. We are helpless to resist. And why would we want to? It’s a primal kind of delight, and we are made for it.
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’sPlexus 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…
Awhile back, the website Science and Religion Today asked me to write a short piece on the topic of aesthetics of places of worship, and I thought about some of the ideas in that piece when I saw these amazing images of vaulted ceilings from the book Heavenly Vaults, by David Stephenson. I realized I never posted the piece in full here, so I thought I share these ideas from the archives:
People seek many different things in a spiritual experience, a fact attested to by the variety of religions and rituals practiced around the world today. But if there’s one motivation that all faiths seem to share, it’s a desire for transcendence — a wish to rise above mundane concerns and commune with a higher or more complete entity. When we worship, we look to shift our perspective away from the trivial towards the big picture, to put ourselves in context of a larger whole. Can design help us do this?
In short, yes. Design won’t make believers out of atheists, but it can certainly provide conditions for deepening the experience for the spiritually inclined. Researchers studying awe, an emotional state closely linked to transcendence, believe that a key trigger is a sense of vastness. Encountering objects or spaces that are extremely large in scale, from Ayer’s Rock to the Grand Canyon, stimulates what psychologists call a need for accommodation — a need to take this new experience and fit it into our existing mental models, stretching them in the process. As our mental models struggle to accommodate the power behind works of great scale (both natural and manmade), we feel smaller by comparison. Our focus broadens, which effectively minimizes our daily preoccupations. The builders of the great cathedrals, the Angkor temples in Cambodia, and Easter Island’s famous moai statues all understood, whether explicitly or intuitively, the power of great scale to inspire this perspective-shifting, spiritual sense of awe.
Scale can be particularly effective when the exaggerated dimension is height. Earthly existence naturally has a vertical orientation, defined by the gravitational force that holds us to the earth. Upward directionality is associated with lightness, air, and spiritual thoughts, while downward brings connotations of heaviness, earth, and physicality. Some religions conceptualize this vertical dichotomy as a moral one, with heaven above earth and hell below it. And many religions conceive of the spirit as a weightless entity, which is freed upon death from its gravity-bound body. Defying this downward pressure by turning our gaze upwards naturally leads many of us to a more spiritual frame of mind. Structures that are upwardly expansive feel more conducive to worship than those with low, dark ceilings. This effect can be enhanced by adorning the ceiling with elements that cause the gaze to drift upward, such as lighting fixtures, ceiling frescos, or skylights.
Turning the gaze upwards has another effect: it allows more light into the eye, and light is another aesthetic element that can enhance our spiritual experience. Light is a common metaphor for deities and a proxy for their blessing. In Genesis, God’s first act after creating heaven and earth is to proclaim “Let there be light.” When a religion wins a convert, they say he has “seen the light,” and the object of spiritual quests is “enlightenment.” Many early religions, such as those of ancient Egypt and Greece, featured gods of light or sun as primary deities. It makes sense that light would be so prominent a feature in worship, considering its significance to our survival. Light was certainly on the minds of gothic cathedral builders when they developed the practice of using flying buttresses. By taking pressure off of the walls, these exterior structures allowed for taller, lighter cathedrals with vast expanses of glass windows that were previously impossible. Structures of worship are at their most sublime not just when they’re bright, but when they call attention to the light and focus our gaze on it. Stained glass windows are one way architects of religious structures have done this. Others work with natural light. A particularly beautiful example is Osaka’s Church of Light, designed by Tadao Ando. The cuts in the expansive structure shape the light, giving it form and presence. The result is an expansive space with a transcendent glow.
Surely there are other aesthetics more specific to different religions that can enhance the experience of prayer and spiritual contemplation. Features such as the structure’s shape, color treatments, and level of adornment all vary according to belief systems. But these three elements — scale, height, and light — seem to have deep roots in human nature or cultural practice that make them particularly conducive to achieving spiritual communion. Can you pray meaningfully in a dimly lit, undergound cave? Surely the answer is yes. But an expansive, well-lit space is more likely to put you in a prayerful mood.
In case you missed it, this Idea Lab visualization from Sunday’s NYT Magazine made me smile, and made me think.
It’s interesting to me the way aesthetics can transform the emotional tenor of content. Though the subject matter has a negative slant (partially genuine, partially comic), the circular shape, colors, and stripes emanating like rays of light from the center make the whole thing kind of delightful. But why? I think it’s because our emotions react to aesthetics before they process content. Even when the aesthetics and content are dissonant, the aesthetics guide our reactions, I guess because in most circumstances, aesthetics are an accurate shortcut to understanding content.
Recently, the website Science and Religion Today invited me to answer an intriguing question: what architecture or design works best for places of worship? I shared a few thoughts with them on aesthetic elements that tend to put people in a spiritual frame of mood, regardless of religion. Read my answer here.
What is your favorite place for spiritual communion? Why? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Image: Osaka’s Church of Light, designed by Tadao Ando. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
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.
With all the holiday festivities upon us, I’ve been thinking a lot about joy’s celebratory side. (Please forgive if these thoughts are a little rough, as I’m also simultaneously editing my thesis document and my attention is a little divided.) It’s interesting to think about what kind of adaptive value celebration has in human life. Why do we celebrate? Or rather, why do we need to celebrate?
We know that cultures all over the world celebrate, and though we celebrate in different ways, we often celebrate similar things: lifestage transitions, marriages, births, harvests, seasonal shifts, and good fortune. And though celebrations of foreign cultures may seem filled with alien customs, aesthetically there are many common elements. Sweets, such as cakes or candies, are common, as is alcohol in cultures that consume it. Bright color, music, and dancing are typical in celebrations around the world. Light is a particularly important element, as in the Christmas tree, the menorah, and the fireworks displays that commemorate a range of festive occasions. And exuberant bursting gestures — like those of fireworks, but also the breaking of a piñata, the throwing of confetti, and the open-armed jump for joy — seem to originate from the very nexus of joy within the human soul.
It seems clear to me that celebration is a universal human drive that like curiosity or lust is hardwired into us by evolution. That the aesthetics of celebration also have universal elements suggests that perhaps these elements have had a long association with events to be celebrated (sweetness, for example, would be a natural correlate with fruit harvests, and light a natural relationship to seasonal celebrations). The question is, is celebration itself adaptive — does it have a function that aids in the survival of humans and the propagation of the species? Or is it a byproduct of evolution, having evolved in the company of other traits that enhanced gene dispersal? I haven’t read any definitive treatment on the subject, but I believe there must be at least some adaptive value. In his book The Art Instinct, evolutionary theorist Denis Dutton references the importance of social cooperation in the evolution that got Homo sapiens where we are today. I think celebration is like a social form of reward that motivates cooperation and helps maintain social harmony. It also strengthens bonds that may be needed in tougher times. (Perhaps companies who eliminate holiday parties in an effort to save costs might be well-advised to reconsider, given these insights.)
I hope you have a wonderful holiday this season, whatever you are celebrating! And if you have any thoughts on this topic, please share them: How else could celebration be adaptive? What are celebration’s benefits? How is celebration good for us?
These joyful Christmas cones in Barcelona’s Mercat Santa Catarina square are bike powered! Passersby can hop on for a few minutes to keep the LEDs going. Now if only they could find a way to get the Rockefeller Center skaters to fire up NYC’s big tree…
See more bike-powered holiday installations on Vanessa’s joyful blog for the love of bikes.
Well, I’m back! And I must say, I have really missed my daily posts. On Friday, I presented the masters thesis portion of Aesthetics of Joy — the theory as well as ten furniture concepts and a designer’s toolkit for creating joy. Over the coming weeks I want to share some of these ideas, as well as revel in some of the holiday joy I’ve missed while I’ve been in thesis isolation.
This video shows one of my furniture concepts. It’s a stool based on the idea of a firefly lantern. I could imagine a bunch of these scattered around a garden restaurant or bar, gently lighting up the night. The lights are LEDs driven by an Arduino board, programmed to pulse randomly using a sine wave function. Getting the lights to look like fireflies was no mean feat, and required a lot of fine tuning of the code. Fortunately, my electronics professor Liubo Borissov was extremely generous with his time in helping me get this going.
The inspiration for the stool is the magic aesthetic, which has to do with joy from things that seem uncanny, implausible, or impossible. Magic is about the apparent defiance of ordinary laws of nature, and for me bioluminescence has always been a conduit to that strange and wonderful magic.
Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” With all the advances in the technologies becoming readily available to designers these days, it feels to me like I’m constantly surrounded by magic, constantly feeling amazed at what is possible in the world.
The chair above, called the Murakami chair by American designer Rochus Jacob, generates electricity by using a nano-dynamo in the rocker, which it then uses to power its own light. This harnessing of invisible energy feels so impossibly magical that it gives me a little burst of joy.
The fireplace below, designed by Camillo Vanacore, is intended to provide a safe and portable fire for heating purposes. The glass starts out opaque and turns transparent as the flames heat up, which does not seem like a necessary feature, but certainly adds to the magical feeling. But the real magic, for me, is enclosing fire in a glass, capturing its volatility and power in an inert vessel, kind of like the thrill of having a butterfly in a net, without the sad quality of restraining a living thing.
When I look at these designs, I think of Clarke’s words and it strikes me that the meaning of magic is always changing. There was a time when switching on a lightbulb was magic, when firing up a car’s ignition was magic, when seeing an IM ping on your screen was like a flash from the ether — incomprehensibly magic. Now these events are as routine as can be. As technology shifts, and as designers integrate that technology into our lives, the limits of possibility are pushed outward. Magic hovers along that line.
More interesting than the fact that the concept of magic is shifting is how it is shifting. For a long time energy was transferred into work by strictly manual means — every unit of work done had an immediate and understandable impetus. (Similarly, every unit of food consumed or clothing acquired contained for the user a knowable and comprehensible set of inputs and forces that led to its creation.) The magic of technology slowly took away our understanding of these things. It moved sources of energy far away from the work they delivered — from the proximity of the muscles to the distance of the coal-fired electric plant. (Same with food, clothing, and everything else we consume.) There was magic in work that could be done without an immediate proximate cause.
Now, technology is finding magic in immediacy again. It’s the Murakami chair that really drives this point home for me. We’re so used to power coming mysteriously through holes in the wall that we don’t even question it, and yet power that comes from the intuitive rocking motion of our own bodies feels impossibly wonderful. All of these new power sources being explored — the dirt battery or the battery that runs on sugar — have a similarly magical quality, and yet they relate to the things in our world that are the most mundane and elemental: movement, light, earth, fire. Simple pleasures that for all their lack of pretense have a little mystery hiding within.
Glow-in-the-dark mushrooms — another weird and wonderful innovation from Mother Nature. Seven new species of bioluminescent mushrooms were recently discovered by scientists in places as diverse as Japan, Belize, Brazil, and Jamaica.
Someone turned me on to photographer Massimo Vitali this week, and I can’t stop looking at his fascinating images of Italian beach culture. Viscerally, there’s something immediately appealing about the slightly sun-bleached color palette and the way the images manage to be both peaceful and bustling with activity at the same time. It’s hard to see at this scale, but because Vitali shoots large-format, the images are incredibly detailed, so much so that he considers them to be compositions of portraits. In an interview with LensCulture magazine (audio here), he describes the role of the human element in his decision to press the shutter.
And then it comes a moment. Because in fact all the pictures are taken in a very little amount of time. And obviously, I follow stories and things. I look at the people, people that interest me and that pick up my fantasy, and I say, “Oh, what is she doing? Why is she looking at her?” and so I start to make connections, and when I see a certain number of these connections taking place, then I shoot. Because I want to, I try to have the picture as complicated as I possibly can.
His photos are actually compositions of stories, tons of little narratives distilled into light and color, and there is joy in the abundance of it, the way you can simply get lost in the contemplation of other lives in their leisure. This idea of complexity is fascinating, because we don’t normally associate it with joy. We think of joys as simple pleasures, but when we think about simple pleasures, we often fail to recognize how sensorially complex they are. We simplify a day at the beach to sun, sand, saltwater.
But the sun has a feel that is particular to a latitude, a time of day, even the melanin composition in a particular person’s skin. Sand has texture and color (different everywhere), micro and macroscopic scale, hidden stones and shells that may be jewel-like treasures. Saltwater has smell and taste, temperature, and translucent color so mottled and varied it’s like a world in itself. Before we even get beyond the setting, the beach proves to be a deeply complex pleasure. This complexity is one of the things that makes joy renewable. It explains why the same settings can trigger powerful emotions over and over again. Just like gazing at a Vitali portrait-scape, each time you return to something that gives you joy, there’s always the likelihood you’ll discover something new.
“Sunrise” by Georgia O’Keefe. Featured in the exhibit Dove/O’Keefe: Circles of Influenceat the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. The exhibit traces the mutual influence and development of early American abstract painter Arthur Dove and the very famous Georgia O’Keefe.
O’Keefe’s work is usually perceived to have sensual overtones (all those unfurling flowers) but there is also a naively, viscerally joyful quality to her work as well. Dove’s work, too, speaks to me of a certain joyful spirit as well, particularly this painting.
To me, the aesthetics of joy really come alive in abstraction. Removed from clear representation, emotion is carried by color, form, texture, light, and gesture. If the artist can replicate the emotional response s/he felt on first experience, or even intensify or modulate it, using form unmoored from its object, it is an enormous statement on the power of aesthetics as emotional language.
The headlines have been comical. “Richard Perry in the Sky With Diamonds,” reads one. “Jeff Koons’s Blinding Bling,” blares another, calling out the controversy over hedge fund founder Richard Perry’s installation of a giant green diamond-shaped sculpture by Koons on the terrace of his penthouse apartment.
Art is a terribly subjective thing, which is how you get debates such as this one, which has led to myriad complaints and has even forced Perry to shift the direction of the sculpture to prevent light reflections from its mirror-polished surface from “burning like lasers” in a neighboring penthouse. (Ah, the problems of the very rich!)
You could argue an aesthetic of joy here — the oversized scale, the delicious shininess — though perhaps it’s not so layered as joy and may be more novelty than joy. My friend Deirdre says it makes her happy, though she can see how the neighbors might not be so thrilled. When private taste impinges on public eyeballs, the line between joyful and hideous can get awfully blurry. Is a work of art or a piece of decor still joyful if it bothers some to the point of agitation?
Thank you to my friend Ben for these amazing rainbow pictures over the Sydney harbor (or, I should say, harbour!). Rainbows have a way of making the whole earth seem enchanted and surreal. I especially love how the light in the pic above makes everything under the rainbow seem brighter, like the world under the rainbow is charmed.
This is a great find by my friend Maggie. Two-thousand LED paving stones have been set in amongst the cobbles on the Place du Molard in Geneva. What a magical place!
These lit pavers disrupt our expectations in so many subtle ways. We are so used to light coming from above that lights from below seem to upend the world in a beautiful way. We also expect solidity and density from the stones under our feet, not translucency. And every day, there is the renewed joy of dusk — watching certain stones defy the graying landscape and come to life.
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