Introduction

(Rewritten Feb 20, Mar 3, 2004)
I have been thinking about tips, the end of things, the end of objects. I want to investigate the subject in depth and in the end to produce a visual essay. While blogs are meant to be personal diaries I use this blog to present and develop a work in progress. Much of "Tips - The End of Things" is devoted to photographic examples but this introduction dwells on the questions and confusions that shape my query. I would appreciate comments and suggestions for examples of tips.

From a certain point of view an object ends everywhere its surface meets the space around it. There are also some areas of a shape where we feel it ends more than others, for instance, the edge of a box where two planes meet. But I concentrate on the area of an object we call the tip. (Once you begin to talk about this in an abstract way "tip" becomes difficult to define. "Beginning" and "end" are truly abstract concepts when it comes to physical shapes. Do our bodies begin at our feet and end at our heads? Or do they begin at our heads and end at out feet? Or even do they begin at our skin and end at our skeleton.) When we say "tip", however, we know what we mean. If an object "ends" everywhere, still we feel that it ends at a specific locale, which is often called the tip... the very end. The end of fingers, toes, penis or nipple, the steeple of a church and the point of a knife are all tips.

(Added February 26, March 8 2004)
Frequently a tip tapers. There is a dramatic, noticeable transition from solid to void. Tips are pointed. Not to put too fine a point on it but that is the point. Or if not tapered, tips end in a bulge. Tips end in either a taper or a knob. A tip is "created" when a shape becomes either smaller or larger as it ends. A change in size at the end of a shape is one of the main things that makes a tip, a tip. A shape defined by parallel lines does not have a tip - consider a Mies skyscraper, as compared to a gothic church. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building have tips on top but not classic modern buildings.

And so I want to think about tips as a formal category. Got that! A formal category! And if tips constitute an aspect of form I want to think about what they might mean as form, not just as reference. What do tips mean? And not only what the mean but why do we notice them, why are we concerned about them, what is special about them and why the locus (?) of attention paid to them?

It is very common that there is some kind of extra work, some more refined, sustained elaboration that occurs at a tip. Newel posts, steeples, finials, pinnacles etc. And there also seems to be a peculiar lack of "tips" in things and art modern, maybe contemporary as well. Cars, for instance (think of a Corvette) were covered with tips. Now they aren't. Or think of Donald Judd. Tipless. Adamantly tipless. What form would be more tipless than a box, a rectilinear prism. And so the final form that I am imagining, the point of this exercise is to create a visual essay. Use the new forms/media that I now know Flash or Final Cut Pro to create a video. An essay that makes its argument as much by collecting, editing, arranging, composing images as by making an argument with words. And, as usual I have had a hard time getting started. This is an idea that has been in my head for a long time. At least four years (and I started this a year ago and let it ferment until now). This blog is a place to build and organize.

One of the points of this project is to find out what happens when you see all these pictures of tips. Tips from all these different walks of life. To see what happens for me - the conclusions that I make, that I discover, the meanings that I can unpack. But also what conclusions the audience makes. Though I want to make an argument with pictures (and text) but I also want the pictures to make their own "argument", to say things implicitly, to say things that I do not know or can figure out, to say things that I do not want to state outright.

An elaboration on "intermediate abstractions".

Random Thoughts 3

Tips are embarassing. That is, body tips. The tip of the penis and the nipple are required, by custom, to be hidden.

Decollatage. The curve of the breast, its fullness is allowed to be seen. In fact it is prized. But the nipple is taboo. (e.g. the Janet Jackson affair (breasts are exposed almost completely in every mass media venue but not the nip)). Occasionally the dangling privates of a (handsome) man are seen in R rated movies but never really focused on. You can see the hairy whole but not the tip. Fingers are not to be pointed - this is less embarassment but a sign of rudeness... but it seems similar the tip of the finger is not to be held up for scrutiny, not to be the center of attention. Same with the tongue. Sticking out your tongue, exposing the pointy end is the height of rudeness, though childishly silly. And so the tips of the body must be kept under wraps. Perhaps this is why there is a little flourish on the end of created objects - a profusion at the tip. Showing off. Exposing in another form what cannot be exposed otherwise. I know this sounds simplistically Freudian but I want to keep it even simpler than that (I am hoping by not even writing the ph-word that I will escape the trap of over-used insights). There is clearly some tension between hiding and showing when it comes to tips and this tension is being worked out in not terribly disguised forms in cultural products.

Tips penetrate. Edges slice. This only works for sharp tips. Knives. But you cannot have a slicing tip. Piercing, probing... "p" words.

What are tips at the bottom of things... a different kind of end? (Octopus tentacles)

Random Ideas 2

added feb 13, 2003
I was wondering if tips have anything to do with desire. It seems as if some kind of yearning is implicit in a tip but I am not sure that this is central or a helpful path to pursue. More important is that tips infer a relationship. I am not sure what the right word is - "make", "create", "require" "force" - but where there is a tip there is a relationship.

(Of course you can say this about anything but it seems to me a matter of degree, a matter whether relation-making is a necessary, central, unavoidable quality of a tip or not). A tip is never singular or separate, despite the fact that it stands out (is there such a thing as a demure tip), but comes in pairs, always paired with its environment. Whether tender or violent a tip reaches towards the "outside world". Beckoning or threatening or exploring or... the tip is different than the box or the wall (Richard Serra) for which division and seperation are central. Tips link or join - the steeple to the sky, the knife to the heart, fingers tto... almost everything.

Tips are breakable. The finials on the posts at the beginning of stairways throughout New York are frequently broken off or mended back together.

"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire."
Roland Barthes (1915–1980) “Talking,” A Lover’s Discourse (1977, trans. 1978).

"What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment."
Virginia Woolf The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, entry for Aug. 21, 1927

The idea that the tip is an analogy for the brain. An elaboration on the end of a stem that is both different and continuous with the stem, both receptive and aggressive towards the outside (its surroundings) taking in the world, probing the world, penetrating the world.

Protection. Threatening. Not just aggressive. Maybe defensive.

Reminds me of the colloquialism "His brain is in his penis."

But analogously I am kind of saying that the "brain" of the church is the steeple. The "brain" of the bed post, newell post, stairway is the finial.

(Added March 4, 2004) I noticed an homology between the diagram of the spinal cord/brain and a cross. I wonder what the cross and tips share as abstract categories. There is potentially something similar about them - simple to spot, simple physical configurations, common, basic, found in the body, nature, manmade object, can connect diverse things with a formal category. However one cannot escape the meaning of the cross, burdened with great cultural weight. So ultimately the "cross" and "tips" are essentially different. The cross is a symbol. Inescapably. It stands for Christ, Christianity, the Cruxifixion and if I am not mistaken, the Resurrection. Aside for the "plus" sign (+), the cross is identified with these meanings. The meaning of the Cross does not change with context - it is always Christianity (the meaning of Christianity may change with context... and people's attitudes toward Christianity may change but the Cross as symbol does not change. (Except, of course that everything is contextual. It is just the context of the Cross is global and over 2000 years.)) The meaning to a "tip" though, is contextual. The tip of a knife at your throat means something different to you than a stamen to a bee, a nipple to an infant, the welcoming finial at the bottom of the stairs. And so, perhaps, as tools for thought "tips" and the "cross" are on opposite sides of the spectrum. "Cross" is fixed and singular and "tips" is flexible and multiple. And that is both the pleasure and the usefulness of exploring "tips". I remember, in Art Forum, in the heyday of high abstraction someone writing on the "cross" - its appearance in abstraction, its use, and meaning and _____ with little consideration of its symbolism of its inevitable reference. Perhaps it was easier to play with symbols, to empty them of their oft-used meanings, and play with them but that does not seem possible today. And that is the point, you (I) can play with "tips" conceptually and otherwise, while you cannot really play with the Cross. Well, I suppose you can, but then you are playing with Christianity, which seems quite the task. No matter how irreverent or heretical or _______ you are how is it play?

Intermediate abstractions.

In art we have tended to focus on the most abstract of abstractions. I want to look at a subject that is slightly less abstract (and all the more fertile for being so).

At least this is inherited from the Modern Movement. And it seems that we accept these notions of the abstract, in so far as we still differentiate between abstract and representational art, as if abstract and representational were complete and mutually exclusive categories. The sculpture words for form include "mass, volume, void, surface, shape, texture, light and dark, etc." The thing about these words is that they are irreducible (except maybe to form) and they cannot get any more inclusive without becoming ineffective (referring to nothing or way too much). All things have mass or volume or a surface but not all things have a tip. And all tips can be discussed using these very abstract terms. These form words are useful... are needed to learn about sculpture, both seeing and making, but it seems hard to think new thoughts using these concepts and at this moment they seem restrictive, as if to use them is to think through and about the Modern Movement... or the tradition. "Tips", then are less abstract than the usual terms for form... (I guess that is one of the prerequisites that the abstraction, intermediate or not, must be a potentially formal category) but still abstract. Clearly more abstract than chair or stamen or knife or finial. (A different kind of abstract than "sharp" or "dull" because it is not qualitative, those are words that describe qualities... a tip can have any quality). More abstract than "box" but possibly equivalently abstract as "container". Lots of disparate items can be contained in the word "container" - a box, a cabinet, a vase, a refrigerator, a hard drive, a planter, a shell. And this seems different than another kind of abstraction which includes things of a similar nature - architecture, for instance... a dense and hetoerogenous category, for sure, but focusing on the built environment. Whereas "tips" brings together "stamens" and "corvettes", "bottletops" and "brains". The trick when searching for an "intermediate abstraction" is that it be satisfyingly abstract and suggestively specific and more than anything to bring together things that do not normally get thought in the same thought. "Tips" would be a much less interesting area of exploration if it only led us to consider "towers" and "penises" _____ and ____ but by bringing together "tusks" and "coathooks", "fingers" and "serifs", "arabesques" and "beaks" we do not know what thoughts we might come up with. Yet it is not an arbitrary combination, they all are "tipped". And so "tips" are an intermediate abstraction... on a spectrum quite abstract but not the most abstract of abstractions. Now that I think of it there is something visceral about the concept - to say the word "tip" is to conjer an image, is to feel a physical sensation, unlike mass or volume or plane.

What are other examples of "intermediate abstractions"? Aside from container. "Handle" seems too specific, "indentation" works but I feel I am searching too hard (tip is a common word and a common concept, easily grasped), perhaps a "wrinkle", a "fold", a "joint" (no...), a "corner" (that is getting close)... "Cracks" might be an interesting category... but will have fewer heterogenous connections than "tips".

The "tip" is less abstract, though, than "inside" and "outside".

Also refreshing is that "intermediate abstractions" do not seem to be part of a discipline. Who studies "tips"? No one particular field would focus on them for their tipness. Needless to point out, though, that there is a trend to think along these lines - Phillips with tickling, the book on miniatures, etc. So I am not alone.

Random Ideas

Really random ideas. Collect them, then put them together later.

The tip as a kind of climax. As in the steeple of a church. Or a cross.

added Feb. 12, 2003
Tips seem to be lacking in the modern and contempoary periods in comparison to the faraway past.

Perhaps tips are old-fashioned or antique. Perhaps there is a conflict beween the present culture and the need to decorate/differentiate what happens at the end of an object. There is not the same elaboration of the tip (or even the use of the tip) in our time or in the era of the modern movement. Modernist furniture and architecture are noted for their boxed off edges. Parellel lines. No decoration. The sides, beginning and end of a shape are all rectangles. And contemporary architecture, furniture, objects seem to be smoothed out, aero-dynamic, aqua-dynamic space age shapes. Even Bilboa which has a more tolerant attitude towards the decorative, (the non-functional) has no tips, is a long flowing shape, nothing making a transition to a point or to an end. Cars are the same. No hood ornaments, no fins, nothing poking our of the grill.

A corvette covered with tips. (added Feb.2004)

The lights on the back of a corvette protrude and taper.

Cars seem to be smoothed out as well, every shape transitioning into another. Except for the boxy milataristic cars - the hummvies and various SUV's that seem to be prepared for battle. Decoration has been replaced by defense. They use a wide variety of shields, gaurds, bumpers, protecting shapes as their form of decoration. (A need to elaborate on the shapes of protection/shields).

An humvee

An humvee decorated with protective gear.

A Range Rover.

Maybe even tv antennas are on the way out with the advent of cable and the internet. I am sure there are examples of the tip in contemporary life but it seems to be used less and when used it refers to a bygone era, a romantic view of the past e.g. perfume bottles.

The contradictory qualities of a tip. A tip is both sensitive, the most sensitive part of the body, the part of the body that finds out about the world and returns information but penetration, poking, slicing are also characteristics of tips.

The knife and the fingers, the penis and the stamen. So the tapered decoration at the end of a tip can be seen as a welcoming of the air around it and a cutting into it. Whereas the box (rectilinear prism) does not seem to have this relation to the space around it. Neither aggressive (probing) nor responsive. Neutral in a way. Even. Regular.

Tips, an area of extra attention. Like windows, doors, altars but not like walls - the long expanse, an undifferentiated plane.

One of the main qualities, characteristics of a tip is tapering. (Need picture of a table leg and of reitveld's chair). The tip is a kind of end. But not all ends are tips.

Tips emanate from limbs.

The trunk or torso is really the opposite of a tip. Even though a tip is the end of something, it's opposite is not the beginning but the middle, the center. Tips are eccentric.

Tips are mostly "outsides" not an inside. Boxes on the other hold, contain, their function is to put something inside of them. Though I think I am wrong here. What about the penis or the bee stinger - something inside waiting to come out.

I was trying to think of another opposite. Thought of the cave. But the "cave" is less of a concept, less abstract, refers to something more specific. On the other end of the spectrum was "void" the abstraction used by sculptors to talk of emptiness, what is not there, holes, negative space, hollows. And going through the list I thought that "hollows" and "holes" are concepts more like "tips" than "cave". Intermediate abstractions.

Intermediate abstractions. This is important. Kind of the idea of this exercise, exploration (if you will). A move away from the almost complete abstraction of "mass, volume, void, surface, shape". The all-inclusive abstractions.

Multiplicity of tips. Bad reproduction of a fragment of a drawing in progress.