your turn #6

stein brianhoff

the emigrés: zwart, pineles, bass, lubalin, cassandre. mondrian & de stijl, 1940's women's lib: jenny on the job, etc.

World War II Propaganda (& Big Brother in between)

what's borderland?

hi class. FYI: our own, arh 346's leah brown, has her MFA show up. she got a nice review in the the miami new times. 

 My process is very much about trying to get a philosophical or scientific understanding of dreaming through the examination of my own dreams. Dreaming is really kind of lost on science right now, it's something that's very much unexplained, and yet it's something that we each do every night, regardless of how much we remember. I think it's kind of a borderland, and that's why I called the show 'Borderland' - it's this area between something that is real and something that is not real."

it sounds interesting, it looks good.

i plan to go see it. you should, if you can. 

your turn #5

expressionism, dada, surrealism, constructivism's color "filters," the lesson of BAUHAUS, neue typographie, "marks" as art, propaganda vs. advertisement, photomontage, lissitsky, tshichold, Die Wissenhoffsiedlung, the total designer: beal, binder, brodovitch, matter, graphic design as art, etc, etc,  

 what's on your mind?

el lissitzky

lissitzky's entire career was laced with the belief that the artist could be an agent for change, later summarized with his edict, "zielbewußte Schaffen" (goal-oriented creation). he began his career illustrating yiddish children's books in an effort to promote jewish culture in russia, a country that was undergoing massive change at the time and that had just repealed its anti-semitic laws. 

over the years, he taught in a variety of positions, schools, and artistic media, spreading and exchanging ideas. he worked with malevich in heading the suprematist art group UNOVIS, when he developed a variant suprematist series of his own. in 1921 he took up a job as the russian cultural ambassador to weimar germany, working with and influencing important figures of the bauhaus.

some works by lissitzky.

Moving posters: Man With a Movie Camera

Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera was produced by the Ukrainian film studio VUFKU. It presents urban life in Ukraine and other Soviet cities. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life. The film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invented, deployed or developed, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, animations, and a self-reflexive style (at one point it features a split screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles (WKPD).

Art for the people?

Vladimir Tatlin achieved fame as the architect who designed the huge Monument to the Third International, also known as Tatlin's Tower. Planned in 1920, the monument, was to be a tall tower in iron, glass and steel which would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower (it was a third taller at 1,300 feet high). Inside the iron-and-steel structure of twin spirals, the design envisaged three building blocks, covered with glass windows, which would rotate at different speeds (the first one, a cube, once a year; the second one, a pyramid, once a month; the third one, a cylinder, once a day). High prices prevented Tatlin from executing the plan, and no building such as this was erected in his day.

40th secession exhibition poster, 1912

by Richard Harlfinger

what's unique about this design is the expressionist "S" enguls the lettering blocks within its rhythm. the letters are hand-drawn the design overwhelms any individual expressive quality. the weight of the negative space is expertly calibrated to strike a compact pulsing balance. this is both about abstraction and geometry. the organic motifs of the nouveau era have been left behind. the search for a universal language of form had begun.