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In a video set up by James Joyce, a yellow circle rotates as two black ovals and a curved line tumble on the backside, thwarted by gravity. Watching the video, Perseverance within the Face of Absurdity, which was projected at Banksy’s pop-up dystopian theme park, Dismaland in 2015, one can mentally reassemble the three shapes into their acquainted formation: two eyes and a swooping smile.
It’s a testomony to the image that it may be deconstructed to such a level and but nonetheless be instantly recognizable. There is little question that it’s a smiley face, although it appears to be like something however comfortable.
The yellow smiley icon was born in 1963 in Worcester, Massachusetts, when the graphic designer Harvey Ball was approached by State Mutual Life Assurance Company to create a morale booster for workers. As the story goes, it solely took ten minutes for Ball to create an icon that might knit itself so firmly within the material of American tradition that we’d be compelled to file lawsuits and ponder it for many years to come back. He was paid a whopping $45 for his work.
For such an enduring picture, the logic behind it’s nearly laughably easy. Ball is usually quoted as saying to the Associated Press, “I made a circle with a smile for a mouth on yellow paper, because it was sunshiny and bright.”
The firm produced hundreds of buttons and indicators, setting the stage for Hallmark reps Bernard and Murray Spain to swoop in within the early Nineteen Seventies and copyright the design with the slogan “Have a Happy Day.” Just one 12 months later, the French journalist Franklin Loufrani launched the Smiley Company, which grew into a worldwide licensing large.
At its core, the smiley is like another image – a visible that has been assigned a particular which means.
Why have these symbols in any respect? Marcel Danesi, an anthropology and semiotics professor on the University of Toronto, stated that symbols are like “little capsules [that] tell us what things are about – in our own terms.” Not in contrast to language, they “form a kind of rhetorical system that undergirds a whole society. We live by symbols.”
The stability of this method is up for debate; symbols usually exhibit the pliable high quality of Play-Doh. On its face, the smiley is straightforward and feelgood, straightforward to be taught and reproduce.
In the correct context, it elicits that giddy childhood rush – the morale enhance that impressed the picture from the beginning. But stretched this fashion or that, the icon shortly turns into surreal. As Jon Savage penned for The Guardian in 2009, the smiley “presented such a fixed facade of childlike contentment that it was ripe for subversion.”
Over the years, the icon has been reimagined by bands like Nirvana and the Talking Heads, and it flourished within the rave tradition of the ’80s and ‘90s, imprinted on ecstasy pills and flyers for acid house DJs. Teen Vogue recently reported that “the playful symbol seems to be making a resurgence” in fashion, including on Marc Jacobs runways and in Justin Bieber’s line, Drew House.
The smiley has held a uncommon twin place as a countercultural icon and a paragon of American consumerism. The Smiley Company, which introduced in $419.9 million in 2017, claims that the smiley is greater than an icon, it’s “a spirit and a philosophy.” Though the corporate is world, this explicit phrase strikes a really American chord. It presents an nearly cult-like obsession with happiness – and what we are able to purchase to attain it.
When the icon seems in artwork, its which means is usually twisted or exaggerated. Nate Lowman has created childlike renderings of smileys, overlapped and coloured outdoors the strains. Lowman, based on a 2012 New York Times profile by Jacob Bernstein, is “somewhat obsessed” with the face, “seeing in it a kind of collective mask – what he calls an ‘anxious hysteria to appear happy.’”
Various takes on the smiley have additionally appeared in Jacqueline Humphries’s emoticon-inspired items, together with “:) 🙂 🙂 🙂 (2016)”; Wesley Martin Berg’s darkly comedic “Medicate”; Banksy’s “Grin Reaper” (2005) and “Flying Copper” (2004); and Katsu’s “Facial Recognition Just Released from Jail” (2015), amongst others. The DJ and producer Fatboy Slim, who confirmed his spectacular catalog of smiley ephemera within the latest exhibition, Smile High Club, has stated he sees it as a logo of “happiness, goofiness, stupidity and unconditional life.”
It’s arduous to speak in regards to the smiley face with out broaching the topic of emojis, which we sprinkle into every little thing from Instagram posts to work emails. The smiley is not a standalone icon, however a single character in a visible on-line language.
Meet the inventor of the emoji
Though the invention of emoticons is often credited to Shigetaka Kurita of the Japanese telecom firm NTT Docomo, the first set of yellow smilies bear an simple relation to Ball’s authentic design. As extra communication occurs on-line, the smiley takes on a extra nuanced vary of feelings. It could be a stand-in for real happiness, or a balm for phrases which may in any other case sound harsh. The rise of emoticons has prompted a slew of research and essays in regards to the evolution of language on-line.
Given its uncurtailed proliferation, will the smiley ever lose its worth as a signifier? If it will probably imply every little thing, then, certainly, it will imply nothing. Danesi, nonetheless, appeared unconcerned by this existential risk to the comfortable image. The extra which means we apply to it, he instructed, the extra endurance it will have – even when we don’t all the time know what to make of it. Or, even easier: The smiley will persist as a result of it’s cute.
Maybe, Danesi stated with fun, he’ll go discover a smiley t-shirt to put on himself, “so that I can bring sunshine into people’s lives.” Ironic or not, that could be purpose sufficient to smile.