A Superhorse named American Pharoah

First Published in ‘Le Mauricien’ on 10 June 2015 (Leading Mauritius Daily Newspaper)

‘It is kind of ironic that the two sports with the greatest characters, boxing and horse racing, have both been on the decline. In both cases, it is for the lack of a suitable hero’ – Dick Schaap (Sportswriter and Broadcaster)

Horse lovers in Mauritius and across the world have their favorite equine champions. Some love the stayers which compete the French Arc de Triomphe, or the milers of the St. James Palace Stakes in Britain, or the Melbourne Cup’s list of legends, and of course the classic champions of the Champ de Mars. But for me as a horse-lover, there is a special breed of thoroughbred heroes, who stand as an intangible symbol for equine perfection through their ethereal elegance, their impossible speed tamed with spectacular endurance, and their running amidst history and reaching for immortality. They are the American Triple Crown Winners: horses who have won the arduous marathon of three consecutive races over a daunting five-weeks period. The Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stakes are those races, ran across three different states through a thousand miles journey through May and June every year, while carrying the dream of a whole generation. And sometimes, when the wait is too long for the impatient, some stellar comet appears on the track, a superhorse thundering its hooves like bolts of hope in equine poetry, where the ‘impossible’ rhymes with the ‘possible’.

In 2014, when California Chrome broke millions of dreams by failing to win the last leg of the Triple Crown, a little horse named American Pharoah, with quizzically short tail and a wrongly-spelled name, was making his way through the lower divisions. The horse trained by Bob Baffert is owned by Egyptian-American Ahmed Zayat, who chose to epitomize his own cultural duality of East meeting West in the horse’s name. Despite being forced to end his 2014 campaign in October through a training injury, American Pharoah would still win the Champion two-year old Eclipse Award. His three-year old campaign would resume months later in a fantastic manner in March 2015 with a 6-length victory in the Rebel Stakes and another 8-length win in the Arkansas Derby in April, which was to be his final preparation before the daunting challenge of the Triple Crown.

The sheer clock-work technicalities of traveling, preparation, training and racing for each of the three races which are the 2000 metre-Kentucky Derby, the 1900 metre-Preakness Stakes and the 2400 metre-Belmont Stakes reserved for three-years old justify how in almost 150 years of racing history, only 11 horses have won the Triple Crown before June 2015: Sir Barton (1919), Gallant Fox (1930), Omaha (1935), War Admiral (1937), Whirlaway (1941), Count Fleet (1943), Assault (1946), Citation (1948), Secretariat (1973), Seattle Slew (1977), and Affirmed (1978). Media pundits around the globe have debated, analyzed, and deconstructed why since 1979, the thirteen horses who won the first two legs of the Triple Crown, failed to win the last Belmont Stakes, which is referred as ‘The Test of Champions’. From wild theories of the effects of modified nutritional intake through the decades and genetic conditioning, to the more pragmatic excuses of preferential speed-training over endurance-building for horses, many believed that we would probably never see a Triple Crown Winner, myself included. For me, it was essentially the fresher horses who avoided the Preakness Stakes, and came fresh into the Belmont Stakes who made the task even more non-pragmatic.

On 2 May 2015, the Kentucky Derby, referred as ‘The Most Exciting Two Minutes In Sports’, opened with eighteen horses including quality thoroughbreds such as Materiality, Dortmund, Frosted, Keen Ice and Mubtaahij. Despite being a frontrunner, American Pharoah would be denied leading the race and would win the hard way by charging late into the last furlong, winning by a length over Firing Line. Every year, the Kentucky Derby winner would become the automatic subject of a passionate bid, and American Pharoah was no exception. Over the years, watching horses like I’ll Have Another in 2012 (non-participation in the Belmont Stakes) or California Chrome in 2014 fail to win the Triple Crown, I was very sceptic when two weeks later on 16 May 2015, American Pharoah engaged the Preakness Stakes on the heavy and rainy track of Pimlico. But this time, despite the arduous conditions, the horse jumped to the front, controlled the race nicely by jockey Victor Espinoza, and charged to win with an incredible 7-lengths. With the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes in its saddle, American Pharoah became the fourteenth horse since 1979 to get a chance to win the Triple Crown, with all the previous ones failing of course.

Finally on Saturday 6 June 2015, the last leg of the Triple Crown which is the Belmont Stakes kicked off through the roar of thousands at the Belmont Park in New York. Aiming to deny American Pharoah’s incredible historic bid, five horses who were beaten in the Kentucky Derby and eclipsed the Preakness Stakes, entered the race. Charging badly to the lead, American Pharoah maintained a respectable tempo ahead in the longest race of his career yet, worth 2400 metres long and the weight of his fourth race in eight weeks. Through the backstretch and the first 1800 metres, American Pharoah was constantly under the threat of second-favorite Materiality. As the crowd grew in apprehension and the clamor rose, no other contenders could follow the long powerful strides of a giant in the making. There was a moment before entering the final stretch where history zoomed through everyone’s eyes. Or maybe just mine. As the sky-blue and yellow silks of American Pharoah’s jockey turned into the final 400 metres with a 2-length lead over Frosted, there were momentary souvenirs of past heroes who turned for home and made history. Could he know as it breezed through the final straight that he was writing history himself, immortalizing his name along the tremendous machine Secretariat, or the crushing prowess of War Admiral?

As American Pharoah passed the Belmont finish line victoriously with a 5-length lead, his seventh consecutive victory in a total of eight career races, the deafening clamor shrouded a superhorse whose heroics and beauty will certainly stand the test of time. Seeing a Triple Crown Winner in the making is one of the sport’s most tantalizing moments, one which I never thought I would be able to see or live to savor. And while he will keep charging down the straight of history for immortality in a blaze of glory, American Pharoah has written its name among the constellation of my equine heroes.

The Future of Visual Advertising in Mauritius

First Published in ‘Le Mauricien’ on 29 April 2015 (Leading Mauritius Daily Newspaper)

Beyond Marx’s theory of ‘Commodity Fetishism’, the materialist synergy of exchange, marketing and business in our modern consumerist society has become a truly visual affair. We in Mauritius, however, far from the madding crowd of neo-capitalist societies in Europe, Asia or America, we are not absent invitees at the table of market dynamics involving their fair share of visual advertising. From mainstream diffusers such as press adverts, billboards, posters, flyers, to the digital platform of Facebook or LinkedIn, every marketing media has developed towards a denser form of visual advertising during the last decades in Mauritius.

The upheaval of digitisation in the creative industry with the aid of more powerful software and hardware, has led the advertising strategies to become more elaborate, and to experiment towards the production of more complex and sometimes inaccessible works of higher art. Today through newspapers or billboards, our visual attention is bombarded by layers of retinal complexity through the advertising message. Which leaves the latter  diluted, obscured and sometimes nullified. Bombastic photography and surreal photomontages have become the norm, resulting in posh creativity, lucrative colours and concepts that would have little impact on the busy everyday mind.

The methodology used by creatives and advertising companies is one unfortunately based on a wrong formula, dispensed moreover by design  schools and courses: ‘good advertising is about getting attention’. This simplistic philosophy of cause and effect has been sublimated during the last decades in our local, cultural understanding of what good visual marketing should look and feel like. But as soon as our attention is seized, we are often rewarded with little in terms of genuine content, fulfilment and satisfaction, leaving us with a sense of having been misled. This of course has generated a whole culture of advert bashing and mistrust in the whole advertising industry.

To me as a graphic designer, advertising should deliver more than pure cognizance and fulfilment of our materialistic needs. Advertising should sell ideas, values, a sense of success and attainable quality, in genuine manner.’Many a small thing has been made great, by the right kind of advertising’ wrote Mark Twain. The future of visual advertising locally is definitively at a crossroad. I envision two different pathways with two distinctive outcomes. The causality of each will have distinctive effects on the future of our visual language, aesthetic appreciation and general vision of what good advertising is for our local culture.

The first possibility and the one we are heading towards, is a growing disproportion between advertising and its informational content. As the disparity between what is being communicated in essence and what is being visually advertised becomes larger, it will require a deeper understanding to assess the functional purpose and content, which will become shelled in misunderstanding. The visual enrichment of the adverts will lead towards aesthetic recognition, while the poverty of content will signify a further mistrust towards the purpose of the industry. Slowly the market will become one of pure aesthetics, with little relevance to the product or service being advertised, leading to a general feeling that we are not being sold what we see.

But the second possibility which I hope will be the future of visual advertising in Mauritius, is a deepening sense of philosophy through ethical development and engagement within the industry. We need the people within it, from creative schools’ lecturers to design professionals, to meditate and focus towards a humanist curriculum and understanding of the role of visual communication in an increasingly fast-paced, materialistic modernist society. In a world of increased connectivity where the new digital media through smartphones, applications, media platforms will provide more infographics and digitised information in our everyday life, we need to go beyond the grandiose techniques of Photoshop. Design schools should start dispensing a methodology that will usher on bringing forward a new brand of creative minds, with a genuine social awareness of their role as defining the advertising industry’s design codes. A methodology based on sustainable creativity, dispensation of ethical messages, use of recyclable materials and the building of a visual communication that is democratic in form and understandable at all levels of society.

My personal belief is that genuine visual marketing and advertising is a sublimation and celebration. Not of the product or service being advertised. But of what they bring to our lives to help us fulfill our potential and our dreams. Great advertising at its humane best, will deliver not only materialistic satisfaction, but will truly aid in bettering our quality of life through visual understanding.

A Journey towards Creative Minimalism

First Published in ‘Le Mauricien’ on 28 May 2015 (Leading Mauritius Daily Newspaper)

May 1874, the unfamiliar painting of Le Havre’s harbor by French artist Claude Monet, caused an unparalleled uproar, far beyond the Beaux-Arts, through the Parisian cultural community. ‘Grotesque’ and ‘puerile’ were used to describe the blurry suspension of coarse, unrefined brushstrokes which Louis Leroy, from the newspaper ‘Le Charivari’, sarcastically baptized as ‘Impressionism’. This strikingly mundane painting was ‘Impression, Sunrise’ and yet it furtively signified a new dawn in Art.

The science of Photography was then barely decades old, born through the Daguerreotype in France, and Talbot’s extensive works in England on photographic negatives. As the ‘primitive’ camera slowly challenged to usurp Art from its pinnacle-role of depicting the world, the Impressionist movement aimed to rethink artistic values away from Renaissance’s classicism of iconography and religiosity. Monet, Degas, and Pissarro aspired instead towards the celebration of the modern city life through its transient moments, the busy steam-clad train stations, the afternoon sunshine over the cafés, and the mitigated seasonal tones of the countryside.

But beyond their aesthetic preoccupation, there was an ontological desire to discover the truth masked behind the landscape which ‘does not exist since its appearance changes at every moment’ in Monet’s words. This inquisitiveness, forbearing the existentialist theories in the future writings of Camus and Sartre, would be the start of the metaphysical journey of Art from the ‘outer’ to the ‘inner’. ‘Pointillism’ would follow the Impressionist movement, as Georges Seurat’s pioneering painting technique involving the use of primary colored dots. From close, the painting would mean almost nothing, but receding away, the dots would mix and create the illusion of tonal harmony in the eye of the viewer, thus furthering the idea of a persistently subjective reality. ‘Pointillism’ was also the technical fore-bearer of the pixels to come, much later.

From 1900 until the world wars, ‘Expressionism’ through Kandinsky, ‘Dadaism’ through Max Ernst, ‘Surrealism’ through Dali and ‘Cubism’ through Picasso, would all emerge in an artistic Big Bang whose perspective converged towards minimalism, abstraction and expression of the inner self. Impressed by the prevailing Freudian and Jungian theories, or shocked by the realities of the global conflicts, some artists incontrovertibly turned towards the subjective landscape of the unconscious mind, or to the illusory theories of Socialism. Through artists like Rodchenko or architects like Van Der Rohe, the Constructivist movement in  Russia, or the German Bauhaus movement would further advocate the use of art, design or architecture, for social communication and the enhancement of the lifestyle of people.

New methods of mass printing and the outburst of globalized communication following the Second World War, would further metamorphose artistic aspirations. Similar to how Guthenberg’s printing press and Photography forced Art into new frontiers of existential questioning, the development of the Turing Machine during the war, culminated towards the invention of the microprocessor, and consequently to the first computers. The computer revolution would take Art to a new step on the evolutionary ladder. It brought the demise of reactionary art movements and the birth of capitalistic agency-art through modern graphic design, meant for mass-consumption. Leaving their brushes, artists become graphic designers, or digital artists. History will remember that it was a classic calligraphy class attended by the young Steve Jobs in 1973, which would instill the first seeds of digital typography in the first Macintosh computers produced in 1981. The Apple computers would lay the foundation for specialized creative software to develop and enhance the old traditional methodology of Art, Communication and Design.

Today, with the advancement of the internet, digital electronics and the miniaturization of processing hardware towards more powerful entities, visual techniques have entered new territories. Smartphones or tablets screens have pioneered a whole industry of web interfaces, creating a new style of minimalist, iconic art. The new generation of touch-screen hardware with more advanced screen-reality, promises a more intimate relationship between designers and their works of art. Leaving the mouse or keyboard, designers create with the tip of their fingers, in a beautiful rhythm of digitized poetry.

But what is the philosophy behind this persistent development of creative expression and design through the centuries? And where are we heading now? From the cave paintings of Lascaux in France 17,000 years ago, to the hypnotic glare of computers, our creativity has spanned millennia, as we search for our place in the Universe, albeit in the artistic and philosophical sense. In some 20 years, Visual Design would have taken digital interfaces to a new level of ergonomic experience. Smartphones would become wrist-gadgets displaying holographic information with hand gestures. Smart glasses shall become the norm and offer instant visual data from any object of our visual interest, while tablets would become only a little thicker than paper. This would signify another step for artistic design in its journey towards Minimalism. From there, we cannot objectively fathom what the future of Art will be like, just like Claude Monet would never have grasped how digital galleries across the world would one day display his ‘Impression, Sunrise’ online.