Earlier this week I had a conversation with an American colleague about (amongst other things) the British way of holding your cutlery and the comedy value of the thing in my garden that I call a water butt. After we had stopped laughing we got into a discussion about the extent that your own cultural background and the way in which things are presented to you affects personal interpretation. I kept this in mind while I was listening to and watching the gears.
The designer Stefan Sagmeister gave an insightful TED talk about the power of taking time off. He closes his design studio for a whole year every seven years, explaining that he is ‘…shifting five of his retirement years to his working life for greater creativity’. I really like that concept, and maybe one day I’ll be able to afford to do it too. Sagmeister spent his first sabbatical in New York, trying to look at his adopted hometown differently; his second in Bali where he made t-shirts and furniture inspired by the ubiquitous stray dogs. In an entertaining presentation he tells of how subsequently he ‘felt closer to design’ but also went on to make art inspired by his time out. Particularly striking are the products of the logo generator and his numismatic art which was ultimately taken into custody by the police.
Fostering creativity was also the topic of KCRW’s DnA podcast. Their case study was Central LA High School Number Nine (better known as the School of Performing Arts). This controversial building was discussed by its students, teachers and the architect Wolf Prix. He had wanted to create a ‘reference point in the city,’ that would inspire creativity not only in its pupils, but in the general public too. Can a building inspire creativity? Or is it about the people who are involved with its running and use? The building could be seen as a container for the creativity which goes on within and around it. Does it actually contribute though?
If you take as a basis the way a frame acts around a painting then yes, the building can and probably does contribute something. NG director Nicholas Penny talked about the way frames interact with images in the National Gallery podcast. ‘Frames isolate the picture [and] therefore they affect the way we view art.’ Using a case study, he discusses how frame colour and decoration affect our perception of paintings.
In addition to talking about the practical aspects of using frames, Penny advocates telling the gallery public whether they are looking at an original frame or not. But how important is this really? It is not something that I have ever really considered. However, our perception of a Mondrian or a Gainsborough will be altered by the way in which we view it as a whole. By this I mean that the frame is as much a part of this experience as the information on the label, the colour of the gallery wall or even just having somewhere to sit and look at it. If there was simply the canvas itself, our personal interpretation may be different (like viewing a painting online in white space, you might say). So in thinking about the artist’s original intention: this might be entirely altered by our viewing it in a non-original frame. We could be taking a wholly different experience away with us. Does that matter? Or do we do that anyway, simply by all coming from different backgrounds?
