Poetics of Design

THERESA BERENATO Theresa is a recent Pratt MFA graduate. Recurrent themes in her work included crafted and gestural forms. She lives and works in New York city.

“How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise—the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream—be set down alive?” john steinbeck,

Cannery Row

the P O E T I C S of D E S I G N redefining nostalgia

For years, an empty frame travelled with me. From the kitchen on South Robinson Street, where the firemen came one afternoon, to Butcher’s Hill, in the third story bedroom in which I had attempted to uncover hardwood flooring, to Park avenue, still empty, where it leaned against the temporary wall and watched the Chrysler building’s hood ornaments and radiators light up each night and fade away each morning.

The frame was cumbersome but beautiful, dirtencrusted but white, antique and a bargain for fifteen bucks off Rt. 40, on the way to Cape May. It was dusty and hung behind a shelf of Charlie Brown glasses, the kind my childhood neighbors, the Hubbards, drank from while eating ‘supper.’ The Hubbards’ house smelled like baked beans and I remember there was a line of masking tape on the carpet a few feet from their TV, a boundary to prevent blindness, I suppose.

I finagled the frame out from behind the shelf and I also inquired about a worn, shabby medicine cabinet, but the owner said it wasn’t for sale. She wrote my name and number down on a small slice of scrap paper and promised to call if she changed her mind. I took home a handwritten receipt.

In this small exchange, I experienced waves of past memories, I was enchanted by a piece of ephemera, I physically felt connected to the moment, to the shop, to the woman.

So easily in daily life, we successfully subordinate ourselves to the concept of linear time. We are constantly enticed with low hanging fruit: email, social networks, blinking billboards and pop-up advertisements! The majority of visual language today is snapping and flashing, demanding, unwelcoming. As a result of our forward-moving culture, a sense of being fully present is sometimes unfamiliar.

On the other hand, any remnant of emotional evocation seems overdone, mass produced. We can buy experience, from the pages of Restoration Hardware or the aisles of Anthropology, the whole kit and caboodle purchased in one stop. Because of this readily

packaged experience we have come to call nostalgic, the technique has been tainted. We shy away from the mention of nostalgia—pawning it off as a means of dramatizing the past. This overly sentimental notion of nostalgia began as early as the eighteenth century, when nostalgia was seen as a disease, described as “hypochondria of the heart.” 1 However. I believe designers have the ability to create the platform which enables the opportunity for someone to experience, to feel the essence of something. We can—instead of handing someone a packaged experience—create a space where people can attach their memories and associations, where they can be emotionally present with their past experiences, or daydream about new possibilities. The subjectivity and consideration the viewer brings is essential to this equation. We can use a term I will describe as post-nostalgia—a nod toward English art critic Roger Fry, who was the first to label the fine art movement following impressionism post-impressionism, “out of convenience”—to create this subjective, intimate space.

(A self-deprecating Fry did delve deeper into the distinction, defining post-impressionism as an “exploration and expression of the emotional significance which lies in things.”) 2 Post-nostalgia differs a bit from the original meaning of nostalgia: instead of being “a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one’s life; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time,” 3 post-nostalgia, as a design device, is the space created to form an emotional connection to another person, time, or place. Nostalgic yearning is replaced by post-nostalgic appreciation.

1.

2.

3.

4.

Mamma Andersson. Leftovers, 2006. a) Found ephemera and collage, 2011 Thesis exploration. b) Collaboration and foil assemblage by Nick Misini.

Pablo Picasso. Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass, 1912.

Note to my mother, 1989.

1.

2.

4.

3.

Post-nostalgic design—and Milton Glaser boils design down to “any intentional act”—is design in which the touch of the hand is evident through a heightened level of attention to detail made visible through - materials - techniques and/or the inclusion of - artifacts For example, by incorporating textured material or found ephemera; relying on hand production skills; considering the inclusion of tangible pieces of daily life­; ideas and experiences act as physically triggers that can evoke an emotional reaction. Fine artists of the early 20th century are precedents to this type of exploration: through the assemblage techniques of Cubism to the paintings and photographs of the Abstract Expressionists.

Post-nostalgic design dismisses those who say We invented humanity. Nothing happened before us (or nothing worth remembering). Post-nostalgia acknowledges that we are temporary beings seeking connections to former generations and time.

Thinking about connection, I recalled the work of psychologist Abraham Maslow. He spent years researching and writing about peak experiences, which he described as experiences that have the ability to release creative energies; affirm the meaning and value of existence; give a sense of purpose to the individual; provide a feeling of integration; and leave a permanent mark on the individual. 4 Far from a religious or pharmacologically 5 induced experience, I decided that the emotions, memories and connections that manifest from the beauty of my antique frame were not invoked by the frame’s beveled edges or chipped wood, though that aesthetic does exist. The beauty stems from the multiplicity of objects: to have a piece that has already lived is a reminder that we are temporary beings, and by constructing—through memory, imagination or speculation—an island of connections to past experiences and former generations and time, I somehow create order and meaning in my own life.

Post-nostalgic design can speak to the sentiments of humanity without being wistful, reveal the commonplace with authenticity and illuminate the invisible interconnectivity of our past memories.

Recently, a friend recalled that as a child, every card, gift or letter she gave—to her classmates or parents or grandparents—was handcrafted. The recipient always showed enthusiasm upon receipt, because, she said, “It showed heart. It was unique.

Discarded shutter, recovered in Chelsea.

Hand-painted Rilke quote, The Ninth Elegy

It took time and effort and love.” As trivial as this conversation may sound, and for fear of venturing into the technology vs. the handmade battle, at the heart of post-nostalgic design is the desire to create, arrange, or offer something tangibly punctuated with time and effort and love. I shook my head in response, yes, yes, yes and my friend said, “No, really. I cleaned my room the other day and I threw out every birthday card from last year, but saved yours. Not only did I save it, but I held it in my hands and marveled at the fact that you actually made it. You spent time and thought and crafted something. And did it for me. I put it back in my storage box and will save it forever.”

Without the opportunity to physically relate to another human being, another time or place, the world remains abstract and distant. At the end of the day, it is only human nature to recollect, to seek connections to the past and daydream about future possibilities.

The white frame is filled now, with an archival pigment print by Pratt graduate and artist Clare Grill, whose paintings are about family folklore and backyard rituals. The Overachievers is familiar in a complicated way.

The colors are murky and the subjects—school children with bent heads—are creating something unseen with their tiny hands.

The technique of the blurred brush strokes and the ambiguity of the subjects and their concentrated focus in The Overachievers allows the present, the past and the future to exist simultaneously, lines are blurred.

That The Overachievers is now the occupant of the frame connects my past experiences, in grade school art classrooms, to the present moment—being a Pratt graduate student—while also acting as a reminder that the future is full of creative possibilities yet unseen.

.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Jessica Helfand, “The Shock Of The Old: Rethinking Nostalgia.” Design Observer. 2005.

Roger Fry, Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition catalogue, 1910.

Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, 2009. pharmacology: the science dealing with the preparation, uses, and especially the effects of drugs.

Abraham Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences,1964.