Nonnus

A Worthwhile Motto

Rivington Arms will close after its final show on January 25th. Known for showing very young artists, the gallery was owned by Melissa Bent and Mirabelle Marden (both of whom remain quite young themselves).

Artists formerly represented by Rivington Arms include the group Lansing-Dreiden and Dash Snow. Snow, of course, has been celebrated as the return of the bohemian superstar artist. Lansing-Dreiden are a collaborative who have produced drawings, animated films, and music. 

Completely unrelated

Here's a worthwhile motto we came across: "Your life will be rich if you study and critique what you love. Get to know what you love. And then do what you know."

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Best Music of 2008

Here's our (Matt's) favorite listening of the year; not in order.

The Reveries, Matchmakers, Vol. 1: The Music of Willie Nelson (Rat-Drifting)

The Reveries play with modified cell phone speakers in their mouths. The band's label explains: "Ryan Driver's voice and sometimes the drum machine go through Eric Chenaux's mouth. Eric's guitar goes through Doug's mouth, and Doug's guitar or saw goes through Ryan's mouth. The Reveries can then, by opening and closing their mouths, essentially play each others' instruments."

The Advisory Circle, Other Channels (Ghost Box)

The Advisory Circle is the work of musician Jon Brooks. Everything from this label (including the video above) combines vernacular British modernism with the spirit of pre-scientific, non-rational weirdness. Late, recently historical, post-christian Britain is filtered through even more dusty attempts to suppress half-forgotten pagan assumptions about the world. Some critics have tried to see in this label's excellent, nearly sui generis output a new genre they've dubbed "hauntology."

Hair Police, Certainty of Swarms (No Fun)

Sickening noise rock from Lexington, Kentucky. Feedback with blown-out, fuzzy whispering and dry heaving. HP has been aptly compared to the innovative scariness of Wolf Eyes, Double Leopards and the noisiest bits of Black Dice. Less rythmic, and not nearly as funny as the family of Providence bands Mindflayer, Lightning Bolt and Forcefield.  

Bonnie Prince Billy, Lie Down in the Light (Drag City), and Bonnie Prince Billy, July 26th at Funtown in Jeffersontown, Kentucky.

Lucky Dragons, Dream Island Laughing Language (Marriage)

Dream Island is a 2008 release, but view this five minute documentary about Lucky Dragon's ongoing project "Make a Baby" (performed earlier this year at the Whitney Biennial) to get a sense for what they're about and how they sound:

CD-R and Cassette Labels

Capitalism eats itself; everything solid melts into air. So it's easy to understand why micro-edition labels are becoming more important as musicians, listeners, and the market give the tall finger to business people (so-called artists included) who think music needs big distributors and labels. It's becoming axiomatic to say that the more difficult a recording is to get, the better it is likely to be. We bought our first CD-Rs (Elvish Presley and Bullroarer) from Massive Distribution way back in 2002. Elvish Presley still gets spun all the time.

House of Alchemy 

American Grizzly

Digitalis & Foxglove 

Massive Distribution

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Extra-Liturgical Sacred Art & the Modern World

Roger Lipsey describes Ananda Coomaraswamy's view of contemporary culture (please forgive the long quote):

"It would be useful to consider whether Coomaraswamy was a conservative, and if so, whether his conservatism impedes our contemporary strivings. Certainly his single-minded interest in traditional religious art, and the psychology of the artists and patrons who needed it, was conservative and backward-looking. He viewed the modern world as a cul-de-sac. Yet he wished very much for a bright continuation to culture. It was this that gave him so much energy to examine the artistic principles and forms of the premodern world. He had, I think, very little hope for the modern world, yet he acted as if he could contribute to a splendid new day. In this paradox is the man: his mind told him that the truth of the Vedic rishis, the severe psychology and compassionate teachings of the Buddha, the clear light of Plato, the visionary grandeur of Plotinus, the Christian insight into God's intimacy with man—that all of these, and the arts that expressed them, are dead letters in the modern world. But his writings betray hope that these things could be assimilated. In his wish that we 'somehow get back to first principles'—particularly in the disarmed simplicity of the phrase, which he used at times—it can be recognized that he did not know what sort of change it is."[1]

This must be similar to how Shakespeare understood the progress, strivings and innovations of the Renaissance. But I wonder just the littlest bit if Lispey might not be projecting modern, teleological notions about history onto Coomaraswamy. As we hope to show, Shakespeare, like the premodern practitioners of sacred art, did not concern himself with historical progression or identify with contemporary strivings. The sacred artist is, instead, concerned with microcosmic progress, sanctification, or (gag) transformation on an individual level.

First we need to clear the air of any presumed notions of historical-dialectical progress toward a pure, abstract Idea. Only then can we can begin to see what the world looked like from Shakespeare's point of view. At the turn of the 17th Century, England was desperately provincial, European power was centered in Italy, Spain and France. This afforded Shakespeare the ability to set his dramas where the action was, while maintaining a distanced, reflective introspection. Such balance is the stuff of reality. The momentary, heady sensation of power (or an association with power) is not real. Locating a solid, unmovable nobility of spirit, transcending power and poverty, in the middle of life's storms and dramas is the subject of Shakespeare's work. This nobility is premodern code (a symbol) for what we so weakly describe as "salvation," "enlightenment," "spritual transformation," or worst of all, psychological stasis (as in Freud's familiar description of therapy: turning "hysterical misery into common unhappiness").[2]

But while deification, or the intrinsic nobility of the human soul, is Shakespeare's subject, he never presents it as a didactic gospel. Unlike a sermon, a great work of sacred art balances the spiritual and the physical in order to demonstrate, to show—rather than tell, argue for, or teach—what an intellectual understanding of a physical world penetrated with spirit looks, feels, sounds and tastes like. Where a sermon or lecture is didactic, in other words, art is symbolic. Art's function, and the function of Shakespeare's art, is "not so much to define spiritual wisdom as to give us a taste of that wisdom, each according to his capacity."[3]

For example, the symbolic meaning of traditional craft under Christendom compensated for

"the unilateral pressure of Christian morality, fundamentally ascetic as it is, by manifesting divine truths in a light that is relatively non-moral and in any case non-volative: it sets up against the sermon which insists on what must be done by one who would become holy, a vision of the cosmos which is holy through its beauty; it makes men participate naturally and almost involuntarily in the world of holiness."[4]

Premodern civilizations accepted the spiritual, the holy, as a given. They accepted the next world, the next life, as real. This world was understood to be shrouded in illusion. Whether we take Christendom, Platonism, traditional Buddhism or Islam as exemplary of a traditional worldview, this world, this life, is seen as a shadow of the next. William Blake echoed a traditional perspective when he claimed that "when the windows of perception are cleansed, man will see the universe as it truly is—infinite."

A recurring theme in Shakespeare's plays is that of the banished nobleman. In The Tempest, Prospero is banished from Milan, in Measure for Measure, the Duke is banished from Vienna. Similarly, the hero of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, is caught between his murdered father, the king, and his uncle the usurper. Kings and princes throughout the Bard's work represent "the human soul on its way through purification."[5] In most cases, the king represents the old, fallen soul that has withstood the horrors of persecution in Hell. The Prince must find his way through Purgatory to his rightful throne—in symbolic terms, of course, the soul.

Since the advent of modernism in the Renaissance, knowledge has been divorced from submission, humility and ecstatic understanding. Western civilization exchanged unity and ecstasy for control and power. According to Seyyed Nasr, knowledge was always associated with ecstasy. Principial knowledge is ecstatic (as opposed to cooly rational and controlled), because it unified the knower with the known. The highest form of knowledge cannot be separated from freedom, liberation and salvation ("You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free"). So, while ecstasy was traditionally associated with carefully ritualized experiences of the sacred, the set-apart, the holy, and the transcendent, the modern world is characterized by the loss of anything sacred. Where a form of holiness is retained it's dissociated from knowledge—it becomes a matter of "faith" or "belief," but never knowledge. In the same way, the ecstatic has been secularized.[6]

The modern, rational world suppresses the mysterious, the uncontrollable, but it does not obliterate it. For evidence of this fact we have to look only as far as the Romantics, Surrealists, the psychology of Carl Jung or any other artistic or cultural form concerned with the breakdown of neat separations between reason and the irrational, interpreting dream-states or the "subconscious." One of our greatest translators of the non-rational is Walter Benjamin. Benjamin, whose masterpiece is the unfinished Arcades Project (which takes up shopping as a new source of mystery and fulfillment; the Arcades were an early form of the shopping mall), sees in the dominance of capitalism "not simply an awakening of our technological and rational powers," but also a "new dream-filled sleep." A 'commodity trance' replaced the 'ecstatic trance' known by the ancients."[7]

Similarly, William Shakespeare:

"wrote his plays as Europe was shaking off the animistic and magical beliefs of the past. Some of his most memorable moments seem like a public staging of this transition—for example, Prospero breaking his staff and giving up his powers at the end of The Tempest. 'Drama is born in the renunciation of magic,' wrote the critic Northrup Frye, 'and in The Tempest and elsewhere it remembers its inheritance.'"[8]

[1] Roger Lipsey, ed., Coomaraswamy, Volume 1: Traditional Art and Symblolism (Bollingen Series: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. xxxv.
[2] Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer, Nicola Luckhurst, Rachel Bowlby, Studies in Hysteria (New York: Penguin Classics, 1952, 2004), p. 306.
[3] Lings, The Sacred Art of Shakespeare, 194
[4] Titus Burckhardt, Sacred Art in East and West: Principles and Methods (Bedfont, Middlesex: Perennial Books, Ltd.), pp. 45-46
[5] Martin Lings, The Sacred Art of Shakespeare: To Take Upon Us the Mystery of Things (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions), 172. The entire argument about nobility comes from this wisest of commentaries on Shakespeare's work.
[6] S.H. Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989).
[7] Daniel Pinchbeck, Breaking Open the Head (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), p.63. See also, Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2002).
[8] ibid, p.64.

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Tradition, Modernism and the Contemporary

Back in June, Jeff wrote:

Am I to understand that Jesus' understanding of children in first-century A.D. Palestinian Judaism is “premodern” in precisely the same way as Thomas's 12th century Medieval understanding of children, innocence, and humility? That, for me, is a bit of a stretch. The modern view of children is certainly not the same as Thomas’s, but neither is Thomas’s view of children necessarily the same as Jesus’.

This got us thinking about tradition, modernity, modernism and the contemporary. What are the basic ways in which Western Europe of the 12th century was much like first-century Palestine? And how can we put most clearly and simply the huge difference between both eras and our own?

First, tradition and modernity have long been seen as fundamental units of measure in the social sciences.

"Anthropologists and other social scientists have tended to view our own kind of society—complex, interdependent, large-scale, industrialized, in short modern—as a special case in the history of the world's societies." [1]

This macro-level difference between all traditional societies, on the one hand, and modernity, on the other, doesn't register much in modern hermeneutics' use of historical "contexts" or "backgrounds."

When interpreting a text, we impose a modern interpretation on what we call a historical period. These "historical periods" are in almost every case traditional societies with their own complex organization. Many religious historians call these traditional societies' most fundamental principle of organization a "wisdom tradition." Modernity's closest equivalent to a wisdom tradition is the legacy of instrumental reason, empiricism, a homocentric (vs. theocentric) cosmology, and a thoroughly humanistic artistic and cultural logic.

Religious historian Seyyed Hossein Nasr puts this point of view succinctly:

"I use the term modernism rather than modernity. It is a philosophy, a worldview that grew during the Renaissance in the West, and gradually became the dominant force. It is characterized by a number of elements that are very distinct. One is rationalism, that is, the prevalence of human reason as the ultimate determining factor for knowing anything." [2]

For someone whose contextual and interpretive framework is thoroughly modern, understanding any part of a traditional society requires immersion, if not full participation, in the philosophical and spiritual framework—the life—of that traditional civilization.

The great art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy saw that the art of “Hindu, Buddhist, medieval Christian and Muslim, and many other premodern sources appeared to be an expression of truth, truth decidedly more complete, intellectual and moving than such truth as he generally found in Western art since the death of Leonardo. Furthermore, he did not see these traditional cultures as fundamentally opposed to each other in their conceptions of truth, although their means of expression and their emphasis differed considerably.” [3]

The medieval, Christian historical context of Thomas Aquinas and the Roman-Jewish context of Jesus were both traditional in the anthropological and religious senses of the word. Our own context is clearly not traditional in any sense.

In our next post we hope to look at Shakespeare as a transitional figure straddling the medieval and modern eras. While Dante is perhaps the most exemplary artist operating within the Christian tradition, Shakespeare's work is deeply informed by Christianity while representing a new, extra-liturgical, (and, thus, modern?) form of sacred art.

[1] John Monaghan and Peter Just, Social and Cultural Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2000), p. 66
[2] "The Sacred World of the Other: An interview with Seyyed Hossein Nasr," Parabola vol. 30: issue 4, Winter 2005, p. 32
[3] Roger Lipsey, ed., Coomaraswamy, Volume 1: Traditional Art and Symblolism (Princeton, 1977), p. xxxiv.

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Books, Magazines, Craft & Permanence

Interview magazine has just been redesigned and relaunched. It was visually very worthwhile as recently as the '80s, when Tibor Kalman designed it. But the magazine's intrinsic topicality has caused it to begin to lose readers to the internet. Editorial director Fabien Baron writes the following in the September issue:

"Magazines have changed. Today the Internet does what magazines used to do. They give you the news, the flash, the buzz. Today a good magazine is more like what a book was in the past. I think that what we're doing is going against that instant, disposable thing. I think we are offering something with real craftsmanship, with a very high level of work coming from many people."

Baron uses the word "craftsmanship" here to mean "a high level of work." But that's not what many of us think when we hear "craft." Of late, the word implies craft fairs, ReadyMade magazine and Etsy.com. It sounds harsh, but craft has come to mean handmade junk. A less-than-high level of work coming from, most often, one person. Contemporary craft culture is about conspicuous idiosyncracy, not the excellence or seriousness of the work.

Charles Eames knew the difference between junk and valuable objects had nothing to do with whether an artifact was made by hand. This is from over thirty-five years ago:

"How do you design a chair for acceptance by another person? By not thinking of what the other guy wants. . . we're a hell of a lot more like each other than we're different. . . . The trap is that if you try to satisfy your idiosyncrasies, those little things on the surface, you're dead, because it is in those idiosyncrasies that you're different from other people. And in a sense what gives a work of craft its personal style is usually where it failed to solve the problem rather than where it solved it. . . What you try to do is satisfy your real gut instincts and work your way through your idiosyncracies." [1]

Compare that first line (How do you design a chair for acceptance by another person? By not thinking of what the other guy wants) to the more common culture industry spume we hear these days. This is from the current issue of Poets & Writers magazine:

"What makes Billy Collins one of America's best-known (and best-selling) poets? Perhaps it's his attention to what matters most—his audience."

That's right, his audience matters most. Not his art, not his gut instincts, his audience. Poets & Writers goes on to emphasize Collins's popularity, and the fact that every book he's published with Random House has sold in the six figures, "huge for any book and monumental for poetry."

This brings us right back to Fabien Baron's notion that "today a good magazine is more like what a book was in the past. I think that what we're doing is going against that instant, disposable thing." Interview's publisher knew, like the daily newspapers know, that they will lose the battle for readers (and advertisers) if they continue to push more merely popular, disposable fare. A good magazine is more like what a book was. So what makes a good book? It goes without saying, but the criterion is the same. The superficial marketing of idiosyncracy may increase sales in the short run, but it's a fool's game—building on sand—to go after the immediate sale without pursuing permanence. Are we in the business for the sake of culture, or are we into "culture" because it's good business?

In closing, let's reprise this, from Jason Epstein:

“Book publishing is not a conventional business. It more closely resembles a vocation or an amateur sport in which the primary goal is the activity itself rather than its financial outcome.” And, "literature, like all religions, is also a business, though not a very good business.” [2]

[1] Kevin Jackson, ed. Schrader on Schrader & Other Writings (London: Faber, 1990), p. 98
[2] Jason Epstein, Book Business, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), p. 4, 59

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Understanding Jeff Koons

(updated September 13, 2008)

What does it mean that almost everyone responds to the work of Jeff Koons in the same way: "I hate it," we say, "but it seems worth paying attention to." Or, "It makes me sick, but he's the artist we deserve."

These assessments are right as far as they go, but they don't explain much. So let's look a little further. Why does this stuff makes us ill? And what is it about the monumental, manufactured sculptures that tell us something worthwhile about the multifaceted idea of "surface"?

First, Koons makes us uncomfortable because he holds up a mirror to our understanding of self, status, class and what is most often referred to in the language of the social sciences as both elite and mass "societies."

In a series of vacuum cleaners displayed in plexiglass with flourescent lights, for example, Koons is confronting the viewer with the nearly inescapable attachment we feel to new commodities and consumer goods (both high and low—the Hoovers have, after all been elevated like Duchamp's readymades to the status of fine art). But the effect is more than an awareness of our misplaced desire. When the objects are placed in the contemplative context of the museum or gallery, we become aware of our confusion of new, clean, unused objects with the eternal and the transcendent. Koons draws our attention to the fact that even the most spiritually expert among us are caught in a cycle of commodified obsolescence. Our desire for even the most spiritual values are understood in material terms. His choice of vacuum cleaners is significant because they resemble the human body. They are, as the artist points out, machines that breathe.[1] And when placed on their backs in airtight plexiglass box, they become an abstraction of ourselves suspended outside of time—beautiful, pristine and exalted, but dead.

In these very early works (the pieces in the vacuum cleaner series—called "Pre-New and New"—are from 1979-1987), Koons is already indicating that he is addressing his work to both a museum-going public and the collector and art-world elites. The encased, supine Hoovers work on the viewer whether or not we are aware of the references to Marcel Duchamp, Dan Flavin or minimalism. Koons puts it explicitly when he declaims, with a salesman's grin, "When under economic pressure, you start to see disintegration around you. Things do not remain orderly. So I have always placed order in my work not out of respect for minimalism, but to give the viewer a sense of economic security."[2]

References like this one to economic status are self-consciously crass. They indicate another way Koons's work makes us uneasy, namely how closely his persona is linked to the work. When the artist discusses his art, he's performing a complex ruse, speaking for his own work the way a huckster would—with a patent, slippery dishonesty. He can say that his references to minimalism are actually a concern for his audience's sense of economic insecurity, but obvious allusions to Flavin's colored flourescent bulbs in Hoover Celebrity III (1980) or Toaster (1979) remain. Why play this game? The answer contains the secret to what makes Koons's art unpleasant but important.

Duchamp is to modern and contemporary art what Koons is to Duchamp. The elder artist performed his role as a trickster (with his allies among the Surrealists and Dadaists), successfully altering the course of modern art's central teleologies when they were taken too far or became too monolithic. Koons does the opposite by halting the normal changes, progressions, evolutions and devolutions in art's ongoing cultural history. The younger artist doesn't contribute to visual culture so much as reify the ideas that appear to be already governing contemporary art's trajectory.

The story of modern art told by many historians and critics posits the potential for a "pure art." Like Kant's pure reason (reason applied to itself with no other subject), pure art was art that referred only to itself.[3] Paintings as far back as the abstract expressionists tended toward the subject-less and non-representational, and later toward the even more abstract notion of a "color field," in order to call attention to the flat plane of the canvas. Art that was most clearly itself (meaning its material elements) was best. Duchamp and his followers spoil this materialist notion of pure art by allowing mundane objects like urinals, bottle racks, bicycle seats and, our personal favorite, a miter box-with-plumbing, called "God," into the sacred space of the gallery.

The story of modern art as no more than the evolution of abstraction is an ideology, making Duchamp and his friends subverters of a simple ideological doctrine. But Koons, and what art historian Hal Foster calls his "commodity sculpture," underminines meaning itself. Foster quotes Jean Baudrillard approvingly: "ideology only corresponds to a betrayal of reality by signs; simulation corresponds to a short-circuit of reality and its reduplication by signs."[4] Duchamp substitutes art with non-art, correcting overblown values given to "fine" or "high" art. Koons attempts to turn art into nothing more than its commodity value. He impishly reinforces our tendency to reduce all value to the quantifiable. He conflates the illusion of transcendence (shiny surfaces) with the real thing, the sentimental appeal of kitsch and folk art with actual spirituality.

Koons's series "Statuary, Kiepenkerl"—which includes what is perhaps his most famous sculpture, Rabbit, from 1986—introduces surface and monumental scale to kitsch in order to confront the viewer with the difficult matter of taste. Like religion, politics and money, class and taste are not polite subjects. These sculptures, including an oversized, stainless steel Bob Hope, a duplicated Louis XIV-era bust, and an enlarged figurine depicting a German market peddler, all undermine the possibility of ambitious art with kitsch. As we have seen, this inversion is not equivalent to the upending the ideology of modernism with dada or surrealist pranks. Those subversions were prosecuted at the highest levels. They were low tricks with very high purpose. Koons's shiny rabbit purports to be elevating the lowest of intentions to the heights of cutural refinement. The artist's project is to flatten culture. Reducing the discussion of values, and what were once quaintly referred to as qualities, to the vulgar arbitration of taste.

"Taste develops," Walter Benjamin tells us, "when commodity production clearly surpasses any other kind of production." And, "the more industry progresses, the more perfect are the imitations it offers the market. A profane glimmer makes the commodity phosphorescent; this has nothing in common with the semblance that produces its 'theological niceties."[5] Koons has said that his rabbit sculpture is like a speech-making politician, and if he were to rename Rabbit, he would call it The Great Masturbator. The refinement of surface and the use of monumental scale are both traditional methods used to refer to actual spiritual values—scale corresponding to greatness or nobility of spirit, and translucence symbolizing clarity admitting an inner light. For Jeff Koons these qualitative values are not now and never were real. His carrot-eating rabbit is meant to equate such values with the lowest possible rituals and charades.

[1] Francesco Bonami, ed.,Jeff Koons (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2008), p. 26.
[2] ibid., 28.
[3] see Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton University Press, 1997).
[4] Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 105.
[5] Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard, 2006), 131.

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Surveying Peter Doig

Back in 2003 we wrote this for Shift Japan about a Peter Doig exhibition at the Arts Club of Chicago. At the time, there had been very few survey shows dedicated to Doig's work. But now that a full-scale retrospective is touring (organized by Tate Britain, and currently at the ARC/Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris), we thought we'd revisit the subject of Doig's great paintings.

Included in our April 2003 review was the following:

"the very traditional subject of Doig's paintings—they're almost all landscapes—is given new life through a relentless varying of style which could really only be imagined after an era of appropriationist referencing had run its course."

Several months later, Matthew Higgs wrote the following in Artforum:

"Doig's melancholic works—invariably landscapes—were anathema to the visceral theatrics and conceptual endgames of much '90s art. However, Doig's persistent engagement with painting's potential to describe or imagine pictorial realms outside of, or just beyond, those of our rational world can be seen as both prescient and increasingly pervasive: Echoes of his folksy and often unrepentant romantic "realism" can be found in the work of his near-contemporaries Verne Dawson, Kai Althoff, Daniel Richter, Elizabeth Magill, and Laura Owens, among others" (Artforum, XLII, no. 2, October 2003, p. 168).

Indeed, much of the joy in Doig's work comes through entirely despite the fact that the his source material is photographic (providing what would normally come across as a pretentiously conceptual "representation of a representation of the real"). "Romantic realism," even "folksy," describe this work perfectly, and Higgs's comparison to Dawson Althoff, Owens, et al is also terribly apt. The quality of the work produced by Doig and his contemporaries explains why painting in the early aughts came to be seen as an effective response to the anxious endgames of art in the '90s. (Painting, still very popular among collectors, has only recently given way among curators to the fashionableness of assemblage- and installation- sculpture).

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GTF at the AIC

Graphic Thought Facility is a graphic design studio based in London. Founded in 1990 by three graduates of the Royal College of Art, the work produced by GTF over the last two decades can be seen as exemplary of the kind of design that would be copied, aped, mimicked and stolen from by the rest of us.

Graphic design in the twentieth century can be grouped into two very rough groups. Through the first half of the century, designers' presentation of graphic information moved toward being determined by rational guidelines and minimal, "pure geometries." Swiss design's familiar gridded organizations and sans-serif type created a clean, formal structure that distanced the look of contemporary graphics from the heavily ornamented look of 19th Century Victorian and Art Nouveau graphic, industrial and architectural design.

Toward the end of the last century, designers began to play with visual elements and production techniques in a way that utilized strict formalisms if only for the sake of upending them. Parts of the outmoded, but comfortingly comprehensive systems of modernism were used, while gleefully transgressing many of its limiting strictures. (Contemporary examples of the joys of adhering closely to the spirit of mid-century modernism can be found in the work of the Dutch firm Experimental Jetset and the web site AisleOne.)

In the sixties and seventies, psychedelic, punk and DIY-style graphics broke all remaining rules, revelling in graphics that flaunted bad composition along with excessive color and ornament. In the wake of this bacchanalian spirit of rule breaking, great designers like Peter Saville and Tibor Kalman, picked and chose at will from  numerous historical styles in order to create designs with contemporary resonance that also emphasized the craft of design. And this is where studios like GTF come in.

Some ten years ago now, in 1998, GTF designed a catalog for the Royal College of Art using a low-budget pastiche of photocopies, post-it notes and illustrations. The look was slightly modified a year later when they designed the exhibition graphics and catalog for Stealing Beauty: British Design Now at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. This time handwritten questionaires were included with photos and illustrations on pages of varying trim sizes and paper weights and finishes, all held together with a simple plastic spiral binding, giving the book a rudimentary, custom-made appearance.

Drawing attention to the "craft" of graphic design became a more central part of GTF's method in 2000, when they began work on the identity for British retailer Habitat. The most conspicuous part of their work for Habitat is the logo and its use of a modified Fry's Baskerville (they elongated the letterforms and exagerrated the serifs slightly). This is where many of us are still locating a sense of graphic contemporaneity: in the subtle use of classic, familiar typefaces in restrained, but hopefully unexpected contexts. Gone are the slick photo-collages and futuristic typography. GTF's work for the Frieze Art Fair (2004-07) and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre (2003-06) are perfect examples of this tendency.

For the Frieze Art Fair, the studio updated a modern-looking slab serif typeface to look like a stencil, and placed it on commissioned photography of Regent's Park, where the Fair is held for four days each year. The effect is to emphasize the ephemerality of the event. Similarly, GTF's work for Shakespeare's Globe Theatre utilizes wonderfully conservative type treatments over candid-looking back-stage photographs of actors in 16th century costume and theatre-goers peering up at actors feet on stage.

"Graphic Thought Facility" was organized by and presented at the Art Institute of Chicago from March 27 to August 17, 2008. The accompanying catalog, with an essay by Zoë Ryan (whose history this post follows very closely!), is published by the Art Institute and distributed by Yale University Press.

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Edward Ruscha's Artist's Books

Edward Ruscha is often thought of as an iconic California artist. His art is democratic and very American. A few of the most familiar subjects of Ruscha's paintings and photographs are Standard gas stations, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and a place called Norm's Diner—all reproduced multiple times, and occasionally set on fire. He also returned repeatedly to the Hollywood sign and the 20th Century Fox logo.


Dave Hickey, a critic similarly insistent on democratising art in the '60s, points out that by figuratively setting Standard Oil, Norm's Diner and museums on fire, Ruscha's intention was to symbolically dismantle the hierarchical, institutional arbiters of "standards and norms." Ruscha, to his credit, never stated things so bluntly. His interest is in representing words, gas stations, wonder bread, palm trees, swimming pools and art museums in simple, multiple, ways.


A truly populist pop artist, Ruscha's early role models were his dad, Walt Disney and Norman Rockwell. But while he often employs a sign painter's or pinstriper's careful lettering techniques, Ruscha is not a craftsman. His word paintings have as much in common with a Lawrence Weiner as a car by Ed Roth or Von Dutch. As Hickey puts it elsewhere, "Ruscha's iconography arises from the intersection of cultural and autobiographical metaphor."[1]


The symbolic center of Ruscha's work is his series of artist's books. They, too, are modest, unimpressive objects, populist in spirit. Their subjects include the familiar, Twentysix Gas Stations (1963), and the banal: swimming pools, palm trees and "available real estate," serially presented with no explainations. His attitude seems to be "anybody can do it."


The books are meant to be flipped through, so that the reader creates his or her own sequence of photographs. Large editions and servicable, uninspired design, ensure that the books avoid being perceived as precious art objects. In this way, Ruscha follows some of John Cage's performances, the Happenings of Allan Kaprow and Fluxus events by employing the idea of going straight to the public with art that avoids the system of galleries and dealers. Ruscha has been credited with: "the idea of the book as a democratic, affordable, available multiple in which an artist is able to produce a vision and disseminate it widely."[2]


"Ed Ruscha and Photography" was on view at the Art Institute of Chicago March 1–June 1, 2008.


Ruscha on his books:

"It is not a book to house a collection of art photographs—they are technical data like industrial photography. To me, they are nothing more than snapshots.”


“I have eliminated all text from my books—I want absolutely neutral material. My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of “facts”; my book is more like a collection of Ready-mades.”


“All my books are identical. They have none of the nuances of the hand-made and crafted limited edition book. It is almost worth the money to have the thrill of seeing 400 exactly identical books stacked in front of you.”[3]



[1] The Works of Edward Ruscha (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2001), p.17

[2] Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists' Books (New York: Granary Books, 2004), p.78

[3] Artforum, February 1965 by way of Ubuweb


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Opening Day 2008

"Everywhere from Portland to Pawtucket, baseball's the same slow, sometimes stately, sometimes tedious game governed by extensive, complexly arbitrary rules, and practiced according to arcane, informal mores and runic vocabularies which compel that almost every act of play be routine. Even the great smashes, the balletic defensive turns, and the unparalleled pitching performances—by being so formally anticipated, so contemplated and longed-for by the fans—become ritual, even foregone. It's a Platonic game in this way, with all visible excellence (and even unexcellence) ratified by a prior scheme of invisible excellence which is the game itself." —Richard Ford, "A Minors Affair" Harper's Magazine, September 1992, p. 32

Richard Ford's idea is an elegant one. He sees baseball as a game without drama. It is a ritual performed for its own sake, with greater or lesser degrees of accuracy, or faithfulness to the underlying form. For that reason he claims to enjoy flawed, imperfect minor league games as much or more than Major League games performed at a high level. The simplicity of the Minors allows access to the form without flourish or distraction. It's an idea I'd like to test against the more conventional (or traditional) notion that formal perfection is the outworking of morality, the good. Without supposing that we watch baseball to be preached to, I prefer the conventional wisdom in this case.

It's why I'd like to work this season to deactivate the too-familiar notion that "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." This idea, attributed to Vince Lombardi, has a lot to do with why football has supplanted baseball as the most popular sport in this country. We're impatient for success. On the surface of it, football is less boring. But Lombardi, as every coach must, spent more time working for success than he spent actually succeeding.

As long as we describe sports as an "entertainment product," we undermine its core value. Sport is entertaining only as long as it is dramatic, and the drama of any game is a direct result of its participants need to work at success. Drama is not the result of promotional hype, generated enthusiasm or even an intense sense of vicarious participation through a rooting interest. The Red Sox success in 2004 was far more entertaining than the World Series win in '07 because the odds against it were so much greater. They had to work for it. As an audience, we were interested in the details of the team's success, and the drama was heightened.

It is precisely the boring parts of baseball that provide the spectator with time and distance enough to examine the dramatic arc of the actual contest: three-and-four hour games often played in 90-degree heat, over the course of a grueling six-month, 162-game season. Can atheletes earning annual salaries of twenty million dollars* remain motivated to work hard under such conditions?

A single-minded dedication to winning must be qualified by emphasizing the role of effort, discipline, will, and hard work. Winning must be demonstrated every day, not just in the playoffs. Whether or not an athlete has talent, we watch to see if he is capable of bringing the best of himself to the task. Has he enriched the quality of the game and himself by rising to increasingly difficult, specialized and nuanced challenges? Simply bringing one's talent to the contest at its broadest level—winning or losing—is not enough. We've all got to risk failing at increasingly higher levels. In sport and life, that means choosing one field of competition, and trying oneself at it over an extended period of time. That's what we learn from and enjoy. It's the source of excellence, whether we want dramatic "entertainment," great art, or nothing more than a tolerable quality of life and a sense of identity in our vocation, religion, family and friends.

*For the next eight years, 24-year-old Miguel Cabrera will earn an average of $19,000,000 per season playing for the Detroit Tigers. And Cabrera's is only the fourth-richest contract in Major League Baseball. Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter and Manny Ramirez all earn more.

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