Hasta La Ideas

When Vogue creative director Grace Coddington first watched the 2009 documentary The September Issue, she was in total shock. “There was way too much of me in the film,” explains Coddington in her memoir, Grace, out today from Random House. “Now I can look at the end result and laugh. After all, I was rather outspoken. Nevertheless, there really is way too much of me.” In doing press for the film, she not only became much more recognizable, to the point that fans gathered in front of her Chelsea apartment building (“I felt like the Beatles,” she writes. “Actually, better than the Beatles, because the crowds chasing them in the early days of their fame could get rough.”), but also found herself looking back over an extraordinary life and career. “It got me thinking…that maybe I had a bigger story to share.”

That story, told over some 400 pages and annotated with Coddington’s charming pen-and-ink illustrations, now pushes the reluctant celebrity back into the spotlight. Among the first stops on her press tour was NPR, where she chatted yesterday with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross about her early life in Wales, career as a model (interrupted by a car accident), and all things Vogue. Alas, the interview (click below to listen to the full segment) inevitably devolved to Gross asking a variant of the “But who really wears that stuff?” question. Coddington’s response:

You know, you have to have a bit of fun in life, and that’s why they [designers] do it, and they do it to get your attention. They do the extreme ones. When you go back to their showrooms, you’ll find the more commercial versions of that, but it’s to get across a point. You have to say it in a strong way to get across a point. So if you want to go short, they go very, very, very short on the runway. But you’ll find in the showroom, it’ll be a reasonable short, you know, that you can wear. So there’s always the commercial version. And equally, we photograph both. We photograph the more commercial things, and we photograph the extreme things because–for the same reason. In order to make the point, you have to say it strongly, so people can see the difference between this season and the last season, and, you have to feed them the information. If you’re too subtle about it, you’re not going to get it.

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Tequila. The television mogul and the Mexican artist share a love for Casa Dragones. The tequila “made especially for sipping” landed on Oprah’s latest list of Favorite Things. “I truly appreciate people who are excellent at what they do, and the folks who handcraft this incredibly smooth tequila are masters,” enthuses Oprah, between endorsements for handmade jam and organic chai masalas (and alongside, it should be noted, yet another tequila). “Forget the lime, skip the ice, and just savor it like fine wine.” Meanwhile, Gabriel Orozco has partnered with Casa Dragones for a special bottle (pictured) engraved with a motif based on “Black Kites,” his 1997 checkerboard “skull-pture.” The 400 limited-edition bottles, yours for $1,850 apiece, also include the artist’s signature.

Should Oprah and Orozco ever find themselves sipping tequila together, they could also bond over their mutual fondness for the iPad. The Apple tablet has all but replaced the artist’s trusty Leica. “I like to use my iPad to take photos because of the big screen,” said Orozco last week during an on-stage chat with art historian Benjamin Buchloh at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, where his “Asterisms” project is on view through January 13. “It feels like a Hasselblad, somehow.” Oprah has said that she never goes anywhere without her iPad, although she has recently become enamored with the new Microsoft Surface. She tweeted as much yesterday–from her iPad.

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(Courtesy Reed Seifer)

We’ve been fans of graphic designer and artist Reed Seifer since 2010, when he pulled off a multi-sensory triumph at the Armory Show, simultaneously giving some much-needed visual punch to the art fair’s staid branding and infusing cavernous Pier 94 with an aromatherapeutical concotion designed to make fairgoers forget their recessionary woes. Since then, Brooklyn-based Seifer has brought his razor-sharp and wonderfully understated visual sense to other art fairs, book projects (this one is sure to take your breath away), and identities for galleries such as Zach Feuer, CRG, and James Graham & Sons. Read on to learn about Seifer’s favorite font, his recent project for the freshly expanded Sean Kelly Gallery, and his formative meeting with–gasp!–Paul Rand.

1. You work with a lot of clients in the art world, including The Armory Show, Creative Time, and top galleries. How did you come to specialize in working with these very aesthetically minded–some might say hypervisual–clients?
As a designer, artist, and minimalist, I feel I have a rare sensibility and understanding of how design and art may compliment one another. In the art world, where many businesses have similar visual identities and graphic practices, having a brand which harnesses well-composed, thoughtful typography makes a potent statement to a hypervisual audience. I love working with words and letterforms in that capacity. I am a font fetishist. So the way I came to specialize in working with hypervisual clients is by doing what I love and promoting myself well.

2. Tell us about the new hand-drawn wordmark you’ve created for Sean Kelly Gallery:

What did you seek to capture in this custom logo?
When I first met with Sean Kelly, he mentioned Duchamp as being of his favorite artists, so I wished to express the unconventional but as it spoke in the context of typography.

3. Turning to non-custom type, what’s your favorite typeface and why?
Comic Sans hands down, because as Nina Garcia says, “It is the sweatpants of fonts.”
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With a career that began with acclaimed children’s books, surged into iconic 1960s protest posters, blossomed into lavish books of erotica, and included dalliances with architectural design, advertising, and sculpture, Tomi Ungerer evades easy description. (Reader, he has published almost as many books as Steven Heller!) The Alsatian-born illustrator gets his close-up in Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story, a documentary that makes its U.S. premiere tomorrow at the DOC NYC film festival.

“Once you start digging into Tomi’s personal history and then start studying the body of his work, you realize quite quickly that he has visually captured on paper every moment his eyes have witnessed,” director Brad Bernstein tells us. “And when you consider that his life began in 1931 in the lead-up to WWII in such a cataclysmic place like Strasbourg, on the border of France and Germany, you realize that from three years old Tomi was recording the most seminal events of the 20th century–in Europe and America. That’s not such a bad starting place for a documentary, this combination of art and narrative, right?” The deal was sealed when Bernstein flew his crew to Strasbourg and spent three days with Ungerer. Six bottles of Alsatian wine later, neither director nor subject could wait to get the cameras rolling. Read on for the film’s trailer and more of our interview with Bernstein.

How and where did you first encounter the work of Ungerer?
The first time I read about Tomi Ungerer was in a New York Times article in 2008, and I thought I was seeing his work for the first time. Certainly I was hearing his story for the first time. But as I did more research I realized I had indeed seen parts of his portfolio in the form of his anti-war (Vietnam) posters and his famous Village Voice campaign, “Expect The Unexpected.” I guess being a native New Yorker the VV slogans and art were stamped into my subconsciousness and it took some dusting off by the Times for me to realize it had been with me all along–or at least some of his work.

What surprised you the most about Ungerer as a person?
What surprised me the most is how honest Tomi is with himself and others. He realizes he hasn’t always said or done the nicest of things, but he also realizes he can’t apologize for it so he kind of owns his past and wears it as both a badge of courage and shame. But I’m also meeting him at at his octogenarian stage, where he’s mellowed out in some respects, so I can only wonder what a terror he was forty years ago! I could never have made this film then!
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In 1948, John Cage paid a visit to the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, an echo-free room that had recently been built for the purpose of physics research. Surrounded by foot-thick concrete walls that bristled with sound-absorbing wedges, he had an epiphany: “I heard that silence was not the absence of sound but was the unintended operation of my nervous system and the circulation of my blood,” wrote Cage. He credited that experience, along with the white paintings of his Black Mountain College chum Robert Rauschenberg, with leading him to compose 4’33”. The composition, divided into three sections, consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds in which the performer plays nothing. On the occasion of Cage’s 100th birthday, his most famous work gets a graphic design twist from Nicholas Blechman (art director of The New York Times Book Review), Irene Bacchi, and Leonardo Sonnoli. The trio created “Heidelberg Speedmaster” (below), an offset print interpretation of 4’33” and named for the industrial printing machine at work in the video, recorded last Friday at La Pieve Poligrafica in Rimini, Italy. Each of the composition’s three parts are also interpreted in posters designed by Blechman, Bacchi, and Sonnoli (two of the posters are pictured above). And now, your moment(s) of Zen:

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