College Art Association Session

I will be co-chairing a session with Alice Twemlow, School of Visual Arts at the College Art Association in New York City in February 2011. Our panel, “What’s Art Got to Do With It? Design Writing in the Twenty-First Century,” will include the presentations “Useless: Art History and a Taste for the Useful”—Cameron Tonkinwise and Shana Agids, Parsons The New School for Design; “Expanding Design Criticism”—Carma Gorman, Southern Illinois University Carbondale; “Design Journalism, Anonymity, and the Critical Audience”—Gerry Beegan, Rutgers University; “The Emerging Aesthetic of Ugly: Fabbing, Modding, Hacking, and the Power of DIY Interventions, an Assessment”—Kevin Henry, Columbia College Chicago; “Implosure”-- Kenneth Fitzgerald, Old Dominion University.

Notting Hill Tube Station Posters

Last spring, when an upgrade to London’s Notting Hill Gate Underground station uncovered an abandoned passageway filled with vintage posters from the late 1950s, the dingy, worn posters seemed an apt metaphor for the century-old medium itself.

 

courtesy London Underground

Made in Internet

Joe McKay, my colleague here at Purchase College, gives new meaning to the ubiquitous progress bar.  His contribution to Made In Internet, a showcase of short video forms created by web artists, gives new meaning to Purchase’s large, blank architectural spaces. 

 

Dansk House

Slipping under the radar is this landmark house, owned by Theodore D. Nierenberg, founder and president of Dansk, whose cookware, flatware and dinnerware embodied Scandinavian Modernism for many Americans. Listed at seven and a half million dollars, the house is here in Westchester County, in a neighborhood better known for the headquarters of IBM headquarters and massive McMansions.  Utterly unique, Nierenberg’s house was the only building planned by Dansk’s chief designer, Jens Quistgaard.

This just in from Kelsey Cyr- Is Art Nouveau really dead?

Facebook: The So Coal Network?

 

I'm always amazed how often we forget that the immaterial world is still solidly based on the material.  When Greenpeace began calling Facebook "The So Coal Network" last February, activists drew our attention to information infrastructures and the data centers that serve them.  Specifically, activists pointed to the energy sources being used at Facebook’s data center in Prineville, Oregon.  The New York Times profiled this problem last week, noting that the data center would be powered by PacifiCorp, a company that gets 58 percent of its energy from burning coal.  Is communication really becoming more ethereal? Perhaps.  But even in the age of global flows and digital networks, the entire system still relies on physical supports and real-world infrastructure.

Abel's Signs of the Times

I’ve just finished reading Elizabeth Abel’s Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (University of California Press, 2010). Spread across a vast region of the Southern United States, Jim Crow signage confirmed the remarginalization of African Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Abel does not consider these signs within a design tradition, but I do; for several years I’ve been collecting examples of miscellaneous “Whites Only” and “Colored This Way” signs.  When seen as part of a lost design history, they challenge us to reconsider our notions of design during this period.  Can these signs be considered a repressed underside to the work of Otl Aicher at the 1972 Summer Olympics at Munich or the AIGA’s sign symbol system for the US Department of Transportation? Only traces of these segregation signs remain today. After years of research, Abel notes that she has found roughly a hundred images of Jim Crow signs. I add this striking image, taken by Gordon Parks for Life magazine in 1956. 

Kid Made Modern Workshop

The weekend before last, we went to the Cooper Hewitt  Museum for “Kid Made Modern,” a hands on workshop with Todd Oldham, the hip clothing and furniture designer as well as television personality.  This was DIY for the third grade set.  Some naysayers told me that Oldham himself wouldn’t show up, but the effervescent designer not only lead the group, but really propelled the whole event. He was full of nothing but praise, encouraging the kids while distributing helpful advice.  I spent most of the time working with my eight-year-old daughter on a bike messenger bag made out of high performance Tyvek envelopes and colored duct tape.  I started to lose patience when the younger kids at my table had a lot of trouble cutting the duct tape so it wouldn’t crimp and crinkle, but Oldham came to the rescue, revealing a nice ripping action best executed with a forceful twist of the wrist.  Our finished bag looks like a cross between a Freitag bag and a home plumbing job. But the two people next to us (both adults) ended up with bags that Bloomingdales would be proud to sell. 

I congratulated Oldham on the success of the event and leafed through his recent publication, Kid Made Modern.  He assures me that the crafts in it use common household items—alas, we don’t have zebra print duct tape at home, but I suppose the standard grey kind would work too.  I was also interested to hear about OIdham’s latest project, a study of the mid-century designer Alexander Girard; indeed Oldham spent a chunk of time last summer at the Vitra Museum in Switzerland, working in their archives and learning more about the designer.

My only qualm about the event was how the project was marketed by the Cooper Hewitt.  Announcing that we’d be creating “modern design pieces from everyday and recycled materials,” I expected that we’d be using materials like used coffee cups and bicycle tires.  But when I got home, I started to wonder if I was being churlish.  And then I noticed a stack of old FedEx envelopes made of Tyvek; thanks to Oldham, what I was previously looking at as trash suddenly begun to look like the beginnings of an elementary school craft project. . .  

Another set back for the Segway?

When George Bush fell off his Segway in 2003, it seemed a kind of metaphor for the product. But now comes even worse news.  According to the New York Times website, Segway owner accidentally drove a Segway off a cliff in West Yorkshire.

When introduced, the Segway was claimed as a brilliantly designed product and supporters envisaged that mass use would return to us streets and public spaces that have been dominated by the automobile for almost a century.  

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/segway-owner-dies-in-segway-crash/?emc=eta1

 

Retro and Other Modern Rubbish

     
    Hearing the ring of a clanging bell from a phone is perhaps an unremarkable sound to us today. But what is unusual, or perhaps even perverse, is when the sound comes from a cellphone. In addition to its unusual ringtone, this “cellphone” looks like none other. 

     Sparkfun Electronics’s  “Port-O-Rotary,” is made from a derelict mid-century rotary desk phone; its original wiring has been removed and replaced with contemporary cellular technology, including a SIM card, miniature antenna, and lithium battery.  Though weighing close to two pounds and obviously bulky, it can be carried and used as a cellphone.

     What are we to make of such fetishization of the old and seemingly impractical? Of course the Port-O-Rotary is part of a consistent thread in contemporary design, one of housing new technologies in just slightly older yet already obsolete forms. Mashups of contemporary technology and retro packaging suggest how the past itself is “repurposed” for the present. 

     Certainly, the Port-O-Rotary is intended to amuse--as its advertising states: “The looks from family, friends, and even bartenders as the Portable Rotary Phone rings for the first time have given us endless amounts of entertainment.”[i] Beyond the mere sight gag, however, the Port-O-Rotary is part of a growing number of repurposed objects that constitute a new type of memorial in the information age.
 

MacAquarium