I’ve been studying and practicing for what seems like a long time. I was formally trained, I’ve read about the history of the work in my field and I’ve traveled to other countries to study how other people practice. I’ve paid fairly close attention to what’s going on in the various professional communities that border my field, as well as how markets and media respond to this work. I have a reasonable summary handle on the historical scholarship, contemporary practices and even some of the critical theory that people have developed to explain some of the phenomenon and links between the field and the larger culture. But, even armed with these filters, I haven’t quite pinned down the nature of this work.
“Each generation that discovers something from its experience must pass that on, but it must pass that on with a delicate balance of respect and disrespect, so that the race — now that it is aware of the disease to which it is liable — does not inflict its errors too rigidly on its youth, but it does pass on the accumulated wisdom, plus the wisdom that it may not be wisdom.”1
Sometimes my work is about the elimination of error. A positivist spin may be that my work is about the creation and maximization of beauty, and recognizing error is how I evaluate my progress toward that goal. These might be errors in idea, in approach, in form, in color, in surface, in presentation, performance, or longevity. My primary tool to work through these provisional errors is the pencil. I’m an artist, I sketch through as many of my bad ideas as possible before I waste time in slower, more dimensional materials. I talk through my ideas with other people and give my students feedback on their ideas because I think it will help us to discard the ugly, useless and stupid — as well as point out the opportunities we’ve so far overlooked. But over the past few years I’ve been losing some of my faith in that process. Not just because the trends in art and design have rewarded the loose and intuitive, but because as I’ve gained more experience I’ve gotten better at seeing flaws in things I once thought perfect. As a young artist I thought that once my skills of observation and making improved, the quality of my work would improve. But the number of facets and flaws I can see have also increased.
What if errors aren’t avoidable? What if we can avoid them only by squinting or looking away from them? What if they’re necessary? What if everything, (if looked at from particular formal, conceptual, material, ecological, functional, referential or narrative points of view) is always fallen?
Learning to do something the right way implies there is a wrong way. Sometimes those wrong ways (perhaps more numerous than the right) are a large part of the educational process in a new craft. Whether or not there was a stated injunction, once we see a defect, we point it out, we can talk about it, a decision can be made as to whether or not it is in need of correction, whether it is profitable to correct it and what various consequences of the revised widget might be. This is a skill. One of my favorite practical books as an undergraduate was Web Pages that Suck. Not just because it was entertaining, but because it was a rare critical idea at the time: showing and pointing out the bad in order to instruct us toward the good. Recognizing the relative quality of inputs and their manipulation is an important critical faculty — whether or not the project suggests that we should minimize or eliminate it.
What is it that I do and why do I do it?
“I craft dreams.”
“Because it’s what I am good at.”
“I make things that have never existed, that no one yet needs.”
“Because I took a co-op class in high school.”
“I teach students to be critically creative.”
“Because I had a great teacher.”
“I make jewelry.”
“Because of Calder.”
“I surprise people.”
“Because I like detail.”
“I make sense of the world.”
“Because I need the money.”
“Because someone inspired me.”
“I try to prove that I am smart.”
“Because I like working with my hands.”
“I pay attention to beautiful and surprising things.”
“Because there is so much to learn about.”
“I juxtapose incongruous elements from source material.”
“Because of Treasures of Tutankhamun.”
“I make things to be desired.”
“Because my work might survive me.”
The overall process that I tell people I follow, that I teach students to follow, is:
Research, Brainstorm, Ideate,
Design, Revise, Render,
Present, (Repeat ∞)
I identify formal problems and vacancies and try to solve and take advantage of them with new work. I look into a subject, try to find opportunities or new ideas based on that subject, go through a number of variations in quick succession, give something a provisional form, revise it, execute it in an appropriate fixed form and then document and present it to some audience — sometimes for feedback that will jump the process back to a previous point, or force me to abandon further iterations. Research, brainstorming, ideation, design, revision, rendering, presentation. Everything is recursive; I make lists of the things I want to learn and then lists of the things I need to learn to understand those things and then lists of things I need to learn to understand those things…
I make and consume non-verbal things for pretty much the same reasons; adventuring through and being surprised by little adjustments in ways of looking at things. I’m not making breakthroughs. I am trying to learn about the world I’m making work in through the products others design and the objects I’m making.
The seven steps in this process, when given two weeks for each, are perfect for a fifteen week college course. Research: investigate, read. Brainstorm: generate ideas, evaluate. Ideation: develop the best of them, discriminate. Design: give them shape, fit them into the world. Revise: interrogate, change. Render: give them form, presence. Present: tell everyone how you got there, take questions. But that process and that timing is both a contraction and an expansion of non academic workflows. It’s is a contraction because, for very complicated projects or for certain individuals, there will be many more steps (some of which will be substeps in a category related to those I’ve listed.)
Consider the design and construction of a skyscraper: there may be a small, initial team involved in conceptual research, brainstorming, ideation and design — and certainly they will do a lot of rendering and presentation to win the call for proposals — and they will often be specialists with particular expertise. So the process would need to expand in order to meet the needs of the project. The research, design, revision and rendering2 stages could very easily be meaningfully subdivided and augmented with additional stages, each with their own team of different specialists. Research, for instance, might be broken out into components that deal with the site, materials and manufacturing, usage and programming, visual design of the structure, energy use and physical plant issues and regulatory issues. While there is an implied reciprocity between design and revision that could logically include formal engineering concerns — for something like a skyscraper there could easily be more engineering and construction substages than there is work in any other stage — and they could be more expensive and persistent.3 Another implied stage in the design process that would likely be given insufficient expression using only these seven categories would be required approvals. While there are multiple points within the design of a shoe to have a manager sign off, the consequences of having to repeat work that hasn’t been signed off on would be relatively minor. For a large building, the consequences could be catastrophic.
Seven stages are also an expansion of real workflows; for many people and for smaller projects, there is little mental or formal separation between these stages. The steps of brainstorming and ideation seem especially artificial if I consider the way an oil painting might come into being. There are artists who do exhaustive studies that might be considered separately as brainstorming when they are loose and then be called ideation as they approach what is eventually cartooned onto the canvas. But, to the extent that most artists do a lot of preparatory work in ideation, they are either doing it in their heads or through repetition in their primary materials. Revision is something more organic for some of us, (with small, non-articulated changes based on instinct, experience and feedback.)4 While someone building a one of a kind chair might tweak some detail as they are shaving the spokes, it’s far more likely that some details will be revised in the next chair. There is a lot of individual and circumstantial variability to the stages of developing an idea and thing — but it’s reasonable to assume that the smaller the project (in scale, in time, in resources needed to develop it,) and the more experienced the developer (in practice, through accumulated standards, in well chosen constraints,) the more organic and indivisible these stages might be.
A scaffolded process makes us feel like we are in control, that we are approaching problems systematically — breaking them into smaller pieces, combining approaches to each and reaching reasonable solutions algebraically. But the clockwork isn’t always the same.
I don’t follow that recipe precisely. The stages in the design process I teach have been borrowed from other people who have articulated their process, but my actual work product does not go through each in that order and with equal intensity. Few people probably go through any process, over their lifetime, applying the same steps in the same order.
Let’s imagine that I’ve decided to work on a new widget. The first deviation from the process comes at the first step — I likely started my research years before the idea came up to make this widget. I read and watch and do things that can (tangentially at least) inform the work I tend to be involved in making.5 So, the moment the project idea comes to me, I already have a few books of pop social science and historical fiction, a few thousand photographs of great and crap benchmarks, video and more photos of phenomenological references that might be able to be brought into the widget, memories of cracked objects and metal buildings and brick streets and tree roots from local and exotic locales. These will need to be augmented with particular research, of course. So the category of research still exists for me to go through, but it doesn’t exist for me the way that it exists for my students, or for someone taking on a project that is completely novel for them. I have both a habit of finding and consuming new research materials, as well as existing data that can be cross referenced with those inputs. My new widget will likely be iterated, designed and rendered using the same pipeline, dozens of times, without approval.6 So my edits in the revision stage will also show up in the design and ideation stages. There would be a render2 stage that could be differentiated as a final version, that would likely go through additional finishing stages; but I could be rendering/making provisional versions of my widget within hours of brainstorming on my (continuing or purpose-accumulated) research. Most of the time spent researching and brainstorming ideas is letting the information attach to other ideas i’ve stored in some ordered or casual spot; which is why I have to do it a little bit at a time, all the time. If I’ve worked on a similar widget before, my mind is already a magnet for information in the category — sucking things in that might be of use well before I commit to developing a new one. But information is also ammunition, so pointing it at yourself can be a little dangerous.
A lot of us are really impressed with complex, sophisticated work. On one edge is the incredibly time consuming, along another is work that seems to flow effortlessly into complication. Especially in novels, good craft shows through illustration — we are shown what is important with skilled marks/phrases. I loved every single reference to pressures and gauges and gasses in the rockets of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. They helped sell the revisionist pornanoia. The author came to the sources for that quite honestly; he studied physics at Cornell, he served in the Navy and he was a technical writer for Boeing. This fulfills the ‘write what you know’ maxim pretty well — but that doesn’t help so much with the narrative proper. Pynchon could know WW2 by reading and from the generation just before him that fought through it, but that just provides the background. The foregrounds, the subjects drenched in thick, nerdy, erect detail, were lyric ooze. The specific and factual grounded the fantastic. Strip away the historical flashbacks, the science and the war itself and we are left with characters who have no motivation — breathing vacuum. So the sophistication works — it provides an integrated set of objects that can’t be removed without the entire structure crumbling. That can only be said about art of the very highest quality — but most of the work to the left of that curve could be disassociated and recombined ad nauseam. Most ornamentation is a moiré masking ugly form.
My oscillating focus is on a fuzzy, idiosyncratic matrix of source documentation. What is not in the record is not in the world7 — but what is not efficiently tagged in the metadata may be found, in purgatory. My studio bursts with evidence of things that might one day make arguments or jewels. Each object, source, note, mutation, sketch, version, amputation, comment, abortion, junkheap, success is compulsively saved — though not necessarily with the flags that will allow me to catch back up to it later. The books in my library are among the most organized of these fonts; which is to say that my literature-galactica has expanded out into only about five places. They started out on a single shelf, but cascaded into islands at each of the places where I might want to read or refer to things made of purple plastic or examples of stainless stampings or the supporting walls of crumbling art schools in Cuba.
My collection of toys is an entropic corpus — what started as a small study collection, related to toys about craft processes, grew manic as I started to consume the various versions that were produced throughout the twentieth century. And then I proceeded to adopt didactic toys in general, to acquire spare parts I might never need, and now they’re packed three layers deep — on shelves that go from floor to ceiling in two rooms. The dark matter filling the gaps between the books and toys is made of old laptops, stethoscopes, boxes of test tubes, Trans Am parts, vintage software and industrial scraps (things that might be tools or found forms for new projects — most of which will never be used.) These storage habits bookend my widget making — a database queried during research phases. I build up my stores as I’m ideating and I pull or push at its margins every time I pass a thrift shop. Purges happen only when the shelves start to bend.
“Art is as notoriously resistant to both measurement and management as it is powerful in its effect.”8
Alva Noë argued that art removes things from their expected settings and, “in making them strange,” we bring “out the ways and textures of the embedding that had been taken for granted. A work of art is a strange tool, an alien implement.”9 Design, on the other hand, generally aims to humanize the alien — to use process to investigate the person and deliver something surprising; pleasurable but accessible. Design makes the machine seem to have been born. While it generally hides the manipulation as well as fine art does, it is no less artificial. The products of our labor are all naturally synthetic; modern habits built on a million years of instinct pressed against invention.
Our species creates order and stores it in grids, the most basic of which is the list. We inventory what we have to see what we are missing, to make a place for things that we might need later. “What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible…we make lists because we don’t want to die.”10 So it probably is with creating anything new — we consume and make because we live. Our ideas are molded into things using a technology called organization. Entering data into a grid, reading the tables and pulling things out to place them next to things pulled from other sources is always done with low confidence but high consequence.
Variations within an organized system can account for the compression of processes into kernels that encase, obscure and support their code; allowing them to shrink until they seem automatic or to inflate until each stage requires teams and meetings to handle the complexity. Look into the sky: our stars, planets and galaxies appear to be moving — and in some ways they are in motion. But what we see is largely the result of the motion of our planet; which is itself the result of the pull of our sun. The sun moves because of the pull of other stars and galaxies, it pulls them — and all of it inflates under the influence of geometric and quantum gravity.
Following my intuition I might arrive at some particular mechanism for a new widget in a flash. Another way of saying that is: after years of looking at various mechanisms and with the amount of experience I’ve accumulated working on similar projects, I had a new idea when I didn’t happen to be in my studio trying to solve that particular problem. Other mechanisms might be arrived at by more formally stepping through the design process. I might spend some time studying the requirements of the opening, even questioning whether a mechanism of that type is even called for — or whether I can solve the problem in some other mechanical way? Then I can survey the products of other objects in the same class, the way I might mimic nature to solve such a problem,11 the available off-the-shelf solutions, custom materials, iterate through some ideas on paper, test the best of them, commit them to material, do some more testing and make changes, etc.
Utilizing this design thinking says little about the quality of that thinking;12 I could have had a useful insight intuitively or rigorously or anywhere in between. The difference between intuition and a calculated solution can be as much about perspective and style as anything else; though we might have a semantic preference for procedural or metaphysical explanations. The primary advantage of the intuitive approach is that it sounds good, is fast and might work well for some people who use it (probably individuals working on self directed, speculative projects.) The primary advantage of a more formal and segmented approach is that it sounds good, is transparent and might work better for some people and projects (probably teams.) And there are exceptions and variations and parallel systems of processes that may each be useful if they produce results that someone is willing to pay for or continue using. A way to assess this may be — was the intuition or process useful? In watching the stars move, did you identify the actual motion at work or did you mistake the Earth for a stationary center — and what are the long and short term consequences of that view?
If there is an opposite type to myself, it is whoever readily embraces the happy accident. I might make them, but I am not happy about them. I want to control my process, not have it control me. My system for accomplishing this, at least in my mind, is the illusion of independent variable control. It is limited control, sure — but with some interpolation it is useful.
“Not without deep sorrow do we admit to ourselves that artists of all times, at their most inspired, have transported to a heavenly transfiguration precisely those ideas that we now know to be false: artists glorify man’s religious and philosophical errors...”13 I work in the way that I do because I want to be involved with things that reflect my values, to make things that are examined, innovative and beautiful. And I have come to think of the elimination of chance and mistakes as an ethic. But the more I look at the world, the more I read, the more people I talk to and the more I think about what I’m doing and ask myself why I do it and what it means — the less convinced I am that what I see is what is there, the less convinced I am that anything I know is free of glorified error. Fine jewelers will often use reflective surfaces to distract people from the shortcomings in their work; art-jewelers try the same thing with sandblasters and dark patinas and generalized weirdness. Everyone has some way of mitigating weakness at some stage in their process. The crafting of concepts is perilous; the combinations of variables and operations, normal to one another, outnumber animistic gods. The crafting of composition seems a little more stable. (Although calculating the bond dissociation strengths between certain formal and conceptual elements can be difficult.) The crafting of material seems relatively easy to control by comparison. Once silver is chosen, communicating anything that silver doesn’t say is improbable. Once casting is chosen, anything better said in sheet, tube, or forged rod will remain unsaid. No matter how many hammer marks we leave, no matter what we electroplate it with, no matter how well we polish it, it will always mean silver.
There is no ne plus ultra, not even in the mind.
Even surfaces are imperfect — they are all swirled and scratched, with seams and bubbles and pits — before you even get to the ugly choices their designers made in terms of color, pattern and intentionally imparted texture.14 Forms often perform poorly, or have reasonable utility while failing to signify their affordance to the user. Materials fail in sunlight, under stress, or to adequately engage people who might have fallen in love with them if the right matter had been located. But even when all these variables are exceptionally attended to, the premise that we build an object on can be flawed. That is, the content and context and purpose and history and influence and perspective of the things used as sources are as likely as the objects they inform to be ill-considered in subtle or serious ways. It may be that every source, when scrutinized closely enough or from far enough away, is questionable. And building on top of these sources is an opportunity to explore, but also an opportunity to multiply the misunderstanding. Looking too deeply for meaning in our work and lives will always undermine it, bringing Sisyphus’ rock rolling back down on top of us. Meaning in our work is relative, provisional.
“Error does not carry any recognizable badge, for when we change our point of view, to focus on a different problem, what had been error may become information, and what had been information may become error.”15
Consider a cruciform pendant: no form or story, material or finish can rescue such a thing from the lack of any empirical basis for belief in the divinity of the Christ concept. So the mental and verbal symbol, as well as its material fabrication in jewelry or other forms, is laminated in this basic flaw. We can talk about how well it communicates this common myth, how innovative it is within the niche and beyond it. But we are building on apocrypha; we will misunderstand one or more interpretations of a gospel and we will apply our flawed retelling in a way that doesn’t serve the symbolic ends that either the dogma, designer; or potential wearer requires if they look closely enough. All of these can be evaluated; factually, aesthetically and in terms of their utility (to the individual, to the small and large group, to their god idea and to the planet,) but they won’t be able to iron out the basic problems in either the referent or references. It will always be difficult to apply two-state truth-values to our evaluations; they will be in between wrong and right — sometimes simultaneously occupying multiple states, depending on our perspectives on a single facet. But a cross won’t even come close to satisfying our interest in truth. It is an overtly mythological totem, but maybe its premise being in error is specific to its category.
A decade ago I stood in the studio of one of the most creative and well respected artists in my field, and they graciously brought out and showed us decades worth of their work. It was beautiful, well made, surprising in scale and material. They told us about the emotional and narrative content of the work; and my appreciation waned. It wasn’t that they weren’t a good storyteller, it’s that what they were showing and what they were saying were hopelessly incongruous. They thought the work was funny, but it was patently depressing. It was absurd, but not humorously. Because it was art, it’s probably easy to dismiss this as being a natural part of subjectivity. But, to the extent that art is about communication16, it seemed fairly obvious to me that even the best among us occasionally don’t know what our images mean to the people who read them.
Roads are paved error. They freeze and thaw, crack and break open to swallow us. Even when they are in good condition they are often crowded, or undergoing improvements that will soon disintegrate. They are amazing feats of engineering and labor, but they are also mechanisms that enable suburban flight. They can destroy habitats and they tend to be designed only for motor vehicles. To the extent that they are good for the latter they are not equally appropriate for vehicles of various sizes, and little systemic work is done to keep animals of various sizes from venturing into them. They are useful and destructive, a technology that enables a civilization that is itself compelling and violent, beautiful and unfair. Roads allow a type of freedom and adventure, and they underwrite whole segments of our economy. One might be better than another by various measures, but they are all expensive, regressive things that allow people to drive in cars, enabling a significant amount of waste, property loss, suffering and death, as well as safety, speed, economy and possibility. But they are easy to excuse; maybe because we’ve been building on top of simple trails for hundreds, even thousands, of years.
Our food is a similar mix of modernity and tradition, though far simpler (at least physically) to rehabilitate or rebuild from scratch than roads. Eating is a more fundamental human need than driving, so criticism of a staple will quickly run into arguments about instinct. Ice cream, on the other hand, is obviously fairly modern — and eaten purely for pleasure. It is made from the milk of cows who are kept forcibly impregnated most of their lives before going to slaughter. Their daughters suffer the same fate. Their sons (not having been bred to become enough ‘beef’) go into sheds for a few months, are deprived exercise and are slaughtered to become veal. This milk is trucked to a plant where it is mixed with sugar; frozen; mixed with salt, ice and emulsifiers; packaged; trucked to a store; purchased; rushed home in a car; kept frozen in an electric freezer…until people eat it as a luxury that is no longer recognizable as milk, sugar, salt, and refrigeration. Because it is entirely wasteful, save the possible beneficial effect of increasing the movement of trade in the economy (so that more people can consume ice cream) it’s hard to see something of this type as being composed of anything but a bright flaw. Unless you look at it only from the point of view of the ice cream partisan.
Take a minute, open a few tabs in your web browser and perform some Google Image searches for a 1974 Volkswagen Golf, DeVos Place and Rodin’s Gates of Hell. They are in marginally different domains, each is loved by many people who are familiar with them and they can each be understood without difficulty on multiple levels. They are each resonant, original forms; each perform particular utilitarian and symbolic tasks and each is as flawed as it is triumphant. I’m not going to articulate all of the questionable features and histories and shapes of each, just to call out a few of the issues that come immediately to mind.
The 1974 Golf17 is the GenX hipster dream — it was a fun, practical, affordable, sporty, beachy, car that played minor roles in the mid 80’s films Thrashin’ and Can’t Buy Me Love. Its wedgy shape was designed by the same guy that eventually penned the DeLorean, Giorgetto Giugiaro. One of the many terms I have heard friends use about this car is that it’s minimal — it’s simple, boxy and doesn’t have a lot of the distractions of modern cars. And the boxiness was a trait that had some legs. It’s still seen, from the Scion XB to the Hummer to a Volvo. But another way of looking at its simplicity is that it was cheap, feeble and disposable. Some of these flaws are actually the charm that people see in them; they have the quirky, retro featureless features that I like in a manual typewriter. Some of my VW loving friends hate my favorite domestic brand, General Motors, largely because of the poor performing cars GM built while companies like VW were blowing up in our market. History matters. GM made some crap cars, VW made some good cars — and brand loyalty was born. In argument I can’t really use the fact that the many Pontiac Fieros I’ve owned have never caught fire to convince people that they should buy a used or new GM car. I have multiple friends who have early and late model VWs that they own because of the historical cuteness of cars like the Golf, and their perceptions of companies like GM as big, lazy, low quality polluters. They see VW (and BMW, Mercedes and Volvo) as an innovative, modern, fast, high-tech and high-value company — characteristics that we would all like to relate to. But that’s not what I see when I see a VW. Volkswagen’s and Porsche’s founder was a fervent Nazi. The Beetle’s design brief was written by Adolf Hitler18 and the first versions were built using Jewish and Gypsy slaves.19 While I am writing this, Volkswagen is embroiled in a scandal wherein they intentionally cheated on emissions tests in order not just to pass them, but to trick their customers into believing that their vehicles were exceptionally clean. We don’t just act in accordance with our gut on these things, we choose what it important to us and make decisions — each of which involve compromises of various kinds and which could be looked at from different angles, with each showing different truths.
I was in Grand Rapids in 2002 as the DeVos Place convention center was being constructed along the Grand River, a few blocks from where I teach. Its grand opening was on Dec 20, 2003, but wasn’t complete until early in 2005. It was exciting to have a large exhibit hall, capable of hosting a small auto exhibition handed down from the monster auto show in Detroit, held weeks before. A little less exciting is the name; a branding opportunity for one of the right-wing billionaires in the region who founded Amway. DeVos Place has an atrium that is almost beautiful — with a winding series of planar chandeliers cutting through a multi story opening with a large walkway that looks down on the convention floor. But there is something awkward about it. Grand Rapids is waveform-crazy — much of what’s been built in the past 20 years has had an undulating water motif; from the city’s graphic design to its suburban airport, from the research hospital on top of Michigan Avenue to the DeVos Place on Monroe Street. If you look at the images of the DVP in your browser tab, the main form is a tense wave with a horrid kink at the top southwest edge as the convention space transitions into the atrium. It looks like half a fish with a broken neck. The DVP and its related venues serve the needs of the community, so far as I can tell. And it isn’t horribly ugly by local standards. But if you look a little closer, it’s a cable tied, typographically challenged, visual mess of a complex.20 This is, seemingly, surface error: just the shapes and skins are ill considered. No big deal. But given that a building of this kind has an outsized effect on the way this community is seen by those traveling here for conferences — the amateur styling reinforces perceptions of Midwest mediocrity.
Auguste Rodin worked on his commission for the Gates of Hell for almost forty years, dying before he finished them. When the first casting from the model was displayed in the Musee Rodin, they were thirty-four years late for the opening of a decorative arts museum that was never built. Its central figure, the Poet or Thinker, has become far more familiar to us than the sculptural menagerie it was crafted for.21 The gates are, at least in part, a meditation on or illustration of a set of gates in the Inferno — part of Dante Alighieri’s medieval epic poem, the Divine Comedy. On Dante’s gates are inscribed the words, as translated by Longfellow in the late 1800s:
“Justice incited my sublime Creator;
Created me divine Omnipotence,
The highest Wisdom and the primal Love.
Before me there were no created things,
Only eterne, and I eternal last.
All hope abandon, ye who enter in!”
And yet HF Cary translated the same low Italian in the early 1800s as:
“Justice the founder of my fabric mov’d:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none,
save things eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.”
There are scholars of Italian, Medieval literature and Dante who argue there are subtly different ways to take in the relative meanings of Dante’s short summary, “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.” By the middle of the twentieth century Dorothy Sayers said it was “Lay down all hope, all you who that go in by me.”22 Are these differences stylistic or substantive? What is the difference when it comes to poetry? We can imagine that this kind of thing is common to translation work in general; languages didn’t evolve in a manner that permits direct substitution of even words, let alone the meanings of sentences and paragraphs — and certainly not when those meanings are infused with the rhythm of verse, rhyming or not.
Rodin also worked from the relatively modern Baudelaire. In Hymn to Beauty, from Flowers of Evil,23 B wrote:
“From God or Satan? Angel, Mermaid, Proserpine?
What matter if thou makest — blithe, voluptuous sprite -
With rhythms, perfumes, visions — O mine only queen!
The universe less hideous and the hours less trite”
What did Rodin make of the original French version of this collection of poems? How did his attraction to Baudelaire’s work alloy with his reading of Dante? And besides these references, what else was he looking at, who was he speaking with, about what? How many of these things found their way into the density of his gates? And how many of them, from our point of view or from imagined perspectives in Rodin’s day, are logically bulletproof? Assuming they were tight, within their metaphysical domains anyway, how many of them became faithfully appropriated source materials in that they were represented in a way that corresponds to their original or translated meanings? Or were they used as antitheses for some portions, tensions off of which figures appeared to do dialectic battle? And then there is the quality of the castings, the patina, or the placement — most of which was done after the artist died (though using his wishes and his previous work as guides.) How do the choices made in each of those areas, along with the themes and intents, contribute to the accuracy of the gates — is it the translation of poetic ideas of hell to people walking through them?
The windows in the house where I live now are significantly better than the windows we had in the house I grew up in. More and bigger windows are better, right? If you live within sight of trees you want to see them, and windows seem like they are more efficient than light bulbs — the more windows, the more light. They are metaphors of transparency and modernity — the very building block of the marquee Apple Stores. The ones I am looking at are all double pane, have very sturdy trim, let in light in just the right places, and are in sizes that are easy to find reasonably priced shades for when we don’t want light or eyes looking in. But they will lose their argon gas as the seals slowly crack. We often fail to open the right ones at the right times to balance the entering sunlight in winter versus the cold escaping in summer due to the relatively low insulation. And they are significantly more expensive and wasteful to manufacture and replace than their timber and drywall based alternatives. Different glazing could be chosen, but there will always be a tradeoff for cost, efficiency, defense, or longevity.
Do any of these examples really prove that everything is in a state of error and imperfection, or just that I am being picky and judgmental? How about looking at something I love?
I own a Michael Graves can opener that I bought at Target in 2000. It is the perfect weight, easy to use, it has never broken or failed to open a can, is attractive, in a color that I love, feels great in the hand, is reasonably priced and is in my kitchen until I find something better — at which point it will go on the shelf in my studio. But a can opener assumes a can; a can assumes mines pulling iron, nickel and chromium out of the earth; a smelting plant pouring out ingots and rolling them into sheets of steel; each making mountains of waste in runoff and depleted coal. Those sheets will be rolled into tubes, factories will pack foodstuffs into them (some of which is likely the product of human and non-human suffering.) Trucks will carry the cans to a marketplace, that marketplace will heat and cool them until we come to collect them by spending money we earned doing tasks that do not challenge or nurture us to buy them. This is before we even get to how the can opener itself is made, how we got the can to our kitchen, how the food will be prepared and what will happen to it when our bodies have stripped the nutrients we can use from their contents.
Imagine a flowchart that diagrams each of these variables and the various decisions that need to be made in order to determine what, as well as whether and how, to do once we arrive at answers for can-based questions. For each of the variables I’ve listed there are likely many dependent questions and conditions. Let’s assume an input statement of “I’m hungry,” or “I’m going to be hungry;” even those can be critically examined. “Are you sure?” “What’s your BMI?” “Do you deserve food?” “Will feeding yourself contribute to personal goals or the greater good?” And while some suggest binary answers, all of them can be answered in ways that have either low confidence or otherwise send the deliberation mechanism into an infinite loop. There are principles of excluded thirds to consider, logically; but these are measures of propositional imperfection — not of the number of possible ways to evaluate the world. Most of us will avoid this perilous complexity by answering with our gut. But every one of the assumptional errors in the decision we are crafting around is still there; threatening to make the whole thing crumple. It’s a set of relatively fine distinctions that could go still finer, but each set is evidence of imperfection — of unwhole understandability on a continuum between marginal and total.
There are comedies, tragedies and dramas of error on everything worth recognizing. If not in the conception, then in the application. If not in the construction, then in the use. If not in the acting, then in the script. If not the script, then the playwright. If not the playwright, the stage, the theater, the entrance, the carpet… And these things are the play too — except to the extent that we can suspend our disbelief in them.
What is the veracity of a wild tree or a flower or a beaver? Probably, so long as they were not cultivated or manipulated by man, they are impervious to examinations of beauty, utility, or meaning — except as would fit a particular human purpose. We build machines, and they sometimes fail to live up to their specifications — nature, not as much. We could weigh it or put a ruler up next to something in nature, but what would we be comparing it to? One thing could be taller, heavier than the next — but what would that mean? While there will be various ways that their genes may be expressed, with both idiosyncratic and disfiguring mutations, I am not able to come up with a theory by which cellular things could be given truth-values that wouldn’t be humancentric; specifications set by the universe that have failed to be lived up to. The same would be true about wind, lakes, mountains and planets — their fitness for a task can only be judged in relation to something in our minds. These kinds of sources are likely only capable of misleading us the moment we start integrating them into logos, metaphors, or aluminum alloy wheel designs — when we try to make sense of them. Hobbes said that “Nature itself cannot err,” which sounds about right. What is susceptible to error, in these cases, isn’t so much the referent but the reference — the mental and physical links and morphings that happen as something crosses the transom from its province into ours.
Love is another special case. My daughter Memo was ten weeks old when I brought her home from the Ann Arbor Humane Society, nearly twelve years ago. She grew to sixty-five pounds and has been very healthy and gracious to the other animals that my wife and I have brought into our house over the years. I would stab someone in the face if they tried to hurt her — which is another way to say that I love her as much as I am capable of loving anyone. Can that love be queried in a way that could show its deficiency? If I were to use her as the source of a poem, could that source be shown to have a flawed premise? She exists, I say I love her, I could provide evidence of each thing24 and love is a common input for many creative activities. Love could be flawed — that is, it might be comparably small, large, useless, or destructive. It has greater immunity to argument than the something we made that could be measured with a reliable gauge, but because the love exists in our minds it could be measured — and could be usefully wrong to the level of confidence that we can measure any idea or emotion.
From some vantage nearly everything that humans make or participate in has a footprint that is larger or deeper or differently shaped than we might prefer if we were designing them in a clean room as deus ex machinas. This kind of truth, that our source materials are as imperfect as we are, is sometimes used as an excuse not to exercise control — to bend to nihilism. Carbon emissions from cars come to mind — a simplistic argument deflects all attempts at reform because there are no perfect systems (no sources of energy that do no damage.) None of this is to say that we need look for the perfect. While verifiability and repeatability are important ideas in engineering and science — even they can acknowledge and systematize variation of certain kinds.25 But they start by recognizing it, and then decide where their tolerances can and ought to be set. The things we haven’t or can’t control for, in creative activities, are often embraced — from useful noise to the subject of the work itself.
We are enterprises of error.
Reducing error in perception and action to its minimum possible level is the subject of many books on ethics, efficiency and education. The economy of errors that I’m talking about isn’t about industrial quality or safety or yield — it’s about fog. Every thing is made from other things, and we utilize our technologies to make the most of these compounds and fabrications. But we tend to see these procecsses only in the logical, functional, mechanistic relationships that entangle them with our needs. We can occasionally work production backward and embrace a ‘cradle to grave’ ecology. But we can’t as easily see how the things we can’t control contribute to its meaning.
The vision we lack isn’t optical, it’s cerebral. We tend to see in things what good writers and designers want us to — form, function, beauty. But we can’t see the misty contributions of chaos, the numbing outcomes of the vapid, the infantilizing influence of the bold, the nostalgic basis of waste, the men doing horrible things to one another, the demoralizing theft of novelty, the frustrations of choice and scarcity, the relationships between our noble work and the crimes of those we support with it, or how the ugly affects our individual and social psyches. Our work has causes and effects, as well as miasmatic interdependencies among what we do, why we love and when we are.
“First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then, what is the real nature of control?”26
Our objects are carriers of our Virtue and our Failure, and the analog states between V and F. But they carry each only so long as we continue to recognize them. When the light is on them, objects are base materials of sources, which become bodies, which influence us, that we use as tools to build yet more objects… But what if the interconnected ideas we build things on top of are mythical, incomplete, or false? What if the truths that we put at the center of our work turn out to be untruths, shallow impressions, or even deep un-understandings. What would that mean for the work? If we accept imperfection at the surface of an object, like cracks and color and texture variegation on a raku pot, would we dismiss whole vessels if a premise we based it on turned out to be confused, misleading or corrupt?
This might not be the kind of error we regret, the kind of thing that blows bubbles into our concrete (eventually allowing the building to fail.) It might be a kind of reinforcement (or necessary) sweeming-inert aggregate. Our imperfection-infused products are evidence that our confidence intervals are never 100%.
Everything we make is flawed, imperfect, incomplete; physically and semantically. Not because we have a perfect matrix to compare a thing to, nor necessarily because we have faith in inerrant c/Creators who have convinced us that everything is sin; but because our makings commit ideas to material. These ideas, these more perfectable cousins of our hypererrant crafting, are spelled out in words, phrases and narratives. An errant verbal idea can be changed in scale or applicability, is provisional, can be updated to reflect new information, or can even eradicated should we find it opposes truth (although it can be extremely difficult.) Things too can be updated, but with great difficulty when compared to changing something that isn’t made of atoms put together with our hands and tools. To the extent that my can opener changes from being designed to open cans of dead fish into a sculpture (when it is no longer useful) it does so first in my mind. We pass over or include the errors we find into our thing-concepts. We pack new knowledge into old ideas and fix them into things that are as valid as we are capable of at the instant of their creation.
The things we build are worth considering — occasionally celebrating — despite being the product of cruelty, ill performance, or profound misunderstanding. Or perhaps because of these things.
When I fail to choose all the right variables and the piece fails to be the shiny, perfect thing that I imagined it to be, whom do I blame? I might blame my parents, my children, my car, my job, or even my tools or materials. But we can all recognize that no one else should buy those excuses. So many of us have developed a more socially acceptable excuse: ‘appropriate level of craft.’ We choose materials and processes and subjects and scales and markets that will accept a level of labor and attention to detail that is lower than what we are capable of — as individuals or groups. This is a smart strategy — outside of the military and the space programs there is an infinitesimally small group of people who are willing to pay for something with error rates that have to be measured in a hundred thousandths of a unit. We can’t all be Apple.27 But it’s also a conceit that can justify the ugly which ought to have been beautiful, dragging intent into the junkyards of reconceptualized accidents.
Do any of these ideas translate to things that do not fold-in earthly or intellectual sources, but which are not representative of anything? We could have a crucifix with a Jesus that is highly representative, we could have a relatively abstract cross, we could further abstract the Christ idea with some kind of incredibly simple dove or fish or cup. But let’s switch that out with a perfectly made unobtanium orb that a well-fed human made without coercion, with no title or statement or measurable impact. It’s not from nature, it is somehow magically perfect and human made. It has only two sources: the sphere and the material. Since the material doesn’t exist, there is no chance trying to beat up on it. But the sphere — the perfect, efficient shape; is it really perfect? While there are globes in nature, none are perfectly spherical — it’s as much the invention of the geometer as something fundamental in the universe.2829 If this artsphere is beyond reproach as a physical thing, shouldn’t we need to know why it is here? Needn’t we come to conclusions about whether or not we want it? Would any of these facets contribute to whether or not we could measure an error that isn’t physical but conceptual? Although framed in a hypothetical physical form and world, this is fairly obviously an idea-based problem — and as such is quantum; the more we pin down the position on one of these variables, the faster the idea (which is still in someone’s mind) can morph in order to keep from being known for certain. This is a bit of an endorsement for conceptually-based artwork, and for story problems in general. If the particular manifestation isn’t the thing — but the idea is — it has the potential to be perfected. Until it is made.
Nietzsche’s idea that artists glorify error is perfectly reasonable; correctness is the province of the math proof. Even within science, minute changes in scale and context will often yield unpredictable results, and the complexity of large scale changes — which is what extrapolating from models demands — if often wildly spasmodic.30
The arts, including design, music, dance, film, theater and literature, are metaphysical industries. We describe what there is and what it is like and why we do practice a priori. And, sometimes, what it is is what it isn’t — as looking into deep space with only optical telescopes before the radio, we can’t see what can’t be seen — but it’s still there; and we can tell from the effects — we can plot a position. Tracking tight to the valid, accurate and precise is an aesthetic choice — a strategy or affectation — not a binding charge. We are sometimes aided by the verifiable; but our work can be measured using only local and operational measurements. We have our own nomenclature, our own critical credentials and our own infinitesimal calculus of enumerations. And we have the fuzzy effects we can measure at great distances if we cross-link our activities with things we can get a caliper on. Our laws need not exclude middles.
The nature of synthesis is to call for the breakdown of things into their constituent parts; to take broken bits and recompile them into new forms with novel methods. The nature of control is limitation — no matter how much we think and work it through we will never have custody of the whole of our creation. If we don’t allow for error as a function of the basic process then we may also not be able to count on the occasionally transcendent breakthroughs that we are capable of making — we glorify not only the errant but the true.
Without error there may be no genesis.
“Why is nature so nearly symmetrical? No one has any idea why. The only thing we might suggest is something like this: There is a gate in Japan, a gate in Neiko, which is sometimes called by the Japanese the most beautiful gate in all Japan; it was built in a time when there was great influence from Chinese art. This gate is very elaborate, with lots of gables and beautiful carving and lots of columns and dragon heads and princes carved into the pillars, and so on. But when one looks closely he sees that in the elaborate and complex design along one of the pillars, one of the small design elements is carved upside down; otherwise the thing is completely symmetrical. If one asks why this is, the story is that it was carved upside down so that the gods will not be jealous of the perfection of man. So they purposely put an error in there, so that the gods would not be jealous and get angry with human beings.”31