Pre-Ramble:  My very eclectic artist, teacher, traveler Uncle Richard sent over a comment on my last blog post, Faux-cumentary, ( … watch that pronunciation) 5/6/10 along with the photo of street art shown below. 

I’ve been meaning to see that movie ["Exit Through the Gift Shop"] for several weeks now… Since I used to teach art in a juvenile detention facility, and a number of schools on the wrong side of D.C., I became very interested in the “wild style.” The best graffiti I’ve seen is in Barcelona. Here’s a piece I caught in Athens last month. The 420 refers to drugs – there’s a lot of drug reference in street art.”

The Take-Away:  Regardless of the potentially objectionable subject matter or the element of vandalism inherent in graffiti, there is something so spontaneous, expressive, powerful and free about it.

Post-Note:  Next time you’re in Athens, keep your eye out for this piece (hopefully, it hasn’t been removed), and if you happen upon some other interesting street art, do take a pic and send it over!

Pre-Ramble: Hi, it’s me Daisy – I pitched this great story idea at our weekly editorial meeting and Mom said if I was really inspired, I should go for it (writing up the story, not digging a giant hole in the family room). 

This goes in the “I could totally do that” category … an art installation (shown right) created in 2007 by Swiss artist, Urs Fischer, for Gavin Brown’s New Museum space in New York City’s West Village. The piece is a 38-foot-by-30-foot hole, eight feet deep, that extends almost to the walls of the gallery, surrounded by a fourteen-inch ledge of jagged concrete flooring that serves as a viewing platform. The pit/art, titled You, took ten days to build and cost around $250,000  (talk about throwing your money down a hole). 

New York Magazine’s Jerry Saltz gives a pretty accurate characterization of the effort:

A gallerist has got to have a lot of faith in an artist to let him rip through the concrete, upend pipes, and fill the space with a huge open trench of dirt and debris.”

Open trench? … Dirt and debris? … (and I’m pretty sure I saw some bits of rawhide in there too) … This is my kind of art!  

Minimalist yet surreal – I thought it might be useful to consider other interpretations of Fischer’s work. Here is more of what Jerry Saltz had to say about it:

Fischer’s extraordinary installation touches on the tradition of indoor earthworks that includes pieces from the sixties and seventies by Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, … and others, while also bringing together many of his ongoing themes of transparency, transformation, disruption, and destruction.”

‘You’ simultaneously attacks and fetishizes the attributes of galleries, the qualities that the critic Brian O’Doherty has described as ’something of the sacredness of churches, the austerity of courtrooms, the mysteriousness of research laboratories, something that, together with stylish designs, makes them unique cultic places of the aesthetic.’”

In a very minimalist yet surreal and expressionistic way, ‘You’ makes space palpable. Initially the chasm dominates your vision and takes over the room …” (duh) …

Experientially rich, buzzing with energy and entropy, crammed with chaos and contradiction, and topped off with the saga of subversion that is central both to the history of the empty-gallery-as-a-work-of-art, but also to the Gavin Brown experience itself, this work is brimming with meaning and mojo… a Herculean project.”

‘You’ is less a Deconstructivist avant-garde gesture or a parodic work of anti-art than it is an inversion machine. To be in it is to be above and below at the same time. You are indoors and outdoors; there are the perfect white walls of the gallery and this red-brown New York earth.”

This is an amazing sight that warps psychic space. It’s a bold act that brings on claustrophobia and agoraphobia at the same time, makes you look at galleries in a new way, and serves as a bracing palate cleanser.”

Here, here! … I know I’ll never look at a gallery the same way again! And, I’m sure I’ve braced my palate with the likes of the gritty fare on display here.

A brief chat with Urs – In closing, I thought it would be super interesting to get a better sense of Mr. Fischer as an artist.  The following is a clip from a recent conversation between Urs and New Museum gallery owner, Gavin Brown for Interview Magazine:

GAVIN BROWN: In our day-to-day activities there are a lot of things I don’t ask you.

URS FISCHER: Likewise.

GB: Like, I didn’t know until recently that you hadn’t gone to art school. That’s getting rarer these days. It actually makes me think that to be an artist, maybe you shouldn’t go to art school anymore.

UF: I think it’s about different generations. Many artists who don’t go off to art school come to New York. It’s about what you learn when you’re here.

GB: So where did you learn about art?

UF: I don’t know. Everywhere.

GB: Did you learn more, say, when you were 16 than you did when you were 26? Does what you learned apply better now?

UF: You basically only discover a new thing once. Actually, I’m only starting to learn about art art now.

GB: What’s art art?

UF: Art, like in the historical sense.

GB: Are you learning about that from books?

UF: Yeah. Sculpture from 2,000 or 3,000 years ago or more has similar concerns as it does now.

GB: Like what?

UF: Maybe an artist’s position in society is different today because it’s more individualistic. Maybe you’re not a direct servant anymore to the patron-you’re an indirect servant, or a servant with a choice, or maybe you could not even serve. That doesn’t matter. What I mean is, it’s the same. It’s the way you make something. Take a relief. You draw it, you carve it out. Later you build it up from a flat surface. There is no other way to do a sculpture-you either add or you subtract. There are only two choices, and it’s the same today.

The Take-Away:  There are tons of fascinating, wild, creative, odd things going on in the world all the time – sometimes right under your feet. All you have to do is dig around a little.

Post-Note:  I just hope Urs got all the mud off his paws before going back in the house.

Pre-Ramble:  The following post was recently written (by me, as a contributing editor) for the PUSH Institute.  Founded by visionary Cecily Sommers, PUSH is an organization that monitors under-the-radar technologies, markets, people, and ideas that are pushing the future in new directions, and divines their implications for business, government, and nonprofit sectors in the years ahead … all to foster and promote “strategic foresight.” (And who couldn’t use a little of that?)  Check out PUSH at the link above!

So, here is the post.  It’s about the role of typography in the modern marketplace … (this kind of thing is really fascinating to us “designer types” … )

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I was blown away the first time my accountant used the “f” word.  Since when does a bean counter talk bold face and italics?

B.C. (before computers) the word “font” was exclusive to graphic design.  Basically, unless you were a card carrying “creative,” you never had meaningful access to the secret society of typography. (Afterall, there are rules about this stuff … when typography falls into the wrong hands, all kinds of illegible things can happen.)

Anyone who has practiced the fine art of graphic design prior to the main-stream presence of word processing knows what I’m talking about. If I start waxing on about “keylining” or the living hell of “type spec-ing” you have my permission to slap my wrists with your pica ruler (google it). Let’s just say that, like nearly every aspect of our modern way of life, the design field, and specifically the manipulation of typography, has been literally transformed by technology.

In his classic tome, Designing with Type (1971), James Craig reveals the back story on all things typography — symbolic pictographs, ideographs, and early alphabets like Phoenician, Greek and Roman. Craig discusses the anatomy of a letter and common font terminology like: uppercase, lowercase, x-height, ascender, descender, counter, serif, san serif, boldface, italic, condensed, extended, leading, point size, punctuation marks, and the beloved “ampersand” … &.

When it comes to specific fonts, Craig has his favorites and goes into great depth on five classics that he believes provide a “standard by which to judge/evaluate all typefaces” — Garamond, Baskerville, Bodoni, Century Expanded, and Helvetica. I’m guessing that he would look askance at some of the fonts I’ve uncovered in my research here.

I’d invite Prof. Craig to contrast the Bodoni cap “S,” for example, with a cap “S” configuration designed by Estonian font designers, Vladimir and Maksim Loginov, made out of biscuit dough (biscuit alphabet shown above right). The brothers Loginov specialize in developing “unique, untraditional fonts.”  From the myraid samples offered on their website, I’d say they have exceeded this expectation.

The Take-Away: If you’re still thinking that nothing could be more pedestrian than font design, fasten your seatbelts and take a look at the iQ Font project by Pierre Smeets and Damian Aresta. I’d bet large sums of money that the genesis of this idea occurred in a dorm room somewhere.

iQ font – When driving becomes writing / Full making of from wireless on Vimeo.