Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
- Sonorisms I
- More than just a machine that runs along
- Nobody was doing anything
- NYLA
- Aggressively Zen
Because the approach to the room is along a long corridor, the attentive visitor might at first think that three light squares had been affixed to the windows or, as one gradually came closer, that the tinting of the windows had simply been removed in these three lighter near-square areas. Davies continues: "only at this point do the other senses kick in. The visitor begins first to hear and smell the ocean and then to actually feel the outside air entering the gallery; this sensory experience is in complete contradiction to the faulty first impression."
One of the responsibilities for an architect is to provide a space that is usable and enhances the possibilities for what you do. But mostly, museums are just the opposite; they're horrible spaces, anti-art, they can't be used. They can't function, they overwhelm it. So in a way, they become objects in themselves many times, almost sculptures, and they get a lot of aggrandizement out of it...In terms of Bilbao, the one difference there is that they did not really want a museum, they wanted a monument. They wanted a thing that would bring people to the Bilbao.
Lawrence Weschler:
The red, for example, wasn't simply red – or rather it was: the surface was covered over in a completely even gloss of lipstick red paint – but (had it been doing that before?) the panel was reflecting ambient conditions like crazy, so much so that in fact almost none of the surface, strictly speaking, was red. Pool-like, it was reflecting the yellow ceiling panel beyond, whose own color was in turn being affected by the blue floor piece beyond that. There were purple effects and green, a sort of even bruise-brown hovering over the entire array when one now viewed the gallery from the side.
In order: Kenny Price, Blue Lou, Legacy, Fourfold, Niagara.
Irwin has explained that he decided to use the fluorescent tubes in the "dumbest" way possible, but, as one critic cautioned, "dumb, it turns out, has a special meaning for him: It's a form so simple that you end up not paying attention to it as a form." Irwin's interest was, rather, in the range of light, color, reflection, and shadow interaction made possible by combining tubes with different hues and finishes by wrapping them with theatrical gels.
EVER PRESENT NEVER TWICE THE SAME
EVER CHANGING NEVER LESS THAN WHOLE
I'd been talking about this idea of a conditional art for a very long time, and what I did was actually accomplish it, the idea that there was not a normal structure to it, that every decision had to be intuitive or instinctual or tactile. You decide to go this way or that way, but there was no beginning, no middle, and no end and so there's no hierarchical structure to it at all. And at the end of it, I mean, after you wander for a while, you just ended it yourself because there was no solution to it.
Photographs of 5 Openings 2 + 3, Untitled, and Double Diamond.
Black Line Volume, String Line-Light Volume, Corridor String Piece, Line Rectangle
"The resultant black rectangle was not what you "looked at" – there was actually nothing to focus on – but soon it brought the space into focus with a distinct visual snap. From inside, the light in the area seemed different, more substantial, and the wall color began to shift ambiguously. From outside the area, the tape seemed to lift the plane of the floor upward in your field of vision, and it also made the room seem wider and shallower than it really was." — Roberta Smith
"Quality is only there," Irwin explained, "if you pursue it all the way to the last bolt." Consequently, how joints are finished must be specified in the contract. "And believe me," he added ruefully from experience, "there is a real discrepancy here. The difference [in] how we interpret the word finish or this word quality is really disparate."
"When you bring them in and get them to be part of it," he noted, "the workmen themselves start to take pride in it. And when they start taking that pride in this idea of quality, ...it starts becoming theirs, something important to them, that they in fact do know what we are talking about."
I know some people are going to say: "Hey! That's Dan Flavin's act. Why in the hell is Irwin doing a Dan Flavin? Why is he suddenly so inconsistent – fluorescent one day and Cor-Ten the next?" The key to all of this is that we have to examples what we mean by consistency. And here the critical question is: "what do we use to measure consistency with?" If you measure consistency in terms of material, or gesture, then I will be found inconsistent. But, in all of the recent pieces and proposals, if you go to the actual site and look at it, you will find that the solution is absolutely consistent on the grounds within which it responds to its environment. This in turn is consistent with my development of the implications implicit in non-object art.
Irwin also included as part of the expanding network of aesthetic experiences radiating out from the museum a series of what he termed "incidental" sculptures, or phenomena of perceptual interest...
"Continuing Responses" began formally in the museum as a series of situations in direct response to the already existing spaces and their uses. At first easily accessible but then moving to consider more and more those previously unacknowledged and covert events. This project now moves outside the museum beginning with a window of the museum and then to include a series of "concrete" and "incidental sculptures" on sites throughout Fort Work and vicinity. These responses already number twenty-five and are referenced by a map of locations in the lobby of the museum.
I tilt the room just enough, the space just enough that you may not be able to use your normal mode of placing yourself in that space, forcing you for one second to make a perceptual read and become aware that you are the perceiver and that all information comes through that perceptual act and that when you walk out of there, ...if you take that with you, you will begin to see things everywhere around you and that you are the one that is changed and you are there and that is what changed things.
I cannot perceive for you. I can conceive for you and we can then in a sense hold a general agreement about quality of conception and we may all operate under it and that's what is known as a common agreement. But the area of perceiving as such is totally individual, there's no way that we carry it in that sense.
This is not an antisocial gesture; it is in fact a highly ethical one, since trying to get another person to see what and how you see has the potential to become a violation of the other's own autonomy:
There is nothing more unethical than having ambitions for someone else's mind.
Someone said to me the other day that there's nothing really ever new. That everything really repeats itself, you know, is repeating itself all the time, and they were showing me a Carl Andrew and they were also showing me some aborigine art and there really was a very strong similarity. And so I got to thinking about it and it came to me that if everything is really repeating itself constantly and that there's nothing ever really new...at the same time it's equally true that nothing is ever exactly the same. That everything is different every single time even though it's repeated constantly and all the same things keep passing through. They're never exactly the same so that the nature of change is not about something wholly new. It's actually about the subtlest slightest kinds of differences.
The column essentially disappeared into the space. It was there but it wasn't. As you walked around the room, suddenly, it might flash. Or, because I'd notched a little facet along one side, there might appear, for just an instant, a single white line, or a thin black glint.
The column was an indication of my wanting to get out and treat the environment itself, I don't mean in the sense of building buildings or being an architect, but rather of dealing with the quality of a particular space in terms of its weight, its temperature, its tactileness, its density, its feel – all those semi-intangible things that we don't normally deal with.
Irwin had begun his disc paintings with what, in retrospect, he described as a simple question: "How do I paint a painting that does not begin and end at an edge but rather starts to take in and become involved with the space or environment around it?"
Artwork and detail.
I took the surface of the canvas and curved it slightly in all directions, so slightly that you did not see it as being curved, but sensed its added physicality...The beauty of it for me was that you were not aware of it first as an idea, but only aware of it on this tactile level.
Black rakuware tea bowl (late sixteenth century), Kyoto, Japan. Freer Sackler Museum of Asian Art.
For Irwin, the lesson of [the raku tea cups] was twofold: first, their presentation was important, insofar as the ceremony involved a gradual preparation of the audience's aesthetic attention. Then, when the time came to handle the cups, the intimacy of the experience fused visual and tactile sensations into a single continuum. As he also noted:
he would set on the table this box with a beautiful little tie on it – very Japanese – and you untied it, you opened up the box, he let you do that. And then inside of it was a cloth sack. You took the sack out, and it had a drawstring, and you opened up the drawstring and you reached inside and took out the bowl. By that time, the bowl had you at a level where the most incidental detail – maybe even just a thumb mark – registered as a powerful statement.
It was clear that [Hewlett-Packard] recognized that its true value was in its employees.
How do you learn to run a company at 21 with no business experience?
Throughout the years in business I found something, which is, I’d always ask why you do things, and the answers you invariably get are “oh that’s just the way it’s done.” Nobody knows why they do what they do, nobody thinks about things very deeply in business. That’s what I found.
I’ll give you an example. When we were building our Apple Is in the garage we knew exactly what they cost. When we got into a factory in the Apple II days, accounting had this notion of a “standard cost.” Where you’d kind of set a standard cost and then at the end of the quarter you’d adjust it with a variance. And I kept asking, “why do we do this?” And the answer was just “well that’s the way it’s done.” And after about 6 months of digging into this what I realized was the reason you do it is because you don’t really have good enough controls to know how much it costs, so you guess, and then you fix your guess at the end of the quarter. And the reason you don’t know how much it costs is because your information systems aren’t good enough.
But nobody said it that way. And so later on when we designed this automated factory for Macintosh we were able to get rid of a lot of these antiquated concepts, and know exactly what something costs, to the cent. And so in business a lot of things are what I would call “folklore.” They’re done that way because they were done that way yesterday. And so if you’re willing to ask a lot of questions about things and work hard you can learn business pretty fast. It’s not the hardest thing in the world. It’s not rocket science.
I think everyone in this country should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think. It’s like going to law school — I don’t think anyone should be a lawyer, but going to law school could be useful because it teaches you how to think in a certain way. So I view computer science as a liberal art.
The technology crashed and burned at Xerox.
What happens is, like with John Sculley, John came from PepsiCo, and they at most would change their product maybe once every ten years. To them a new product was like a new size bottle. So if you were a product person you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore they were the ones that got promoted and they were the ones that ran the company.
Well, for PepsiCo that might have been ok, but it turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM and Xerox.
If you were a product person at IBM, or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer? So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company isn’t any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people end up getting driven out of the decision marking forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibilities and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
So that’s what happened at Xerox.
People get confused, companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success, and a lot of them think that somehow there’s some magic in the process that they’ve created. And so they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long people get very confused that the process is the content.
In my career I’ve found that the best people are the ones who really understand the content. And they’re a pain in the butt to manage. But you put up with it because they’re so great at the content. And that’s what makes great products. It’s not process, it’s content.
What’s important to you in the development of a product?
One of the things that really hurt Apple was that after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease — I’ve seen other people get it too — it’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can just go off and make it happen.
The problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts, because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it, and you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs you have to make, there are just certain things you can’t make electrons do, there are certain things you can’t make plastic, or glass, or factories, or robots do. And as you get into all these things, you find that designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain, these concepts, and just fitting them all together and continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover a new problem or a new opportunity to do it a little differently. And it’s that process that is the magic.
What I’ve always felt that a team of people doing something they really believe in is like, is like when I was a young kid, there was a widowed man that lived up the street. He was in his 80’s, and a little scary looking, and I got to know him a little bit — I think he paid me to cut his lawn or something — and one day he told me, “come into my garage, I want to show you something.”
And he pulled out this dusty old rock tumbler. It was a motor and a coffee can and a band between them. And he said “come out here with me,” so we went out to the back and we got some rocks, just some regular old ugly rocks and we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and a little bit of grit powder, and he turned the motor on and said “come back tomorrow,” as the tumbler was turning and making a racket.
So I came back the next day and what we took out were these amazingly beautiful and polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in — through rubbing against each other, creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise — had come out as these beautiful polished rocks.
And that’s always been my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they’re passionate about. It’s that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together, they polish each other, and they polish their ideas. And what comes out are these really beautiful stones.
People are being counted on to do specific pieces of the puzzle. And the most important thing I think you can do for somebody who’s really good and who’s really being counted on is to point out to them when their work isn’t good enough, and to do it very clearly, and to articulate why, and to get them back on track. And you need to do that in a way that does not call into question your confidence in their abilities, but leaves not much room for interpretation.
Microsoft’s orbit was made possible by a Saturn V booster called IBM.
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and what that means is — and I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way — in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their product. And you say “well why is that important?” Well, you know, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books, so that’s where one gets the idea. And if it weren’t for the Mac they would never have that in their products.
And so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success — I have no problem with their success. They have earned their success — I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. Their products have no spirit to them, no spirit of enlightenment about them. They are very pedestrian. And the sad part is that most customers don’t have that spirit either. But the way that we’re going to ratchet up our species is to take the best and to spread it around to everybody so that everybody grows up with better things, and starts to understand the subtlety of these better things. And Microsoft is McDonald’s.
So that’s what saddens me — not that Microsoft has won, but that Microsoft’s products don’t display more insight and more creativity.
As we look back 10 years from now, the web is going to be the defining technology, the defining social moment for our generation.
I think it’s going to be huge.
I read an article when I was very young in Scientific America. It measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet — you know, for bears and chimpanzees and raccoons and birds and fish — how many kilocalories per kilometer did they spend to move? And humans were measured too. And the condor won, it was the most efficient. And mankind, the crown of creation, came in with rather an unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list.
But somebody there had the brilliance to test a human riding a bicycle, and it blew away the condor, all the way off the charts. And I remember this really had an impact on me, I remember thinking that humans are tool builders, and we build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities.
And to me — we actually ran an ad like this, very early at Apple — the personal computer is the bicycle of the mind. And I believe that with every bone in my body, that of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near if not at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented, and I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time where this invention has taken form.
How do we know what’s the right direction [for computers to take]?
Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then trying to bring those things in to what you’re doing.
Picasso had a saying: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” And we (at Apple) have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. And I think part of what made Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to have been the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hasn’t been for computer science, these people would all be doing amazing things in life in other fields. And they brought with them — we all brought to this effort — a very liberal arts air, a very liberal arts attitude, that we wanted to pull in the best we saw in these other fields into ours.
There was a germ of something there. And it’s the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead of bankers. I think that’s a wonderful thing, and I think that same spirit can be put into products, and those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit. If you talk to people that use the Macintosh, they love it. I mean you don’t hear people loving products very often. But you could feel it, there was something really wonderful there.
So I don’t think that most of the really best people that I’ve worked with have worked with computers for the sake of working with computers. They work with computers because they are the medium that is best capable of transmitting some feeling that you have that you want to share with other people. And before they invented these things, all these people would have done other things. But computers were invented, and they did come along, and all these people did get interested in them, either in school or before school, and said “Hey, this is the medium that I think I can say something in."
I observed something fairly early on at Apple, which I didn’t know how to explain then, but I’ve thought a lot about it since. Most things in life have a dynamic range in which [the ratio of] “average” to “best” is at most 2:1.
For example, if you go to New York City and get an average taxi cab driver, versus the best taxi cab driver, you’ll probably get to your destination with the best taxi driver 30% faster. And an automobile; what’s the difference between the average car and the best? Maybe 20%? The best CD player versus the average CD player? Maybe 20%? So 2:1 is a big dynamic range for most things in life.
Now, in software, and it used to be the case in hardware, the difference between the average software developer and the best is 50:1; maybe even 100:1. Very few things in life are like this, but what I was lucky enough to spend my life doing, which is software, is like this.
So I’ve built a lot of my success on finding these truly gifted people, and not settling for “B” and “C” players, but really going for the “A” players. And I found something… I found that when you get enough “A” players together, when you go through the incredible work to find these “A” players, they really like working with each other. Because most have never had the chance to do that before. And they don’t work with “B” and “C” players, so it’s self-policing. They only want to hire “A” players. So you build these pockets of “A” players and it just propagates.