My brand of Marxism and People Who Need People

 

“I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”

- Groucho Marx

“What professional organizations do you belong to and how are they helpful to your career? What organizations would you like to join?” is this week's prompt.

I don’t belong to any and I have yet to hear of any that spark my interest. AIGA would be an obvious choice, but I’m as fond of obvious choices as I am of organized groups with tithing or fee structures. So, that is to say, I’m not looking to join any in the near future.

Any exclusivity an organization like AIGA claims to offer is rendered mute by its size: 22,000 strong, with dozens of chapters (even in China). It’s hard to see how joining gives me as a design professional any real edge. To quote a member, Christopher Simmons, who blogs for the AIGA site, “If you want to be a brand, I tell clients, you must work from the inside out. A great logo isn’t going to make a shitty product any less shitty, any more than a hard worker is going to make a bad boss a compelling leader. “ And analogously, a membership in a professional organization won’t necessarily make one a better or meaningful designer or anything but $315 less wealthy. Merit and hard work will get me where I want to be, not people who need people, as lucky as they may be. Branding one’s self as “a professional in a design organization” is accessory at best, in my opinion.

I’m not into conventions and symposiums. Unless, hypothetically, I get paid to attend, opposed to paying for: entrance, a yearly membership fee and airfare. I know it’s tax deductable, but it just seems garishly unnecessary.  I’m social. It’s why I pay in excess for drinks and dining in bars as opposed to doing so alone, at home. I understand that advocacy of design is important. But doing so through a club seems like self-aggrandized preaching to the choir, or worse, to 22,000+ preachers.

Another case in point is DMI, which applies directly to me; again, an obvious choice. Design Management Institute bills itself as having, “earned a reputation worldwide as a multifaceted resource, providing invaluable know-how, tools and training through its conferences, seminars, membership program, and publications.” To whom, one might ask. Design managers, of course.

Perhaps I’m too young to appreciate a pillar of design society like AIGA. Perhaps I’m too rugged an individual to appreciate the safety-in-numbers, legitimacy-through-consensus and repetition that organizations like DMI provide. Overall, I’d like an organization to want more out of me than money. I like that in all my relationships.

They say acceptance is the first step.

... never take more than you can handle & always know your dealer.

Hello, my name is Carmella. And I’m a Creative. This is my 12-Step Be-more-Creative technique:

1. I accept I am powerless over Creativity.

2. I believe that a power greater than myself exists. And it is Creativity.

3. I have made the decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of Creativity, as I understand it.

4. I make a searching a fearless inventory of everything, creatively.

5. I admit to Creativity, to myself and to other human beings the exact nature of my creative mistakes.

6. I am entirely ready for Creativity to remove my shortcomings.

7. I humbly ask Creativity to remove all these defects from my work.

8. I continue to refer to the list of all the projects and personal artistic endeavors I have wronged.

9. I make direct amends to such endeavors whenever possible, except when to do so would lack in, or injure the Creativity of my work.

10. I then continue to take personal inventory and when I am wrong, I promptly admit it.

11. Sought through concepting, drafting and revision I improve my conscious contact with Creativity, as I understand it, creating for knowledge of Creativity’s will for me so that I might be granted the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a Creative awakening as the result of these steps, I try to carry this message to other Creatives and to practice these principles in all my affairs.

Don't let schooling interfere with your education - Mark Twain

My most positive and memorable education experience...

    

In my senior AP English class in high school, I was obliged to read The Natural by Bernard Malamud. I didn’t like the movie as a kid, and I sure as hell didn’t like the thinly metaphoric, morally thick book.  Sorry sports fans, it just didn’t grab me. But my teacher Mr. McKenzie loved it. And I loved him. Not in that way. He looked like Mark Twain and is seriously one of the sweetest men on the planet. He introduced me to authors that changed my life and he’s a big part of why I enjoy writing at all. So, I felt kind of bad for hating it. Ungrateful even.

After we read it, he started an open class discussion on what we thought about the book: theme, mood, character development, etc.  He started us off by giving his thoughts, which turned into a 5-minuet dissertation on a book he was passionate about. I was taken aback. He wrapped it up by saying, “… but that’s just my opinion. What do you guys think?” And so help me; he genuinely cared to hear opposing and varying opinions, in hopes to learn something from us. A hope as passionate as the one he had for that lame book. This tempered the negative opinion I gave about The Natural. It didn’t change my mind about it, but I did learn something about trusting the passionate expertise of others while the object in question I find to be crap.

The Odyssey & the Ecstasy- Existentialism & the Zen of Self-Mentorship

Genesis… of a nemesis? A sampling from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel  

This week’s Business Communication blog prompt: “Mentoring-Do you have a mentor? What should you look for in a mentor?”

Instead of giving the short answer, (which, I have a sneaking suspicion is “no”) and facing an abysmal grade as a result, I’d like to protract my answer by exploring the word “Mentor”. Who knows? The protraction might change my answer.

As a noun, mentor is defined as: “a wise and trusted counselor or teacher, an influential senior sponsor or supporter”.  The word comes from a proper name in ancient Greece, a character in Homer’s Iliad. Mentor was entrusted to advise the son of Odysseus in his father’s absence. So there’s a kind of parental vibe about mentor. I had a dance teacher, whom I could consider a personal mentor, in an almost spiritual kind of way. But, I don’t think that’s what the assignment is asking. I am supposing what I’m being asked about is a professional mentor.

I don’t know anyone who does what I want to do professionally.  I have heroes and role models, but mentors seem to have hands-on, personal, technical advisory involvement with their mentorees.  I get regular professional and technical advice from my peers, however and their sterling tutelage I wish I could pay for. But my peers are the opposite of a mentor by definition.

In answering this question I now realize that I’m flying blind, as it were, plunging head long into at sea of the unknown.  My major, my focus and my career aspirations are the products of hope. Elusive hope. Not faith in a mentor. Not yet anyway…  

But, do I need one? Being without the explicit direction of an expert sounds like freedom to me. But then again, the freedom to act has the tendency to produce the fear of failure: angst or dread, as they call it. Kierkegaard figured, in the absence of the absolute control of a creator we would fear letting that creator down, risking hellfire.  Contemporary Existentialist thought maintains that we as individuals are uniquely responsible for the meaning in our lives, the looming fear being our own disappointment. 

So, existentially speaking, we’re all flying blind. Whether you’re in an Iliad phase, journeying forth to make your mark on the world or an Odyssey phase, finding your way home; we’re all on our own. So I guess I don’t feel so left out.  Michelangelo had one. But with a rival like DaVinci, you’d need one... and then some; but, I’m not shooting that high.   

I am elated with the prospect of learning alongside my friends, forging our way ahead into respective creative fields, personal battles of Troy, as uniquely as possible with or without overt guidance.

Zen master Linji said, “If you meet the Buddha, kill him.” The idea here is that a perfected teacher outside your self is illusory and should not only be disregarded but, also destroyed. So I will continue to look inside myself and to the good company I have placed myself in for guidance. And what can I say? I just won't settle for less than perfection. 

"Live the questions." R.M. Rilke

Victore piece quoting Rilke

This week’s Business Communication assignment: “Write about a current designer inspires you.”

An unambiguous enough prompt to be sure, but it only inspires in me a propagation of incisive questions: Whom can I consider a designer? How broadly should I consider design? How liberally can I deem a designer “current”; what if they’re dead and inspiring none-the-less? At the risk of appearing to be an overachieving busybody, would it be garish to write about more than one?

Designers, designers everywhere, which one makes me think… Stefan Sagmeister, James Victore and Tibor Kalman come to mind immediately and fit the prompt criteria (maybe not Kalman, because he died in the late ‘90’s) and street artist Banksy demands to be listed in my mind as well (though flying in the face of the criteria).  I lack the fortitude to choose only one.

Sagmeister installation using 10,000 bananas 

Sagmeister has a way with self-reference that continually draws the viewer into simple designs; using typography in a warm and human way, calling out the dehumanizing factor in cold, corporate design at large. He took 10,000 bananas to spell out, “Self-confidence produces fine results” as an installation.  “Complaining is silly. Either act or forget,” he’s told us through a self-negating billboard design, and he has been personally quoted as saying, “Yes, design can make you happy.” Though conversely, he has also said, “Art fucks design and vise versa,” illustrating the tenuous relationship between the two and their relationship with us, the audience. He focuses on concept as opposed to style and has carved out a venerable style of his own regardless.

Sagmeister has involved himself in charitable efforts using his art, further emphasizing the humanity of his work. An ethic I appreciate. He has made album art for The Rolling Stones and Lou Reed and I’m supposing he’s met all of the above. Now that’s inspiring to little ol’ me.

Victore produced the above as stickers

For me, as a student who didn’t want to be a student for quite some time and who judges favorable design as “sexy,” James Victore is a persistent inspiration. Political, satirical, vulgar and always thought provoking: Victore is a champion of self-discovery and iconoclasm. Not having a solid, formal art education himself: “I try to be the teacher that I needed: less a teacher, more a fire starter. I discourage my students from becoming designers. Designers tend to think alike. They even dress alike. I want my students to become good, strong citizens, independent thinkers and entrepreneurs. I try to get them to look inside themselves for answers, and not to follow trends or fashion. I try to get them to be open, and to expand their ideas of what design is and could be.” So, if I drop out, I can blame Victore… or maybe R.M. Rilke.

Kalman for Esquire

Tibor Kalman wasn’t an art school grad either.  A perverse optimist, he championed the young, seeing them change the world around them by any means necessary. “Children will smash your understanding, knowledge and reality. You will be better off. Then they will leave. You’ll miss them forever.”

Working his way up through a company that eventually became Barnes & Noble, after dropping out of college as Journalism major, he made heartfelt ephemerae and jarring images about multiculturalism. He once said, “Graphic design is a means, not an end. A language, not content.”

And that having been said, a designer that transcends definition, missing the prompt criteria perhaps, but who’s work I consider a logical extension of where graphic design has come from and where design in general is going, is Banksy. “I use whatever it takes. Sometimes that just means drawing a moustache on a girl's face on some billboard, sometimes that means sweating for days over an intricate drawing. Efficiency is the key.”

Banksy-Leake St. London. A la Cave art @ Lascaux

Banksy’s incessant and barely legal commentary on art and society has inspired many in street art and has gained deference among contemporary art critics as well. Taking the iconic, with a liberal application of irony, he is redesigning the urban landscape with images that indict the complacent and herald change. For this Banksy is renown as a subversive. Yet his work, both street art and gallery pieces, unify a diaspora of sympathizers. Wrought with the intent to arrest his audience visually and emotionally, while evading capture legally, Banksy knows exactly what he’s saying even when seemingly inconsistent, “We can’t do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves.“

So in conclusion, and in the interest of living the questions: Whom can I consider a designer? Anyone that makes things with an intended purpose that is duly received. How broadly should design be considered?  Pretty damn broadly, but please kids, do so with deft, informed preference.  Or at least make a go of it. How liberally can a designer be deemed “current”?  If people are still talking about and nigh on stealing their work, it’s current. At the risk of appearing to be an overachieving busybody, was it garish to write about more than one designer? Yes. But it was totally worth it.

The Riled One

This week, for my blog post, for the dual sake of convenience and novelty, I decided to follow the prompt: Discuss your personal career choice and motivation.


I’m now confronted by the stone-cold fact that I have not yet made a career choice, exactly. Was I supposed to? When was that assignment due? I consulted the authority of an English language reference to check my stats:
      ca·reer
      [kuh-reer]
      –noun
          1. An occupation or profession, esp. one requiring special training, followed as one's lifework.
          2. A person's progress or general course of action through life or through a phase of life, as                        some profession or undertaking.
          3. Success in a profession, occupation, etc.
          4. A course, esp. a swift one.
          5. Speed, esp. full speed.
          6. Archaic. A charge at full speed.


“An occupation or profession”… seeing how I’m still in training I may have chosen a career but the relationship is as of today, unrequited. “Progress or general course of action”… OK. I think I’m on to something. I am progressing as a critic and researcher. Progression has been achieved with the execution of my designs; the designs aren’t good per se, but progressing none-the-less. As a career choice, Design Manager seems vague. “Entrepreneur in Design” sounds like someone with authority issues and no direction. Which wouldn’t be exactly untrue, but it’s not quite the whole story. But perhaps, less is more.


I’ll elect to simplify things and refer to myself, my career choice, course of action, lifework and occupation with the words: Design or Designer. Isn’t that just elegant?


But what will I design? Where? For whom? In the immortal words of the mortal Marlon Brando in The Wild One: “Whadda ya got?”


My motivation is to change the world around me for the better, aesthetically and ethically, without the mocking affectation of morality. Give people what they want, without depriving them of what they need or who they are. Design not for the masses but design for the masses to look to and feel inspired.


I am continually inspired by artists of all sorts who have excelled despite and to spite adversity. I’ve got a lot of spite and I’d like to do something constructive with it, especially if that means deconstructing norms, mores and expectations. In conclusion, with some more Brando, “I’m gonna take this joint apart and you’re not gonna know what hit you.”