Gossip has always been such an interesting social concept. An individual tells someone else’s story to another person, and usually intentionally leaves out portions of the story to activate the listener to feel a certain way. The storyteller may include specific but minor details to help keep the story interesting. The listener than makes his or her own conceptual leaps on why they feel the subject in the story said what she said, or did what she did. Similarly to gossip, I am interested in the ways in which visual work can activate the viewer to fill what is intentionally omitted, by drawing the viewer’s attention to minor details, or absences in the design. By providing a purposefully incomplete story to the viewer, it is interesting to see the conceptual bounds they endure to fill in the information that is not provided.
The work of John Baldessari is a good example because “he upends the commonly held expectations of how an image is supposed to function (Baldessari, 8).” In many of Baldessari’s works, he eliminates much of the information in the painting or photo, forcing the viewer to fill in what is missing. In some instances he places colorful dots over the faces of his subjects or he will completely remove a portion of the subject (a leg or arm) and replace it with a flat color but still maintaining the structure of the segment he removed. This ambiguous space that he creates forces the viewer to fill in what he or she thinks is missing. A lot of the time Baldessari will combine the subject with the background and foreground so it is difficult to distinguish one from the other.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres created a public work using his photograph of a bed that was slept in, with two indentations in the pillows where the head of a person would have been laying. The photograph, called Untitled 1991, was reproduced as a billboard for all the public to see. Designer Daniella Spinat writes about this work, “Anybody would probably recognize the image on this billboard as familiar. It shows hopefulness and sadness, presence and absence, at once. The potential simultaneity of the two opposites, the intimacy and emptiness, private and public, is self-reflexive. Like a giant mirror, the image suggests that each viewer fill in the space with their own bodies.” What is so great about Torres’ work is that it is suggestive in a way that the viewer can make up his or her own story to the image. Due to the absence in the photograph, we are able to fill in the space with our own perception of what should be laying in that bed. The image provokes many emotions in the viewer, but more importantly from a design standpoint it asks the simple question of, “What should be in that space?” This question activates the viewer in a way that straight forward design concepts cannot. Straightforward design concepts may consist of icon, symbol, or index; however this is only one way of categorizing how signs communicate, and much more can be done to activate the viewer.
The work of Paul Sahre is metaphorical and suggestive to the viewer. For example, Sahre designed the cover for the Ernest Hemingway novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The image on the cover is of pine needles and pine cones. The limited amount of information provided to the viewer forces him or her to fill in what is missing. For those who have read the novel, the book begins and ends with the same scene. At the end of the novel, character Robert Jordan is lying in wait on the forest floor to die in glory. A quote from the novel, “He was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow. He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest. (43.402)” In this case, the subject Robert Jordan is missing leaving the pine needles as the only indicative piece of information. This image references the viewpoint and experience of the character, rather than depicting the actions of the story.
Bruce Mau designed the Panama Museum of Biodiversity. His design is suggestive in the way that “Instead of pushing information, the museum allows visitors to be pulled into understanding as they follow a thematic path (Mau).” By purposefully designing the museum to be abstract, this gives the visitor an inverted experience. The museum design intentionally omits things that other more traditionally designed museums do not, such as mere illustrations in the exhibits, so that the viewer has a more activated experience.
Designer John Gall was presented with a project to redesign all twenty one of Vladimir Nabokov’s book covers. Gall states, “Nabokov was a passionate butterfly collector, a theme that has cropped up on some of his past covers. My idea was also a play on this concept. Each cover consists of a photograph of a specimen box, the kind used by collectors like Nabokov to display insects. Each box would be filled with paper, ephemera, and insect pins, selected to somehow evoke the book's content (Gall, 2009).” Gall chose a number of talented designers to each create each of the boxes. Invitation to a Beheading designed by Helen Yentus and Jason Booher has a little chair in front of the invite which is hauntingly suggestive to the book’s content. In contrast, the Penguins Classics book cover is an image of a large knife on a wooden chopping block which depicts the forthright actions of the story rather than the experience of the character, making the design direct rather than metaphorical or suggestive.
As an approach, I could create a series of visual works, (taking multiple forms) that intentionally and purposefully provides an incomplete story to the viewer so that he or she has to pay attention to the minor details and absences in the work and then may fill in the information about what they think is going on in the story. I could then have each person write down what they think the content of the story is, and how they would tell it to another person. The series would then become an example of gossip.
