“Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.”
- Jonathan Letham, via Ned Rorem.

It seems only a natural progression and appropriate response to the Postmodern condition of creativity, to briefly touch upon the various manifestations and re-contexualisations of Mephistopheles, and to gaze into the horizon of creative linearity in the artist’s endeavour for the allusive ‘original idea’.

The Mephistopheles used in Goethe’s romantic version of Faust, portrays Mephistopheles as an agent of the Devil, consumed by his own private Hell, similar to that of Faust’s desire for transcendental knowledge, which makes him conscious of his own self-perpetuating absurdity. An endless unavailing existence in the mould of Sisyphus. It is this very template of Sisyphus (popularised by Camus) that allows for synergy when coupled with the transparency of the internet, in highlighting the simultaneous regression and procession of the multifarious ‘critical repurposing’ of texts.
Just as Camus’ Sisyphus was the existential recontexualisation of Greek myth, Goethe’s Faust (1831) was inspired by Jacob Bidermann’s ‘Cenodoxus‘ (1602), and borrowed by Christopher Marlowe for the play ‘The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus‘ (1604). All of which ultimately were sourced from a German chapbook, printed around 1587.

In Kenneth Goldsmith’s article ‘It’s Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It’s Repurposing.‘ he draws attention to the idea that due to “an unprecedented amount of available text (that is at our disposal), our problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists.”
This has been the case throughout history, only recently made apparent to the digital multitude of self-published authors and audiences post 1990 through the transparent utility of the internet.
I am reminded of a lecture held in Berkely by Terrance McKenna on the ‘Transformations of Language Under the Influence of the Psychedelic‘, where Western society, in it’s drive to acquire knowledge, is defined by McKenna as a topography of electronic gestalts, whereby we are informed in generalities. This is the antithesis of how isolated shamanistic societies have accumulated their knowledge in regards to their particular psychoactive agents, used for social cohesion.
Unlike the spread of information across a digital topology, that these electronic gestalts allow us, the Shamans are fully informed in a vertically fashion, about a singular subject, namely the Ayahuasca, or ‘Spirit Vine’, which Western society tries laboriously to recreate through the idea of unmediated, copyrightable, original thought.
It is this very idea of original thought (dubbed ‘unoriginal genius‘ by literary critic Marjorie Perloff) that is at the core of our tendency to reconstruct and reorder literature and art, brought on by the technology of the internet.

Although liberating for the artist in creating work with the essence of cultural commentary, which is always going to be inherent in utilising the lost art and literature of the past into contemporary ‘re-workings’, there persists an anxiety in the individual that pertains to the opaque mysticism of pre-internet.

In ‘The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry‘, by Harold Bloom, this anxiety is considered almost as the facilitator of new poetical works, as the poet is inspired to write by reading the poetry of whom he considers a master of that field. They will in turn, produce works derivative of the artist who inspired them.
Bloom isolates six premises, or ‘revisionary ratios‘ that distinctly elucidate the key stages of this anxiety for originality.

1. Clinamem
2. Tessera
3. Kenosis
4. Daemonisation
5. Askesis
6. Apophrades

(All description of all ratios can be read here)
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bloom/excerpts/anxiety.html#anticrit

I would like to focus primarily on the Clinamen.

The Clinamen, itself a term borrowed by a multitude of philosophers and writers from Deleuze to Lacan, originates from the Roman poet Lucretius, who coined the phrase to name the unpredictable movement or swerve of atoms as they fall downwards. Each swerve of the atom is not dependent on the velocity or mass of the atom, and thus cannot be measured accurately, as the Clinamen inhabits only the space in between the falling atoms. The collisions that are caused by the Clinamen, are the sole reason for creation, if they were to fall straight like rain drops through an abyss, nothing would emerge as a result.

In terms of Blooms’ notion of artistic creation, the “Clinamen is a poetic misreading or misprision proper… appearing as a corrective movement in his own poem, which implies that the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, but then swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem had moved.”

Alfred Jarry, symbolist poet and cyclist, and eminent figure of the Parisian art scene in the late eighteen hundreds, was considered a precursor to the Surrealists and used the allusion to the ‘original’ Faustus character as the basis of his Pataphysical novel, ‘The Opinions and Exploits of Dr. Faustroll.’ (1911) and regarded the philosophy of the Clinamen as an integral element of his science of exceptions and imaginary solutions.

Dr. Faustroll was born at the age of sixty-three, and died the very same year, after his hallucinatory expedition through the fourteen imaginary islands and back to Paris. But one of Faustrolls last acts before drowning, was the construction of the Clinamen;  A post-humanist art machine, controlled by Henri Rousseau, with the intention of altering thirteen paintings hung inside the Luxembourg museum, to create thirteen new compositions of primary colours. Based on the chance mechanisms of the machines’ stomach, and the hand of Rousseau, the Climamen implied the simultaneity of involuntary and intentional action upon it’s new creations.

Jarry referred to his Clinamen as the “unforeseen beast, ejaculating onto the walls of the universe“, that would engender the immanent creative downfalls of mechanically produced artworks, associative at the time through the works of Baudelaire.

Jarry, and the ‘Painting Machine’, brought to the fore our generation’s inevitable predilection for the machine, and our fascination with the process of art as opposed to it’s meaning. But the swerve of the Clinamen is what ultimately canonised the reciprocity of contemporary artworks to their precursors, mythologising them in hyperlinks.

“Meanwhile, after there was no one left in the world, the Painting Machine, animated inside a system of weightless springs, revolved in azimuth in the iron hall of the Palace of Machines, the only monument standing, in the deserted and razed Paris.” (Dr Faustroll.)

The notion of the isolated romantic, along with the tortured soul of the 19th and early 20th century, has now become outdated and replaced by the Alchemical Programmer, who’s proficiency in the sorcery of Html is analogous to the esotericism of the ‘hecho poetico‘; the poetical fact, that becomes self-sufficient and non-reliant on its relationship with reality or originality.
Just as Jarry repurposed Goethe, Goethe repurposed Marlowe, and Marlowe in turn repurposed Bidermann, in some cases, the subconscious extrapolating of their predecessor’s thoughts existed as a means, and not an end, of perpetuating ‘unoriginal genius‘.
As Camus invoked the spirit of Sisyphus and his mountain, Jarry similarly likened the struggle to understand the perplexing notions of originality to an uphill bike ride.

Amongst the modern curiosities of multitudinous screenshot pineapples, absurd dolphins and pizza gifs, precariously balanced on Hellenistic pillars in hyperspace under the lexicon of Net Art , art is engaging in simultaneously making monuments of our disposable surroundings, whilst casting our ideals back towards our cultural precursor, to exemplify their ideologies and modes of living, to please our anxious minds and to aid us in finding our position within the machine-integrated universe. Inherently nostalgic, art participates in contemporary atavism and the resuscitation of relics, making use of all things useless and forgotten.
This linear character of “…institutional, hierarchically structured societies that we associate with our own culture…is just an inherited form of tribal organisation, but with the need to abstract the leadership quality, so that control can function over wide areas.” (McKenna) and sustain the artists’ perambulations through hyperspace.

As we use the forward thrust of history in shaping our future, the sound of Mephistophele’s incarnations hit the floor of the abyss, and the poet indeed says “I seem to have stopped falling now; now I am fallen, consequently, I lie here in Hell.” But he is thinking as he says this, “As I fell, I swerved, consequently I lie here, in a Hell, improved by my own making.”

Further reading :

Harold Bloom – The Anxiety of Influence (review)
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bloom/reviews.html#anxiety

Jonathan Letham – The Ecstasy of Influence
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387

Joachim Schmidt – Hybrid Net Art collages
http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/hybrids/index.html

Jeffrey Lewis – Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwGhPnsCjDg&ob=av3e

“Ah, he serves you well, indeed!
He scorns earth’s fare and drinks celestial mead.
Poor fool, his fervent drives him far!
He half knows his own madness, I’ll be bound.
He’d pillage heaven for its brightest star,
And earth for every last delight that’s to be found;
Not all that’s near nor far
Can satisfy a heart so restless and profound.”

(Mephistopheles)

As we continually engage in electronic data transfer in an attempt to strive towards a reality (both personal and universal) that employs an intimate relationship between highly developed technology and art, the personal blog has become one of the most obvious tools used in order to suppress the flaws of a physical reality.

The construction of the blog within this type of simulation, similar to the ‘Ideal-Ego’, acts as a digital representation of the personal psychodramas, that formulate the basis of the discord between how we perceive ourselves, and how we are actually perceived. However, with this form of internet-based-ideal-ego, we bare the notion of decentralisation, and thus can detach ourselves from our projections as and when we please.

Blogging was a neologism of the early millennia, and has fast become a common intransitive verb and tool of the developing artist, opening up entirely new realms of limitless discussions on infinitely broad spectrums. This has undoubtably revolutionised how audiences discover music, artwork and literature, but the most contradictory aspect of the blogging environment however, would be to imagine the possible counterintuitive impact that it would have had upon the countercultural art and literary movements of the past. If William S. Burroughs’ ‘Naked Lunch’ had appeared primarily as blog posts, Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ as a tumblr reblog, McClure’s ‘The Beard ‘ on his personal Vimeo page, would the socio-cultural content of these works have been compromised and in some cases leveled through the mass reconstitution of divergent information that is the internet.

As the limitations of publishing are reduced, the distinction between high and low culture merge, leaving only the residue of artistic progression. Commodified by the commercial art market and saturated to the point of useless parody by the advent of 24 hour news broadcasts, the ‘shock’ element that was synonymous with Howl’s obscenity trial, appears as nothing more than a trite political gesture in the current zeitgeist, and the fecundity of blogged content that spawn reblogged (recessive) memes as a derivative of the original, has ramifications on how art work of the past is to be perceived in a ‘real time’ context.

Howl, written in 1955 in the Cafe Med in Berkely, California, was an attempt to write without restraint, based on earlier writings involving the technique of parataxis (the placing, side by side, of often fragmented subjects.) It is this lack of restraint in the spoken word of Ginsberg’s poetry that correlates perfectly with the complete freedom of the blogosphere. But poems such as Howl (published in 1956, incidentally the same year that nineteen year old Hunter S Thompson was arrested for robbery (Wikipedia)) was a full 22 years before the emergence of the first online ‘networked news forum’, entitled UseNet, and early social networking site ‘Open Diary‘ (1998), and preceded what has now become a generation well versed in the language of autonomy.

Open Diary was created in 1998 by Brian Ableson, and in the first ten years of it’s existence, over half a million people were able to freely publish their diaries to a vast readership, that extended to over seventy seven different countries, and included all seven continents. The obscenity laws faced by Ferlinghetti and City Lights upon publishing Howl seem to have been effortlessly brushed aside by the boundless info-library of the internet, and in one swift click, the multiplicity of creative texts and self-published works can be viewed in an instant, and although the leveling of the creative platform ensues, making vast amounts of texts attainable, it in some cases makes the difference between greatness and mediocrity almost imperceptible, as metaphorical bridges are constructed between all content produced inside the undiscriminating context of the internet.

Upon clicking the ‘random’ button of Open Diary, I soon came across the diary of a thirty year old female ‘wolf’ currently residing in Texas (appearing under the pseudonym ‘Manitou Wolf’), where her ‘General Wolf Rules for Life‘ reads as a ten point manifesto that could benefit even the most sagacious Postmodernist artist or writer. Furthermore, this highlights the metaphorical ‘bridging’ of content that is only related through the digital and mental fluctuations of the net and it’s users, subjecting even one of the most eminent pieces of American literature (Howl) to the whims of the digital ideal-ego of the amateur author (me).

General Wolf Rules for Life

1. Eat
2. Rest
3. Rove in between
4. Render loyalty
5. Love the children
6. Cavil in moonlight
7. Tune your ears
8. Attend to the bones
9. Make love
10. Howl often

http://www.opendiary.com/entrylist.asp?authorcode=D378032

The internet interpolation of psychodrama that now plays out through the psychological extension of the blog, sees the rise of the fledgling Sovereign Self, that endeavors to make the world transparent, and as transparency implies lucidity, it nurtures the casual neurosis of understanding our personal environments enough to be able to control them with Faustinian enthusiasm.

The blog is Mephistopheles incarnate, dwelling in the private hell of the internet in search of susceptible minds, and although this has inevitably been a positive influence in the world of free press, and how we consume information more openly and frivolously, the sheer amount of data has become somewhat undigestible, and not only have we reached a metaphorical ‘endpoint’ of information, we have also been left with an eternal progression towards it’s critical mass. This is one of the obvious reasons behind the ‘re-approppraition culture’ of Postmodernism; founded upon cutting, copying, pasting, remixing and parodying, in every avenue of creativity. But as Mephistopheles warned Faust of the private hell that manifests itself as ego idealism (the blog) and unrequited knowledge (the internet), we must also understand the inevitable dangers of homogonising artistic content on the basis that our tools of expression are widespread, and appear ubiquitously as desktop illuminations.

If instead of a gallery in Berkley, Ginsberg had utilised the blog to satiate his ego-ideal, ‘Howl’ may have been submerged into the ‘Eternal Empty’ that Faust so desperately tried to avoid. Faust, ultimately, was saved by his constant striving to find greatness, and with the blog, we are offered the chance of momentary reprieve, and we are happy to sell and refund our souls infinitely into simulated Heaven.

Image : Wild Thornburry’s

You are invited to an exhibition curated by Ryan Gander and Christina von Rotenhan
at DIENSTGEBAEUDE, Zurich, CH.
Opening Thursday 9 February 6.00pm until Saturday March 17, 2012
Gallery Hours: Open Thursday – Saturday, 11am – 6pm and also by appointment

These young artists chosen for this exhibition are all exceptionally talented individuals,
who are British or live in Britain.They were asked to create an unique work of art for
this exhibition in only black and white.

This exhibition is a group show of 46 artists selected by the artist Ryan Gander:
Thomas Adank, Aaron Angell, Cornelia Baltes, Tom Bardwell, Jacqueline Bebb, Richard Bevan, Rachal Bradley, Alice Browne, Michael Burkitt, KIMI CONRAD, Edward Cotterill, Simon Davenport, Tim Davies, Tomas Downes, Steven Emmanuel, Alex Farrar, James Ferris, Robert Filby, Tom Gidley, Matt Golden, Tommy Grace, Anthony Green, Richard Healy, Dean Hughes, Max Hymes, Ann-Marie James, Rob Lye, Jessica Mallock, Harry Meadley, John Henry Newton, Jonathan O’Dwyer, Murray O’Grady, Barnie Page, Myles Painter, Sam Porritt, Lucia Quevedo, Dan Rees, Matthew Richardson, Jessica Sarah Rinland, Helen Robertson, Sven Sachsalber, Giorgio Sadotti, Iona Smith, The Hut Project, Santo Tolone, Jeanine Woollard.

‘Young British Art II’ is organized by Limoncello and follows the first installment that was held at the gallery in May 2011.
No other curatorial themes are intentionally related to this exhibition, any other meaning derived is purely circumstance or coincidence.
Dienstgebaeude
Toepferstrasse 26
8045 Zurich
www.dienstgebaeude.ch

Limoncello
15a Cremer Street
London E2 8HD

+44 (0)20 7739 2363

limoncello@limoncellogallery.co.uk
www.limoncellogallery.co.uk

26th January through 02nd of February 2012

B.C. are delighted to present B.C. #2, a group exhibition by some of the world’s most exciting new artists, at Mexico Project Space, Leeds. Here 29 artists were asked to create black and white artworks which have been photocopied onto A2 size fluorescent paper. The artists have consented to their work being liberally distributed by submitting the artwork via e-mail as a digital image, then allowing the curators to create the final artwork. This adds to the overall effect of this very unique exhibition.  Each artwork will be widely available, and in a format that many would regard as throw-away— what effect does this have on the value of the artwork?

www.bazandchaz.com
www.m-e-x-i-c-o.co.uk

At a Digital Arts in Education conference, not so long ago a few questions were posed.
The first question was: “How should we prepare ourselves for the rapidly increasing
demand for software creativity?”  This question captured my attention mainly because
of the way it was phrased. I understood that the questioner deliberately placed the word
“software” before the word “creativity” to emphasize the needs of creative people in the
highly specialized field of software art. We often formulate subcategories of art, such as
painting, graphic design, net art, software art…etc. Is it also possible to classify creativity
in a similar way? Or, does being creative simply mean being capable of going beyond the
generally perceived limitations of media and generating original and imaginative ideas
and outcomes?

The second question was:  ”How can we find balance between creativity and technology
instructions in digital arts courses?” I wish I had answers to this question. Everyone to
whom I have spoken, who is teaching digital art and design, has been seeking solutions
to this dilemma. In his paper, “Design Education in the Post Digital Age,” Professor
John Maeda from MIT clearly articulated what has evidently become a quandary for
many educators. He said, “The consensus heard in the field is that there is no time to
teach design when teaching the digital tools has become a fulltime job.”

Both of these questions represent challenges that many digital art educators are facing
today. My purpose here is to examine the nature of digital media within the context of
digital arts education. Within the context of this discussion, “digital art” is a generalized
term meant to include both fine art and applied art.

Discussion: Can Techies be Creative?

In today’s digital arts curriculum, students often learn how to be creative in art classes,
and then spend time in technical courses learning how to use computers to actualize
their concepts and ideas. Compartmentalizing creativity and technology in this way
has subordinated the role of digital technology, perhaps to the detriment of both. Digital
technology has, perhaps more often than not, been relegated to being a mere assemblage
of tools or production skills. The unfortunate result is that students whose main objective
is to produce art often learn digital technology, and even master software applications
such as Photoshop, Flash or After Effects while failing to grasp the principles that
underlie the technology they utilizing with such apparent proficiency. And perhaps
more significantly, the possibilities inherent in new technology are rarely explored
because technology is generally not being presented as an area in which creative
expression is solicited or even welcome.

Another example of the failure to capitalize on art students’ innate creativity is the way
in which Web design is being taught in colleges. Students of art and design often take
Web classes simply in order to learn to use Web design software packages such Flash,
Adobe Muse, DreamWeaver or FrontPage. The general consensus is that these students
learn art and design in their major courses, and that once they master the use of software
programs, they will have all the tools they need to become “Web Designers” or “Net Artists.”
Yet core Internet communication and media concepts, such as usability, user participation,
motion, navigation, and screen-based typography, are rarely introduced or discussed.
Without a true understanding of Web principles, these artists and designers are capable
of little beyond digitizing their analog concepts into file formats that can be put onto a
server. Given this state of affairs, it is hardly surprising that our “WebScape” resembles
a bunch of electronic brochures linked together, rather than the true virtual environment
it has the potential to become.

The current conceptual “disconnect” between technology and art in digital art education
seems to be predicated on the idea that those who specialize in technology cannot be creative
and that truly creative artists cannot and need not extend their creativity to the technological
arena. In order for the new generation of digital artists to gain a complete understanding of
the characteristics and principles of the technology they are using, and to thus become capable
of applying creativity to the technological arena, we must begin to take concrete steps to integrate
art and technology in the digital arts curriculum.

I look forward to your thoughts and comments.

Next Week Part 2: Challenges Integrating Art & Technology In The Digital Arts Curriculum.

My |krē-āˈtivitē| Recipe.

Since I was a child I’ve been fascinated with the creative world. It is also when I’ve started my journey to explore myself as a creative individual. I’ve learned many things, some more unexpected than others, about myself and about my creative habits.
The list is long, always evolving and includes for example: music, smell of the wind, sound of the rain, cracking fire in the fireplace, silence and mysteriousness of a night, chocolate, tea, freshly brewed coffee, as well as moods of the city, a rock concert or opera. I also found that when in a creative mess nothing else, but cleaning of my surroundings brings harmony to my creative activities.

I was convinced that I have my creativity more than less under control. Until just recently when I found myself creatively numb, and all of the old tricks that used to work up to that moment, failed. I was burned out and desperate to find a way out from that dark place. With my home sparkling clean and my creativity still buried under a pile of ashes, I was forced to look for some new ways to find inspiration to free my creativity.
I decided to come up with a new, different strategy – cooking. I pulled out my magical cooking books and I started the crusade. I cooked, I broiled, I stewed, I grilled and I baked. I did feel a bit better, but I also wondered how many pounds later I will find my light in the tunnel. The rescue, however, came from a bit unexpected and somewhat forgotten direction. It wasn’t until one quiet night, when reading an email from my dear childhood friend about her experience with making bread, when for the first time in a long time, I felt a wonderful excitement about creating something. That was it! Suddenly I had this exuberant urge to make bread. I was inspired! I thought to myself that this is it – my light in the tunnel. If I could teach myself how to make an old style sourdough bread, I could definitely force myself out of the dead creative zone. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I had to make bread. It took some research and planning to gather and select the right recipe, most appropriate techniques, ingredients, and tools to make the perfect sourdough peasant bread.

I have to admit making bread is a long and demanding process, but I had to be very patient. I did not rush, I did whatever it took to face this challenge and to succeed. As the smell of the bread baking in the oven filled my home I found myself working on my design projects. It worked. It’s been about 4 months since I made my first bread, but I can still remember the smell and the taste of it. I‘ve been making bread at least once a week since.

It is difficult to point out what aspect of bread making in particular helped me snap out of the creative numbness. Was it just the challenge itself? The excitement of discovering and learning something I’ve never done before? Finally finding inspiration and courage to do what I wanted to do for years? Perhaps all of the above with addition of one more fact: when we cook we use all 5 of our senses, therefore it is extremely creative and stimulating process. Maybe it is safe to say that when one of the senses is unresponsive, using any of the other senses can help to unlock it, stimulate it. I have to admit with full confidence that cooking and bread making in particular, not only make me hungry, but most of all inspire me as a designer.

I have never before tried to compare design with cooking or bread making, but I can’t stop thinking how much they have in common and how much one can affect the other. A secret to a delicious dish or a great design is in the right recipe, ingredients, proportions, and techniques. When selecting the tools for cooking and for design we have to consider what is appropriate, what can help us achieve the goal without scarifying too much in the process. I make my bread with my hands using all natural ingredients, clay pots and wooden spoons so the bread tastes better and reminds me of the bread my great-grandmother used to make, a taste long forgotten by the commercial bakers. I believe that we can easily apply it to the design too. The new technology makes a life of a designer much easier, we can produce things much faster, but as a result the design often lacks the uniqueness of a one of a kind hand made piece. We should remember that old school tools and methods were used to create some timeless icons of design, so we should not be afraid to use them. All of the above combined with innovative ideas and patience hide secrets to unforgettable delicious dished as well as great design.

The major difference in the process of cooking or bread making and design is how do I know that it is ready. In cooking it is simple to control it, in design it is much harder to recognize when the work is overcooked, undercooked or it is just al dente. I guess I should continue my journey, perhaps spend some more hours in the kitchen, to find the answer to this question.

Written by: Aga

ReVision Arts Gallery — Voyeurism

From the French voyeur, “one who looks” can take several forms, but its principal characteristic is that the voyeur does not normally relate directly with the subject of their interest, who is often unaware of being observed. In our current state of technology and our involvement of many aspects of Social Media, we have come to an impasse of what is considered “private.” The submitted work is a commentary on what it means to be a voyeur in a world where everything is shared.

Their art (and written words) will soon be featured on the ReVision Arts Gallery Site; due to launch at the close of November ’11.

(Selected art work by Adam Cruces for ReVision Arts)

1. 
YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE.
This is a curious rule and it took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required that you didn’t particularly like the people that you worked for or at least maintained an arms length relationship to them, which meant that I never had lunch with a client or saw them socially. Then some years ago I realised that the opposite was true. I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle.

2. 
IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB.
One night I was sitting in my car outside Columbia University where my wife Shirley was studying Anthropology. While I was waiting I was listening to the radio and heard an interviewer ask ‘Now that you have reached 75 have you any advice for our audience about how to prepare for your old age?’ An irritated voice said ‘Why is everyone asking me about old age these days?’ I recognised the voice as John Cage. I am sure that many of you know who he was – the composer and philosopher who influenced people like Jasper Johns and Merce Cunningham as well as the music world in general. I knew him slightly and admired his contribution to our times. ‘You know, I do know how to prepare for old age’ he said. ‘Never have a job, because if you have a job someday someone will take it away from you and then you will be unprepared for your old age. For me, it has always been the same every since the age of 12. I wake up in the morning and I try to figure out how am I going to put bread on the table today? It is the same at 75, I wake up every morning and I think how am I going to put bread on the table today? I am exceedingly well prepared for my old age’ he said.

3. 
SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.
This is a subtext of number one. There was in the sixties a man named Fritz Perls who was a gestalt therapist. Gestalt therapy derives from art history, it proposes you must understand the ‘whole’ before you can understand the details. What you have to look at is the entire culture, the entire family and community and so on. Perls proposed that in all relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing towards one another. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

4
. PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT.
Early in my career I wanted to be professional, that was my complete aspiration in my early life because professionals seemed to know everything – not to mention they got paid for it. Later I discovered after working for a while that professionalism itself was a limitation. After all, what professionalism means in most cases is diminishing risks. So if you want to get your car fixed you go to a mechanic who knows how to deal with transmission problems in the same way each time. I suppose if you needed brain surgery you wouldn’t want the doctor to fool around and invent a new way of connecting your nerve endings. Please do it in the way that has worked in the past.
Unfortunately in our field, in the so-called creative – I hate that word because it is misused so often. I also hate the fact that it is used as a noun. Can you imagine calling someone a creative? Anyhow, when you are doing something in a recurring way to diminish risk or doing it in the same way as you have done it before, it is clear why professionalism is not enough. After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal.

5. 
LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE.
Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the history of the world. If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and everything else. However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’

6. 
STYLE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED.
I think this idea first occurred to me when I was looking at a marvellous etching of a bull by Picasso. It was an illustration for a story by Balzac called The Hidden Masterpiece. I am sure that you all know it. It is a bull that is expressed in 12 different styles going from very naturalistic version of a bull to an absolutely reductive single line abstraction and everything else along the way. What is clear just from looking at this single print is that style is irrelevant. In every one of these cases, from extreme abstraction to acute naturalism they are extraordinary regardless of the style. It’s absurd to be loyal to a style. It does not deserve your loyalty. I must say that for old design professionals it is a problem because the field is driven by economic consideration more than anything else. Style change is usually linked to economic factors, as all of you know who have read Marx. Also fatigue occurs when people see too much of the same thing too often. So every ten years or so there is a stylistic shift and things are made to look different. Typefaces go in and out of style and the visual system shifts a little bit. If you are around for a long time as a designer, you have an essential problem of what to do. I mean, after all, you have developed a vocabulary, a form that is your own. It is one of the ways that you distinguish yourself from your peers, and establish your identity in the field. How you maintain your own belief system and preferences becomes a real balancing act. The question of whether you pursue change or whether you maintain your own distinct form becomes difficult. We have all seen the work of illustrious practitioners that suddenly look old-fashioned or, more precisely, belonging to another moment in time. And there are sad stories such as the one about Cassandre, arguably the greatest graphic designer of the twentieth century, who couldn’t make a living at the end of his life and committed suicide.
But the point is that anybody who is in this for the long haul has to decide how to respond to change in the zeitgeist. What is it that people now expect that they formerly didn’t want? And how to respond to that desire in a way that doesn’t change your sense of integrity and purpose.

7. 
HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN.
The brain is the most responsive organ of the body. Actually it is the organ that is most susceptible to change and regeneration of all the organs in the body. I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have. I was fascinated by a story in a newspaper a few years ago about the search for perfect pitch. A group of scientists decided that they were going to find out why certain people have perfect pitch. You know certain people hear a note precisely and are able to replicate it at exactly the right pitch. Some people have relevant pitch; perfect pitch is rare even among musicians. The scientists discovered – I don’t know how – that among people with perfect pitch the brain was different. Certain lobes of the brain had undergone some change or deformation that was always present with those who had perfect pitch. This was interesting enough in itself. But then they discovered something even more fascinating. If you took a bunch of kids and taught them to play the violin at the age of 4 or 5 after a couple of years some of them developed perfect pitch, and in all of those cases their brain structure had changed. Well what could that mean for the rest of us? We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain. I am convinced that if someone was to yell at me from across the street my brain could be affected and my life might changed. That is why your mother always said, ‘Don’t hang out with those bad kids.’ Mama was right. Thought changes our life and our behaviour. I also believe that drawing works in the same way. I am a great advocate of drawing, not in order to become an illustrator, but because I believe drawing changes the brain in the same way as the search to create the right note changes the brain of a violinist. Drawing also makes you attentive. It makes you pay attention to what you are looking at, which is not so easy.

8. 
DOUBT IS BETTER THAN CERTAINTY.
Everyone always talks about confidence in believing what you do. I remember once going to a class in yoga where the teacher said that, spirituality speaking, if you believed that you had achieved enlightenment you have merely arrived at your limitation. I think that is also true in a practical sense. Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you from being open to experience, which is why I find all firmly held ideological positions questionable. It makes me nervous when someone believes too deeply or too much. I think that being sceptical and questioning all deeply held beliefs is essential. Of course we must know the difference between scepticism and cynicism because cynicism is as much a restriction of one’s openness to the world as passionate belief is. They are sort of twins. And then in a very real way, solving any problem is more important than being right. There is a significant sense of self-righteousness in both the art and design world. Perhaps it begins at school. Art school often begins with the Ayn Rand model of the single personality resisting the ideas of the surrounding culture. The theory of the avant garde is that as an individual you can transform the world, which is true up to a point. One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty.
Schools encourage the idea of not compromising and defending your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usually all about the nature of compromise. You just have to know what to compromise. Blind pursuit of your own ends which excludes the possibility that others may be right does not allow for the fact that in design we are always dealing with a triad – the client, the audience and you. 
Ideally, making everyone win through acts of accommodation is desirable. But self-righteousness is often the enemy. Self-righteousness and narcissism generally come out of some sort of childhood trauma, which we do not have to go into. It is a consistently difficult thing in human affairs. Some years ago I read a most remarkable thing about love, that also applies to the nature of co-existing with others. It was a quotation from Iris Murdoch in her obituary. It read ‘ Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.’ Isn’t that fantastic! The best insight on the subject of love that one can imagine.

9
. ON AGING.
Last year someone gave me a charming book by Roger Rosenblatt called ‘Ageing Gracefully’ I got it on my birthday. I did not appreciate the title at the time but it contains a series of rules for ageing gracefully. The first rule is the best. Rule number one is that ‘it doesn’t matter.’ ‘It doesn’t matter that what you think. Follow this rule and it will add decades to your life. It does not matter if you are late or early, if you are here or there, if you said it or didn’t say it, if you are clever or if you were stupid. If you were having a bad hair day or a no hair day or if your boss looks at you cockeyed or your boyfriend or girlfriend looks at you cockeyed, if you are cockeyed. If you don’t get that promotion or prize or house or if you do – it doesn’t matter.’ Wisdom at last. Then I heard a marvellous joke that seemed related to rule number 10. A butcher was opening his market one morning and as he did a rabbit popped his head through the door. The butcher was surprised when the rabbit inquired ‘Got any cabbage?’ The butcher said ‘This is a meat market – we sell meat, not vegetables.’ The rabbit hopped off. The next day the butcher is opening the shop and sure enough the rabbit pops his head round and says ‘You got any cabbage?’ The butcher now irritated says ‘Listen you little rodent I told you yesterday we sell meat, we do not sell vegetables and the next time you come here I am going to grab you by the throat and nail those floppy ears to the floor.’ The rabbit disappeared hastily and nothing happened for a week. Then one morning the rabbit popped his head around the corner and said ‘Got any nails?’ The butcher said ‘No.’ The rabbit said ‘Ok. Got any cabbage?’

10. 
TELL THE TRUTH.
The rabbit joke is relevant because it occurred to me that looking for a cabbage in a butcher’s shop might be like looking for ethics in the design field. It may not be the most obvious place to find either. It’s interesting to observe that in the new AIGA’s code of ethics there is a significant amount of useful information about appropriate behaviour towards clients and other designers, but not a word about a designer’s relationship to the public. We expect a butcher to sell us eatable meat and that he doesn’t misrepresent his wares. I remember reading that during the Stalin years in Russia that everything labelled veal was actually chicken. I can’t imagine what everything labelled chicken was. We can accept certain kinds of misrepresentation, such as fudging about the amount of fat in his hamburger but once a butcher knowingly sells us spoiled meat we go elsewhere. As a designer, do we have less responsibility to our public than a butcher? Everyone interested in licensing our field might note that the reason licensing has been invented is to protect the public not designers or clients. ‘Do no harm’ is an admonition to doctors concerning their relationship to their patients, not to their fellow practitioners or the drug companies. If we were licensed, telling the truth might become more central to what we do.

Image: Milton-Glaser-by-Sam-Haskins