Camberwell Illustration

Luke on crane.tv

2012-01-20T08:42:00.000-08:00

Crane.tv paid Luke a studio visit recently. Interesting thoughts on his working roots and balance. And a little tribute to all of you towards the end.

David Hockney's Bigger Picture

2012-01-03T14:24:00.000-08:00

David Hockney interview from Royal Academy of Arts on Vimeo.

David Hockney's major new exibition opens at the Royal Academy on January 21st. He is an artist who works within the Renaissance tradition of depiction, with those central concerns of nature, space and time, and, as in this forthcoming show, the tradition of the landscape. But he is also an artist who has embraced new technology; photography, fax, and now the iPad. I have always admired him - his draftsmanship, his thoughtfulness, and even his humour.

Last week (26 Dec 2011) BBC Radio 4 devoted a Start the Week programme to Hockney, discussing his latest work. The in-depth interview by Andrew Marr was both revealing and fascinating. He spoke about drawing, about observation of nature, the benefit and the excitement of seeing consecutive springtimes at the same place over a number of years. It showed the depth of his engagement with his subject.

He had a lot to say about technology, and it is apparent that the use of computer technology has become integrated into his process of picture making, even when the result is painting. David Hockney has always been interested in technology, not for its own sake, but in furthering his picture making.

The camera is one example of his embracing of technology and investigation of picture making. 'Photography is not a final reaching of reality. Technology is opening something up, we are able to alter pictures.' He also noted that 'Cameras give you a certain type of view, but it’s not the human view.'

David Hockney (1983). Walking In The Zen Garden, Ryoanji Temple, Kyoto 1983
photographic collage, 40 x 62 1/2 in. http://www.hockneypictures.com/photos/photos_collages_06.php

The photomontageworks he has produced over many years (see the example above) are, hesaid, a type of drawing with the camera. (Hockney is perhaps unusual inappreciating that we have not yet exhausted cubism any more than wehave exhausted Renaissance perspective).

David Hockney (2011) The arrival of spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011
ipad drawing printed on paper
144.4 x 108.3 cm

© David Hockney
http://wwwimg.bbc.co.uk/programmes/i/512xn/f11b28a2e586a3017ad932e490ddc80eb46f1fc5.jpg

His latest work uses the iPad, both as a part of the process and as an end in itself - 'the luminous screen' - and the RA exhibition will feature some of his iPad drawings (see above). He is also showing film of this English landscape shot with an array of 18 cameras.

For me Hockney's approach encapsulates the paradoxical relationship with the world which we can now enjoy (and I do mean enjoy) - he embraces the latest technology whilst, at the same time, acknowledging the importance of craft and of 'the hand'. He cited a Chinese saying: 'In drawing you need the hand, the eye and the heart. Two won’t do!'. And he spoke about the importance of craft in the work of the artist. 'I would say the hand counts, there’s a whole group of other people who say it doesn’t, it’s a little bit insulting to craftsmen isn’t it?' And this aspect of craft has an importance for pedagogy, he maintained:

'I used to point out, in an art school, you can teach the craft. It’s the poetry you can’t teach, but now they try and teach the poetry and forget the craft. It’s craft that can be taught.'

Food for thought... perhaps, to some extent, one can teach, or at least encourage and facilitate, the poetry (not forgetting of course that there is also a 'craft' to poetry). But Hockney poses here the interesting question of just where that balance lies between the poetry and the craft in the teaching of art.

He related a story about his Mother coming to his exhibition at which there was a sculptural piece by Barry Flannagan whichcontained a large rope. 'Did he make the rope?' his Mother asked...

Bibliography
Start the week: David Hockney Special (2011). BBC Radio 4. Monday 26 December. 45 minutes. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b018g2yz (Accessed 4 Jan 2012)
Royal Academy of Arts (2011). David Hockney RA: a bigger picture. Interview. Royal Academy of Arts Video online. http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/hockney/ (Accessed 4 Jan 2012)

Links & information

You can listen to the BBC interview with David Hockney at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b018g2yz
David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture can be seen at the Royal Academy from 21 January to 9 April 2012. Advance booking is recommended. http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/hockney/
http://www.hockneypictures.com/home.php
See also Peter Nencini's reflections on the handmade and the digital in this earlier post on Camberwell Illustration

Further publications
Wroe, N (2012) David Hockney: a life in art. The Guardian (Review), Jan 14, <Available online at> http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/jan/13/david-hockney-life-in-art (Accessed 14 Jan 2012)

'The iPad is like an endless piece of paper that perfectly fitted the feeling I had that painting should be big'says Hockney in this Guardian interview.

Postmodernism

2011-11-30T13:37:00.000-08:00

Postmodernism: style and subversion. 1970-1990

(Victoria and Albert Museum, to 15 January 2012)

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.
We march backwards into the future.
(McLuhan and Fiore 1996: 75)

It is difficult, as Marshall McLuhan observed, to understand the times we are living in. And perhaps it is only now that we have some chance of really understanding, in retrospect, the phenomenon that became known as ‘Postmodernism.’

The exhibition Postmodernism: style and subversion. 1970-1990
(Victoria and Albert Museum, to 15 January 2012), attempts to lend some coherence to the subject of postmodernism, by presenting a broad survey of design and art from these two decades (and a little before). In this it is broadly successful, and the curators, Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt, deserve credit, I believe for a largely coherent treatment of postmodernism through selection and exhibition of a wide range of works from architecture, art and design.

The exhibition does of course have some of the disadvantages of a survey, a widely cast net and consequent lack of depth in any one discipline, along with a sense of works being highly filtered and selected, which a focus on a more narrow field could have avoided. But it also has the merits of a survey – a broad and inclusive treatment, and a certain didactic clarity. And there is still a focus, appropriate to the V&A, which is, of course, design.

There are, as the curators explain in the catalogue essay, exceptions – notably for me, the literary, since one might argue that postmodernism sprang at least as much from literature as from architecture.

There is also an odd paradox, the careful arrangement of the exhibition, more or less, into disciplines – e.g. architecture, graphic design, furniture (though with thematic connections that also cross the disciplines). And a greater paradox of the seeming use of chronology – a paradox because the synchronic, and a notion of the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama) was a feature of the postmodern. History is back now. And probably modernism too – architecture has long spoken of the ‘neo-modern’ and Bourriaud has coined the term ‘Alter-modern’ for our present times. Perhaps the modern never really went away – except that today’s modernism can not be like that of the 1960s...

Ettore Sottsass (1969). Teapot

Ettore Sottsass’s (1972) Basilico Teapot Prototype, in painted wood, encountered in the first room of the exhibition, seemed to set the tone well (the above image is an earlier version). A playful application of architectural form to a domestic object – light hearted and yet, oddly alien. Ironic, and quoting history with little sense of any weight of that history – a basilica turned teapot.

Venturi R (1964) Vanna Venturi House

Robert Venturi’s (1959-1964) Model of Vanna Venturi House also gave insight into the origins of the postmodern. Not far off the modern at all, and yet, it had subverted the archetypal house by absurd shifts of scale and distortions of conventional form. And a slightly surprising arc, decorating the facade, interrupted the otherwise linear forms – the arc itself broken by a jarring interruption of the facade that penetrated the interior space. (Venturi’s book Learning from Las Vagas is very illuminating about postmodern architecture).

Brodsky and Utkin (1989) Columbarium Habitabile. Etching http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ksqvya72to1qzz5i6o1_500.jpg 

Other pieces that caught my eye included Paolini’s Arte Povera work L’altra figura (1984) and the fantasy architecture of Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin with their Soviet era etching Columbarium habitabile (1989) – a ‘reservation for old houses and their inhabitants in a large modern city.’

Aside from seeing new works (and the show had an exciting global scope) I was struck by a number of themes. Firstly the impact of architecture – that often escaped architecture itself – (Pieter de Bruyne’s (1975) Chantilly Chest, and other furniture and domestic objects had strongly architectural feel). A second theme that came over well was bricolage – the idea of working with ‘oddments left over from human endeavours’ (Levi Strauss - exhibition notes). And, thirdly, a comment by my colleague Mary Kuper, who noted that postmodernism seemed to be marked by an almost complete separation of form and function (in contrast of course to the marriage of form and function in the modern). This is somehow where the question of style comes in. Bricolage – a cobbling together of diverse elements – became an often jarring aesthetic choice in itself. But the separation of form and function, and the eclectic quoting from the past, without worrying too deeply about historic significance, lent itself to a playful approach to style, and the playing on style, seemingly for its own sake, that at times amounted to enthusiastic and guilt-free stylisation. Style is a complex question, and one to which we will return in future...

Postmodernism is a rewarding and often surprising exhibition.

Bibliography
McLuhan M. & Fiore Q.(1996) The medium is the massage. London: Penguin
Venturi R. (1977). Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge MA: MIT  Press

Postmortemism

2011-11-14T09:54:00.000-08:00

A few weeks now since visiting Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990 at V&A. It did feel timely. A tough one to curate but something happened enough to make it resonate for weeks after. At the age and stage now to be presented with a lived-through history, which makes one much more aware of the edit and framework. In terms of the greedy eye — the elements which impact and feed concurrent working concerns — a film of Kazuo Ono, performing La Argentina, stopped my heart for a moment. Horrifying and beautiful in micrometrically equal measure (the c.1600s pre-perjorative meaning of the word 'grotesque' was fanciful, or fantastic). Rare to see an original form that shocks. This, attributed to Ono, sums it:

"There are an infinity of ways in which you can move from that spot over there to here. But have you figured out those movements in your head, or are we seeing your soul in motion? Even that fleck at the tip of your nail embodies your soul... the essential thing is that your movements, even when you're standing still, embody your soul at all times."

This 'embodiment' does remind me of the acute, needle-sensibility of Matthias Grünewald's The Crucifixion (1515) (via).

And the artificial limbs at the Wellcome Collection's permanentMedicine Man displays.

Tatsumi Hijikata, it seems, was the founder of the dance-form Butoh; but somehow in parallel, they took the form forward, albeit with divided concerns. Hijikata's work was more violently trangressive in its themes and spectacle, borne of a post-war, 1968-catalysed rejection of an undue, superficial imitation of Noh and of the West; towards a subversive, truly Japanese form.

The first corner turned in the show featured two long-held-heroes; Ettore Sottsass and Tadanori Yokoo. This poster (via), from 1965. Learning from Las Vegas — as a documentation of the strip, rather than the later book — began in 1968. A group of the earliest works in the show are from this year too. Interesting to think of the student/worker protests as a cultural catalyst for Po-Mo.

Das Scweizer Plakat (1984) by Wolfgang Weingart, via MoMA.

And Kunsthalle Basel Kunstkredit (1976-77), also by Weingart; alsovia. A nice conversation was had, in front of Yokoo's and Weingart's posters. The Weingart characteristic is so much a product of its technical time; the make and then break with the Swiss typography amplified by the dot-screen photosetting of layers. Intrinsically planographic. But also the fragmentation is making evident the gridded alignments it breaks, so it's a respectful eruption.

Adhocist Chair (1968) by Nathan Silver, via. The perfect incarnation of Charles Jencks' "using an available system". Furniture, architecture and ceramics to discuss from this show; perhaps in another post.

Adrien Gary Lucca, colour mixing and separation

2011-10-30T08:15:00.001-07:00

Regarding the upcoming project, on reprographic process. "Adrien Gary Lucca is currently researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands. He creates large-scale paint drawings which confront mathematics, geometry, forms and colours. For the colour studies, he has developed a personal colour mixing methodology inspired by the 19^th-century research of Georges Seurat. The second series of works may seem like grey charts, or scales of brightness. Black paint lines are carefully quantified inside bi-dimensional forms (circles or squares); the contrast between the white colour of the paper and the black paint varies from a minimum to a maximum point. These studies are models for future large-format wall drawings that will interact with the lighting like custom in-situ filters." Quoted from — and via — We Find Wildness.

Where Blake saw angels - replanting the Angel Oak on Peckham Rye

2011-09-18T15:18:00.000-07:00

Adriana, reciting poetry on Peckham Rye (photo: (c) Scott Johnson 2011)

Thanks to Scott Johnson, for this post recounting today's Blake Society event:

In 1765 an eight-year-old William Blake saw his first vision; 'A tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.' He saw this on Peckham Rye.

Today I went to the Rye to join the Blake Society and artist John Hartley in the planting of a young oak tree somewhere near that spot where William Blake first saw his angels.The event began at noon with a lady called Adriana who - in eighteenth century costume - recited poetry; mostly about angels; at a string of locations around Peckham Rye Park.

This was followed by a performance and video screening by Matt Sexton. We gathered round an oak tree in the park; and a video played from his laptop which lay on the floor, covered in oak leaves. At the same time, he walked through the crowd with a hand-held projector, projecting the film onto people's bodies.Matt explained afterwards that the video contained interviews of some of the 62 South African school children who in 1995 all witnessed a UFO. He said that the children's vision of the UFO was partly a product of our time as Blake's vision of angels was partly a product of his.

Planting of the Angel Oak (photo (c) Scott Johnson, 2011)

From here we moved to a space on the Rye that is believed to have been close to where William Blake had his vision.Artist John Hartley explained that, as a child, Blake lived in the West End; an area which at the time was the margins of London; and that Peckham today is in some ways an area of margins. He said that artists are attracted to margins and so was William Blake. John then explained that the new sapling had been brought to the Rye from the margins of England. He and a friend had driven to the coast, to an eroding cliff and taken a young oak that was ready to fall into the sea, and brought it there to Peckham Rye. As the tree was lowered into it's new hole, everybody was encouraged to help by chucking a handful of dirt in.

The new Angel Oak can be seen at the Dulwich end of Peckham Rye.

Links:
Audio bite of the event http://soundcloud.com/herebeangels/episode5
John Hartley's web site http://www.ambivalency.net/angel%20oak.htm
The Blake Society http://www.blakesociety.org/2011/08/23/september-event/

Fiction: Place, Diorama

2011-08-30T02:51:00.000-07:00

Jens Reinert. More here. Notes to come.

Jockum Nordström. More here. Notes to come.

Wilder Shores of Love

2011-07-06T01:53:00.000-07:00

Cy Twombly has died, age 83. For such an idiosyncratic, he is held as a standard by many I've known or taught, in their reaching for a way to make. He showed a way to make work from narrative without being literal. He showed that the history of a drawing is the drawing. He showed that no work is definitive. Latterly, at the Tate's retrospective, the revelatory sculptures. Today, finding some of his photographs; stand-alone in a way similar to Tarkovsky's polaroids. This, 'Yard Sale' (1993), via. Nearby, Dulwich Picture Gallery have just opened 'Arcadian Painters: Twombly and Poussin', with the 16mm Tacita Dean film Edwin Parker. Rest in peace.

Illustration Students' Documentary at Kyoto Seika University

2011-06-21T23:52:00.000-07:00

A group of six Second Year Camberwell Illustration students are now spending one month at Kyoto Seika University, accompanied by alumnus Chie Miyaki and current First Year Daniel Draper as translators. The team are making a documentary, with a focus on the University's distinguished Manga teaching programme. We are all following their progress (and enjoying their holiday snaps) here.

Forest marks, Love is Enough, Utopia

2011-06-10T08:06:00.001-07:00

A month or so ago, my Camberwell group visited the London Metropolitan Archive, the Guildhall Art Gallery and library, brokered by Adrian Holme. A day leafing through and opening up fascinating documents of — and belonging to — the City of London.

The LMA is, simply put, London's archive. Kilometres of shelving in strong rooms, holding miscellany reaching back to a small piece paper, a 1067 decree by William the Conqueror (or the Bastard as he was known at the time).

We spent some time with boxes brought up from the archive, related to Adrian's seminars this year. What became clear, is the impossibility of a definitive record. Through the conservator's studio and here, we handled Victorian concertina'd paper viewfinders of the Crystal Palace, a scrapbook belonging to an employee of Horniman's Tea, photographs of crowds esconced in banter and singalong, in Bethnal Green tube station during an air raid, hand-coloured architectural plans and sections of a works. It's clear there were reams of more linear records but the unpredictable truth-telling of these things detained us.

I enjoyed the Epping Forest box.

The Guildhall library presented an opportunity to handle two amazing, original Kelmscott Press editions in a limp vellum binding. This, Morris' Love is Enough (1897) with illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones. A full 100-page scan here.

And Thomas More's Utopia (1893). Note the yapp edges. Also seen here.

Steve Bell at the Cartoon Museum

2011-05-25T15:23:00.000-07:00

Source: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/1/12/1263261460869/steve1.jpg

Political cartoonist Steve Bell has an exhibition at the Cartoon Museum, until July 24th. Bell also charts his career and discusses his approach to caricature in a Guardian story that accompanies the current exhibition.

Bell Epoque: 30 Years of Steve Bell is at the Cartoon Museum, 35 Little Russell Street, London WC1, until 24 July. Students £3 with ID.

How...talk...work: Max Lamb

2011-05-19T23:53:00.001-07:00

Hexagonal Pewter Stool from Max Lamb on Vimeo.

How...talk...work: Ellen Gallacher

2011-05-19T06:48:00.000-07:00

Ellen Gallagher, Watery Ecstatic from Corrie Van Sice on Vimeo.

How...talk...work: Olafur Eliasson

2011-05-19T06:44:00.000-07:00

How...talk...work: Do Ho Suh

2011-05-19T06:41:00.002-07:00

How...talk...work: Richard Tuttle

2011-05-19T06:41:00.001-07:00

How...talk...work: Ai Weiwei

2011-05-19T06:38:00.000-07:00

How...talk...work: John Cage & Merce Cunningham

2011-05-19T06:37:00.000-07:00

How...not...talk...work: Damien Hirst

2011-05-19T06:34:00.000-07:00

How...talk...work: Jacques Tati

2011-05-19T06:31:00.000-07:00

How...talk...work: Max Ernst

2011-05-19T06:29:00.000-07:00

Max Ernst.

How...talk...work: Steve Bell

2011-05-19T06:24:00.000-07:00

Steve Bell.

How...talk...work: Jeff Koons

2011-05-19T06:22:00.000-07:00

How...talk...work: Georgia O'Keefe

2011-05-19T06:16:00.000-07:00

How...talk...work: Mike Nelson

2011-05-19T06:12:00.000-07:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2001/oct/05/art.artsfeatures

How...talk...work: Syd Mead

2011-05-19T06:08:00.000-07:00

How...talk...work: Martino Gamper

2011-05-19T06:07:00.000-07:00

How...talk...work: Agnes Martin

2011-05-19T06:05:00.000-07:00

How...talk...work: Geoff McFetridge

2011-05-19T06:02:00.000-07:00

How...talk... work: Andy Warhol

2011-05-19T05:55:00.000-07:00

How people who make work talk about making work: Alice Channer

2011-05-15T23:39:00.000-07:00

Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida - The Guardian March 26 2011

2011-04-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

Roland Barthes. Image http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/L/A-Robert.R.Lauer-1/roland-barthes.jpg

Somehow I missed this piece by Brian Dillon (Guardian March 26 2011) when it was published last week. But Re-reading Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes does serve as a welcome (and poignant) introduction to a work that is not only a wonderful book on photography, but a wonderful book, full stop.

Dillon makes the interesting point that Barthes' subjective approach is academically contentious:

It's this (in academic terms quite scandalous) embrace of the subjective which allows Barthes to begin the quest that makes his book so moving. Having lost his mother, with whom he had lived most of his life, he goes looking for her among old photographs... (Dillon 2011)

In this little book Barthes achieves the feat of marrying academic discourse to the personal. Perhaps it is 'scandalous' as Dillon suggests, but the subjectivity in Barthes' writing is what makes it not just wonderful critical writing on photography, but also great literature.

Do read it...

Bibliography:

Barthes, R. (2000) Camera Lucida: reflections on photography. London: Vintage

Dillon, B. (2011). Re-reading Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. In: The Guardian, March 26. [Online] Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/26/roland-barthes-camera-lucida-rereading [Accessed April 4, 2011]

London and the Multisensory City

2011-03-23T16:29:00.000-07:00

William Hogarth (1741). The enraged musician. Engraving. Image source: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/hogarth/images/works/the_enraged_musician.jpg

Hogarth's friend Henry Fielding, said that the Enraged musician (1741) was 'enough to make a man deaf to look at it' (Uglow 2008:55).

We visited the idea of the multisensory city, which Hogarth manages to express visually, in an earlier post on this blog. For more on this, see the latest issue of TENGEN magazine where I have an article London, the multi-sensory city expanding on some of the ideas in that post. My colleague Gareth Polmeer has an accompanying piece, The cinematic map, reviewing the new film on London by William Raban, About now: MMX (2010).

Bibliography
About now: MMX (2010). Directed by William Raban. Film
Holme, A. (2011). London, the multi-sensory city. Tengen Magazine. No. 3, (March), Pp.3-5 http://issuu.com/tengenmag/docs/tengen_issue_3 (Accessed March 23, 2011)
Polmeer, G. (2011). The cinematic map. Tengen Magazine. No. 3, (March), Pp.5-6 http://issuu.com/tengenmag/docs/tengen_issue_3 (Accessed March 23, 2011)
Uglow, J. (2008). Words and pictures: writers, artists and a peculiarly British tradition. London: Faber and Faber

Shopping: JG Ballard - Kingdom Come

2011-03-17T17:17:00.000-07:00

JG Ballard's last novel, Kingdom Come (2007), is centered on a shopping mall.

Note the reversal and interchangability of agency between the consumer and the commodities in the 'Metro-Centre' in this excerpt from Ballard's writing which is to be found towards the finale of the novel:

Vaguely searching for a more comfortable matress than my fever-sodden berth
in the hotel, I stood in the entrance to the store as the pilot lights shone on
the freshly waxed floor. A work party had moved through the ground level, and
the tang of polish hung on the unmoving air, making me feel almost giddy. By
sweeping out these temples to consumerism, by wiping and waxing and buffing, we
made clear that we were ready to serve these unconsecrated altars. Every shop
and store in the Metro-Centre was a house of totems. We accepted the discipline
that these appliances and bathroom fittings imposed. We wanted to be like these
consumer durables, and they in turn wanted us to emulate them. In many ways, we
wanted to be them...
(Ballard 2007, p235)

Ballard's writing brings to mind Marx's idea of the commodity fetish (1990, p163), and also Guy Debord's Society of the spectacle:

67. The satisfaction that no longer comes from using the commodities produced in abundance is now sought through recognition of
their value as commodities. Consumers are filled with religious fervour
for the sovereign freedom of commodities whose use has become an end in itself.
(Debord, p33)

Guy Debord refused to copyright his work. The complete text (in translation) is available here http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/index.htm

Debord's film, The society of the spectacle is available here http://www.ubu.com/film/debord_spectacle.html

Bibliography
Ballard, J.G. (2007). Kingdom Come. London: Harper Perennial
Debord, G. (No date given). Society of the spectacle. Rebel Press
Marx, K. (1990) Capital. Volume 1. London: Penguin Classics

Shops on Screen

2011-03-16T08:47:00.000-07:00

They Live (1988), directed by John Carpenter.

The Stepford Wives (1975), directed by Bryan Forbes.

The Pawnbroker (1965), directed by Sidney Lumet.

Gun Shop (1977), with Richard Pryor.

Local Shop from The League of Gentlemen (1999–2002), with Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton.

Four Candles (1976), with The Two Ronnies.

Watercolour, Tate Britain

2011-03-06T10:52:00.001-08:00

Edward Lear, Macropus parryi, watercolour, reproduced as a lithograph in Volume 1 of the Transactions of the Zoological Society of London. Image source: http://static.zsl.org/images/width500/img-2054-600-9107.jpg

One does not necessarily think of the poet Edward Lear as a zoological illustrator. But his watercolour of the Kangaroo was just one of the surprises that awaited me at the Watercolour exhibition at the Tate Britain (until August 21, 2011).

It is an excellent show bringing together often less well known watercolour works by major, and sometimes less well known artists - Turner, Blake, Samuel Palmer, Graham Sutherland, alongside Cozens, Paul Sandby, Wenceslas Hollar.

The thematic curation can be a little irritating - you arrive at a bit of a hotch potch of works in places, and at times it seems overly didactic. Some of the categories do in fact work - The Natural World, and Travel and Topography being good examples, but other categories are much more open and less convincing than a chronological approach - Intimate Knowledge, Abstraction and Improvisation, InnerVision - and here we are at the whim of the curator (hence the dispersed Turners, some breathtaking late works in Abstraction... of course we know what the curator means, but the subtlety and the differences get lost beneath such heavy handed didacticism.)

Some of the time I found myself marvelling at technique (how does Turner in his landscapes, achieve such an apparent freedom and overall unification of the image together with such exquisite fine detail?) and at many works that did not, even on close inspection, seem to resemble watercolours, such were their technical strengths.

All in all, this is a show that must be seen - and, I would have thought, a particular delight to any illustrator. It has really made me rethink the possibilities and the vast potential of the medium.

The mysterious commodity

2011-02-20T03:31:00.000-08:00

'And the more receipts I get, the bigger the thrill.
They're even getting to be like money to me now.'

Andy Warhol (2007, p.130)

JSG Boggs (1997). Available at http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/8/view/5440/money-design-and-history.html

Our discussion at Thursday's seminar on 'Shopping' reminded me of the artist JSG Boggs. He produces (by meticulous drawing and printing) dollar bills of various denominations, as works of art, which he then attempts to 'spend' in real transactions in real shops or restaurants - and for the value declared on his 'money'. As one might imagine this causes some perplexity to cashiers and shopowners. To further confuse matters he also requests a receipt and the correct change as a result of the transaction.

See here a Youtube clip (Topangacreek, 2010) from the wonderful (and hilarious) TV documentary Money Man (1992), which shows such a transaction taking place - in which Boggs profers one of his own $50 bills and also asks for a receipt and change from the $7.20 purchase: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEtKSqzpj0Q .

Following his transaction Boggs will then offer to buy back the dollar bill (negotiating on the price), which he attaches with information on provenance and the till receipt and offers for sale to the art market. The shopkeeper makes a handsome profit and he makes a further profit. Often people choose to retain the Boggs work or sell it on themselves.

Boggs deliciously subverts the nature of the transaction - confusing the exchange of money for commodity, by producing his own 'money' - which as a work of art is not really money but another commodity itself. To use Marx's terms, Boggs 'money' is a commodity with both use value and exchange value - and not necessarily the exchange value declared on his note.

The issuing of paper money, what Marx terms 'money of account' (as opposed to gold with its intrinsic value as a commodity) is of course very carefully controlled and regulated by the state (Marx, 1999). Boggs' issuing of his own 'money' - or 'art' according to Boggs - appears to threaten the state's control over the issuing of money, and he has had a number of run-ins with the US authorities over this (Money Man, 1992). Through art he pulls apart and exposes hidden aspects of economy, of which we are not normally conscious in our day to day lives.

YvesKlein (1962). Transfer of a Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility to Dino Buzzati, Paris, 26 Jan 1962. http://www.yveskleinarchives.org/works/works18_us.html Image available from http://www.atisma.com/spiritart/Immaterial%20Pictorial%20Sensitivity%20Zone.jpg

The French artist Yves Klein (1928-1962) highlighted both the material and the spiritual nature of exchange (Klein was influenced by Zen Buddhism, Rosicrucianism and alchemy (Seymour 1987)). In 1962, Klein offered to sell a 'zone of immaterial pictorial sensitivity' in exchange for gold leaf. The purchaser bought the gold leaf and Klein provided a certificate in return which was only valid upon being burnt. Klein threw 20g of gold leaf into the River Seine, while the purchaser burnt his certificate. All remains of the transaction were destroyed (Goldberg 1988, p.147). However this is not entirely true. What remains of course is the record of the work in words and photographs. (What is also sometimes overlooked, I recall - though I cannot locate the reference, is that Klein made a profit from the purchase of the gold leaf).

'Great beauty is only a reality when it contains, intelligently mixed with it, "genuine bad taste," "irritating and intentional artificiality," with just a touch of dishonesty.'

Yves Klein (cited in Seymour 1987, p.25)

Bibliography

Designboom. (2011). Money design and history. [Internet]. Available from: http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/8/view/5440/money-design-and-history.html (Accessed 20 February 2011)
Goldberg, R. (1988). Performance art: from Futurism to the present. London: Thames and Hudson
Marx, K. (1999). A contribution to the critique of political economy. Marxists.org First Published 1859. http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Contribution_to_the_Critique_of_Political_Economy.pdf (Accessed 20 February 2011)
Money Man (1992). Directed by Philip Haas. TV documentary. 60 mins
Seymour A. (1987). Transformation and prophecy. In: Beuys, Klein, Rothko: Transformation and Prophecy. London: Anthony d'Offay Gallery. Pp. 9-28
Topangacreek (2010). J. S. G. Boggs - The art of making money. [Video online]. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEtKSqzpj0Q (Accessed 20 February 2011)
Warhol, A. (2007). The philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and back again). London: Penguin
Yves Klein Archives. (2011). Zones of immaterial sensibility. [Internet] Available from: http://www.yveskleinarchives.org/works/works18_fr.html (Accessed 20 February 2011)

"Publication is the creation of a Public"

2010-12-19T03:31:00.000-08:00

Matthew Stadler, founder of Publication Studio, based in Portland, Oregon. The studio prints and binds books on demand but moreover is "a laboratory for publication in its fullest sense — not just the production of books, but the production of a public. This public, which is more than a market, is created through deliberate acts: the circulation of texts; discussions and gatherings in physical space; and the maintenance of a digital commons. Together these construct a space of conversation, a public space, which beckons a public into being."

On style

2010-12-04T11:10:00.000-08:00

‘...practically all metaphors for style amount to placing matter on the inside, style on the outside. It would be more to the point to reverse the metaphor. The matter, the subject, is on the outside; the style is on the inside’

Susan Sontag, 1987, 17

It is tempting to think of style as something akin to putting on a coat. But Susan Sontag's words help us look deeper into the nature of style.

Perhaps it is helpful to consider this image of the nave of Lincoln Cathedral constructed in the 13th century in the Gothic style. One can see decoration, to be sure (and the surfaces would have been painted originally). But, it is difficult to see style in this context as in any way superficial. It seems to reside in the very bones of the building.

Bibliography

Sontag, Susan. (1987) On style In: Sontag S. Against interpretation. London: Andre Deutsch. Pp25-36

Image sourced here.

Iso Type of Thing

2010-11-19T00:51:00.000-08:00

A trailer for the new film on the US' public education system, Waiting for Superman, from Buck. Note the interplay of narration, type, image, motion. The language's info–graphic heritage in Otto Neurath's Isotype, imaged by Gerd Arntz.

Embedded Messages

2010-11-16T16:01:00.001-08:00

An excellent trip last week, to the Pitt Rivers Museum and theOxford University Museum of Natural History. Neighbouring but entirely separate entities, with contrasting taxonomies. Apparently, originally, there was an intent to demonstrate a social Darwinism in the Pitt Rivers, by juxtaposing objects of common function from 'primitive' and 'advanced' cultures. The net effect is opposite, with beautiful examples of the symbiosis of available materials and requisite making. I always return to the cabinets containing object–systems for writing and counting.

These West African Oroko and other symbolic systems, communicate personal insults, calls to battle, requests for foodstuffs, news of death, bids for friendship. The number and orientation of cowrie shells denotes an array of meanings, as described here. The intrinsic character of a cowrie is human and therefore connotes a human situation. Where they face away from one another they really are facing away. Elsewhere, knotted string gives the intuitive property of distance and space to travel.

I reflected afterwards (in the light of messages and matter) on another trip, back in September and in Berlin. The Museum of Otto Weidt's Workshop for the Blind is the original site, where around thirty blind and deaf Jews were employed—and therefore shielded from internment—by Weidt to make brushes and brooms in the early 1940s. Under constant threat, they hid within concealed spaces in the workshop and Weidt obtained false identities (as above, for Marianne Bernstein) and bribed Gestapo officials; any means to stave off the inevitable.

The museum has humility, weighted only by the original nature of the spaces and the stories of individuals who, in the majority were killed and the exceptions who survived. This is the recto and verso of a postcard, thrown from an Auschwitz–bound transportation train by Alice Licht and addressed to Otto Weidt in the remote hope of it finding him, which it did. Somebody picked it up and sent it on.

Alice parents were killed in Auschwitz. She was later transported to Groß–Rosen. Weidt managed to make contact and organised a safe hiding place in Berlin, to which she fled during an evacuation in 1945. She emerged few weeks later, surviving the war and then emigrating to the US. She died in 1987.

This poem, Zurück–Glück (Return–Happiness), written after her escape in April 1945.

Beyond the stories, the walls within the hidden spaces.

Walter Benjamin: "To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger".

A certain resonance in straightforward effects and documentation, telling a human tale. Perhaps the gap to think. The frankness of a factual item. Christian Boltanski has referenced and used as a raw material, the emotional impact of piles of clothes belonging to those deported, discovered in the Nazis' storage warehouses. The specificity of belongings, indicating an individual's life, over the anonymity of a naked body. This piece, Inventaire des Objets Ayant Appartenu a une Femme de Bois-Colombes (1974), from a series of five (I think) bookworks which fully documented the belongings of a woman living in a suburb of Paris.

At no stage do we see an image, a likeness of the woman. Only her taste in books. Which tells a greater truth?

Back to the Pitt Rivers and some more from the Writing & Counting cabinet.

This beautiful correlation of one available material with the form to which it refers and encodes, a reindeer herder's register of his herd's ear notches, cut into birch bark.

Nearby, a cabinet displaying scrimshaw and other notchmaking, markmaking in bone. An object behaving as a page.

Visions of cities– the multisensory city

2010-10-10T09:49:00.000-07:00

Umberto Boccioni's (1911) 'Futurist' painting, The Noise of the Street Penetrates the House attempts to reproduce the multisensory experience of the modern city, with its noise and endless movement, within the frame of a two-dimensional work, with a fracturing of the traditional Renaissance fixed-point perspective. (The way in which this is also a painting about 'a view' somehow reinforces the point that perspectival representation is inadequate for conveying this multisensory experience).

Literature is a medium well capable of conveying this multisensory experience of the city.

See how Charles Dickens achieves this in this excerpt from Great Expectations (first published 1860-1), Pp 163-4, describing Pip's experience of the City of London:

'When I told the clerk that I would tke a turn in the air while I waited, he advised me to go round the corner and I should come into Smithfield. So, I came into Smithfield; and the shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me. So, I rubbed it off with all possible speed by turning into a street where I saw the great black dome of Saint Paul's bulging at me from behind a grim stone building which a bystander said was Newgate Prison. Following the wall of the jail, I found the roadway covered with straw to deaden the noise of passing vehicles; and from this, and from the quantity of people standing about, smelling strongly of spirits and beer, I inferred that the trials were on.'

An earlier example, from the Romantic era, is to be found in William Blake's poem 'London' (Songs of innocence and of experience, 1794), which, as in Dickens, includes appeals to the ear and touch as well as the eye, along with an embodied feeling of walking in the City.

I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness,
marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues
the marriage-hearse.

Louise Bourgeois, 1911-2010

2010-06-01T01:25:00.000-07:00

The truly great Louise Bourgeois has died, aged 98.

The Great And Powerful's Letterhead

2010-04-15T08:46:00.001-07:00

This is MGM's letterhead from 1939, promoting what is amongoneofmanyofour favourite films, The Wizard of Oz (via A Rook's Foundry). Very nice and odd hand rendered, nib-pen type, something we discussed in pre-term-end Macmillan Children's Book sessions.

An echo of Peter Blegvad's renderings for the English language imprint of Tove Jansson's 1952 The Book About Moomin, Mymble And Little My (via), translated by Sophie Hannah in 2001. Some control of the colour, inflection and pictorial within the type so it doesn't tread on the toes of the imagery.

Fact & Fiction Too

2010-03-17T23:58:00.001-07:00

Camberwell Illustration's Second Year exhibit this week, in the second 'Fact & Fiction' show of work made in response to the projects discussed on this blog. The poster here designed and hand-silkscreened by Liam Cobb and James Cartwright.

Type setting and hand lettering

2010-02-08T03:20:00.000-08:00

Here's a look at one of Alfred Wainwright's pictorial walking guides. These spreads are from The Outlying Fells of Lakeland. What's amazing about these guides are that they are entirely hand rendered, yet at the same time they look like they have been carefully typeset. Fully justified columns of prose, careful consideration of caption text size, title text size and body text size, use of all caps, italics and indentation are all used to carefully create hierarchies of information in the book. At the same time seamlessly tying together treatment of the text and the images.

Here's another example of familiar forms of typesetting. Again hand rendered but imitating typesetting conventions so that we know that this is a letter as soon as you look at it.

The conventional layout of a letter is so recognisable we don't even need the words to identify it.

THE AUTHOR-DESIGNER AND THE READER-USER (3)

2010-02-07T07:08:00.000-08:00

What was underlying the previous two posts was a discussion on the relationship that the reader-user has with the work. The point I think I was trying to get at was that the spectator is always an active participant in the work. Whether they play a physically active role in its creation, say changing something in it, finishing it off etc., or just a mentally active role, by bringing it into existance through their interpretation of it, they are never the less active in both instances.

THE AUTHOR-DESIGNER AND THE READER-USER (2)

2010-02-05T11:23:00.000-08:00

"The creative act is not performed by the artist alone. The spectator brings the work into contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."

Taken from a recording of Marcel Duchamp made in 1957 titled 'The Creative Act'

The spectators interpretation of the work is both enabled but also clouded by cultural references built up over their lifetime. That's why, with its dominance in the international bank of references, this is recognised as being a sign for Coca-cola

and in London this is recognised as being a sign for Costcutter. So while it's true and important that we all interpret things differently we also all interpret things very similarly.

The Author-Designer and the Reader-User

2010-02-02T10:09:00.000-08:00

Umberto Eco:
“In a narrative text, the reader is forced to make choices all the time...the model reader of a story is not the empirical reader. The empirical reader is you, me, anyone when we read a text. Empirical readers can read in many ways, and there is no law that tells them how to read, because they often use the text as a container for their own passions, which may come from outside the text or which the text may arouse by chance...If you have ever happened to watch a comedy at a time of deep sadness, you will know that a funny movie is very difficult to enjoy at such a moment...if you happen to see the film again years later, you might not still be able to laugh.”

“Any narrative fiction is necessarily and fatally swift because, in building a world that comprises myriad events and characters, it cannot say everything about this world. It hints at and then asks the reader to fill in a whole series of gaps. Every text, after all, is a lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work.”

THE THING QUARTERLY

2010-01-25T16:22:00.000-08:00

We've just made a pack of double fronted playing cards in collaboration with the artist Ryan Gander. They were published by a quarterly periodical based in San Francisco called The Thing. The reason I mention it is because as a publication The Thing is quite unusual. In the words of their website: "The Thing Quarterly is a periodical in the form of an object. Each year, four artists, writers, musicians or filmmakers are invited by the editors (Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan) to create a useful object that somehow incorporates text. This object will be reproduced and hand wrapped at a wrapping party and then mailed to the homes of the subscribers"

This is Issue 6, by Allora & Calzadilla. It consistes of a blank book, entitled "Problems and Promises", which is attached to a tennis shoe. One of the tennis shoe laces is sewn into the spine of the book.

WHY PUBLISH?

2010-01-25T15:55:00.001-08:00

From the book burnings of China's 3rd century BC Qin Dynasty to the recent censorship of google.cn the control of published information has been a preoccupation for those in power across the world.

Book burnings in Berlin, 10 May 1933.

The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 1873, an institution supposedly dedicated to supervising the morality of the public.

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

2010-01-25T14:29:00.000-08:00

Complete Broadcast

Here's the whole radio drama by Orson Welles, broadcast in New York on 30 October 1938. The radio play was an adaptation of the 1898 novel of the same name by H. G. Wells and part of a series called The Mercury Theatre on the Air.

The headline on The New York Times the next day indicates the effect the broadcast had. The way Welles plays on the format of radio and in doing so demands that listeners question what they hear on the radio in future is an approach that could be taken to any medium.

Inside Nobrow

2010-01-18T01:42:00.001-08:00

Sam Arthur and Alex Spiro will be coming in this Wednesday to talk about Nobrow, their young-but-already-influential independent publishing venture. Their print ethic makes this a platform both for the craft itself and for emergent voices.

These two films (via Creative Review) give a good idea of their set-up and process. Thanks to our own Natalie Kay-Thatcher for the link to this. And special mention to Clark Keatley, who graduated last year with some amazing printmaking , now spending a portion of his time with Nobrow.

Some Publications #1

2010-01-15T14:48:00.000-08:00

A glimpse of some publications available via Stand Up Comedy, based in Portland, Oregon. All quotes from the site.

"Veneer (or, alternately, Ve) is cultural critique via gesture, phenomena, documentation, and detritus. It's also the arithmetic of print and its possibilities, with an emphasis on technical minutia stretched to the edge of absurdity as its epistemological approach."

"The Kingsboro Press is operating out of New York and is edited by Megan Plunkett and Daniel Wagner. It's without imprimatur, that is to say, it's without judgement."

And so it has curiously judged. It's raw art and lit, and it changes formats each time. It is winding through a certain underground path."

"Sasa Annual Report 2007. The Korea-based conceptual artist compiles annual reports of his activities, purchases, and general living. An on-going archival project that takes a different form in each volume."

"This year's report is interpreted in a series of bar graphs. Strange how analytical information takes on an abstract quality. Folded poster in dust sleeve".

Irma Boom

2010-01-11T20:02:00.001-08:00

Irma Boom on 'The Most Beautiful Book in the World' from D&AD.

Sendak on Illustration / Extruded Characters

2010-01-09T08:30:00.000-08:00

Maurice Sendak, on what it is (to him), to illustrate a book. He talks about the illustrator quietly wishing to have written, with imagemaking the next best thing to do. Feels as if a similar place-in-the-food-chain logic has been used as basis for criticism of the just-released 'Where The Wild Things Are', directed by Spike Jonze. Will go see but expect that Spike has just tried to do something else.

The book of course is one of the greats, with less than 200 words and it's wonderful left-to-right kinetic. A 101-minute film of the three-dimensional world is a different object. The book is so much about the drawing, the hairyness and claustrophobia emerging from hairy, claustrophobic linework.

So illustrators have a crisis about their pictures spoiling a book for the mind's eye. Here it seems is an equivalent, of a filmmaker extruding a two-dimensional classic. It looks as if the collaboration with Jim Henson's Creature Workshop gives the cinematic monsters their own breathing space, with a Big Bird inflection.

It is a strange and counter-aesthetic compulsion to make something that innately belongs to a world of flatness and line, literally live-action and three-dimensional. A clear example was Robin William's incarnation of Popeye. Here is E.C. Segar's Thimble Theatre original, c. 1930, with the archetypal, everything-facing-the-front face.

And here is the 'live' but dead version. Same for Carreyfication of Dr. Seuss. Leave well alone. It worked already.

Concrete & Counterform

2010-01-06T01:17:00.000-08:00

A favourite thing since Royal College of Art days in South Kensington, has been this cast-concrete typographic entrance to the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle.

Each facet, as you can see, is designed to become a different character. It is the three dimensional, internal, negative physical route from one to the other that offers beauty out of economy.

I don't think all six sides of each chipped cube becomes a letter. Haven't done the maths to know the saving on cast forms. Tried to find out the designer without success. Anyone know?

So, the active and determinate nature of the counterforms andkerning call to mind Wim Crouwel's Soft Alphabet (via), originally designed for a Claes Oldenburg / Stedelijk Museum catalogue, I think.

And Armin Hoffmann's consistently poetic use of energised negative space.

Roads lead back to Cassandre. Not so much the entirety of this poster but the word 'Reglisse' at the top. I have found that the character 's' is tough in a kind of relishable way, like a tricky but therefore valued personality in a family. Cassandre kind of looked sideways to solve his 's' with each re-incarnation, never forcing it to fit and therefore finding counter-rhythm and colour.

The page as an alternative space

2009-12-07T15:59:00.000-08:00

We recently visited the legendary Printer Matter in New York. It exceeded expectations. I bought 'I See / You Mean' by Lucy R. Lippard and subsequently find that she was one of the founders in +/- 1976. Alongside her was Sol Lewitt. Throughout his career, he acknowledged and used the book format on merit, with a recurrent nine-or-sixteen-square-grid, as seen above (in Autobiography (1980)) and below (in Four basic kinds of straight lines (1969)) (via).

An excellent interview with Lippard here, where she describes the original motives for setting up Printed Matter; useful for us looking in the 'Publish' project, for propellant beyond the churn-out of a showcase 'zine. And also the importance of distribution. She says: "We were all into artists'' books at the time because they seemed yet another way to get art out of the gallery/museum, to give artists control of their own production, and to get art out to a broader audience. Somebody wrote about 'the page as an alternative space.'"

Books that lie open

2009-12-07T10:35:00.000-08:00

Robin Kinross, typographer, writer and proprietor of Hyphen Press, writes here on the 'vexed issue of book-production: binding techniques. He discusses paperbacks, the advantages of the relatively new 'Otabind' process, where the book-block is free of the cover sheet spine, allowing for a flat opening (pictured above) and the problems with the 'hot-glue' binding (pictured below), which cracks when the book is opened by the 'serious reader'.

He goes on to say: 'One might remark also that a book open on a table – while the reader holds a cup of tea in both hands (for warmth and comfort), or sews a button on a shirt, or carries a young child – is no more than a mark of decent civilization. So the binding should be strong enough to withstand this opening-out.'

the Glacier Project

2009-11-20T00:44:00.000-08:00

Series of books by Elizabeth Jackson that explore and explain the nature of glaciers through the books' physical qualities. Click here for more information

I, Me, Mine

2009-10-21T07:22:00.000-07:00

It's Nice That invited me this week to write an article for their feature 'Weekly Discussion'. Saying 'I, Me, Mine: do we specialise too soon?' Go, read and tweet your thoughts. It's live until next Monday, I think.

Somehow the point I'm attempting to make is evidenced (albeit from then, not now) in the work of Max Bill. Each of these projects is borne of intimacy with material, use and unfettered thinking. The result is a work which often synthesises two previously discreet functions or habitual forms.

Bill's applied, tactile understanding of the behaviour and limitations of process and materials in no way hampered his ability to think laterally.

(via Kultur + Kontext, cianomagentagiallonero, V&A, thebestoftime)

Two Colour for Seven Colour

2009-07-16T01:12:00.000-07:00

An invitation card by Duncan Hamilton for an exhibition by Sarah Crowner of Dexter Sinister. Under his working name, The Uses of Literacy, he designs, publishes, workshops and lectures. Explore the non-hierarchical index for his span of interests and actions. In terms of independent publishing, his use of the Riso and Ricoh digital duplicators, is very interesting. A build-up of solid and halftone colour with overprinting, passing the card back through the machine with changes of colour cartridge (see sequence here), arrived at the result which cites Max Bill's classic cover design for Johannes Itten's Die Farbe (via Reference Library).

Everything Drawings #1

2009-03-21T01:55:00.000-07:00

Archiving 'Everything' pictures for next run of the 'Fiction' project. That is, pictures of more than one moment in time. Or more than one space. Or more than one viewpoint. Composite moments. A good question to ask oneself for depicting narrative, to offset the moment of choice strategy. This is Vancouver-based Lucas Soi's Adventures in Babysitting (2007). Click for a nice big look.

D&AD science museum project

2009-02-23T06:22:00.000-08:00

For this project you will have to deal with trying to communicate the difficult subject of black holes. Animation, as a form of education, is made simple here through the use of building blocks. The way they show how a structure fails and collapses, in the early parts, means that the viewer gains a simple understanding before the animation develops and grows in a more fantastical way.

This second Sesame Street animation, 'changing shapes', has a constant, in the form of the shape, that is then surrounded and affected by a more imaginative narrative, keeping a good balance between information and entertainment.

Technique. Here are some ways of creating moving image pieces without being hindered by a lack of 3D computer skills. This is by RBG6, making the most of simple mechanics.

'Sally' by Roul Wouters: a simple use of a box, marbles, and a camera becomes hypnotic viewing.

'My Paper Mind' by Javen Ivey: an animation technique called stratastencil based on an early method know as strata-cut which was pioneered by Oskar Fischinger in the 1920s and later on in the 1990s used by David Daniels to create 'Buzz Box'. You can see Javen Ivery's process here.

Sometimes the limitations of what you can achieve can be used to your advantage. The animation 'Jubliee Line', a collaboration between Shelley Fox and Tim Hope contains short film clips that are looped and repeated. Rather than being perfectly made to blend into their environment, the square edges to the footage are made visible and add to the aesthetic feel of the piece.

Diter Rot, Type, Image

2009-01-29T01:14:00.001-08:00

(via)

Eduardo Paolozzi, Type, Image

2009-01-29T01:10:00.001-08:00

From Eduardo Paolozzi's Metafisikal Transformations (1962)(via Tate).

Herb Lubalin

2009-01-29T01:05:00.000-08:00

Japanese binding

2009-01-27T01:07:00.000-08:00

An alternative to the 'case-bound, multi-sectioned binding' you've made in the workshop is a simple, classic Japanese binding (via). It works especially well with a landscape-format and with thin paper-stock.

The 'stab' technique to make holes in the book is traditional but we've found it works well to clamp the book between two pieces of mdf cut to the book size, then pin-drill in the workshop using the pillar drill.

Permutation

2009-01-23T08:45:00.000-08:00

Two spreads from Bruno Munari's 'Character Building' chapter in Design as Art (1966). He says, "the graphic designer works without set limits and without rejecting any possible technique. His (sic) experiments in the visual lead him to try out all possible combinations and methods in order to arrive at the precise image he needs for the job in hand and no other".

The argument for and against consistent 'style' versus a kind of imagery led by the 'concept' goes on. It's a criticism levelled against illustration- a lack of rigour or appropriateness- or style over content. Interesting here that Munari refers to the Graphic Designer; hard to tell but he may be trying to distance himself from the notion of an unthinking illustrator. For me the arguments, in their polarity, are fruitless. Anybody making imagery has to have a rhythm and a language. Inevitably the work, however applied, will be also somewhat self-referential. Without this the results can lack idiosyncrasy, locality and become corporate. Munari's imagemaking, even if it did follow the ethos described above, still has his hand on it all. A certain set of spatial, linear characteristics. Variety with identity is possible. There are a lot of crude distinctions also made between hand-drawn versus digital. Why is one at the expense of another? Is it not possible for someone to arrange objects in a space, or draw a line on paper, or assemble an image on-screen without having to nail their colours to one mast or another, or have to project a kind of obvious stylistic consistency for lazy eyes? Surely a practice can incorporate all of these with integrity.

Innate Creepiness of Stop-Motion

2009-01-20T01:04:00.000-08:00

Excerpt from The Mascot by Ladislas Starewicz (1933). See the full animation, the array of characters and a full scope of the live action and stop-motion at the very useful Fantastic Animation.

Character and Abstraction and Typography

2009-01-19T09:03:00.000-08:00

From English Medieval Graffiti.

Marks are limited by the implement and the ground. Pictographic: a synthesis of the figurative windmill with the idea of a windmill. Thingliness.

Oscar Schlemmer's Slatdance (via Multimedialab) synonymous with its environment or what it does, what it uses, what it represents.

Evan Holloway's Pas Des Deux (2005) (represented by The Approach gallery).

Bjork, by Jean-Paul Goude with Bernhard Willhelm (via Tira la Pirinola).

Classic Grace Jones, again by Jean-Paul Goude.

Herb Lubalin. Advanced understanding of Character, ornament, vernacular, form and counterform.

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (via Palantir).

Les Xipéhuz (1887) written by J.H. Rosny (aîné) "are silicon-based, geometric-shaped alien beings, most in cone shape, nearly all cylindrical, but some tall and thin and others short and squat, some in cone shape and some rectangular slabs. Their shapes and colors can change, but they generally remain cylindrical and bluish green. They communicate by flashing lines in various shapes across their sides. They can kill by focusing rays from the “stars” at their base. They have individual personalities and are at least somewhat comprehensible by humans, but their purpose for coming to Earth, besides an apparent drive for expansion, is unknown, as is their culture and much else about them. They are truly alien, and only slightly comprehensible".

Cuneiform signs for 'King'.

Alexander Giraud's dolls.

Ubu, Miró, Commedia dell'Arte, Schlemmer

2009-01-19T06:47:00.000-08:00

Alfred Jarry Ubu Roi (1888). Theatre of the Absurd.
"The central character is notorious for his infantile engagement with his world," wrote Jane Taylor. "Ubu inhabits a domain of greedy self-gratification." Jarry's metaphor for the modern man, he is an antihero- fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, cruel, cowardly and evil."

See Jan Lenica's animation

Wookmark's trefoil knot.

Joan Miró's lithograph, Ubu Roi aux Baleares (c.1966)

Eric Campbell in The Count (1916) (via BFI).

Commedia dell'Arte (c.C16th) Pantalone

Jabba: over-rendered, over-realised but interesting character.

Blob Sculpin (via Things That Are Wrong).

Oskar Schlemmer's Das Triadische Ballett (1916-1932) (via Flickr).

Oskar Schlemmer's Das Triadische Ballett (1916-1932).

(via Mart)

Head Net

2009-01-15T00:47:00.001-08:00

Net for a character head (from a French children's publication?) as seen on the wonderful An Ambitious Project Collapsing.

The Goblin Spider

2009-01-14T15:49:00.001-08:00

An exquisite, one-eyed goblin character from The Goblin Spider, a Japanese fairy tale of 1899, printed from woodblock with characteristic colour gradient backgrounds. The translated version by Lafcadio Hearn. See the complete book at the New York Public Library's site.

Penny Dreadful Covers

2009-01-14T15:19:00.001-08:00

Black Bess (1866), published by E. Harrison of London. Note the poor registration of the colour printing which has become an affectation, an effect, an option in our time.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), Charles Dickens' last and unfinished novel, published in monthly instalments by Chapman & Hall of London.

An advertisment for a Spring Heeled Jack Penny Dreadful of 1886. The South East London Folklore Society give a comprehensive history of Jack.

Rogues' Gallery

2009-01-13T01:16:00.000-08:00

Dick Tracy characters Pruneface and Flattop Sr., Chester Gould, 1943-44, Tribune Media Services (via LA Times). Note the hardboiled-economy of the character names. And that the appearance always had seemed to have catalyst, an past disfiguring event.

Two Colour Possibles

2009-01-12T17:57:00.000-08:00

A detail from Andreas Samuelsson's limited-run screenprinted poster for If You Could, HudsonBec's ongoing publishing project. Always solely using red and black. Each illustrator takes on the constraint in a way that fits their method and aesthetic. Mr. Samuelsson is 100% on both colours, with a signature use of the paper-white as positive form.

A detail from Luke's poster shows him exploiting halftones in the black jutted up against 100% red to achieve something close to the gamut of marks he makes in other work.

Nez

2009-01-12T16:56:00.001-08:00

Alberto Giacometti's Nose (1947) (via Peter Foerger).

Beautiful Monsieur Gainsbourg with Jane Birkin.

The elastic John Barrymore as Mr. Hyde (1920). Witness the wonderful, terrifying, pantomime-absurd, angular change.

Blinky Palermo's Schwarzes Quadrat und Grünes Dreieck (1970) (via Artnet).

Margaret Hamilton as The Wicked Witch of the West alongside a terrifying Judy Garland as Dorothy (1939).

Chelsea Smile

2009-01-12T16:02:00.000-08:00

The great Conrad Veidt (he of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) as Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs (1928), whose 'permanent rictus grin' is given him as a child by a surgeon, ordered by King James II to punish an offence caused by his nobleman father.

The film is fundamentally a melodrama (with the protagonist as a tragic hero) but has come to be seen as a horror classic. The story is based on Victor Hugo's tale of craving and desire, L'Homme Qui Rit (1869). This, in turn, was Bob Kane's inspiration, of course, for The Joker.

With reference to the project and London folklore, mutilation of this type has a root in the 'Chelsea Smile'. Inflicted, according to lore by Chelsea football fans, it somehow is a story that holds its place alongside Spring Heeled Jack and other 'bogeyman' tales in the way it taps undilute fear. This is C'est Moi Ce Soir's Ms. Clinton in the act (via Soma Gallery).

Jour et Nuit

2009-01-11T10:50:00.000-08:00

Typographer Pierre di Sciullo's Jour et Nuit. As succinct a manifestation I can find of RGB (additive) and CMYK (subtractive) colour. Play it here.

Significant too that in both cases the full 'saturation' of all colours fall as the counterform (the negative space within a letterform), a determinate factor in the design and signature-recognition of any form.

This, in turn, best illustrated by Emil Ruder in his seminal Typographie (1967).

Seeing Sound

2009-01-10T01:52:00.000-08:00

Mary Ellen Bute's Tarantella (1940). Blue and Red for Black. Then Red and Magenta for Redmagenta. Using illuminated coloured acetates or gels it seems, for subtractive colour.

Note the richness gained by reversing out to white from a coloured background, counterpointed by colour on a white background.

The mis-registrations leading to a 'black' and a white on the edge of the diagonal rectangles may or may not have been deliberate but they offer object-volume.

And the exchange between hand-liquid and geo-stable line or form.

Head

2008-12-14T07:34:00.000-08:00

Each day, find a head. Listen to what it is saying. Draw it as soon as you can. Draw what it said and make it a part of the head. Do 28 heads.

It's an optional exercise for the vacation. Thinking of 'head' rather than 'face' because it's more of a 'thing'. The painting above is 'N'(2006) by Mathew Cerletty.

And this is 'Face Eater'(2004) by Dana Schutz.

(Ex-Chelsea) Mari Sunna's 'Pass' (2001).

'Vanished' (2004), also by Mari Sunna. She's represented by The Approach (who incidentally have a very good-looking show on now at their 'E2' gallery called Dogtooth and Tessellate).

Maps and Fields

2008-11-12T03:20:00.001-08:00

Nigel Peake's maps from Tiny Showcase. more notes to come.

Slimy Drawings

2008-11-12T01:46:00.000-08:00

Architect partnership Ushida Findlay's 'Slimy Drawings' for Soft and Hairy House (Ibaraki, Japan 1994) and Truss Wall House (Tokyo, Japan 1993).

The houses carry a signature, organic configuration of space where inside becomes outside and vice-versa. Therefore conventional plans and elevations won't do, as expressions of the house-to-come. So they developed 'slimy drawings' in order to see everything at once. Somehow this is more poetic than a CGI flythrough; although that might be my limitation.

Ernst Haeckel

2008-11-12T00:38:00.000-08:00

Bats, from Ernst Haeckel's seminal Kunstformen der Natur (1904). Adrian will discuss Haeckel in lecture 3 of his Art & Science series. Haeckel, a zoologist-artist (that doesn't quite cover his achievements), popularised Darwin in Germany (On the Origin of Species was published in 1859).

Haeckel's system of imaging and composition is of a laid-bareness, a head-on symmetry that emphasizes recurring geometries across species and nature. This supports his "recapitulation theory ('ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny') claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species' entire evolutionary development, or phylogeny." (Wiki).

He sometimes resorts to a more illusionistic, three-dimensional space but it is quite rare through the 100 or so plates. It happens through his motive to articulate and reveal. This is perhaps unfamiliar to you and a step you are required to take in the project. That is, composition, formal decisions borne out of a need to explain.

Florafauna

2008-11-11T10:05:00.000-08:00

Rebecca Stevenson, re: microscopist Armand Clavaud's Florafauna ideas. More notes to come.

Kyushu University Medical Books

2008-11-10T15:09:00.000-08:00

Eye discolouration (as seen on the amazing BibliOdyssey) by Majimaganryonozu, from a collection of C18th and C19th Japanese medical books archived online by Kyushu University.

Dermatological conditions by Hosonozu. See more here and note the intertwined image, calligraphic text and the use of flatness and abstraction for organ-forms.

Window Water Baby Moving

2008-11-10T10:21:00.000-08:00

Stan Brakhage's Window Water Baby Moving (1959) is the only film I've seen of childbirth which makes sense. It has genuine, uncanny, visceral poetry. It tells the truth. Be prepared for its frankness.

Oliviero Toscani's Benetton billboard of 1991 was removed, as I recall, a week or so after it appeared due to the volume of offendees.

An anonymous (French c.1800) oil on paper from tomorrow's destination, the Wellcome Collection. Articulating such a complex event, the image has a head-on objectivity but also features caricature, in the gurning midwife and the fey father-to-be.

Darwin, Transformism, Mutation, Gallagher

2008-11-10T09:30:00.001-08:00

Double Octopus Floating With Jellyfish, from Ellen Gallagher's Watery Ecstatic series, 2005. I saw these in the flesh at Liverpool Tate a while ago, an amalgam of paper cut, watercolour, ink, varnish and collage. All Gallagher's work deals in one way or another with African-American stereotyping, delivering the narrative through Darwinian transformism and mutation.

In this case, the ongoing series "relays the story of Drexciya, an underwater world populated by the descendants of pregnant West African women forced off slave ships on the Middle Passage, from West Africa to America, whose unborn children adapted to the water in utero and began a species of half-human, half-fish creatures" (from Circa).

This earlier work, part of the Deluxe series of 2004-5, is characteristic of a process she applied to many advertisements featuring black models. Wig, eyeball and other viral caricature-elements multiply, smothering the head, amplifying the stereotype.

Gallacher is discussed on Species of Origin, a useful site for this project, set up by Edinburgh College of Art and dealing with contemporary art's relationship to Darwin.

Powers of Ten

2008-11-10T08:12:00.000-08:00

Charles & Ray Eames' mesmeric 1977 film. Slightly soiled here by the extraneously kitsch pyramid graphic at the beginning of this clip. Ride that bit out then sit back to watch.

Magnetic Movie

2008-11-10T07:28:00.000-08:00

Magnetic Movie by Semiconductor. "The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic, ever-changing geometries. All action takes place around NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries" (from Animate Projects).

All Fact is Theory

2008-11-10T06:32:00.000-08:00

"The highest is to understand that all fact is really theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the basic law of color. Search nothing beyond the phenomena, they themselves are the theory." So said Johnann Wolfgang von Goethe, in his Theory of Colours of 1810. He was critical of Isaac Newton's prism-theory (from Opticks of 1704), which he believed to be schematic, underestimating the role of human perception of colour.

The work here, above, below is Colour Square Sphere by Olafur Eliasson. He of the Tate Sun Machine. I'm thinking about Goethe's statement above and his well-known epigram, "The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes".

A function of this project is to see and depict the unseen. That may not necessarily be something at, for example, nano-scale. It may be a thing or event so familiar that it is invisible. That is why Dürer's Turf is so remarkable.

Eliasson's Round Rainbow (2005).

Ash Black Slug

2008-11-10T04:01:00.000-08:00

Preparing this project and listening to Radio 4 and The Living World's programme on the Ash Black Slug. It's found on Dartmoor and can grow up to 30cm in length, making it the world's largest. On a dank-dark-day such as this, its fungi-munching world is ever more vivid. It has 'flower-like genitalia' and is hermaphrodite, giving it the option of mating with another or going solo, spinning on a metre-long length of mucus. Now for lunch.

Nothing & Something

2008-10-29T02:16:00.000-07:00

'The Large Turf' a watercolour by Albrecht Dürer, 1503. Ostensibly a study for larger-themed works, the image has come to represent humanism. An interesting article by Tom Lubbock discusses the paradoxical moment where this image- celebrated for the manner by which it depicts plants embedded in the nature- stops, has an edge and sits on blank paper as a fragment, a specimen.

A Young Hare, 1502. I'm starting with these pictures because of their intensity. Everything is Something.

As Georges Perec said: "Note down what you can see. Anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to see what's worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you? Nothing strikes you. You don't know how to see."