We will discuss Adolf Loos his essay “Ornament and Crime” (1908) on Thursday.
Please come in with reactions and thoughts.
We will also show our graffiti-ist treatments of Madison’s (flat) house, and possibly do further work on these in class.
This page in progress (throughout the week).
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“... there is something immoral about a well-paved road, and about the speed of departure to which many of us have subjugated our lives.”
— Anna Badkhen, ‘Once I Took a Weeklong Walk in the Sahara,’ in Bright Unbearable Reality : Essays (forthcoming, 2022) : link
Patrick (word/image) showed more in the $17.99 series. We discussed treatment of language (name of item) and the number ($17.99), and also contemplated showing the “framed” products/artifacts (e.g., winter cap) in a straight, uninflected manner (meaning: not drawn let alone digitally manipulated: photographs with minimal intervention.
This current series might be thought of as a kind of reflection on the magic of modern, manufactured objects of desire, and thus not (or not only!) as advertisements for those objects.
It was suggested (not by jm) that Patrick abandon the restraint of “$17.99.”
Thursday —
Patrick showed his “marketing” piece for a wireless trackball mouse (here). If an advertisement: where? magazine? website (for display in browser? on a smartphone?). All kinds of issues came into play. jm wondered why marketing. Why not just “art” (so to speak) around the object? We noted that noone in the room reads magazines (Sarah looks at old ones; Stacey reads zines, but that was it. Even the arrangement of the elements shown — an abstract "aura" graphic borrowed from work in another class, the price, the a for amazon logo at lower right — all of these were tentative or vague in terms of how they would work in an actual instance of marketing.
And yet. And yet the wireless trackball mouse had been treated, endowed/imbued with a kind of internal halo or glow. jm thought it was already sufficient. It need only be surrounded by language, perhaps a $17.99 below it, to be enough — enough in this case meaning, able to stand alone, or be incorporated in other settings (e.g., marketing, advertising), and even to stand alone as art.
jm pointed to orange crate art (one example on wall above door, and many more via a google search).
And there is also Lucian Bernhard’s advertising poster for the Priester match company (emphasized, because so important) :
source : MCAD Library, flickr : link
This and other examples of so-called Sachplakat or object posters are discussed in Meggs and other histories of graphic design.
Stacey (kindness) is working on a “zine” devoted to kindness; we saw page spreads of text and facing drawings of hands. jm had also printed these, and those spreads were on the homasote wall. Zines are not limited to design by designers; indeed, most are probably created by untrained (in typography, etc.) non-designers. A designer needs to be careful about her/his adoption of such default characteristics as 8.5x11 size, different type sizes, etc.: in done, it needs to be consciously (strategically) done. We talked about how one might select a book size, and also gave thought to different ways text can be presented in a book, e.g., snaking/flowing through, rather than distributed, one story per page spread. And thought was given to the symbolic nature of the illustrations of hands, and to whether each story required an illustration. Attention was also given to the sans serif type face chosen (there was something antiseptic, and even cool-y corporate, about the spreads).
When creating content for and designing a book, it can be useful to identify a book that one thinks is relevant, and borrowing its size at least for a trial.
Thursday —
Stacey showed photographs she has taken of instances of “kindness” she has encountered in her daily life, family events, comicon attendances, in stores, and so on. Upon closer inspection and interrogation (of the images, so to speak), kindness related to them in different ways, some strongly, some weakly or not at all, or in some un-obvious special way that would require explanation. Her idea for these photographs was to use them in collages.
And yet the images were already full of meaning, overdetermined, complete in themselves. JM thought Stacey was too close to them, anyway. Better to use material in which Stacey had no investment, and find ways to use that material, in collage form, with language, to explore the idea of — and ideas around — the concept of “kindness.”
There was some discussion of redundancy (caption = picture in an obvious way), and a different strategy of leaving some space between image and language for mystery (for want of a better word, at the moment) — some measure of ambiguity, some space (and/or catalyst) for thinking and imagination.
And so we turned for visual material to magazines (specifically, the “How to Spend It” (HTSI) supplement to the weekend edition of the Financial Times), and for language, to the Bible.
With regard to collage: we looked through a copy of HTSI for imagery. On first pass, found absolutely nothing. And so went back, shifted gears, jm's cropping tool in hand, and started to find parts of advertisements that might work, in combination with others. A box, in a model’s arms, with a plant coming out its top; butterflies in an advertisement... Could these work together? (The answer: yes.) Avoid clever over-involved collaging. Just two rectangles, different sizes ok, abutting each other (in different combinations, even some overlap: the point being, keep it simple). jm pointed to some juxtapositions (simple parataxis: side by side) in this flickr : milkshakenhoney/ (Kelsey Reilly).
The Concordance to the Bible might be useful; better to restrict oneself to what is found there, than to choose one’s favorite (and perhaps clichéd) phrases from other sources that are specifically devoted to kindness.
many resources out there, e.g., Bible Verses about Kindness : link
Looking forward to see the results of these experiments.
Katie (color; windows) presented page spreads of short texts (from her writing, and from DMs), facing photographs of and through her venetian blind-ed window. jm had printed the spreads from screen grabs of Katie’s blog post. This document, like Stacey’s, was not consciously chosen. We considered the texts (24 of them) and how these might be used and even edited; we also considered different ways they could be oriented to the images, as well as whether the images should bleed, be large, medium or even small on their pages. Here, the concern was to let neither image nor text to dominate the other (i.e., so that this doesn’t become a “photo book” with captions.
jm will bring in examples of different treatments of photographs (of the same thing — Los Angeles freeways). One of these will be a catalog of Catherine Opie’s photographs of freeways (interchanges, under construction, etc), and urban strip malls. Two photographs, that were included in that show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, can be seen here : link
Thursday —
Katie continues to work on the (poetic) language.
Madison (graffiti...) brought in the flat “doll house” templates, and distributed these for homework. We will discuss and may continue in class on Thursday, possibly in relation to the Loos essay.
jm pointed to @realtorsguide : link
“A digital road trip that explores American culture and issues of loneliness, greed, love and loss through the photos of real estate agents.”
Thursday —
Some of us brought in "tagged" or otherwise marked-up houses, flat or assembled; others worked on these during class; some took blanks home, to submit on Tuesday.
John (shoes) showed drawings and photographs of shoe ideas. jm favored the drawings, as they also involved handwritten notes, but later saw that both drawings and photographs were good directions (see his comments at John’s post, 20 September) : link
Sarah (life after death) showed (1) recently acquired artificial worms, maggots and (3D-printed) spiders; and (2) two square-shaped collages (5-6 inches square), involving found text and imagery. The latter are functioning as think pieces, and will (likely) continue. Sarah mentioned an interest in making 3D collages as well.
Thursday —
Sarah brought in her “blood bucket,” and explained its ingredients and shortcomings. There was some discussion of possible uses. jm took and displayed a photograph of a detail of an emptied container — bubbles, etc. — and rambled on about the importance of lingering at different stages of the process, looking sideways (tangentially, so to speak), alert to the potential of accidents along the way. There is the final aim or target, perhaps — which will matter differently to different designers/artists/writers — but meanwhile, there are the events that happen along the journey, that for some may be the more important aspects of a project, and yield greater opportunities for development and application.
jm’s photo, inverted but not otherwise modified.
Josh (sound... gesamtkunstwerk ?) showed a passage (not so much different from what was previously seen) of his sound + images. The word “error” appeared several times, and seemed to promise (or at least allow) more glitch or leakage of visuals (of a different register) than we were seeing. Josh showed a photographic image of a plate of pasta (with sauce), as an example. Yes, this might work (or others), the point being, to see what the sound/image relationships yield.
To demonstrate how cuts (of sound and image) might be done, jm showed an excerpt of Jean-Luc Godard, “Hélas pour moi” : link.
- “Jean-Luc Godard, giant of the French New Wave, dies at 91” : link
- Peter Bradshaw, “Jean-Luc Godard: a genius who tore up rule book without troubling to read it” : link
Josh wondered about using some of the digital sound interface (“blocks” in the timeline) in the visuals. Good idea. jm showed his copy of H. H. Stuckenschmidt. Twentieth Century Music (1969) : link.
The book contains several rather visual scores.
Estonian composer Arvo Pärt was mentioned in this context. : link (wikipedia)
Fratres (1980 : link
Thursday —
Josh will work on thumbnails for posters (using the sound interface visuals, mentioned above); jm suggested to bring in posters (plural), not thumbnails. Josh can (and should) use thumbnails in his own process; we don’t need to consider these unless there is a good reason to.
Thea (Notebooks) showed some early derivations of her great-grandfather’s text, the result of work with Obsidian and simple text search functions. One was a list of a repeated word (singular and plural forms, and with apostrophe if memory serves). Another — a kind of concordance view of a single word and its surrounding text — was poetically charged: a mix of repetition and alliteration, but also because of its relationship to the lived and recorded life, the ordinarily unremarked activities that make up most of our lives.
jm mentioned concrete poetry in relation to what was shown. His own sense of what that term means is: an emphasis on the physical form in which letters and words are clothed/manifested; and an emphasis on placement of those elements, whether on a page or in the physical landscape, in which they might interact with or even call to mind or draw attention to other elements — or the general mood, or historical aspects, etc. — in or of those settings (this sentence has gotten away from its writer !).
Several anthologies are on the seminar room (glass bookcase, middle shelf at left).
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