Less Is More?
Welcome to the first issue of House of the Interpreter. Today's subject: "less is more."
Less is more. This phrase, with two perfectly-balanced pronouns on either side of the equation, pairs usefulness and nonsense in just the same way. It guards against excess, feature-creep and gaudiness, while playing into the popular fear of saying anything big as a hedge against big criticism, and into the hands of scolds who tell you to tone it down or turn it down, when those who moved things forward did exactly the opposite.
Instead, I advocate that we avoid glib equivalences like this, and instead trust ourselves to judge things like beauty, balance and proportionality.
Clearly there is a good deal of wisdom in the cliché: saying no to trivial things, removing unnecessary rules and restrictions, simplifying down to what is important is a source of clarity and meaning.
Governing a large country is like frying a small fish.
You spoil it with too much poking.
—Tao te Ching
That said, there’s something unsettling about our current obsession with simplicity and plainness—whether in the blank skyscrapers in modern cities or the flat blandness of fashionable websites—it is as though we have run out of ideas for what to put in spaces.
Take an alien or someone from the distant past: show them the Empire State Building, then the Freedom Tower. Seeing the latter, even with it’s 100%-American 1776-foot stature, what would they think happened to the civilization? Or what if you showed them an engraved, floral book from the 19th century, then a flat, corporate website, either without ornament or whose only ornamentation is polygonal and little more.
When and why did we stop adorning things we build with complex, symmetric geometries, living pictures from nature, and in their place put flat space, gradients and platonic shapes?
To say that the Freedom Tower, for all its guts, is more than the Empire State Building in that it is less adorned is just plain wrong. Bach’s fifth Brandenburg Concerto, which goes so fast, so far, with uncountable notes, ideas and phrases ought, in its complexity, to be practically nothing, if less is more.
But then Louis Armstrong, with his one-note trumpet solo in “West End Blues,” really does seem to embody what the phrase is supposed to mean. So what’s the difference?
Roger Scruton’s Beauty: A Very Short Introduction is useful here.
Things can often be compared and ranked according to their beauty, and there is also a minimal beauty—beauty in the lowest degree, which might be a long way from the ‘sacred’ beauties of art and nature which are discussed by the philosophers. There is an aesthetic minimalism exemplified by laying the table, tidying your room, designing a web-site, which seems at first sight quite remote from the aesthetic heroism exemplified by Bernini’s St Teresa in Ecstasy or Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. You don’t wrestle over these things as Beethoven wrestled over the late quartets, nor do you expect them to be recorded for all time among the triumphs of artistic achievement. Nevertheless, you want the table, the room or the web-site to look right, and looking right matters in the way that beauty generally matters—not by pleasing the eye only, but by conveying meanings and values which have weight for you and which you are consciously putting on display.
This platitude is of great importance in understanding architecture. Venice would be less beautiful without the great buildings that grace the waterfronts—Longhena’s church of Sta Maria della Salute, the Ca’ d’Oro, the Ducal Palace. But these buildings are set among modest neighbours, which neither compete with nor spoil them—neighbours whose principal virtue resides precisely in their neighbourliness, their refusal to draw attention to themselves or to claim the exalted status of high art.
Ravishing beauties are less important in the aesthetics of architecture than things that fit appropriately together, creating a soothing and harmonious context, a continuous narrative as in a street or a square, where nothing stands out in particular, and good manners prevail.
Scruton puts it rather perfectly: all things can’t all be supremely or even equally beautiful. But at the same time, most things can have some small beauty in them, and we have the opportunity to give them this beauty, ourselves.
Take my desk, for example:
This desk was destined for our New York apartment, but got stranded in my wife’s business office in Pennsylvania, where I am squatting. Of all the functional objects in this photograph, three are finely decorated: the desk, paper organizer and lamp. The paper organizer (a gift from my wife) is particularly lovely, with a non-repeating floral engraving.
Two objects are almost unadorned: the Tibetan singing bowl and the portfolio (another kind gift), but take a good deal of character from their materials—leather and tarnished bronze. None of the above objects is particularly expensive or ornate, but they all do their best given limited means.
The only plain object is the most expensive: my beloved ThinkPad, in flat, black plastic and carbon fibre. And I don’t mean to insult the designer: I really do love this computer, and it types better than my Mac. My Mac, too, is both expensive and plain.
What gives?
Just Enough Is More?
The frisson for this piece came from Milton Glaser, who explains in his essays how silly he feels the “less is more” expression is.
Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realized that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the history of the world. If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realize that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and everything else. However, I have an alternative to the proposition that i believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’
I like this equation, in that it appeals to proportionality and economy, and warns against the poking that intrudes constantly: unnecessary meetings at work, mandatory fields in carelessly-created web forms, what my father used to call “potato-peelers” on the back of inexpensive cars, layers of instrumentation and production atop a pop music theme without artistic merit.
It might be said that the poking tendency is our first nemesis, it will always stalk us, because it is much easier to add a stroke of paint than to resist, it’s easier to add a feature to the system, to add an instrument to your mix.
Our second nemesis is the inversion of the first, and it’s harder to describe; my best attempt is to call it the tendency to doubt that our ideas justify our investment in them, in taking them seriously enough to expound them at length and decorate them.
This, I think, is related to the contemporary habits, firstly, of expressing almost everything ironically, as though irony might provide refuge if one’s ideas turn out to be sub-par, and, secondly, of usually visual artists to present what is essentially just an idea (like a piece rope on the floor) as work.
You can see Glenn Gould do this for real: in this clip he plays the stripped down harmony that underlies the first movement of Bach’s fifth Brandenberg Concerto; he wouldn’t be foolish enough, though, to say that this summary could stand in for the whole movement.
Nonetheless, and with due respect to the recently lost and much missed Glaser, I don’t think his formulation quite solves this problem—putting aside how hard it is to tell how much is enough.
Rather, there is something of the scold in the idea that more than enough is too much: do you want to be the person to tell Led Zeppelin to stop the ten-minute piano solo because it might be excessive, Beethoven that his Grand Fugue (16 minutes) might be surplus to requirements, or Gaudí that his Sagrada Família in Barcelona has more points than is strictly necessary?
The above may be true on some level, but someone with such a response must be missing the point.
Rather, I’d moderate Glaser’s injunction with my own: make your idea and its ornamentation balanced. This is to say that challenging and profound ideas can support time, space and complexity; but don’t insult us by building a temple for the preachings of a spiv; conversely, there is great merit in small beauty, modestly expressed.
Thus, genuinely big ideas earn the artist significant freedom of scale: Beethoven could double or half the length of the third movement of his Hammerklavier Sonata while still maintaining balance. Louis Armstrong could play a single note for four whole measures of West End Blues and about 60 in the next four measures—I think the point is that Armstrong’s performance is beyond questions of more, less or enough; he’s too good to hold to such considerations.
Conclusion: Don’t Try to Understand the Koan
For those who aren’t familiar, koans are simple, wise, challenging, shocking stories or aphorisms in the Zen tradition, the contemplation of which is designed to advance the subject’s meditation practice.
My favorite example is: If you meet the Buddha, kill him. The shock and confusion that might result from reading this phrase is the desired effect. It feels, however, like large sections of our society are taking an aphorism like less is more literally.
A good friend of mine went to an art gallery and saw one piece that consisted of a shopping cart made from the same material as a bin or trash can. He asked the artist, who was present, whether the message would be different if they made a bin out of shopping cart material. They gave him a blank look.
This is the sort of thinking that results from taking a koan or aphorism literally, or from mistaking an idea for a work. I see that same blank look in the formless buildings in our greatest cities and in the flat plastic of my laptop. It’s an expression that says “Thinking any bigger, adorning more, crossing more disciplines will put a bull’s-eye on me and I’m scared.”
As Nassim Taleb put it in Bed of Procrustes: “To figure out how well you will do ten years from now relative to someone else, count your enemies, count his, and square the ratio.”