Daily Poetics

No Maps ...

Link: Keep Calm Ltd » Get Lost.

"Each of these stunning prints have been hand letterpressed by Doug, directly onto old maps of the UK! The diversity of these maps and the printing method combined means that each print is truly unique."

"And all the names of the tribes, the nomads of faith who walked in the monotone of the desert and saw brightness and faith and colour. The way a stone or found metal box or bone can become loved and turn eternal in a prayer. Such glory of this country she enters now and becomes part of. We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography-to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps." -Michael Ondaatje

Casual Aesthetics by Wyeth Hansen

Link: Untitled Document.  Casual Aesthetics by Wyeth Hansen

WHO IS THE CASUAL AESTHETE?

The Casual Aesthete believes that it is necessary to understand the meanings of the forms they employ and the decisions they make, even if these meanings are largely subjective. The Casual Aesthete acts and creates in the manner in which she would urge the world to follow suit, while acknowledging that it is entirely unnecessary for anyone else to actually do so. The Casual Aesthete, while a passionate observer and practitioner of form, lacks the fanatic zeal and rigidity of her forebears who made a habit of stubbornly walk themselves into walls of their own creation.

WHAT IS CASUAL AESTHETICS?
The principal conceit of Casual Aesthetics is this: that the individual, though systematic self-articulation and careful observation, can generate a framework to maximize clarity of both her formal work as well as her broader lifestyle decisions. Casual Aesthetics seeks to unite more fully the individual's larger belief systems with their graphic and symbolic counterparts – the Casual Aesthete firmly believes that all form codes for greater conditions and that by understanding these linkages can become a formally responsible designer. This is all tempered, of course, by an open and casual approach to this system. It's not that big of a deal.

Casual Aesthetics is both practical and poetic, able to function broadly and suggestively as well as in a focused and concrete fashion. While it is acknowledged that CA should differ from person to person and thus the guidelines I provide henceforth could be tossed out entirely on the grounds of their subjectivity, I make a problematic appeal to authority: to someone who thinks that casual aesthetics sounds like a good idea in the first place, these suggestions and provisions follow the same path and should be of interest.

HOW DOES IT OPERATE?
Seeking to lasso the common wisdom of the ancient platitude, "I know what I like when I see it", Casual Aesthetics seeks to freeze the moment of observation for the benefit of analysis. When one sees, hears, or experiences in some fashion something that strikes them as "right on", one dissects the work into its various positive elements. This goes from the broadest of notions of harmony, balance, and proportion to minute details of composition and particular empirical characteristics,also accounting for (or just noting) such intagibles as 'gestalt', 'genius', and 'virtuosity'. By cataloguing the various characteristics of a wide variety of exceptional works and concepts to which she aspires, the individual begins to create a creative beacon of positive attributes. By deeping the breakdown of elements, the individual also begins to arrive at an understanding of the coding of elements, which should appear entirely natural. i.e. "I enjoy the reductive simplicity of both the form and the concept in this piece – I prefer simplicity and perfection of a few elements to busier, more complex compositions – I prefer quietude and calm to clamor and chaos – I prefer scrabble and fine wine to a night out in the city drinking sparks."
We can see how the reflexive relationship between lifestyle and form begins to take shape.

It is our responsibility to be magicians, to be jesters, to be alchemists, to create hope where there is only illusion, to create reality where there are only dreams. -Marcel Wanders

Link: Marcel Wanders studio, quotes.
The contemporary renaissance of humanism, Marcel Wanders
Foreword in: Marcus Fairs ed. Twenty-First-Century Design, London: Carlton Book, 2006.

The Poem Will Resemble You ...

Link: Tzara "Dadaism".

"I say unto you: there is no beginning and we do not tremble, we are not sentimental. We are a furious Wind, tearing the dirty linen of clouds and prayers, preparing the great spectacle of disaster, fire, decomposition. We will put an end to mourning and replace tears by sirens screeching from one continent to another. Pavilions of intense joy and widowers with the sadness of poison. Dada is the signboard of abstraction; advertising and business are also elements of poetry.

I destroy the drawers of the brain and of social organization: spread demoralization wherever I go and cast my hand from heaven to hell, my eyes from hell to heaven, restore the fecund wheel of a universal circus to objective forces and the imagination of every individual.

Philosophy is the question: from which side shall we look at life, God, the idea or other phenomena. Everything one looks at is false. I do not consider the relative result more important than the choice between cake and cherries after dinner. The system of quickly looking at the other side of a thing in order to impose your opinion indirectly is called dialectics, in other words, haggling over the spirit of fried potatoes while dancing method around it. If I cry out:

Ideal, ideal, ideal,

Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge,

Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom,

I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so manv books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and that the writer is entitled to his boomboom: the satisfaction of pathological curiosity; a private bell for inexplicable needs; a bath; pecuniary difficulties; a stomach with repercussions in life; the authority of the mystic wand formulated as the bouquet of a phantom orchestra made up of silent fiddle bows greased with philtres made of chicken manure. With the blue eye-glasses of an angel they have excavated the inner life for a dime's worth of unanimous gratitude. If all of them are right and if all pills are Pink Pills, let us try for once not to be right. Some people think they can explain rationally, by thought, what they think. But that is extremely relative. Psychoanalysis is a dangerous disease, it puts to sleep the anti-objective impulses of men and systematizes the bourgeoisie. There is no ultimate Truth. The dialectic is an amusing mechanism which guides us / in a banal kind of way / to the opinions we had in the first place. Does anyone think that, by a minute refinement of logic, he has demonstrated the truth and established the correctness of these opinions? Logic imprisoned by the senses is an organic disease. To this element philosophers always like to add: the power of observation. But actually this magnificent quality of the mind is the proof of its impotence. We observe, we regard from one or more points of view, we choose them among the millions that exist. Experience is also a product of chance and individual faculties. Science disgusts me as soon as it becomes a speculative system, loses its character of utility-that is so useless but is at least individual. I detest greasy objectivity, and harmony, the science that finds everything in order. Carry on, my children, humanity . . . Science says we are the servants of nature: everything is in order, make love and bash your brains in. Carry on, my children, humanity, kind bourgeois and journalist virgins . . . I am against systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none. To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one's own littleness, to fill the vessel with one's individuality, to have the courage to fight for and against thought, the mystery of bread, the sudden burst of an infernal propeller into economic lilies.... Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructivc action: Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity: Dada; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest one's church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them -with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least-with the same intensity in the thicket of one's soul-pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE  -Tristan Tzara"

 

CHANCE                                         WORDS is                                         an activity inspired by artist Tristan                                         Tzara’s                                     recipe for making a Dada poem:

                                    

                                     TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM
                                     Take a newspaper.
                                      Take some scissors.
                                      Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.
                                      Cut out the article.
                                      Next carefully cut out the words that makes up this article and put  them all in a bag.
                                      Shake gently.
                                      Next take out each cutting one after the other.
                                      Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
                                      The poem will resemble you.
                                      And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming                                                  sensibility,even though unappreciated  by the vulgar herd.
                                      —Tristan Tzara, 1920

The most marvelous is not/the beauty, deep as that is, but teh classic attempt/at beauty at the swamp's center: the / dead-end highway, abandoned when the new bridge went in finally. -william carlos williams "the hard core of beauty"

Link: Ahtisaari: Slow Art - 6 The hard core of beauty.

Slow Art - 6 The hard core of beauty

"Elongation, augmentation or the stretching of time: these are a way of getting at what architect Peter Zumthor has called the hard core of beauty. A way of directing the audience’s perception to the world as it is.In a passage on the poet William Carlos Williams, Zumthor observes:    [

The] purpose of his art was to direct his sensory perception to the world of things in order to make them his own…[This] appeals to me: not to wish to stir up emotions with buildings, I think to myself, but to allow emotions to emerge, to be. And: to remain close to the thing itself, close to the essence of the thing I have to shape, confident that if the building is conceived accurately enough for its place and its function, it will develop its strength, it will develop its own strength, with no need for artistic additions.

The hard core of beauty: concentrated substance. In Music as a Gradual Process composer Steve Reich writes of the extremely gradual processes in his early work. In Piano Phase (1967) and Violin Phase (1967)a single pattern on two or more identical instruments slowly slides out of phase with itself forming a complex gradually changing whole.    

Listening to an extremely gradual musical process opens my ears to it, but it always extends farther than I can hear, and that makes it interesting to listen to that musical process again. That area of every gradual (completely controlled) musical process, where one hears the details of the sound moving out away from intentions, occurring for their own acoustic reasons, is it.

Reich might well have called it the hard core of beauty, the sound itself away from intentions, the sound that allows emotions to emerge."

Jonathan Adler Manifesto

Link: Jonathan Adler Manifesto.

We believe that your home should make you happy.

We believe that when it comes to decorating, the wife is always right.
Unless the husband is gay.

We believe in carbohydrates and to hell with the puffy consequences.

We believe minimalism is a bummer.

We believe handcrafted tchotchkes are life-enhancing.

We believe tassels are the earrings of the home.

We believe in our muses: David Hicks, Alexander Girard,
Bonnie Cashin. Hans Coper, Gio Ponti, Andy Warhol, Leroy Neiman,
Yves Saint Laurent, and Madonna.

We believe in the innate chicness of red with brown.

We believe in being underdressed or overdressed always.

We believe in infantile, happy emblems like butterflies and hearts.

We believe celebrities should pay full price.

We believe in rustic modernism: Big Sur, A-Frame beach houses,
raw beams, and geodesic dome homes.

We believe in Palm Beach style:
Louis chairs, chinoiserie, Lilly Pulitzer, The Breakers circa '72.

We believe our designs are award winning even though
they've never actually won any.

We believe in Aid to Artisans.

We believe dogs should be allowed in stores and restaurants.

We believe in mantiques - suits of armour,
worn chesterfield sofas, heraldic tapestries.

We believe you should throw out your Blackberry
and go pick some actual blackberries.

We believe colors can't clash.

We believe in blowing your nest egg on our pots.

We believe our lamps will make you look younger and thinner.

We believe in irreverent luxury.

The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites. -Eli Siegel

Link: Aesthetic Realism Foundation International Periodical.

Aesthetic Realism is based on these principles, stated by Eli Siegel:

1.  The deepest desire of every person is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis.

2.  The greatest danger for a person is to have contempt for the world and what is in it .... Contempt can be defined as the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.

3.  All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

Marie Howe, Poet.

...We want the spring to come and the winter to pass.  We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss -- we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless.
I am living...

To see beauty is simply to learn the private language of meaning that is another’s life: to recognize and relish what is.

CrimethInc. Cyberian Market : posters.

       Beauty must be defined as what we are, or else the concept itself is our enemy. Why languish in the shadow of a standard we cannot personify, an ideal we cannot live? To see beauty is simply to learn the private language of meaning that is another’s life: to recognize and relish what is.

 

Link: Studio Verdir.

The nature of a company should be a reflection of the people it comprises. It is more than the collective talents and skills. More than a shared philosophy or compatible personalities. It is the organic assemblage of all of these things. An anthology.

Without some discernible measure of sincerity and commitment, good work means nothing. It’s easy to be clever and provocative; less so to be perceptive and genuine. We feel profoundly moved by what we do, and believe that it takes tenacity to get there. And we don’t make promises that we can’t keep.

Enduring relationships are the culmination of human endeavor, and the true focus of our existence. We have the opportunity to demonstrate our expertise and our beliefs simultaneously. Everything that we have learned, everything that we remember, we bring to the proverbial table.

Studio Verdir is the real thing. An imaginative and resourceful group of individuals who crave creative freedom and yearn to reveal to ourselves and to our clients the possibilities that lie in wait if only we have the courage to unearth them.