The Politics & Philosophy of the Bauhaus Design Movement: A Short Introduction

in Art, Design, History, Politics | October 17th, 2019

This year marks the cen­ten­ni­al of the Bauhaus, the Ger­man art-and-design school and move­ment whose influ­ence now makes itself felt all over the world. The clean lines and clar­i­ty of func­tion exhib­it­ed by Bauhaus build­ings, imagery, and objects — the very def­i­n­i­tion of what we still describe as “mod­ern” — appeal in a way that tran­scends not just time and space but cul­ture and tra­di­tion, and that’s just as the school’s founder Wal­ter Gropius intend­ed. A for­ward-look­ing utopi­an inter­na­tion­al­ist, Gropius seized the moment in the Ger­many left ruined by the First World War to make his ideals clear in the Bauhaus Man­i­festo: “Togeth­er let us call for, devise, and cre­ate the con­struc­tion of the future, com­pris­ing every­thing in one form,” he writes: “archi­tec­ture, sculp­ture and paint­ing.”

In about a dozen years, how­ev­er, a group with very lit­tle time for the Bauhaus project would sud­den­ly rise to promi­nence in Ger­many: the Nazi par­ty. “Their right-wing ide­ol­o­gy called for a return to tra­di­tion­al Ger­man val­ues,” says reporter Michael Tapp in the Quartz video above, “and their mes­sag­ing car­ried a type­face: Frak­tur.” Put forth by the nazis as the “true” Ger­man font, Frak­tur was “based on Goth­ic script that had been syn­ony­mous with the Ger­man nation­al iden­ti­ty for 800 years.” On the oth­er end of the ide­o­log­i­cal spec­trum, the Bauhaus cre­at­ed “a rad­i­cal new kind of typog­ra­phy,” which Muse­um of Mod­ern Art cura­tor Bar­ry Bergdoll describes as “polit­i­cal­ly charged”: “The Ger­mans are prob­a­bly the only users of the Roman alpha­bet who had giv­en type­script a nation­al­ist sense. To refuse it and redesign the alpha­bet com­plete­ly in the oppo­site direc­tion is to free it of these nation­al asso­ci­a­tions.”

The cul­ture of the Bauhaus also pro­voked pub­lic dis­com­fort: “Locals railed against the strange, androg­y­nous stu­dents, their for­eign mas­ters, their sur­re­al par­ties, and the house band that played jazz and Slav­ic folk music,” writes Dar­ran Ander­son at City­lab. “News­pa­pers and right-wing polit­i­cal par­ties cyn­i­cal­ly tapped into the oppo­si­tion and fueled it, inten­si­fy­ing its anti-Semi­tism and empha­siz­ing that the school was a cos­mopoli­tan threat to sup­posed nation­al puri­ty.” Gropius, for his part, “worked tire­less­ly to keep the school alive,” pre­vent­ing stu­dents from attend­ing protests and gath­er­ing up leaflets print­ed by fel­low Bauhaus instruc­tor Oskar Schlem­mer call­ing the school a “ral­ly­ing point for all those who, with faith in the future and will­ing­ness to storm the heav­ens, wish to build the cathe­dral of social­ism.” In their zeal to purge “degen­er­ate art,” the Nazis closed the Bauhaus’ Dessau school in 1932 and its Berlin branch the fol­low­ing year.

Though some of his fol­low­ers may have been fire­brands, Gropius him­self “was typ­i­cal­ly a mod­er­at­ing influ­ence,” writes Ander­son, “pre­fer­ring to achieve his social­ly con­scious pro­gres­sivism through design rather than pol­i­tics; cre­at­ing hous­ing for work­ers and safe, clean work­places filled with light and air (like the Fagus Fac­to­ry) rather than agi­tat­ing for them.” He also open­ly declared the apo­lit­i­cal nature of the Bauhaus ear­ly on, but his­to­ri­ans of the move­ment can still debate how apo­lit­i­cal it remained, dur­ing its life­time as well as in its last­ing effects. A 2009 MoMA exhi­bi­tion even drew atten­tion to the Bauhaus fig­ures who worked with the Nazis, most notably the painter and archi­tect Franz Ehrlich. But as Ander­son puts it, “there are many Bauhaus tales,” and togeth­er “they show not a sim­ple Bauhaus-ver­sus-the-Nazis dichoto­my but rather how, to vary­ing degrees of brav­ery and caprice, indi­vid­u­als try to sur­vive in the face of tyran­ny.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Doc­u­men­tary That Cel­e­brates the 100th Anniver­sary of Germany’s Leg­endary Art, Archi­tec­ture & Design School

How the Rad­i­cal Build­ings of the Bauhaus Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Archi­tec­ture: A Short Intro­duc­tion

The Bauhaus Book­shelf: Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books, Jour­nals, Man­i­festos & Ads That Still Inspire Design­ers World­wide

An Oral His­to­ry of the Bauhaus: Hear Rare Inter­views (in Eng­lish) with Wal­ter Gropius, Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe & More

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

The Nazi’s Philis­tine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Magazine Pages Were Created Before Computers: A Veteran of the London Review of Books Demonstrates the Meticulous, Manual Process

in Design, History, Magazines | October 16th, 2019

The Lon­don Review of Books is cel­e­brat­ing its 40th anniver­sary, but some­how the mag­a­zine has always felt old­er than that: not like the prod­uct of a stuffi­er age, but of a more tex­tu­al­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly lav­ish one than the late 1970s. Pick up an ear­ly issue and you’ll see that, as much as it has evolved in the details, the basic project of the LRB remains the same: pub­lish­ing essays of the high­est qual­i­ty on a vari­ety of sub­jects lit­er­ary, polit­i­cal, and oth­er­wise, allow­ing their writ­ers a length suf­fi­cient for prop­er engage­ment of both sub­ject and read­er, and — per­haps most admirably of all — refus­ing, in this age of inter­net media, to bur­den them with semi-rel­e­vant pic­tures and click­bait head­lines.

“Much in those ear­ly num­bers still looks fresh,” writes Susan­nah Clapp, who worked at the LRB dur­ing its first thir­teen years. “But the appa­ra­tus and sur­round­ings that pro­duced them seem antique. Type­writ­ers. Let­ters cov­ered in blotch­es of Tipp-Ex, for which the office name was ‘eczema.’ No screens; hand-drawn maps for lay­out; tins of Cow Gum.” The cow gum was an essen­tial tool of the trade for Bry­ony Dale­field, who since 1982 has worked “pret­ty near con­tin­u­ous­ly” for the LRB as what’s called a “paste-up artist.” In the video above, she describes how her job — whose title remains “pleas­ing­ly still in the vocab­u­lary in the dig­i­tal age” — once involved “lit­er­al­ly cut­ting up copy and past­ing it onto a board so it could be sent to the print­ers and pho­tographed for print­ing.”

Dale­field does­n’t just recount the process but per­forms it, sum­mon­ing a pre­sum­ably long-dor­mant but well-honed suite of skills to paste up a cur­rent page of the LRB just as she did it in the 80s. First she takes the text of an arti­cle, fresh from the print shop, and cuts it into columns with scis­sors. Then she spreads the Cow Gum, with its “strong petrol smell,” to fix the columns to the board, fear­ing all the while that she’ll stick them on out of order. Even in order, they usu­al­ly require the addi­tion or removal of words to fit just right on the page, and at the LRB, a pub­li­ca­tion to whose metic­u­lous edit­ing process each and every con­trib­u­tor can attest, anoth­er round of edits fol­lows the first past­ing. We then see why X‑ACTO knives are called that, since using one to replace indi­vid­ual words and phras­es on paper demands no small degree of exac­ti­tude.

With the wrong bits cut out and the right ones past­ed in and held down with Mag­ic Tape, the com­plet­ed page is ready to be sent back to the print­er. Past­ing-up, which Dale­field frames as a mar­ry­ing of the work of edi­tors and typog­ra­phers, will seem aston­ish­ing­ly labor-inten­sive to most any­one under the age of 50, few of whom even know how mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers put togeth­er their pages before the advent of desk­top pub­lish­ing. But the very word “desk­top,” in the com­put­er-inter­face sense, speaks to the metaphor­i­cal per­sis­tence of the old ways through what Dale­field calls the “falling out of trades” in the dig­i­tal age. I myself have done a fair bit of “cut­ting,” “copy­ing,” and “past­ing” writ­ing this very post — but I sup­pose I nev­er did say, “Oh, that’s very sticky” while doing so.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The End of an Era: A Short Film About The Last Day of Hot Met­al Type­set­ting at The New York Times (1978)

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Writ­ten With a Type­writer

The Art of Mak­ing Old-Fash­ioned, Hand-Print­ed Books

How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Process with William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

J.G. Ballard’s Exper­i­men­tal Text Col­lages: His 1958 For­ay into Avant-Garde Lit­er­a­ture

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Talking Heads Songs Become Midcentury Pulp Novels, Magazines & Advertisements: “Burning Down the House,” “Once in a Lifetime,” and More

in Art, Design, Music | October 8th, 2019

Do you like Talk­ing Heads? Writer and visu­al artist Dou­glas Cou­p­land once pro­posed that ques­tion as the truest test of whether you belong to the cohort named by his nov­el Gen­er­a­tion X. Cou­p­land’s con­tem­po­rary col­league in let­ters Jonathan Lethem summed up his own ear­ly Talk­ing Heads mania thus: “At the peak, in 1980 or 1981, my iden­ti­fi­ca­tion was so com­plete that I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clear­ly seen by those around me.” What makes the band that record­ed “Psy­cho Killer,” “This Must Be the Place,” “Once In a Life­time,” and “Burn­ing Down the House” so appeal­ing to the book­ish, and espe­cial­ly the both book­ish and visu­al, born after the Baby Boom or oth­er­wise?

What­ev­er the essence at work, screen­writer and “graph­ic-arts prankster” Todd Alcott taps into it with his lat­est round of pop­u­lar songs-turned-mid­cen­tu­ry book cov­ers, posters, mag­a­zine cov­ers, and oth­er pieces of non-musi­cal graph­ic design. You may remem­ber Alcot­t’s pre­vi­ous adap­ta­tions of the Bea­t­les, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, and Radio­head appear­ing here on Open Cul­ture.

The cul­tur­al­ly lit­er­ate and oblique­ly ref­er­en­tial cat­a­logue of Talk­ing Heads, how­ev­er, may have pro­vid­ed his most suit­able mate­r­i­al yet: “Burn­ing Down the House” becomes a “a 1950s pulp nov­el,” “Life Dur­ing Wartime” a “1950s men’s adven­ture mag­a­zine,” “This Must Be the Place” an “adver­tise­ment for a 1950s sub­ur­ban hous­ing devel­op­ment,” and “Take Me to the Riv­er” the “cov­er of a 1950s-era issue of Field & Stream, with the four mem­bers of the band enjoy­ing a day on the lake.”

Amus­ing even at first glance, these cul­tur­al mash-ups also repay knowl­edge of the band’s work and his­to­ry. “Psy­cho Killer,” with its French lyrics, becomes an issue of Cahiers du Ciné­ma fea­tur­ing David Byrne on a cov­er dat­ed March 1974, “the ear­li­est date the song ‘Psy­cho Killer’ is known to have been per­formed by David Byrne’s band The Artis­tics.” “Once in a Life­time,” quite pos­si­bly the band’s most impres­sive piece of songcraft, becomes an equal­ly lay­ered Alcott image: a “a mag­a­zine adver­tise­ment for the 1962 clas­sic The Man in the Gray Flan­nel Suit, based on the best-sell­er by Sloan Wil­son” — in oth­er words, an ad designed for a mag­a­zine meant to sell a movie based on a book, and a book as tied up with the themes of alien­ation in post­war Amer­i­ca as “Once in a Life­time” itself.

Talk­ing Heads fans will rec­og­nize in Alcot­t’s graph­ics the very same kind of genius for resound­ing lit­er­al-mind­ed­ness cou­pled with sub­tle, some­times obscure wit that char­ac­ter­izes the work of Byrne and his col­lab­o­ra­tors. You can buy prints of these images at his Etsy shop, which also offers many oth­er works of inter­est to those for whom music, books, mag­a­zines, media, and his­to­ry con­sti­tute not sep­a­rate sub­jects but one vast, dense­ly inter­con­nect­ed cul­tur­al field. To those who see the world that way, Alcot­t’s design­ing the cov­er for an album by Byrne or anoth­er of the ex-Heads — or indeed a Jonathan Lethem nov­el — is only a mat­ter of time. Enter Todd Alcot­t’s store here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bea­t­les Songs Re-Imag­ined as Vin­tage Book Cov­ers and Mag­a­zine Pages: “Dri­ve My Car,” “Lucy in the Sky with Dia­monds” & More

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: Space Odd­i­ty, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

Clas­sic Radio­head Songs Re-Imag­ined as a Sci-Fi Book, Pulp Fic­tion Mag­a­zine & Oth­er Nos­tal­gic Arti­facts

Clas­sic Songs by Bob Dylan Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: “Like a Rolling Stone,” “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” & More

Songs by Joni Mitchell Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers & Vin­tage Movie Posters

How Talk­ing Heads and Bri­an Eno Wrote “Once in a Life­time”: Cut­ting Edge, Strange & Utter­ly Bril­liant

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch 15 Films by Designers Charles & Ray Eames

in Architecture, Art, Design, Film | September 25th, 2019

If you’re read­ing this, chances are good that you live in the mod­ern world, or at least vis­it it from time to time. But what do I mean by “mod­ern”? It’s a too-broad term that always requires a def­i­n­i­tion. Some­times, for brevity’s sake, we set­tle for list­ing the names of artists who brought moder­ni­ty into being. When it comes to the tru­ly mod­ern in indus­tri­al design, we get two names in one—the hus­band and wife team of Charles and Ray Eames.

The design world, at least in the U.S., may have been slow­er to catch up to oth­er mod­ernist trends in the arts. That changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly when sev­er­al Euro­pean artists like Wal­ter Gropius immi­grat­ed to the coun­try before, dur­ing and after World War II. But the Amer­i­can Eames left per­haps the most last­ing impact of them all.

The first home they designed and built togeth­er in 1949 as part of the Case Study House Pro­gram became “a mec­ca for archi­tects and design­ers from both near and far,” notes the Eames Office site. “Today it is con­sid­ered one of the most impor­tant post-war res­i­dences any­where in the world.” “Famous for their icon­ic chairs,” writes William Cook at the BBC, the stream­lined objets that “trans­formed our idea of mod­ern fur­ni­ture,” they were also “graph­ic and tex­tile design­ers, archi­tects and film­mak­ers.”

The Eames’ film lega­cy may be less well-known than their rev­o­lu­tions in inte­ri­or design. We’ve all seen or inter­act­ed with innu­mer­able ver­sions of Eames-inspired designs, whether we knew it or not. The pair stat­ed their desire to make uni­ver­sal­ly use­ful cre­ations in their suc­cinct mis­sion state­ment: “We want to make the best for the most for the least.” They meant it. “What works good,” said Ray, “is bet­ter than what looks good because what works good lasts.”

When design “works good,” the Eames under­stood, it might be attrac­tive, or pure­ly func­tion­al, but it will always be acces­si­ble, unob­tru­sive, com­fort­able, and prac­ti­cal. We might notice its con­tours and won­der about its prin­ci­ples, but it works equal­ly well, and maybe bet­ter, if we do not. The Eames films explain how one accom­plish­es such design. “Between 1950 and 1982,” the Eames “made over 125 short films rang­ing from 1–30 min­utes in length,” notes the Eames Office site, declar­ing: “The Eames Films are the Eames Essays.”

If this state­ment has pre­pared you for dry, didac­tic short films filled with jar­gon, pre­pare to be sur­prised by the breadth and depth of the Eames’ curios­i­ty and vision. Here, we have com­piled some of the Eames films, and you can see many, many more (15 in total) with the playlist embed­ded at the bot­tom of the post. At the top, see a brief intro­duc­tion the design­ers’ films. Then, fur­ther down, we have the “bril­liant tour of the uni­verse” that is 1977’s Pow­ers of Ten; 1957’s Day of the Dead, their explo­ration of the Mex­i­can hol­i­day; and 1961’s “Sym­me­try,” one of five shorts in a col­lec­tion made for IBM called Math­e­mat­i­ca Peep Shows.

Just above, see the Eames short House, made after five years of liv­ing in their famed Case Study House #8. The design on dis­play here shows how the Eames “brought into the world a new kind of Cal­i­forn­ian indoor-out­door Mod­ernism,” as Col­in Mar­shall wrote in a recent post here on famous archi­tects’ homes. Their house is “a kind of Mon­dri­an paint­ing made into a liv­able box filled with an idio­syn­crat­ic arrange­ment of arti­facts from all over the world.” Unlike most of the Eames designs, the Case Study house was nev­er put into pro­duc­tion, but in its ele­gant sim­plic­i­ty, we can see all of the cre­ative impuls­es the Eames brought to their redesign of the mod­ern world.

See many more of the Eames filmic essays in this YouTube playlist. There are 15 in total.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Pow­ers of Ten and Let Design­ers Charles & Ray Eames Take You on a Bril­liant Tour of the Uni­verse

How the Icon­ic Eames Lounge Chair Is Made, From Start to Fin­ish

Vis­it the Homes That Great Archi­tects Designed for Them­selves: Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Cor­busier, Wal­ter Gropius & Frank Gehry

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Bicycles Can Revolutionize Our Lives: Case Studies from the United States, Netherlands, China & Britain

in Current Affairs, Design, Health, Life | September 23rd, 2019

A two- (and three- and one-) wheeled rev­o­lu­tion is upon us. Dubbed “micro-mobil­i­ty” by start-up mar­keters and influ­encers, the trend incor­po­rates all sorts of per­son­al means of trans­port. While the buzz may hov­er around elec­tric scoot­ers and skate­boards, the faith­ful bicy­cle still leads the pack, as it has for over a hun­dred years. And advocates—who bike as their pri­ma­ry means of exer­cise, com­mut­ing, and run­ning dai­ly errands—are chal­leng­ing the ortho­dox­ies of car cul­ture.

As an avid cyclist myself, who bikes as often as I can for gro­ceries and oth­er errands, I will admit to a strong bias in their favor. But even I’ve been chal­lenged and sur­prised by what I’ve learned from bik­ing advo­cates like Liz Can­ning, pro­duc­er and nar­ra­tor of a new doc­u­men­tary film, Moth­er­load, a por­trait of the many peo­ple who have cho­sen to use car­go bikes instead of cars for near­ly every­thing.

The film is remark­able for the ordi­nar­i­ness of its sub­jects. As one car­go cyclist, Brent Pat­ter­son of Buf­fa­lo, New York, says, “I’m not an ath­lete. I’m not super­hu­man. I’m just a com­plete­ly nor­mal per­son like you.” The Pat­ter­son fam­i­ly “sold its car,” notes Out­side mag­a­zine, “and trav­els by car­go bike year-round, even in snow­storms.” Anoth­er car­go cyclist in the film, Emi­ly Finch, “carts all six of her kid­dos around on two wheels.” We see car­go cyclists around the world, using bikes as emer­gency trans­port haulers and dai­ly gro­cery-get­ters.

Most of the Amer­i­cans pro­filed live in bike-friend­ly com­mu­ni­ties like Marin Coun­ty, Cal­i­for­nia or Port­land, Ore­gon. But oth­ers, like the Pat­ter­sons, do not, “and not all are as com­fort­ably off as Can­ning,” who retired as a com­mer­cial film­mak­er to raise her kids in bike-friend­ly Fair­fax, CA. “Some had to sell their car or take out a no-inter­est loan in order to afford a car­go bike.” No one seems to have regret­ted the deci­sion.

Read­ers who hail from, or have lived in, places in the world where bike-reliance is the norm may scoff at the pre­sumed nov­el­ty of the idea in Canning’s film. But at one time, even the Netherlands—home of the ubiq­ui­tous Bak­fi­ets—was almost as car-cen­tric as most of the U.S., as Amer­i­can Dan Kois writes in a New York­er essay about how he learned to become bike com­muter in the Nether­lands.

I had assumed that Dutch people’s adept­ness at bik­ing was the result of gen­er­a­tions of inces­sant cycling. In fact, after the Sec­ond World War, the Nether­lands had, like the U.S., become dom­i­nat­ed by cars. Cycling paths were over­tak­en by roads, and neigh­bor­hoods in Ams­ter­dam were razed to make room for high­ways. Between 1950 and 1970, the num­ber of cars in the coun­try explod­ed from about a hun­dred thou­sand to near­ly two and a half mil­lion. Dur­ing that same peri­od, bike use plum­met­ed; in Ams­ter­dam, the per­cent­age of trips made by bike fell from eighty to twen­ty.

That all changed when young activists and par­ents, espe­cial­ly mothers—like the bik­ing moth­ers in Moth­er­load—began protest­ing high num­bers of traf­fic deaths. They took to the streets on their bikes, block­ing traf­fic, run­ning for office, and pres­sur­ing city offi­cials to make infra­struc­ture and pub­lic space safe and accom­mo­dat­ing for bikes. Now, there are more bikes than peo­ple in the Nether­lands, and cars co-exist on roads full of cyclists of all ages and class­es, on their way to work, school, and every­where else.

Dutch dri­vers “look out for cyclists,” writes Kois. “After all, near­ly all of those dri­vers are cyclists them­selves,” using the car for a brief, nec­es­sary out­ing before they get back on their bikes for most every­thing else. Next to Kois’ first-per­son account of his few-months-long sojourn through Delft, we have the glob­al tes­ti­mo­ny of the Bicy­cle Archi­tec­ture Bien­nale, a “show­case of cut­ting edge and high pro­file build­ing designs that are facil­i­tat­ing bicy­cle trav­el and trans­form­ing com­mu­ni­ties around the world.” The exhibits, writes Karen Wong at David Byrne’s Rea­sons to Be Cheer­ful, “point the way to a two-wheeled utopia.”

BYCS, the group respon­si­ble for this well-curat­ed exhi­bi­tion, come from Ams­ter­dam. The projects they fea­ture, how­ev­er, are in Lon­don and Chong­min and Cheng­du, Chi­na. The car­go cyclists in Moth­er­load, and the fero­cious activism of cyclists in places like New York City, despite tremen­dous “bike­lash,” may show Amer­i­cans they don’t need to look abroad to see how bikes could slow­ly dis­place cars as Amer­i­cans’ vehi­cles of choice in some parts of the coun­try. But learn­ing from how oth­er places have reimag­ined their infra­struc­ture could prove nec­es­sary for last­ing change.

Many Amer­i­cans can­not imag­ine life with­out their cars, even if they also have garages full of bikes. Some lash out at cyclists as a threat to their way of life. The coun­try is enor­mous (though we do most dri­ving local­ly); cars serve as modes of transport—for human, plant, ani­mal, and every­thing else—and also as escape pods and sta­tus sym­bols. Canning’s film shows us ordi­nary Amer­i­can men and women get­ting the gump­tion to trade some com­fort and secu­ri­ty for lives of minor adven­ture and eco­log­i­cal sim­plic­i­ty. (And a good many of them still have cars if they need them.)

We also see, in exhi­bi­tions like that pre­viewed in the video above how design prin­ci­ples and pol­i­cy can help make such choic­es eas­i­er and safer for every­one to make. Can­ning point­ed­ly frames her argu­ment in Moth­er­load around cycling’s rad­i­cal his­to­ry. “100 years before the bicy­cle saved me,” she says in the film’s offi­cial trail­er at the top, “it lib­er­at­ed the poor, empow­ered the suf­fragettes, and trans­formed soci­ety faster than any inven­tion in human his­to­ry. It could hap­pen again.”

via Out­side

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First 100 Years of the Bicy­cle: A 1915 Doc­u­men­tary Shows How the Bike Went from Its Clunky Birth in 1818, to Its Endur­ing Design in 1890

The Art & Sci­ence of Bike Design: A 5‑Part Intro­duc­tion from the Open Uni­ver­si­ty

How Leo Tol­stoy Learned to Ride a Bike at 67, and Oth­er Tales of Life­long Learn­ing

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Glorious Poster Art of the Soviet Space Program in Its Golden Age (1958–1963)

in Design, History, Science | August 29th, 2019

How do you sell a gov­ern­ment pro­gram that spends tens of mil­lions of dol­lars on research and devel­op­ment for space trav­el? While the aver­age tax­pay­er may love the idea of brav­ing new fron­tiers, far few­er are apt to vote for fund­ing sci­en­tif­ic research, the space program’s osten­si­ble rea­son for being.

Dur­ing the Cold War, how­ev­er, when the biggest break­throughs in space flight occurred, sell­ing the pro­gram didn’t involve sophis­ti­cat­ed meth­ods, only the broad­est themes of hero­ism, patri­o­tism, futur­ism, and, in more or less sub­tle ways, mil­i­tarism. The appeal to sci­ence always went hand-in-hand with an appeal to the sub­lime­ly aus­tere beau­ty of the heav­ens (which we’d hate to lose to the oth­er guys.)

All of these were strate­gies NASA uti­lized, and then some. In addi­tion to plant­i­ng a U.S. flag on the moon, they deliv­ered the first col­or image of Earth from space. On the ground, they enlist­ed artists like Andy Warhol, Nor­man Rock­well, and Lau­rie Ander­son and actors like Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols to sell the pro­gram.

Recent­ly, NASA has seemed to be in a reflec­tive mood, from its anti­quar­i­an prepa­ra­tions for the 50th anniver­sary of the moon land­ing to its ad cam­paign of retro posters that resem­ble not only vin­tage sci-fi book jack­ets and movie ads, but also the futur­is­tic social real­ism of their for­mer Sovi­et rivals.

There’s almost some­thing of an admis­sion in NASA’s retro posters: we may have won the “space race,” but it wasn’t win­ner take all. There were some things the Sovi­ets just did better—and when it came to mak­ing space trav­el look like the most mon­u­men­tal­ly hero­ic and excit­ing thing ever, they excelled, as you can see in this ear­ly col­lec­tion of Sovi­et space posters from 1958–1963.

There’s some­thing for, well, not every­one, but for men, women, young, old, young adults. Sci-fi geeks and mod­el builders, peo­ple cel­e­brat­ing the new year, chil­dren cel­e­brat­ing the new year, a gag­gle of young stu­dents who some­how all look just like Mary Tyler Moore. The artists are not celebri­ties, they’re fel­low work­ers who “fore­saw a Utopia in space,” writes Flash­bak.

The Com­mu­nists would bring peace and pros­per­i­ty not only to the peo­ple of Earth but also to the tech­nol­o­gy-enabled, God-free Great Beyond. The artists cre­at­ed Sovi­et Space posters, vivid, ener­gis­ing and inspir­ing visions of the rosy-fin­gered dawn of tomor­row. They’re ter­rif­ic.

They’re maybe even more ter­rif­ic when we con­sid­er that ordi­nary cit­i­zens didn’t have much say, at all, in the fund­ing and direc­tion of the U.S.S.R.’s space pro­gram. (Whether Amer­i­can cit­i­zens did is anoth­er ques­tion.) It was impor­tant that Sovi­ets know, how­ev­er, that “We will open the dis­tant worlds!” as one poster reads, and, as the six­ties teenage cig­a­rette ad on a train above pro­claims, “In the 20th cen­tu­ry, the rock­ets race to the stars, the trains are going to the lands of achieve­ments!”

The num­ber of posters here is but a smat­ter­ing of those post­ed on All about Rus­sia (here and here) and Flash­bak. Each poster has its own enchant­i­ng qual­i­ty: emu­lat­ing the pro­pa­gan­da of the 1930s; turn­ing indus­tri­al labor­ers into anony­mous tow­er­ing heroes; and reach­ing some very heavy met­al heights of bom­bast, as in the ad above, which declares, “Glo­ry to the con­querors of the uni­verse!”

One poster super­im­pos­es the beam­ing faces of four cos­mo­nauts, lined up like Kraftwerk, over a scene of four rock­ets leav­ing the earth. “Gagarin, Titov, Niko­laev, Popoviich—the mighty knights of our days.” (I’m not sure how that pun works in Russ­ian.) The Sovi­ets could also pro­claim “Glo­ry to the first woman cos­mo­naut!,” Valenti­na Tereshko­va, who became the first woman to fly in space in 1963.

The Sovi­et space pro­gram deserves plen­ty of recog­ni­tion for its many his­toric firsts, and also for the wild­ly enthu­si­as­tic opti­mism of its ad cam­paigns. They sold grand ideas about the explo­ration and, yes, con­quest of space (and “the uni­verse”) with the same verve and pop­ulist appeal as U.S. com­pa­nies sold cars, cig­a­rettes, and wash­ing machines. Glo­ry to the unsung Mad Men of the Sovi­et space poster!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sovi­et Artists Envi­sion a Com­mu­nist Utopia in Out­er Space

NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Lei­bovitz, Nor­man Rock­well & 350 Oth­er Artists to Visu­al­ly Doc­u­ment America’s Space Pro­gram

Down­load 14 Free Posters from NASA That Depict the Future of Space Trav­el in a Cap­ti­vat­ing­ly Retro Style

Watch Inter­plan­e­tary Rev­o­lu­tion (1924): The Most Bizarre Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Pro­pa­gan­da Film You’ll Ever See

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Songs by Joni Mitchell Re-Imagined as Pulp Fiction Book Covers & Vintage Movie Posters

in Comedy, Design, Film, Music | July 19th, 2019

I wish I had more sense of humor

Keep­ing the sad­ness at bay

Throw­ing the light­ness on these things

Laugh­ing it all away 

                           — Joni Mitchell, “Peo­ple’s Par­ties”

Joni Mitchell has been show­ered with trib­utes of late, many of them con­nect­ed to her all-star 75th birth­day con­cert last Novem­ber.

The silky voiced Seal, who cred­its Mitchell with inspir­ing him to become a musi­cian, soar­ing toward heav­en on “Both Sides Now”…

“A Case Of You” as a duet for fel­low New­port Folk Fes­ti­val alums Kris Kristof­fer­son and Bran­di Carlile….

Cha­ka Khan inject­ing a bit of funk into “Help Me,” a tune she’s been cov­er­ing for 20 some years…

They’re mov­ing and beau­ti­ful and sen­si­tive, but giv­en that Mitchel­l’s the one behind the immor­tal lyric “laugh­ing and cry­ing, you know it’s the same release…,” shouldn’t some­one aim for the fun­ny bone? Mix things up a lit­tle?

Enter Todd Alcott, who’s been delight­ing us all year with his “mid-cen­tu­ry mashups,” an irre­sistible com­bi­na­tion of vin­tage paper­back cov­ers, celebri­ty per­son­ae, and icon­ic lyrics from the annals of rock and pop.

His homage to “Help Me,” above, is decid­ed­ly on brand. The lurid 1950s EC hor­ror com­ic-style graph­ics con­fer a dishy naugh­ti­ness that was—no disrespect—rather lack­ing in the orig­i­nal.

Per­haps Mitchell would approve of these mon­keyshines?

A 1991 inter­view with Rolling Stone’s David Wild sug­gests that she would have at some point in her life:

When I was a kid, I was a real good-time Char­lie. As a mat­ter of fact, that was my nick­name. So when I first start­ed mak­ing all this sen­si­tive music, my old friends back home could not believe it. They didn’t know – where did this depressed per­son come from? Along the way, I had gone through some pret­ty hard deals, and it did intro­vert me. But it just so hap­pened that my most intro­vert­ed peri­od coin­cid­ed with the peak of my suc­cess.

Alcott hon­ors the intro­vert by ren­der­ing “Both Sides Now” as an angsty-look­ing vol­ume of 60s-era poet­ry from the imag­i­nary pub­lish­ing house Clouds.

“Big Yel­low Taxi” car­ries Alcott from the book­shelf to the realm of the movie poster.

The lyrics are def­i­nite­ly the star here, but it’s fun to note just how much mileage he gets out of the float­ing text box­es that were a strange­ly ran­dom-feel­ing fea­ture of the orig­i­nal.

Also “Ladies of the Canyon” is a great pro­duc­er’s cred­it. Giv­en Alcott’s own screen­writ­ing cred­its on IMDB, per­haps we could con­vince him to mash a bit of Joni’s sen­si­bil­i­ty into some of Paul Schrader’s grimmest Taxi Dri­ver scenes…

That said, it’s worth remem­ber­ing that Alcot­t’s cre­ations are lov­ing trib­utes to the artists who mat­ter most to him. As he told Open Cul­ture:

Joni Mitchell is one of the most crim­i­nal­ly under­val­ued Amer­i­can song­writ­ers of the 20th cen­tu­ry, and that now that I live in LA, every time I dri­ve through Lau­rel Canyon I think about her and that whole absurd­ly fer­tile scene in the late 1960s, when artists could afford to live in Lau­rel Canyon and Joni Mitchell was hang­ing out with Neil Young and Charles Man­son.

See all of Todd Alcott’s work here. (Please note that this is his offi­cial sales site… beware of imposters sell­ing quick­ie knock-offs of his designs on eBay and Face­book.) Find oth­er posts fea­tur­ing his work in the Relat­eds below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Clas­sic Per­for­mances of Joni Mitchell from the Very Ear­ly Years–Before She Was Even Named Joni Mitchell (1965/66)

Bea­t­les Songs Re-Imag­ined as Vin­tage Book Cov­ers and Mag­a­zine Pages: “Dri­ve My Car,” “Lucy in the Sky with Dia­monds” & More

Clas­sic Songs by Bob Dylan Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: “Like a Rolling Stone,” “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” & More

Songs by David Bowie, Elvis Costel­lo, Talk­ing Heads & More Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for a new sea­son of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Beatles Songs Re-Imagined as Vintage Book Covers and Magazine Pages: “Drive My Car,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” & More

in Books, Design, Music | July 17th, 2019

What makes the Bea­t­les the best-known rock band in his­to­ry? None can deny that they com­posed songs of unsur­passed catch­i­ness, a qual­i­ty demon­strat­ed as soon as those songs hit the air­waves. But the past 55 or so years have shown us that they also pos­sess an endur­ing pow­er to inspire: how many begin­ning musi­cians, fired up by their enjoy­ment of the Bea­t­les, play their first notes each day? The trib­utes to the music of the Bea­t­les keep com­ing in non-musi­cal forms as well: take, for exam­ple, these Bea­t­les songs turned into vin­tage book cov­ers and mag­a­zine pages by screen­writer and self-described “graph­ic-arts prankster” Todd Alcott.

“ ‘Dri­ve My Car’ re-imag­ines the clas­sic 1965 Bea­t­les song as a clas­sic 1965 adver­tise­ment for an actu­al car,” Alcott writes of the work at the top of the post, “mash­ing up the image from an ad for a 1966 Chevro­let Cor­vair with the lyrics from the song.”

Below that, “Lucy in the Sky with Dia­monds” makes of that num­ber a mass-mar­ket book cov­er “in the style of Erich von Daniken’s clas­sic 1970s alien-vis­i­ta­tion book Char­i­ots of the Gods?” Below, Alcot­t’s inter­pre­ta­tion of “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows” per­fect­ly re-cre­ates the look (and, with that vis­i­ble cov­er wear, the feel) of a heady 1960s sci­ence-fic­tion nov­el.

Tomor­row Nev­er Knows does sound like a plau­si­ble piece of spec­u­la­tive fic­tion from that era, but Alcott has made use of much more than these songs’ titles. Even casu­al Bea­t­les fans will notice how much of their lyri­cal con­tent he man­ages to work into his designs, for which the 1967 Nation­al Enquir­er cov­er pas­tiche he put togeth­er for the 1967 sin­gle “A Day in the Life” (“com­plete with pho­tos of Tory Browne, the Guin­ness heir about whom the song was writ­ten”) offered an espe­cial­ly rich oppor­tu­ni­ty. Just when the Bea­t­les broke up in real life, the era of the new-age self-help book began, and after see­ing what Alcott did with “Hel­lo Good­bye” using the dis­tinc­tive visu­al brand­ing of that pub­lish­ing trend, you’ll won­der why no one cashed in on such a com­bi­na­tion at the time.

You can see all of Alcot­t’s Bea­t­les book cov­er and mag­a­zine page designs, and buy prints of them in var­i­ous sizes, over at Etsy. Oth­er selec­tions include “Rocky Rac­coon” as an 1880s dime nov­el (pub­lish­ers of which includ­ed a firm named Bea­dles) and “Rev­o­lu­tion” as a Sovi­et his­to­ry book. Open Cul­ture read­ers will know Alcott from his pre­vi­ous for­ays into retro music-to-book graph­ic design, which took the songs of David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Radio­head and oth­ers and re-imag­ined them as sci-fi nov­els, pulp-fic­tion mag­a­zines, and oth­er arti­facts of print cul­ture from times past. In the case of the Bea­t­les, Alcot­t’s for­mi­da­ble skill at evok­ing a high­ly spe­cif­ic era of recent his­to­ry with an image under­scores, by con­trast, the time­less­ness of the songs that inspired them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Short Film on the Famous Cross­walk From the Bea­t­les’ Abbey Road Album Cov­er

How The Bea­t­les’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band Changed Album Cov­er Design For­ev­er

Songs by David Bowie, Elvis Costel­lo, Talk­ing Heads & More Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers

Clas­sic Songs by Bob Dylan Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: “Like a Rolling Stone,” “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” & More

Clas­sic Radio­head Songs Re-Imag­ined as a Sci-Fi Book, Pulp Fic­tion Mag­a­zine & Oth­er Nos­tal­gic Arti­facts

Pulp Cov­ers for Clas­sic Detec­tive Nov­els by Dashiell Ham­mett, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie & Ray­mond Chan­dler

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast