aesthetics of joy

There’s something pleasurable about a good pattern, and it’s a pleasure all out of proportion to reason. Pattern is just arrangement, not content; it lacks the inherent meaning and immediacy of pure sensory pleasures, like buttercream frosting or dappled sunlight or the first crunchy bite of a ripe apple. And yet, pattern has tremendous emotional significance, at times irrespective of or even in contrast to the content it holds. Simply the act of imbuing order creates delight.

To experience this, you need look no further than the aptly named Things Organized Neatly blog, which showcases all manner of random objects upon which various kinds of order have been imposed: color spectra, grids, size hierarchies, taxonomies, pairings, tesselations, stacks, and so on. It’s a catalog of order, and of the ways in which order can transform ordinary objects in enchanting ways. A set of paint-dipped spoons, a few feathers, some mismatched number 2s — any of these objects would be unremarkable alone on a flea market table, but together, in their arrays, they’re evocative and compelling. Even objects that normally evoke emotions like fear, anger, disgust — objects like fish parts, knives, and guns — become joyful in this neatly organized world.

That the content can be arbitrary makes order an intriguing aesthetic of joy. It’s an aesthetic of process, rather than substance. Actually, as I write this, I’m reminding myself that all aesthetics concern process, when it comes down to it. Aesthetics are results of different kinds of processes — of growth, of fabrication, of movement, of selection, or of arrangement — and they reflect these processes in their forms. Order, a product of the last two, is a manifestation of balance, a sense of harmony between elements that transcends the quality of the individual objects. It’s about the forces between modules, rather than the modules themselves. Order gives the content emotional significance; in fact, we could say that by becoming the dominant feature to which our emotions react, order itself becomes the emotionally-relevant content.

But what kind of content? Why does order stimulate contentment, and even delight?

We humans are natural pattern-finders. Our brains revel in discovering order, and they do it even when no actual manipulation of objects is involved. With the volume of data being received through our senses at any moment, an ability to find a meaningful signal among the noise is one of the brain’s most essential functions. Order begets pleasure because order creates a canvas that allows us to identify disorder, and the opportunities or threats it could connote. As a species, we thrive and die by the extraordinary, so systems for finding it are intrinsic to our survival. One researcher describes this drive as patternicity, and points to a study that demonstrates that evolution favors an over-inclination to assign patterns to the world around us. (This tendency is so pervasive, our brains often even manage to find patterns where none exist — and it makes sense we do so even more when stressed, when the brain is on heightened alert for threats.) This patternicity extends to aural stimuli, as well as visual ones. Studies have shown that infants have an innate understanding of the concept of beat, and will react with surprise when a regular series of tones is disrupted. And of course, in music, the pattern or organization of tones is as much a determinant of the emotional content as the tones themselves, while the ability to discern these patterns is a major source of the pleasure of listening to music.

Many thinkers have expressed the joy of order, as they have observed it or felt it intuitively. Alain de Botton writes, “The drive towards order reveals itself as synonymous with the drive towards life.” Pearl S. Buck observed that “Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.” And perhaps a bit more abstractly, the biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, who had such a keen eye for order in nature: “The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty.” I love the word harmony, a more emotional interpretation of the more sober order. Harmony connotes a certain rightness, balance, and intrinsic pleasure that come from things that have meaningful relationships to each other. And I’m struck by the mention of soul in Thompson’s observation; we tend to think of soul as unbound, free of the confines of predictable order, so there’s a wonderful tension in the idea that the mathematical world of order can also offer soul.

Collecting is another manifestation of this desire for order, and a seemingly universal human behavior. I believe that we collect things to find patterns, often through objects that link together moments in our lives. Collecting, like all forms of pattern-finding, is a narrative impulse: Our things tell better stories when thoughtfully arranged. This may explain the oft-misunderstood delight of the collector, at finding an unusual button or butterfly. It is another link in the chain, a module in a story that is not so much invented as curated, assembled from ordinary-looking dross into a pattern of joy.

For more, check out Things Organized Neatly, as well as A Collection A Day, both blogs that showcase the joy of order. The last two images were republished on Things Organized Neatly from Homemade Is Best, a baking cookbook from IKEA. They’re amazing, probably deserving of a post of their own.

Can death be joyful?

The Merry Cemetery is a real burial site in Romania. But instead of the traditional somber aesthetics of death, the headstones feature colorful designs and scenes that explain how a person died. Some of those scenes are not too joyful (see: “Three Year-old Hit by Car,” above) but they do wrap the experience of death in a more uplifting aesthetic package. It may not make you feel any better about the loss of a loved one, but I wonder if it does change your immediate mindset on entering a cemetery. It sets a lighthearted tone that might remind a visitor that life is fleeting, and to spend the visit remembering the joys of being with the deceased, rather than the pain of being without them.

These somewhat gaudy headstones remind me of a procession that went by on the day we buried my grandmother. We were driving back from the burial, and at that moment a hearse drove up with an enormous picture of a deceased woman on top, ringed with many garlands of flowers. It was so visually loud I had a moment of synaesthesia: I could practically hear a marching band accompaniment to the parade-float aesthetics of the hearse. It was a jarring contrast with the understated, Bach sonata aesthetic of the funeral we had just attended, and my cousin couldn’t help but say, “That is so not Nana!” It was true, and we burst out laughing. Nana was reserved, self-effacing, elegant, in life and in death.

But to each his own. Apart from a merry cemetery or a joyful hearse, have you come across other ways people create a joyful celebration of a person’s life, after death? Do you know of any other joyful funeral rituals, either personal or cultural?

{via boing boing; images: Michael Foord}

A few months ago I wrote about the architecture of worship — about how elements like elevation, light, and scale create a sense of awe that supports transcendent, spiritual joy. These elements are common to holy places: churches, temples, and mosques, as well as many spiritually significant natural spaces.

This morning, as I was reading The Architecture of Happiness (this is inspiring a lot of thinking at the moment), I came across a discussion of another aesthetic element that might stimulate that wonderful perspective shift we associate with religious joy: pattern at scale. Alain de Botton writes:

Muslim artisans covered the walls of houses and mosques with repeating sequences of delicate and complicated geometries, through which the infinite wisdom of God might be intimated. This ornamentation, so pleasingly intricate on a rug or a cup, was nothing less than hallucinatory when applied to an entire hall. Eyes accustomed to seeing only the practical and humdrum objects of daily life could, inside such a room, survey a world shorn of all associations with the everyday. They would sense a symmetry, without quite being able to grasp its underlying logic. Such works were like the products of a mind with none of our human limitations, of a higher power untainted by human coarseness and therefore worthy of unconditional reverence.

In prior posts, I’ve talked about pattern’s ability to create a sense of abundance, through a visual illusion that uses surface to mimic volume and quantity. This matters because we are innately drawn to abundance, and the aesthetic abundance of patterns such as dots and stripes seems to satisfy a vestigial hunger in our primal mind. Trained to the cycles of glut and privation, we crave quantity as a bulwark against an uncertain future.

But what about the type of pattern that de Botton is talking about — pattern so vast and so staggering, it creates an abundance almost incomprehensible to the human mind? At these orders of magnitude, dazzled by a supernatural abundance, our minds struggle to reconcile the scale of what we’re witnessing with the boundaries of our experience. We measure this new experience against the possible, the normal, and the likely; in each case, our existing mental models are challenged and stretched, causing us to wonder about how this experience came to be. We also face this conflict, between a new experience and our mental models, at encounters with great scale (Grand Canyon), great force (a thunderstorm), great talent (a passionate aria), or great good fortune (“miracles”). For the spiritually inclined, religious belief becomes a way to accommodate an amazing new experience, to explain it and the feeling it triggers within us. For non-believers, though the explanation may be different, the aesthetic awe and resulting joy is there too. It is joy at its mysterious best.

There is also, as de Botton observes, a transporting effect played by pattern at scale. The patterns that line the insides of mosques, like the colored light from stained glass windows, create a world apart. They are immersive and enveloping, jolting the mind away from mundane concerns and holding them at attention. In this way, they function not just as context for worship but a tool of it. Like a zen Buddhist koan, the endlessness of pattern dazzles and contains our restless minds, leaving them primed and open for transcendence.

Can something say “Keep Out!” and still be joyful?

This was the question that popped into my head as I considered the Razzle Dazzle Sculptural Security object, the angular plywood contraption jammed in the window of the house pictured above, by Detroit-based Design 99. The purpose of the Razzle Dazzle (more examples of which you can see below) is to protect empty houses from squatting and vandalization, a common problem in Detroit neighborhoods. An alternative to boarding up doors and windows, the method signifies that someone is interested in looking after a place.

A strong thread of joyful activism runs through all of Design 99′s projects: the brightly-painted Power House, a community space cum sculpture made from a previously empty house, or the Neighborhood Machine, a similarly hued Bobcat with trailers that can be appended for various urban renewal tasks, such as gardening and collecting found material. For these projects, aesthetics of joy such as bright color, stripes, and other patterns catch the eye and raise awareness for urban renewal projects. They also telegraph the spirit of the movement, and offer an exuberant energy that might inspire volunteers and invite onlookers to join in. The aesthetics visually convey the intent of the artists behind Design 99, Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope:

The Power House intends to be a stimulator and not an end in itself as a singular art object. The Power House is a broadcaster of potential ideas and a place to plug those ideas into. The Power House will be used as an interactive site, by us and by our neighbors. The Power House will become a symbol for creativity, new beginnings and social interaction within the neighborhood.

But while the house and the machine seek to invite, the purpose of the Razzle Dazzle is entirely different. It’s a three-dimensional “No Trespassing” sign. So there’s an inherent tension between the spiky, angular form, which articulates (and enforces) the “stay away” message, and the vibrant pattern, which is a visceral enticement. There is also a tension in the way the piece is crafted. The Razzle Dazzle’s form is haphazard, seemingly cobbled together from debris — something you might expect to see at an abandoned site. It looks like it might itself be an act of vandalism. But the deliberate color treatment transforms the meaning of the piece. It says, “Someone put me here on purpose,” and therefore, “Someone cares about this place.”

In this way, the Razzle Dazzle is inviting. Through a splash of color, it offers the promise that a space will be inhabited by people who will care for it and restore it. It’s an invitation to return, suggesting that next time you visit, it may not be an abandoned shack, but a lively business, a vibrant community gathering space, or a home. It’s a joyful “Keep Out,” because it’s also a “Come Back Soon.”

{via Core77}

Power House and Neighborhood Machine

Neighborhood Machine with solar panel trailer attached

Gardening trailer for Neighborhood Machine

Razzle Dazzle Sculptural Security objects

Well, I was going to leave you for the next few days* but then I saw these and I couldn’t wait to put them up. For these Penguin Classics, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith, I might actually think about violating my multivariate color-coding system.

What is it about gorgeous objects that makes me all synesthetic? I literally want to eat these. I guess, in the end, all aesthetics comes back to survival, food being a big part of that. Whatever the reason, I think these are just delicious.

Also, one the more joyful interviews I’ve read in awhile features Bickford-Smith on the Penguin blog. The image-text format really made me smile.

{via Daily Candy, available on amazon}

*Wow, it’s evidence of the long week I’ve had that I spent this whole morning convinced it was Friday. But, no, it’s still a day away. So there will be at least one new post here tomorrow. Apologies if I confused anybody! xx Ingrid

Riaz has these great photos of Pakistani cargo trucks on his site. He says:

What’s amazing about this is that these are just regular cargo trucks. The truck drivers put in this much effort into almost every single vehicle you see.

In Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, there is a tendency towards embellishment of buses and the like, but I have never seen anything like this! They may strike a Western eye as a little gaudy, but you can’t deny there is so much love in these designs. I’m especially struck by the contrast between the plain attire of the drivers and their over-the-top vehicles. I wonder if this somehow became a sanctioned form of self-expression, and so, in the face of sumptuary convention, all creative energy gets channeled here.

See the full set here: Truckistani

Patterns give me joy, and this quiz from @Issue magazine suggests that they bring joy to many cultures around the world as well. The quiz asks you to match the patterns above with the nationalities that created them, showing the diversity and distinctiveness of the ways we express ourselves in non-linguistic 2d terms. The differences interest me less than the fact that all cultures seem driven to create in this way; to abstract, in varying degrees, our essential experiences into color, line, shape, and repetition.

Take the full quiz here.
Via Joyful Delight

I’ve been meaning to do a post on joyful blankets for awhile, but today the gray, rainy weather really has me craving coziness. So put away the snuggie and wrap yourself up in something with a little more style and texture. Clockwise from top left: Uzbek suzanis, each one of a kind from L’Aviva Home; Saddle blankets from Roxtons; Ladak recycled moving blankets, embellished with ribbon and lace, available at Reform School; Vintage striped Moroccan blankets; Hand-crocheted Granny Square throw by Sandra Juto; Vintage Bolivian frasadas from Twine.

Enjoy your weekend. Stay warm and happy!

xx Ingrid

This joyful roof, tweeted by @design_sponge and found on MandR, sent me off in search of others. My mind first went to the marvelous glazed tiled roofs in Burgundy, such as the one in the upper left below, from the Hospices de Beaune. It looks to me a like a carpet laid out. Then I remembered China, and the amazing color and texture of many palace roofs, like the large image in the middle. A Flickr search uncovered many more joyful roofs, with wonderfully textured tiles, light-capturing glass, wavy forms, and the charming patina of old age. And how could I forget the exuberant sails of the Jorn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House.

A roof is often a forgotten element of home design. I grew up in a home that had those dull gray-black shingles, the kind that felt like sandpaper while I was climbing it (to my father’s chagrin). But that common oversight makes it all the more surprising and delightful when you come across a special one.

Images left to right and top to bottom: Polar lights, miuenski, Guy Hunkin, ruthness, Manuel Barroso Parejo,  ~morsus~, anneinparis16, Alex E. Proimos.

Joyful wrappings at Purl Soho, via simple song. A little early for Christmas, but just in time for a little “thinking of you” present…

I’d consider leaving the country to get to use these on my mail, if only they weren’t fictitious!

From A Field Guide to the Stamps of the World by Gavin Potenza, available in poster form here.

Outdoor art by Samuel Francois plays with contexts urban and rural using color and pattern. He considers himself “a joyful manipulator of symbols,” stating “his goal is above all to preach a transitory art of which spontaneity and decasualization of the images are the bases of the work.”

via Oh Joy!

Design*Sponge today has a lovely piece on an exhibit at the Rockefeller Center anthropologie of Vera Neumann’s textiles. I find joy in the outpouring of energy that makes its way onto the fabric in the form of vibrant color and pattern.