Posts Tagged ‘aesthetics’
“If it is not useful or necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to make it”*…
The Shakers, a millennial Christian sect founded in the mid-18th century, are characterized by their simple, communal lives… and their celibacy (as a product of which there are only three known Shakers alive today). That said, they had an outsized impact on design– now on display at Frank Gehry-designed Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany. Jane Enfield unpacks the Shakers’ legacy…
Vitra Design Museum is presenting The Shakers: A World In Making, an exhibition highlighting the enduring design principles of the 18th-century Shakers who prioritised utilitarianism, craftsmanship and ethics.
Designed by Milan studio Formafantasma, the exhibition spotlights the design legacy of the Shakers, a Protestant sect founded in England around 1747 whose members created unadorned and meticulously built architecture and furniture.
“Today, the relevance of Shaker principles feels more urgent than ever,” Vitra Design Museum curator Mea Hoffmann told Dezeen.
“Their approach to democratic design, combining utilitarian function with exceptional craftsmanship and ethical intent, offers a compelling alternative to the excesses of modern consumer culture.”…
… The historical works were created after the Shakers emigrated to the USA in 1774, where they established 18 communities from Kentucky to Maine and created pieces that set the tone for a utilitarian, wood-heavy trend that endures to this day.
Among Hoffmann’s highlights is an four-metre-long bench from 1855, which was designed as communal but gender-segregated seating for the traditional Shaker meetinghouse.
“Community and shared property were at the heart of Shaker life,” explained the curator.
“There’s something very compelling about the inherent proximity that comes from sitting together on a bench – you can’t help but feel your connection to the people around you.”
Also on display is an “elevator” shoe, created around 1890. The footwear was specially designed with a raised sole for a woman whose legs were of two different lengths to facilitate her mobility.
“The Shakers were dedicated to including all members in daily life and often adapted or created objects to allow everyone to contribute,” noted Hoffmann.
The curator emphasised that the exhibition strives to highlight the Shakers’ knack for embracing external influences despite their particular way of life, highlighting the sect as early adopters of electricity, indoor plumbing and telecommunications.
An object that reflects this is a 1925 radio designed by trailblazer Elder Irving Greenwood, who is said to have persuaded the Canterbury Shakers to install electricity throughout his New Hampshire community in 1909.
“It’s an interesting example of the Shakers’ openness to technological change and innovation,” reflected Hoffmann. “Although they retreated from the world, the radio demonstrates that this apparent division may have been far more permeable.”
“Beyond adopting existing technologies, the Shakers also engineered their own machinery, such as steam engines and specialised cutting devices, to streamline labour-intensive tasks,” continued the curator.
“As they mass-produced their standardised goods, they also developed the tools necessary to improve production.”…
… Considering the sect’s enduring visual language, Hoffmann described the Shakers as holding a “unique position within the design canon”.
“Although their object culture emerged from an organic craft tradition rather than a centralised design ideology, their work has had a lasting influence, particularly on 20th-century Scandinavian designers such as Kaare Klint and Børge Mogensen, and continues to inspire contemporary practitioners today,” said Hoffmann.
“In many ways, Shaker design anticipated modern aesthetics, though it was entirely unintentional,” concluded the curator. “It’s an interesting example of groups of people getting to similar places from very different starting points.”…
More (and more photos) at: “Shaker exhibition at Vitra Design Museum “feels more urgent than ever‘,” from @dezeen.com.
* Shaker maxim
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As we keep it simple, we might spare a thought for a contemporary of the earliest Shakers, Richard Lovell Edgeworth; he died on this date in 1817. A politician and writer, he is best remembered as an inventor (perhaps most notably– and Shaker-like– a turnip-cutter and a velocipede [an early bicycle]).
That said, Edgeworth was no Shaker. He was a member of the Lunar Society, an informal organization of Birmingham-based industrialists, scientists, and intellectuals that met regularly to discuss and share ideas relating to their (amny and various) fields of interest. Other members included Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, and James Watt.
And perhaps more tellingly, Edgeworth was anything but celibate: he married four times and fathered 22 children.
“Men have become the tools of their tools”*…
Visionary philosopher Bernard Stiegler argued that it’s not our technology that makes humans special; rather, it’s our relationship with that technology. Bryan Norton explains…
It has become almost impossible to separate the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences. Reality is parsed through glowing screens, unending data feeds, biometric feedback loops, digital protheses and expanding networks that link our virtual selves to satellite arrays in geostationary orbit. Wristwatches interpret our physical condition by counting steps and heartbeats. Phones track how we spend our time online, map the geographic location of the places we visit and record our histories in digital archives. Social media platforms forge alliances and create new political possibilities. And vast wireless networks – connecting satellites, drones and ‘smart’ weapons – determine how the wars of our era are being waged. Our experiences of the world are soaked with digital technologies.
But for the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, one of the earliest and foremost theorists of our digital age, understanding the world requires us to move beyond the standard view of technology. Stiegler believed that technology is not just about the effects of digital tools and the ways that they impact our lives. It is not just about how devices are created and wielded by powerful organisations, nation-states or individuals. Our relationship with technology is about something deeper and more fundamental. It is about technics.
According to Stiegler, technics – the making and use of technology, in the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our unique way of existing in the world, as distinct from other species, is defined by the experiences and knowledge our tools make possible, whether that is a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface such as Neuralink, or a prehistoric flint axe used to clear a forest. But don’t be mistaken: ‘technics’ is not simply another word for ‘technology’. As Martin Heidegger wrote in his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954), which used the German term Technik instead of Technologie in the original title: the ‘essence of technology is by no means anything technological.’ This aligns with the history of the word: the etymology of ‘technics’ leads us back to something like the ancient Greek term for art – technē. The essence of technology, then, is not found in a device, such as the one you are using to read this essay. It is an open-ended creative process, a relationship with our tools and the world.
This is Stiegler’s legacy. Throughout his life, he took this idea of technics, first explored while he was imprisoned for armed robbery, further than anyone else. But his ideas have often been overlooked and misunderstood, even before he died in 2020. Today, they are more necessary than ever. How else can we learn to disentangle the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences? How else can we begin to grasp the history of our strange reality?…
[Norton unspools Stiegler’s remarkable life and the development of his thought…]
… Technology, for better or worse, affects every aspect of our lives. Our very sense of who we are is shaped and reshaped by the tools we have at our disposal. The problem, for Stiegler, is that when we pay too much attention to our tools, rather than how they are developed and deployed, we fail to understand our reality. We become trapped, merely describing the technological world on its own terms and making it even harder to untangle the effects of digital technologies and our everyday experiences. By encouraging us to pay closer attention to this world-making capacity, with its potential to harm and heal, Stiegler is showing us what else is possible. There are other ways of living, of being, of evolving. It is technics, not technology, that will give the future its new face…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Our tools shape our selves,” from @br_norton in @aeonmag.
Compare and contrast: Kevin Kelly‘s What Technology Wants
* Henry David Thoreau
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As we own up, we might send phenomenological birthday greetings to Immanuel Kant; he was born on this date in 1724. One of the central figures of modern philosophy, Kant is remembered primarily for his efforts to unite reason with experience (e.g., Critique of Pure Reason [Kritik der reinen Vernunft], 1781), and for his work on ethics (e.g., Metaphysics of Morals [Die Metaphysik der Sitten], 1797) and aesthetics (e.g., Critique of Judgment [Kritik der Urteilskraft], 1790).
But Kant made important contributions to mathematics and astronomy. For example: his argument that mathematical truths are a form of synthetic a priori knowledge was cited by Einstein as an important early influence on his work. And his description of the Milky Way as a lens-shaped collection of stars that represented only one of many “island universes,” was later shown to be accurate by Herschel.
Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, at all times also as an end, and not only as a means.
“Man’s first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one”*…
From the new series, “Conjectures,” in the invaluable Public Domain Review, a piece by Octavian Esanu…
What do we want from “school”? Knowledge, surely. But other things too. Experience, perhaps? — the vibrating sense of having been present as new thinking happened, of having been affected by an encounter with ideas? Certain kinds of teaching and learning, anyway, privilege that vaunted nexus of knowing and being. Early in the first session of his seminar on Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, the American Marxist literary scholar Fredric Jameson asserts, here below, that “aesthetics” can be thought of as precisely a project that lies “halfway between the cognitive and the artistic” — which is to say, it is the enterprise of trying to understand (conceptually) that which seems to elude reduction to concepts (because we are, somehow, there in aesthetic experiences; and we are not conceptual!). By meticulously translating his recordings of Jameson’s seminars into the theatrical idiom of the stage script, the artist and scholar (and former Jameson student) Octavian Esanu doubles down, playfully and tenderly, on this deep problem. Pedagogy as performance? Teaching and learning, about art — as a work of art?
Series editor D. Graham Burnett‘s introduction
An experiment with historical form and method: “[Door creaks open. Footsteps]: Fredric Jameson’s Seminar on Aesthetic Theory,” from @PublicDomainRev.
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As we investigate the ineffable, we might send absolutist birthday greetings to Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury; he was born on this date in 1588. A father of political philosophy and political science, Hobbes developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be “representative” and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid– all this, though Hobbes was, on rational grounds, a champion of absolutism for the sovereign. It was that, Hobbes reasoned, or the bloody chaos of a “war of all against all.” His 1651 book Leviathan established social contract theory, the foundation of most later Western political philosophy.
Indeed, it was in some large measure Hobbes (and his legacy) that Adorno’s Frankfurt School colleagues Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse (et al.) were working to revise.
“Fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life”*…
Need assistance in selecting that armor– in identifying your aesthetic? Aesthetics Wiki is here to help…
Our wiki is a comprehensive encyclopedia of online and offline aesthetics! We are a community dedicated to the identification, observation, and documentation of visual schemata…
From Acid Pixie to Zombie Apocalypse, dozens and dozens of “looks” and ways-of-being, each described, illustrated (both visually and with examples from TV/movies, music, and books), and cross-referenced to related trends (or vibes or whatever): “List of Aesthetics“
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As we browse, we might encounter Neo-Romanism… and recall that it was on this date in 31 BCE that the forces of Octavian defeated the forces of Cleopatra and Mark Antony in the War of Actium, the last civil war of the Roman Republic. As a result, Cleopatra and Mark Antony fled to Egypt (where Octavian’s forces cornered them the following year), and ultimately committed suicide. Octavian was rewarded for bringing peace by being named Augustus and the first Roman emperor beginning the transformation of the Republic into the Roman Empire.
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”*…
… and vice versa. Case in point: the new Orange County Museum of Art. On the one hand…
[architect Thom Mayne of the firm Morphosis] created something that is as much a civic plaza as it is a building. The outdoor public space seems to sweep up and glide across the top of the museum, taking up a full 70% of its roof, dissolving any sense that it is a closed and private thing; nor is this mere advertising, since admission is to be free for the next 10 years. Access to the rooftop plaza is by means of a broad flight of stairs, which Mr. Mayne says was inspired by that of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. In fact, it is less a staircase than an amphitheater. At the same time, the building is handsomely detailed, with textured ceramic panels that give the facade a pleasant sense of physical reality…
“The Best Architecture of 2022,” Michael J. Lewis, Wall Street Journal
On the other hand…
Nowhere is the gulf between digital promise and physical fact more spectacularly evident than at the new Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in California, which stands as a $94m (£77m) hymn to the difference between render and reality. From a distance, its sinuous white flanks buckle and bend with the trademark fractured geometries of its architects, the Los Angeles practice Morphosis. The facade rears up around a corner, folding in on itself to embrace a roof terrace, with a similar wayward energy to the torqued steel plates of a rusty Richard Serra sculpture that stands outside.
But, as you approach the building, you see that the ruptured, splintered aesthetic goes beyond the sculptural moves alone. Sheets of buckled steel are screwed crookedly against the edge of the undulating facade, hastily cut tiles have been fitted with wonky abandon, while other parts of the building are literally held on with tape. A temporary clamp keeps part of a soffit from falling down, while glass balustrades lean at precarious angles, their oversized steel fixing plates bolted with Frankenstein glee. The shop of horrors continues inside, where sheets of painted foam-board stand in place of steel coping, cracked glass floors line precipitous aerial walkways, and suspended ceilings appear to have been cobbled together from whatever leftover bits were lying around. The US construction industry isn’t known for its attention to detail, but this is something else…
“‘An unfinished Frankenstein’s monster’: the disastrous new Orange County Museum of Art,” Oliver Wainwright, The Guardian
* Proverb
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As we tackle taste, we might recall that it was on this date in 1958 that The Chipmunks— Alvin, Simon, and Theodore (aka Ross Bagdasarian, aka David Seville)– released “The Chipmunk Song” (“Christmas Don’t Be Late”). The song won three Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Performance, Best Children’s Recording, and Best Engineered Record (that was non classical). It even reached the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles chart– the only Christmas record to top the chart spot until Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” dethroned it in 2019.
That said, when featured on American Bandstand‘s “Rate-A-Record” segment, it received the lowest possible rating—35– across the board.
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