What Now? A Question Ain’t Really a Question, if You Know the Answer Too: Part 02
“Seventeen and strung out on confusion”
Some thoughts on communication informed—in part—by life in the pandemic though not necessarily about life in the pandemic and, if I’m being honest, the writing kinda started beforehand anyways. The essay equivalent of a streaming mini-series in four parts. If you missed it, read Part 01 here.
Tryna Say Something
In 2012 I placed myself in the dubious lineage of “Designer as Author,” with an essay pointedly titled “Network as Author.” I wanted to rethink my predecessors’ perspective. Design was not strictly a visual end-product and whether content was client or self-created was irrelevant. Rock was right to look for the underlying structure, though it’s not productive to think that this alone will guarantee results. To look at the way the Bauhaus experimented with industrial production there is a lot to be gleaned from their methodology, but it would be silly to replicate their experiments. László Moholy-Nagy’s famous Telephone Pictures experimented with the idea that when he called in the specs for his paintings to a factory, Moholy-Nagy used new communication technology and industrial production methods, as opposed to his own hand, to make his work. More than a conceptual exercise these gestures were meant to test the boundaries, the outer reach and limitations of this newly available media. An artist who gets their work fabricated today is so commonplace it can barely register as a rationale. But what other communication networks, what other types of material production would work in a similar way now? Perhaps artists should see what happens when they use Russian troll farms for abstract or sublime purposes. When I was thinking through the concepts in “Network as Author,” I couldn’t know the extent to which information would atomize, but I had an inkling that the number of platforms were growing in orders of magnitude. Though this was before YouTubers like Casey Neistat and podcasters like Marc Maron had started to develop identities stronger than corporate brands, it remains my job to understand how to manipulate communication networks, whatever form they take.
László Moholy-Nagy, EM 2 (Telephone Picture),1923
I was 28 the year I wrote that essay. I was coping with unresolved trauma as well as a fundamental sense that I was misunderstood. Some of this came from soon-to-be unearthed and unpleasant childhood memories and some had to do with my religious upbringing with which I was still shadowboxing. I grew up a Modern Orthodox Jew and the messages my rabbis, parents, and peers repeated as mantras ultimately did not match the frequency of my wiring, the wrong voltage on a foreign plug that eventually combusted. It’s hard to explain exactly the experience of being Modern Orthodox. We didn’t have the hats and the long jackets, though a few men in my schools, summer camps and synagogues wore black, wide brimmed Borsalinos as a nod to those traditions. After the war, a branch of Orthodox Judaism that could both follow halacha, the Jewish scripture as interpreted and catalogued by generations of constantly arguing rabbis that dictated every muscle-twitch of one’s daily life—a set of rules so all-encompassing even the most religious mass-all-the-time Catholic wouldn’t really understand—that could also allow for a certain, acceptable amount of assimilation into secular America, seemed necessary. The cognitive dissonance embedded in an attempt to carry out the lifestyle of a strict, ancient religious practice and engage in the contemporary world simultaneously drove the movement to where it is today: further to the religious and political right, and less interested in any meaningful relationship with secular culture.
The Yeshiva University team competing in the College Bowl on CBS, 1963
True Modern Orthodoxy is a tough line to maintain as a practice. For me, it never fit. I remember entering the nursery school at my synagogue with a sense that all the kids knew each other and something that I didn’t. I immediately felt like an outsider. As I look back, of course this is silly. How could this group of three-year-olds know anything at all? This dysmorphia never abated. What I wanted from my Modern life wouldn’t fit into its Orthodox framework. As I first learned to play instruments, piano then guitar, I wanted so badly to be a musician. As a career. For real. When I told my parents about my star-eyed goals they were, on the face of it, supportive though they made sure to mention that it would be difficult to manage a tour with breaks every Friday night for Shabbat. Sandy Koufax sat out the World Series for Yom Kippur. This is something I heard a lot, in the way I imagine they discuss important martyrs around the water cooler at the Vatican.
Production still from Kids, by Gunars Elmuts
My best resource was an organism I credit with saving my life, one that no matter how many trend pieces I read about LA or upstate or how cheap it is in Charleston, a living breathing constant that, although currently, clearly sick, I could never fully abandon, New York City. At the very least, by the time I was nine, I could walk out of my house to the Bethesda Fountain that led up to the Central Park Bandshell where the skaters and miscreants hung out—think Kids but the off-hours they spent uptown—and just watch. I looked at their body language, their style, the choreography of their social exchanges. By middle school I could ride the subway down to the East Village and walk in and out of head shops that sold Puma Suede Classics, Doc Martens and an ocean of logo flip t-shirts and skate, grunge or heroin chic—likely some Venn diagram of the three—posters. Maybe it was all those Calvin Klein underwear ads hanging around that started my compulsion to cop rare Kate Moss magazine covers, including her first editorial with Corrine Day in The Face. I can remember perfectly what it felt like to save up and buy my first Stüssy hat.
Top: Catwalk directed by Robert Leacock, 1995. Bottom: Stüssy ad from Thrasher Magazine, October 1990
I’m reminded of the monologue delivered by Al Pacino’s character in The Devil’s Advocate. “[God] gives man instincts. He gives you this extraordinary gift, and then what does He do? He sets the rules in opposition. It’s the goof of all time. Look, but don’t touch. Touch, but don’t taste. Taste, but don’t swallow.”
In my work, research and final writing of “Network as Author” I was still dealing with this history of an internal psychological noise that both distorted incoming signals and corrupted outgoing communication. But I wasn’t thinking about any of this; I didn’t think about my childhood experience, the lack of a common tongue with those around me even if we theoretically spoke the same language, how frustrating that must have been. And how that might have affected my subconscious relationship to communication itself. Instead, I thought about what it meant to stand at the control panel of information networks, to understand their pathways and to know fundamentally how they could be manipulated, even or perhaps especially in their capacity for miscommunication.
Diagram from Armin Hoffmann
In 2019, I had a breakdown in the form of deep depression and self-destructive behavior. As I climbed out of that pit, through therapy and self-reflection, I realized that I tend to intellectualize tough emotional truths, and perhaps my interest in network fission related to my internal life. I pathologically misread certain behaviors as dangerous, a defense that helped me as a child but had become maladaptive. I put out often misunderstood and reactive signals, even if I think I’m being calm and clear. The world as I see it might not be congruent with an agreed reality. Armin Hoffmann’s 1965 Graphic Design Manual: Principles and Practice applied gestalt theory to a series of visual tests like how minimal marks can suggest a range of relationships. How much information do we need to transfer a signal from one node to another? An example from Hoffmann might be that if a cluster of dots is not close enough together it does not resemble a group, as opposed to one in which they do. Though meant as an instructional text, this example could easily be read as a visual metaphor for the frictions and miscommunications that lead to some of the great heartbreaks, disappointments, missed opportunities and failures of our lives.
Corporate Magazines Still Suck
I see a series of fulcrums where my subconscious pulled me towards a particular work or theory. There was a reason I found Lacan’s The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious towards the end of college just as the wobbly legs of what would become my art practice found their teetered footing. It was his breakdown of how language can only approximate the truth of one’s experience, that human communication has an inherent inability to translate a complete idea because our relationship to language is subjective. In reflecting on it now I also realize that the fraught relationship between signifier and signified established by Lacan and his mentor Saussure was not my first encounter with the idea. In hindsight, it was in my Yeshiva bible class, in our study of Moses receiving the commandments from god. Appropriately this was also the place I started to really feel the disconnect between my interior self and the world as it was presented to me.
Diagram from Lacan
The story, as written in the Old Testament, is that after leading his people out of slavery in Egypt, Moses stopped at the foot of Mount Sinai. It is here they were meant to receive the word of god, an idea akin to a fleeting thought, an internal moment where a swirling mess of abstract ideas, repressed emotion, short term memory and analysis come together for just a second to make something that is and will always be inexplicable, clear in that one moment. As instructed, Moses ascends the mountain to confer directly with whatever form of god is able to reveal itself on earth. This set of tablets is written directly by god.
This idea troubles me as I circle around the logic. If god is inexplicable, then how does it make itself material? As it happens, no one except Moses ever witnessed the hand of god make an impression on the stone, because as he descended the mountain back to the camp, Moses found his people worshipping a golden calf, an idol they had made by pooling the community’s wealth. The official narrative is that Moses got so angry he broke the tablets because idol worship is against the codes as originally defined by Abraham, who broke all his idols and devoted himself to monotheism. The way I’ve always read it is that Moses saw the inherent materialism of man. He witnessed a community in ecstasy as they worshipped gold, the oldest and most obvious symbol of material excess. He smashed the tablets because he knew there was never going to be any true bridge between divinity and man. There is no anecdote of a curious tribe member picking up a shard just to see it. Moses then went back up to the top of the mountain to plead with god for a second set of tablets. God acquiesced but with a new condition: that this time god would not write the commandments in his own proverbial hand but would dictate them to Moses, a symbol of the fact that the inconceivably perfect language of god, in its most pure form, must be mediated through the fallibility of man, forever limited by the material tools at his disposal.
And I think about this when I think about the impossibility of ever fully communicating a perfect thought. How every time we try to translate an idea gleaned from an ephemeral moment of clarity, as soon as it achieves physicality, it will inevitably be unsatisfactory, our permanent reminder that we did not and were never able to receive the true word of god. Don’t we all know the disappointing process of porting an idea from an excited brain to a piece of paper that never quite translates? And how that permanent disappointment keeps us inventing new ways to communicate, to climb that impossible Tower of Babel, to divide that line in half to infinity, to get close but never succeed and ultimately our mortal world is made richer every time we try.
Photograph by Michael Lavine for Sassy Magazine, April 1992, editor Jane Pratt
Since human dialogue is faulty, it’s a designer’s job to organize communication not necessarily for clarity but for resonance. In order to titrate the message and the form it demands, we need to first look at the material and cultural conditions of how it will be dispersed and received. Techniques and media are not set, the approach can range from abstraction to narrative to informational, physical to ephemeral. I can see now this is why I ended up in graphic design. My sensitivity to signals morphed into a fascination with and obsessive study of the codes and signs of culture. I also desperately wanted to learn how to generate and distribute thoughts that could fit through these various pop- and counter-cultural networks that were so far away from me, behind the electric dog collar fence of a religious childhood in the Upper West Side Shtetl. These interests and desires were abetted by my mostly female household’s stacks of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Sassy, along with my own copies of Rolling Stone, Spin, Thrasher and Mad Magazine and the sheer number of hours I spent reading these, in almost talmudic study, through long Shabbat afternoons with nothing to do.
Parts 01–02 will be archived on hgtv420.substack.com, and Part 03 of What Now? A Question Ain’t Really a Question, if You Know the Answer Too will be sent out next week. Feel free to pass around :)