Austin Kleon

You are here: Blog / Archives for juxtaposition

Two quotes

At this risk of this blog just being a back-and-forth with Alan: I love his “twoquotes” tag on his blog, where he simply juxtaposes one quote with another.

I’m coming up on the second anniversary of keeping my commonplace diary, and all year I’ve been putting one quote beneath another quote, letting them talk to each other:

Sometimes I am intentional with the juxtaposition, saving a quote for the right day, but the really fun juxtapositions are the random ones when the meaning reveals itself only after the ink is dry.

Heading into my third year, it’ll be interesting to see if this still works with three, then four, then five…

DJing on the hedonic treadmill

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the “hedonic treadmill,” the idea that being the resilient and adaptable creatures that we are, we can get used to almost anything.

To simplify: We chase after the things that we think will make us happy, and once we get those things, we realize we’re not that much happier than we were before, but we see other things that we think will make us happy this time, so we chase after them, etc., etc. (See also: Arbitrary stupid goals.)

One way to deal with this is to just jump off the treadmill and be grateful for what you have.

Another solution might be found in this wisdom from composer Tom Holkenborg I found in Blood, Sweat, and Chrome, the book about making Mad Max: Fury Road.

On the problem of how to “continuously build on that anticipation of what comes next,” Holkenborg brings up a lesson he learned from being an electronic musician doing live shows:

Every time the DJ drops a new track, it feels louder than anything else that you’ve heard before, which is actually not the case! What happens is you drop a new track, and then over the course of three to five minutes, you make it ever so slightly quieter. And then the new track comes in and it’s back at the level where the original one started, and then everything feels so loud.

This seems to me a valuable tip for art and life.

Holkenborg also talks about how much his hobby, cooking, influences his work. He thinks about his soundtracks like building a 10-course meal: putting a taste in one course that begs for another in the next. (Like DJing with food. I suspect Questlove would have much to say about this.)

Juxtapositions from a sequence of experiences are overlooked as a source of creativity.

We tend to think a lot about what we do, but we rarely think about the order in which we do it.

I have found this especially true in one’s self-education: the order in which you come into contact with things is almost as important as the things themselves. (See: Melville not reading Shakespeare until he was 30.)

Adjust the volume, shuffle the sequence…

Input as collage

In Edgar Wright’s outstanding film The Sparks Brothers, Stephen Morris, the drummer in Joy Division, says they were listening to two records on repeat when they recorded “Love Will Tear Us Apart”: an LP of Frank Sinatra’s greatest hits and Sparks’ No. 1 in Heaven.

My first reaction was “Whoa!” But the more I think about it, the more the mashup makes sense: isolate the vocal of “Strangers in the Night” and put it over the backing track of “La Dolce Vita.”

Your output depends on your input, but a lot of your input is random: you’re interested in lots of different things, and those things, occasionally, will talk to each other in your work.

Lately I’ve been thinking about being more intentional with input. Thinking about input as collage. Taking the principle of juxtaposition (1+1=3) and using that to guide your input: what weird, seemingly disparate things can you feed your brain that will come out later in a new mix?

The input collage can be subject or genre based and even better if it’s multi-media. (For example, reading art books and physics books at the same time, or watching a lot of westerns and kung fu movies at the same time or looking at paintings in a museum while reading physics papers while watching kung fu movies, etc.)

There’s a balance here between feeding your brain intentionally and then backing off and letting your brain do the subconscious work of mixing your inputs together.

In Art & Physics, the writer and surgeon Leonard Shlain wrote about his interesting method of “self-education” in the books’ subject matters:

Serendipitously, I discovered a way to heighten my creativity. My habit was to read a popular physics book late at night until the snooze gremlin nudged me with the signal that it was time to call it a day. Prior to falling asleep the following night, my mind relatively empty, I leafed through art books. The next morning, I would often connect images I had seen the night before with concepts in physics contained in my previous night’s reading. Something mysterious happens in the creative process during dreamtime, and I am an avid proponent of the school that advocates, “sleeping on it.”

It’s been pointed out before that dreams and collage work in the same kind of holistic, non-logical, non-linear manner. I love the idea of our brains gluing together the bits while we slumber…

Drawing with light


The story goes that when photographer Gjon Mili visited Picasso’s studio in 1949, he showed the artist these photos he’d taken in 1945 of Carol Lynne skating with flashlights embedded in her boots:

Mili suggested Picasso draw with a flashlight in a darkened room. What happened next, as detailed in LIFE, Jan 30, 1950:

Picasso gave Mili 15 minutes to try one experiment. He was so fascinated by the result… that he posed for five sessions, projecting 30 drawings of centaurs, bulls, Greek profiles and his signature…. Mili took his photographs in a darkened room, using two cameras, one for side view, another for front view…. By leaving the shutters open, he caught the light streaks swirling through space. By setting off a 1/10,000-second strobe light, he caught Picasso’s intense, agile figure as it flailed away at the drawings.

You can see their further experiments, many in color, with Picasso playing with drawing in 3-D, here.

Mili did the light trick with many other kinds of artists:

Henri Matisse, sculptor Henry Moore, and violinist Jascha Heifetz

There are lots of his curiosities in the Mili LIFE archives. Here’s an image of a housewife ironing from a Sept. 9, 1946 article on “Easier Housekeeping”:

Here’s a picture of Mili from the table of contents:

Going through the LIFE archives is a total trip. I feel like somebody could write a whole book based solely on the juxtaposition of these two images and their captions. (“Squatting in the darkness, Picasso draws a distorted spatial centaur.” “Pattern of light streaks shows how an efficient housewife makes a bed.”)

More on Mili: “Hands in Motion,” and his books: Photographs and Recollections, Picasso’s 3rd Dimension, and The Magic of the Opera

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.