Work & Labor
Begin with your work
Your life adds up
So much knowledge not being applied
To form an integrated human milieu
Baumol’s cost disease
The aspiration for quality
Intrapreneurship
On Criticism
From the desk of: Austin Kleon
Violence to the very structure of our being
Shortlist of interesting spaces
The right kind of building can do great things for a culture
Values vs. strengths
To improve the way you perform
Parkinson's Law
When you're interested in what you're working on
The dual ladder
Dad's study
All-use environments
Until the nineteenth century, virtually all cities were “all use” environments. Craft-scale production was typically carried out in a workshop below the home of the craftsperson, which often also served as the site of exchange.
Roman empire military
Rome military diagram.
Most company structures are based on the Roman empire military. CEO Caesar says he wants something, and the lieutenant managers below him on the org chart break it down into smaller tasks for the soldiers to accomplish.
On a development team, programmers are the soldiers of these shitty new armies. They open their Jira issues and add whatever feature it says to add, or fix what it says to fix. If I can save time by adding another dependency, or skip a meeting by implementing a mockup exactly as designed, why should I care?
9. Scattered Work
Problem
The artificial separation of houses and work creates intolerable rifts in people’s inner lives.
Solution
Use zoning laws, neighborhood planning, tax incentives, and any other means available to scatter workplaces throughout the city. Prohibit large concentrations of work without family life around them. Prohibit large concentrations of family life without workplaces around them.
Men are not an abstraction
Placing work and commerce near residences, but buffering it off, in the tradition set by Garden City theory, is fully as matriarchal an arrangement as if the residences were miles away from work and from men. Men are not an abstraction. They are either around, in person, or they are not. Working places and commerce must be mingled right in with residences if men, like the men who work on or near Hudson Street, for example, are to be around city children in daily life—men who are part of normal daily life, as opposed to men who put in an occasional playground appearance while they substitute for women or imitate the occupations of women.
80. Self-Governing Workshops and Offices
Problem
No one enjoys their work if they are a cog in a machine.
Solution
Encourage the formation of self-governing workshops and offices of 5 to 20 workers. Make each group autonomous—with respect to organization, style, relation to other groups, hiring and firing, work schedule. Where the work is complicated and requires larger organizations, several of these work groups can federate and cooperate to produce complex artifacts and services.
Manual labor
Artisanal craftsmen have proved particularly promising subjects for job retraining. The discipline required for good manual labor serves them, as does their focus on concrete problems rather than on the flux of process-based, human relations work. For this very reason it has proved easier to train a plumber to become a computer programmer than to train a salesperson; the plumber has craft habit and material focus, which serve retraining. Employers don't often see this opportunity because they equate manual routine with mindless labor.
A dry, husky business
Despite the furor over their aggressive unmanliness, clerks, and with them the office, crept silently into the world of nineteenth-century America. Moral philosophers were mostly preoccupied with the clang of industrialization and its satanic mills, and most regarded as negligible the barely audible scratch of pens across ledgers and receipts that characterized the new world of clerical work. It was only a “dry, husky business,” as the narrator of Bartleby had it.
Each fascinating crisis
The problems themselves, though they once obsessed you, and kept you working late night after night, and made you talk in your sleep, turn out to have been hollow: two weeks after your last day they already have contracted into inert pellets one-fiftieth of their former size; you find yourself unable to recreate the sense of what was really at stake, for it seems to have been the Hungarian 5/2 rhythm of the lived workweek alone that kept each fascinating crisis inflated to its full interdepartmental complexity.
An extremely closed structure
Nearly all housing in Japan today consists of exclusively residential units for salaried workers and their nuclear families. Such residences have, by definition, no reason to interface with their surroundings.
Salaried workers commute to workplaces outside, and often a considerable distance from, their homes. Residences built for these workers do not contain a place of livelihood—in the broader sense, a place for exchange. This "residence-only housing" is only a place for the nuclear family to eat and sleep, with no occasions for interaction with the outside world, and no need to foster a sense of belonging to the community at large. Thus the only organizational principle is the maintenance of privacy. Both in external appearance and in lifestyle, it is an extremely closed structure.
The cubicle
The cubicle had the effect of putting people close enough to each other to create serious social annoyances, but dividing them so that they didn’t actually feel that they were working together. It had all the hazards of privacy and sociability but the benefits of neither. It got so bad that nobody wanted them taken away; even those three walls offered some kind of psychological home, a place one could call one’s own. All these factors could deepen the frenzied solitude of an office worker.
Taylorism in software
Interestingly, just as software people were talking about how we need to kind of follow this very Taylorist notion as the future of software development, the manufacturing world was moving away from it. The whole notion of what was going on in a lot in manufacturing places was the people doing the work need to have much more of a say in this because they actually see what's happening.
Freedom
Thus freedom brings not stagnation, but rather the danger of overwork.
The gathering darkness of a Sunday evening
Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
Long-term
"Apart from his own design work, this is the second greatest achievement of Dieter Rams: establishing a design department within a company, which succeeded for decades in preserving its own individual approach and rigorously advancing it, without really being influenced by changing market interests." — Klaus Kemp
He is right; it was a remarkable feat. It takes a considerable degree of doggedness and conviction to follow the ungratifying and difficult path of insisting on a consistently long-term view in a corporate world that is constantly shifting and full of short-term decisions.
Shorten the wings
The labile tastes of certain decision-makers in a company are often a great burden for designers. Too many feel themselves qualified to pass judgment. And how insensitive, how superficial these judgments often are.
Taste, believes Rams, is something that needs to be trained, since the aesthetic decisions at this level in product design are intrinsically bound to the entire form and function of the object. It would be unimaginable, for example, that the management of an aerospace company would ask the designers of a new plane to shorten the wings because they think it would make it look prettier.
Selling your own ignorance
When you sell your expertise - and what I mean by sell is to move ahead in a corporation, or sell an idea to a publisher, or sell an ability to a client - by definition, you’re selling from a limited repertoire.
However, when you sell your ignorance to move ahead, when you sell your desire to create and explore and navigate paths to knowledge, when you sell your curiosity - you sell from a bucket with an infinitely deep bottom that represents an unlimited repertoire. And, you sell in a way that’s not intimidating, in a way that joins the explanation to the fascination that comes with understanding.
Defining craftsmanship
By craftsmanship I refer to a style of work and a way of life having the following characteristics:
- In craftsmanship there is no ulterior motive for work other than the product being made and the processes of its creation.
- In craftsmanship, plan and performance are unified, and in both, the craftsman is master of the activity and of himself in the process. The craftsman is free to begin his working according to his own plan, and during the work he is free to modify its shape and the manner of its shaping.
- Since he works freely, the craftsman is able to learn from his work, to develop as well as use his capacities.
- The craftsman’s way of livelihood determines and infuses his entire mode of living. For him there is no split of work and play, of work and culture. His work is the mainspring of his life; he does not flee from work into a separate sphere of leisure; he brings to his non-working hours the values and qualities developed and employed in his working time.
The star system
The distributor is ascendant over many producers who become the rank-and-file workmen of the commercially established cultural apparatus.
The star system of American culture – along with the commercial hacks – tend to kill off the chance of the cultural workman to be a worthy craftsman.
Office survival
“The caveman was undoubtedly very pleased to find a good cave but he also undoubtedly positioned himself at the entrance looking out. Protect your back but know what is going on outside is a very good rule for survival. It is also a good survival rule for life in offices.” — Robert Propst, The Office: A Facility Based on Chicago
Instruments of cooperation
When work isn't shared, the instruments of cooperation – listening, taking note, adjusting – atrophy like muscles that are no longer in use.
An unfolding network of associations
We know strategy is an unfolding network of associations:
The evidence from the case suggests that the concept of strategy can be reappraised. From strategy as a static set of choices made at a specific point in time to strategy as an unfolding network of people, shared experiences and artifacts that is constantly being remade.
And we know that only 30% of employees can articulate a company’s strategy.
And I believe in the hyper-connected age we live in both of these things are becoming more true - that strategy is increasingly “in motion” and that most organizations are realizing their OODA loops are too slow for the modern world.
This causes the articulation of strategy to stall and get left behind - how do you articulate something in motion? It’s easier to write strategy down when it doesn’t change right?
As a result - there’s a widening gap between the perspective on strategy that the executive team has and the received ideas of the company’s direction that teams and employees have.
Displacement
...the man fitted to his job like a man to the exact pocket of space he displaces.
Strings and clots
The walls' texture was mostly smooth, but if you really focused your attention there were also a lot of the little embedded strings and clots which painters tend to leave when they're paid by the job and not the hour and thus have no motivation to hurry. If you really look at something, you can almost always tell what type of wage structure the person who made it was on.
The Real World of Technology
A Lecture by Ursula M. FranklinManaging Oneself
A Book by Peter F. DruckerCubed
A Book by Nikil SavalI've designed it that way
A Quote by Townes Van ZandtI don't envision a very long life for myself.
Like, I think my life will run out before my work does, you know?
I've designed it that way.What Le Corbusier got right about office space
An Article by Tim HarfordIn the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished.
Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives.
...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not.
Background textures of work
An Article by Lucy KeerOne thing I've been enjoying about working as a technical writer is that the minute-by-minute texture of the work feels right. Something about formatting text, faffing about with SVGs, trying to rewrite a sentence more clearly... it's just enjoyable in itself, and I feel at home with it.
...Working as a programmer was very much not like that. There's something in the rough vicinity of professional dev work that I do like, which I could probably label as 'iterative hobbyist tinkering with websites'. I like working on something with a strong visual component, and I like to be inside of a fast feedback loop, and I'm mostly interested in just somehow bodging through until it works. I'm not very interested in either the computer-sciencey side of programming — data structures, algorithms — or the software-engineerey side of making things run reliably at scale in a maintainable way. So maybe it's not surprising that the minute-by-minute texture of professional programming was just... kind of bad. Occasional fun bits when I got into something, but the background experience was not fun.
I don’t believe in Zoom fatigue
An Article by Matt WebbIt’s not Zoom fatigue, it’s Zoom whiplash.
It’s a hunch. I can’t prove this.
The trick to get around this is to move smoothly up and down the gradient of social interaction intensity, never dropping below a basic floor of presence: the sense that there are other people in the same place as you.
Instead of having two modes, “in a call” and “on my own,” we need to think about multiple ways of being together which, minimally, could be:
- In a video call
- In an anteroom to a video call, hearing the sound of others
- In a doc together
- On my desktop but with the sense that colleagues are around
And the job of the designer is to ensure that their software ensures the existence of these different contexts, instead of having the binary on-a-call/not-on-a-call, and to design the transitions between them.
Say yes and never do it
A Quote by Mel BrooksYou have some wonderful stories of basically getting away with stuff at the studios.
I’d learned one very simple trick: say yes. Simply say yes…You say yes, and you never do it.
That’s great advice for life.
It is. Don’t fight them. Don’t waste your time struggling with them and trying to make sense to them. They’ll never understand.
Thanks Doc
An Article by Robin Rendle & Craig ModA couple of months back, Craig mentioned in a video that he has a doc filled to the brim with snippets of text—nice words, compliments, and thanks that had been sent his way for his work. Whenever someone says something nice he just copy/pastes it into that doc.
It sounds silly at first and perhaps a little egotistical. Behold! I have a document that proves how great I am!
But I started doing it just to see what it feels like and…hey…actually? It’s so great! When I’m feeling low (often) or whenever the world feels unstable (extremely often) it’s so very nice to return to a few kind words about my work. It reminds me just how much these words of praise mean, it reminds me that I ought to pass that favor along.
Efficiency is the Enemy
An ArticleMany of us have come to expect work to involve no slack time because of the negative way we perceive it. In a world of manic efficiency, slack often comes across as laziness or a lack of initiative. Without slack time, however, we know we won’t be able to get through new tasks straight away, and if someone insists we should, we have to drop whatever we were previously doing. One way or another, something gets delayed. The increase in busyness may well be futile.
Spreadsheet Portfolios for UX Designers
An Article by Erica HeinzThe “case study?” column was the whole point of the spreadsheet — identifying which projects I still needed to write up for my portfolio — but at this point I looked at the sheet, and thought “This is honestly a better overview of the work I do than any ‘portfolio’ I’ve seen”.
So I tweeted a screenshot, joking/trolling that it WAS my portfolio (I didn’t include any winks or notes that I was still planning a “real” portfolio), but people didn’t respond with the lulz I expected — they got the idea, or took it at face value and said they were going to do their portfolio this way too!
My Anti-Resumé
An Article by Monica ByrneA couple years ago I was having dinner with a playwright, Bekah Brunstetter, and her director David Shmidt Chapman. We talked about how rejection is just part of the landscape for all beginning artists, no matter how talented or hardworking they might be or how successful they might appear. David said he’d love to publish his “anti-résumé” someday—a list of all the things he didn’t get.
The Third Way
An Article by Kevin KellyBut all the civilized cities of the world were also filled with third places that people loved. Not quite private, not quite public, these third places were intimate but open to anyone. Like settling down at a table at a cafe. It felt like your space, but you were not the landlord. They were public, open spaces that you could “own” for a while.
…We need a new third category of work — something between “employee” and “not an employee”—that encompasses digital gig laborers. AirBnB is neither a hotel, nor a private resident. It is a third thing, and we need to create a new category to deal with it…This is the era of the third way.
Individuals matter
An Article by Dan LuuOne of the most common mistakes I see people make when looking at data is incorrectly using an overly simplified model. A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I've looked at is treating people as interchangeable, as if it doesn't matter who is doing what, as if individuals don't matter.
Individuals matter.
Deadlines are bullshit
An ArticleIn software development deadlines are a necessary evil. It is important to understand when they are necessary, and it is important to understand why they are evil.
- External vs. internal deadlines
- Why are internal deadlines evil?
- Engineers who love their work
When their salary depends on not understanding it
A Quote by Upton SinclairIt is difficult to get people to understand something, when their salary depends on not understanding it.
Touch the keys
An Article by Rach SmithIn his course Being Productive: Simple Steps to Calm Focus, Kourosh Dini emphasises the importance of taking a moment to “be with” the work every day (or however frequently you need to tackle a project). “Being with” your work is to be fully present and intentional about that activity and doing nothing else.
This idea was inspired by Dini’s piano teacher, who encouraged him to sit at his piano and touch the keys every day. Even on the days that he felt he had no time or inclination to practice. Sometimes touching the keys would lead to a good practice session, even when he didn’t feel like it would before he actually gave it a go.
Just like Dini, I find that once I give the task my full attention and be present, the actual doing of it turns out to be much easier and more enjoyable than my mind had been expecting. As usual, the resistance to getting started is far more uncomfortable than actually doing the thing.
I haven't experienced imposter syndrome, and maybe you haven't either
An Article by Rach SmithI have never felt like an “imposter”.
I have always deserved to be here, I’ve worked hard.
I don’t suffer from a “syndrome”.
Identifying the gaps in my knowledge and being aware of what I don’t know is part of my vocation.In recent years it’s become trendy to discuss how we all apparently suffer from this imposter syndrome - an inability to internalize one's accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a “fraud”. I take two issues with this:
- it minimizes the impact that this experience has on people that really do suffer from it.
- we’re labelling what should be considered positive personality traits - humility, an acceptance that we can’t be right all the time, a desire to know more, as a “syndrome” that we need to “deal with”, “get over” or “get past”.
Learning About Work Ethic From My High School Driving Instructor
An Essay by James SomersShould we really demand that the guy who checks ticket stubs at the movie theater hones his craft?
Well, yes. No job is too low to not warrant care, because no job exists in isolation. Carelessness ripples. It adds friction to the working of the world. To phone it in or run out the clock, regardless of how alone and impotent you might feel in your work, is to commit an especially tragic—for being so preventable—brand of public sin.
Bob [the driving instructor] oozes concern; he wants to infect the state of New Jersey with good driving habits. He respects his public role, the fact that the minute he's done with these kids they head straight for their parents' car keys and out onto the roads we share. When I asked him what he likes to do outside of work, he laughed: "This is my life."
His reward is the pleasure of depth itself.
If we didn’t live to work
A Fragment by Charlie WarzelWhen you talk to people who reject the modern notion of a career, many of them say the same thing: They crave more balance, less precarity, and better pay. They also, crucially, want to work.
What’s profound about the career rejectionists is that their guiding questions are simple. What if work didn’t make you feel awful? What would life be like if we didn’t live to work? What do workers and employers actually owe each other? What if we structured our work lives around a different idea of success?
136 things every web developer should know before they burn out and turn to landscape painting or nude modelling
An Article by Baldur Bjarnason- The best way to improve software UX is regular direct observation, by everybody on the team, of the work done.
- Have some personality.
- Minimalism is garbage.
- Metaphors are fantastic.
- Naming things is fantastic.
- Try to write HTML that would make sense and be usable without the CSS.
- The buyer is quite often wrong. That fact never changes their mind.
- Working on a functioning app’s codebase does more to increase its quality than adding features.
- A good manager will debate you, and that’s awesome.
- The term ‘project’ is a poor metaphor for the horticultural activity that is software development.
The brag document
An Article by Julia EvansIt’s frustrating to have done something really important and later realize that you didn’t get rewarded for it just because the people making the decision didn’t understand or remember what you did.
The tactic is pretty simple! Instead of trying to remember everything you did with your brain, maintain a “brag document” that lists everything so you can refer to it when you get to performance review season!
Why We Build the Wall
A Song by Anaïs MitchellWhat do we have that they should want?
We have a wall to work upon
We have work and they have none
And our work is never done
And the war is never won
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us freeFrom the desk of
A Blog by Kate DonnellyA site dedicated solely to canvas of the Desk.
A Desk is where we work. Symbolic. Physical. Present. A second and third home. A Desk is a platform. A hearth. Roots are planted. It’s a place, a sanctuary, where hours upon hours pass.
The saddest designer
An Essay by Chia AmisolaI am tired of the premise that creation means productivity––especially in the laborious sense...Creation has become mangled with labor in a world that demands man to monetize all of their hobbies and pursuits. In return, it seems empty, almost sad, really––to be the designer spending weekends again on the screen.
To tell you what I like to do in the weekends, I like to do the sad thing...The ‘good’ people tell you to detach your life from your workspace, but this summer, I think I’ve just realized how much I adore what I have the luxury of working on everyday.
In the weekend, I make. I make not because it’s the only thing I have ever known, but because it’s the most certain way forward.
Contrafreeloading
A DefinitionContrafreeloading is an observed behavior in which an organism, when offered a choice between provided food or food that requires effort to obtain, prefers the food that requires effort.
In defense of disorder: on career, creativity, and professionalism
An Essay by Chia AmisolaProfessionalism is a lie, build what you love, explore everything. In today’s age of creation, anyone who attempts to tell you otherwise is lying. You’ll end up seeking what you traded for the rest of your life.
Two types of work
An Article by Jorge ArangoThere are two types of work: growth work and maintenance work.
Growth work involves making new things. It can be something big or small. In either case, growth work often follows a loose process.
Maintenance work is different. Maintenance work involves caring for the resources and instruments that make growth work possible. This includes tools, but also body and mind.
Maintenance is ultimately in service to growth. But effective growth can’t happen without maintenance. As with so many things, the ideal is a healthy balance — and it doesn’t come without struggle.
At least everything was important
A Quote by Mads MikkelsenMy approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.
Apprenticeship: An Internship Replacement
An Essay by Ivana McConnellUniversities are often too large, dulling the student-educator relationship. Internships are often transitory and involve large volumes of work without context or learning: building web pages or presentations from pre-built components to meet a deadline, for example. It’s work that people need to do, but it doesn’t require learning or understanding the client or the project. Thankfully, there is a middle ground that we seem to have forgotten about in tech: the apprenticeship.
Senior craftsperson
A Fragment by Wilson MinerThe thing that you’re talking about though, which I’ve never seen a mature company really have a sustainable space for, is the “senior craftsperson.” They’re not pivoting at some point in their career to saying “I’m going to take what I know and leverage it through other people.” They’re saying “I want to get better infinitely at the thing that I do.” I believe that that’s possible.
You see it more in pure-art kind of careers. Like “I’m an illustrator” or “I’m a concept artist” or something, and there’s a need for that person being really fucking good at that one thing, and continuing to do that one thing. I think a lot of people can intuitively understand why that would be really satisfying for someone as a career path.
When we were all together in-person
A Quote“We believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future,” said Deirdre O’Brien, senior vice president of retail and people, in a video recording viewed by The Verge. “If we take a moment to reflect on our unbelievable product launches this past year, the products and the launch execution were built upon the base of years of work that we did when we were all together in-person.”
Building Momentum
An Article by Dan MallFight the Waterfall
Start all of the pieces of work a little bit earlier. The key to starting work early is not succumbing to the pressure of having to finish the work. Don’t worry about finishing. If you’re a developer, you can start doing things while your design or information architect are working because a lot of your work actually isn’t dependent on their work. Some of it is, so you probably won’t be able to finish, but that shouldn’t stop you from starting.
Share Work-in-Progress Early and Often
When you share work-in-progress, share it with the caveat that no feedback is needed at this point. You’re simply sharing it to let people know where you are. For example, if you have to make 12 wireframes, share it when you finish 2 or 3. Rather than spending a whole week to drop 12 wireframes, share 2 – 3 wireframes every 2 days. The more often you do this, you start to build rhythm, and rhythm builds momentum.
Life as Protest
A Fragment by Craig ModI’ve written this before but I constantly need to remind myself of it, so, once again: A certain kind of work, lifestyle, mode of living — in and of itself — is protest. That is, work that is curious and rigorous is implicitly an antipode to didactic, shallow bombastity. It is inherently an archetype against bullshit. That to be committed to this work or life of rigor (be it rigor focused on “art” or, as they say in Japanese, sakuhin, or family or athleticism or whatever), and to share it with the world is to opt-out of being paralyzed by idiocy, and help others who may be paralyzed find a path back to whatever fecundity of life it is that they deserve.
What doesn't seem like work?
An Essay by Paul GrahamThe stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do.
So I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly. What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you?
How to do what you love
An Essay by Paul GrahamQuestions to ask on a new job search
An Article by Sally LaitThe role and expectations
- What does this job entail?
- What's driving the hire?
- What are the biggest challenges?
- What scope is there to do x, y, z?
- How/when/why would you consider hiring me to be successful?
- What does progression from here look like?
- What's the biggest mistake I could make?
The wider business
- Can you tell me a bit about the company?
- What about the culture?
- How does diversity, equity, and inclusion play into this?
- What's the most exciting thing on the company horizon?
- What's been the impact of COVID-19 on company finances/strategy?
- What are the best and worst things about working here?
Day to day
- What's the size/structure of the team I'd be around/have reporting to me?
- Which other people would I work most closely with?
- What technologies/tools would I work with?
- What could I do that would make your life easier?
The practical bits
- What salary are you offering for this role?
- Additional package/benefits
- How do you approach distributed working, and is there scope for this?
- What timescales are you hoping for?
- Holiday
- Job title
Give yourself an extra shot: Is there anything I've said today that makes you hesitate?
Dolor
A Poem by Theodore RoethkeI have known the inexorable sadness of pencils.
Difficult to work with
A Tweet"Someone recently told me that 'difficult to work with' often really means 'difficult to take advantage of' in creative industries, and I haven’t stopped thinking about that for weeks" — @AdalynGrace_
Robert Irwin: A Conditional Art
Only a mind opened to the quality of things
Only a mind opened to the quality of things, with a habit of discrimination, sensitized by experience and responsive to new forms and ideas, will be prepared for the enjoyment of this art. The experience of the work of art, like the creation of the work of art itself, is a process ultimately opposed to communication as it is understood now. What has appeared as noise in the first encounter becomes in the end message or necessity, though never message in a perfectly reproducible sense. You cannot translate it into words or make a copy of it which will be quite the same thing.
The most incidental detail
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.
In a state of reverberation
Irwin's terms of sudden, physical realization – bam! – call to mind the suddenly enlightening Zen slap or rap on the forehead. It also calls to mind [Philip Guston]'s own remark..."Look at any inspired painting...it's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation." Reverberation is another way of suggesting a kind of sudden, energetic, physical experience.
Sort of underway by then
He was sort of underway by then...he had this whole ritual for showing the work to people – you had to sit in a chair that was positioned what he felt was exactly the right distance from the painting. There was a certain mystique about it that worked for him.
Untitled (Dot Painting)
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.
Four essentially straight lines
One of [Marvin] Silver's photographs shows Irwin checking the quality of a line, peering down its extent to verify that no distracting gesture of variation would attract the viewer's attention. Another has him standing on a milk crate to get a closer look at a line placed higher up on the canvas.
"So I finally arrived at a painting with four essentially straight lines put on by hand," he recorded, "which was important. If I put them on too crudely, they were like the older paintings, having all that kind of emotive thing." But, at the same time, too much of a geometric look was also to be avoided: "If I put them on which I tried, like ruling them in a way, they had an image to them of geometry."
Standing before Bed of Roses, the viewer quickly becomes aware of this absence of geometry as his or her own perceptual processes of grouping and sorting kick into action.
Art as art
If modern painting is "art as art," this means, to paraphrase Reinhardt, that is represents nothing and exists only in and for itself. If this has created an "art language, with an art communication," this is because this kind of art has implied all along a form of intimate contact with its viewer, in which the viewing of "art as art" becomes "sensation as sensation" or "perception as perception." This distinguishes "modern painting" from representational painting, which exhibits duality, that is, it uses imagery to refer to "past experiences and feeling," and to "color and reconstruct in the mind" associations that are meaningful, but that take the viewer far away from the specifics of the encounter with the painting before them.
The art is what has happened to the viewer
The art is the sensual involvement itself, not the thing that Irwin hangs on the wall. Consequently, as soon as the viewer turns his or her back, the "art" is over. Or, better, it potentially lives in different ways in each individual spectator's increased perceptual attentiveness. Leider stressed this point: "What stays in the museum is only the art-object, not valueless, but not the value of art. The art is what has happened to the viewer."
Irwin Discs
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?"
Irwin Acrylic Columns
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.
Slant Light Volume
You are the one that is changed
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.
The subtlest slightest kinds of differences
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.
I can only conceive for you
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.
The here and now
Irwin's ambition is to shift emphasis to the experience of the spectator of his art, identifying the process of looking, moving, and thinking, and looking again, as the actual art. That is, the aesthetic experience of the audience is the art, not the scrim or plasterboard. Irwin's installations, therefore, are problematic for the art world insofar as they take the here and now perceptual experience of the visitor as their subject matter, and exist only temporarily. They cannot be bought and sold, at least in principle, and they are sufficiently reliant on the space in which they are built that they cannot be transferred from one place to another.
Irwin Volumes
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
Continuing Responses
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.
Scrim Veil — Black Rectangle — Natural Light
Portal Park Slice
Four categories for public art
Irwin proposed four categories for public art...based on the relationship of the art to its site:
- Site dominant (Moore, Calder): The public square of plaza is used as a pedestal for an enlarged version of a studio piece originally made without reference to the specific site.
- Site-adjusted (di Suvero): Still designed in the studio but was adjusted to the scale of the site during installation.
- Site-specific (Serra, Morris, Heizer, Smithson): Starts to take the specificity of the site into account, but for all intents and purposes remains a statement determined in advance by the artist's already recognizable style and materials.
- Site-conditioned or Site-determined (Irwin): "Takes all of its cues (reasons for being) from its surroundings." ...Takes nothing for granted going into the project, not even a consistent style or set of materials.
Conditional art
[Conditional art] requires the process to begin with an intimate, hands-on reading of the site. This means sitting, watching, and walking through the site, the surrounding areas (where you will enter from and exit to), the city at large or the countryside...
A quiet distillation of all this – while directly experiencing the site – determines all the facets of the "sculptural response".
What do we mean by consistency?
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.
48 Shadow Planes
Reversibility of perspectives
Irwin's thinking was informed by the writings of Alfred Schutz, a follower of Husserl, ...[who] had noted that typification was at the basis of the assumption of the reversibility of perspectives, which was a condition for the possibility of intersubjective experience and the notion of a shared, commonly experienced world. It is also the first step in overcoming the specificity of the individual in favor of knowledge about groups. What is gained by this procedure is an understanding of demographics, but the cost of this understanding is a lack of emphasis on differences between individuals and their unique subjective experiences.
All the way to the last bolt
"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."
Clarity and richness
Sketches and plans for the Arts Enrichment Master Plan at Miami International Airport.
New in Miami was the episodic structure, whereby a complex sequence of switches back and forth between these two kinds of attention would be orchestrated according to the shifting needs associated with the different spaces. Areas focused on clarity facilitate the achievement of practical objectives. Areas focused on art, conversely, facilitate a diversity of overlapping configurations and sensory richness. Art in the wrong place, therefore, causes confusion precisely where clarity needs to take precedence; and clarity in areas where the visitor has time to linger and enjoy aesthetic richness is a lost opportunity.
Both practical and aesthetic concerns
The group [of Irwin, Howard, and Wortz]'s thinking here seems to have been influenced to a degree by Christopher Alexander's landmark article, "A City is Not a Tree" (1965)...
Irwin referred specifically to Alexander's argument in his effort to sort out his own thinking about how the Miami International Airport might be designed with both practical and aesthetic concerns in mind, allowing for their overlap and emergence from the conditions on the ground.
Photogrids
Irwin made grids of photographs he had taken in the local environment of Miami and South Florida in order to indicate the site-determined nature of this project as well as to show the kinds of plants, flowers, and trees his gardens would include. These grids are works of art in themselves in the way in which they organize and group environmental elements.
The differences in intentionality
[Marc] Treib summarized Irwin's views on conditional art as follows: "One does not start with a personal vocabulary or manner to be adapter to each situation. Thus, given the differences in intentionality between art and design, the artist and the designer will 'plow different furrows seemingly in the same field.'" This is an important point since it gets at the difference that Irwin sees between art and design, the first of which is predicated, as he says, on the opportunity to deal with each situation freely and without constraints, and the latter, which is restricted in many ways from the outset by functional, stylistic, and economic concerns.
Getty Center Central Garden
Ever Present, Ever Changing
EVER PRESENT NEVER TWICE THE SAME
EVER CHANGING NEVER LESS THAN WHOLE
The ideas up there
The relationship between Meier's overarching rational design, on the one hand, and the conditional relationships in the garden, on the other, was a constant reference point for Irwin...
[Meier] had this whole geometry, and in some cases it is invisible. He will say this line has to go through here because it matches that one up over there. In my mind, I am standing here, I can't see that over there. I can only see this, this, and this. So I would make the decision much more based on the interfaces I am involved with rather than some idea up there.
To enact visually the message
The inscription is itself a perceptual component within the space of the garden insofar as it becomes a pattern of sameness and difference. Paired identical terms are interspersed between paired different terms. This movement between repetition and difference seems, at least in part, to be intended to enact visually the message of the inscription itself.
An index of the shifting patterns
"Because this is a garden where things can be left out at night without being stolen, we're going to 'furnish' the garden with French café chairs that won't be secured in the ground, so people can move them to wherever they want to sit...It's like with the chairs being totally casual and relaxed and comfortable. They set a tone. There's things that you have to do to get the right feel, where it's all already there, but then, you know, 'Bing!' – there's a moment of recognition." The patterning of chairs pulled together in different ways by successive waves of visitors over the course of the day becomes an index of the shifting patterns of people that sit in a variety of arrangements to facilitate conversations and other intersubjective alignments, or simply to allow for a moment of private contemplation free from contact with others.
The plan has its own plan
Incidental accumulations of individual perceivers along the path or on the terrace do not constitute stable aesthetic communities, but pluralities of crisscrossing, irreducibly singular aesthetic perspectives that are, to recall Irwin's inscription, "ever present," yet "never twice the same."
...As Irwin has explained: "I go back to the garden constantly and it's always doing something I didn't anticipate. It's always better than I thought. It's like I make this plan and then it has its own plan and it's a thrill."
Traveling Exhibition Installations
Photographs of 5 Openings 2 + 3, Untitled, and Double Diamond.
Excursus: Homage to the Square^3
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.
Frosted and transparent
Irwin's window arrangement at the Dia:Beacon.
In addition to managing the flow of people in the spaces of the museum in order to maximize freedom of movement and choice, Irwin also modified the industrial window grids to create perceptual ambiguity, placing transparent glass in the inner four panes while using frosted glass for the outer panes. With this, Irwin solved the problem of either having the windows become a wall of glaring light, if all transparent glass was used, or having them become a claustrophobic muffling of space, if all frosted glass was used. Irwin's windows catch the eye in a back and forth oscillation between distant and proximal focus.
They wanted a monument
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.
Doing nothing with precision
For his part, Gehry has noted in defense of his recent museum extravaganzas: "artists want to be in an important building, not a neutral one." At Dia:Beacon, Irwin pursued the opposite logic. As Govan has pointed out: "The money was spent to make it look like nothing was done to the building." Or, as a partner from Open Office observes: "We talked often about the idea of doing nothing with precision. Do it right and they'll never know we were here." As one critic has written, what the result showed was, as he puts it, "Irwin's unwavering conviction that museum spaces should serve the art and not the other way around."
Light and Space
Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, & Blue^3
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.
When the phenomena are endless
"There can be no description or theory of color per se," Irwin insists, "when the phenomena are endless." The notion that color can be reduced to a series of codes, to a grammar, or to a form of "mathematics," to use Wittegensetein's term, is, for Irwin, nonsense, since color is dependent on context and ground-up perceptual experience. Beginning with color codes or concepts was to reduce in advance an infinitely wide range of phenomena to a limited set of categories, editing out all specificity in favor of abstraction.
Irwin Fluorescents
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.
1º2º3º4º
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."
Stands up and hums
The ruin [at Marfa] itself, in fact, set the terms for the kinds of solutions Irwin would propose, since its absent roof and floor, and its shockingly wide-open sequences of windows, which overlap and align with one another from different points of view on the site, already presented a rich, thoroughly keyed-up set of perceptual events before Irwin ever considered the project. It was already one of those sites that, in Irwin's words, "stands up and hums" thanks to the rich quality of their perceptual phenomena.