Lined & Unlined

The spectral mimicry of things said to the mind

Fri, 04 May 2012 16:11:00 -0400

A stunning bit of writing from William Gass, by way of his essay “The Aesthetic Structure of the Sentence” from his collection Life Sentences:

“The shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman.” The rhythm of the sentence not only propels the sentence forward, it helps to organize its significant units — its phrases and clauses. The reader is made, not merely to see the sentence, but to sound it, because it is now a small mouthful. These sounds are not those of ordinary speech, but the spectral mimicry of things said to the mind, heard only by the mind, in the arena of the mind — in the subvocal consciousness that exists during reading.

The saleman’s sentence seems quite sure of itself. It is direct; it is definite; it has no room for reservations. Yet without altering a word, its epistemological and ontological status can be radically altered. That is why I called these verbal instruments, transformative operators. For instances, we could lower the sentence’s degree of assurance. “[I thought that] the fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman.” “[I guessed that] the fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman, [but Gertrude was of quite a different opinion].” Amphibolously: “[Harold said that if] the shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman, [he was a monkey’s uncle].” Or change tone and attitude: “[I certainly hoped] the shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman, [otherwise I’ve just now bought a cat’s brush to comb my beard].” “The shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman, [but what if he were also the exhibitionist who has been frightening the neighborhood?]” More radically, we can put it in another realm of Being. “[While seated before the fire in my dressing gown reading Descartes’s Meditations, I dreamed I heard a knocking. Then a cuckoo popped out of its clockhouse to announce that] the shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman. [I realized, when I was awakened by my desire to answer his knocking, that I had been dreaming inside a dream not altogether mine.]”

Layers of reality, degrees of uncertainty, ranges of attitude, levels of society, depth of contextual connection, modulations of tone, the ramifications and complexities of concept, and, above all, the vocabulary of the denoted world, must be taken into account, managed, and made the best of.

Time Warp

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:04:42 -0500

Above: Time Warp as published in Mousse #30.

Each issue, the editors at Mousse invite a contributor to select a text or a group of texts to be reprinted in the magazine as part of their section “Reprint.” The reprinted work may be an article, a short essay, a piece of narrative, or something else, but the original layout is always kept. The scans are accompanied by a text/introduction by the contributor. I was delighted when they asked me to contribute and enjoyed the selection process enormously. The simple act of choosing a set of things and then writing something that helps to connect them was a productive one for me. My thanks to them for the opportunity, and for making it look great. — RG

Lydia Davis’s compact story “20 Sculptures in One Hour” begins like a word problem from a long-lost math class: “The problem is to see 20 sculptures in one hour.” We wait for more, but that is the entirety of the problem, which is a classic half-empty or half-full scenario — though this one comes with a twist, as it must account not only for perception but for the passage of time. Once the problem is stated, Davis’s prose quickly double-backs on itself, repeating the worry that although “An hour seems like a long time” it also seems like “20 sculptures are a lot of sculptures.” If anxiety can be described as the reflexive condition of worrying about worrying, then you might know where the first part of Davis’s story is heading.

I love Davis’s story all on its own, but I had the desire to stretch it out, to make it last longer, to parse it more closely, to somehow freeze-frame each sentence in motion, like Muybridge’s famous photographic study of a galloping horse. Muybridge’s images were made at the behest of university founder Leland Stanford in order to prove a supposition by French naturalist and early photographer Étienne-Jules Marey that all four of a horse’s hooves left the ground while galloping. With the help of twelve special cameras, Muybridge captured “movements whose speed exceeded the perception of any painter’s eye,” writes Prof. Friedrich Kittler in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, and proved Marey correct.

By 1882 Marey had developed something better than Muybridge’s cameras for recording bodies in motion. Combining Gatling’s mechanized machine gun with a multi-chambered camera developed for capturing the night sky through a telescope, Marey introduced a “chronophotographic gun” that could fire twelve frames per second. “Shooting” film was born.

The chronophotographic gun was soon aimed at one of Marey’s assistants, Georges Demeny, who produced images of himself speaking common phrases in an attempt to understand the motor functions of the face and mouth in producing speech. He used his simulations to teach deaf and mute patients at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. The 20 millisecond-long exposures shown here animate Demeny as he speaks a declaration of love, “Je vous aime.”

“Such is the solidarity of film and typewriter,” Kittler notes, as every word heard, read, spoken or typed by Demeny and others “breaks down (as the stenotypist puts it) into its constituent letters.” Almost 100 years after Remington launched its first commercial typewriter in 1873, the typewriter’s filmic potential had throughly infused the writing of poetry. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Peter Finch’s slim collection of Typewriter Poems (1972), edited by Finch and published by Something Else Press, whose leadership by then included not only founder Dick Higgins but also editor Emmett Williams, whose epic concrete poem sweethearts had been published several years earlier with a note instructing readers to both read the poems’s pages and try flipping them “fast enough to achieve a primitive cinematic effect.”

Every one of Finch’s selections stretches, bends, shapes and sculpts words with the help of the typewriter’s clacking keys of uniform width, but Alan Riddell’s “hologrammer” is perhaps my favorite. By 1972 holography (which means “whole writing”) was spreading — found everywhere from a gallery show by Salvador Dalí to a window at Cartier’s 5th Avenue shop — and its inventor, the Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor, had just received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his creation. Riddell’s poem neatly diagrams the process, which involves “the exposure and reconstitution of an image,” with the typewriter’s keystokes substituting for particles of light.

The holographic process is likened to musical recording on Wikipedia, “whereby a sound field created by vibrating matter, like musical instruments or vocal chords, is encoded in such a way that it can be reproduced later without the presence of the original vibrating matter.” This notion of a musical experience that can remain direct even if mediated synchs up well with some of composer Steve Reich’s early tape loop pieces from a decade earlier. In his Writings on Music, Reich explains that “it seemed disappointing that tape music, or musique concrète as it was called, usually presented sounds that could not be recognized, when what seemed interesting to me was that a tape recorder recorded real sounds like speech, as a motion picture camera records real images.” Reich, a trained percussionist, is well known for working with tapes to adjust, repeat, or overlay found sound, allowing musical patterns to emerge.

These tape loop pieces, which functioned similarly to musical canons, stretched language and allowed the passing of time to be heard in new and different ways. Reich explains in Writings that “canons are produced by gradually changing musical distances” and his work went on to explore canons and their relationship to language in many ways. Early unison canons had both live or prerecorded voices sounding together, while substitution canons began to extend phrases by substituting notes for rests. “Proverb” is an augmentation canon, taking a single phrase found in Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value — “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!” — and elongating it through augmentation to over 14 minutes.

The last part of Davis’s story opens not with the problem but with a suggested answer, and it charts a different course from part one. Here time is not fleeting but slow, and in a single sentence we are astonished by how an hour, which now seems a little short, can be stretched to include so many three-minute periods “lasting so long.” As you finish reading the story, maybe three minutes or so after you started, you might be left wondering if it’s really a story at all, or if a sculpture wouldn’t be a better word for it, and, turning this over in your mind, you might feel tempted, as I have, to circle back and scrutinize it a second time.

Above: Part one of “20 Sculptures in One Hour” from Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis, 2007.

Above: Georges Demeny speaks the phrase “Je vous aime” from Photography of Speech, 1891. Reproduced in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter by Friedrich A. Kittler, 1986 (German edition).

Above: “hologrammer” by Alan Riddell from Typewriter Poems, edited by Peter Finch and published by Something Else Press, 1972.

Above: Measures 495-501 of “Proverb” by Steve Reich, 1987. Reproduced in Reich’s Writings on Music, 2002.

Above: Part two of “20 Sculptures in One Hour” from Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis, 2007.

SPRAYPAINT, painted

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:08:00 -0500

Above: SPRAYPAINT as painted by Hektor installed at the Utrecht Manifest Biennal for Social Design, 2011.

It’s so fun when wishes come true. Thanks to Jürg Lehni and Hektor for making this one happen.

New essay for Graphic Design: Now in Production

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 21:31:00 -0500

Above: Cover of Graphic Design: Now in Production

Project Projects was in attendance a few weekends ago at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for the opening of Graphic Design: Now in Production, Andrew Blauvelt and Ellen Lupton’s rich and engaging survey of graphic design since 2000. But the show is much more than just a survey, as they write in the catalog description:

Graphic design has broadened its reach dramatically over the past decade, expanding from a specialized profession to a widely deployed skill. The rise of user-generated content, new methods of publishing and systems of distribution, and the wide dissemination of creative software have opened up new opportunities for design. More designers are becoming producers—authors, publishers, instigators and entrepreneurs—actively employing their creative skills as makers of content and shapers of experiences.

Project Projects has several pieces in the show, including our identity for SALT Istanbul, our book series for Art in General’s New Commissions Program, our imprint and book series Inventory Books (edited by Adam Michaels), and more.

Above: Project Projects’ identity for SALT Istanbul installed at the Walker Art Center’s Graphic Design: Now in Production show.

In addition, Project Projects will be designing the exhibition when it arrives in New York next summer at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Since the Cooper-Hewitt will be closed for renovations at that time, the show will be presented on Governor’s Island at Building 110, formerly a historic Army warehouse on the island’s northern shore.

Finally, I was pleased to contribute an original essay to the show’s catalog, which is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. I’ll archive my full essay here sometime later next year, but if you’re keen to read it before then I hope you’ll go out and grab a copy of the book. Quoting again from Andrew and Ellen’s catalog description:

[The book was] conceived as a visual compendium in the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalogue. It features posters, info graphics, fonts, books, magazines, film titles, logos and more, interspersed with a variety of small texts delving into specific project details, excerpted artists’ statements, interviews and published manifestos, technical details, and new and old technologies and tools.

For the curious, my essay is called “School Days” and is a close reading of The Program Era, UCLA English Professor Mark McGurl’s Capote Award-winning study of the rise of MFA Creative Writing programs in the postwar period. What’s so useful about McGurl’s study is that he sets aside the typical value judgments that accompany the discussion of these programs and instead examines how, as more writers go to school, the culture, setting, and experience of the classroom increasingly finds its way into the creative work of the period. He also looks at the social and cultural conditions that fueled the growth of the MFA Creative Writing degree and the reflexivity it fosters in the life of a writer. I was interested in adapting McGurl’s ideas to look at the last 15 years of MFA Graphic Design programs to understand their impact, along with offering some general context around their history and founding.

Above, top: Writer Paul Engle teaching a class at the Iowa Writers Workshop, ca. 1950s. Above, bottom: Albers assesses work from his Preliminary Course at the Bauhaus, 1928-1929.

Here’s a bit more on my approach from the essay itself:

What McGurl’s book offers to a designer reading it closely is not a set of examples to follow in explaining design education but rather a methodology to adapt for investigating it. What if we play the old “designer as author” metaphor in reverse, describing authorship not as an input or mode of creation, but as an output or model of practice: the designer as cultural influencer, identifiable persona, and creator of a distinctly voiced body of work. This, perhaps, is how an author’s training and a designer’s training are linked. […] Once dedicated to mastering basic skills of the craft, the school has become, in design’s Program Era, tied instead to the production of a professional, the creation of a designer as a whole self, an individual with a self-actualized practice in which student work, not client work, often forms the basis for an introduction and ongoing access to the design sphere.

And here’s a bit of the parallelism I’m describing in application:

“For the modernist artist,” McGurl writes, “the reflexive production of the ‘modernist artist’—i.e., the job description itself, is a large part of the job.” These reflexive professional efforts, he suggests, are not all that “radical” or even “deconstructive” but instead “perfectly routine,” part of a system of self-reference that extends past the making of literature and to the making and organizing of all things. McGurl describes this self-constitution of systems using a concept drawn from systems theory called “autopoesis.” Designers know these efforts, under slightly different circumstances, as so-called “self-initiated work,” which comprises a good portion of what’s done as an MFA student. And just as McGurl prepares a list of “signature genres of the Program Era”—which includes the campus novel, the portrait of the artist, the workshop story collection, the ethnic family saga, meta-genre fiction, and meta-slave narratives—we might attempt a designer’s list along the same lines, including the thesis book, the process poster, the experimental typeface, the urban map, the data visualization exercise, the group portrait photograph, the image archive, the slide talk, the meta-exhibition, and the project-as-class performance.

I’ll have to leave it there for now, but there’s much more great writing in the catalog from Åbäke, Peter Bil’ak, James Goggin, Peter Hall, Steven Heller, Jeremy Leslie, Michael Rock, Dmitri Siegel, Daniel van der Velden, and Lorraine Wild, just to name a few. To say that it would be a welcome addition to any designer’s bookshelf would be an understatement. Go out and get it.

Identity and the arts: A talk at Artists Space

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:06:00 -0400

Later this month, Dexter Sinister will present “Identity,” an exhibition that, in the words of its description, “charts the emergence and proliferation of graphic identity since the turn of the twentieth century, with particular reference to contemporary art institutions — museums, galleries, and so called alternative spaces.”

Initiated by Artists Space, the project has been run by Dexter Sinister in cooperation with a variety of colleagues for over two years. In the fall of 2009, I was asked by Dexter Sinister and Stefan Kalmár of Artists Space to give a talk to an invited group of 20 or so guests. Part of a series of informally titled “How do we look?”, this initial lecture carried an aim that was deeply reflexive, examining the history of the organization’s own visual identity in the context of both arts-related identities and the somewhat woolier world of branding and visual culture. To facilitate the talk, I was given special access to Artists Space’s archive of printed ephemera — my thanks to Amy Owen and Jessica Wilcox at Artists Space for their help and guidance.

The tone was informal, with people asking me to expand upon one point or another, as we sipped some whiskey with conversation. Rather than adhere to a strict chronology of Artists Space’s identity development, I chose to group its marks around a loose taxonomy that included IMPRINTS, SYMBOLS, MONOGRAMS, LANDMARKS, and LOCKUPS so that perhaps a new story could emerge.

The talk was, for me, foundational to many projects and assignments that followed and informed both the structure of my SVA course and our recent identity work for SALT Istanbul at Project Projects.

The writing below is loose and rough, assembled from my notes and fuzzy memory of the evening — but, truth be told, it’s a story better told through visuals, anyway. Even if the below serves as nothing more than a prompt to visit David and Stuart’s smart and inventive show, then I’m glad to have shared it here. — RG

I thought I’d start out tonight with one of Artists Space’s most important early shows, the Pictures exhibition from 1977. And if you look at the booklet of the show here, you’ll see that at the bottom the name Artists Space has been typeset to match the look of the overall booklet. No standalone mark, nothing too systematic — in the early days things changed a lot from one exhibition to another. Reading this, the analogy seems to be that the gallery thought of itself as a kind of publisher. It’s presenting these things, but it’s not imposing its own external identity on anything. It’s initiating creative projects and then allowing its own identity to be mutable, to change with those projects.

And so with that idea in mind the first group of marks I’d like to look at is IMPRINTS. Imprimatur means “to sanction” or “to give formal and explicit approval,” and this is what I was describing before. Rather than a visual identity the emphasis is on the provenance: on where an exhibition came from and who initiated it.

Publishers have long relied on this mutability. Most famously and illustratively, Knopf has a whole broad set of Borzoi dogs that change to compliment a book’s cover design, tone, and setting. There is no single Borzoi. Instead, there are many simultaneous possibilities. It’s almost Platonic: it’s not a specific book with a specific dog but the idea of a book with a dog on it that assigns the book as a Knopf book. It’s more descriptive, really, than symbolic.

This website for White Columns, designed by Project Projects, works in much the same way. When you reload a page the style sheets refresh, and the site goes from serif to sans and back again. So it’s like the Borzoi dog, in that it opens up the possibility that White Columns can take on a variety of formal details but still remain, essentially, itself. The formal “idea” of the site doesn’t change, just its visual expression.

The more you rummage around the archives, the more you see a range of materials in which the Artists Space identity acts in this way. Here is a a flyer for some film programming from the mid-’80s, looking very theatrical indeed. And this strategy wasn’t continuous, either — between the Pictures show and the design of this flyer different, more formalized marks emerged and were then discarded.

Sometimes there was even variance within a given piece. Here’s a great example from 1988 for a show called Telling Tales. There’s literally one “super” logo, which is set in one typeface, and then there’s a smaller “logo-sized” logo in another typeface.

By the late ’80s the impact of design’s postmodern tastes were readily apparent, and the hybridity of a given graphic system set to the max. Even within the artists’ own first and last names there is variance and expressivity. This piece is from 1989.

At other points around this time, zine culture and DIY publishing became more apparent, as in the booklet design for this Robert Gero show from 1990. Here Artists Space acts as the publisher once again, with the form of its name subordinate to the larger aesthetic system of the booklet.

Here, too, in this small photocopied pamphlet from the ’90s, this vibe is apparent. What’s important to understand here is that imprints don’t need to be large or institutional in tone — they can be homemade, grassroots, inventive, and unmonolithic. Quite casual, really.

And in this casualness I’m reminded of Ed Fella’s wonderful posters for the Detroit Focus Gallery, made over a number of years with great inventiveness. Each poster treats the logo differently, and yet the set is coherent and identifiable, offering a kind of aesthetic consistency that supports the range of activities housed at the gallery. Willi Kunz’s ongoing posters for Columbia’s GSAPP program are another example of this kind of identification strategy. Rather than impose a system that can be executed by anyone, they create a highly particular set of responses that can be recognized without being formulaic.

Imprints can be achieved through the use of an institutional typeface. One of my favorite examples is Walker, designed by Matthew Carter for the Walker Art Center in 1995. By allowing serifs to be “snapped on” in a variety of positions and styles, Carter created a single typeface with a variable identity. He presented the initial idea to the Walker through a series of faxes, shown here.

In the hands of P. Scott Makela and Laurie Haycock Makela, the typeface soon became expressive, yielding promotional materials like this one. Much like Fella’s work for the Detroit Focus Gallery, this distinctive touch defined the Walker’s print materials for several years.

A few years later, the Walker introduced a new identity with a similar spirit. Once again the solution was a typeface with variable formats, only this time instead of letters it includes words and patterns that can be assembled on a tape-like strip. It is the work of Eric Olson’s Process Type Foundry.

This new identity reminds me of OMA’s work for the Seattle Public Library, which takes its form from the building’s program and allocation of space. I’ve heard the gesture of the glass skin referred to as “throwing a net over the brief,” which is a metaphor I quite like in this context. The Walker’s ever-present ticker-tape keywords play out in much the same way.

In its simplest sense, a SYMBOL is something that stands for or alludes to something else. It is “this” but also “that.” It’s a doubling device and a shortcut in one.

One of the most iconic symbols for Artists Space was this one from 1983–4. It appeared on the cover of a booklet and soon became adapted to a variety of uses. It works in a symbolic way…

…doubling the anarchist symbol, the circled A, meaning “Anarchy is order,” a double letter. This symbol dates back to 1868 when it was used by the Federal Council of Spain of the International Workers Association, an organization set up by Italian anarchist Giuseppe Fanelli in 1868.

The emphatic triangularity of the A also reminds me of the triangulation involved in perspective and sight…

…which is perhaps why the all-seeing eye, the Eye of Providence, is also inscribed in a triangle. The symbol has been in continuous use since antiquity and has been used by Egyptians and Masons alike. Perhaps because of the Masonic connection, it has also come to be known as the Great Seal of the United States and makes a well-known appearance on the back of the $1 bill.

The circling of the A also reminds me, in some ways, of the circled C in the copyright mark. The circle here forms a kind of barrier, a protection.

The circle alone makes an appearance in Josef Albers’ identity for a private club in New Haven from 1959–60, shown here in an elevation subtly inscribed in the masonry of the building itself, designed by architect King-lui Wu. Albers also notably used a black circle in his seal for Black Mountain College several years earlier.

The A can also double itself, serving as both logo and headline copy, as in this flyer from the early ’80s.

The A is also reminiscent of an engineering form — triangles are known to be the strongest shapes, used in bridges and buildings. In this way it is reminiscent of an easel or prop.

Experimental Jetset used the A this way (though in an isosceles rather than equilateral configuration) in their engaging identity for 104 (La Cent Quatre), a French cultural institute.

Similar to the flyer we saw earlier, the A here can serve as both logo and headline. It is a letter, a symbol, and a prop for 104’s cultural platform.

It’s also well-known that the certain aspects of the triangle’s history as a symbol are more difficult. In the Nazi concentration camps of WWII, people were marked with color-coded badges like the pink triangle, which represented homosexuals. The group ACT UP later appropriated the symbol, transforming it from a emblem of hate to an icon of protest. Turned right-side up, it sits on a more stable base and points more optimistically skyward.

By 1984-86, the A had morphed into the mark seen above…

…a kind of squaring of the circle, and, in the way that it breaks out of its geometric frame, a bit reminiscent of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

In this card produced around the same time, the A has moved to the center, a focal point or hub around which the other elements circulate. The name of each artist in this show is set in a different typeface, mixing individuality with system.

In a later card, the A moves from the center but becomes even larger and more systematized.

Artists Space’s new identity, designed by Manuel Raeder, collapses many of these themes into a single open mark that is a triangle, a protest mark, a support structure, and a monogram all at once

Speaking of MONOGRAMS — monograms are when one letter stands for the whole.

Obviously, as we’ve seen, it’s here…

…but it’s also here in this earlier monogram from late ’70s.

These days we see monograms too. Here is one for the newly-opened X Initiative project.

And a few years ago Spin in London made one for Haunch of Venison gallery.

Here as before, this monogram gets inserted into words as a letter itself. It’s on the verge of being a custom typeface, which underscores how blurry the boundaries are between all these approaches. Art institutions mix and match these approaches all the time.

The monogram and typeface for the Museum Boijmans von Beuningen, designed by Mevis and Van Deursen, is a good example of this. Carrying inline and outline styles, the two letters come together to form a double monogram, a B within a B. Formally, it gives the B’s a sense of energy, they seem to radiate.

It’s a similar feeling, though in a different cultural context, to Lance Wyman’s work for the Mexico ’68 Olympics. Wyman’s identity was derived from a mix of the Olympic rings, Op Art, and Huichol patterns. By recycling or reinserting these forms back into culture, Mevis and Van Deursen’s double-B becomes symbolic and suggestive in other ways, too.

Inside the museum itself, the prop returns, here shown leaning against walls within the gallery space to form a loose set of triangles. In this identity, museum and signage don’t so much cohere as collide or collapse into a kind of mutual coexistence. Rather than using fonts on brochures in a hybrid way, here the museum transforms itself into a heterotopia, a forest of signs, a system that tends toward individualization.

Mass customization surrounds the monogram form in 2x4’s identity system for the Brooklyn Museum. Here, the museum can generate a wide array of logos using a highly structured kit of parts. As diverse as these forms are, however, the result feels very systematic — from any given input comes a nearly identical output.

In this way, it reminds me a bit of NikeID, Nike’s recent foray into the world of custom footwear. It too, is a mass customization project, allowing the buyer to change colors at nearly every level but retaining its “Nikeness” nonetheless. It’s impossible to break the system, to inject something into it that feels out of place. This is what makes it a durable consumer process, but it is also what makes it feel like the product of an assembly line, something that is mass produced despite its claims of individualization.

In my research of mass customization processes, I dug up this chart detailing the various modes of mass customization, and I have found myself referring to it many times since. It’s interesting how much shape and contour can define a sense of change or transformation — it almost harkens back to our earlier discussion of Platonic forms earlier. You can’t, after all, call a square a triangle, or a circle a square. Looking at the chart, cut-to-fit and sectional modularities feel differentiated while mix and bus modularities feel unified.

At least four of these modes are in play with Mevis and Van Deursen’s 2001 design for Rotterdam’s turn as the European Capital of Culture. Here component-sharing, mix, bus, and sectional modularities come together in a single system.

The Yale University School of Art website, designed by Linked by Air, is also modular, but in allowing users to become involved in constructing their own pages and insert their own content it becomes both customizable and participatory. Its many pages feel truly hybrid, active, and individual despite the overarching system.

LANDMARKS are building — they are marks on geographic space.

Here’s a photo, used as the cover of a 1985 catalogue, which shows the now-familiar Artists Space squared A as a sign hanging in front of the gallery.

This image reminds me of the Ferus Gallery’s sign, shown in this photo from 1958, which is as much the “logo” of that institution as anything I can think of.

Logos that suggest buildings emphasize the gallery as a kind of shop or site. Here’s one from the late ’70s where the typical “white cube” has become a “black house” instead. Simplified, almost childlike, it’s hard to tell how to read it. Is it a plan or an elevation? Does it depict an artists’ space from above or from the side?

Weirdly, it reminds me of the Pizza Hut logo, which may have appeared around the same time. Pizza Hut is also a decorated shed, a branded building, and the logo takes its form from their iconic red roof, visible from a distance, while driving down roads and highways. Architecture and identity are one.

“Chains” like Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, and others create an unusual set of landmarks in the landscape. While our experience of a city may differ widely from one to the next, every fast food restaurant is identical and consistent. They almost form a kind of networked place within another place, like a set of corporate embassies whose interior space is unaffiliated with the context surrounding them. They are mass customization writ on a much larger scale, component-swapping atop the simplest possible type of building.

Here’s an early flyer from Artists Space that uses the floorplan directly, initiating an invitation or offering. Artists were invited to make projects in this space and the invitation to this program provided the specifications for these proposals to be made, open-sourcing the project.

The building as diagram is a well-known form — a discussion of it will recall our discussion of OMA’s Seattle Public Library from before. Here’s an earlier example, the Centre Georges Pompidou, designed by architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. The design evokes many things, but among them it specifies the museum as a kind of organ within the body of the city.

And while the Pompidou has a logo, really the logo for the Pompidou is the building itself. A proper logo is almost unnecessary because the building is so iconic, every photograph that includes it is, in a sense, branded. The Eiffel Tower plays a similar role, as Roland Barthes writes in his famous essay, “Wherever you are, whatever the landscape of roofs, domes, or branches separating you from it, the tower is there; incorporated into daily life until you can no longer grant it any specific attribute, determined merely to persist, like a rock or the river […] the moment I begin writing these lines about it, the Tower is there, in front of me, framed by my window.”

Here’s an equally iconic building, photograph here to show the type that’s been applied to it and derived from it.

Employing the institutional typeface in yet another away, Hoefler & Frere-Jones’s Verlag for the Guggenheim both revives the building’s Deco-era face and extrapolates it into the present day. It is an act of “historic preservation”, but with an intent to modernize. It’s not a break from the past but an extension to it, a bridge.

Here is another Guggenheim, Frank Gehry’s iconic Guggenheim Bilbao. Its form is contextual — Gehry has likened it to a boat on the water — but also iconic, like the Pompidiou from before. It exists within the same institution as Frank Lloyd Wright’s building, but type is applied to it in a very different way…

…and somewhat awkwardly. Instead of Verlag, it uses Futura Bold; instead of a surface application, it uses a scaffold. The type here, unlike the New York building, feels more applied than rooted in the building itself.

In a more recent example, the right angles of Breuer’s Whitney Building…

…became the right angles of the institution’s new typeface and logo by Pentagram’s Abbott Miller.

Stefan Sagmeister’s identity for Portugal’s Casa de Musica identity represents the building, designed by OMA, directly — but it adds a bit of mass customization in the form of mix modularity as colors from various images can be applied to the building’s gemlike surfaces, which appear quite different depending on position and perspective.

The role of architecture in defining the identities of arts institutions is seemingly continuing to expand. Another recent example is Wolff Olins’s “stack” system for the New Museum, which uses the museum’s base and roof as a set of brackets into which varied activities and phrases, set in Fred Lambert’s bold Compacta, can be swapped and exchanged. Part of its effect comes from the stack’s similarity to the shape of SANAA’s building, but part of its effect also comes from the font’s ability to imbue an art institution with a more casual, even industrial flair befitting its location among the restaurant supply shops on New York’s lower Bowery.

Art Basel doesn’t depict a building in its identity, designed by Müller+Hess, but its typeface — Heinz Hoffman’s Block Berthold Condensed — has a similar effect.

For a period of time, Artists Space drew inspiration from within its walls rather than directly from them. The gallery has a huge archive of artists’ slides and for a time made regular catalogs with selections from this archive. To represent this program, the slide was used. The booklet on the left is from ’82, and on the right, ’83.

Playfully, the slide is used as both an emblem and an object. Its properties of compression are retained in its graphic expression, as seen on this catalogue from 1984, where it’s used in conjunction with the squared A that represented the broader institution.

The more I saw these slides in Artists Space’s archive, the more I was reminded of Art + Project Bulletin’s attempt to extend the gallery to the mailbox. In many ways these mailers were a kind of distributed gallery space rather than a representation of its built form. Here, the White Cube is transformed into a Tabloid Sheet, a portable art space. This Bulletin from 1975 is by Bas Jan Ader.

The final system I want to look at is the LOCKUP. “Lockup” is a term designers use to describe how information is laid out or arranged on a 2D surface. It’s often consistent — “locked up” — but it doesn’t have to be, and many identity systems accommodate varied lockups for more horizontal or vertical scenarios.

Beginning in the 1970s, Artists Space’s print materials had very expressive lockups, often pushing the gallery information to the absolute edges of the paper, and leaving as much “space” — the “artists space,” presumably — as possible. Here are a few other examples. In one, the type playfully engages a rather heavy grid; in the other, basic info is pushed more typically to the corner and the center of the card is cleared for the exhibition information. More examples from the mid-’70s follow.

GTF’s identity for the Max Wigram Gallery is a kind of lockup as well. Centered with a custom color and typeface, it “expands” with the gallery’s programming and “contracts” when it needs to represent the gallery alone.

Müller+Hess have used the lockup as a kind of palimpsest in their printed matter for the Kaskadenkondensator Art Space, from 1996–1998. The entire yearlong roster is printed in advance, and then overprinted as events are completed. When the sheet is full, the season is over, but the residue of past projects is left behind.

This Artists Space catalog cover from 1987 creates a lockup system as well, as everything, even the gallery name, is systematically slotted into the grid and made equivalent.

Instead of 3D becoming 2D in the case of the landmark examples I showed earlier, Bruce Mau’s 1993 identity for the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) projects 2D type into 3D spaces to suggest architectural surfaces and built forms. Like a flash of light, its forms are fleeting and ever-changing, varied from one printed piece to the next as they are taken from 2D to 3D and back again.

In the context of narrative space, lockups take on yet another meaning. In Maureen Mooren & Daniel van der Velden’s work for ROOM gallery from 1999–2003, press releases were used to “lock up” information systematically into various narrative genres. Here the press release is a kind of visual/verbal readymade, available for reuse and reappropriation by each artist using it. Here form is given not through typography but through language itself, shaping our ideas about art objects via the stories we tell and are told about them. In the second image, there is a more lyrical system of marks, dots, doodles, and squiggles applied on top of the press release, and these marks, at least to me…

…represent both the press release’s mundane office-bound origins and the artists’ touch or signature. The final identity for Artists Space I’ll show tonight is this lockup, lettered by John Baldessari and used from 1994–2001. With echoes of the artist’s signature, perhaps the original artistic mark of identity, I guess I’ll sign off there. Thanks.

Discussing entrepreneurship

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 12:36:13 -0400

Justin Kropp — who writes a blog called One Skinnyj — recently got in touch to ask if I’d be game for an interview and I was happy to oblige. His questions were thoughtful and wide-ranging, but one topic I enjoyed discussing in particular was entrepreneurship, so I thought I’d pull out two pieces of our conversation to share in that vein.

First, Justin asked me to weigh in on the “end of client services” conversation — described thoughtfully here, here, and here — and I tried to add a slightly more historical take on the increasing popularity of this mode of practice:

We’ve always seen designers seek opportunities and models for practice outside of commissioned work — whether it was setting up publishing programs, advocating for cultural resistance, building institutions that centralize and reinforce design’s cultural capital, or finding solace in a world of “self-initiated” projects. In many ways, each of these alternative practice models is a product of their times, and the shift to entrepreneurial endeavors you mention is no different. I think we should, as designers, keep inventing more of these as time goes on. But I think as long as design’s central narrative is one of a problem-solving, analytical discipline, then the need and opportunity for service-driven practice will persist and endure. What’s notable, if anything, is the degree to which a ’90s-era world of self-initiated work has broadened, in the ’00s, and with the help of the internet, to a world far beyond the self — it’s now a whole design culture, large enough to support the careers of certain designers without the need for them to frame their practices through service. But I’ll sound a cautionary note here: while I think it’s good to launch projects that other designers think are great, I think it’s much more essential that designers look beyond the design sphere in framing new opportunities for themselves. These are the projects — self-initiated, entrepreneurial, commissioned, bartered, speculative, or otherwise — that I look forward to most.

Second, Justin asked me to offer some advice to designers getting ready to start their own studio. Since I’ve not yet had a chance to write a “top ten” list, I tried my hand at one here:

An untended garden quickly becomes a field: plant what you want to grow.

Have partners, but don’t do the same things: make sure you both do something you enjoy.

Hire people for what they can teach you, not for what you can teach them.

Everyone should be able to take criticism: creative trust is built on critical honesty.

Design is only one part of the puzzle: savor the discussion, development, debate, and dissemination of your work just as much as the making of it.

Goals may be arbitrary, but not having them will be maddening when there’s no one else to tell you if you’re doing a good job: set 3-month, 6-month, and 1-year goals at the outset.

When you take your favorite clients out to lunch, it’s a good time to propose what you’d like to do together next.

Knowing more designers doesn’t necessarily translate into having good clients: spend your development time wisely.

Be known for something: it helps.

You will never work harder than when you’re building something: find balance. Sometimes the best way to solve a creative problem is to take a vacation or read a book.

Read the whole interview here.

Introducing Otlet's Shelf

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:01:15 -0400

Above: Lined & Unlined’s Library (top) returns, powered by a free Tumblr theme and bookmarklet called Otlet’s Shelf created by Andrew LeClair and I (bottom).

I’ve been meaning to write this housekeeping post on changes, upgrades, and new sections of the site for awhile, but I’m very excited that it’s also the announcement of a new tool called Otlet’s Shelf, a bookmarklet and Tumblr theme for Amazon.com created by Andrew LeClair and I.

Read on for more…

Transition to Tumblr

When Lined & Unlined launched (five years ago this November), it had a section called the Library with a selection of favorite books from my bookshelves. It was immediately the most popular area of the site, prompting nice notes from friends and readers saying they also loved this book, or thanks for pointing out that book, and for this reason it was my favorite area of the site as well. It was easy to browse, easy to update, and, because of Amazon’s Affiliate program, helped to passively support my activities writing and editing the site.

Originally both L&UL and the Library ran on Wordpress, and the Library was dependent on an outdated WP plugin that made the entire WP install difficult to upgrade and inflexible in general. Eventually in 2009 the site was hacked because of this inflexibility, and it had to go offline for several weeks. Every time the intrepid Randy Hunt and I tried to remove the malicious code from the site, it would be hacked again in a few hours and we’d take it offline so that cleanup start afresh.

In the meantime, I started to re-evaluate my decision to use Wordpress. It had never been a tool I liked writing in for one thing, and it seemed way too overloaded with features for the relatively simple writing I was doing. Meanwhile, my friends Liz Danzico and Frank Chimero had both been managing their blogs using Tumblr, and not only did a I like the look of their efforts, but I also liked their focus on writing and the elegance of their understated, language-driven designs. I suggested to Randy that we try moving the site to Tumblr and he was immediately enthusiastic, installing a WP plugin called Tumblrize that allowed me to quickly move all 800 or so posts over to Tumblr in an afternoon and leave the malicious code, buggy plugins, and Wordpress software behind.

Unfortunately, it meant leaving the Library behind too, at least in the short term. For one thing, the database inside Wordpress where the Library’s books were stored was corrupted and unusable. For another, while Tumblr made it simple to post almost anything from the internet to my blog using its bookmarklet, that simplicity didn’t extend to adding books from Amazon.com. What I wanted to was a something as simple as Tumblr’s bookmarklet that would work similarly to the earlier WP plugin, grabbing the title, author, description, and cover image from a book using Amazon’s Product Advertising API and adding with my Affiliate code in a single click.

I set the project aside and worked with Chris McCaddon, a designer at Project Projects, to gently redesign the site to work even better on Tumblr, simplifying the look of posts, adding some of Tumblr’s notes and feedback (which work far better than the comments I had always avoided adding to L&UL on Wordpress), and making the tags a more prominent design element as the site focused increasingly on a number of specific topics and disciplines.

Enter Otlet’s Shelf

Still, I missed the Library. And this summer, when Andrew LeClair joined us at Project Projects from RISD’s Graduate Program, I was eager to see if we couldn’t get it back up and running. We discussed many ways to structure the project and looked at a few sites that do a great job of handling book-related content, including A Working Library and Thinking for a Living. In the end, we opted for a solution that mirrored Tumblr’s own: a bookmarklet.

Once we got the bookmarklet working we quickly adapted the look of L&UL to begin receiving books on its “infinite shelf”, but we were also eager to make the tool we’d built available to other Tumblr users out there. Since I’d relied so much on other people sharing their tools in building and maintaining the site, it seemed only right to share one of my own.

Sharing it was pretty simple. We designed a Tumblr theme pre-built to handle the incoming content from Amazon.com. The theme has a number of different configurations — users can have shelves flow in an “infinite scroll” and can make book covers link directly to Amazon.com if they wish, along with having control of styling, layout, header, etc. Then we set up a website where users can enter basic info and get the bookmarklet. The only question was what to call it.

We looked at many, many names, but, in the end, it seemed fitting to name it after a librarian, and there was one that stood out as an early favorite. A few years ago I’d linked to a talk by Alex Wright, which was part of The Long Now Foundation’s Seminars on Long Term Thinking. In it Wright described a Belgian librarian named Paul Otlet whose visionary work in the early 1900s anticipated the networked knowledge and hypertext.

According to Wright, Otlet felt that librarians were too fixated on the book as an object. He felt what was important was the information inside books and the connections between them. He also felt that the efforts people spent interacting and annotating their books were as important and legitimate as the energies spent writing them, and that these energies of interaction and annotation could also be used for classification and exchange. Wright suggests that Otlet believed that people’s “trails through a document would become a new kind of document.”

To manage this, he conceived of a unique “electric telescope” that would allow people to view answers to questions by telephone on 3x5 cards housed in distant buildings called “radiated libraries”. He even built one: The Mundaneaum, which thrived for a short time before being closed in 1934. Tragically, it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1940, an early precursor to the internet.

Like Otlet, I think the way people use their libraries is often as meaningful and interesting as the information inside the books themselves. I hope the creation of Otlet’s Shelf makes more libraries, reading lists, and collections available for use. As another librarian, S.R. Ranganathan, writes in the Five Laws of Library Science,

Books are for use.
Every reader his or her book.
Every book its reader.
Save the time of the reader.
The library is a growing organism.

I’m delighted to have L&UL’s library back. Have a look, and, when you’re through, feel free to use Otlet’s Shelf to make one of your own.

Trading fours

Mon, 16 May 2011 11:58:00 -0400

My friend Frank Chimero has started a new “occasional back-and-forth blog” called The Mavenist, and I am so pleased to be part of the first post, “Permutations & Loops.” The format of The Mavenist is simple, but also a welcome departure from the standard blog format. Rather than regular posts, The Mavenist will post occasionally. (This blog was founded with a similar attitude.) And rather than a single editor’s point of view, or even an interviewer/interviewee dynamic, The Mavenist will allow two people to take part in an equal exchange—or, rather, five equal exchanges, for a total of 10 parts.

Frank has done a lovely job introducing the project on his blog through the lens of gift exchange, which readers of this blog will know is a favorite topic of mine as well. There were so many parts of his introductory post that I liked that it was hard to choose just one, but I’m a sucker for a good West Wing reference:

There’s a scene in an episode of The West Wing where President Bartlet has his personal aide Charlie go on the hunt to purchase a new carving knife for the holidays. With each knife Charlie brings to the Oval Office, Bartlet shoots down his selection, citing the details he finds important. This happens several times, and finally Charlie brings the best possible knife he can find in Washington. President Bartlet inspects the knife closely while Charlie describes the finer details of what makes this knife the finest knife available. And with that, President Bartlet refuses the knife, much to Charlie’s exasperation. But then, Bartlet produces an heirloom knife of his own, apparently made by Paul Revere and in his family for generations, and gives it to Charlie as his Christmas gift.

This is what good gifts feel like.

Reading this, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Michael Bierut’s reaction to Tibor Kalman’s incredible $26 book project, one of M&Co’s annual holiday gifts. Bierut writes of receiving the book,

It was transcendent: not just a gift but an experience, combining surprise, humor, pathos, and guilt in an astonishingly controlled sequence. Everyone who received it was invited to feel not just the joy of getting but the joy of giving.

What Bierut’s observation suggests is that it is not just the exchange that makes the gift meaningful—it is also the structure surrounding and framing the exchange, as well as the careful control and use of time to allow emtions to unfold. This is why we wrap gifts, and why we unwrap them. It’s why we offer them on special occasions, and hide them at the end of treasure hunts. In shaping time with tradition in this way, the process is reminiscent of a poetic form, which both structures the verse and frees the poet to improvise within it. In this way, a poet’s creativity plays both with and against the constraints of the formal tradition. When composing a poem, the poet is in dialogue with the form itself—and the process of exchanging posts with Frank for The Mavenist didn’t feel all that different from the process of composing a poem in that sense.

Or, better still, it was a bit like the old jazz technique of “trading fours,” in which two musicians build on a melody with short four-bar improvised passages, listening and responding to one another instead of taking their solos individually. You can see Dr. Charles Limb discuss the process from a medical perspective on this TED Talk, or you can see Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette go at it at around the 8:00 minute mark on this version of Sonny Rollins’s “Oleo.”

However I try to explain it, it sure was fun, and quite a gift to boot. Here’s hoping the occasion arises again soon.

A message from the Open Reading Group

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 07:44:00 -0500

Yesterday, I received this message from the Open Reading Group:

Fellow readers,

This spring, Dexter Sinister is busy morphing from a “just-in-time workshop and occasional bookstore” into an non-profit institution-of-sorts called The Serving Library. This involves incorporating (The Serving Library Company, Inc.), describing (A Statement of Intent) and fundraising (here):

http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/the_serving_library

The idea is to build on the haphazard, contingent clutter of activities assembled during the five-year lease of our basement space on Ludlow Street in New York (which expires just before the summer) towards a more explicit, coherent set of intentions that can be condensed into the following equation:

“The Serving Library is a cooperatively-built archive that assembles itself by publishing. It will consist of 1. an ambitious public website; 2. a small physical library space; 3. a publishing program which runs through #1 and #2.”

The longer story involves two collections of books and artifacts, an online and printed successor to Dot Dot Dot called Bulletins of The Serving Library, a speculative Foundation Course modeled on the Photoshop Toolbox, a rotating Guest Librarianship, and a 12-year Black Whisky. Further elaboration is offered in A Statement of Intent, available from our existing library:

http://www.dextersinister.org/library.html?id=262

“I don’t complain about institutions! I complain about institutions that I don’t like.” (Michelangelo Pistoletto)

Please circulate this announcement freely.

Regards, David Reinfurt, Stuart Bailey, Angie Keefer

Please give what you can — one Ben Franklin will go a long way toward supporting The Serving Library and will ensure your copy of the first issue of the library Bulletin.

Update: Funded!

A fragile glass couldn’t help but break

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 18:01:42 -0500

Philosophy Bites interviews philosopher Helen Beebee on The Laws of Nature and Beebee continually revisits the metaphor of a fragile glass throughout the interview as she builds this poetic line of thought:

When you say a glass is fragile, you’re saying something about how it’s going to behave in certain kinds of situations. If I say, “Oh be careful that glass is fragile,” you know that I’m telling you not to drop it on the floor, or to dry it very carefully, or whatever it is, because to be fragile is to be disposed to break in certain kinds of situations.

[…What] the defender of the Armstrongian, Necessitarian view is going to say is: look, fragility isn’t really a fundamental property. What underlies the fragility of the glass is the fact that the glass has a certain kind of microstructure. And it’s a law of nature that things that have that kind of microstructure shatter when they come into contact with hard surfaces.

But just the fact that that glass has that microstructure and the floor is hard just by itself, that doesn’t guarantee anything about how the glass is going to behave. You could imagine a world where glass with the same kind of microstructure got dropped on hard floors and nothing bad happened, the glass just kind of bounced up. The laws of nature would have to be different, but that’s perfectly conceivable.

So in the Armstrongian view, we have to now think there’s a necessary connection between what’s happening with the microstructure of the glass when it comes into contact with a very hard surface. That’s an extra fact, as it were, about the relationship between those two things.

Now, the Dispositionist Essentialist view agrees on the case of fragility because they don’t think that fragility is a fundamental property, but let’s imagine that fragility is a fundamental property. The thought is that the very fact that the glass is fragile, the fact that that’s a disposition to break in certain kinds of circumstances, once you know that the glass has that disposition, you know that the glass is going to break. A fragile glass couldn’t help but break. Try to imagine an impossible world now where you have a fragile glass that doesn’t break when you drop it on a hard surface. You can’t do it, unless you imagine it being encased in bubble wrap or something. In exactly the same circumstances, if the glass is fragile, it’s guaranteed to break so you don’t need that extra, as it were, necessary connection to tie those two things together. It’s just given by the fact that the glass has that property, that it must break.

A ton in ash

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 12:06:46 -0500

“A ton in ash” is a new Williams poem published by The Holster as part of the 5th installment of their “Demand & Supply” series at the 2010 NY Art Book Fair at PS1. It was funded in part by one of ASDF’s “One Hundred $1 Grants.” Get a copy for just $3.00 or grab a PDF here.

Branding & Visual Studies: Foundations and Research

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 18:51:00 -0500

Above, top to bottom: Quaker Oats mascot; Sealand identity proposal by Metahaven.

Almost two years ago, I was asked by SVA MPS Branding Chair Debbie Millman and Co-Founder Steven Heller to teach a course for the new program, which kicked off its inaugural year this September. Over the months leading up to the program’s launch, I had the opportunity to immerse myself in research and to seek out the opinions of fellow faculty as I prepared this class. I am grateful for their contributions, and for the smart and hardworking students that enrolled in the course. I couldn’t have asked for a better group, and their contributions deepened and amplified the themes I’ve laid out here at every turn. I found few resources online for assembling a class of this kind, yet its topics seem to infuse our contemporary discussions of design and identity. I offer the syllabus here as an evolving document and will be adding to it myself over time. I welcome suggestions for additions as well. —RG

Course description: Beginning with the history and underlying ideas of branding and identity design, this course will examine the development of classic identities as well as seminal identity designers and design studios. We will also review contemporary cases that highlight the challenges of brand and identity creation in specific sectors including fast-moving consumer goods, durable goods, services, organizations, places, and ideas. At the same time, we will examine both critical viewpoints around the practice of identity design and speculate on the future of brands and branded environments.

Above all, this course will:

Educate and train your eyes
Ask you to observe, evaluate, and critique basic claims and assumptions
Provide you with a platform for research

Guest lecturers: Guest lectures by contemporary practitioners will complement our coursework. This semester, we will welcome:

Dmitri Siegel, Executive Director of Marketing, Urban Outfitters
Matt Wishnow, SVP D2C, Warner Music Group; Founder, Insound
Randy J. Hunt, Design Director, Etsy
Albert Lee, Portfolio Lead, IDEO New York

Class blog: Our class blog is a place to continue discussion, debate, and sharing outside of our weekly class meeting. You will be required to submit three kinds of short posts to the blog:

Image posts: Select an image drawn either from our current coursework or from your own ongoing research. Write a short description about this image, what it is, how you see it, why you find it interesting, etc.
Material posts: Select a reading, link, or video related to our focus in class that week along and write a short note about its connection with our coursework.
Discussion posts: Generate five questions or comments for discussion in next week’s class related to that week’s reading material.

Please tag your posts with your name to get credit and plan to monitor the blog closely to keep current with your classmates’ posts.

Instructional format: This course will employ a variety of formats including group presentations, individual presentations, discussions, lectures, and working sessions. When appropriate, video or other supplemental materials will be used. Students are strongly encouraged to take part in class discussions and in their own working groups. Working groups will be assigned early in the semester and will remain together for all group projects.

Projects and evaluation: Students are required to attend every scheduled class meeting, complete all required readings, participate actively in class discussions, and collaborate effectively in an assigned working group. Individual work, group work, and in-class participation will be evaluated using a four-point rubric (Beginning = 1, Developing = 2, Accomplished = 3, Exemplary = 4). Course grades are pass/fail but rubric evaluations will be available upon student request at the midterm and final class. At the end of the semester, group project slides and notes should be collected as a set of PDFs and handed in. Individual projects should be emailed as PDFs as well. All tagged blog posts will also be considered in the final evaluation.

Classes

Class 1: Myths and meanings
Class 2: Taxonomies
Class 3: Clarity and confusion
Classes 4 & 5: Practitioner groups
Classes 6 & 7: Market sectors
Class 8: Futures

Class 1: Myths and meanings

Summary: I started the class by looking at a wide spectrum of definitions of branding, and sorted them into four categories. Simple definitions took the form of “Branding is [blank],” reflective definitions suggested the brand was a kind of mirror for the internal dynamics of either a company or its consumer base, metaphorical definitions took this took this idea of the “brand as [blank]” and pushed them even further, and, finally, there are negative definitions, which often suggest that banding is not what you think it is. Like all definitions, each claim says as much about the claimant’s position as it does about the practice of branding itself.

We then looked at branding through more historical lens, suggesting that what has come to be known as branding can also be seen as the merging and mixing of four earlier professions: marketing, advertising, public relations, and graphic design. What triggered these disciplines to start to merge? One answer might come from looking at a shift in business itself: businesses, particularly fast-moving consumer goods like packaged food, realized it was ultimately more valuable to own the means of representing a product than it was to own the means of producing a product. Thus a company’s assets moved from tangible assets, or physical capital, to intangible assets, or intellectual captial.

Throughout the semester, we returned to this remark by John Stuart, Chairman of Quaker Oats (1900), which I introduced in this first class:

If this company were to split up, I would give you the property, plant and equipment, and I would take the brands and the trademarks — and I would fare better than you.

Stuart realized as early as the turn of the 20th century that the image of his smiling Quaker was worth more than any of his mills.

We went on to view branding not just through the merging of various professions but also through the lens of various academic disciplines like semiotics, economics, psychology, and anthropology. And finally, we saw the products of branding and identity design — symbols, logos, colors, etc. — as not a single but a varied set of signs, including marks of ownership (cattle brands), marks of affiliation (club insignias), marks of nationality (flags), marks of autheticity or maker’s marks (ceramic stamps), marks of reputation or rank (four-star general), and marks of aspiration (luxury brands), which typically have evolved out of one of the preceding mark categories.

I then posed several questions about the future of identity design:

How can an identity function not as a solution but as a framework? How can it function less like a building and more like a masterplan?
How can an identity remain simple and flexible enough to generate new implementations?
How do time and collaboration yield successive variations? How can these differences be productive?

The first question prompted a connection to Stuart Brand’s famous concept of a building’s “shearing layers” that suggest a single building is changing at various speeds all at once.

Above, top to bottom: Graphic from How Buildings Learn by Stuart Brand. The sixth installment of Brand’s BBC series of the same name.

The second question prompted a look back to an earlier talk I’d given at Artists Space on the evolution of its A monogram from the institution’s founding in ’70s to its current iteration today by designer Manuel Raeder.

Above, from top: An early Artists Space monogram; marks from the early- to mid-’80s; a mailer from 1984; the Artists Space website in 2010.

The third question prompted a reference to art historian George Kubler, who, rather than looking at art objects on an individual basis, tried to position each object within a lineage of objects that are formally related to it, influenced by it, and influences on it. Kubler’s method blurs the boundaries between objects and treats them more like ideas captured at a certain moment, the way a page on Wikipedia is both static and evolving at the same time. This all-at-once-ness is present in the wonderful example of Knopf’s Borzoi dog, who takes many forms, each of which was made at a certain point for a certain reason by a variety of designers, all of which signal that the book is a Knopf book, and whose selection is somewhat conditional on the type of book Knopf is publishing in that case. Thus a Knopf book may be described as “a book with a dog on it,” and this description alone, though loose, is sufficient to mark it as a Knopf book.

Above, from top: The cover of Kubler’s The Shape of Time; the Wikipedia page for “Collaboration” and the history of its modification; a selection of Knopf Borzoi marks.

In-class project: Pick five brands that you identify with; discuss your thinking with the class. (30 mins)

Individual project: Using one of the five brands you identified in class, write a letter to Roland Barthes; come to class next week prepared to read and discuss your letter. (5-10 mins)

Rubric: Understanding of Barthes, engagement with chosen brand, quality of writing

Reading

Roland Barthes: “The Eiffel Tower” from The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies
Roland Barthes: “Toys,” “Plastic,” “Soap-powders and detergents” from Mythologies
Douglas B. Holt: Chapters 3 & 8 from How Brands Become Icons

Class 2: Taxonomies

Summary: In this session I introduced the idea of taxonomies as a tool for visually organizing many of the marks we see. Taxonomies involve two simple activities that come naturally to designers: classing and ordering. Heterogeneous things are classed into common sets and those common sets are ordered into a hierarchical scheme. The Animal Kingdom, which moves from kingdom to species, is a good example. As you move up the chain, you get increasingly specific.

Above: Taxonometric classes (top) ordered into a hierarchical table (bottom) from Per Mollerup’s book Marks of Excellence.

We looked at a few different ways of creating taxonomies within identity design, from playful (Tibor Kalman’s “A New Identity” for Print Magazine), to basic (Elinor Selame’s 1975 chart of symbol types) to complex (Per Mollerup’s classification system). As we did, we discussed some of the assumptions these charts made, and what kinds of other systems might be open to exploration.

Above, from top to bottom: Tibor Kalman’s “A New Identity” flowchart taxonomy for Print Magazine, reproduced in Perverse Optimist. Elinor Selame’s chart of symbol types from her book Developing a Corporate Identity

Finally, we discussed some different ways companies organize their own brands. With the help of some taxonomies prepared by Australia’s Blueprint Advisory, we organized these strategies into “uniform” brand strategies (like BMW’s), “endorsed” brand strategies (like Apple’s iPod), “variable” brand strategies (like P&G’s Gilette, Clarol, Cascade, and more), and “hybrid” stratgies that combine elements of each. While uniform strategies work well for durable goods like cars and services like air travel, “variable” strategies work well for fast-moving consumer goods to aid in consumer recall and differentiation.

Above, from top to bottom: “Uniform,” “Endorsed,” and “Variable” brand strategy charts by Blueprint Advisory.

Individual project: A taxonomy is a hierarchical classification scheme useful in simplifying or abstracting a large set of varied data. For next week, your task is to collect 50+ varied logos and propose a taxonomy to organize them. While the logos in your collection will necessarily inform the taxonomy you construct, do not be overly literal in your conclusions. Logos that are all one form, logos from a single industry, etc are simply catagorical; they are not taxonometric. Also, while ambitious or even fantastical taxonomies are welcome, be sure to come to class ready to support your claims with solid arguments. (10 mins)

Rubric: Good collection, well-organized taxonomy, assertions supported with well-crafted arguments

Reading

Per Mollerup: Chapter 1 from Marks of Excellence
Karl Gerstner: “Logos and labels” from Visual Language
Paul Rand: “Logos, flags, and escutcheons” from Design, Form, and Chaos
Bruce Mau: “Audition” from Life Style
Hans Weckerle: “Typographer as analyst” from Design

Class 3: Clarity and confusion

Group project: Using brands from Kevin Clancy and Jack Trout’s Harvard Business Review article on “Brand Confusion” as a starting-point, select a pair of brands often confused for one another and research their histories, their present-day visual identities, and their market positioning. From this research, propose at least five actionable steps one or both brands could take to help mitigate consumer confusion and, potentially, increase market overall share. (20 mins)

Rubric: Quality of research into brand histories, strength of arguments, overall presentation and group effort

Reading

Barry Schwartz: TED Talk [Video]
Malcolm Gladwell: “The Ketchup Conundrum” from The New Yorker
Nicholas Lemann: “The Word Lab” from The New Yorker

Classes 4 & 5: Practitioner groups

Group project: Prepare a profile and portfolio selection for a significant practitioner of visual branding and identity design. This could be anyone: individuals (Paul Rand, Saul Bass), design firms (Pentagram, IDEO, Chermayeff & Geissmar, M&Co), industry giants (Landor, Wolff Olins, Siegel & Gale, Interbrand, Futurebrand, Lippencott), boutiques (Lloyd, Baron & Baron, A+R, Saffron), advertising agencies (Wieden+Kennedy, Saatchi & Saatchi), even in-house departments (Target, CBS). Along with preparing a representative selection of these firms’ work, you should be ready to offer your analysis each group’s impact and overall philosophy. (20 mins)

Rubric: Breadth of survey, quality of visual and factual research, depth of insight, conclusions, and take-aways, overall presentation and group effort

Reading

Wally Olins: Chapters 1–4 from The Corporate Personality
Phillip Meggs: Chapter 22 from Meggs’s History of Graphic Design
Thomas Frank: Chapter 1 from The Conquest of Cool
Metahaven: Intro Riff & Chapter 1 from Uncorporate Identity

Classes 6 & 7: Market sectors

Group project: Fast-moving consumer goods, durable goods, services, organizations, places, and ideas together comprise the six broad sectors of branding. Within each of these sectors there are several subsectors as well; organizations, for example, include not just corporations but also governments, NGOs, universities, churches, and museums to name a few. Consider each of these subsectors in your analysis, survey representative brands in each subsector, and then gather and analyze these brands’ visual assets and communication strategies in order to draw conclusions about the particular challenges faced by both the subsector, and, more broadly, the sector as a whole. (20 mins)

Rubric: Breadth of survey, quality of visual and factual research, depth of insight, conclusions, and take-aways, overall presentation and group effort

Reading

Judith Williamson: “Magic” from Decoding Advertisements
Raymond Williams: “Advertising: The Magic System” from Culture and Materialism
John Berger: Chapter 7 from Ways of Seeing
Daniel Boorstin: Introduction & Chapter 5 from The Image
Rotterdam 2001: Introduction and presentation by Mevis & Van Deursen from Identities
Dexter Sinister: “We would like to share”

Class 8: Futures

Individual project: As thoughtfully as you can, tell us what’s next, what’s coming, what’s on the horizon. What areas of opportunity do you see opening up? How will branding change in the next five years? How about the next ten? How can brands take advantage of this? How can customers? What sort of visual forms, systems, and strategies could be around the corner? What are pitfalls, dangers, and how can we plan for them? What are some risks worth taking? Where are there new opportunities? Take care to be persuasive and support your claims with facts, statistics, supporting visuals, and memorable take-aways. Consider this a pitch. (5 mins)

Rubric: Use of course materials in preparing presentation, big ideas presented in an accessible way, focus and polish in presentation, conclusions and thoughts future action or study

Fair Trade

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 23:24:00 -0500

Above: A spread from The Book Trust Prospectus by IFS, Ltd.

This year, much of the talk about the New York Art Book Fair seems to be centered on the Fair itself. Fueling some of this talk, whether expressly stated or not, is a simple question: how, in the midst of one of the most historic economic recessions on record, as the media outlets decry the final hour of the book, was last year’s Fair the biggest yet? And why does it seem that this year’s Fair may be even bigger still?

Against the backdrop of the recession and the destabilization of the book there are three additional factors that have a bearing on the Fair’s ever-increasing reach: the graphic design postgraduate program that defines a thesis book as its culminating project; the design social scene that functions a bit more like a rock scene, celebrating the making and distribution of new work over the more professionalized goals of acquiring and servicing clients; and the temporary or “pop-up” store that transforms the sometimes solitary act of buying into a networked, participatory, and collective event.

At the start of The Program Era, his study of the influence of postgraduate creative writing programs on postwar American fiction, Prof. Mark McGurl asserts that “the rise of the creative writing program stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history.” The same may be true our postgraduate design programs today. During the recession, designers have enrolled in these programs in record numbers, turning to the academy as fewer jobs and clients are to be found. If we look to McGurl as an example, the creative results of this widespread enrollment may soon, to use his phrase, be “everywhere visible in the texts as a kind of watermark.” For graduates of these programs, early notice often takes the form of design blogs, which monitor degree shows and are read largely by other students, designers, and design enthusiasts. Returning to the rock analogy, publishing work on one of these blogs might be equated with the release of a new single by an emerging band; in fact newness is the mode, and a meaningful contribution (along with perhaps a modicum of notoriety) the ostensible objective. Names get known, the best work gets celebrated, spurs new work, and the cycle of influence turns once again.

These design networks make it possible to “know” or even “follow” the work of more designers than ever before. And once you feel you know someone, it’s natural to want to reach through the Internet to shake hands and trade goods. The Fair enables this impulse, encouraging the exchange of books, in order to frame, or even ritualize, this movement from the virtual to the real. While these transactions are often microcapitalist and cash-based — at times, the classic lemonade stand image comes to mind — this year’s Fair features two projects that are not. The Werkplaats Typografie’s project is based on bartering and invokes the circulating metaphor of a library. And IFS Ltd.’s project is based on speculation, asking friends and followers to financially support a book that is, in one sense, the story of its own fund-raising or publishing while containing the potentially new tale of where it will move and how far it will go. Both projects tweak the economic concept of “stock and flow” to creatively productive ends, taking a common inventory (books produced by either group) and diversifying it to accrue new value as the common stock changes hands and flows outward into the marketplace. In in both projects, the system of exchanges will leave participants feeling more “invested” in the books they’ve acquired and in the people from whom they’ve acquired them.

For bookstores, the Long Tail of infinite shelf space and the elimination of middlemen in the supply chain along with increased transparency in pricing has either forced book prices down (as it has at big box retailers like Target and Walmart) or evened them out (as it has at internet retailers like Amazon or specialist sites like AbeBooks or BookFinder). New modes of distributing the “book” itself, either electronically or with on-demand printing, further challenge not only booksellers but book manufacturers, wholesalers, and publishers right up the chain. For books where content is separable from physical form — the book-as-markup — one of these two methods of distribution will likely become the rule, leaving booksellers to reckon with the results.

But while there may be other ways of getting books if not from bookshops, there’s a distinct loss at a local level without them there. “The local bookstore creates all kinds of value for its community, whether it’s providing community bulletin boards, putting rocking chairs in the kids section, hosting book readings, or putting benches out in front of the store. Local writers, harried parents, couples on dates, all get value from a store’s existence as a inviting physical location, value separate from its existence as a transactional warehouse for books,” wrote Clay Shirky last year in a post titled “Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization.” At the conclusion of the piece, he proposes “trying to save local bookstores from otherwise predictably fatal competition by turning some customers into members, patrons, or donors” — though it’s not exactly what he had in mind, for three days the visitors, booksellers, participants, and networkers at the Fair are precisely that.

So what, then, of books and their makers? In the case of the book-as-markup mentioned earlier, its fabrication was once the purview of jobbing typesetters and fine printers. Now this kind of book is available for output across a wide range of devices, formats, and screens. And while e-readers like the Kindle seek to acclimate the readers of actual books to a new reality by retaining the booklike trappings of pages, bookmarks, and serif printing types, there’s nothing keeping the same device from outputting the same text as an unending tagged scroll in sans-serif backlit type for reading in bed, or as a scatterplot of most-cited quotations by readers on a particular continent for scholarly analysis. In this iteration of the book, the only labor required to produce it is the labor required to write it and distribute it. The labor of giving it one of its many potential forms is either frontloaded to the device manufacturer or offloaded to the readers themselves as a set of user preferences or stylesheets.

In the case of another sort of book, the book-as-artifact, its creation has long been the purview of artists, professional graphic designers, and art book publishers. While they may not always be wedded to the book form in the sense of a codex — many artists’ books and multiples actually do away with this most “booklike” of book qualities — books-as-artifacts are always wedded to objecthood itself and are lushly aware of their materiality, coming slipcased or bellybanded or oversized or hand-stamped or somehow otherwise ceremonial and laudatory. The reproductions certainly far surpass anything on a screen. The whole production is handsome and tasteful, something that’s likely displayed on a coffee table or carefully catalogued by a dealer.

There are many of these sorts of books, and many of them are wonderful too, and some of them can be found and browsed at the Fair, but not many of them will be bought there: they feel a bit remote from its aims. They are a bit expensive for one thing; books at the Fair are, for the most part, affordable. For another thing, these books-as-artifacts reiterate an existing power structure, particularly when it comes to the relationship of the art and design world; the Fair, though, seeks a different kind of order. Instead of relying on books to bolster established careers, books at the Fair more often showcase new talent, particularly when it comes to the making of the book itself. And it is not enough, in the eyes of many, to simply generate the files for output; now the book must be “made” through and through, editioned in a small number, output using inexpensive or cast-off printing technology and distributed one-by-one by the makers themselves, all of whom come together in one place for one weekend in a kind of superstore of mass localization. These are books that are meant to travel and be traded, to circulate and be charted, to grace the shelves of colleagues and to define another class of book that is just the kind of book that’s found at the Fair. The book produced by IFS, Ltd. is fueled in part by the speculative efforts of a community within a marketplace that mirrors this action. It is vanity publishing born out of communal necessity, and it is, every year, my favorite time, my favorite place to see friends, to swap copies, to drop cash, to grab coffees, and to take part in that common and much-loved thing I hope will always remain as vital as it feels now, in spite of all the gloom and doom. That is, the making and sharing of books.

This piece was comissioned by IFS, Ltd. for their project The Book Trust Prospectus at the 2010 New York Art Book Fair.

On "symbolic creativity"

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 12:47:41 -0400

From the 1990 book Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young, anthologized in the excellent Everday Life Reader, comes this observation from cultural theorist Paul Willis on his concept of “symbolic creativity”:

[There] is another kind of humanly necessary work — often unrecognized but equally necessary — symbolic work. This is the application of human capacities to and through, on and with symbolic resources and raw materials (collections of signs and symbols — for instance, the language as we inherit it as well as texts, songs, films, images, and artifacts of all kinds) to produce meanings. This is broader than, logically prior to and a condition of material production, but it’s “necessariness” has been forgotten.

Necessary symbolic work is necessary simply because humans are communicating as well as producing beings. Perhaps they are communicative before they are productive. Whilst all may not be productive, all are communicative. All. This is our species distinction. […] This is how we manifest and produce the social and dynamic nature of our humanity.

A workshop with Lewis Hyde

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 13:09:00 -0400

Above: A poem by Wang Wei (c. 700-761). The title has been translated as “Deer Park.”

Self-discovery

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of taking a writing workshop with one of my heroes, Prof. Lewis Hyde. Hyde has an excellent show up right now at the Japan Society called “Oxherding,” and the workshop was presented in connection with that show. The show notes describe the project:

The product of a collaborative meditation by two internationally known artistic visionaries, Max Gimblett and Lewis Hyde, oxherding is based on the Song-Dynasty Chinese “Oxherding Series,” a Zen Buddhist parable of self-discovery comprised of pictures and verse. A contemporary American set of perspectives on this greatly venerated Buddhist text, the exhibition includes six collaborative artist books, a series of 10 sumi ink paintings by Max Gimblett, and 10 poems in Chinese and three English versions translated by Lewis Hyde.

Hyde has shared his translations on his own website here. He explains the process of translating the poems using methods of varying length and correspondence to the original:

Each Oxherding text will appear in three different English versions: a “one word ox” which sticks slavishly to the Chinese (one word per character), a “spare sense ox,” which puts each Chinese syntactic unit into a simple English sentence, and an “American ox” (or “fat American ox”) which takes considerable liberties while trying to be faithful to my intuitions about the meaning of the series.

Though we had not been told in advance about the nature of the workshop, after seeing the show I guessed it would focus on the nuances and challenges of translation, and indeed it did.

Translating English to English

Hyde began the workshop by explaining that his work as a translator had had a very positive influence on his own writing, because of the difficulty we all have in rewriting or rephrasing our own words once we’ve written them. Often, in revising our writing, we make only minor changes or adjustments, rather than more meaningful and substantive edits to the text we’re seeking to improve. Yet revision is essential to successful writing: Hyde quoted a colleague who’s quipped that the revising is “a process that takes a text from egotism to altruism.” That is, with revision a text goes from its author’s own individual point of view to a place where it can be shared and where it will find resonance with a broader readership.

Our objective for the workshop was to adapt translation for our use in editing and revision. Instead of editing a text, Hyde challenged us to think about translating our English words into better English. He called this “translating English to English.”

Obama’s rug

Above: A new rug for the Oval Office, installed earlier this year.

After Hyde’s introduction, we started by looking at a few examples of this English-to-English translation in action. One of the examples was pulled from recent events. A few weeks ago, President Obama had a new rug designed and installed in the Oval Office, and it includes a number of quotations that he’s quite fond of, including one from President Lincoln (his famous “of the people, by the people, for the people” quote from 1863) and another from Martin Luther King, Jr. that King often said in his lifetime:

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

It turns out both of these famous quotes are in fact themselves quotations, or revisions, or adaptations, or English-to-English translations of sermons by the reformist minister Theodore Parker (1810–1860). In the case of King’s quote above, here is Parker’s original statement from a sermon in 1853:

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Hyde joked that it’s as if midway through this thought Parker starts trying to actually calculate the measurement of the moral universe’s arc rather than focusing on the thrust of the phrase, which is where that arc takes us.

Ways of looking at Wang Wei

Above: A character-by-character translation of Wang Wei’s poem “Deer Park,” which is shown in its original Chinese at the start of this post.

We then turned to the first of our two writing exercises. Hyde is not a Chinese speaker, so he worked with a scholar at Harvard to prepare all possible English word translations for each character of the Oxherding text in a one-to-one matrix. He credited Eliot Weinberger’s book Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated in introducing him to this approach. Weinberger’s book examines nineteen translations of a single poem by Wang Wei (c. 700-761), a wealthy Buddhist painter and calligrapher. The titular poem is “Deer Park,” and the book moves from looking at the characters to looking at a transliteration (Chinese pronunciation written phonetically in English) to the character-by-character translation and concludes with a translation by poet Gary Snyder from 1978.

Here’s a rather basic version from earlier in the book:

Empty mountain: no man is seen,
But voices of men are heard.
Sun’s reflection reaches into the woods
And shines upon the green moss.

His assignment to us was to “make four lines, or for sentences, or four syntactic units based on these indications of the Chinese original.” That is, using the matrix and this basic version of the poem, translate the poem from a clunky to a more elegant English.

The poem itself raises a number of questions. What does it mean? Who, if anyone, is its subject? The Chinese characters don’t assign for the same kind of subjectivity that the English language does, nor do they provide a distinction between singular and plural. The poem is classically Buddhist in its philosophy, and Hyde described a colleague who wondered if “the mind-states of Buddhism can even be accurately captured in English.” So the challenge of translating “Deer Park” is a vexing one.

Nevertheless, I gave it a shot and produced two attempts. As we read the basic translation together in class and discussed it, Hyde emphasized the word “empty” as being critical to the understanding of the poem. The mountain was empty, yet there was a presence of some kind, both in voice and in light from above. Putting the word first made me kind of read past it, and I wanted to give it more emphasis:

The mountains are empty. No one is seen
but some are heard.
Light returns to the forest,
reflecting the colorful mosses in the trees.

So “empty” now has more presence, so to speak. “No one” / “some” seems, in a way, more disembodied than “no man.” The matrix includes the idea of light “returning,” but it was not in our basic translation, and I wanted to reintroduce it as I liked its cyclical implications. Instead of choosing a single color option for the moss (green, blue, black), I opted for “colorful,” and left the reader to picture it for themselves. Finally, while the basic translation and others from Weinberger’s book have the moss on the ground, I always pictured it in the trees, accentuating the wind as it did when I visited Savannah, Georgia many years ago. A Japanese speaker in our class also guessed that the moss was in the trees, and Gary Snyder’s version includes this reading as well.

I had a bit of time to continue working on the poem, so I attempted another draft that pushed it a bit further and took some bigger risks:

The mountains, the hills: all empty, with no one in sight.
Yet voices can be heard in the distance.
At the close of day, the forest is filled again with sunlight,
shining through the blue-green mosses in the trees.

You could go on and on, it’s a wonderful poem that just keeps unfolding as you go.

Orwellian shepherds

For the second exercise, we turned to translating English-to-English in terms of tone. Hyde began by sharing this example from George Orwell’s famous essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Here is a Bible verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

And here is Orwell’s “modern English” translation of the same verse:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Our assignment was to “translate the 23rd Psalm into Orwell’s modern English.” As a refresher, here is part of the 23rd Psalm:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul… Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

And here is my attempt at the translation:

Guidance is essential to the reduction of anxiety. Leadership, too, has been shown to relax and restore subjects to a more focused and productive state. Even in late adulthood, or in convalescence, hospice, and other situations, subjects whose lives have been touched by strong guidance and leadership have noted a positive — even comforting — effect.

Depressing and eye-opening all at the same time. But a thoroughly challenging exercise to be sure. My fellow workshop members handled it in a dazzlingly wide range of ways, all of which were great, and we all felt we learned a lot. Hyde’s new book, which I’m thoroughly enjoying and definitely recommend, is called Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership — do check it out.

RE: Sottsass

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 19:03:03 -0400

A serious history of co-optation

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 12:26:49 -0400

From Thomas Frank’s intriguing book The Conquest of Cool, which I’m beginning to think of as some kind of secret Mad Men handbook:

It is more than a little odd that, in this age of nuance and negotiated readings, we lack a serious history of co-optation, one that understands corporate thought as something other than a cartoon. Co-optation remains something we vilify almost automatically; the historical particulars which permit or discourage co-optation—or even the obvious fact that some things are co-opted while others are not—are simply not addressed. Regardless of whether the co-opters deserve our vilification or not, the process by which they make rebel subcultures their own is clearly an important element of contemporary life. And while the ways in which business anticipated and reacted to the youth culture of the 1960s may not reveal much about the individual experiences of countercultural participants, examining them closely does allow a more critical perspective on the phenomenon of co-optation, as well as on the value of certain strategies of cultural confrontation, and, ultimately, on the historical meaning of the counterculture.

To begin to take co-optation seriously is instantly to discard one of the basic shibboleths of sixties historiography. As it turns out, many in American business, particularly in the two industries studied here, imagined the counterculture not as an enemy to be undermined or a threat to consumer culture but as a hopeful sign, a symbolic ally in their own struggles against the mountains of dead-weight procedure and hierarchy that had accumulated over the years. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, leaders of the advertising and menswear businesses developed a critique of their own industries, of over-organization and creative dullness, that had much in common with the critique of mass society which gave rise to the counterculture. Like the young insurgents, people in more advanced reaches of the American corporate world deplored conformity, distrusted routine, and encouraged resistance to established power. They welcomed the youth-led cultural revolution not because they were secretly planning to subvert it or even because they believed it would allow them to tap a gigantic youth market (although this was, of course, a factor), but because they perceived in it a comrade in their own struggles to revitalize American business and the consumer order generally. If American capitalism can be said to have spent the 1950s dealing in conformity and consumer fakery, during the decade that followed, it would offer the public authenticity, individuality, difference, and rebellion.

If we really want to understand American culture in the sixties, we must acknowledge at least the possibility that the co-opters had it right, that Madison Avenue’s vision of the counterculture was in some ways correct.

More of the introductory essay is here. Michael Bierut also touches on the book as part of his post about adman Jerry Della Famina here.

So much more than the world could offer

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:04:00 -0400

From historian Daniel Boorstin’s introduction to The Image, his book from 1961:

When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect — we even demand — that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio as we drive to work and expect “news” to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press. Returning in the evening, we expect our house to not only shelter us, but to relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theater, and a bar. We expect our two-week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place; and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a faraway place. We expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night. We expect everybody to feel free to disagree, yet we expect everybody to be loyal, not to rock the boat or to take the Fifth Amendment. We expect everybody to believe deeply in his religion, yet not to think less of others for not believing. We expect our nation to be strong and great and vast and varied and prepared for every challenge; yet we expect our “national purpose” to be clear and simple, something that gives direction to the lives of nearly two hundred million people and yet can be bought in a paperback at the corner drugstore for a dollar.

We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for “excellence,” to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to go to a “church of our choice” and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be a God.

Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never have people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.

What comes from where and what that means

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 01:43:16 -0400

Wally Olins’s lecture “The Nation And The Brand And The Nation As A Brand” from 2007. It’s well worth watching all four parts.

Being available in response

Thu, 20 May 2010 01:25:00 -0400

Frank Chimero, a man full of good ideas, shared another one recently: a text playlist. Basically, it’s a selection of readings that he revisits on a regular basis, “almost a pep talk in text form,” as he describes it. Frank’s list included a ton of good stuff (I’ve done some thinking about “stock and flow” myself), and the wonderful Liz Danzico responded in kind with a great list of her own.

I’m still working on my list, but while I’m in the process of pulling it together I decided I had to share one reading that I’ve been revisiting a lot over the last few days. It’s from Lawrence Weschler’s incredible book Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, which is about the artist Robert Irwin. Chapter 15 is called “Being Available in Response,” which is also the name of a project initiated by Irwin.

The first time I read this chapter I nearly lept out of my chair — I got so excited I reread it three or four times right away.

Rather than trying to explain the project too much, though, I’ll let Irwin (and Weschler) tell you about it as they do in the book. Here’s Irwin:

“I just sort of let it be known that I was available, in a way like I’m saying it to you. I mean, I didn’t put out any ads or anything, but word got around. And you could be, let’s say, up at UCLA, and you’d say, ‘Well, let’s take advantage of that. We’ll have him come up and talk to the students.’ And that’s what I’d do. Or, ‘We’ll have him come up and do a piece on the patio.’ And I would just come up and do that.

“There’s an important distinction to be made here,” [Irwin] continued, “between organizing and proselytizing, on the one hand, and responding to interest, on the other. I was and continue to be available in response. I mean, I don’t stand on a corner and hand out leaflets. I’m not an evangelist. I’m not trying to sell anything. But on the other hand, if you ask me a question, you’re going to get a half-hour answer.’”

People scratched their heads. Weschler explains:

Irwin was availble in response but for a long time nobody asked. Nobody knew what to make of the offer, and Irwin was no help: he didn’t have a clue. “Curators would ask me, ‘If we invite you, what are you going to do?’ and I would have to say, ‘Well, I don’t know what I’m going to do; I’ll just spend some time there and then decide.’ […] In other words, we had no connection, because they kept needing something tangible, and I kept saying, ‘I don’t know,’ which also put into these situations the possibility of failure. I could go to the Walker Museum, let’s say, and they’d set up an exhibition with all their catalogues and press releases and everything, and there was a risk that when I got there, I wouldn’t be able to come up with anything.”

Though it was slow to gain momentum, Irwin’s idea eventually caught on. Weschler continues:

[…] By 1972–73, enthusiasm had soared to such an extent that Irwin was almost continually on the raod, wending his way through labrynthine tours, travelling weeks on end, for example, from one small midwestern college to another. […] At each stop he might stay a week, talk with students, contrive an installation, stir things up, and then be gone. For many young art students in the vast middle reaches of this continent during the pale middle reaches of the past decade, Irwin’s roadshow constintuted a first exposure to significant strains of modernism and minimalism.

The trips also grounded Irwin:

“The ideas I came to be dealing with during this period were getting real obscure, even for me, to the point where I was beginning to wonder what and how I practiced in the world. There were some critics who from a political perspective attacked that obscurity as a kind of elitism. […] To me, the crucial difference between obscurantism and elistism is availability.”

He charged nothing for his visits:

“I do things which from any social or political view are outrageous. I mean, they absolutely ignore all the social issues of the day. […] But my way of balancing that out is that there’s one thing I can do that has immediate social value, and that has been this kind of running around and talking with people. So I do that for free. Because I don’t want to put economics on it at all.”

Lined & Unlined

The spectral mimicry of things said to the mind

Time Warp

SPRAYPAINT, painted

New essay for Graphic Design: Now in Production

Identity and the arts: A talk at Artists Space

Discussing entrepreneurship

Introducing Otlet's Shelf

Transition to Tumblr

Enter Otlet’s Shelf

Trading fours

A message from the Open Reading Group

A fragile glass couldn’t help but break

A ton in ash

Branding & Visual Studies: Foundations and Research

Class 1: Myths and meanings

Class 2: Taxonomies

Class 3: Clarity and confusion

Classes 4 & 5: Practitioner groups

Classes 6 & 7: Market sectors

Class 8: Futures

Further readings and resources

Fair Trade

On "symbolic creativity"

A workshop with Lewis Hyde

Self-discovery

Translating English to English

Obama’s rug

Ways of looking at Wang Wei

Orwellian shepherds

RE: Sottsass

A serious history of co-optation

So much more than the world could offer

What comes from where and what that means

Being available in response