1. A Too-Soon Farewell to 5Pointz Long Island City’s 5Pointz—the factory building whose walls became a museum and mecca for graffiti artists from all over the world for the past decade—was painted white overnight this past…
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Covered in henna-colored scribbles, Vitamin D2 is the unassuming sequel to Phaidon’s extensive 2005 tome Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing. Like its predecessor, Vitamin D2 explores the contemporary world of art’s most fundamental, but sometimes overlooked tool, the pencil. Approaching its subject…
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Anyone concerned that our increasingly integrated, global world will lead to a homogenized population or uniform culture need to look no further than the artwork of Tomokazu Matsuyama to see how uniquely varied it can be. The Japanese pro snowboarder-turned graphic designer-turned fine artist uses an optimistically hued palette…
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The cultural significance of this widespread medium condensed in a fascinating new book
Since its genesis in 1839, photography itself has evolved tremendously as a medium, with the very essence of its output forging culturally significant technological, social and artistic movements. In Prestel’s new visually compelling tome, “Photography: The Whole Story,” editor Juliet Hackering and her team tackle the daunting task of…
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The New York School of Interior Design recreates the seminal show “What Modern Was” in a new exhibit and discussion
When the traveling exhibition “Design 1935-1965: What Modern Was” opened in 1991, the accompanying 424-page catalog startled the industry with its declaration that the Modern period was over, and should, from that point, be spoken about in the past tense. Subsequently revered as the bible for mid-century decorative arts, the heavy tome’s distinct perspective came from four years of scholarly research of the thirty-year period, led by Rutgers University art history professor Martin Eidelberg and acclaimed curator David A. Hanks.
In celebration of the volume’s 20th anniversary, the New York School of Interior Design is recreating the landmark show in an exhibition dubbed “Modern in the Past Tense.” While the original selection showcased designs solely from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, the updated display will echo the time period with chronologically-arranged photographs of interiors and architectural milestones, as well as furniture from various other private collectors.
Another groundbreaking moment for the exhibition, in addition to the catalog’s bold claim, came when the team of 16 scholars separated the Modern period into five subdivisions. Designs were broken up into International Style Modernism, Biomorphic Modernism, Streamlined Modernism, Postwar Modernism, and Postmodernism. The timeline accompanying “Modern in the Past Tense” will add even more context to these categories, showing the cultural moments that helped to define each one.
The exhibition opens with a panel discussion with “What Modern Was” curators Hanks and Eidelberg, legendary collector Mark McDonald and modernist interior designer Ali Tayar. “Modern in the Past Tense” opens 26 October 2011 and runs through 12 January 2012 at NYSID.
Ethereal landscapes and moody figurative scenes in Peter Doig’s comprehensive new monograph
Best known for melancholy and dreamlike renditions of bucolic landscapes, Scottish artist Peter Doig has become one of the most internationally-celebrated painters of his generation. The distinction is all the more striking for a modern artist given such ordinary-seeming subjects and his chosen medium—painterly figurative work initially put him on the global stage in the ’90s.
In a new slipcased monograph of the Turner Prize-winner’s work, publisher Rizzoli offers the most up-to-date and comprehensive collection of paintings and illustrations spanning Doig’s career. The 400 pages include found photographs of unidentified figures and settings that have informed his oeuvre as much as his own surroundings. Though he’s lived in Trinidad since moving there as a child with his family, that environment and other source material serves as starting point for paintings that have more to do with memory and subjectivity than true-to-life depictions.
Snowy, tree-filled scenes—sometimes dotted with a lone figure—account for much of the artist’s subject matter. But blurry cabins and solitary, water-drifting canoes (including Doig’s record-breaking “White Canoe,” which sold at auction for $11.3 million in 2007) also feature prominently among the book’s 350 images, each one eerie and hypnotic in its own way.
With the exception of supplemental essays by art critic Richard Shiff and Catherine Lampert, an art writer and curator, the book’s layout is a clean one, comprising just one illustration per page. The design lends a powerful effect to the overall collection, allowing viewers to get lost in one painting at a time.
Doig’s monograph is currently available for pre-order from Amazon or Powell’s, while the official publication release date is scheduled for 11 October 2011.
A comprehensive study of tribal art
American art historian Carl Schuster spent more than three decades traveling the world exploring tribal customs and patterns, gathering ancient tribal art and artifacts along the way. Though his goal was to illustrate the intrinsic human connection to artistic expression in an anthropological study, Shuster never managed to compile his research into a cohesive form. With the help of a fellow anthropologist, Edmund Carter, who transferred Schuster’s notes and musings, they were able to transform Shuster’s work into “Patterns that Connect: Social Symbolism in Ancient & Tribal Art“, a seminal book from 1996 that provides evidence and examples to support the scholar’s theories on our natural connection to art.
Comprehensive and comparative, the study contains a total of 1,023 illustrations, featuring sculpted figurines, garments, carved stones, paintings and body decorations from cultures and tribes around the world. Schuster labors to decode this complex iconography in notes and analyses that accompany the images, providing insight into the surprising unity of human society.
According to Schuster, tribal designs such as the ubiquitous zig-zag motif and artifacts such as “Y-posts” are really attempts to record family lineage, not meaningless doodles or objects meant for play. Of the continuous patterns generally used in ceremonial and even everyday garments Schuster remarks, “This is a graphic representation of the puzzle of procreation itself, in which there is neither beginning nor end.”
In contrast to the common anthropological idea that each culture is singularly unique, Schuster argues that since these designs did not just occur in isolated cultures, but were widespread across the earth at different time periods, they are proof of a collective human instinct. Schuster further pushes his theory by positing that ancient patterns continue to survive and are in fact relevant today. Stacked chevrons, for example, ubiquitous in several tribal cultures, are used as modern military insignia denoting rank. Another extension of this relevance appears in modern tattoos, textiles, fashion and art, which all seem to draw from frivolous and innocuous patterns that are actually saturated with hidden meaning through their connection to our tribal past.
A hefty tome in and of itself, Schuster & Carpenter’s “Patterns That Connect,” is intended for more than casual students of anthropological beauty (I discovered it in the library of New Mexico-based artist Judy Tuwaletstiwa). It’s out of print but a good copy can be found for around $100. Those even more serious about the discipline will want to check out the monumental work from which “Patterns” is derived, the 1986 “Materials for the Study of Social Symbolism in Ancient and Tribal Art,” which consists of twelve books in three volumes. Alibris is a good place to start your search.
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