
What makes us satisfied as individuals compared to what makes us satisfied in professional groups or communities of interest, that is, when are we satisfied in the membership of mankind or membership of the entire living community on the planet? What is one pleased to do and how is one pleased to take part? What are the priorities of personal and what of collective pleasure and do we have them within our reach, or do we have to create them?
Boris Greiner:
If we start from the fact that professional priorities are usually already set, that a paper is already on our desk in the morning, and that they do not necessarily have anything to do with pleasure, although eliminating them from the list makes us satisfied, I suppose that pleasure mainly comes from doing what is not on the list. Meaning that the priorities of personal or collective pleasure are difficult to name, let alone categorize. If we exclude common prerequisites, health, money, meteorology and good shoes, the range of possibilities or recipes for achieving pleasure is completely open, from a high school graduation trip to an armchair and a book.
Zooming in on the topic of creative activities, there are different paths to achieving pleasure. Some people, for example, claim that holding back charges creative batteries; the less one indulges in pleasure, the more one can achieve. By contrast, others say that everything should be experienced, jumping into the whirlpool regardless of the consequences. Still others suggest a compilation of existing in surrender and renunciation. Balancing on the edge as long as possible, they say, setting the measure as a platform for pleasure.
Wandering on this scale is also a common phenomenon. As is for groups to recruit members from all categories of achieving satisfaction. The clash of their completely opposite approaches is problematic in the process: while one starves, another one eats and drinks, and yet another one, hungry, drinks slowly. However, it is effective at the result level: the product has been surrounded, considered from three different angles, has no way out, all the holes have been plugged, all the shortcomings recognized.
Standing before their joint achievement in which they incorporated their Sparta, their Rome and their Greenwich, members of the group are forced to forget personal preferences and feel joint satisfaction.
And if, over time, they realize that the process matters more to them than the result, the group will disband.
Zooming in even more on the topic, we come to the area of our interest. The designer is satisfied when they solve the task by incorporating a part of themselves into it, identifying with it, so the result is familiar to them, one might say, it is in their image and likeness. Moreover, both the topic and the designer’s relationship with it are presented, and the key message of the content is expressed in characteristic handwriting. A double benefit: paid work and a new argument of their body of work, ready to take its place in the parable of the gallery. The complete satisfaction might, however, be diminished by an ethical issue: what if the content is ideologically or qualitatively problematic? (Let us put aside the question of how they managed to identify with their idea.) In the first case, the designer deceived people in an extraordinary way – should the designer be applauded for their own performance or booed for their participation? In the second case, the designer sided with a bad product as its author – will an actor be completely satisfied after playing an excellent role in a bad play?
Therefore, being very sensitive to cracks in satisfaction, the designer chooses their own clients. The designer will feel additional satisfaction when, based on unequivocally shown commitment, clients choose them. The designer’s complete satisfaction could only be spoiled by a questionable number of such clients.
Returning to the general level, as regards the second part of the question – do we have it within our reach? – we could say that collective satisfaction is both within and not within our reach because it depends on the satisfaction of each individual, and in this sense each individual is being tested like never before: to incorporate personal satisfaction into the collective one.
Assuming that the achievement of something is the reason for satisfaction, which implies that one should be doing something, it is logical not to set goals that are too big. And if an individual wants to have more shares in the total of collective satisfaction, the stake must be higher. The problem most often arises from imbalance – wanting to gain as much satisfaction as possible, the individual sets goals they cannot achieve, which makes them doubly dissatisfied: there is no satisfaction from achievement, and consequently, there is no share in the principal.
Therefore, as a consolation to those who find themselves in limbo in question, I would like to say that we are almost all there, and in terms of a recipe that might, like a rope thrown from above, pull us out of this abyss, I would like to propose a quote by José Ortega y Gasset from Meditations on Quixote.
“There are men who might reach complete self-fulfillment in a secondary position, but whose eagerness to occupy the forefront destroys all their worth. A contemporaty novel presents a certain boy, not very intelligent but endowed with an exquisite moral sensibility, who consoles himself for being the last in his class by thinking: “After all, someone has to be the last!”
This is a good remark, good enough to guide us. There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.”
Boris Greiner
Boris Greiner was born in 1959 in Zagreb. His authorship began in 1983. Together with Stanislav Habjan, he realized a number of projects in various media (graphic materials, prose, performances, exhibitions, actions and experimental films) within the twenty-year conceptual project Greiner&Kropilak Mailart Office. Since 1992, he has been working with S. Habjan and Danijel Žeželj within the artistic group Slipa Konfidenca. In 2001, together with S. Habjan, D. Žeželj and Boris Cvjetanović, he founded the art organization Petikat. In 2003, the 20-year author’s project Greiner&Kropilak Mailart Office ended and since then he has mostly been working independently. Since 2005, he has been publishing reviews of events on the contemporary art scene in various public media, and in the book series of collected texts “Conquered Areas”. From 2010 to 2013, he worked as the commissioner for experimental film at HAVC. He works professionally as a graphic designer.
https://osvojenapodrucja.petikat.com/