dream-like substitutions / Guiseppe Arcimboldo

Arcimboldo, Fruit Basket (upsidedown reversible)

During all the years I taught university-level art and design (about 45 years), among the most pleasurable aspects was the process of inventing hands-on studio exercises which I presented to students to solve. 

Everyone was given the same problem, but the solutions that resulted were invariably different, often surprisingly. Each problem was presented to the assembled group, but each student worked alone on his / her answer. No one knew what the other would do until the day of the critique, at which time everyone's work was revealed.

The problems were sometimes derivative of certain kinds of imagery, which often as not were indebted to historical styles of art. In one of those problems for example (of which five responses are reproduced below), which I presented to freshmen, I gave a prefatory talk about the portrait paintings of the Italian Mannerist artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593), one of which is shown in the reproduction above.

In the Modern era, it was often claimed that Arcimboldo had anticipated the dream-like qualities of Surrealism, since the bulk of his paintings consist of surprising portraits that were made by combining bits and pieces of non-portraits, such as plants, animals, flowers, fish, and so on. Using cut-out fragments of magazine photographs (this predates the use of computers), the students were instructed to devise comparable portraits.

Five of those are shown below. I regret that so many years have passed that I no longer have a record of the names of the students who made these.

the process by which creativity works / koestler

Roy R. Behrens, from the film narration in HOW TO WIN KINGS AND INFLUENCE CABBAGES: The Process by Which Creativity Works (2022), free to watch online on YouTube here—

As a college student, I was required to read for a humanities class Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Albert Camus’ The Stranger, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. Years later, I found out that, amusingly, all three of these literary titans had been drinking companions in postwar Paris, and that on one unforgettable evening in 1949 a greatly intoxicated Koestler (who was small and reputedly scrappy) had thrown a glass at Sartre and given Camus a black eye.

My favorite photograph of Koestler was made in the same year as that famous brawl by Dmitri Kessel for Life magazine [see above]. A double portrait of the Hungarian-born British writer and his magnificent boxer Sabby, it is memorable in part because of the uncanny resemblance between dog and master—boxer meets boxer, they seem deliberately to be imitating one another.

It is also, as might be said, a “self-exemplifying” image because that portrait is a superb example of what Koestler identified as the key ingredient throughout all creative activity: “The discovery of hidden similarities” or bisociation (perceiving things “in two self-consistent but incompatible frames of reference at the same time”).

Herbert Simon / the fruits of being colorblind

Arcimboldo, Fruit Basket (c1590)

Above Painting by Giuseppe Arcimboldo titled Fruit Basket. Oil on panel, c1590. It is a reversible still life of fruit. Turned upsidedown (as shown here), it resembles the head of a person.

•••

Herbert Simon, Models of my life. NYC: Basic Books, 1991, p. 5—

Whether during his fourth summer or on some later occasion, the boy [the author] was among a party picking wild strawberries. The others filled their pails in a few minutes; there were only a few strawberries in the bottom of his. How could the others see the berries so easily amid the closely matching leaves? That was how he learned that strawberries are red and leaves green, and that he was colorblind. 

•••

Postscript As Simon comments in his autobiography, he would later marry a woman with red hair. In view of his being colorblind (he continues): “'How did you know her hair was red?' the perceptive reader might wonder. Well, I had early been told that there were no green-haired people, nor any red lawns. Ergo. . . ."

In relation to the use of ambiguous, pun-like images in art (such as this painting by Arcimboldo), it may also be of interest to view my recent video called EMBEDDED FIGURES, ART AND CAMOUFLAGE.

the offense of telling the same thing twice

Alan Fletcher

Above Alan Fletcher [British designer], model of one of twelve proposals for outdoor drinking fountains (made in stone, one meter high), in which each fountain is shaped to form the silhouette of a famous cultural figure, through reversible figure-ground. This one is the silhouette of Albert Einstein. As reproduced in Fletcher, Picturing and Poeting. London: Phaidon, 2006, p. 103.

•••

Vyvyan Beresford Holland [the second son of Oscar Wilde], An Evergreen Garland. London: Cassell 1968, Page 156-157—

My next case [of how to deal with boring people] is that of the horrible habit of repetition, often known as "twicing." This is the offense of telling the same person the same thing twice. Unfortunately, everyone over the age of forty is to some extent a "twicer," because he refuses to remember to whom he has told his stock stories, and he is apt to forget any new stories he has heard. He is also apt to be much too interested in his past life to care very much whether his victim has heard his stories, so long as he can get someone to listen to them once more, particularly if they happen to be true, or were true before they were embroidered out of all recognition. And it is almost worse if he says, "Do stop me if I’ve told you this before," because one should never run the slightest risk of repeating oneself to other people. On the whole, it is far better not to tell stories at all unless either you invited them yourself or they are very short.

The remedy for "twicing" is contained in: 

Rule VI.—As soon as one is certain that a case of "twicing" is about to occur, one should interrupt the "twicer" roughly by telling him that his story reminds you of another one, and then proceed to tell him his own story, with added detail. That is, if he will let you.

the essential link between humor and creativity

According to Arthur Koestler (in The Act of Creation), humor in all its various forms is rooted in mock confusions of two or more usually different components, which may then result in so-called bisociative acts. In one form or another, it is often delivered through bait-and-switch. The audience is “baited,” or led to believe that a particular train of thought is in play. And then, abruptly, as a result of the punch line, a disarming switch of attention occurs, and a momentary confusion erupts. The effect is a double awareness in which A is A, while, at the same time, A is also not-A.

In performing bait-and-switch routines, it is customary to feature a pair of comedians, one of whom, known as the straight man, is the person who sets up the pattern—the bait—for the audience. The second person ignites the laughter in the process of airing the punch line. In Abbott and Costello, Bud Abbott is the straight man, while Lou Costello makes the pretended confusions. In Burns and Allen, George Burns is the straight man, while his partner, Gracie Allen, is the sort-crosser. Sancho Panza is the straight man in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In Mister Magoo cartoons, Magoo’s impoverished eyesight leads him to mistakenly think that A is not-A, while Waldo provides the conventional view. In the case of Sherlock Holmes, it is the insightful detective whose cleverness takes us by surprise, while Watson underscores the norm. more>>>

the process by which creativity works / video

Just posted: HOW TO WIN KINGS AND INFLUENCE CABBAGES: The Process By Which Creativity Works

mammoth flyer / elephantine mastodon hybrid

Before I became a university professor, I taught briefly in a public school. One day, in a class of seventh grade students, I came prepared to talk about usually unnoticed connections between familiar objects, and in particular, about skeletal structures. I brought with me to school that day various examples of medical x-rays, a plastic model of the skeleton of a mastodon, and the balsa wood wings of an unassembled model airplane. I displayed these on a table top in preparation for my talk. But I was then distracted by some other event in the classroom, and I briefly turned aside.

When I returned to the table, I found, to my surprise and great delight, that one of the students had spontaneously attached the airplane wings to the skeleton of the mastodon. I was so pleased by this invention that I permanently mounted the wings, added a wooden base, and painted the hybrid construction. Obviously, a new idea had taken flight, and the title I later chose for it was the Mammoth Flyer. It appealed to a wide range of people, as was confirmed, a few years later, when it was stolen from an art exhibition.

tobacco road / the story of a boy who smoked

EVOLUTION OF A BOY WHO SMOKED, in The Journal (Huntsville AL), February 28, 1907, p. 2. Reprinted from the Chicago Daily News. Artist unidentified—

Do you know any little boy that [sic] smokes cigarettes? If you do, just show him this picture. It is the sad story of Dick Sillypate. He saw another boy smoking a cigarette, and thought it looked so manly that he would try it himself. The picture shows what happened to him at the end of five months.

that's the second dirtiest leg in all knox county

Above Drawing from Keith J. Holyoak and Paul Thagard, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995, p. 14.

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Wilbert Snow, Codline's Child (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1974), p. 39—

One day working ln the garden, Polly Dan stumbled over a big rock and sprained her leg. The post-mistress telephoned for Dr. Hitchcock, who took a good look at her leg, probed the muscles, and said: “Aunt Polly, I'll bet that's the dirtiest leg in all Knox County.” “How much will you bet?” asked Polly. “I’ll bet five dollars.” “All right, it’s a deal,” she said. Thereupon she took off her other shoe and stripped down her stocking. “I washed that one because I knew you were coming.” The doctor lost the money, but he had a story which he loved to tell for the rest of his life.

the stuff of my pleasures / flesh of my thoughts

Honoré Daumier (attr.)

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words (New York: George Braziller, 1964), pp. 93-94—

I’m a dog. I yawn, the tears roll down my cheeks. I feel them. I'm a tree, the wind gets caught in my branches and shakes them vaguely. I'm a fly, I climb up a windowpane, I fall, I start climbing again. Now and then, I feel the caress of time as it goes by. At other times—most often—I feel it standing still. Trembling minutes drop me down, engulf me, and are a long time dying. Wallowing, but still alive, they're swept away. They are replaced by others which are fresher but equally futile. This disgust is called happiness. My mother keeps telling me that I'm the happiest of little boys. How could I not believe it since it's true? I never think about my forlornness. To begin with, there's no word for it. And secondly, I don't see it. I always have people around me. Their presence is the warp and woof of my life, the stuff of my pleasures, the flesh of my thoughts.

RELATED LINKS

Embedded Figures in Art, Architecture and Design

Other sources

Diablo French Postcard | The devil in the details

 ANON—
A farmer once called his cow Zephyr,
She seemed such an amiable hephyr.
But when he drew near
She bit off his ear,
Which made him considerably dephyr.

MRS. P.R. WOODHOUSE—
A hefty whaler, after some discussion with [British missionary Samuel] Marsden, remarked: "Your religion teaches that if a man is hit on one cheek, he will turn the other." And he hit Marsden on the right cheek. Marsden obediently offered his left cheek and received a second blow. "Now," said Marsden, "I have obeyed my Master's commands. What I do next, he left to my own judgment. Take this." And he knocked the man down. 

RELATED LINKS

Embedded Figures

Metamorphosis

Creativity and Humor