We were given three pieces of her work to read before the seminar an excerpt from The Blazing World, and the chapters Becoming Others and My Louise Bourgeois from A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind. She has the feeling of a person from a different era driven by curiosity and a desire to understand the world around her, somehow avoiding the politics and trappings of the modern ‘public intellectual’. She manages to move smoothly across disciplinary boundaries, without care for their formal and superficial barriers. Siri Hustvedt is an amazing woman a creative thinker who possesses razor sharp intelligence, her ideas are expressed with a poetic clarity, which is unusual for someone who draws on such a diverse set of references. All these years later, I’m sat at a table across from Siri, with a feeling of excitement and intellectual giddiness. A world where I could process my feelings and thoughts. A world, where words… stories… books… fiction could be a place to escape to. It changed my relationship to reading and opened a new world to me. I couldn’t sleep and I was spiralling into a black hole. In my first year at University, my best friend died. Zac Baker, a dear old friend of mine, gave me Mr. On seeing and listening to Hustvedt, the significance of Auster’s work on my life suddenly hit me. I discovered Hustvedt’s work through her husband, Paul Auster, 24 years ago. The Friday before last (21st Oct 2018) I went to a GIDEST seminar with Siri Hustvedt. We are a discipline that is reliant on our creativity and imagination, but have become terrified of the imaginary…. When thinking about our conversations in the Newsbar about magical realism and surrealism, it became apparent to me that the level of imaginative freedom allowed in the world of experimental fiction, would struggle to exist in contemporary design culture (and academia) because there’d be some form of backlash about how it wasn’t ‘real’… that the work didn’t address the world’s real issues or problems… that it would never succeed in the ‘real world’. So much of design culture is occupied by people that take themselves so very seriously. My other deep frustration was why did it all need to be so fucking earnest? But I came away deeply frustrated by the gulf between the object obsessive conservatism and the lack of genuine follow through by many of the fanboys (or put more clearly Rams lived his ideas, those that hero worship him often take his ideas as superficial styling to fuel consumption). I, like many of my generation, enjoy a bit of design fetishism as much as the next white-male-middle-class-designer. A beautiful documentary about the legendary head of design for Braun, Dieter Rams. We talked about the freedom and joyous expression of literary fiction in relationship to experimental design practice.Īlso during my last week in NYC I went to see Rams with the brilliant Matt Brown. Fiona demanded, with a sense of almost indignation, why the freedom, creativity and imagination of the great surrealist, postmodern and magical realist fiction writers, like Flann O’Brien, didn’t populate the world of design. It was my last day with Fiona, Tony and Carolyn and, as with many lunches over those 3 months, our conversations drifted towards our favourite films, artists and fiction. O’Brien’s wondrous, surrealist, postmodern masterpiece, written between 1939–1940, has been a continual source of inspiration to me for over 20 years. We were discussing the brilliance of The Third Policeman over lunch. This question, asked by Fiona as we ate our sandwiches at the Newsbar, has lodged itself in my mind since leaving New York. Why can’t we have more of that!? (Fiona Raby, Newsbar, 2018)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |