Arts & Culture
Heartfelt sympathies
Published 12 February 1999
Design byHugh Aldersey-Williams
Not for the first time in writing this column, I find that Margaret Visser has been here before me. The cultural (and culinary) anthropologist investigates the now universal symbolism of St Valentine's Day in her series of essays The Way We Are. She explains how the familiar red motif was handed down from the renaissance to become the vulgarism it is today.
The organ itself has had symbolic value far longer. In the west, the heart has been the organ associated with emotion, but in some eastern cultures it has more to do with the intellect and intuition. Its pulsation, too, is symbolic of the cyclical universe. All this made the heart important enough to warrant burial separately from the rest of the body in ancient Egypt. The tradition continued in medieval Europe and became the last affectation of romantic poets since.
Though off-centre within the body, the heart represents centricity, a midpoint between the head and the sex. One could dilate on the misplaced meaning of "heart" as centre, and stir in the deconstruction by "science studies" academics of Harvey's "circulation" of the blood to amusing effect; after all, if circulation were really circular and the heart really at the centre, the two could have nothing to do with each other.
But how did the heart arrive at its stylised, and most unrealistic, two-dimensional outline? Theories are many and ancient. In Egyptian hieroglyphics, a vase stood for the heart. The curlicued outline of a lyre offers a Greek explanation. It may simply be a corruption of an inverted triangle, representing the female.
Whatever, the pulsing, visceral thing itself now plays little part in our daily lives. It has been marginalised in the kitchen, not central at all but classed with offal, literally what is allowed to fall off in butchery. At the same time, its shapeless shape has been progressively neatened up in our symbolism. Drawings of the 17th century show the heart shaded as a three-dimensional object, not drawn to anatomists' standards perhaps, but nonetheless displaying the irregularity of the real organ. During the 18th and 19th centuries, in woodcuts and embroidery and finally on commercial Valentine cards, it became flat and symmetric.
This simpler heart shape could be cut into furniture of the period and was kitschily quoted in this century by the Eameses. As function dictated new form so the stylised form came to signify new functions. In Sweden today, the heart symbol is used to denote lavatories for both sexes - a hangover from the days, not so long ago even in modernistic Sweden, when a toilet was a wooden hut whose pine door would have the shape cut from it as a spy-hole and source of light.
But love prevails. Heart shapes feature in the branding of various foods, either healthy or naughty but nice. It is the wishful corporate symbol of a Japanese bank. There is even a key option for a heart symbol on my Macintosh computer which has served me no purpose until now: * [HEART SYMBOL].
The New York designer Milton Glaser was the first to put the * in a sentence: "I*NY". Visser rightly calls the slogan "one of the most ingenious advertising campaigns of recent decades". Its cleverness, for her, is in the warmth and acceptance it instantly signals, disarming the city visitor who trembles before the urban chaos.
This is only part of the story. If this were all it did, the "I*NY" logo would be no better than the other words and pictures companies use to pretend they are lovable and human: RTZ's "Bringing out the best in the world" springs to mind, or BT's senescent but still chirpy piper. It would be of a piece with slogans of other cities, such as Birmingham, which optimistically calls itself "Europe's meeting place".
No. "I*NY" is ingenious above all because it has truth at its centre, core, heart. It is ingenious because it expresses this truth, or rather many complex truths about New York and its people, in an economical and memorable way. There is a further cleverness. Being memorable, the idea is easily imitated. There are knock-offs of the "I*NY" symbol everywhere in the city; pale homage is paid it by businesses and other cities and states: "Virginia * is for lovers", for example, or "I L * Vermont", both official bumper stickers.
This is to some extent deliberate. Whereas great effort goes into ensuring that a corporation's logo is reproduced only by the right people in the right way, Glaser's logo has no copyright protection. The idea was that anybody and everybody in New York City could use it. It was an unpredictable strategy, but more than 20 years on it has yielded huge dividends.
The debit side is that Glaser's design is not replicated with precision on every occasion. The heart shape may not swell in quite the way of the original; the typeface will more than likely not be the one (American Typewriter) that Glaser chose. But in its way the design is doing its job even better because of this, showing as well as everything else that New Yorkers are nobody's conformists.
But there is also richness and invention and undreamed of multicultural diffusion: "J'* Quebec"; "Me * Antigua", "I * Allah". All these variants work unintentionally to recall our memories of New York, effortlessly augmenting the message of many cultures rubbing along together that is such an intrinsic fact of New York life, even as they announce their own loyalties.
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