Today, we're meeting with illustrator and artist
Christoph Niemann whose work has graced
the cover of many a "New Yorker" magazine,
the front page of Google, and can be found regularly
in the "New York Times Magazine."
With text and image, Christoph has chronicled the World Cup,
the Venice Biennale, the New York City Marathon,
as well as his love/hate relationship with gummy bears.
He's the author of several books and created a most excellent
app called Petting Zoo.
Christoph has the remarkable ability
to find the emotive and expressive potential
in the most every day bits of the world around us.
His work is an absolute pleasure to behold
and contains equal parts humor and depth.
Christoph spends most of his time in Berlin,
but we've caught him at his studio in Brooklyn,
so let's go meet him and see what kind of assignment
he has for us.
My name's Christoph Niemann and this is your art assignment.
The first thing you draw when you're a kid, you draw people.
It's the most fascinating thing.
There's nothing greater than a face with emotion.
You can do something smiling or weeping, and this is great
and it's the most direct way I think to communicate emotions.
But I realized after a time that it's also limiting,
because the moment you show a face, I'm so drawn to that face
that I actually don't look at anything else.
So I realized there's a beauty in doing inanimate objects.
Because they're not like a girl or a boy,
and they are young and old.
They're just like a thing.
They're just boring, that's completely devoid of emotions.
And then you can start putting things in context.
You can have something small versus something big.
You can have something far away to something close.
And if this is only a building or a car
or a leaf or a piece of fruit, then all of a sudden
you can create tension in a very pure way.
I think in a way that you could never really
achieve with people.
Because the moment you have a person in there
you think is he beautiful, is she smart?
There's all these things are starting to blur this picture.
So I think inanimate objects are great because they're so pure
and they give you the chance to use them as actors
and put them into context and tell very precise
and I think really beautiful stories.
I started working much more with photography
recently because it's a fascinating medium.
You can also often do things that are more objective.
The moment I draw a chair, it's my chair.
It has my handwriting.
The moment I photograph a chair it feels
more like it's from real life.
Drawing always exaggerates or simplifies.
And sometimes a photo of a chair just gives you
a lot of background meaning to ease you into a story.
So the assignment is called emotional furniture.
And you have to do three photos, and each of the photos
should convey one emotion.
The first one envy, the second one melancholy,
and the third one confidence.
And the elements that should convey that emotion
should be pieces of furniture, and you should arrange them
in your shot only through composition, not
through altering.
If I as a viewer look at these things, and go,
oh, this is envy.
This is all about confidence.
And oh my god, this is so melancholy.
I can't even believe it.
That's your assignment.
Christoph's assignment for me really
emphasizes the absolute tyranny of the human figure in art.
Pretty much if there's any sort of face,
or figure, or creature with eyes in a picture,
you are sucked immediately into it, unable to escape,
to notice anything else that's in the picture.
So I like that no people are allowed in the photos,
and you shouldn't add faces to your furniture
either to give them an emotion.
This challenge is showing us the expressive potential
of the inanimate, and this is something
we see all the time in art.
A still life can very much impart a mood or an emotion
despite containing no people as can scenes of interiors.
Christoph and I talked about a variety
of paintings that show this like this lovely interior
by Adolf Menzel or van Gogh's super famous "Bedroom in Arles"
painting.
Or a number of Matisse's paintings
like "The Window" from 1916.
Or even Roy Lichtenstein's "Step-on Can with Leg"
which come to think of it doesn't even need the leg to be
interesting to me.
And that makes me wonder what other paintings are lurking
around out there with superfluous figures distracting
us from perfectly adequate settings and backgrounds.
Let's take the well-known 1942 painting "Nighthawks"
by Edward Hopper.
Hopper was an absolute master at creating a mood
and is talked about as capturing the ethos of wartime
and postwar American culture.
Your attention probably goes right to the figures,
but what about those fantastic other items?
Look at the attention paid to the coffee urns, the salt
and pepper shakers, the cash register
in the shop across the street.
I would argue that the emotion of this scene
would be just as strong without the figures,
letting the setting, the furniture, the lighting,
and the perspective communicate the emotions of loneliness,
distance, and numbness.
There are figures in a lot of Hopper's works like this one
from a couple years earlier.
You definitely want to figure out
what's going on between these two,
but for me, the impact of this picture
is in the artificial lighting, the somewhat
awkward arrangement of furniture,
and angled viewpoint.
With this painting and "Nighthawks,"
there's something distinctly human-like
about the furniture and something
furniture-like about humans.
They are all props for the artist's arrangement,
coalescing into place and creating
strongly evocative scenes.
The great thing with furniture is that they ultimately
have so much to do with us.
Not only are they an object of daily life, but they have legs.
There's something human about them, but on the other hand,
they are so abstract.
I think for this assignment there should be no altering,
there should be no painting, no signs, no type.
And really the idea is to work with the object as one
and as a tool instead of paint and type, use scale, use
arrangement, composition.
How far do I put something?
Maybe tilting something, leaning a chair against something,
putting a chair upside down.
That's totally fine, but it should be done without props.
It should really, every scene, even if it's arranged,
should be possible in real life.
It should have something of you walk into a room
and see this arrangement, and then you
call it like envy or happiness and then all a sudden, now it
makes sense.
It's like drama played out with furniture.
I work here, I sleep here, and I work here, and I make coffee.
So it's like the essentials of life happen right here.
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