Chapter 7 of potential hindrances to our creative development continued…

The other day I was talking to a friend about the possibility of a stone having the most primitive form of consciousness. He was like, woe, you’re going to have to back way up somewhere so I can get what you’re saying. I’m often catching myself presuming that other people see something the way I do— why is it so easy to forget that while we share a human experience, each of us is always bringing our own light and shadow to the table? We’re probably clueless about most ‘misunderstandings’, but is this always a bad thing? In a creative field I prefer to take these as other understandings.

David Shrigley. From Drawings In The Middle Of The Magazine for Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin.

Allow me to return to the scene I brought up in the last article dealing with making something and having it ‘misinterpreted’. I went back to childhood times to offer a sense of well it all started somewhere, and to point out that the feeling of being exposed can manifest a lifetime haunting habit of guarding our solo expression. Here’s another way I attempt to kick resistance along these lines:

Usually at the beginning of a course (youth or adult), I introduce the idea that we in some way create what we see through the act of observing (I’ll come back to some of the sweet complexity about this but for now I’ll just say that this harkens back to what I was recently saying about imagination and our use of it to recognize something that emerges out of a process or experience).

Sometimes, I will make a big ink splotch on a piece of paper and ask students what they see— usually I get a variety of interpretations to make the point that art (and our world) looks a particular way through each set of eyes. Then we explore how someone looking at our work could see something different than us based on their own experience, memories, perception and imagination. The idea is to create an open and inviting attitude toward multiple interpretations of our work versus a sense of misinterpretation and misunderstanding that usually conjures feelings of being attacked. This will come up again in articles about the context of formal critique, but for now we are looking at the teeter-totter of knowing and not-knowing within our creative expression and how this balance is influenced by exposure to the views of others.

What I try to get across in this lesson is the expanding offerings of multiple interpretations of our work. Someone might see something we missed or didn’t know and then bring it into our awareness in a way that offers us a new clue or connection. Some feedback might be in total contradiction and instead of taking this as a lack of clarity in the work, we could consider art’s capacity to convey opposites (like how we may have used the colour blue and it feels ‘cool’ to one onlooker and ‘warm’ to another). Not knowing exactly what our work is and how it will be received allows new messages, questions or sensations to arise— giving us a chance to learn from it.

Now what if we have a particular message that we really want to be received? There are certain creative fields that are more interested in specific message delivery. I can see how graphic designers need to get closer to this because, by trade, they customarily need to communicate something known and usually fairly specific. If a logo for an eco friendly company leaves its target audience thinking and feeling ‘toxic waste’, it’s a problem. Designers tend to be skilled at stitching their unique creative style into the mainstream style and are much more in tune with common patterns of perception and concepts such as Gestalt principles and psychology etc. It goes without saying that we share general perceptions based on our cultural experience and our human nature (we are both unique and common). There is a reason why our dentist office walls and ceilings aren’t usually tie-dyed rainbow pattern. I’m sure there are individuals who could totally chill in the chair surrounded by psychedelia but there’s a chance that patients might feel overstimulated or anxious and a dentist doesn’t want to tempt that. A skilled designer or architect is usually more attuned to the nuances of common responses and feelings of an audience.

The collective howl/yawn. (source unknown)

Perhaps a weakness that could occur in a graphic designer’s education is a more dominant focus on the mainstream style/common experience and what has succeeded in the past. It is a very extroverted attention. If we are already connected with our individual expression this works out well. I wouldn’t draw a line between the creative development, capacity, or process of a designer and anyone else. But if we are out of touch with our individuality it makes it pretty tricky to bring it to our work (in any field) and discover something new; we may default to constant revision of past ideas (not that there is anything wrong with this). New York-based Austrian graphic designer, storyteller, and typographer Stefan Sagmeister once said:

“If you want to communicate something, you’d better make sure that your design piece is well-dressed and that its teeth are fixed. At the same time, I still believe that if it is only stylistically great and it has nothing to say, it still is not going to make a lasting impression on anybody.”

AIGA Detroit Poster. 1999. Stefan Sagmeister

As far as lasting impressions go, Sagmeister once made his own body into a poster for an American Institute of Graphic Arts conference by having an assistant carve the text details of an event with an X-ACTO knife into his flesh. When asked about it he said, “We probably could have Photoshoped that AIGA Detroit poster, rather than cutting the type in my skin. I think the results are more authentic and the process more interesting (and painful)”. Just one extreme example of individual expression in typography.

Within the design field it is also possible to impose our individual taste and sensibilities without enough consideration of the response and well-being of the general public, and this could result in a myriad of negative effects or damaging lasting impressions (like the inhumane design of high-rise public housing a.k.a. ‘the projects’). 

But what if we’re not specializing in any particular field, are in the process of making a connection with our unique creative self and want to convey a personal message? That’s possible. But everyone receiving the same message? That’s a tall order and probably would involve more established knowledge. What may end up happening in message-driving work is that it will feel like a should to our audience. Have you ever watched film or episode of a lecture-vibe scene that shows people acting like actual zombies on their phones? Ugh. Who isn’t already aware of the doom of too much phone time? This kinda art feels like my dad standing in the doorway of my bedroom delivering some replay sermon. Who is a fan of being told what they already know? Who wants to feel judged by art? But this is only my take on it. That message could be brand new for some people; I bet there is someone out there watching a film right now who is just realizing—we’re like zombies on our phones!

 The minute something works, it ceases to be interesting. As soon as you have spelled something out, you should set it aside.

ROSEMARIE TROCKEL

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