Hasta La Ideas

A view of Monumenta 2012 at the Grand Palais in Paris. (Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier)

Just when you thought that illy couldn’t out-dazzle its collaboration with Anish Kapoor, the espresso purveyor has teamed with Daniel Buren. The latest addition to illy’s “Artist Cups” series was created in conjunction with Buren’s Monumenta installation, “Excentrique(s),” which recently turned the Grand Palais into a kind of rainbow-kaleidoscope. Tasked with creating a site-specific work for the 14,500-square-foot nave of the Paris building (and following in the footsteps of previous Monumenta artists including Richard Serra and Christian Boltanski), the French artist was initially stumped. “The breakthrough came when I finally realized that this iron and glass architecture was based on the circle and the main tool used to design the building was a compass,” said Buren in an interview with Marc Sanchez, artistic director of Monumenta. “The most important thing for me was the confrontation between a device placed quite low down—a sort of ceiling made of hundreds of clear, colored circles—and the great height of the nave of the Grand Palais. I expected this extreme tension to emphasise not the hugeness of the building but its volume, left as empty as possible. As if to give shape to the air circulating in it.” The exhibition closed last month, but the colorful circles live on as saucers in illy’s Daniel Buren espresso cups. The beautifully packaged set of four, now available in illy’s online store, combines the Monumenta circles’ blue, yellow, orange, and green (chosen because they were the only available hues for colored film that was stretched over specially made circular steel frames) with Buren’s signature stripes, in black and white.
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Berlin’s leading design book shop welcomes world renowned illustrator Olaf Hajek and more

As ardent readers of Gestalten‘s stellar art and design books, we’ve been wanting to visit their storefront, Gestalten Space, ever since it opened last year in Berlin. Tucked away in a cobblestone alley in Mitte, Gestalten Space sells the imprint’s own publications along with a well curated selection of covetable design objects, while the exhibition space in back allows for an expansion to the work of the artists and designers they publish. Demonstrating a wide scope, in April they exhibited photographs from Jorg Bruggemann’s book “Metalheads,” followed by a selection of the best new Japanese communication design from the Tokyo Art Directors Club.

Right now Gestalten is celebrating “Black Antoinette,” their second monograph by illustrator Olaf Hajek, with an exhibition that runs through July. A collection of Hajek’s work from the past three years including editorial contracts, commercial portraits and personal pieces, “Black Antoinette” continues Hajek’s visual language of colorful botanical headdresses and folkloric influences with a distinct handmade, tactile quality akin to woodblock, not seen is most contemporary illustration. The look stems from the fact that Hajek never starts his work on the computer, but with paint on paper, wood or gray board. He does use a scanner, but only to send his work to clients—never as part of his illustration process.

The new book sets itself apart from Hajek’s previous publications with a style that has become more “free and painterly,” as Gestalten puts it, and less committed to absolute perfection. “Hajek masterfully melds influences from West African and Latin American art to create surreal juxtapositions of fairy tale fantasies and disordered realities. His magical realism enriches the perspective of anyone viewing his work,” and, we’d like to add, allows him to masterfully tread the fine line between commercial illustration and fine art.”

“Black Antoinette” runs through 29 July 2012 at Gestalten Space, where you can also buy the book. Copies will be available in the US within the coming months.

Gestalten Space images by Perrin Drumm

• We’re still waiting for an opera devoted to the happenings of a few years ago at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum: secret meetings, deaccessioning schemes, legal threats, resignations, and finally, renovations! Having clarified the differences between an art museum and an ATM, the university is ready to restore the bloom to the Rose with a new director: Christopher Bedford (pictured), chief curator of exhibitions at Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts. He’ll begin his new role on September 15 at the ripe old age of 35. Among his top priorities: to integrate the museum’s collection into the university’s curriculum and “to commission a major work of public sculpture for the exterior of the museum that connects to ideas of social engagement and social justice,” Bedford said in a recent interview. “Those concepts are central to my thinking and to the core ideology of Brandeis, too.”

• The Rhode Island School of Design looked across the ocean to find its new dean of architecture and design. Pradeep Sharma, who starts this fall, comes to Providence from England’s Bath Spa University. As head of the Bath School of Art and Design, he managed the school’s operations, finances, facilities, assessment, academic program development, as well as the student experience, all while maintaining his own ten-year-old design management and consultancy practice. With degrees in electrical and information sciences as well as industrial design engineering—and a doctorate in management in the works—he is as enthusiastic about digital technologies as he is about hands-on studio learning. “Pradeep brings a keen interest in howthe architecture and design disciplines can work together with the fine arts and the liberal arts to inform each other’s practice,” said RISD provost Rosanne Somerson in a statement announcing his appointment.
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An interactive digital woodland at London’s Tate Modern

Having won the hearts of music fans and artists alike with the wonderful co-creative spirit of “The Johnny Cash Project” and their digitally groundbreaking video for Arcade Fire, “The Wilderness Downtown,” Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin (head of the Data Arts Team at the Google Creative Lab) have joined forces again for a new project called
“This Exquisite Forest.”

Drawing on the overwhelming response they received in the frame-by-frame drawings that created their Johnny Cash video, Milk and Koblin are now broadening the scope of their creative partnership by offering a digital game of consequences to the global online community. This project takes the form of a new web platform where people can evolve each other’s drawings frame-by-frame into new animations.

The title of the project is inspired by the Surrealists’ game of consequences, called “The Exquisite Corpse.” Suitably, this week’s project launch was hosted by Tate Modern in London, in a gallery filled with 20th-century masterpieces. A large interactive screen in an annex of the gallery allowed visitors to navigate “This Exquisite Forest” with a handheld laser device, which, when pointed at the wall, triggered new animations to spring forth from the branches and leaves of the trees.

The initial seeds of the project have been sown by eight artists chosen from the Tate’s own collection. Dryden Goodwin, Olafur Eliasson, Bill Woodrow, Mark Titchner, Julian Opie, Raqib Shaw and Miroslaw Balka have all contributed work, creating an archive of drawings that the public can then appropriate and change according to their own taste. People from around the world can add their drawings online, while London locals can do so in person at the Tate Modern, where a bank of interactive screens are available for visitors to make their creative contributions to the project.

We spoke to Aaron Koblin about having his work in such a prestigious museum and how the project has grown and changed with the involvement of his collaborator, Chris Milk.

We’re standing in Tate Modern surrounded by Giacometti, Dubuffet and many other amazing artists—how does it feel to have your work in here?

I’m thrilled, this space is amazing. It’s a bit intimidating actually, but it’s a beautiful and wonderful space to be in. We’ve put so much time and effort into putting this project together, so it’s a bit surreal to be standing here and see it finalized and ready for people to do whatever it is that they do with it. It’s an exciting moment. Tomorrow we’ll open up the website and see what people do.

How did this project come to be in Tate Modern? Was the project always destined for this place?

Chris and I worked on a project called “The Johnny Cash Project” a couple of years ago, and in that project we saw people really wanting to express themselves more and take it further. So we thought we should build something that empowers them to explore their creative potential together. And that’s what this project is.

When Jane Burton (Tate Media Creative Director) reached out to us shortly afterwards and asked what we could do together with the Tate, then we knew this was a great opportunity to let people express and explore in a totally different way. To see what happens when you use the internet to allow them to connect in a way that I don’t think people have in the past. Random strangers exploring ideas in a really visual way.

Is this the first time you guys have collaborated on a physical installation as well as a digital platform?

I guess it is. I have unofficially been involved in some of Chris’s physical installations in the past. I’ve been helping behind the scenes, but this is our first physical collaboration.

How has the creative process been different on this project compared to “The Johnny Cash Project” or the “The Wilderness Downtown?”

This project is more complex in a lot of ways. It’s very open ended so people can really do all kinds of things with it. And it also has this physical component as well as the interactivity. It’s a bit like YouTube combined with Google Docs combined with a social network—it has a lot of aspects to it. So it’s been a different way of thinking and a much bigger experiment.

How has your creative relationship with Chris evolved over the time you’ve been working together?

I think we’ve only gotten better at communicating. There’s very little held back. Which sometimes is brutally honest, but also very valuable and it makes the iteration process very quick. We can openly discuss things and come to conclusions pretty quickly.

Are you always working at a distance from each other or do you get to be the same space sometimes?

Since we’re both in California it’s not too bad. Sometimes Chris drops into San Francisco for the day, or vice versa. We’re in the same time zone so video conferencing is really easy. It’s definitely a less traditional process where we’re not in the same room that often.

How does your role at Google play into your collaborations with Chris? Are they separate endeavours or one in the same?

It’s been an interesting fusion. I think working at Google has been great. They are amazing people with great resources. I’ve been able to use that opportunity to create some pretty exciting art projects. We’ve just been having a lot of fun really. There’s so much cool technology and so many interesting uses for it. So we really experiment with the potential of the web and see if we can’t push these technologies to their limits in weird ways to see what happens. So it’s a pretty dream job, for a nerd who’s into art.

• Do you enjoy the work of Damien Hirst but wish that it came with a Whopper? Have it your way in London, where the Burger King in Leicester Square has a spin painting—the artist’s “Beautiful Psychedelic Gherkin Exploding Tomato Sauce All Over Your Face, Flame Grilled Painting” (2003)—on view for the rest of the year. Turns out that Hirst is chummy with the owner of the franchise, which was recently remodeled as a ‘Flameship’ to showcase the brand’s flame-grilling cooking method, according to a report in Marketing. And have no fear about rogue ketchup packets or greasy fingerprints. The painting is behind a wall of reinforced glass.

• Congratulations to 99% Invisible, the self-described “tiny radio show about design” from producer Roman Mars and KALW in San Francisco. The scrappy podcast recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund its third season of “trying to comprehend the 99% invisible activity that shapes the design of our world” and surpassed its $42,000 goal within 12 hours. At last count, 2,097 backers had pledged $82,338 to support the production of future episodes. With 22 days to go on the Kickstarter campaign, Mars is now looking to reach 5,000 backers. “I want to make each person who listens to 99% Invisible understand that the simple act of supporting the show, with a pledge of any size, is meaningful,” he says. “This ambitious goal inspired Debbie Millman at her brand new Design Matters Institute to offer a challenge grant of $10,000 to motivate 5,000 people to show support for 99% Invisible at any level they can afford.” Learn more here.

• In other design business news, shelter mag Lonny has been acquired by Zimbio. The online-only publication was founded in 2009 by Michelle Adams and Patrick Cline. The acquisition includes the founding editorial team, the Lonny website, its library of backissues, and an archive of thousands of original photographs. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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