The Modernist Imperative

As much as mid-century modernist art philosophy can be faulted for being domineering, misogynstic and callous in its disregard of opposing viewpoints, it did generate loads of potent conceptual fodder which still fuels a great deal of contemporary thought. Yes, I'm aware that the last sentence is a totally unsubstantiated claim which nonetheless acts as the cornerstone of my argument – whatevs. The major principle that I would like to dredge from the modernist pond is the notion that various media are imbued with a sort of ideal platonic form – that paint has certain qualities that cannot exist in sculpture or film, for instance, and vice versa. Futhermore, the goal of said media is to eliminate all unnecessary trappings and hone in on the essence of the material.

This concept can also be broadened to not only include medium but also form. If you are making a two-dimensional design, it is important to consider what exactly it is that a triangle can do that circle cannot, or that a color can do that another cannot. Here we start to get into some Göethe territory, which is awesome to do if you're into that. Not only is it important to do that, but it is essential. Now I digress. But more on shapes and their connotations later.

Which is great, and all well and good. However, Casual Aesthetics recognizes that the problem with such grand theory which aims to function so broadly, and of matters of such grave import, is that the practitioners feel a great need to stand rigidly by their rules which they fiercely conjured as a testament to their mental mastery. The Casual Aesthete understands that for every forceful and passionate conjecture there exists a couple other rad alternatives which will still function if the individual's creative vision is broad enough.

Here's what I mean. To me, the role of the artist or creator is not to be in service to the self, but in service to the concept or idea. The concept is the puppet master that makes the artist move, and the concept, seeking to make itself material in the most perfect way possible, should manifest in a way that is appropriate. Some ideas function best as an image, as the image can communicate certain qualities that no other means can. Likewise, sometimes an idea needs to be a song, or a performative gesture, and is imperfect in other forms. The goal of the artist is to be the most flexible vessel possible and let the concepts manifest in a natural fashion, and not bend the concept to fit a presupposed form.


However, there are many interesting things that happen when you purposefully counteract this impulse. Most prominently, one can achieve a sort of cognitive dissonance in which the content is at odds with the form. For instance, the german artist Thomas Demand makes highly intricate sculpturs out of paper and then photographs the scenes, and their versimilitude is astounding.



Rather than seek to explore the essence of the material, he uses it in a seemingly contradictory fashion, as well as 'nesting' his process, i.e. taking photographs of the sculptures rather than show the sculptures themselves. The photos completely pass for normal still life photography, though on inspection prove to be something else. What his work does do is highlight the fragility of the medium by trying to force it to act permanent and solid, and the pleasure of viewing his artwork comes from this tension.

There are many other examples of this type of cognitive dissonance in art work, which sometimes simply masquerades as Trompe L'Oeil – whether the material illusionism of Jeff Koons' balloon animals made of steel or more traditionally imagistic chicanery.



So where does this leave us? The Casual Aesthete should be aware of the mercurial nature of material, and how it can be bent and shaped to achieve conceptual nuance. Once again we can construct a sliding scale of usage. observe –

Beware of Creeping Mannerism

The word 'mannerism' crept into my head long ago when looking at certain examples of contemporary art and design that struck me in a particularly negative way, but for reasons I couldn't readily identify. While the art world version of the term originally refers to the garish style of painting that followed the Renaissance and gave rise to the Baroque period, it seems appropriate now to repurpose the word. Just as the Mannerists of old re-used Renaissance tropes (mostly ham-handedly) without quite reaching the depth and rigor of their predecessor, we seem to be in the middle of another mannerist moment in contemporary design. This is not simply a post-modern condition of the 'well, anything goes' sort, but rather a lazy and hackish repurposing of imagery and concepts, sloganeering and empty gesture. Perhaps this has always been the case. But man, it can be disheartening to look around and wonder what the hell everyone is doing. And what is most disheartening it seeing this emerge in your own work.

My goal with Casual Aesthetics, again, is to try and rid myself of Mannerist tendencies – namely, to employ form in the service of nothing. There is a surplus of good-looking and well-meaning design and art that is quite lovely to see, to have and to hold on to. But when that strange hollow feeling arises, it means the form is just an exquisite shell around a billowing gust of hot air. Actually, a billowing gust would be ideal, it's more like a stale, unmoving cloud of halitosis.

Awhile back I was asked to do some illustration and animation for a music video. The director, my pal Ben, wanted it to be very much in the Yellow Submarine/Sesame Street/Schoolhouse Rock continuum. Fair enough. The video concept revolved around a neighborhood party, where the young and hip of all races and persuasions were hanging out with the old folks and the youngsters. In this sense, the Sesame Street style is shorthand for this kind of community-minded positivity, which is fine and dandy for a music video. The addition of psychedelic sequences and imagery is you know, rock currrency.



Wow the youtube quality is bad. Now anyways, to make the animation feel 'vintage', I developed a layering system which basically involved lowering the frame rate, desaturating certain colors and bumping others up, adding a looped 'wash' texture over the piece and adding fake film grain to give it a gritty texture. And all the animated elements had a faked line quality to make it feel like it was drawn with ink. Here is what the digital file looked like originally and how it looked after the layering process.



Anyways – there was a very short deadline and we had to move as economically as possible and still get results. Great, no problem there. It seems like an appropriate response.

The only problem is that I began to use this method on all kinds of other jobs, just because it always looked cool and I knew how to do it easily. While I'm aware that it's unreasonable to think we should be able to do something new or at least appropriate for each job that comes in, especially ones with very quick turnaround which is quite the norm now, I at least want to think that I can move away from this in my personal work. Easier said than done.

SO

Really what I'm trying to get at here is that we need to beware of creeping mannerism. To beware of creating shells with no true content beneath them. Some kind of finely rendered typography of a phrase with no anchor in reality, or in anything meaningful. There is soooo much of this. I get enraged at myself everytime I make a t-shirt with some kind of phrase which has at best a half-meaning. Here's the latest one, soon available on Threadless Select. At least it's formally a little interesting.



It says Folk Rock and Roll. Ha ha. Yeah, if you could actually read it. If I had the wit to actually come up with a phrase I could stand behind, I wouldn't couch all of my work in illegible typography. But yeah. But yeah Folk Rock and Roll, and folk you too.

Just because a piece is rendered in a high modernist style with simple sans serif type and plenty of white space mean that is the product of a rigorous investigation of the content whose only appropriate visualization is a stark and straightfaced reading. Similarly, an idiosyncratic phrase done in a practiced hand-letter style with attendant personal symbology fare any differently, unless there is some story, some content, some idea beneath the veneer, it is all empty signification masquerading as something more.

Technology! Then And Now, As It Were

I've long held a conviction (rightly so or not) that time is the key to understanding and using technology. While there are always those perched on the crest of the technological wave, enamored with the brand-new and its thrilling novelty, I've always been a little rear-facing in my technological habits, interested in tapes, film, and other recently dethroned media. While we are naturally greatly indebted to those pushing the frontiers of technology, it is important to note that this seems the realm of the engineer, the scientist, the programmer. Those of us on the more 'emotional' end of the spectrum, the artists and designers, are best to take novelty with a huge grain of salt. Technology, when it offers us a more economical route to reaching solutions or exploring complex concepts, is a great boon. However, the seductive nature of 'the new' is problematic, especially when we haven't had the time to fully digest its function and potential. This is often very evident when working in the field of motion graphics, where technological novelty is the common currency.

So.

Went to see Animal Collective last Monday at Webster Hall with pals Justin and Christine. Saw David Byrne as well bying a beer, which is always a bonus. In short it was a tremendous show, kind of a slow burner but by the end I had one serious moment of rapture and was pretty smitten with their approach and sound. I'd always been partial to them in the past but never a serious fan, but being at that show I felt that I was watching a great band at its peak deliver a great performance. What I was most pleased with was how their sound was constructed and the way the elements fit together.

There were only three of them on stage, as one member who typically plays guitar was gone. Each of the guys had a little setup that was similar to the others but differentiated for their skills – one (Prospector) consisted of samplers, keyboard, and more sophisticated sound manipulation effects, the next (Avey Tare) was keyboard, djembe drum and cymbal, and microphone, and the last (Panda Bear) was samplers, snare drum, bass drum turned upright, crash cymbal, and microphone. There was a heavily delayed guitar for a song or two but for the most part, your typical power-trio setup was nowhere to be seen.




The greatest revelation was that the sampler, the 1980s-bound pre-pro tool sound manipulator of choice, was the primary instrument here. Yet, the sound bore no affectation of nostalgia, nor any pretense to hyper-futuristic synth pads. Rather, the sound was organic, constantly transmuting from completely airy and arrythmic passages into concise, arpeggiated runs that flowed gracefully into one another with the occasional sudden shift or shrill dissonant disruption. What seemed most awesome to me was that a piece of equipment going on 30 years of age was able to function in such a fresh way without instantly conjuring up spectres of its past.

With this bank of samplers acting as the pacemaker'd heart of the show, the addition of hand-drummed patterns on top added a distinct sonic counterpart, and needless to say their vocals were the centerpiece of the show. It is important to note that the band has, in the past, explored far-flung sonic landscapes, all-acoustic singalongs, and full band thrashing, and it was these past incarnations which were evident in the usage of the technology.



This is not to say there haven't been plenty of incredibly innovative moments in the history of the sampler, it was simply that the unassuming, ahistorical usage of the sampler (no recognizable sources) and the looseness of the application signaled a maturation of the technology. And for this reason the music felt very much 2007 – it was futuristic for the very lack of recognizable historical markers. By eschewing a typical band setup, using traditional elements in a nontraditional way, by economizing their approach through necessity and experience, even reducing their time signatures to the elemental 2/4 for most songs, the band created what felt like an entirely appropriate sound. Big thumbs up.

The Nature of the Experiment

So I'm starting this thing as a way to work out my rather tangled mass of thoughts regarding the creative enterprise. Being nominally a young graphic designer who also works in the fields of motion/video, audio, and some bastard version of the fine/decorative arts, I like to think all my enterprises are united by a common vision. However I've been very aware of lazy thinking and lazy designing on my own part, which makes me wonder just how that came about, when making stuff is the primary focus of my life. So, if I'm making lots of stuff and not being as rigorous and thoughtful about it as possible, what exactly am I doing? This is where I am starting.

I call the process Casual Aesthetics. Here is why.

Aesthetics, being the study of / appreciation of beauty in art in nature, is a rich philosophical subject with a long history, the details of which I will not pretend to be well versed in. I am, however, familiar with the Casual concept, of leisure and informality and generally takin' 'er easy. Thusly, we have an area of study that is concerned with, but not overly concerned with, things that are pretty or harmonious, and the reasons why we should care about them.

THE BASIC TENETS OF CASUAL AESTHETICS

1. Seriousness, Sort Of – If you consider yourself a serious person, it is likely that you have a serious investment in the things that occupy your time. If your occupation is of a creative nature, then you would want your creative process to be rigorous and thoughtful to maximize your efforts.

2. Propriety – Creative pursuits all stem from a problem that needs solving. Whether the problem is concrete and physical or interior and expressive, creative output is the act of filling the void left by the initial problem. The most important aspect of problem solving is propriety – determining to the best of your knowledge what the appropriate response to a given situation is. Here appropriate doesn't necessarily mean 'stodgy' or 'conservative', but can encapsulate any response that by all reasoning seems to be the correct solution.

3. Formal decisions code for larger values or value systems. Much as proponents of modernist architecture once claimed that 'ornament is crime' in response to the supposed excesses of their predecessors, we as creatives must understand that what elements and attributes we choose to include or exclude in our creations are, in a sense, shorthand for greater or more expansive concepts. However, Casual Aesthetics also holds it to be true that these observations are not absolutes by any means.

4. Elasticity – Casual Aesthetics embraces a sort of sliding-scale approach to problem solving by identifying both the merits and shortcomings of various solutions. What emerges is a gradation of values linked to formal attributes, which ultimately becomes an expanded matrix as more and more elements and ideas are analyzed and added. This is achieved by organizing and analyzing existing objects and media that exemplify various characterstics and extruding their latent meaning.

5. Inter-Media Attributes – Concepts and conditions that exist in one media are certainly applicable in others, from music to film, athletics to page layout. There are certain traits that may exist only in their parent media, but parallels exist throughout.


That's all for now to begin with – pardon the convulted prose, notice I didn't include 'writer' in my list of proficiencies. My subsequent posts will deal mostly with a single topic or thought and try to flesh it out, break it down, and start assembling my conclusions into the aforementioned sliding-scale apparatus thinger.

Again, my goal with all this is to erase some of the less desirable parts of my creative process, with the hope that anyone who follows the model can do the same for themselves via their own specific tastes and values. Ciao.