I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics. You’ll find this week’s article below, followed by Ports of Call, links to things I’ve been reading and pondering this week.
I never used to like Matisse. I remember being unimpressed with his colorful scribbles as a high-school art history student. Still, when I traded in my car for a summer backpacking in Europe after graduating high school, I made a stop in Nice for a few days and visited the Musée Matisse.
My 17-year-old self was not a fan. As I wrote in my journal on June 24, 2007:
Oh yeah. I went to the Museé Chagall and Museé Matisse. They were okay. Not sure whether I actually like either artist much, but at least I saw something at each place that was intriguing. And of course I saw lots of people playing bocce ball. I watched for a while, but I am still no closer to discovering how that game is actually played. And I saw some strange homeless(?) people—one was cooking tomato stew in a pot over a fire set inside an assembled ring of rocks. And I saw a lot of faint-looking people, evidently exhausted from the triathlon. One actually looked dead, and his friend was holding him propped in his arms… By the way, I have some new blisters.
At that time in my life, I also didn’t like brie cheese.
One afternoon a few months earlier, I was at a friend’s house studying for our AP Art History exam, and her mom made up a cheese plate for us. I tried the brie. I made a face.
“It’s an adult taste,” my friend’s mom said.
Matisse must also be an adult taste, because now I appreciate both brie cheese and his works—quite a bit.
Last year the Philadelphia Museum of Art put on an exhibition of Matisse’s works from the 1930s, and I went to see it twice because I loved it so much.
Matisse’s Self-Portraits
Matisse was a master of color and pattern—something I came to appreciate from reading Christopher Alexander’s comments on Matisse’s work in The Nature of Order—as well as draftsmanship. He was a master of conveying a specific impression with very few lines—the same skill a good caricaturist has.
If you know what Matisse looks like, you will immediately recognize the drawings below as drawings of him. They’re self-portraits, done in the mirror.
They are all drawings of Matisse, yet if you look closer, you’ll see the four drawings are each completely different—based on the details, they ought to be different people. The proportions are different and the shapes are different. In one his nose is gigantic and squat, in another it’s long and slender. The chin is in turns bulbous, pointed and round. The eyebrows are thick and thin, and sometimes he has bags under his eyes.
The details are all different, yet somehow the whole is the same.
These drawings were displayed in a 1948 retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for which Matisse wrote a short essay, “Exactitude is Not Truth.” In that essay, he wrote:
The different elements which go to make up these four drawings give in the same measure the organic makeup of the subject. These elements, if they are not always indicated in the same way, are still always wedded in each drawing with the same feeling—the way in which the nose is rooted in the face—the ear screwed into the skull—the lower jaw hung—the way in which the glasses are placed on the nose and ears—the tension of the gaze and its uniform density in all the drawings—even though the shade of expression varies in each one.
Matisse says:
It is thus evident that the anatomical, organic inexactitude in these drawings, has not harmed the expression of the intimate character and inherent truth of the personality, but on the contrary has helped to clarify it.
Matisse observed that we can see this same principle at play in nature’s expressions—that is, in plants and animals. For example, in the leaves of a fig tree, “the great difference of form that exists among them does not keep them from being united by common quality. Fig leaves, whatever fantastic shape they assume, are always unmistakeably fig leaves.”
Losing the Forest for the Trees
A few weeks back I wrote about the challenges that information technology poses to democracy. Among them, the evisceration of truth.
Byung-Chul Han, author of Infocracy, writes that truth is about being more than just correct or not, it’s about connecting with something broader—what he described as a narrative or direction. And what information does is fragment the truth into particles that may be individually correct but lack that broader something.
The philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote about this as well, as a forefather of Han’s ideas in this regard, particularly in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology.”
Heidegger was concerned with the way we relate to each other and things, and how our relations may be changing in the technological age. The world is complex and everything is connected, and we can only understand small pieces of it, which we package up as knowledge.
But that packaging can be misleading.
Think of grades, for example, which take a student’s effort, performance and experience over a whole learning journey and collapse that into a single letter. And then we see the letter on the student’s transcript and think we know “how the student did” in the class, when really it tells us nothing. Worse: a student’s entire college career gets summed up in a cumulative GPA, which tells us even less.
Heidegger saw, as he wrote in the middle of the 20th century, virtually all of society going in that same direction: collapsing complex phenomena into single numbers, the fancy term for which is commensuration. In the scientific age, we start to see everything in terms of parts and how they can be made use of: instead of forests, we see only lumber (and dollar signs); instead of animals, we see meat (and dollar signs); instead of colleagues we see “human resources” (and dollar signs). And then of course we will see ourselves that way, too.
“In the midst of all that is correct, the true will withdraw,” Heidegger wrote.
For Heidegger, truth was rather a matter of “unconcealing,” or revealing something within its context, and being aware that for everything you have unconcealed, much of it still remains covered. Put differently, approaching the truth is a matter of intellectual humility, acknowledging that for everything we know, there’s much more out there to be yet known, and we could be mistaken anyway.
Getting the Forest Back
How might we get away from this way of thinking?
Han seems fairly pessimistic about this prospect. Heidegger thought an answer lay in the practice of questioning: if we learn to question more, we can become better thinkers.
The psychologist Iain McGilchrist also reflects on this question in his work, which focuses on the respective roles of our two brain hemispheres. The left hemisphere is responsible for the details, while the right is responsible for the whole. In the context of my discussion here, the left hemisphere is about correctness, the right about truth. McGilchrist worries that societally we overvalue the left hemisphere—and so that’s our focus everywhere from education to the workplace.
The right hemisphere is also the one that hears music—not just a string of discrete sounds—and sees images—not just pixels. Thinking back to Matisse, that makes me think that immersing ourselves in pursuits like art and music—pursuits where the connective tissue of wholeness is what gives the thing any meaning in the first place—is another way forward.
So go to a museum or listen to an album.
Ports of Call
Doodling: Related to this week’s post, in the past I wrote about the lessons of doodling for design, how this intuitive activity encourages us to tap into our feelings and attend both to the details and the whole. That was the work of Christopher Alexander, from whom I also learned about Matisse’s writings that I cited above.
A Cheese Vending Machine: Philadelphia has a cheese vending machine, enough said.