VOLUME 1.
2021/2022
UNIBZ
SPECTRUM.
1 rosy
colour cheeks
of
embarassment
2 truth
light behind
the
3
shadow
the
real
4 off
spotlight
MVP
subject the
high
horse
INDEX
rosy cheeks of embarassment
COLOUR
6
art is one way of gaining control.
1. I remember him being a little embarrassed to really sing out, seeing we were stuck right in the middle of my parents‘ place with the whole family walking about. He said he felt funny singing about love and such around my dad.
2. A pa of Ke catio ful, t imm just e but v
7
articular strength eats is the implion that the youththe luxuriant, the mature, can be, not excusable errors, vantage-points.
3. The creation of art actively courts embarrassment, and fear of it is natural. In the best cases [...] it may produce a masterpiece.
We have all felt embarrassed and witnessed the embarrassment of others. The act of creating art invites the potential of negative evaluation, the foundation of embarrassment. George Harrison recalled the period when he and Paul McCartney used to play music together after school in his small family home in Liverpool, England: Embarrassment doesn‘t always engender creative hesitancy, however. In his book Keats and Embarrassment, Christopher Ricks propounds the view that A word little used before the 1700s, embarrassment entered the common lexicon during the Romantic era, and became a hot topic of scientific inquiry, social analysis, and, for Keats, poetry. According to Ricks, Keats as a man and a poet was especially sensitive to, and morally intelligent about, embarrassment. By raking over the “Thousand bitters„ of the past, the performers at My Diary and Mortified are revelatory about the present. The potential for embarrassment at My Diary is tempered because, instead of fearing judgment, the performers judge themselves in a kind of self-schadenfreude, as snakes reviewing some scraggy skin they shed long ago. Besides the dissociation of self-ridicule, there is another reason why My Diary, Mortified, and other art borne of embarrassment doesn‘t necessarily seem to embarrass the artist baring all. Embarrassment is spontaneous
1.
2.
and inextricably linked with the occasion that caused it. Embarrassment is a hot shock felt in the moment, whereas the performers at My Diary and Mortified know what‘s on the menu. Control over humiliation is antithetical to embarrassment, and Embarrassment often provokes empathy, and tales of social misfortune forge a “Me too!„ bond between the viewer and the performer. The most significant ramification of embarrassment is realised in what we don‘t do, thus the fear of embarrassment often prevents us from acting. Embarrassment is spontaneous and inextricably linked with the occasion that caused it. Embarrassment is a hot shock felt in the moment, whereas the performers at My Diary and Mortified know what‘s on the menu. Control over humiliation is antithetical to embarrassment, and art is one way of gaining control. In the 17th century, the word embarrassment was used as a synonym for obstacle, and it may still function that way for artists. On one hand, it could be argued that fear of embarrassment is a good thing for those attempting to make art: it prevents unnecessary hurt and rejection. Blushes may have been spared, but what has been lost? Though embarrassment is naturally associated with making mistakes, it is not the recourse of a rookie: artists of the highest caliber are subject to it as well.
3.
they are all going to laugh at you
and that is okay
LIGHT
truth behind the spotlight
At another ad agency, I had the pleasure of sitting through a meeting where one senior male executive made offensive jokes to another about lesbians and little people. Rafael, a senior art director at a global media agency, whose team was slashed overnight as a result of Covidrelated redundancies, tells of a “Business as usual„ expectation from his bosses, despite the company‘s drastically reduced headcount. Despite the frequent portrayal of the creative industries as freewheeling utopias, whenever I swap stories with friends working in more corporate environments, it is the anecdotes from my own industry that most regularly elicit openmouthed horror.
I‘ve been doing absolutely everything myself with no support, and the company is expecting the same results and demanding we hit the deadlines as if we were still a five-strong team.
Yeah, well, I hope it actually happens - we were all pretty coked up when it came about.
At every ad agency I worked at, even relatively junior creatives were idolised on account of their supposed genius, while the rest of us were expected to coax work out of them with compliments and flattery - and sometimes just booze. A friend who worked as an account manager in her early 20s recalls regularly having to traipse to a pub near her office to solicit work from senior creatives who‘d set up camp there for the afternoon. At one company where I worked, colleagues were said to rack up lines of cocaine at after-work pub trips, which I was neither invited to nor wished to attend. Once, a male colleague quietly mentioned that he‘d been given a soonto-be-announced promotion, though after I congratulated him he responded,
For Rafael, an increased workload and the lack of support from his employer has been brutal for both his personal life and his mental health. “It has put a massive pressure on my marriage and family. I overheard my four-year-old telling one of his friends that his dad has no time to play with him. I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything that painful before in my life. I broke down in tears.”
13
Counterintuitively, another reason why creative workplaces so often foster toxic dynamics is their relatively informal cultures. Vice Media, where I briefly worked, used to require its employees to sign a “Non-traditional workplace„ agreement acknowledging that they might be exposed to highly explicit and potentially disturbing material during the course of their employment, and agreeing
Some employees said they took the agreement to mean they could not complain about issues of harassment.
To hold Vice harmless from any and all claims I may have based upon Vice‘s workplace environment.
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This was understood to be because the company was notorious for covering extreme topics, but when media reports of a culture of widespread sexual harassment at Vice Media emerged in 2017, the New York Times reported that
Vice Media no longer requires new employees to sign the agreement. The ad agency where I encountered the book-thrower was also an intensely hierarchical environment. While working there, I once received a late-night email from my manager requesting that I come into the office at 7am the next morning to print out a 100-page PowerPoint and stick every page up on the walls for a client meeting. I was by this point a senior account manager - not the most senior position, but not exactly an entry-level employee either.
After all, such outbursts aren’t rare in the industry. Grace, a twentysomething advertising creative, describes the “intolerable” atmosphere created by the executive creative director of the agency where she worked shortly after graduating. He would frequently scream at employees for transgressions as minor as emailing him work, rather than printing it out and putting it on his desk. “It was humiliating,” she says. “I worked in fear of being shouted at. Once during a meeting, he yelled at a colleague that if she ‘didn’t like it here, she could fuck off back to [a competitor ad agency]’. She left the meeting room in tears and we sat in there while he justified his behaviour to us.”
SHADOW
the real MVP
You have an
18
idea...
an intuition, a feeling, a subconscious thing. It comes in many versions, but when it does it is sometimes better to go back and ask where it came
The playing, the fooling around; you need to step out of the macho-driven
from than to immediately decide where it is about to go.
goal-orientated brutality of today’s success criteria.
19
20
21 When F. Scott Fitzgerald finished The Great Gatsby and sent it to friends, fellow authors, and critics for feedback, he received one of two responses. Neither was particularly encouraging. One group said it wasn’t any good. In fact, this was the majority opinion of the work, which didn’t sell that well in Fitzgerald’s lifetime. H.L. Mencken called it “no more than a glorified anecdote” and referred to the author as “this clown.” A bit more bluntly, Ruth Snyder wrote, “We are quite convinced after reading The Great Gatsby that Mr. Fitzgerald is not one of the great American writers of today.” The second group, however, was even worse. They liked the book and wondered what Fitzgerald would do next. And that was the problem. After Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s career and life would descend into an abyss from which he would never escape. As a prominent writer of the 1920s who quickly rose to fame and success, making ten times the average income of his peers, he was just as soon forgotten. Fitzgerald never really bounced back from that failure. By all accounts, he was a sensitive soul and didn’t cope well with rejection. His personal life fell apart, too, when his wife Zelda who had been cheating on him was admitted to a mental hospital, and he was left to raise their daughter. In need of money, he moved to Hollywood to write screenplays and struggled with alcoholism until his untimely death at age 44. No matter how you look at it, it’s a sad story. What I can’t help but wonder is if the pressure to write something even better than Gatsby was one of the causes for Fitzgerald’s short-lived career, and for that matter, his life. This is a problem we don’t often acknowAs it turns out, there are hidden opportunities to the ledge: the trappings invisibility and irrelevance we all fear. And when you of success sometiembrace those opportunities, you end up creating better mes hurt more than work. We might think of these as “The Advantages of they help. So why do Anonymity.” Here are a few examples: When you‘re ano- we still strive for it? nymous, you can try new things. Fame brings pressure to Why being anonyperform, which can lead to playing it safe and not taking mous can be an the kind of risks that make for interesting work. But when advantage Often, I nobody knows who you are, you can experiment without find myself imagiexpectation. When you‘re anonymous, you can fail quietly. ning what it would This means you can attempt projects that may not work be like to be more and learn from them without public shaming. You can successful. I wish iterate more easily and less conspicuously. When you‘re more people read anonymous, you can get better faster. Because you‘re not my books or that I worried about what people will think or trying to live up to had begun writing your last success, you can use all that energy to practice. earlier or that I had It‘s often easier to grow your craft in the shadows than in saved more money. the spotlight. Granted, we all want our work to succeed, I regret wasting but we forget there’s a shadow side to sudden success: so much time and it usually doesn’t last. Fast fame is the quickest to fade. worry that I’ll never And so perhaps, what we should want more than sudden “catch up” — to success is the opportunity to create enduring work. Fast what, I’m not sure. fame is the quickest to fade.The opportunity of invisibility We writers don’t Scott Fitzgerald’s last royalty check before he died was like to admit we for $13. At the time, The Great Gatsby was practically out think about such of print and couldn’t be found anywhere. What copies had things, but many of been bought were apparently by Fitzgerald himself. A us do. As an online once-promising writer who was writing movie scripts teacher, I tend to just to survive now run into people considered himself a who share similar failure, and that conlongings: “Yeah, I’d sideration killed him. love to write, but These days, we love to who would read it?” glamorize failure. But “Is it too late for we forgot how painme to start now? If ful and demotivating only I would have failure can be, how started earlier…” more often than not it “It doesn’t matter demoralizes a person how you good I am from ever attempting or how hard I try. anything again. There Nobody knows who is, however, another I am.” Occasionally, side to failure: we I even regret how I can choose how we began my writing see our circumstancareer and wonder ces. Fitzgerald didn’t what it would have have to consider been like to publish himself a failure. He my first book to wasn’t. He’d already universal acclaim, published This Side as Fitzgerald of Paradise to literary did. What would it and popular acclaim. be like to be an early He didn’t have to drink bloomer? Maybe himself into oblivion or not everything I fade into obscurity. He imagine. could have kept going, kept working. And if he had done that, he may have lived to see the success of his greatest work yet.
One potential cause for the downfall of this great author may have been the pressure he placed on himself after having achieved incredible success so early.
off the high horse
SUBJECT
for
see please desperate
me, see me voices pleading seeking attention
24
25
26
E
1 1 27
let
go
2 3
28
I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist.
Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I
demure
want it when I get like this. That’s why I’m trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning.
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Credits Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Faculty of Design and Art Bachelor in Design and Art - Major in Design WUP 21/22 | 1st-semester foundation course Printed: Bozen-Bolzano, January 2022
Design by: Ingrid Meszaros Magazine | Spectrum. Supervision: Project leader: Prof. Antonino Benincasa Project assistants: Amedeo Bonini, Rocco Lorenzo Modugno
Project Module: Editorial Design Photos courtesy of:
Cover SONW – Shadow Of New Worlds, Installation view at Kunsthall Bergen, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and The Approach, London and Croy Nielsen, Vienna. © Sandra Mujinga Page 3 Your blind movement, 2010 - Photo: Jens Ziehe Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles © 2010 Olafur Eliasson Page 5 Beyond-human resonator, 2019 - Photo: Kazuo Fukunaga Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles © 2019 Olafur Eliasson Page 6 Midnight sun, 2017 - Photo: Jens Ziehe, 2017 Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles © 2017 Olafur Eliasson Page 8/9 Sonne statt Regen, 2003 - Photo: Marianne Franke Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles © 2003 Olafur Eliasson Page 10 - 13 Life, 2021 - Photo: Pati Grabowicz/ Mark Niedermann 2021 Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles © 2021 Olafur Eliasson Page 15 Pervasive Light, 2021 Courtesy of the artist and The Approach, London and Croy Nielsen, Vienna. © Sandra Mujinga
Page 16/17 Soil quasi bricks, 2003 - Photo: Giorgio Boato Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles ©2003 Olafur Eliasson Page 18 The unspeakable openness of things, 2018 - Photo: Anders Sune Berg, 2018 Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles ©2018 Olafur Eliasson Page 19 Flo, 2019 - Photography by Thor Brodreskift Courtesy of the artist and The Approach, London and Croy Nielsen, Vienna. © Sandra Mujinga Page 20 The weather project, 2003 - Photo: Olafur Eliasson Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles © 2003 Olafur Eliasson Page 23 Yellow egoless door, 2005 - Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles © 2014 Olafur Eliasson Page 25 Inside the horizon, 2014 - Photo: Iwan Baan Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles © 2014 Olafur Eliasson Page 26 Spectral Keepers, 2021 - Photo: Plastiques Courtesy of the artist and The Approach, London. © Sandra Mujinga Page 28/29/30/31 Athropic Giants, 2018 Courtesy of the artist and The Approach, London and Croy Nielsen, Vienna. © Sandra Mujinga