Jul 12
2010
Cultural icons are sources of inspiration and fascination. However, icons can also be remote as they are put on a pedestal. Let's challenge that pedestal.
In your experience, when, where and how can icons inspire and positively affect your daily life?
Angela gave the final word
I find human icons most inspirational because the best of them don’t keep repeating what they are known for, but keep evolving it into newer and better territory. They have the ability to startle and delight us on an ongoing basis, using their personal vision to guide them along varied explorations of the world and let us keep learning from them.
Friday, July 16 at 11:10am
And of course, “The Name of the Rose” was a big popular success, Eco being a public intellectual who is never afraid to engage the general public. If you’ve never read it, “How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays” is fun and smart. It was a big inspiration to me; at least a few of the things I’ve written are shameless imitations of Eco’s effortless style.
Tuesday, July 13 at 11:55pm
This past weekend during my visit to Brooklyn I happened to chase an ice cream truck up a hilly street. Not something I do every day, but on the rare occasion that I do stop for ice cream, I am hit by a flash of childhood memories: I tell my grandfather about the ice cream truck, he pulls out his bank envelope full of change, he makes my sister and me count the exact amount, we run outside and wait in a semicircle with other kids as my grandfather watches through the window. The icons in this particular memory (ice cream truck, bank envelope) are so loaded that seeing the physical objects causes me to pause each time and re-remember: my grandfather and what he was like (his daily rituals such as counting money and updating his ledger), being a certain age and feeling “grown up” and “responsible,” wanting something bad enough to ask for the money to buy it.
Wednesday, July 14 at 12:46am
A recent transplant to Washington DC, I am captivated by the culture of excellence here. While I still have my favorite nineteenth and twentieth century books, thinkers, art, music, and ideologies, imbued upon me by my liberal arts education, I find that the great thing about being in a city of influencers is that one becomes immersed in it, and a part of it. I’ve had drinks with today’s lead software developers, breakfast with major international jurists, lunch with artists and musicians, and the list goes on. It seems everyone is doing something exciting here, and so, while the moment has its iconic causes and people who are icons among the visionary elites, the world of young thought leaders here is quite flat- everyone is relatively accessible to each other, and I feel that this is as it should be. This is to say that, within the confines of Washington’s vibrant salon culture, our images have not been distilled from ourselves. We are free to safely assume that we must be our own icons and our own personal brands in order to create the world we want to inhabit, and yet, as that which excites and ignites us is largely accessible, either here, or via the train to New York, we are also able to actually embody the very stuff of which our iconic selves are just images. To live in such a milieu feels a little bit precocious, but a lot like history in the making, and while this is the most challenging time in my life to date, it’s also a period of immense growth. All of this is to say that, for me, having human icons is the most beneficial when I can consider them my peers, and thus when they are many and are directly accessible. Perhaps this is because, for me, the inspiring thing is being present in an iconic moment.
Wednesday, July 14 at 2:51am
A while back, I attended a Busta Rhymes concert live in St. Louis. The atmosphere was loud and energetic but near the end, Busta seemed to be growing more and more delirious. Suddenly, he fell off stage onto two people: my friends (luckily breaking his fall!). A fun time for all, and great atmosphere—but in the end Busta was brought down by reality and a bit of gravity.
On a completely different note, experiencing the Villa Savoye (house) in Poissy, France wasn’t exactly a letdown; the clearest and most iconic example of Le Corbusier’s five points was educational, to say the least. This boxy, white “machine for living,” was built up by architecture professors as “great modern architecture,” to the extent that classmates would mockingly bow down to it as if it were a god.
The reality was much richer (and heavier) than what I glanced over in the history books (the roof garden especially) but I can see why (also iconic) Roger Ebert doesn’t like buildings like these in Chicago: they lack “Hogwarts-charm.” However, Ebert’s view is limited and ignores the countless better, more humanistic modern architects since. Seeing and feeling it for myself serves as a clear contrast to the High Lines and Steven Holls of the world that succeed in the touchy-feely department.
Wednesday, July 14 at 2:02pm
Latest posts brought to mind a few things:
1) City as icon—how many people have arrived in New York with the city itself on a pedestal, only to go on to develop a completely new and more intimate relationship with their surroundings over the course of time through a series of disappointments, successes, fireworks, blackouts, and walk-ups? Joan Didion captures this transition in her essay “Goodbye to All That” —a story of a love affair with New York that ran its course.
2) In an age of accessibility—where we’re able to connect more easily with someone whose work we admire, to spot for Busta Rhymes, to visit and personally assess an important piece of architecture— the physical and psychological distance (and the remoteness/mystique that goes with it) between icon and devotee is collapsing. Wondering if this indicates a new yardstick for “pedestals” going forward and, as Max suggests, a general change in the way we express our esteem for icons…less reverence, more engagement?
Wednesday, July 14 at 6:41pm
Molly, those are great points, so I’d like to riff on them a bit. I haven’t read the Joan Didion essay, but I’ll have to check it out, as your description of it reminded me of Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City” series, which must be the most symphonic, brilliant, happy, tragic, freewheeling, and beautiful ode ever written to the city of San Francisco, and especially to the heartbeat of that city in the ’70s and ’80s. I’m also reminded of the “Aya” series of graphic novels, by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie- The series is set in Cote D’Ivoire, in 1970s suburban Abidjan prior to the outbreak of the Ivorian civil war, and is likewise an ode to the color, the fire, and the historicity of a particular place and era. That kind of literature is all about finding the beautiful in the banal, the exceptional in the everyday. I think that often the art that resonates most deeply with us enables us to distill feelings that are more dispersed, and less fully-formed in our day-to-day experience. For me, if art and literature can occupy the spirit-realm of iconic forms, it is by way of the ability to grant me deeper experiential access to the feelings that I already experience. For me, good art, art that I can ‘look up to’ delves into the realm of the iconic, and brings new truth to the surface.
This is why I’m committed to a willful association with artists and thinkers, and others who are dedicated to seeing the world vividly and in new, yet still true forms. One issue with North Atlantic culture and the greater capitalist culture at the macro-scale is that (as Guy Debord outlines well in “The Society of the Spectacle”) the way we treat numbers inclines us to be more in awe of and more fixated upon the big things- the mega-stars who attract the biggest number of fans, the banks with the most money, the clothes that most people are wearing. But this, to me, is a terrible feedback loop. I find myself always gravitating toward things in life that can be termed ’boutique’ or ‘bespoke’. I’d say it’s almost pathological of me, but I think the broader social inclination toward fascination with oversized, overpopular, and overly-grandiose things is the real pathology. When a person is reduced to his or her image before the world, and everyone wants a piece of what that image represents, the original person is left unable to be or do anything else without losing a piece of that larger-than-life, chimeric icon-persona, and is often locked into place as an image-as-product. This is probably why the Eminems, the Britney Spears, and the Martha Stewarts of the world are often regarded as anathema by the people I know within the creative and thinking classes, for we are each a part of a movement that seeks to touch hand to hand, to see eye-to-eye, and to breathe the same air as each other. While this kind of harmony can be easily displaced by the tropes that govern mass-culture, I can see no other way to exist in the world than to exist as a relevant part of it, and as a part which is necessarily connected to every other part.
Wednesday, July 14 at 8:31pm
After much thought, I can’t identify relevant icons at this moment in my life. At fifteen, and maybe even during college, I could probably have answered this question better (i.e.: Paul Rand). However, right now there are things that I aspire to, but can’t really consider as icons.
I read the term as necessarily implying detachment, and right now everything feels pretty tangible to me. And when something is tangible then it loses its icon-ness, whatever that is. I wouldn’t say it’s a generational thing, because I definitely had icons growing up. But now the notion just doesn’t make much sense to me.
Thursday, July 15 at 6:07pm
Angela gave the Final Word
I find human icons most inspirational because the best of them don’t keep repeating what they are known for, but keep evolving it into newer and better territory. They have the ability to startle and delight us on an ongoing basis, using their personal vision to guide them along varied explorations of the world and let us keep learning from them.
In Joan Didion’s essay Goodbye to All That, mentioned earlier in this conversation, the author’s ability to turn a clinical eye on her own near-breakdown and describe the process of falling out of love with New York is masterful but seems a minor confession when compared to her analysis and exploration of her own actions in the year following her husband’s sudden death. The Year of Magical Thinking as an evolution of her journalistic essays is masterful and brave; Didion is as merciless and honest when writing about herself as when she’s dissecting others.
Diana Vreeland, legendary magazine editor, was by all accounts confounding for writers and photographers to work with (though tremendously charming), and yet she produced some of the most memorable features, both visual and editorial, to grace the pages of Vogue. Collaborators have said she never made a similar request twice, yet somehow at the end of the day, it all hung together as her style.
Elvis Costello is not afraid to meander all over the musical map trying out collaborations with musicians from all genres, from Allan Toussaint to Burt Bacharach, and not caring if his original fans are interested in joining him on the journey. Jack White’s contribution to other bands, the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather, is worth noting here because neither of these sounds like the White Stripes but both carry the distinctive stamp that sounds like him. You could even say that Ronald Reagan, an actor playing a cowboy who turned into an actor playing a president playing a cowboy, was the ultimate consistent icon; he never wavered in his presentation, but he never evolved it either.
Friday, July 16 at 11:10am
I am not sure that icons truly exist. To me, icons seem to be the manifestation of a projected mythology. The luck of a person or a group finding something unique or special in an event, a place, a person.
Icons are perfect when kept at a distance kept on a pedestal out of reach where you can only perceive and appreciate the myth. They should be examined for all of their facets and not be taken as a singular source of perfection. Icons are man made and as a result inherently flawed.
Like Vera, I used to have many cultural icons that I aspired to meet, emulate or befriend. Something changed after moving to New York and meeting a number of these people, I realize that they were people. Not a god, or the embodiment of perfection, but normal folks who work hard and have a vision for themselves. As a result, I’ve concluded that anyone can be an icon of something, or to someone.
Friday, July 16 at 1:41pm
I am hesitant to post a response to this question as I thought over the influence of icons this entire week. No, truthfully my interest in icons – cultural, institutional, or commercial – goes back much further. As a perennial architecture student, my entire academic career centers around the study of icons – either through the obligatory history of architecture course with its slide identification exams, or in the more recent use of icons as a method of diagramming the architectural design process in publications. While these two arenas appear to be mutually exclusive, I believe the work of 2 x 4 for the McCormick Tribune Building at IIT (2003) reflects the cross-pollination of architectural icon as an image, a person, a graphic and a place simultaneously. The creation of wallpaper that depicts a portrait literally applied to the interior surface of a building on the campus of IIT and designed by OMA, depicting Mies van der Rohe and comprised of individual, uniformly shaped, icon patterns is so literal and at the same time poetic. Instead of my former professor’s favorite phrase, “Mies is the MAN” his role is recalibrated as the individual, the composition, the building, the masterplan, and yet at each stage remains ultimately an icon.
Friday, July 16 at 4:03pm
Keywords
Selected list of words appearing in this and other conversations.
Molly Heintz
Contributing Editor, The Architect's Newspaper
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At the top of my cultural icon list is Umberto Eco, who himself is a student of culture in its broadest sense. If you created a pedestal by stacking up all his publications to date, it would be a high and variegated one indeed.
I was introduced to his work when studying medieval art history, and went on read his fiction, but one of his recent non-fiction books, The History of Beauty, made a big impression on me. Eco serves up pages packed with images and quotes from primary sources; here, the images aren’t illustrating his story—they are the story. The “Comparative Tables” in the front of the book are a warp-speed ride through western culture—Apollo Belvedere to Arnold Schwarzenegger in ten clicks (Nude Adonis Table).
Eco reveals changing—and consistent—perceptions of beauty over time in a clever image edit, but it’s the seamless transition from ancient history to pop culture that is the really beautiful thing to me. As an art historian who has gone on to study and write about contemporary design topics, Eco’s disregard for academic boundaries is a daily source of inspiration.
Tuesday, July 13 at 10:44pm