aesthetics of joy

I am a big fan of snow. I know it’s inconvenient. I know it piles up in big drifts that make it hard to get around. I know you have to shovel it within 4 hours in Brooklyn or you’ll get a ticket. I know it looks pristine for about 30 seconds in the city and then it turns poo-brown and ugly. I know all this but there’s really nothing you could say that would make me love snow any less.

My first reaction to snow is always a visceral call to memories of childhood joy: “Snowday!” Just the barest snippet of a winter weather forecast or a “storm warning” brings a rush of delight. As a child, a forecast of snow meant I immediately put down the books and pencils and stopped doing my homework, and started dreaming of sledding and hot chocolate and the general indolence of a holiday in the middle of the week. Occasionally the snow failed to materialize, and I was on my way to school with a pack full of unlearned knowledge and bad excuses. But usually the comforting voice of the local radio announcer would announce my school closed along with my best friend’s, and we would grab our matching orange plastic sleds and head for the hills. As an adult, I see snow, and I turn right back into this little girl (in the red, on the left):

There’s a personal joy for me in those memories — in having them and sharing them. But I think there’s a deeper, more profound joy to be found here, one that is more universal because it derives from the aesthetic experience of snow. There’s something magical about snow, the way it drops from the sky with the lightness of cotton, and yet rests so heavy on the earth. There’s a sense of awe created too, by the extent of its scale, both macro and micro: snow covers everything, quickly and indiscriminately, and yet miraculously, because the scale of each flake is so diminutive.

These are common joyful elements that I have written about before, but looking at the commonalities illuminates the many facets of snow’s delight. With its lightness, snow is like bubbles, feathers, dandelion seeds, marshmallows, and meringue — transcendent things that are made of and at home in the air. With its scale, snow can be like the ocean, the redwoods, or the Grand Canyon — awe-inspiring in its vastness. And yet, as tiny things, snowflakes are like jewels, like haikus, and like hobbyist’s miniatures — joyful things made precious by the intricacy they possess in such small scale. Snow’s magic is the magic of invisible sources, of something from nothing. A snowfall is a slow-unfolding abracadabra moment of a rabbit being pulled from a hat, an extended display of the tangible emerging from the intangible as it blows and accumulates into drifts.

Underlying all of this, for me, is a kind of joy of transformation. Snow is itself a shapeshifter, first light, then heavy; small, then large. It is moldable, a substrate for transient sculpture, be it snowman or snowangel, or merely a snowweapon in the form of an icicle or a ball. But more significant is what snow does to what’s around it. In this sense, snow is an intrusion, a new element that transforms its context by its presence. Snow’s intrusion into a city is all-encompassing. Snow’s color and texture redefine the setting. Its volume and density redefine the action. It blankets, it bleaches, and it slows. Snow changes our behavior; it gives us permission to be more playful. And snow changes the feeling of even indoor spaces, making them more intimate and cozy.

The pleasure of this transformation is heightened because we know it won’t last. Days, sometimes weeks, after the first magic act of its appearance, snow performs a second one, disappearing into what seems like nothing. We revel in it because we know it’s an evanescent joy. And we’re not sorry to see it go because we know that like all true delights, it will come again.

{Thanks to Rachel for inspiring this post!}

This week New York magazine offers some very random happiness tips from a cross-section of New Yorkers — everyone from a personal trainer to an interior decorator to a physician specializing in biorhythms. It’s interesting to see how many different lenses there are on what makes us feel good. The advice runs the gamut from pedestrian (“Exercise more!” — Yawn…) to altruistic (help people with strollers up subway stairs) to just plain odd (eat Greek yogurt). My favorite is the advice to paint your walls yellow. Mine happen to be a pale buttery shade — something I never would have picked, but can’t bring myself to repaint because it’s just so bright and cheery.

See the list here. Joyful illustrations by Jim Stoten.

I’ve written about tilt-shift (where real-life scenes are photographed or photoshopped to look like tiny models) before, but I’ve never seen anything like this before: a stop-motion tilt-shift video of a day at Disney. The scale shift is so charming and really captures the magic!

{via @deepglamour}

Squeezing brightly dressed performers into tight urban spaces, Companie Willi Dorner creates surprising living sculptures. Dorner aims to shift our perspective and cause us to reflect on the scale and structure of our environment. As much as the contrast between the rigid environment and flexible performers illuminates some basic truths about the design of buildings and spaces, I think the more interesting revelations relate to behavior.

Like the flash mobs I wrote about earlier this week, the behaviors force us to question the unspoken norms that govern behavior in a society. The positions and arrangements of the performers violate these norms in striking and significant ways. They’re too close together, they’re entwined and contorted, they’re upside down, they’re horizontal, they’re in places forbidden by law or general good taste to occupy. Encountering these behaviors reveals a second layer of structure in a city: an invisible structure formed by codes of behavior that work as well as fences or street markings to maintain our orderly coexistence. The photo below, of the blue-clad person upside-down against the gridded wall, shows this beautifully — an irreverent subversion of both kinds of order.

Something like this is a little piece of chaos, and it can be done in disturbing fashion, or it can be done whimsically. Clearly this is an example of the latter, with color a primary cue to the artist’s intent. There’s a real sense of play here, like a game of hide-and-seek (or in the first photo, sardines) being conducted in plain sight. It would be fun to witness, but I think out of anyone the greatest joy belongs the performers, who have license to indulge their inner child and color outside the lines for a day.

via PSFK

I’m glad Stéphanie Kilgast mentions that these delicious-looking treats are 1:12 scale on her Flickr page, because otherwise I would be calling to ask how she could FedEx over some of those macaroons from Paris. Unfortunately you can’t eat these tiny cakes, but you can buy them on her Etsy page, or gaze admiringly at the many others on her photostream.

I’ve written about miniaturization before on the site, and why we seem to love tiny things. It’s a phenomenon I trace back to childhood and the downscaling of all the elements of real life into toys. As adults, tiny things give us an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of perspective shift. They make us aware of our scale, and allow us to see things in a new way. (They’re also just pretty darn cute.)

Thanks to Lisa at My Artful Life for the tip!

The Lomo story is one of joyful discovery. The Lomo experience is one of joyful freedom.

The Lomo is an incredibly highly light-sensitive Russian camera. For this reason, it was rumored to be used as a spy camera by the KGB, since it could take pictures without flash even at night. In the 90s, the camera was out of production, and was discovered by some Viennese students at an old camera shop. Upon developing the film, they realized that Lomo created intensely saturated colors with ordinary film — very unusual images they started calling Lomographs.

The students managed to convince the factory to reopen production, and the popularity of the camera soared. They introduced a variety of new models, based on the premise that Lomography should be all about having fun. To that end, they created a society to promote their “no rules” approach to photography, hosting exhibitions and creating an international community. Their mantra is “Don’t Think, Just Shoot” and you can see that this irreverent approach produces a certain spontaneity in the images.

Lomo’s a great example of an ethos embodied in a product. Lomo designers use color, simplified operation, and retro styling to reinforce their whimsical approach. Many cameras advertise themselves as being for serious photographers. Lomo’s counterculture approach is liberating. You don’t worry about what setting your f-stop is on. And you don’t  feel like a dunce because you shoot automatic on a camera capable of millions of possible combinations of settings. You just shoot, knowing that whatever you’re capturing will be transformed into something entirely different by the Lomo’s serendipitous lens.

I had an LC-A (the original model) once, but sold it when I got tired of film. Now I’m hankering for one again, because the pictures have such a beautifully perspective-shifting effect on your view of the world. I’d get the photos back after waiting for them to be developed and  think, wow, was that day really that bright? Was the ocean that blue? In my lomo-ized memories, it always will be.

Don’t think, just shoot

One of the things that has struck me in all the interviews I’ve done on the subject of joy over the past 6 months or so is that many people have talked about moments of joy as moments where they felt “small.” At first I found this perplexing — it doesn’t fit with the expansive, larger-than-life, abundant nature of joy — so I dug deeper.

When talking about joy, people often talk about time spent with families, vacations, successes, and simple pleasures. They also talk a lot about experiences with nature, and often these are experiences with nature’s enormity. People talk about wrapping their arms around a giant redwood and realizing that tree has seen a world their grandparents didn’t even see, and may outlive even their grandchildren. They talk about sitting on a beach and contemplating the far horizon. They talk about stargazing and wondering at the contrast between the marvelous stillness they feel and the knowledge that they are actually hurtling through space at great speed. They talk about witnessing migrations of birds or vast schools of fish or seeing a world under a microscope.

I realized that small is about feeling in context. It’s about a realignment of perspective, an understanding that your worries about the noise your car’s muffler is making or the extra cookie you had at lunch are inconsequential. It’s a scale shift — what were big problems are now small ones. They don’t go away, they just reassume proper proportion, and in their place is a joy that comes from the freedom from all that pressure. It’s the ultimate kind of transcendence — transcendence of the self, where we can step outside the identity we continually build and inhabit and be free for a moment.

The Galapagos made me feel this way, the enormity of the sea and sky all around. Driftwood is like an artifact of this enormity, its gnarled surfaces a text of the ocean’s power written in a language we all understand. Perhaps this is why driftwood is so often collected and brought home as a souvenir. Not just because it is beautiful, but because it makes us feel joyfully small.

The scene in the photo above has the precious quality of a carefully constructed scale model, the meticulously crafted miniature boats floating in an inch-deep bay. But in fact, this fakeness is fake, because this is no model — it’s a real scene made to look tiny and toylike with the use of a Photoshop technique known as faux tilt-shift photography.

You can see many more examples like this on Flickr, in pools like this one, where tilt-shift enthusiasts showcase their best work. It’s especially amusing when tilt-shifters use photos with people in them, as in the one below. The people look like toy figurines, and it’s easy to forget for a moment that those are real people with names and lives, and not molded pieces of polystyrene.

It’s also wonderful when you see a familiar scene, like this typical New York City block, transformed through tilt-shift. This transformation, from familiar to strange, is at the heart of what’s joyful about tilt-shift. It’s about more than just getting the joke. Yes, there’s a moment of revelation where you discover what you’re looking at is actually a new perspective on something you know well. But jokes get old, punchlines fail to have the same impact once you know what’s coming, and yet these photos make me smile whenever I see them. I think it’s because the apparent scale shift jars us out of our customary position in relationship to the world around us. Through these distortions, we’re given a moment in which we can realize how small we are, how tiny even our biggest structures can seem, and this momentary change in perspective is liberating.

Photos, top to bottom: mellocakes, nurpax, agent j loves agent a

It starts with babies. Tiny people with tiny ears, tiny noses, and tiny toes. Tiny hats and shoes follow, and for some reason these ordinary things, shrunken down to impossible proportions, give us a big swell of joy.

Kids get bigger, but the miniaturization continues. Toy cars, soldiers, and animals fill our days, all perfect scale models of the real things. Dollhouses — entire worlds in miniature — involve us in hours of joyful play. And I don’t know if it’s because tiny things remind us of these toys and the freedom of childhood, or whether we have a purely visceral reaction to their comical scale, but it does seem that many miniatures have a joyful quality to them and we often seek to miniaturize things even in the adult world.

Think about cupcakes, a craze you’d have to live under a rock not to have noticed. In recent years these small doses of sweetness have been in such high demand by adults, they seem to be capable of keeping entire blocks of the West Village economically afloat. Fruit is getting smaller too. Clementines and cherry tomatoes have been around awhile, but there’s been a growing prevalence of those tiny apples and pears, and now apricots (which already seemed pretty tiny to me) have shrunken into candycots, and watermelons have gotten “personal-sized.”

There’s a pragmatic rationale for small urban cars, but it doesn’t explain why drivers of the Mini Cooper and the Smart car always seem so smiley. We also find miniatures associated with special occasions known to be joyous, such as Christmas ornaments, souvenirs of famous places, and those bride-and-groom caketop miniatures without which any wedding would surely be incomplete. These “tiny worlds” designed and sold on Etsy by Amy Powers seem take a cue from these inspirations, trying to distill moments of joy into something small, pure, and permanent.

Miniatures are like suggestions of another world, a world of a different scale, but often also a world of a different time or place. Like these miniature tuk-tuks (which, even at life-size, are already miniatures) ensconced in the lighting fixtures of New York Thai restaurant (top photo), they bring distant memories or dreams into a concrete physicality. They also work on a purely visceral level, transforming the world around them in powerful ways. These lamps would look quite ordinary, but the mini tuk-tuks make them look enormous, like giant soap bubbles in comparison. Much the way our hands look giant when held palm-to-palm with a child’s, or a Great Dane looks like horse next to a toy poodle, our world reveals itself to us in new ways in the presence of an out-of-scale element. There’s a transcendence in that feeling that the world is larger than life, or in feeling like we’ve become kids again.

I discovered William Eggleston, the iconoclast whose super-saturated prints brought color photography into art world’s mainstream, at the recent show at the Whitney Museum. The retrospective is now at the Corcoran in DC, bringing him back into the spotlight again and giving east-coasters who missed it in New York a second chance to see this wonderful body of work.

What’s joyful about Eggleston’s work? The unexpected hits of color, for starters. In this piece on NPR, Claire O’Neill writes about the transformative power of his color vision:

Although he doesn’t quite understand what people mean when they tell him, “You changed the way I see the world,” the fact remains that he has. Perhaps the living legend is an accidental genius, but before his lurid color prints hit the gallery walls, few people would have found beauty in their own rundown suburban backyards. Whether or not he meant to, and whether or not he cares, Eggleston has taught us to open our eyes and see the wide spectrum of colors around us. He says he doesn’t think much about it. But a few subtle winks and a glimmer in his eye tell me he knows exactly what he’s doing.

The article makes clear this approach was born out of Eggleston’s pure joy at seeing his world in vibrant color. Looking at his photographs, the energy seems to bleed off the print, an irrepressible vitality that stretches beyond the borders and makes each image feel hugely alive. But it also suggests Eggleston has the mischievous spirit of a kind of benign provocateur. Playfully transgressive, his goal is not to destabilize, but simply to liberate art from arbitrary rules that limit us from beauty in our own backyards.

Eggleston’s subjects are not always joyful; indeed, they often have a sort of forlorn or derelict beauty that inspires sad nostalgia rather than joy. Others are wonderfully weird, with an internal tension that asks you to consider joyful aesthetic elements — symbols of childhood, fluffy clouds or cotton candy, holiday motifs—in all their bizarre beauty, almost without emotion.

But regardless of the specific elements featured, to me the body of work as a whole exudes joy, arising as it does from the mind of a man who revels in color. In the audio slide show that accompanies the NPR piece, the final question is, “Do you dream in color?” There is such savory delight in the laugh that punctuates his response: “Oh yes. Wonderful pictures that don’t exist. I would love to print every single one of them. So. . . brilliant.”

From NPR, via tipster-extraordinare: Dad