Tao Te Ching / Bauhaus / Gestalt / Invisible Core

In the past three or four years, I have produced about 18 online video talks, which are indebted to—but not the same—as years and years of classroom slide-embellished talks for courses in graphic design and design history. It is one way to continue to teach, long after having retired from in-person lecturing. The videos have become surprisingly popular, and I suspect that some are being used by university faculty as supplementary teaching resources. The most frequently visited has had thousands of viewers (6000 alone on YouTube, plus those at other sources) which is encouraging, given that I don't admonish viewers to "like and subscribe."The most popular video is a foundations-level overview of the most basic understandings about "how form functions" in design-based art, architecture and graphic design. The title is Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The Film Version. In referring to it as "the film version," I intended to distinguish it from an academic paper with the same title, that I published twenty-seven years ago (in 1998) in the journal Leonardo (MIT Press).

That print on paper version was (perhaps still is) one of the top-ten most downloaded articles in that magazine's history. The paper and the video address the same subject, but they differ markedly, and I think the film is better. The film is derived from a classroom talk that I nearly always gave on the first day of class in my university-level design studio and foundations courses. It evolved over the years of course. But it seemed to function reliably as a "big picture" overview of what designers, architects and design-based artists might hope to achieve.

At the end of the film, I conclude by saying how lucky I was to have taught during the last 29 years of my teaching career (not 39, as the film narration mistakenly claims) in the Kamerick Art Building at the University of Northern Iowa. As I noticed when I first spoke there, the design of that building is based on recurrent references to a rectangular motif, the shape and proportion (1 by 2) of a domino game piece. That same motif is also fundamental in traditional Japanese architecture, where it occurs in the floor mats or tatami, which measure 3 x 6 feet. I surmised that the Kamerick building pays homage to that, in features both inside and out, an assumption that was verified years later when I spoke to the architect.

Earlier in the film, I allude to the resemblance between Gestalt theory in perceptual psychology, and the Tao Te Ching, which may have been first introduced to me by Weimar Bauhaus Master Potter Marguerite Wildenhain, with whom my friend and teacher Dean Schwarz and I spent a summer studying pottery at Pond Farm (her mountain-top studio, home and school) in Northern California. In her autobiography, titled The Invisible Core: A Potter's Life and Thoughts, she makes explicit references to Lao-tze's famous passage that claims that the essence of a pot is not in the walls, but in the space (or void) within—its "invisible core."

Here is the full passage from Lao-tze:

Thirty spokes meet in the hub, but the empty space between them is the essence of the wheel. Pots are formed from clay, but the empty space within it is the essence of the pot. Walls with windows and doors form the house, but the empty space within it is the essence of the home.

Marguerite Wildenhain was one of many who were struck by that now-famous passage. Another was Frank Lloyd Wright, who was quoted as follows in Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, ed., Frank Lloyd Wright: His Living Voice (Fresno: California State University Press, 1987), pp. 25-26—

One day in 1912 I got a little book from the Japanese ambassador to America ... It was a charming little book and all you ought to own it. It is called The Book of Tea [by Okakura Kakuzo]. Well, there I read Lao-tze for the first time, and I read that the reality of a building does not consist in the roof and the walls but In the space within to be lived in. Well, there is my thesis.

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

a young dog acquires name of Henry Yah-mes

Alvin Langdon Coburn / Max Beerbohm Portrait

Max Beerbohm (in a letter to Lytton Strachey)—

Some time in 1913, at this address, my wife and I acquired a young fox terrier. We debated as to what to call him, and, as Henry James had just been having his seventieth birthday, and as his books have given us more pleasure than those of any other living man, I, rather priggishly perhaps, insisted that the dog should be known as James. But this was a name which Italian peasants, who are the only neighbors we have, of course would not be able to pronounce at all. So we were phonetic and called the name of the dog Yah-mes. And this did very well. By this name he was known far and wide—but not for long; for alas, he died of distemper.

liver in one hand a whiskey tumbler in the other

Montage © Roy R. Behrens

Anthony Powell, Messengers of Day (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), p. 101—

He planned a practical illustration of the harm alcohol can do. He came into Helgate's sitting room holding a tumbler of neat whiskey in one hand, a piece of liver in the other. Dropping the liver dramatically into the whiskey, he paused for a moment while the meat shrivelled up. "That: he exclaimed, "is what is happening to your liver all the time you drink as you do." Heygate, who was undoubtedly startled by this action, reported himself as replying: "What a shameful waste of liver and whiskey."

language in which faith intertwines with desire

Montage © Roy R. Behrens

Francine du Plessix Gray, in George Plimpton, ed., The Writer’s Chapbook—

We must all struggle against all that is curious, already-seen, fatigued, shopworn. I battle against what my admirable colleague William Gass calls "pissless prose," prose that lacks the muscle, the physicality, the gait of a good horse, for pissless prose is bodiless and has no soul. Of course this holds equally true for fiction as for essays, reporting, a letter to a friend, a book review, a decent contribution to art criticism—in sum I search for language in which faith intertwines with desire, faith that we can recapture, with erotic accuracy, that treasured memory or vision which is the object of our desire. I'm keen on the word "voluptuous," a word too seldom heard in this society founded on puritanical principles. I think back to a phrase of Julia Kristeva's, the most interesting feminist thinker of our time, who speaks of "the voluptuousness of family life." I would apply the same phrase to the prose I most admire, prose I can caress and nuture and linger on, diction which is nourished by the deep intimacy of familiar detail, and yet is constantly renewed by the force of the writer's love and fidelity to language.

Edison 's clever gadgets / his turnstile watergate

Montage © Roy R. Behrens

Edmund Fuller, 2500 Anecdotes for All Occasions (New York: Crown , 1943)—

[Thomas] Edison was very proud. He enjoyed showing visitors around his property, pointing out the various laborsaving devices. At one point it was necessary to pass through a turnstile in order to take the main path back to the house. Considerable effort was needed to move the turnstile. A guest asked Edison why it was that, with all the other clever gadgets around, he had such a heavy turnstile. Edison replied , "Well, you see, everyone who pushes the turnstile around pumps eight gallons of water into the tank on my roof."