Hasta La Ideas

It’s been a great year for documentaries, from Chad Friedrichs‘s exploding of The Pruitt-Igoe Myth to filmic glimpses into the lives and work of artists including Marina Abramović, Gerhard Richter, Ai Weiwei, Wayne White, and Gregory Crewdson. Many of these films owe a debt to Ken Burns, whose signature effects include “a way of energizing still photographs, of adding complex sound effects and period music, of using not only a third-person narrator…but first-person voices, reading journals and diaries and love letters and newspaper accounts that give the experience of the past something that feels real and feels human,” he tells the MediabistroTV crew in the below video. Watch to learn how Burns, who says he knew at age 12 that he wanted to make movies, got his start “trying to tell stories and [using] American history to tell those stories that I wanted to tell.”

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A car from Normal Bel Geddes’ “Futurama” exhibit at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair and the designer exiting a Chrysler Airflow car.

The interdiscliplinary types of today have nothing on Norman Bel Geddes (1893–1958), who designed everything from stage sets and costumes to buildings and streamlined “motor cars” that resembled elongated teardrops with wheels (tail fins optional). The life and career of the self-taught polymath, who straddled the line between visionary and pragmatist, is the subject of Norman Bel Geddes Designs America, published by Abrams in conjunction with a major exhibition now on view at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. It will travel to the Museum of the City of New York early next year. We asked design historian Russell Flinchum, author of Henry Dreyfuss, Industrial Designer: The Man in the Brown Suit, to give us his take on the new Bel Geddes bible in advance of the show’s arrival in Gotham.

New Yorkers have an exceptional chance to immerse themselves in modernity’s past at the Museum of the City of New York, which last week opened “Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s,” an exhibition that originated at the National Building Museum in 2011. Following relatively hot on its heels will be “Norman Bel Geddes Designs America,” from which most of the latter show’s contents have been gleaned. Moving from the earlier exhibition’s overview to the first in-depth look at Geddes should prove instructive, to put it mildly. No single exhibit from the fairs of the ‘30s is better known or more celebrated than Geddes’s “Futurama,” properly the “Highways and Horizons” exhibit for General Motors at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair. We will finally have a chance to understand exactly what Geddes achieved, and why he merits such curatorial scrutiny.

Donald Albrecht, curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York, has edited an impressive catalogue that covers Geddes’s output in 17 chapters that carry us from theatrical design through furniture, housing, and graphic design and everywhere in between (perhaps most notably in his three-dimensional designs for Life magazine illustrating the battlefronts of World War II, which merited an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art). The authors of these individual chapters range from UT professor Jeffrey Meikle, whose Twentieth Century Limited of 1977 did more than any single book to focus academic interest on American industrial design of the 1930s, to some of his former students and even current doctoral candidates at Austin.
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Noam Chomsky, Alain de Botton, and Errol Morris are not the names one expects to see among the contributors to a journal about graphic design, but Open Manifesto is no ordinary publication. “It’s unlike most other design journals in the world,” says Open Manifesto founder, editor, and publisher Kevin Finn, a veteran of Saatchi Design. “Specifically, it focuses on the intersection of design with social, political, cultural, and economic issues and includes contributions from many significant people outside the design disciplines.” And so critical writing by the likes of Paula Scher and George Lois mingles with the musings of Edward de Bono and ex-CIA operative Larry J. Kolb. The latest issue (#6) is an entertaining, educational, and engaging look at the power of the myth. We seized the narrative-themed moment to ask Finn about his own story. Read on to learn how founding Open Manifesto saved his career as a designer, trends in Australian graphic design, and whose work you might see in a future issue.

1. How did Open Manifesto come about?
To be honest, I had been thinking of the idea for about eight years before I decided to finally go ahead and do it [in 2003]. So why did it take so long? Well, to start with I didn’t think I was qualified to produce anything like Open Manifesto, considering I was not a writer, an editor, a journalist, or a publisher. But I have a very curious mind, so–for better or worse–I figured that was qualification enough. But there were two specific turning points that led to creating Open Manifesto.

The first was when I was Joint Creative Director of Saatchi Design, Sydney. We were staging an exhibition of our work inside the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency, partly for our clients and partly to further explain what we did to our advertising colleagues. At the time, we were fortunate enough to have also won a D&AD Yellow pencil. So I was standing in this room, surrounded by what we considered to be our best work and having just returned from London with a Yellow Pencil. I was 29, and I felt surprisingly empty. I asked myself: Is this it? Is this the height of what we do–take a brief, come up with a good idea, design something well, hope to win an award… take a brief, come up with a good idea, design something well…etcetera. I saw a hamster wheel of repetition ahead of me and, considering I had achieved way more than I had ever, ever expected by age 29, I decided perhaps I needed to leave the industry and learn something new.

But the alternative was just as interesting and challenging. I decided to question what it is that I do, and to question it deeply. That meant looking at how creative people in society think, which ultimately leads them to what they ‘do.’ I was interested in the ‘why’ and also in the connections between things. Most projects that a designer gets involves some aspect of research. But due to circumstances the research is narrow and myopic, simply because it needs to directly relate to the business, client or topic at hand. Open Manifesto allows me to pursue wider and deeper research and–to be honest–it saved my career as a designer.
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1. Yoko Ono for Opening Ceremony “Soooooo, this is actually, like, ‘art’ or something, isn’t it? No fucking way Yoko Ono thinks she can break up The Beatles AND ruin menswear.” Read more of Jon Moy’s appropriate reaction to Ono’s new Opening Ceremony collection over at Four Pins. 2….

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Artists and gallerists, here’s the trio you want to make sure is at the top of your holiday card mailing list: (pictured, from left) Stuart Comer, Anthony Elms, and Michelle Grabner, the freshly crowned curators of the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Opening in early March of next year, it will be the seventy-seventh in the Whitney Museum’s ongoing series of Annual and Biennial exhibitions and the last to fill its Marcel Breuer building. The Metropolitan Museum of Art will take over the building in 2015 when the Whitney moves into its new downtown digs designed by Renzo Piano.

The Whitney is looking to leave its Brutalist beacon on a high note, with a new curatorial structure that places the Biennial in the hands of three curators from outside the museum. “By flinging open the museum’s doors metaphorically, we hope to create a platform in which voices from outside the Whitney can enliven the conversation around contemporary art in the United States,” said Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s chief curator and deputy director for programs, in a statement issued by the museum late yesterday. “Hailing from Chicago, Philadelphia, and London, each curator will bring a personal approach to the process, creating an exciting mix of emerging and established artists that is the Biennial’s hallmark.”
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