On constraints, opportunity, and not losing your shit
The sun is the moon and boxes are for ignoring
I was reading about disaster capitalism this week. A term coined by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine (2008) to describe how corporations and private interests exploit vulnerable countries and cities in the wake of crises. It was referenced in the book Caps Lock - How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design And How To Escape From It (2021) by Ruben Pater, which I am in the middle of, and quite enjoying.
Anyway, the author was making the point that while whole industries benefit from war and natural disasters, graphic designers have been right there alongside those opportunists helping them hone their messaging, or refine the life-saving products they need to survive. It's true. Designers have been getting paid by the wealthy to help them stay wealthy since the first scribes chiseled Hammurabi's code into stone. Branding irons used to stamp crates, cattle, and other humans were "designed." So has been money, the shape of a bomb, and even that horrible stench that blows out of a Sephora when you walk by. Economic models aside, creative energy is often operating at its highest and most focused levels when something has gone wrong, or resources are limited.
In my career as a user experience designer, the work can often comes wrapped in a poorly scoped project. Either you find out after work has begun that the budget is too small to meet the goals of the client, or, the necessary details required to correctly do the work were not thought through to begin with. Don't be surprised to find these two assholes holding hands. Emotionally mature project teams will rally, finding ways to get the job done on time and on budget. There may be some chair throwing, and frustrated internal planning sessions. If you are super lucky, you get to deliver the hard-to-swallow news that "feature A and B will launch on time, and better than you imagined them, but feature C will be backlogged until a later phase." Creativity nailed A and B, and figured out a way to deliver the news about C without getting fired.
Thinking outside the box is creativity's natural state. So when the box is shrinking, misshapen, or otherwise unusable, creative people don't care because we weren't interested in the box to begin with.
In capitalist work culture we learn to call these situations “opportunities" because human emotions make folks uncomfortable on the job. So instead of saying, “this is bullshit, who planned this f&%#ing project?” (because we can’t control it and that makes us feel things), we learn to Internalize It™ and call the sun the moon. But in our daily lives we tend to describe these situations using glass half full/half empty language. (It’s easier to get mad out loud when your paycheck isn’t hanging in the balance.) No situation is perfectly planned, perfectly funded, perfectly timed. If we don’t want to be miserable we figure out how to make the best of it, usually on the fly. Because all humans are creative, even if we aren’t all very stable. Lol.
... art is a noun if you are just looking at it on the wall. But art is a verb too. It is an act that changes things.
I ran into an artist friend of mine this week and I asked him if he had been making any work lately. He said “I kind of had to pack up my paint stuff after my son was born.” But recently he had been making drawings that he thought could become paintings at some point. While this is super common for artist-parents, life can throw anybody’s creativity off the tracks. I’ve mentioned this before on this blog, but my own artwork has had to shift and adapt many times due to life circumstances. I’ve had many periods of inactivity. My studio spaces have been large and well-lit. They’ve been dark and dingy.
In the past I’ve had room to make big paintings on canvas. Right now I’m confined to one half of a 12’x9’ room (the other half is occupied by my design day job.) The smaller space to work has fueled a ton of drawings just out of a need to keep things easy to store and move around. The paintings I am working on are all small - less that 16”x16.” Right now I believe I’m making interesting work, but when I had a big studio with lots of room to stretch out my output was GAr-Bage. Mo’ space did not equal mo’ better.
As a musician, I’ve had the pleasure of storing multiple drum sets in their cases due to lack of space to play them. Have you seen drums in cases? They huge, bro. For the 8 years prior to buying our current house I didn’t get to play them very often. But the flipside to that was my deep diving into electronic music, making tape loops, and playing a lot more guitar. Right now I do have them set up (just past my red slipper toe in the next room) but I don’t play them very often. Mo’ space does not equal mo’ drumming.
K hold on a sec - I wasn’t sure what my point was when I started writing -
[Pauses to figure it out]
I guess the instigator of these thoughts started with the notion that disaster capitalism is bad (it is) and designers help it happen (they do). But also that finding opportunity in weird or unfortunate situations is just the nature of creativity. Outside of the toxic economic model we are all a part of, creativity needs boundaries and constraints to really do it’s best work. I day dream about being able to make art all day every day. But wonder if I would make less work if I had no constraints at all, at least for a while. There is a desperation to my art making time that feels wired into the process. Like, “it has to happen” or else… I’ll stop being an artist? No, not that. I mean, art is a noun if you are just looking at it on the wall. But art is a verb too. It is an act that changes things. We are all one disaster away from losing our shit, shutting part of our brains off, and cashing in at the expense of everyone around us. If I stop making art I’ll stop feeling whole. Art is the one thing that has made me feel like a whole human being who can manage reality on any level.
Yeah, that’s it. I needed to remind myself of that. It just took a lot of nouns and verbs to get there.
Thanks for reading.
Visit my shop and get this dope shirt I designed. No disaster this time. Just capitalism.
