Living Designs

Copyright 1994 Boston Athenaum Library, Boston, MA. Design and production by Elizabeth M. Burke. Copyright 1992 Kenneth Rosen. Designed and edited by Elizabeth M. Burke. Printed at the Ascensius Press, Maine. Other books I've copyedited, designed or produced: Barthel, Diane. The Preservation Project. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Germain, Sylvia. The Book of Nights. Boston, MA: David R. Godine Publisher. Kennedy, Rick, ed. Aristotelian and Cartesian Logic at Harvard: Charles Morton's a Logick System & William Brattle's Compendium of Logick. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts Mundy, James. No Rich Men's Sons. Maine: Harp Publications, 1996 Patten, Robert L. George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art. Vol 2. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Zallen, Doris K. Does It Run in the Family. Consumer's Guide to DNA Testing for Genetic Disorders. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Architects are taking old train crates to make homes. Someone has turned old vinyl records into bowls. Someone else has come up with a lighter-weight "concrete block" for building houses with, by mixing concrete with chewed up styrofoam from styrofoam cups and the like. People make shoes out of cut-up tires. And then there are people who take old furniture and rehabilitate it, or use the wood to create something new. Your mission for this summer class is to come up with ideas, concepts, and then a project for stuff that washes up on the beaches or is on Long Island already. Yep ... recycling. Or, alternately, to come up with an idea about how Long Island can recycle its own everyday "waste" into products. You will come up with not just an idea, but work to transform that idea into a product. You will be engaged in politics, social policy, beliefs, engineering, design, and creativity: first to some up with an idea, then to transform the idea, and all during this proc...

In 1990, I worked with a letterpress shop and the Portland School of Art, with a group of talented students interested in book design and the old-world art of letterpress. I wanted the students to learn more than skill; I wanted them to try to turn the words of a great mind and soul into something worthy of great skill. The work exhibited in the next two slides shows not only how clever they were individually, but how they inherently, long before the "team" work skills became so prevalent in our US of A, did what could be nothing less than brilliant as a team. I gave the assignment, but they did the work, and it was very fine work.

This is an image taken from a dream, but surely someone knows the feeling of swimming at night, and that is not a dream. To swim at night, in the ocean or a lake, tell me, what is the feeling? What images would you use to describe your sensations and your thoughts? This image is one I have worked over and over, erasing and redrawing, since 1997, and it is now 2007 -- so for ten years. For me, it holds some of the mystery of swimming at night. A person, an animal, a house: the shadows a bit obscure, but the sense of containment and wildness there.

Window and tree, or windows and tree ... views from one way considered from another. When did I do this image? When would someone else have done this image, or wanted this sort of image? When would someone want an image of a tree caught between two windows, on either side of an architectural/continental divide? I did it when I was thinking of going into medicine, after a life-time of wanting/hoping to be a writer, or its defunct (to me), a painter: A person who had the fantasy of being noticably by what she had to say. As a painter, it was as someone who was noticable by what she could image forth. No one wants to be "something" (a painter, a writer, an accountant, etc), without wanting to be noticed for something, or at least to have experienced at some point that one's skills were well put. One hardly waits around to be nothing. And yet, recently, I found myself strangely overjoyed by a small moment in the movie Man on a Train, where the poetry teacher in a small French...

It is both the arrangement of images/things in our day-to-day lives and in our dreams that leads us to what is compelling us either toward death or toward life. It isn't the things or the images, but how we arrange them--that say something about how we live. Archeology, the prototype for psychoanalysis, really is about studying how things were arranged, so that someone later made an hypothesis about what a culture or civilization valued and how they lived. How we order what we order, or arrange, speaks of our values and desires. These images are not simply images, but arrangements, orderings, and implications.