Design is Play

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Fox/BlackDog Acquired by LACMA

©DesignisPlay Mark Fox Posters

Two posters Mark designed in the 1990’s were recently acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of the Marc Treib Collection. Treib is professor emeritus of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and his gift of over 500 posters now forms part of the Decorative Arts and Design collection at LACMA.

“5ive Iconoclasts” (left) is an offset litho poster promoting a series of lectures from the same year. The 1995 AIGA/SFMOMA Design Lecture Series featured an eclectic mix of designers and artists which included Tibor Kalman (M&Co.), Vaughan Oliver (v23), the Guerrilla Girls, Jenny Holzer, and Diller + Scofidio. The poster quotes Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky: “Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it.”

“Republican Contract on America” (right) is a 1995 propaganda poster screen printed on chipboard. A quote by Nazi Hermann Göring is used to highlight the anti-intellectual, anti-cultural stance of the Republican-controlled 104th U.S. Congress.

See other agitprop posters at BlackDog.

Cliffs of Id Identity

©DesignisPlay Cliffs of ID

Cliffs of Id is a new climbing gym from Touchstone Climbing opening in Culver City, California. It is named after a passage in Reyner Banham’s Four Ecologies of Los Angeles, a book about Southern California and its architecture: “The Plains of Id are where the crudest urban lusts and most fundamental aspirations are created, manipulated and, with luck, satisfied.”

The Cliffs of Id symbol is a winged robot, an encapsulation of the mythic future as promised to America by the movie and television industries of Southern California in the 1950’s and 60’s. Like most of our trademark work, we inked this symbol by hand prior to rebuilding it in Illustrator. The wordmark is set in a 17 Oblong, an architectural typeface by Dutch designers René Knip and Janno Hahn at Arktype.

Judd Foundation, 101 Spring Street

©DesignisPlay

We were fortunate to be in New York in January where we visited the Judd Foundation in SoHo for the first time. The five-story cast-iron building was purchased by Donald Judd in 1968 as a home, studio, and permanent installation. The ground floor features a 1986 minimalist installation by Carl Andre titled Manifest Destiny which consists of eight stacked bricks, all bearing the legend “Empire.”

The third floor of the building houses Judd’s former studio which was perhaps our favorite space. The studio is comprised of three separate areas for activities that correspond to three distinct body positions: chairs for reading while sitting; a desk for drawing while standing; and a floor rug and wooden headrest for contemplation while recumbent.

Judd’s reductive arrangement of space within the studio and his prescription for a specific, different physical orientation while engaged in each task would no doubt serve to focus his attention and separate each creative endeavor in his consciousness. Daniel J. Boorstin, the author of The Image: a Guide to Pseudo Events in America, warns against the unconscious blurring of experience. Addressing technology and the “rise of images” in particular, he writes: “In twentieth-century America we have gone one step beyond the homogenizing of experience…. Even as we try to sharpen our artificial distinctions they become ever more blurry.”

Milton Glaser notes that “Drawing is thinking,” an observation I am fond of quoting. That said, the experience of being in Donald Judd’s studio leads me to an oppositional thought, which is: reading is not drawing is not thinking. While I still subscribe to Glaser’s dictum, I admire Judd’s implicit acknowledgment that while these three activities are related, they are not equivalent. The discipline (and clarity) demanded by Judd’s approach is revelatory. [MF]

Wang Judges Austin ADDYs

plog_12_JAN_2015

Angie recently served as a juror for the Austin, Texas leg of the American Advertising Awards’ 2015 Competition. This is the first of a three-tier competition—winners move on to a regional and then national competition.

Thank you to Bart Cleveland for this honor!

Odile Redon’s The Birth of Venus

The Birth of Venus

While researching the symbolism of the shell for our (ongoing!) book project, we stumbled on an intriguing visual juxtaposition we thought we would share.

The goddess of love emerges from a seashell in The Birth of Venus by French painter Odilon Redon, c. 1912. Originating in the ocean, the shell shares water’s associations with creation and procreation, genetrix and matrix. Combined with physical characteristics which can suggest female genitalia, the shell is an emblem of fecundity and life and, by extension, felicity and prosperity.

Redon’s rendering of the shell’s elliptical silhouette and luminous interior creates a nimbus-like effect similar to the mandorla found in religious icons of the Virgin Mary or the Christ. (The lunate rim of the shell also echoes the crescent moon on which the Virgin often sits or stands.) The detail on the left is from a 13th century Byzantine manuscript in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Like the early Christian almond-shaped aureole, Redon’s seashell is maternal womb, life, light, and utterly sacred. [MF]