Design

The Insights Design Lecture series is back, starting off with Marian Bantjes on Tuesday, March 4, at 7 pm in the Walker cinema. Buy tickets here.

After a decade working as a book designer and typesetter in Vancouver, British Columbia, Marian Bantjes decided to chuck it all and reinvent her practice. Widely hailed in the recent resurgence of ornamentation in graphic design, her current work draws on 20 years of experience in painting and printmaking. Now a self-proclaimed "graphic artist," Bantjes produces designs of intricate craft, elaborate patterning, and complex ornamentation. Her acclaimed work includes commissions for a limited-edition cover for Wallpaper magazine, catalogues and bags for Saks Fifth Avenue, and illustrations for such publications as Yale Alumni magazine, Wired, and Print. She has taught at the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver and is an author for the design-discussion Web site Speak Up. Check out her website.

To whet your appetite for the lecture, we asked Marian to answer a few of life’s most—and possibly least—pressing questions:

1. What have you been obsessing about?

I’m working on a book and I’ve been obsessing about it from nearly every aspect: what to include, whether anything I’m making is good enough, how much research I should do, whether it will be a work of staggering genius or a laughable and inconsequential attempt. Also about how much work I’m putting into it, and simultaneously how I’m not working on it enough. And finally whether I am wasting my time.

2. What’s your most prized possession?

Hmm. This is hard to say. In one sense it is my house, as it’s what I get my most obvious daily pleasure from, and it’s also my most expensive possession. It is, however, replaceable. So from that perspective, from what I would miss most if my house and everything in it burned to the ground, it would have to be my photos of friends and family.

3. What are you reading?

A number of blogs, ongoing; a number of issues of The New Yorker, ongoing; ditto, Eye Magazine; an issue of Cabinet; plus Debbie Millman’s The Essential Principles of Graphic Design which I have one or two chapters left to read; The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2007, ed. Richard Preston; and The Sense of Beauty by George Santayana. I am in desperate need of a good novel.

4. What’s one of your guilty pleasures?

Well typically this refers to something that I am embarrassed to admit, and I can’t think of much that I’m embarrassed to admit, except for the things I’m *too* embarrassed to admit. But I do feel genuinely guilty that I really love to sleep. It doesn’t fit with our contemporary work ethic, and given that most of my friends seem to be rushing around, getting lots done on little sleep, I feel guilty that I really like to pack the hours in, in bed. The other thing I really enjoy, guiltily, is doing nothing. Just staring into space.

5. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Well this is a tough question, so I decided to look up the Classical virtues, as derived from Plato, which would be temperance, prudence, fortitude, justice … and piety. Despite being an obsessive, I think temperance, or moderation is a good thing; Fortitude is also important: a stick-with-it-ness is necessary to get things done; Justice is a no-brainer; Prudence gave me some pause, as we’ve come to equate it with caution, but really it means to show sound judgment, which I actually think is underrated. That leaves Piety as my obvious answer … especially as I am not a religious person and have pretty strong views on that matter which I won’t go into here.

Aside from that interpretation, something which has been bandied about as a desirable trait has been “passion.” I read a wonderful description of passion somewhere as an extremely destructive force, and I have to agree. Passion is the loss of all sensibility, it is the opposite of prudence, and as such I think it is highly overrated, except in matters of sex.

6. What is one of the most unexpected influences on your design?

Probably modernism. You can’t see it, but I know it’s there.

7. What were you doing before you responded to this questionnaire?

I was writing an article for my book, *Silly*!

8. What question do you wish we’d asked you?

If I would like to sign on the dotted line to accept a paid, year-long Artist-in-Residency at The Walker.

And if you want to go ahead and spoil the lecture for yourself, read Ellen Lupton’s heartfelt review of Marian’s talk at the most recent AIGA conference.

Hope to see you on Tuesday!

Greg Stimac, Mowing the Lawn (Chandler, AZ), 2005/2006; inkjet print 41 x 30 in. Courtesy the artist

Christopher Leinberger explores the deterioration of America’s suburbs in the March issue of The Atlantic Monthly — a timely read in the context of the Walker’s Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, which just opened and runs through August. Looking beyond the current subprime mortgage crisis, Leinberger writes “a structural change is under way in the housing market--a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work. It has shaped the current downturn, steering some of the worst problems away from the cities and toward the suburban fringes.”

He cites a 2006 study by Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, who modeled future demand for various types of housing. Nelson’s most startling finding: A likely surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (houses built on a sixth of an acre or more) by 2025--that's roughly 40 percent of the large-lot homes in existence today.

Leinberger adds:

As conventional suburban lifestyles fall out of fashion and walkable urban alternatives proliferate, what will happen to obsolete large-lot houses? One might imagine culs-de-sac being converted to faux Main Streets, or McMansion developments being bulldozed and reforested or turned into parks. But these sorts of transformations are likely to be rare. Suburbia's many small parcels of land, held by different owners with different motivations, make the purchase of whole neighborhoods almost unheard-of. Condemnation of single-family housing for "higher and better use" is politically difficult, and in most states it has become almost legally impossible in recent years. In any case, the infrastructure supporting large-lot suburban residential areas--roads, sewer and water lines--cannot support the dense development that urbanization would require, and is not easy to upgrade. Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild.

What is Marc Greene teaching ‘em at The New School Department of Media Studies and Film? Whatever it is, we’re happy to have made Nora Beckman’s “bad” list:

Stand Up Comedy

And of course the “good” stuff:

(more…)

In a world where writers strike for online royalties and internet radio (temporarily) escapes paying crippling copyright fees, UbuWeb is a rare bird. Founded in 1996 by artist and poet Kenneth Goldsmith, it’s an extensive and entirely free online archive for avant-garde poetry, writing, film, and sound compositions. Remarkably, not one of the artists, obscure or famous, gets any financial remuneration for their work. Although much of the collection is out-of-print, the editors often post first and ask for permission later (or, perhaps, after the cease-and-desist letters start arriving). Their saving grace is that it’s primarily a site for the un-marketable--the aggressively avant-garde has never had much of a place in a goods-and-services economy. UbuWeb emphasizes free access to information, and in the process creates an online utopia for art and poetry.

[fig. 1 Edgar Varêse and Le Corbusier, Pôeme électronique, 1958]

UbuWeb’s interests are far-reaching, and the site acts as an umbrella for several curated projects. One portion is devoted to Ethnopoetics (where you can see Shaker visual poetry or listen to Inuit throat singing) while another section is called “Outsiders” (former title: “Found + Insane”).

[fig. 2 An example from Kenneth Goldsmith’s collection of Assorted Street Posters.]

Not to be missed is the complete archive of Aspen, a multimedia arts magazine published from 1965 to 1971. Each of the 10 issues, edited and designed by a different artist-designer team, came in a custom box filled with booklets, records, posters, and postcards. (And, in the case of one issue, a super-8 reel.) Contributors included Roland Barthes, Steve Reich, Ed Ruscha, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. (One major drawback is that while a lot of the artwork was scanned in most of it remains at thumbnail size. However, someone did spend a lot of time re-typing the text so it could be read online.)

[fig. 3 Selection of Slides from ‘Northeast Passing’ by Yvonne Rainer, Aspen no. 8, 1970-71]

Last June, Archinect chief editor John Jourden conducted a great interview with Goldsmith, where they touched on a brief history of concrete poetry, “uncreativity as a creative practice”, and the origins of UbuWeb. A tidbit:

“I still believe what the Web does best is what it does originally, and that is just a way of getting things out and disturbing things. That is what’s new about the Web. Programming, you know, making computers jump through hoops isn’t really very interesting to me. UbuWeb is a flat HTML 1.0 site. There is no programming behind it, absolutely everything is written in BBEdit by hand. You know I want to keep the site very basic, because what really is new is this radical sense of distribution. We are in the business of radical distribution ... That is what it’s about! It really is about free and unfettered access for people to materials that were relegated to museums or relegated to a specialist. And now are available to everybody free of charge.”

[fig. 4 On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1956-1972, 1989. View it here.]

Who knows how many would end up seeing a video piece by Richard Serra, hearing the voice of Guilliaume Apollinaire, or reading crazy found street flyers from New York if these weren’t readily available online? There are many, many more artists on the site, both hugely famous and completely unknown, and the list is growing. Be prepared: wandering through UbuWeb is an addicting way to spend a few minutes, a few hours, or a few weeks.

‘The Speculative Diagram,’ a new show of Stephen Willats’ work opens on February 28 at Casco, Office for Art, Design and Theory in Utrecht and we’re majorily excited. “A selection of diagrams will be presented alongside a new series of posters that will be distributed around the city of Utrecht. The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated booklet with a new text by Willats that specifically addresses the role of diagrams in his art practice.”

Here are some screen captures of Daniel Eatock’s performance from last year’s Insights design lecture series. Watch this and other design lectures at the Walker Channel archive.

Enough of that. Let’s talk about the future:

Reinventions: Insights Design Lecture Series 2008

March 4: Marian Bantjes

March 11: Work Worth Doing

March 18: Project Projects

March 25: Ed Fella

Look for mini-interviews with the speakers as we get closer to March.

Several months ago, as part of the exhibition Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, we asked you to tell us a story about your suburb and put it on Youtube for the world to see. We received over 30 submissions, which is extraordinary. We’ve whittled the list down to the best submissions, which will be shown in the “family room” in the exhibition at the Walker and featured on the Worlds Away exhibition wiki (more details on that here). Next week, I’ll be blogging about the interesting way we’re putting the videos in the gallery on the New Media blog. Congratulations are in order to the selected participants, and a huge thanks to all those who submitted their work. Here is a player with all the selected submissions and a list of them following:

• West St. Paul, by mnwebb
• Suburban Opera, by echucho
• Continuous Fence, by lgilge
• Suburbs, by myspacesubby
• “The City of Tomorrow, Today” (a suburb of Detroit), by jtondera
• loopty, by gabrielbbrown
• My orange push reel mower,by bbqpope
• The Last Tree by rythom
• Suburban Satellites, by kditullo
• Problems With Suburbia, by joshoakhurst
• this was actually a nice place to grow up, part 2, by sonicmaneuver
• Westlake - Spot #10 Enter Sandman, by moresmc