Trading fours
My friend Frank Chimero has started a new “occasional back-and-forth blog” called The Mavenist, and I am so pleased to be part of the first post, “Permutations & Loops.” The format of The Mavenist is simple, but also a welcome departure from the standard blog format. Rather than regular posts, The Mavenist will post occasionally. (This blog was founded with a similar attitude.) And rather than a single editor’s point of view, or even an interviewer/interviewee dynamic, The Mavenist will allow two people to take part in an equal exchange—or, rather, five equal exchanges, for a total of 10 parts.
Frank has done a lovely job introducing the project on his blog through the lens of gift exchange, which readers of this blog will know is a favorite topic of mine as well. There were so many parts of his introductory post that I liked that it was hard to choose just one, but I’m a sucker for a good West Wing reference:
There’s a scene in an episode of The West Wing where President Bartlet has his personal aide Charlie go on the hunt to purchase a new carving knife for the holidays. With each knife Charlie brings to the Oval Office, Bartlet shoots down his selection, citing the details he finds important. This happens several times, and finally Charlie brings the best possible knife he can find in Washington. President Bartlet inspects the knife closely while Charlie describes the finer details of what makes this knife the finest knife available. And with that, President Bartlet refuses the knife, much to Charlie’s exasperation. But then, Bartlet produces an heirloom knife of his own, apparently made by Paul Revere and in his family for generations, and gives it to Charlie as his Christmas gift.
This is what good gifts feel like.
Reading this, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Michael Bierut’s reaction to Tibor Kalman’s incredible $26 book project, one of M&Co’s annual holiday gifts. Bierut writes of receiving the book,
It was transcendent: not just a gift but an experience, combining surprise, humor, pathos, and guilt in an astonishingly controlled sequence. Everyone who received it was invited to feel not just the joy of getting but the joy of giving.
What Bierut’s observation suggests is that it is not just the exchange that makes the gift meaningful—it is also the structure surrounding and framing the exchange, as well as the careful control and use of time to allow emtions to unfold. This is why we wrap gifts, and why we unwrap them. It’s why we offer them on special occasions, and hide them at the end of treasure hunts. In shaping time with tradition in this way, the process is reminiscent of a poetic form, which both structures the verse and frees the poet to improvise within it. In this way, a poet’s creativity plays both with and against the constraints of the formal tradition. When composing a poem, the poet is in dialogue with the form itself—and the process of exchanging posts with Frank for The Mavenist didn’t feel all that different from the process of composing a poem in that sense.
Or, better still, it was a bit like the old jazz technique of “trading fours,” in which two musicians build on a melody with short four-bar improvised passages, listening and responding to one another instead of taking their solos individually. You can see Dr. Charles Limb discuss the process from a medical perspective on this TED Talk, or you can see Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette go at it at around the 8:00 minute mark on this version of Sonny Rollins’s “Oleo.”
However I try to explain it, it sure was fun, and quite a gift to boot. Here’s hoping the occasion arises again soon.
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An exceptional set of reading lists from the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School.
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This has been widely blogged by now, but Google has published their annual “Zeitgeist” report, detailing the most popular searches in a wide variety of categories. Most interesting among these (at least to me) were the “Top of Mind” searches, which take the form of “Who is,” “What is,” and “How to.” This year’s most popular? “Who is God?” “What is love?” and “How to kiss.” As of this writing, Google’s #1 result for “How to kiss” is this WikiHow article, which offers tips ranging from “Be polite and patient” to “Make sure your hair is out of your face.”
My Verb List
Above: Richard Serra, “Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself,” (1967–1968).
Serra’s list inspired me to make one of my own, which is drawn from some of the peculiarities of a designer’s particular lexicon.
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Via the always amazing blog of Alec Soth comes SVA Graduate Photo Department Chair Charles Traub’s list of grad school do’s and dont’s. A sampling: “Do celebrities—if you do a lot of them, you’ll get a book, “If it’s the ‘real world,’ do it in color,” “Don’t dare photograph yourself nude,” and “Don’t photograph indigent people, particularly in foreign lands.” The trusims that follow are also outstanding, including “The curator or the director is the one in black,” “The owner is the one with the Prada bag,” and “Know the difference.”
Five Other Forms
In conversation with a friend the other day I was reminded of the following assignment, which I used in a Senior Thesis class at Parsons not long ago. As students go back to school and begin working on new projects, it seemed worth sharing here. —RG
Now that you’ve done some basic reading and research, I’d like you to begin synthesizing some of your ideas in written form. For those of you who feel comfortable writing an academic paper or scholarly essay, this format is perfectly fine. However, I’ve found students sometimes struggle with this form, especially in describing their own projects and processes. If this is the case for you, you may want to try some other strategies for generating the text required for next week’s class. I’ve outlined five options for you below.
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The artist Kay Rosen has a fantastic “Top 10” list in Artforum. Here it is, complete with links: 1) Allen Ruppersberg, The New Five Foot Shelf: Memoir/Novel/Index (2004), 2) Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual (1978), 3) Kenneth Goldsmith, American Trilogy (The Weather) (Traffic) and (Sports), 4) An Inconvenient Truth (2006), 5) Steve Reich, Writings About Music (1974/2004), 6) Joëlle Tuerlinckx and Arturo Herrera, 7) Paul Elliman’s Found Font (a.k.a. Bits), 8) The Suburban gallery by artists Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam, 9) Ha Ha (like Cary Leibowitz’s show “I Love Warhol Piss Paintings”), 10) Northwest Indiana Coalition against the Iraq War.
A List, a Deck
Above: Lauren Mackler and Philipp Rumpf’s response to the assignment. Lauren took an inventory of items in her schoolbag. Philipp returned the inventory to her with his own set of six modifier adjectives and asked her to make sense of his choices. Spread from “This Is Not a Manifesto.”
Find a partner. Over several days, generate a list of ordered items that are significant to you. Keep this list a secret from your partner. At the same time, generate a deck of cards where each card contains an item from your list. Give this deck to your partner, and take your partner’s deck for yourself. Make a new list using this deck. Come to class ready to compare your lists and your experiences.
This assignment is from the class Graphic Design & Critical Thinking.
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A simple list by the Swiss art duo Fischli & Weiss entitled “How to Work Better” from 1991: “1) Do one thing at a time, 2) Know the problem, 3) Learn to listen, 4) Learn to ask questions, 5) Distinguish sense from nonsense, 6) Accept change as inevitable, 7) Admit mistakes, 8) Say it simple, 9) Be calm, 10) Smile.” Ryan Gander has written a nice short essay about this list for the magazine Tate ETC.
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A recommended reading of recommended readings, this time from the speakers of AIGA’s Looking Closer Conference in 2001. Some other interesting choices here.
