Tips (the ends of things)

Tip of the Tongue vs. the Mountain Peak

2005-11-17T14:28:31Z

The phrase "on the tip of my tongue" tells us where tips are and differentiates "tips" from other endings. A word or name "on the tip of the tongue" is just out of reach, so close you taste it but not close enough to possess it fully. (Is this a clue to the underlying "feeling" of a tip - you can have them but not possess them?)

]]> We do not call the top of a mountain, "the tip" (though we have been known to call it the "tippy top"), instead we call it "the summit" or "the peak". Both "peak" and "summit" suggest drawm. In everyday speech they describe the unusual, the intense, the superior or the extraordinary - a summit meeting, a saxophone summit, a peak experience, "at the peak of his/her performance", etc. These phrases refer to the top and use the spectrum of top and bottom metaphorically as evaluation. The top is the best and the bottom is the worst. As with most forms of evaluation, "peak" and "summit" feel definite. To ascend a mountain peak is to be there, whereas to ascend its tip is to be somewhere more precarious, like the angels struggling to stay balanced at the end of their pin. The missing word is "the tip of the tongue" is equally precarious, neither here nor there, like the tapering steeple hovering between its solid form and the "nothingness" of the air around it.

Introduction (Draft 2)

2005-11-11T15:34:05Z

(Rewritten Feb 20, Mar 3, 2004)
I want you to think about tips. I want to you look at tips, notice their abundance and their variety and their ubiquity. The crocket at the top of a building, a dragon's tail and tongue, the pointed _________ of a seed pod, the taper of a decorative scroll and the sharp point of a canine tooth are all tips. If I were to ask you to point to the tip of each item in this diverse collection you could easily point to the tip, but more difficult is to define the word "tip". What comes to mind most readily is that a tip is the end of an object. This is clear enough, until scrutinised. Where exactly does an object end? If you begin to think about it, an object ends everywhere its surface meets the space around it. Why, then, does a tip feel like the end of an object? Not an easy question to answer, nor perhaps one this is frutifully pursued. For the time being let us simply agree that some areas of an object feel more like the end than other areas.

]]> But many other areas of an object could also be considered its end. For instance the edge where two planes meet has been fertile ground for discovery for abstract sculptors of the 20th century and could be where an object ends. The skin, as well, could be said to be the location where an object (a being) ends and everything else begins. Though we are predisposed to call some areas of an object the end more than others. Some might say that our bodies begin at our feet and end at out heads, while others might say that our bodies end at our feet, but few will say that it ends at our elbows, or cheek. As you can see, once you start to talk about "beginning" and "end", abstractly, in reference to an object, what was once obvious becomes topsy turvy. While a philospher might linger here to discuss the meanings of "beginning" and "end", let us yield to connotation and usage to accept our first impression of a tip and where it is, at the end of an object.

Introduction

2004-03-20T19:05:00Z

(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".

Knives

2004-03-17T13:28:59Z

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Animated Vessels 1 - Soakies

2004-03-07T18:52:04Z

Instead of a bulging tip there is a head. These plastic shampoo and bubble bath bottles for children are part of a long tradition of "animated vessels" (more of these later). The term of art for character bottles is "soakies". One soaky, many soakies.

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Antoinette

2004-03-05T14:57:42Z

In a rare exception to the rule that contemporary objects shun tips, some font designers have brought back the serif, the flourish, the arabesque, as in this instance to a pleasing excess.

]]> This font is called Antoinette and was created by Lee Schulz.

It can be found in Alphabook - typeface design and application
General Editor - Roger Walton
Hearst Books, NY, NY 1999
ISBN 0-688-16851-5

See it on amazon.com

Embarassing Tips

2004-03-05T13:56:20Z

Some tips must be hidden. Knives and swords are sheathed. It is impolite to point the finger, to expose the tip fo the finger. Rules govern which tips are exposed and which are not.

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

Are only the powerful, dangerous tips that are 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

2004-03-02T17:00:00Z

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?

Modern Objects

2004-02-29T14:16:10Z

A modern coathook is a rare example of modern/contempary design utilizing tips. An almost humorous, comic-like version of a bulging tip.

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Toys

2004-02-28T13:56:15Z

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A Baby's Toes

2004-02-26T12:51:32Z

The tips of these toes seem more passive than other tips... not yet ready to grab the floor for balance and movement.

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Intermediate abstractions.

2004-02-25T16:49:34Z

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.

Finial, Luxemborg Gardens, Paris

2004-02-22T15:52:06Z

Is this shape called a "finial" or is it called something else when it a sculpture on its own? What a strange thing... to isolate a decorative element and make it an autonomous object.

Candelabra, Vases and more

2004-02-22T15:47:00Z

A Design for a Candelabrum, by Micelangelo Buonarroti, c. 1535

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Finials Queens New York May 2002

2004-02-21T18:06:50Z

Finials from some homes in Queens, New York, taken on a walk in May of 2002.

Looking at these finials, one after another, makes me wonder "Why do we do this? What happens at the end of things that makes us want to decorate them, elaborate on them/with them?" It is as if something different MUST happen when a shape reaches it top. This does seem to happen more at the top than at the bottom of things. But it is mostly a feeling of astonishment at the fact of their invention and the need to invent "out on a limb".

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One way to look at these tips, finials, is to look at their function. As a product of function. These are at the end of stairs or fences. Newel posts. They are on top of the posts that support the structure - stairs or fence, in this instance. On the stairs they mark street level and mark the entrance, so they serve as an announcement "Here is my house. Enter and welcome." or as a warning "This is where my property begins, right here. I want to make sure that you notice." But the post is needed structurally and the top of it needs to be smooth. It holds the stairs stable and it must be fitting for a hand to rest. Smooth. Imagine if it were "raw", just brick or cut-off metal, the cuts and bruises that would occur from contact. An aside -- There is something about the tip that is always not "raw"... it is a way of finishing, finishing off. -- So the finial hides the rough work at the top of the newel post. When using brick the sides are built with to be seen but the top does not resolve, so something must be done, something different. The finial is on top of the part that is strong and upright and necessary as opposed to the diagonal of the riser (?). [obviously needs to be rewritten. added 2004-21-02]