Humor is hard for people to deal with in design...Pt.1
and in the arts in general. When I go to the movies, watch TV, or visit art museums, or go to the symphony, I find myself often amused and chuckling before the great works, while the rest of the audience seems grimly attentive and critically analytical. Oh, I do my share of analysing and standing in awe, but frankly, alot of great art amuses me at the moment of experience and moves me at its closing or afterwards.
For awhile, I figured it was nervous laughter from insecurity; then I felt there must be something warped about my ability to chuckle during a symphony, or smile with bemusement at the visual games Hitchcock was playing with me and the characters, while they were concentrated so intently on their suspenseful enterprise. More than a few dates and mates have chastised me for my amusement over the years. "What's so damned funny?" they say, seemingly resentful they are missing something. Fortunately, they are in my past.
I have concluded that I am just relatively more open to the spectrum of feelings that artists/craftsmen imbue artifacts with than some other persons. I'm not saying I know more about the arts, or am more discriminating, for I surely do not and am not more of either than the average person. Most here continually illuminate my blindspots in design for but one example.
But I am reasonably certain that I am more "open" to the experience of artifacts than alot of persons. By this I mean I am less inhibited about my experience of them. I don't worry about what they mean, or even how they are done, at least at that first moment. I'm a good audience in this regard. I recognize virtuosity and the abysmally bad and gradations between, but do not censor my experience of much of it, except the pornographically violent (which even that I used to take in pretty much unedited, but which I've grown too wise to permit myself to do anymore--feelings afterall, must remain unbutchered in order to experience art at all). As a result of this openness, I think I pick up more humor in the moment of first experience, especially in the greatest works of art, than alot of ordinary persons do. Not because I am looking for it, but because I am open to it. Great artists in any medium seem to me to have great wit AND great seriousness, at least in their work.
Humor is hard for people to get in design...Pt. 2
In fact, one of the dead give aways of lesser artists is that their wit rarely shows through, or if it does, shows through as labored, contrived or imposed. I believe humor shows up in even in the most serious works of great artists, not just as a technique for alleviating and balancing the tension of serious artistic inquiry (though it certainly can do this), but also because great artists are almost invariably as authentic as they can be in their work, and being human, they have wit, as well as seriousness, humor as well as rankor. Hence, in my artistic world view, humor, or perhaps wit is a better word, is organic to much great art as seriousness.
FWIW, I supsect one of the things that makes newly experienced artifacts from different cultures feel rather alien at first is that we often don't "get" the wit that is enfused into the artifact by the artist, either calculatedly or unconsciously. Take the OX chair that I just looked at for the first time very recently. We had a Danish nanny for three years. I slowly got the hang of her and her Danish family's senses of humor. I found it a little different than the American sense of humor, but not inscrutable either. Still I often misunderstood the inflections. They could be rather dead pan after allowing their wit to work on me. So with that background, I see the Ox Chair. I sensed a joke there, but I wasn't sure if it were a warm and fuzzy joke, like a teddy bear, or more dead pan, or maybe both. The humor connected me with the chair but it probably made the chair a bit more alien to me in the beginning, than Wegner ever intended it to be, simply because I got the joke, but did not "get" the joke, if you follow me.
Thank you Martin...
I should know...I wote his bio for DA...that old memory is getting rusty...
http://www.designaddict.com/atlas/designers/Hans-Wegner
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