{"id":24252,"date":"2020-04-20T11:17:40","date_gmt":"2020-04-20T15:17:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=24252"},"modified":"2020-04-20T11:18:48","modified_gmt":"2020-04-20T15:18:48","slug":"judging-a-book-by-its-cover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2020\/04\/20\/judging-a-book-by-its-cover\/","title":{"rendered":"Judging a Book By Its Cover"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Minimalism has a way of latching on to people that want\nnothing to do with it. None of the artists contained in Kyle Chayka\u2019s Longing\nfor Less <\/em>wanted to be associated with the term, and yet here they are,\nmostly posthumously, contained in a book subtitled Living with Minimalism.<\/em>\nChayka nevertheless pulls together midcentury artists like Philp Glass and\nDonald Judd and contemporary pop culture icons like Marie Kondo and the author\nof the 2016 self-help-through-minimalism book The More of Less <\/em>Joshua\nBecker into a single, slim volume against their will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Objections to having your work defined as \u201cminimalist\u201d come\nout of a desire to use art to point to the maximal things that are not\ncontained within the minimalist work\u2014 the majesty of the universe, the stirring\nsounds of an audience, a contemplative desert expanse are the real subjects. The\nfrustration is understandable: Imagine if you underlined an important passage\nin a book, handed it to someone else, and their only reply was, \u201cInteresting\nthat you chose to use pencil to draw that line. Is this about the impermanence\nof thought?\u201d This is the plight of the so-called minimalist artist. Their art\nwas meant to be so straightforward and devoid of metaphor or allusion that the\nobserver would have no choice but to consider the implications of whatever is\nright in front of them\u2014 whether that\u2019s a pile of dirt hiding in a New York City\nloft (The Earth Room, <\/em>by Walter De Maria, 1977) or a collection of metal\ncubes in Marfa, Texas (100 untitled works in mill aluminum<\/em>, by Donald\nJudd, 1982-1986). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most minimalists seem unhappy with wherever they find fame,\nwhether that\u2019s 1970s SoHo or Paris, or Japan. As soon as their talents could be\ntranslated into you-come-to-me stardom, they left for someplace else. Chayka is\ndetermined to give each minimalist on their own terms describing their careers\nwith deference, even the Nazi-sympathizing architect Philip Johnson gets to be\nsomething more complicated than just that. He\u2019s also an exhibitionist neighbor,\nthe originator of the term \u201cInternational Style\u201d, and a certified (by the FBI,\nactually) hottie. It\u2019s the right choice for a book whose stated mission is to\n\u201cfigure out the origins of the thought that less could be better than more\u2014in\npossessions, in aesthetics, in sensory perception, and in the philosophy with\nwhich we approach our lives.\u201d Considering a broad range of work on its own\nterms goes a long way towards understanding what Chayka calls his \u201cworking\ndefinition of a deeper minimalism\u201d which is an \u201cappreciation of things for and\nin themselves, and the removal of barriers between the self and the world.\u201c <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end of a chapter there\u2019s a short anecdote about\nJohnson\u2019s first night in The Glass House, a small home made up of just a few\nsteel beams to support walls of glass. Johnson walks into the house at night\nand upon turning on the lights finds that the glass acts as a mirror more than\na lens. He calls an associate and yells: \u201cYou\u2019ve got to come over immediately.\nI turned on the lights and all I see is me, me, me, me, me!\u201d They solve the\nproblem by setting spotlights outside on the trees, such that more light comes\nin from the outside than is reflected in glass. Chayka doesn\u2019t say as much but\nfrom what I gather from the rest of the book, this is a metaphor (or maybe a\nZen koan?) for all minimalist works: in an attempt to strip everything away and\ncatch an unimpeded glimpse of the world all you end up with is an unwelcome\npicture of yourself. The artist\u2019s reaction is always to change the scenery\ninstead of feeling more comfortable with themselves where they are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The artists are not alone in finding out, once the work is\ncompleted, that their works draw attention to the wrong things: the work itself\nor the artist instead of some deeper truth. This is a fairly common problem\nwith casual consumers of art, though most people articulate it as being picky\nabout what art they deem important. Someone can shout \u201cmy kid could make that\u201d\nin a modern art gallery and then melt down the next day when they learn someone\ndidn\u2019t stand for the national anthem. Both the modern art hanging in a museum\nand a rendition of the national anthem at a ball game are works of art, but their\nstated values and contexts are shot through with different and at times\ncontrasting socio-economic identifiers. Pierre Bourdieu used the word\n\u201cdistinction\u201d to refer to this nexus of social position, economy, and cultural interpretation.\nWe learn to appreciate and decode cultural objects in a social way, ascribing\npolitical valences to both their intended audiences and the artifacts\nthemselves. You already understand this implicitly: think of the stereotypes of\nwho enjoys opera versus NASCAR and Bourdieusian distinction immediately makes\nsense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is clear that Chayka and I do not have the same\ndistinction. He describes watching Lost in Translation<\/em> for the first\ntime at age 15 as a transformative moment. I remember checking it out thinking\na Bill Murray movie would be funny and being sorely disappointed. Even though\nthe Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art is less than an hour away from me I have\nnever been there. I lack both the interpretive schema and social pressures that\nmakes going there enticing. Ditto most symphonies and things described as\n\u201cexperimental.\u201d I don\u2019t even like poetry very much. This makes me uniquely\nqualified to review The Longing for Less <\/em>though, as it was written for a\nbroader audience as an introduction to this material. My interest in the book\nis not propelled by a love of Philip Glass, John Cage, Richard Gregg, Sh\u016bz\u014d\nKuki, or Agnes Martin. I didn\u2019t even know who Donald Judd was until reading\nthis book. My sole motivation is to understand that \u201cdeeper minimalism\u201d Chayka\nis after and if that takes me through a bunch of stuff I don\u2019t find particularly\ninteresting, so be it. This is minimalism in action: looking at a greater whole\nwith the help of something direct and unsettling. To review this book is not\nonly to review the argument printed on the page, but the actual thing itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My copy of The Longing<\/em> for Less <\/em>arrived in the\nmail just as I was lapsing into an extended fit of sadomasochism that took the\nform of watching The West Wing<\/em> for the first time. There\u2019s an episode in\nthe third season where someone named Tawny is arguing with Sam Seaborne over\nthe national endowment for the arts funding. Tawny keeps spitting artworks at\nSam\u2014 \u201c\u2019Slut\u2019 is a one-word poem by Jules Woltz. It’s stamped in scarlet on a\npiece of forty by forty black canvas.\u201d\u2014 as if their descriptions alone make her\nargument: aren\u2019t you mad your government spent money on this?! <\/em>Sam\ncalmly agrees that these examples of art are embarrassing but disagrees\nfundamentally with government assessing the value of the resulting art once the\nartist has been funded. It is a great example of the liberal mind at work: having\nvalues but mistaking them as mere opinions not worthy of connecting to the\npower you wield.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps it is through sheer force of serendipitous juxtaposition\nthat The West Wing <\/em>and The Longing<\/em> for Less <\/em>kept bumping\ninto one another in my head. Like Johnson rejecting the reflection in his own\ncreation, I was catching glimpses of myself in both pieces of media: values I\nonce espoused, desires long extinguished, and half-forgotten memories of past\nrealities. I caught myself having a Sorkin-esque dialogue in my head when\nreading about Walter De Maria\u2019s The Earth Room. <\/em>Why did the microbes\ncontained within the 250 cubic yards of dirt have better living conditions than\nthe 70,000 homeless people in the same city? Well, if we waited to solve all\nhuman needs before making art then what kind of society would we really be\nliving in? Yes, but this kind of art? Who\u2019s to say what art gets to be made?\nYeah, but this dirt has been living in the same SoHo loft since 1977\u2014 how many\nhumans have that kind of security?! And so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Closing The Longing for Less <\/em>does not stop it from\nbroadcasting its thesis. The book is clearly a thoughtfully designed object,\nmeant to participate in the minimalist project it seeks to understand. In an\ninterview with Delia\nCai<\/a>, Chayka says he \u201cwanted the book itself to be a minimalist object, a\nvisual representation of what the book was about.\u201d Designed by Tree Abraham\n\u2014whose work could be described as minimalist\u2014 the dust jacket only comes up\nhalfway but it contains the title and author. On the hardcover is a cube\nsitting on edge with its three visible faces of white, hunter green, and sky blue.\nHowever, once the jacket is removed, the cube is revealed to be part of a longer\nshape. The white extends down into a parallelogram and the blue and green \u2014now\nthey are more recognizable as diamonds\u2014 are mirrored on the opposite side of\nthe single white shape. The text is now confined to the spine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Never have I actually wanted to see a book age as much as\nthis one. To see how the pure white center yellows, whether people keep the\ndust jacket at all. I want to order it for my university library just to see\nwhat they do with it. Do you keep the dust jacket in place with the usual\narchivist tape and plastic or do you put it on the shelf naked? Mine has\nalready creased quite a bit and I find the book hard to hold with it on so I\nsuspect most people will lose it if they don\u2019t intentionally throw it out. Then\nthere\u2019s the ambiguity around where this half dustjacket is \u201cmeant\u201d to sit. The\nspine of the book suggests it belongs at the bottom such that the publisher\nmark, author, and title on the cover and dust jacket line up but from the front\nor back cover any position looks correct and cuts the abstract design in\nsatisfying ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cover design is actually sort of haunting, at least as\nmuch as an abstract shape can be. There are all these moments in the book where\nChayka feels something deep and profound in minimalist art that I just couldn\u2019t\nimagine feeling until I realized maybe this Abraham\u2019s design was doing exactly\nthat to me. The design gave me a bit of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. At first, I thought it looked\nlike the\nstylized S that everyone inexplicably drew on folders and bathroom walls in\nmiddle school<\/a>. That wasn\u2019t quite it though, the autobiographical period\nfelt right but the engram itch was still there. The only place I was likely to\nencounter abstract art was in the underground concourse of Albany\u2019s Empire State Plaza<\/a>\nso I sought out the listing of all the art work hanging down there and\nrecognized Al\nLoving\u2019s work \u201cNew Morning I\u201d<\/a> which has a very similar tessellation pattern\nof diamonds that form the optical illusion of three-dimensional cubes when\nlooked at just right. That still wasn\u2019t quite it though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did not know who Al Loving was (again, I\u2019m not a\nconnoisseur of art) so I read his Wikipedia page. And there it was: Loving had\ncreated dozens of pieces for public spaces. Not just Albany\u2019s concourse but\ntrain stations, college plazas, and theater lobbies. He was even a National\nEndowment for the Arts fellow in 1970, 1974, and 1984. (Eat it Tawny.) These\nshapes and their inoffensive colors are the aesthetic of late twentieth century\npublic space, which is to say, the aesthetic of my early childhood. The Broward\nCounty library I grew up in, the classrooms I couldn\u2019t wait to get out of. They\nall had something that looked like \u2014but was not\u2014 a Loving. Repeated geometric\nshapes in over-stock industrial paint or heathered fabric stretched to a frame\nand hung on a wall. It wasn\u2019t any one particular piece or even one artist, but\na style that this artist was at the center of. As soon as this realization hit,\nI could practically smell the old molding carpet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

—<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book is divided into four chapters divided into eight\nshort sections. In the introduction Chayka encourages the reader to treat the\nrest of the book as a \u201cspace\u201d that can be explored in any order because\n\u201cchronological history is too causal an approach for minimalism. Its ideas\ndon\u2019t have one linear path or evolution; it\u2019s more of a feeling that repeats in\ndifferent times and places around the world.\u201d This nonlinear,\nchoose-your-own-intellectual-adventure has been used to great effect by the\nlikes of Paul Feyerabend in Against Method <\/em>and Christopher Alexander\u2019s A\nPattern Language. <\/em>Both of these books insist you have to read the whole\nthing (in fact the latter says the 1171-page volume is incomplete without\nhaving first read its 552-page companion The Timeless Way of Building<\/em>)\nbut they are broken up into small, more-or-less self-contained essays. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alexander and his compatriots believe that most human\nproblems were understandable as patterns. The size of a house or the\ndecision-making structure of a group can be distilled into typified patterns\nwith generic prescriptions. For example, pattern 161 \u201cSunny Place\u201d notes that\n\u201cwe have some evidence\u2014presented in [another pattern titled] south-facing\noutdoors (105)\u2014 that a deep band of shade between a building and a sunny area\ncan act as a barrier and keep the area from being well used.\u201d To avoid this\nshady barrier they recommend the following: \u201cInside a south-facing court, or\ngarden, or yard, find the spot between the building and the outdoors which gets\nthe best sun. Develop this spot as a special sunny place\u2014make it the important\noutdoor room\u2026\u201d The reader can then follow Outdoor Room pattern 163 for more\ninformation. They might also check out fanciful patterns \u201cwings of light\u201d or\nutilitarian patterns like \u201cbus stop.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why write a book like this? Why chop up your argument like a\n90s sitcom storyline such that it is comprehensible in almost any order but\nmost satisfying when completed? One reason is to help it fit into the reader\u2019s\nlife a bit easier. I was never more than four or five pages away from finishing\na chapter of Longing for Less<\/em>, which meant I could see why my phone had\nbuzzed or I could go get a snack. This was minimal in the sense that the book\u2019s\nideas could seamlessly fit into small parts of the day, not unlike Erik Satie\u2019s\nfurniture music. The philosopher Ian Hacking in the 2007 reprinting of Against\nMethod <\/em>describes the features of this design like a YouTube product\nreviewer considering new iPhone features: \u201cyou can take it hitch-hiking or to a\nsit-in, and read a bit while you are munching on a few pilfered tomatoes or sheltering\nfrom a storm. You can pick up an idea, chase it, and relocate it in the\nAnalytical Index, all the while being in a physical relation to the pages upon\nwhich you can scribble expostulations, if that is your wont.\u201d  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The analytical index of Against Method<\/em> contains the\nauthor\u2019s concise summaries of \u201cthe most interesting parts\u201d of each chapter\nwhich themselves only last about a dozen pages or so. Feyerabend preferred to\ndescribe the book-shaped thing with the words \u201cAgainst Method\u201don the\ncover as a \u201ccollage.\u201d The effect of the collage is a fun performance of exactly\nwhat Feyerabend is arguing: that the history of science shows that there is no\nclear common structure across experiments. Similarly, you, the reader, can make\nup your own path through this epistemological argument. Any two people may take\ndifferent paths but they both read the same book and have a common reality to\ntalk about, and yet their method<\/em> of getting there was totally different.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chayka seems to want you to do the same, starting nearly\nanywhere by dipping into Japanese architecture, modern art, or Steve Jobs\u2019\napartment. I started reading the chapter on Marie Kondo before going on to\nSteve Jobs, reading a few bits on Japan, and then slogging through the more\nart-centric bits. Without something like the Feterabend\u2019s analytical index\nhowever, it was hard to make an informed decision about what to read and in\nwhat order. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

No matter how elegant an author accomplishes this task it\nstill feels like the technology of the book resists this genre. Unless it\u2019s the\nBible and you have hundreds of years\u2019 worth of interpretation and guidance to\nmake sense of each passage and verse, it is easy to get lost jumping around in\na book you\u2019ve never read before. I took to putting a check mark next to each\nchapter number to keep track of my progress. This helped a lot, but it didn\u2019t\nprevent me from getting a bit lost when unfamiliar names popped up. Then I\nwould have to read backwards until that person was introduced. I still saved\nthe last few chapters for the end but was met with no synthetic conclusion,\nwhich was a little disappointing. Instead, and maybe this is fitting, Chayka\nleaves the reader in a Japanese rock garden to contemplate infinity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Equally interesting is how the book is depicted as a digital\nobject. Images of the book all have the half dust jacket sitting at the bottom,\nthe location that the spine suggests it should sit. On Amazon the cover is\nfused into a single image, so you never know that the cube is only part of a\ncollection of shapes. I imagine the ebook version also has the cover designed\nin this way. Perhaps the image is revealed on the last page \u201cback\u201d cover, I\ndon\u2019t know. Inside the text is a sans-serif font with generous margins,\nsomething that would be unknowable in a Kindle version that lets the reader\nchange all of that. All the parts that make The Longing for Less <\/em>a\nminimalist object are obliterated once it is packaged in a digital format,\nsomething that is so minimal(ist?) that it does not technically occupy space at\nall. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And like any good artist working in the minimalist style,\nChayka is understandably annoyed by the misapplication of the term. In this\ncase it is the easy observation that a book<\/em> about minimalism isn\u2019t very minimalist.\n<\/em>His tweets<\/a>\nleading up to the books sound like Judd just before he moved to Marfa (or at\nleast Chayka\u2019s description of him which, again, is my only knowledge of the\nguy) and his joke<\/a>\nthat his book \u201ccounts for negative five books\u201d is a direct reference to Marie\nKondo\u2019s insistence that no one needs more than thirty. The joke is its own kind\nof summary of his book\u2019s larger argument: that the trends of minimalism in\nKinfolk-inspired Instagram photography and the popularity of Marie Kondo has\nonly the most superficial relationship to the people who hated being called\nminimalists but definitely were. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The deeper minimalism, then, is closer to the shallow\nunderstanding than I think Chayka would be comfortable admitting. Because even\nif this current iteration of whatever is being called minimalist is detached\nfrom the longer, deeper history of the term in art, architecture, and music,\nthen so is everything else. Minimalists are all standing in a circle facing\noutwards: a single, simple shape \u2014a unity\u2014 but with each constituent\nparticipant looking somewhere else. There\u2019s a centripetal force pulling them\napart, even as that same force defines them as part of a group. So if,\nminimalism is a collection of \u201cideas [that] don\u2019t have one linear path or\nevolution\u201d and is instead \u201ca feeling that repeats in different times and places\naround the world\u201d then it seems cleaning out your room or judging a book by its\ncover, is as good a place to start as any.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Minimalism has a way of latching on to people that want nothing to do with it. None of the artists contained in Kyle Chayka\u2019s Longing for Less wanted to be associated with the term, and yet here they are, mostly posthumously, contained in a book subtitled Living with Minimalism. Chayka nevertheless pulls together midcentury artists […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1512,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Judging a Book By Its Cover, a review of Kyle Chayka's Longing for Less","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1512"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24252"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24255,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24252\/revisions\/24255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}