Nothing to Hide Here: 20th Century Carpets at Wright
When Wright auctions a new collection, it’s no surprise when the lots consist of cocktail shakers, architectural artifacts, or Italian glassware. For their upcoming auction, Wright continues to explore the treasures of the 20th century with 20th Century Carpets curated by Nader Bolour of Doris Leslie Blau. Bolour is a textile industry expert who grew up in the footsteps of his family, who established their company in Iran before moving to London in 1979. During his time in London, he became acquainted with Doris Leslie Blau, who was known for her gallery of antique and contemporary carpets. As history would have it, after moving to New York, Balour eventually partnered with Blau and acquired the gallery. Together with Wright, the collection of traditional and modern carpets exemplifies the cultural signature of many famous designers from around the world as well as technical achievements in textiles.
From India to Sweden, selections from the auction are featured below.
Barbro Nilsson, Important Falurutan flatweave carpet.
Chinese, rare carpet.
Indian, Animal carpet.
Marianne Richter, Granen flatweave carpet.
20th Century Carpets will take place on June 13, 2014 at 12 pm Central Time. Gallery previews in Chicago and New York run from May 29 to June 12, 11 am – 5 pm.
Exploring Industrial Evolution: A Recap of the IDSA Conference
Designers, industry insiders, and professors flocked to the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) Midwest District Design Conference this past weekend in Chicago to share discoveries and ideas about the future of industrial design. Titled “Industrial Evolution”, the conference explored issues in manufacturing and business for designers across the Midwest. The conference began with an introduction to the Midwest chapter by IDSA Executive Director Dan Martinage (who was appointed just last year). In his opening statement, Martinage described his vision for a more active and engaged IDSA. Aside from generating new memberships, Martinage spoke about wanting to expand leadership opportunities and make the IDSA the main provider of access to the most relevant developments and resources for designers. Overall, his “less talk, more walk” enthusiasm was critical in discussing the evolution of design and business.
The weekend saw many highlights. Here were the top three:
1) Anijo Mathew, a professor from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), compared design companies to Google and other tech companies. Mathew’s presentation outlined the impact of information as a commodity and how content is in some cases more valuable than material goods or services.
2) Bryce Rutter, founder of Metaphase, discussed the rapid pace of technology and communication. Rutter introduced how people’s behavior is perhaps overwhelmingly changing due to technology.
3) John Edson, President of the design company LUNAR, brought up the issue of intimacy between consumers and manufacturers. He described the pre-industrial society, in which artisans such as tailors and furniture makers had direct contact with their customers. Edson even suggested that this intimacy could return, since today’s companies, both large and small, can customize various needs to specific clients.
The presentations featured a variety of speakers covering issues like patents, Chicago industrial design history, and advances in the field. Speakers certainly presented issues and developments themselves, but some presentations were simply observations and lacked practical design application. Even though many speakers were engaging and charismatic, it would have been interesting to see more empirical evidence in the form of case studies or anecdotes. Still, overall, what Martinage discussed during his introduction is essential: design should be always an active force. Whether it’s during or after the conference, how designers make ideas and connections into reality is what helps support and shape the design community. And with the excitement around the conference, it seemed like that transformation was happening.
On Site: An Interview with Paul Tebben and Vladimir Radutny of SIDE architecture
The architect is too often perceived as making demands from his minimalist ivory tower while sitting on his Barcelona chair and sipping an espresso. But Paul Tebben and Vladimir Radutny established SIDE architecture in 2008 to practice architecture by being involved in all aspects of creating a building, from design to completed construction. Tebben and Radutny, who met when working at Krueck + Sexton Architects, display an openness to learn new building methods, and their presence on site during a project is a distinguishable quality that sets their practice apart. Their vision to create thoughtful and meaningful projects for each client’s needs result in architecture that builds homes and community centers, not houses and public spaces.
I got the chance to interview Tebben and Radutny about their practice. Read the interview below, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Matthew Keeshin: What inspired you both to open a studio?
Vladimir Radutny: I wanted to have more control over the final decisions in design projects. I wanted to understand the intricacies of how a project begins and ends. A lot of times when you are in an office, whether it is K+S or another firm, you become just a part in a sequence of events, unless you are there for a very long time. For me at least, the experience I gained there became critical to our ability to launch a practice. It was a fun place to be and I learned a lot there. It reaffirmed our desire to build as much as possible and get stuff done.
Paul Tebben: The other thing we learned from them [K+S] was the idea that design doesn’t stop at the start of construction. The ability to have a presence on the construction site and really be an active agent, not just an overseer in that process and being a part of a project’s realization is essential for us. Having conversations with the tradesmen and contractors is absolutely critical. You can have a really great idea, but if your presence stops when construction starts, that great idea can be tarnished in infinite ways.
MK: How has having a very hands on approach and being involved in the entire construction process allowed you to experiment and explore ideas to further develop as a studio?
PT: For example, with our Planted Environment project, we were there on-site laying out the first courses of the wall assembly to show the contractor how we wanted it to be built, but we were also there to convince ourselves of the design prior to its implementation and calibrate it at that phase to determine, for example, if the gaps in the pattern should be 4 inches or 3 ¾ inches. We wanted to see with our own eyes what would work best. This engagement with the whole process is critical, from taking what we hope is a rich concept in the beginning and making it better at each step of construction. It’s not this elitist profession that people perceive it to be; you really have to roll up your sleeves and go to work.
VR: There is even more to it. Aside from the dialogue with sub-contractors and reaching out to various professions to see what’s possible, we have a genuine respect for the people with whom we work. We are not above the people who are building the projects. They are a part of this bigger process and we need to engage them before construction; before it becomes real. Mistakes can come up, so it’s important to call manufacturers about a something like the size of a tube and understand why we are going to use it and learn. We really work at the idea and the execution because ultimately we want to it to become real. It’s something we also need to fully understand, and that’s the hands-on approach.
MK: What was something you didn’t expect to learn during a project?
PT: A metal worker designed these custom light fixtures for us for our Locomotive Lofts project and it was this really awesome moment where we loosened our grip on the project a bit to allow enough room for someone else's creativity. Instead of specifying the minutia of a portion of the project, we only provided a loose criteria. We had this idea that we wanted these simple, industrial fixtures that light the ground and a corridor, but we also thought that if the surface was perforated, there would be a dappling of light on the walls of the corridor. He said “Great, I can do that, no problem.” And then he called us a couple of days later and said, “I am going to take out the sheets of metal before I form them into these fixtures, and I am going to shoot them with a shotgun. And then bring back into the shop to form.” How would we ever have thought of that? That was a unique piece in the project, and we had allowed enough wiggle room for that creativity to happen. It was a very valuable lesson for us.
MK: What have you learned from managing your own practice?
PT: To realize great architecture, it takes a village. It takes a lot of humility and we are humbled all the time, for better or for worse.
VR: It is also the realization that many of the things we do we haven’t done before. So how do we not fail? For me, it’s a fear factor. It's on us to ensure that these things will come together beautifully and work.
To explore more projects by SIDE architecture, visit their website.
Pure Imagination: An Interview with Wendell Castle
Following up from our visit to the 20th annual Sculptural Object Functional Art (SOFA) + Design Fair, DRA had a chance to speak with the celebrated sculptor and designer Wendell Castle. As the demand for gallery-driven designed objects and furniture continues to grow, Castle’s singular aesthetic has remained one of the most desirable to collectors and collections for over 40 years. His pieces combine playful, free-form shapes with an expert level of skill.
But more importantly, his original technique for stack-lamination, a process of gluing layers of wood together, continues to set him apart. Castle works off the cross-section of the design to guide where to stack and shape the wood to complete the furniture. And his process continues to incorporate new technology as well: the most recent addition to the studio is a 6-axis robot most commonly used for industrial and automotive manufacturing.
Castle is represented by Barry Friedman Ltd., who presented two chairs from Castle’s studio at SOFA 2013. The Triad Chair, a fiberglass chair in silver leaf, was a new edition of a design produced originally in gold leaf. The newest chair was a cantilevered seat with its base off to the side, making it look like it’s levitating. Constructed of stained ash, the one-off chair encapsulated all the characteristics of a classic Wendell Castle chair: expertly executed, expressive, and surprisingly ergonomic.
Castle arrived in style, straight from his Paris exhibition with the Carpenters Workshop Gallery. Jet-lagged, but alert, Castle discussed his new work and his early influences. Read the transcript below, edited for length and clarity.
Matthew Keeshin: What were you trying to do differently with these new pieces than with past pieces?
Wendell Castle: Well, I had actually thought about it and dealt with this issue earlier, but I think I resolved it better. I’ve been very interested in defying gravity. And of course, you really can’t defy gravity, you can only sort of play around with it. But there are a number of ways you can go about that. The way I’ve been pursuing it recently is that the obvious place to put legs is exactly where I will not place them. With a chair, the legs will not be under the seat; they’ll be over to the side or in the back. The chair will balance okay because the weight is distributed on another part that hits the floor. And the vocabulary I've been trying to express this in, I wanted to keep simple. Although in a sense it gets complex, there is just one element, and it is an ellipsoid.
Triad Chair, 2006, Fiberglass with silver leaf, 34 x 36 x 34 inches, Seat height: 13 1/2 inches
Untitled, 2013, Stained Ash with oil finish, 31 1/4 x 41 3/4 x 34 1/4 inches
MK: Can you elaborate on that simple vocabulary?
WC: By simple, I mean this ellipsoid. The interesting thing about ellipsoids is the minute you begin to combine them or mush them into each other and see how they relate to each other in size and placement, you can do a lot of interesting things. And this little chair here does some interesting things. These objects have parts that are up off the floor. It’s the weight that makes it work and it doesn’t matter where the weight is on the floor or in the air. It functions the same, but visually, you wouldn’t know that. Things that are floating in the air; you don’t think of that as heavy.
MK: When you are figuring out the way to defy gravity with these pieces, does the process consist of a lot of research, or do you more intuitively make sure the chair doesn’t collapse?
WC: You can draw the design from the views and angles that give you the most information but you cannot certainly know until a full-scale model is made. I use an old fashion architect’s ruler and check the major components and make sure it’s the right height, and then I can kind of push on the chair to see how much force it takes to make it tip. It’s a very crude judgment call, but I usually get it right.
MK: You’ve produced a variety of forms for your furniture, but there are standard dimensions for things like height, which is 18 inches for a chair. Do you have those type of measurements in mind when you are building or do you think to yourself, “Maybe 16 inches could work?”
WC: You’ve hit my number, sixteen, give or a take a half-inch. That would be considered a low chair, but I think that looks good. It looks better than eighteen. I tend to do low backs and only because I think low backs look better than high backs. I do think about those and the incline of the chair, as well as the lumbar region. Because you can do all those things, and I don’t think anybody realizes you are thinking about them. For the person who has never sat in one, the question remains, “Could that possibly be comfortable?” For people that have, they have found them comfortable, and they haven’t sacrificed many of the design issues.
MK: Do you think those dimension standards will remain?
WC: I don’t see how that is going to break. What I do is make great size differences; I know chairs that could be easily be made twice as wide as that, so I do it both ways.
MK: When people hear "craft" they typically imagine a more traditional piece of furniture. What is the perception of what a craftsman or trade skill can be today?
WC: I think there’s a great dilemma going on now on whether to talk about craftsmanship or design. Design is grabbing the attention and exhibitions like Design Miami. I know that glass and jewelry do very well, but other things are getting left behind, like ceramics and furniture-making. If you go to a university and study to be a potter, it’s going to be awfully hard to make enough money to pay back student loans. So the schools are suffering, and I think if the schools are suffering, then the fields are suffering. But there will always be some people who are at a high level and achieve gallery representation.
MK: Your work has a very specific style to it. How did that develop?
WC: I think the thing that distinguished me at the very beginning is the way I chose to work. I can tell you two stories that set me on the path to find that vocabulary.
First, when I was in graduate school, I was studying sculpture. I was expecting to do sculpture, not furniture. I still had not really found my own voice, but I expected I would sooner or later. I was doing fine and getting along very well in the sculpture department. But at one point in time, I brought in some plywood to make a cabinet to hold some supplies. The instructor asked, “What are you making?”, and I said “I’m making this little cabinet.” He said something to that effect of, “You shouldn’t be wasting your time on making furniture, you should be making art.” And so I began to think about furniture: why can’t furniture be art? I decided I was going to try to make a piece of furniture that was strange enough to pass as sculpture, and the teacher would be just fine with it. I began with this kind of thing, something I can best describe as a high chair for adults. You’d sit on this perch and there was a little place to put your feet, and there were some crutches to rest your arms. And he was fine with it.
The second story is when I was a child, my father was a bit of a handyman; he didn’t make furniture, but there were tools around, and he made a few things. He had a handyman magazine, and they showed you how to make a duck decoy. And what they gave you of the duck decoy is sections. You could cut out these patterns and put them on the wood, glue them together, take a rasp and mock off the stair steps. And you’d have a duck decoy. But I never made a duck decoy.
That image stuck in my mind, and when I was in college, I saw an article about Leonard Baskin. Nobody knows much about him today, but in the 1960’s, he was very well known and he often carved large figures out of wood. They showed his step-by-step process. Well, he would go to a mill shop and have them prepare a giant block of wood for him, like mahogany. Then he goes to carve it. But if he had only read about the duck decoy, he could have saved himself time. And then I realized that is how I should work. I had been frustrated all throughout college about finding a log to carve. The log would have a knot or crack, and with size you are limited with what you find. Well if I did [the duck decoy], I can do it up anyway I want. And if you glue it up thinking about the cross-section, you can pre-cut those, and 75% of the wood is already removed, so you can be much more efficient.
In a sense, I really invented this way of working with the cross-section thinking, not lamination. Then, the fact that I didn’t know how to make furniture didn’t make any difference. I could make furniture anyway. Unfortunately, I did learn how to make furniture along the way, which was a bad thing. I finally decided it was a bad thing because the way that I started first was truly me.
MK: Returning to your new direction, what continues to inspire you?
WC: In terms of the vocabulary that I am currently using, I haven’t begun to really explore its full potential yet; there is so much more. I am doing an experimental piece right now that goes back to the idea of defying gravity. I decided that I am going to make islands. Whether this will be a lot of them or I’ll make one of them hasn’t been decided, but I am making an island. It’s an unusual shape that is about 8 feet tall and 6 feet behind. It’s like when you see a cartoon on a desert island and there’s always a mound and one palm tree, always one. Now I am not going to make a palm tree, but I am going to make one sculptural shape that grows from this island. And off that I can hang chairs, tables, cabinets, three chairs, two chairs, one chair, because I have all this mass. So you have to walk up on the island to sit in the chair. And they are big. The tree-like shape is like 8 feet tall, so not gigantic but big. I don’t have any idea if anyone would put that in their house or not. But maybe, just maybe. So I have to take these kinds of risks if I want to keep on top of this game.
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Portrait by Cheri Eisenberg
Photographs courtesy of Barry Friedman Ltd.
After EXPO Chicago, the city’s Navy Pier is busy again with the return of the Sculpture Objects Functional Art + Design fair, better known as SOFA. Marking its 20th anniversary, the fair is presenting several special exhibitions from various galleries and institutions, including new work by designer and craftsman Wendell Castle presented by Barry Friedman Ltd. Castle’s use of wood and fiberglass continue to push the boundaries on the intersection between art and design, and we're looking forward to speaking with him at the fair. Stay tuned.
Pause and Effect: A Recap of A Better World by Design 2013
You may recall our coverage of A Better World by Design 2012. This year, Siri Olson was there covering the annual event for DRA. Siri is a senior at Brown University concentrating in Architectural Studies and learning all she can about historical preservation and adaptive reuse.
BY SIRI OLSON
A Better World by Design celebrates design as a way to improve the world we live in and brings together designers, architects, educators, environmentalists, and the socially conscious to discuss and inspire. The annual three-day conference, co-hosted by Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design, is in its sixth year. This year’s theme was “Pause and Effect,” encouraging everyone to separate from their daily routines for a moment and rethink how we each approach design, our industries, and projects, and then how we can better effect the change we seek. I could not possibly attend every workshop or panel, so here are some standout moments and lessons from the three days of optimism and innovation.
Day One keynote speakers Julie Beeler and Brad Johnson invited the audience to “wonder, wander, get lost” on the journey from the starting idea to the imagined goal. Their company, Second Story, creates multimedia storytelling tools and exhibitions that get to the heart of an experience. In general, the theme of process-based design and the need to be receptive to new ideas and feedback occurred in nearly every presentation; Second Story’s talk suggested that design is half about having a good goal and half prototyping and challenging whatever path was supposed to achieve it.
The “Designing Spaces for Learning” panel on Day Two challenged our approach to physical space in today’s schools and how we think about education. Ashley Marsh of The Third Teacher+ was the first to speak about combating the “monospaces” of classrooms that exist today. Rethinking and redesigning the physical elements of school can encourage collaboration and positively influence behaviors and learning.
Meanwhile, Adrienne Gagnon of DownCity Design spoke of her company’s projects, ones that engage students in designing for the local community, whether an outdoor classroom or greenhouse. Deeming herself a “designer of creative disruption,” she encouraged people to wield creative power for social change and expressed the need to prepare children better for the 21st century.
Mitch Goldstein, a professor in the School of Design at Rochester Institute of Technology, articulated one of the conference’s reccurring themes: don’t be afraid of seemingly bad ideas, because part of the creative process is finding the great things out of a pile of not-so-great ideas.
The last speaker, Damian Ewens, described his work with digital badges, a new system of credentialing for students that represents more authentic skills than a diploma or resume can. Cas Holman moderated the following discussion that covered the future of education. What emerged from the discussion was that as online lectures and virtual learning become more prevalent, we need to find a hybrid of digital and hands-on work, a way to quantify success, and a way to encourage dialogue between students, teachers, and local communities. Both physical space and system design were represented in this panel, but there was certainly a consensus that the world of education needs to innovate and change to match the modern world and better serve students.
TED Senior Fellow Juliette LaMontagne continued the education conversation by speaking about her organization Breaker, which seeks to teach students how to create value in their lives. The Breaker framework is a team of students (ages 18-24) collaborating on challenges. Recent projects have included analyzing urban agricultural spaces or mulling the future of books and all involve creating solutions that are good for users, good for the environment, and are financially stable as a product. LaMontagne stressed the importance of moving from passive to active learning, distributed learning networks, and collaborative work instead of solitary work. According to LaMontagne, design is the tool through which students create opportunity for themselves and hopefully always keep social good in mind.
Day Two’s evening social showcased an amazing Providence building – The Box Office, made entirely of shipping containers. Architectural firm distill studio, builder Stack Design Build, and developer truth box inc. together found a great way to repurpose 35 containers on an empty industrial lot, fusing these vibrantly colored empty boxes into a versatile office space. It would make even a cubicle fun.
Daniel Feldman, Day Three’s morning speaker, showed the beauty of subversion in his talk “Planned System Perversion: Designing Policy Before Buildings.” Working in Colombia on a number of community projects, he found how government policies and local building codes were extremely limiting and even counter-productive to innovative design. For a project in Tiquisio, Feldman and company needed to use almost all local materials to avoid a code demanding walls be cleaned with a harsh abrasive substance. Therefore, the resulting design, achieved by essential community involvement, had large pivoting windows and no walls at all. For Feldman, policy is a design process and designers should get involved in the policy part of building to allow for further innovation.
The workshop/panel “Behind the Vinyl Curtain: Exploring a Social Design Opportunity with Whole Foods Market + MICA” introduced an inspiring and ongoing project. Representatives from Whole Foods, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and The 6th Branch non-profit and a MICA graduate spoke about the design of a new play area in a depressed Baltimore neighborhood using repurposed vinyl as a shade structure. Whole Foods faced a considerable design challenge in dealing with the vinyl banners that stores use as a common advertising tool; it was estimated that 42 Whole Foods stores generate about 12,096 square feet of non-recyclable material, contrary to the store’s mission and persona. They contacted the Center for Design Practice at MICA, whose idea generation phase created a so-called “Post-It mania” and resulted in shade structures. As they worked out how to maximize that vinyl, The 6th Branch non-profit in Baltimore identified a site that needed a safe play area. The organization facilitates returning veterans in community service for the purposes of re-integration, and their current “Operative Oliver” focused on restoring the Oliver neighborhood in East Baltimore. There began the Bethel St. Playscape project, turning part of an abandoned city block into a suitable play environment. These many groups connected in the site needing shade and Whole Foods needing somewhere to reuse the banners. Right now, the project is very close to implementation with a current prototype that involves 8-inch petal-like rounds of vinyl banner making a canopy. With this shingle construction, 55-58 banners are used per structure. One challenge they have found, which faces many designers and artists in all disciplines working with recycled and found materials, is elevating the materials’ aesthetic to ensure it does not look like trash. For part two of the workshop, the panel broke the audience into small groups and held an ideation session. We wrote all over the backs of banners, wrestling with the question “How can Whole Foods eliminate the use of vinyl?" Engaging and educational, this workshop showed how the many goals of the conference united in one project, with sustainability issues finding a solution in a social good goal that needed both creative design thinking and local community involvement to happen.
Day Three’s Expo showcased student and local projects about sustainability, local foods, and design labs. The European Solar Decathlon student contestant group showed their proposed textile-covered building with flexible solar panels and multiple 3D printers buzzed away. Matter.io, a Cambridge-based company, printed Legos and mini King Kongs, leading the audience to believe all the futuristic predictions about what 3D printers will be able to achieve.
The conference was closed by Sarah Drummond, co-founder of Snook. Her design company seeks to embed design in governmental practice and to teach governments design thinking. She spoke of how a culture of continual prototyping greatly benefits everyone. Testing a design before pouring money into the implementation is only sensible. Much of her work focuses on filling the gaps that schools leave in empowering students and on giving people tools that grant them an opportunity for success. Like most others at the conference, she unquestioningly felt that good design gives us the chance to improve our quality of life.
Design does not have to be found in tangible items. In systems design, services, governmental policy, educational tools, furniture, or architecture, creativity and fearless innovation have the possibility to effect social improvements. ABWxD 2013 brimmed with infectious confidence and potential. The conference was a chance to pause to make room for creativity, avoid getting discouraged or stuck in a rut, and let new inspiration and energy permeate our drive to make the world a better place. The last, surprising take-away from the weekend? Post-Its are the most essential, ubiquitous tool of a designer. No slideshow lacked shots of walls full of multi-colored Post-Its. Good and bad ideas abound, so for aspiring designers, a fresh stack of Post-Its is a great way to start. Oh, and a 3D Printer doesn't hurt.
All photos (except the banner photo, which was taken by Siri) were taken by Emily Gilbert.
Since opening in 1992, Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA) has continued to host auctions of the best 20th century Modern art and design. Embracing designers who called California home like Charles and Ray Eames, LAMA celebrates the West Coast and its influence on Modern designers and architects. As the Modern Art & Design Auction approaches this month, DRA was able to participate in an email interview with 20th Century Decorative Art & Design Director Dan Tolson. In 1998, Tolson began his career by founding the Modern Design department at PHILLIPS (formerly Phillips Auctioneers) in London. After developing the 20th Century Decorative Art & Design department at Christie’s Auctioneers in London, Tolson relocated to Los Angeles to become LAMA’s design director. We're excited to share Tolson’s story on his influences and passion for the Modern era. Read the interview below.
DRA: Growing up, what inspired you and ultimately led you to work with 20th century decorative art & design?
DAN TOLSON: Even before I began collecting, I was acutely aware of good design. My earliest childhood memories are of crawling around my family home in Yorkshire, England during the mid 1970s. Our house wasn’t one of the ubiquitous Victorian, Edwardian, or faux-Georgian homes that predominate English towns, but one of the few modern open plan houses that briefly became fashionable from the late 1960s until the early 1970s. The memory of our bright lounge with its sea grass floor covering, Ikari ceiling lamp and large planters of giant leafed tropical plants, and my father’s own modern furniture designs, are forever etched into my mind. Sadly, in time, along with the rest of the nation, my parents taste moved away from modern French and Scandinavian design to Victoriana, but by then my heart was set on design.
Serge Mouille, Trépied table, lamps, designed 1953 and executed before 1964
DRA: Have those early influences translated to what you do at LAMA?
DT: Yes, absolutely. My early childhood and growing up surrounded by good design, were, by the time I reached around the age of 10, followed by an obsession with hunting for mid-century Murano, British, and Scandinavian glass at local flea markets and charity shops. I would focus on one particular designer, factory, or even country and then collect everything I could find within that field. I would then absorb as much as I could about the pieces and determine what separates a mediocre example from a great example – often before any books had been published on the subject and before the internet. Once I had felt like I had learned everything that I could about a particular area, I would move onto the next factory or designer and then go through the same process again. This spirit of enthusiasm, inquisitiveness, focus, inquiry, and refinement is at the heart of my role with Los Angeles Modern Auctions.
Serge Mouille, Rare custom Pipe Link wall appliques, designed and executed 1960
Serge Mouille, Simple floor lamp, designed 1953 and executed before 1964
DRA: You arrived in Los Angeles in 2011. What about living and working in Los Angeles interested you?
DT: As the “Living in a Modern Way” exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum so eloquently conveyed, from the 1940s up until the 1970s, Los Angeles was one of, if not the most creative and dynamic cities in the world, not only in terms of design, architecture, and visual culture, but also lifestyle. My wife Katie was born and raised in Los Angeles, so over the years we would often spend our holidays here visiting family. The geographic location of the city – mountains, desert, ocean, long hours of sunshine – not only makes life appealing, but has also informed and inspired the style, energy, and character of art in Los Angeles. Even today, there is a tantalizing sense that anything is possible, and a rejection of the status quo that for the past 80 years has drawn a rich legacy of artists, designers, and architects to the city. From my previous experience working in numerous major European and American cities, I have found that this is the most inspirational city in the world. Paris, Berlin, and Vienna had their moments of greatness and international influence at the turn of the 20th century, and London at the end of the 19th century, but here you can still feel the pulse of the city’s energy and creativity, that unlike Europe remains uninterrupted by war or economic hardship.
Greta Magnusson Grossman, Rare Table/Wall lamp, designed 1949
DRA: After working in cities such as London and Berlin, what, in your opinion, is unique about the L.A. art scene?
DT: The distance of Los Angeles from the traditional art centers of New York and Europe is a major factor in the creation of the city’s unique art scene. It has a long tradition for attracting artists, designers and architects who have moved here for a fresh start, whether to escape persecution in their native countries, seek inspiration, or simply to rebel against convention. In Europe, a strong sense of history and tradition is never very far from the surface.
DRA: What has LAMA contributed to the growing market for 20th century design?
DT: Since LAMA’s first auction in 1992, we have been there right from the very beginning of the 20th century design market, so inevitably we have, and continue to make a significant contribution. It is easy to forget, but during those early years there was very little documentation available for most designers, and subsequently our catalogues played an important role as a resource for collectors. To this day our catalogues remain an important conduit for the knowledge of works that may otherwise fall through the cracks. The most recent example of this can be found in the research that we presented in the sale of contents of J.R. Davidson’s Kingsley residence in Pacific Palisades, now sadly demolished. I would like to think that our catalogue represents a valuable historic document for future generations of scholars and enthusiasts.
Karl Benjamin, TG #34, 1961
DRA: How has LAMA influenced collectors and enthusiasts on the West Coast? How has it influenced collectors and enthusiasts beyond the West Coast?
DT: In 1992, LAMA conducted its first auction, which consisted of a blend of both Modern Fine Art & Design, the first of its kind. Just as the original Modern artists and designers had strived to break with tradition, LAMA too had developed a program to change the way auctions were organized. The belief was there was no difference between the esthetic of a painter and a furniture designer or any artist working within the modernist realm. So combining the traditional auction departments of furniture, prints, paintings, jewelry, architecture etc. made perfect sense. It became clear to the consumer when one saw an Eames storage unit pictured next to a Leger tapestry or a Sam Kramer ring. Illustrating multiple disciplines with the same esthetic was a breakthrough for modern auctioneering and was at the forefront of the now twenty-year trend of boutique auction companies.
In addition, LAMA has been influential in marketing the best of California Design to the rest of the world. International museums and collectors had access to a curated selection of art and design not available anywhere else. The local California customer also gained access to design from around the world as consignors in other locales began sending material to our market. As the only specialty auction house on the West Coast, we have inevitably played a key role in the development of the markets for local and international artists and designers – Serge Mouille (Lots 403, 404, 406), Karl Benjamin (Lots 19, 20, 21), De Wain Valentine (Lots 272, 273), and George Nakashima (Lots 292 – 299).
Pablo Picasso, Sculpteur et Deux Têtes sculptées (from La Suite Vollard), 1933; published 1939
DRA: The Modern Art & Design Auction this year includes selections from the Estate of Ruth and Dalzell Hatfield. What makes these works special?
DT: Ruth and Dalzell Hatfield had great taste, but even more important was their tireless efforts on behalf of their artists. They found young, unknown local talents and truly supported them, nurturing the process that ultimately led to extraordinary work. They championed Gertrud & Otto Natzler nearly from the moment the two ceramicists arrived as refugees from Germany in 1939. They discovered Millard Sheets as a young student with no experience and "gave it all they had" in order to promote his talent and vision. Countless other artists blossomed under their care including Europeans such as Emil Nolde, George Rouault, and even Picasso.
DRA: Did Hatfield intentionally collect art and design to complement each other?
DT: Yes, in their period publications they make it clear that the mediums of ceramics, silver, and glass were just as important to them as the prints, paintings and sculpture they sold. Since LAMA is devoted to the same idea, we are a natural venue to represent the works from this estate.
Greta Magnusson Grossman, Cobra table lamp, designed 1949
George Nakashima, Conoid dining table, executed 1973
DRA: How do you feel LAMA has communicated the value of design to enthusiasts who otherwise may just visit an exhibition or event?
DT: Our great knowledge, energy, and infectious enthusiasm for design is an inspiration for collectors. We communicate this passion through our catalogues, researched essays, as well as through our detailed blog posts, which include Dan and Peter’s picks. We cater to every level of collector, from entry level to museums and major institutions. What I also like about LAMA auctions is the interaction with collectors. You are very unlikely to visit a museum and speak with the curator, and you certainly would not be able to handle the works. At LAMA, we like our clients to make an informed decision before they bid, and unlike a museum or gallery, the auction day is unlike any other. The energy of a packed showroom is a unique experience that showcases what the market wants right now and for how much. We are also very happy to encourage bidders’ curiosity by sharing our knowledge first-hand, and encourage them to handle works. The physical as well as the intellectual are essential in understanding what separates good design from great design. An excellent example of this would be the George Nakashima Conoid dining table in this auction, Lot 297. In order to understand the furniture of Nakashima, you have to handle the piece to experience the genius of its construction and the beauty of the wood, its grain, shape and texture. It is obviously not possible to get this kind of first-hand experience from a museum exhibit.
Photo Credit: Photograph Courtesy of Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)
TEXT AND IMAGES BY MATTHEW KEESHIN
“You didn’t mention the parrots,” a gallery owner said to me, in reference to a studio afterparty the previous night.
“Really? I thought I did,” I replied.
That was the sign of the weekend ending for me at Wright Auction’s afterparty for EXPO CHICAGO.
Curators, dealers, collectors, artists, and enthusiasts all gathered to Chicago this month for the art fair’s sophomore year. Last year, I worked for a gallery during the art fair and had seen the fair installed from the ground up. Jeanne Gang’s Mylar jet engine-shaped installations occupied the ceiling at Navy Pier, and the fair was ready for lift off. But this time was different; the new car smell was gone. The focus shifted from making a grand entrance to maintaining Chicago's status as an important city for contemporary art. Among the affordable satellite fairs, the fair offered a wide range of pieces from entry-level prices to the amazingly fantastic and unbelievably high prices we always hear about in the news. It honestly felt like the art and design community united together in Chicago to make the entire week of the fair vibrant and exciting.
An art fair offers something for everyone. For the dealers, a chance to sell work and develop new relationships with clients. For collectors, a chance to travel and explore a city. For professors, students, and enthusiasts, a chance to be inspired. Plus, the personalities that arrive with the art are as exciting and large as the pieces themselves. At the end of the day, an art fair is defined by its sales. However, the fashion and frenzy that art fairs feature sometimes make up the most memorable moments.
Installation by Studio Gang with seating units by Snarkitecture
At an art fair, you know someone's importance by the size or shape of their glasses
Archives are commonly thought of as old and dusty vaults, but the Chicago Design Archive, an online compendium of Chicago design, embraces its past to curate the present and future generations of Chicago icons. Each year, the Archive celebrates contemporary graphic design in Chicago by adding new works to their collection. Their Archive competition, sponsored by the Society of Typographic Arts (STA) and AIGA-Chicago, invites designers and students to submit projects for a place in the archive. The competition emerged ten years ago as a way to not only document and celebrate new, significant design, but to encourage discussion and self-evaluation within the design community.
For the last five years, chairman Bob Zeni has led the archive and the competition. Every year, a creative team develops the branding and identity for the competition. For this year’s competition, Archive13, Zeni is joined by designers Matt Wizinsky and Nick Adam. Wizinsky labels Archive as “an annual ritual that combines two critical aspects that define the local design community: a significant historical, cultural record and celebratory events that bring together everyone working here right now.” In other words, Archive is not so much about finding a coherent “Chicago Style” but about selecting work that tells a meaningful story about practicing and living in Chicago today. The exhibition and events that follow the competition bring the community together to not just celebrate the new inductees but reflect on Chicago’s accomplishments in graphic design over the year.
Most importantly, rooted in Archive is the idea that graphic design is not just for advertisements and business logos. It’s an art that uses typography and visuals to express an idea or comment on current issues. The entries submitted to this year’s competition range from personal artistic statements to client-based campaigns. And for a profession that relies heavily on computers, don’t think print materials are already extinct: they’re as crucial as ever in building a notable collection. Judges receive entries as physical objects like books, posters, and cards to feel and touch. “Materiality and print still greatly matter. Part of our goal is to produce a canon of work,” Adam said. “The physical object is always supplementing the digital.” In general, the Archive’s members practice what they preach: collecting cutting-edge design while finding new ways to explore graphic design themselves.
Coastal Classic: Jordan's Design Bureau Article (July Issue)
Jordan here. I'm in the July issue of Design Bureau magazine with my article on architect Don Ritz's Hull, Massachusetts beach house, which you can read here. Enjoy!
Day Job / Night Job: An Interview with Cameron Brand
Designers like Plural’s Jeremiah Chiu and Chris Kalis have exemplified the intersection between design and music; the latest designer to do so is Cameron Brand. While not working at multimedia design studio Thirst, Brand, along with Chiu, Kalis, Harry Brenner, and Scott McGaughey, is part of Chicago electronic group Chandeliers. DRA was granted the opportunity to interview Brand as part of our Day Job / Night Job series that explores the multiple interests and occupations of artists and designers.
The interview was conducted by Andrew Hertzberg, a first time contributor to DRA. Hertzberg is a freelance writer in Chicago whose primary interests include literature and music. He, like us, is fascinated by the intersection between various media. He can be contacted at [email protected] or on Twitter: @and_hertz. Read the transcript below.
Andrew Hertzberg: What do you do at Thirst?
Cameron Brand: Mainly web development. Making generative tools for designers if they have an idea on how to manipulate an image or text or something like that. We’ll work out a system, and I’ll make them a program that lets them make however many iterations that they want. I use processing for that and there’s a plugin for Adobe Illustrator called Scriptographer and I’ll make scripts with that. The thing that I’ve been calling it is “creative coding.” It’s kind of a silly name. I’m not really a programmer; I don’t have a computer science or engineering degree.
AH: Did you go to school for something else?
CB: I went to University of Ilinois-Chicago. They had a program called Electronic Visualization. That’s what I went there for, but when I started going there, they had this foundation Freshman year. During that foundation year, they decided to suspend that program for undergraduates. I didn’t go to school until seven years after high school. I kind of just talked my way into the program, which was nice. What I was trying to get most out of that program was data visualization work. What a lot of the program dealt with was 3-D modeling. We learned how to program a microcontroller and learned how to make meaningful interactions between people and some sort of device or computer program. That’s the kind of stuff I really got into: how to make those connections between a person and whatever it is you want them to interface with. I still carry that over now.
AH: So let’s go to your “other job:” what’s your role in Chandeliers?
CB: Synthesist [laughs]. Technically, what I do is play synthesizer and drum pads, so I don’t think we all have designated roles. There’s now five of us, and four out of the five people have a synthesizer in front of them, and then there’s the drummer. So, really, you’re just helping steer the stream of consciousness of five people. Everybody has some sort of force that bends that stream in a certain way. We don’t have one person that does the basses and one person that does whatever. We start playing and whatever we’re doing, if it’s working, that’s the role we take on. It’s kind of nice to be able to jump around and essentially be able to do whatever you want, but still have this limited, combined system.
AH: Is that mostly in the writing process or in live shows also?
CB: Once we get to playing shows, our parts are pretty locked in. We’re all playing at least something that’s close to what’s on the recording, if it’s been recorded. There is still a degree of fluidity there. The only thing we get rigid about is the way we count, going from one time signature into another, or sometimes, we have odd transitions. We’ll give ourselves liberty to stretch out but then know that at that point we all have to snap back together and expand again from there.
AH: Do you find any relation between what you do at Thirst and what you do in the band?
CB: It’s really just about experimentation. The more you experiment the more you know your boundaries, or at least you know if you go towards one boundary you will get some kind of result like you’re looking for. I’ve never tried to make a direct correlation between them, but…you keep doing iterations of things and see what works, what doesn’t, and we definitely have that work flow with the band where we’ll come up with something, record a few takes in practice, go out to the living room and listen to it. That’s the same thing as in the design work flow: it usually does not end the way it starts.
AH: So Thirst is just as collaborative?
CB: Totally. It’s very collaborative. Almost everyone has their hand in someone else’s pot. There is a good level of trust and respect between everybody. Everyone respects equally everyone else’s criticism.
AH: Live, Chandeliers has a pretty intense visual element. Are you involved with that at all?
CB: I am not. That’s our friend Nick Ciontea, who goes by brownshoesonly. I knew of him from the Internet, as we were both on this website that was dedicated to modular synthesizers and synth enthusiasts. I’d seen some of his work on there. He had contacted us through Facebook, like, “Hey, can I do some stuff with you guys?” and I was immediately talking with everybody, like, “This guy does really awesome work.” He’s been at pretty much every one of our shows for the last year. His process is similar to what I do. Over the past year and a half, I’ve been building my own modular synths from scratch. He has the same kind of system, except instead of audio, his system produces and synthesizes video. So we always have really dorky conversations about that.
AH: Are the other guys in the band entirely analog based?
CB: We’re not entirely analog based. Obviously there’s a fetish for it, but we’re not purists for it. At least for me, it is about expression, whether it’s analog or digital. It’s how can you get that box to do more than just play a note or a tone and how you can interact with it and how you can program it to adjust its sound to your playing.
AH: What do you listen to while you’re working at Thirst?
CB: When I’m programming I tend to put on my headphones and zone out and work in my own world. I listen to a lot of ambient music because it kind of helps you stay detached from the world. Tim Hecker’s always really good to melt away from the world with. One of the albums I can always listen to is Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works [85-92]. I love that. There’s this guy named Mort Garson. He’s got a record called Plantasia. It’s all just odes to his plants. The record came with Sealy Posturpedic beds. It had to be sometime between ‘74 and ‘76, I think. It’s really calm, really relaxing. When I’m really stressed out, I have this music program called Max/MSP that’s like a graphical programming environment that’s geared more towards audio and MIDI. I just made this drone patch not based on anything; I just found a note that I liked and made a bank of eight oscillators, all just pitched as divisions of that. And then the amplitude of each of them is modulated by an LFO [low-frequency oscillation], but the LFOs are also going at different rates, so you have this chord that’s continuously playing harmonics that are present. It’s very meditative.
AH: Does Chandeliers go on tour?
CB: We’ve gone to the East Coast a couple of times. It’s hard when you don’t have a booking agent. If you don’t have promotion out there, it doesn’t matter [if you have a good show] if nobody comes. It can be really disheartening. Mostly our tours are in Chicago [laughs].
AH: What’s next for Chandeliers?
CB: We’ve been fine tuning our set for awhile, and now we have all these new songs. What I would like to see is to finish up a new album. It’s already too late in the season to get into festivals or stuff like that, or even get a tour together. We will probably just be holed up. I’ve got solo stuff I’ve been trying to do. [Kalis and Brenner] have another band, Songs for Gods, with our friend Emma Yohanan. [Chiu] has his own thing, Deep Sleep, that I help him with. We’re always making new stuff, so it’s just finding those compression points where things spring off of. We’re trying to find other outlets: how can we score films, work with dancers, or do gallery shows. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a show. We just enjoy making music.
AH: If you got to the point where you could live off music, would you say sayonara to the design stuff?
CB: Probably not. I am a fidgeter. I can’t stand to not be doing anything. I’ve been building this synth for the past year and a half. I’m helping friends build some pedals. I may not do web development if I had a steady income, but I would do other programming and building. I would definitely continue to create my own interactive pieces. Or even designing stage sets or lighting sets. There’s always something to do. There’s always an idea to get out. I definitely wouldn’t stop. I hate being bored.
Engineering the Past, Building the Future: An Interview with Mark Sexton
Why is an architecture firm that so precisely adapts to the needs of the future so interested in the past? Founded in 1979, Krueck and Sexton Architects have not only been at the forefront of creating innovative architecture like The Spertus Institute and Millennium Park’s Crown Fountain, but of restoring the masterpieces of their predecessors. Most notably, the dynamic duo of Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton have restored Mies van der Rohe staples like the Illinois Institute of Technology’s (IIT) Crown Hall and 860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments, cementing the two men as architects with a quality that their contemporaries so often lack: appropriate artistic reverence for the past. Not to mention their admirable collaborative spirit: in 2005, Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin famously wrote about the duo, “Unlike today's solo-oriented ‘starchitects,’ Krueck and Sexton form a true partnership, relying heavily on their complementary talents. Krueck conceptualizes. Sexton questions. Krueck refines.”
We spoke to Sexton about the duo’s process in relation to restoring Mies van der Rohe’s buildings, as well as about his background, Krueck and Sexton’s role within the design community, and his advice for aspiring architects. Read the transcript below, edited for length and clarity.
DRA: When did you know you wanted to be an architect?
Mark Sexton: When I found out I wasn’t a good chemical engineer. During high school, I told a counselor, “You know, I think I want to be an architect,” and he said, “No, you don’t, they work their asses off and they don’t make much money.” I thought to myself, “That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.” He said, “Do you want to be a chemical engineer? You’re really good at science and math.” I said, “okay.” I started doing chemical engineering at IIT. They had a very good program. But after about six weeks, I realized I didn’t want to do engineering and switched to architecture.
DRA: Was the choice to go to IIT partially because you had an interest in architecture? Were you at all versed in Mies van der Rohe?
MS: I knew about the buildings, but I didn’t have a sense of them. I grew up in Riverside, which was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, so I was familiar with design and its integration into communities. I was very aware of Crown Hall as the most interesting building on campus. But I went there for engineering because it was something I felt I was good at. I’d always done lots of art: I’d make models, paint, watercolor, and sculpt. I thought the two disciplines--engineering and art--might be very interesting together, so that’s where I thought I’d go into architecture. However, the rigors of architecture turned me off, so I went back to engineering. But eventually, architecture was significantly more interesting.
DRA: Now, as an established architect, you actually renovated Crown Hall. You’ve come full circle. How has renovating buildings by Mies van der Rohe influenced your practice?
MS: Going to school there and then deeply touching the work that he did gives me another level of amazement of how an architect could think with the clarity that Mies van der Rohe did. Crown Hall and Farnsworth House are amazing balancing acts of architecture, structure, and enlightenment. When you take it apart, you have a much greater understanding of how it was put together.
DRA: Even though you discovered you weren’t a good chemical engineer, to what extent did you use your engineering knowledge throughout your career, specifically pertaining to Mies van der Rohe’s buildings?
MS: I was always very interested in how things were connected. I would always make models and take things apart and put them back together. What I realized in architecture is that there’s an incredible artistic discipline to how things go together: a sense of portion, structure, scale, and material. After my education at IIT, where all of those things are thought to be very important, I embraced it on a larger scale. It was no longer a model scale, but a scale of the building itself. [Ron Krueck] shares a love of the same sense of material and connection and proportion that I discovered as a young boy.
DRA: After all, IIT stands for the Illinois Institute of Technology. With Mies van der Rohe’s buildings, do you feel that there’s a certain balance that needs to be achieved between being a piece of technology and being an art form?
MS: His theory and philosophy was one of reduction: you would try to reduce until the absolute essence of the structure and architecture became one. Ron and I have been interested in not copying that but using that as a framework to move onto the next generation of that thought, meaning we’re interested in the same rigor as Mies but in more expression of that structure and material. Mies became more and more simplified and dedicated to purity. As we become more established, we’re actually interested in more expression but with an integrity of structure and material.
DRA: Is restoring Mies’s buildings and working from scratch more or less demanding than starting from scratch?
MS: Crown Hall is the best example. It’s really a design problem. We replaced all the glass. We were supposed to hold on to everything Mies had done, but we had to put in code compliant glass that required a specific depth. Design is exactly this: a constraint that you have to work around. We learned a deep respect for Mies, but we had to work around things because we were using today’s materials. The glass that went in the upper right of Crown Hall was twice as thick as the old glass. How do you do that while keeping the essence of Mies? It’s like restoring The Last Supper. You have to restore it while maintaining the original spirit. It’s not technical, but artistic. You have to have sympathy and a design eye.
DRA: How have you guys established leadership within the Chicago design community?
MS: We never abandoned the principles of Modernism, even in the face of Postmodernism. Philip Johnson had finished the AT&T building in New York, and it was hailed as a masterpiece. But we see now it was the Nehru jacket of architecture. The tenets of Modernism were still valid then and are still valid today. What Modernists did was show that material had its own inherent beauty. That’s what we believed in. We didn’t believe that arches in entrances were required in order to get people to understand they were walking in an entrance. We believed in honest architecture.
DRA: What is your advice for young, emerging architects and artists?
MS: Get out a lot and see a lot. Be responsible for what you want to innovate. Different isn’t always better; it’s sometimes just different. Today, the chance for young architects to understand the world is constantly changing. Be honest and have integrity.
Tone & Structure: An Interview With Michael Jefferson
Although most recognized for his classic Knoll steel frame chair, Italian-born artist Harry Bertoia has achieved newfound cultural significance as a sculptor more than thirty years after his death in 1978 thanks to, among others, Chicago’s Wright Auction House. On June 6th, Wright auctioned off Bertoia’s Standard Oil Commission sculptures, exploring the market enthusiasm now associated with Bertoia’s work.
A few months ago, DRA had the chance to speak with Wright Senior Specialist Michael Jefferson about Bertoia’s work and the chance of a major retrospective in the future. You can read the transcript below, edited for length and clarity.
DRA: How did Wright acquire the sculptures from the Standard Oil Commission?
Michael Jefferson: They were coming out of private collections. I was aware of some missing pieces from the original installation knowing it was much larger. I never quite knew what happened to them. It was through chance and through our position in the market for Bertoias that we got them. It was a great discovery. Most of the commercial public installations that he made are in their original composition and location.
DRA: Why are you selling the sculptures now?
MJ: They are ready to be sold. For a long time, they were in storage. They were an uncapped asset for the current owners, who found it the right moment to bring them to the market and liquidate the asset.
DRA: Independent of the market, why is it important to have these pieces in a collection, whether that’s private or in a museum? What’s important about these works in comparison with other works that might be in a collection?
MJ: Bertoia collaborated with architects starting in the Fifties and then later into the Seventies. These works represent the crowning achievement of his career. They’re some of the most tonal sculptures he’s created. They were unutilized, sitting there, not having value for anybody. There’s so much history behind this installation in terms of public sculpture in the U.S. He collaborated with Edward Stone, who was the original architect of the Standard Oil Building, and Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill. It’s amazing these commissions he was able to get in collaboration with these major architects. There were no other large scale ensembles of these sculptures.
DRA: Would you say Wright has cultivated a market for Bertoia?
MJ: No question. We’ve been instrumental in his rediscovery in the market. This will be our second sale devoted entirely to Bertoia’s work. We’ve included his sculpture, designs, and jewelry in every sale we’ve ever done. It came to us by chance at the very beginning. His work was prone to becoming a bit obscure. One major reason for this is that he’s an artist without ego, which is rare. Second to that, he did not have an ego-driven dealer in the major marketplaces of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. His work came out of a spirit of creativity.
He began his career as the director of the metals department at Cranbrook. He started as a traditional artist with woodcuts. He was absolutely skilled when it came to working with metal. Eames invited him to come to Santa Monica and be a part of Eames’ office. It’s my firm belief that Bertoia can be credited with the chairs that Eames developed in the Forties as well as the metal dining and lounge chairs. Bertoia never had to worry about money, so he was able to completely focus on his art. He also gave so much of his work away. He gave his work away to designers, decorators, and engineers who connected with his work. In 2000, we started coming across his work and reintroducing it to the market. You can see a really broadened interest in his work from major collectors.
DRA: How has the market for Bertoia impacted his legacy?
MJ: I think we’ve helped to elevate his work by giving it a platform and metaphoric pedestal to be reassessed. It’s not decorative, whimsical, or lightweight. We want to show he had a thoughtful career as an artist and present it to people who get it and sell the work to collectors, who will in turn sell his work to others.
DRA: Would you say he’s a prime example in showing how a piece of art and design’s increasing monetary value can lead to its increasing collective cultural value?
MJ: I hate to look at it that way, but yes. I think that once the value of something increases, the tendency for somebody to find it more precious starts to take hold. Once you own it, you have a vested interest in the market doing well by broadening the people who are interested. Once Bertoia’s work started to trade for over $100,000, the six figures start to blink on people’s radar. That’s happening with Harry’s work.
DRA: Would you say that his design philosophies have any contemporary basis for comparison?
MJ: We’re in a different art world than Fifty years ago. When making it, Bertoia didn’t want to catalog or attribute a tale to his work. He wanted to make it out of a pure spirit of creativity. He thought about things on a cosmic, spiritual level. Olafur Eliasson comes to mind in terms of the ethereality and materiality of his work. The pureness of the creativity and appreciation for life and acceptance of one’s own place in the cosmos that Bertoia comes from.
DRA: Would you say that Bertoia’s existential universality leads to the work standing the test of time and the test of different markets? Is Bertoia’s work postmodern, in a “if you’re honestly personal, your work ends up being relatable” kind of way?
MJ: I absolutely believe that. There’s certainly aesthetics that helped it lead the test of time; he was no slouch in working with metals. But it’s the quality of execution coupled with the pure place from which it stemmed that makes it absolutely valid.
DRA: Did this existential process leak into his furniture?
MJ: He designed furniture for a moment and then never designed it again. He didn’t consider himself a designer like Eames. But the process to come to a solution was very similar to him.
DRA: What would you say to someone who might describe Bertoia’s work as kitschy?
MJ: I would say they’re making a knee-jerk reaction. You can see a piece or two out of context and dismiss it. But when you see his whole oeuvre, he’s a master of whimsical metalworking. He’s thinking about these things with pure, mathematical proportions and whole numbers, as in choosing the number of rods in a sculpture. When you start to dissect and undermine it, something else takes its place. I would suggest the person needs to study more.
DRA: Will we see a Bertoia retrospective in the future?
MJ: I’m interested in seeing his work elevated in the art world. I would like to see a major retrospective of his work at a major, international institution. What we’ve seen so far are smaller-scale dealers carrying some of the work. He hasn’t yet been picked up by a major New York dealer. What I’m seeing now are dealers trying to present the work at events like Art Basel in Miami. The Milwaukee Art Museum has a small room with a view overlooking lake Michigan, and the room is dedicated to Bertoia. The Art Institute has some of his works. These things are important to the market, and eventually, he will have a retrospective.
Obscuring The Highlights: An Interview With Designer Nick Steinhardt
BY JORDAN MAINZER
You might know musician Nick Steinhardt from the band Touché Amoré, but he’s a designer by trade. Steinhardt works for Smog Design, a design firm who specializes in print, typography, photography, and packaging. He also designed the cover artwork for one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the year: Sunbather by San Francisco black metal titans Deafheaven. However, the pink and white minimal album art (in conjunction with the actual music) has gained a lot of attention for its radical departure from the black metal aesthetic.
I spoke with Steinhardt about his design for Sunbather's cover art and packaging as well as his process, design philosophy, and some of his other work. You can read the transcript, edited for length and clarity, below. All packaging photos are by Kevin Luong.
Jordan Mainzer: For how long have you been doing album art?
Nick Steinhardt: I started doing it out of default with my high school band because I had a little of an art background. My first professional job was in 2005. Now, I do all of the artwork for Touché Amoré
JM: How did you get in contact with Deafheaven?
NS: We played their first show in L.A. It went really well, so I invited them to hang out in L.A., and we’ve been good friends since then.
JM: How did the idea for the Sunbather cover come about?
NS: George and I were brainstorming for a while while Deafheaven was writing [Sunbather]. He sent me the cover for Pulp’s We Love Life, which had a simple typographic cover. It’s like 19th century Victorian type. That was the inspiration for doing something more minimal. I ran with that theme and did a lot of research. When I’m working on a project, I do a lot of research and collect references, and that leads my mind to think where things should go aesthetically. The key of the idea came from that.
JM: Was George conscious of the type of reaction the cover would get considering that Deafheaven is a black metal band but the cover is summery, pink, and minimal?
NS: Oh yeah. He’s a super smart guy with really great taste. A lot of the reviews of Sunbather will call it a perfectly calculated assault on the black metal norm. We didn’t really approach it from that way. To us, we were just concentrating on the mood and sound of the music. Imagery got the record noticed in a different light--it framed the context of what you’re listening to.
JM: After I saw the cover, I first listened to “Dream House”, and I thought to myself, “You know, I could see myself listening to this during a summer.”
NS: That first riff on “Dream House” seems so uplifting to me, and then it comes crashing down. It’s euphoria, and then pure hopelessness.
JM: Was there anything else the cover was trying to express in connection with certain visual cues that the music might evoke?
NS: The record as a whole is about beauty, success, and riches, and the struggles and faults that hold you back from achieving that. The cover is euphoric-looking, and it resembles the color in the back of your eyelids when you’re staring at the sun. And everything about the typeface is slightly obscured. We approached the packaging in the similar way. The full package is definitely the big expression of the idea. The letters are high gloss so you can feel the lift when you put your finger over it. The interior of the jacket, too. We die cut the "A" on the cover and the "V" of the back cover. It creates a pinhole to view what's inside. The image of the girl with the confetti--you can see that a little bit. It’s a festive thing, but you can only see it through these small windows. The packaging design and the record are about obscuring the highlights.
JM: Are you doing the art for the new Touché Amoré album?
NS: I just finished it, as well as the packaging.
JM: Is the art at all a continuation of the type of thing you did for Deafheaven, or is it more specific to Touché Amoré?
NS: It’s definitely more specific to us. When I have enough time, which I did with Deafheaven and with our releases, I really delve into the process. With Sunbather, George came down to L.A. for a weekend, and we had a brainstorming session, showing each other resources and printed materials. I do the same thing with [Touché Amoré vocalist Jeremy Bolm]. I try to base the aesthetic off of the lyrical themes. I more or less treat him like he’s the client. But we’re collaborative.
JM: How are making music and making album art similar and how are they different?
NS: They’re not all that similar, but they have a few similarities. I was trained as a designer, which most people think is a four-year Photoshop class. But it’s really intense critical thinking education. It’s about your process and how to hone your skills to make something aesthetically appropriate. With writing my music, that kind of approach sometimes enters my brain. To be able to critically analyze why you like something is part of my design background.
JM: Where do you think the role of visuals in music is going? From music videos and graphic design to something more interactive like apps?
NS: As record sales decline and as digital becomes the new medium, visuals in packaging becomes less important to the consumer. If you want to buy the new Selena Gomez album, you’re going to type her name into iTunes and click on whatever. As a designer, it's a shame to design for a 200 by 200 pixel square, but that's reality. But the counterpoint to that is as music sales decline, touring and the live show becomes important. Now, the live visual experience has become more sensory. I don’t remember nearly as many bands as now having projections and concentrating on the overall live experience. I hope Deafheaven grows to have some sort of weird, crazy, psychedelic projected light show.
JM: What’s next for you?
NS: My schedule just got strangely free, and my head is adjusting to that. Next up for me is designing merch for the Touché Amoré tour. Nothing too crazy.
Distance and Closeness: An Interview With Wafaa Bilal
BY JORDAN MAINZER
Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal is known for provocative works like Domestic Tension, during which he lived in a Chicago gallery for a month and was shot by paintballs by remote Internet users so as to mirror the vulnerability and fragility of life in war-torn Iraq. Yet, his latest series, The Ashes Series, which had its run at Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery from April 3 to May 26, is more personal and subdued. In The Ashes Series, Bilal collects images documenting the destruction of Iraq and syndicates them together to create a ghostly whole, removing the human figures in the original photos and replacing them with ashes.
I had the chance to interview Bilal last month. You can read the transcript below, which was edited for length and clarity.
Jordan Mainzer: Where does The Ashes Series fit in with some of your other work?
Wafaa Bilal: In 2003, the war in Iraq started, and I started collecting these images. I didn’t know what to do with them. I made the series because of my desire to connect back home. But this is very meditative work in the sense that it’s not trying to provoke. It’s very personal.
JM: The work is very real, but it’s also somewhat spiritual. Would you agree?
WB: Yeah, the spirituality of loss. A human ash, in the literal sense, represents the aura of the human. The work looks at the conflict from a distance, but it’s really about human and cultural loss.
JM: You fled Iraq in 1991 and taught art at a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia. Describe that experience.
WB: I thought it was going to be a temporary place, but it ended up not being temporary. I opened a studio and started offering up the studio to anybody who wanted to come and practice art. Camp friends who would come and paint, people who wanted to do poetry. It wasn’t really teaching art but instead a space for people to occupy.
JM: Was that experience seminal in changing your opinion on the power of art?
WB: Yes, a profound change in my life. Not in how I make art, but how precious life is. All of a sudden, I’m in the middle of a desert with access to nothing. It made me appreciate life a lot more, and it added an urgency in my work.
JM: When you moved to the United States, how much of a cultural shock was the vastly different role of art?
WB: When I went to school, I couldn’t believe how disengaged art was from a political act. It’s a privilege. Not that there’s no political art in the U.S.--there’s a very strong history of it. It was just the culture I was in. It didn’t deter me from doing what I wanted to do.
JM: Did your art become even more political after moving to the United States?
WB: It became an act of awareness and existence, a safe zone. I had the privilege and responsibility to make political art freely.
JM: Did you notice a shift in public perception towards your art in the U.S.?
WB: The shift appeared after 9/11.
JM: In more recent years, the War in Iraq has become less popular. Has the perception of your work become more favorable?
WB: Yeah. And culturally, people are aware of what is happening more than ever. The decentralization of the news and technology allows for this.
JM: Is there any semblance of a contemporary art scene in Iraq right now?
WB: Unfortunately, no. I don’t think the government is a big supporter of contemporary art. But people still practice it.
JM: Have you gone back to Iraq?
WB: I went back in 2009. It’s a difficult reality. There’s simultaneous distance and closeness.
JM: Is that contradiction present in The Ashes Series or will it be in your future work?
WB: I still have a very strong tie to Iraq, but at the same time, I don’t. I don’t know what to call it. It’s really complicated.
I Will Grow: An Interview With Music Video Director Tyler Williams
BY MATTHEW VIDALIS
Tyler Williams is an up-and-coming music video director who went from shooting skate videos to working with Youth Lagoon. With a unique style and rich visual vocabulary, he has made some of the most beautiful music videos in recent memory. I talked with him about his process and his background as well as his influences and inspirations.
Matthew Vidalis: Where are you from originally and how did you get started in the industry?
Tyler Williams: I grew up in the county close to Santa Barbara, CA. Back in junior high and high school, I was obsessed with skateboarding and filming my friends around town. I would film for days and edit for hours and hours. Fun times back then. Trial and error approach to learning.
MV: What lead you to work with Youth Lagoon’s Trevor Powers? What was that process like?
TW: I met Trevor after I moved to Boise while he was in a band in high school. We always spoke about working together on a music video and it sort of just worked out once he recorded under Youth Lagoon. It's really great working with Trevor because he gives me the freedom to create stories that I believe in.
MV: Both the videos for “Montana” and “July” have very distinct story lines. How do you come up with these stories? Or are they something Trevor has in mind before hand?
TW: All of my work is derived from the feeling the song makes me feel. I then take that feeling and create an environment to house the characters and sort of just piece it all together. There isn’t really any specific way I go about it, it just usually comes to me. I've been fortunate Trevor has allowed me to have 100% control and freedom on his music videos.
MV: Do you plan out your shoots with storyboards? Or is it more of an intuitive process?
TW: I do plan it out from start to finish and somewhat storyboard the master shots, but it does turn into an intuitive process. Especially when I'm working with such small budgets: I usually have to improvise on set if I can't get a location,prop, or vehicle that I originally envisioned. It usually works out in the end. At least I hope so. Usually, by the time I'm halfway through post-production, I'm ready to move onto the next project.
MV: My personal favorite work of yours is your "July" video. I love the look, the color palette, and the whole feel of the video. It also kind of has an old school vibe to it, which I also really like. Was there someone in particular that influenced you when making this video?
TW: Thanks, I really appreciate it! I have this obsession with the past and the way cinema looked pre-digital. I love all of those 80's kid adventure films, like The Gate, The Goonies, and Monster Squad. I just love the feeling they have. For some reason, they have a coziness to them. A current director that I absolutely love is Ti West. The Innkeepers & House Of The Devil are pure love.
MV: Who else has inspired your work and how?
TW: Lately, I have been reading a lot of gritty old crime novels by Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, and Ross Macdonald. It’s a great inspiration. I'd love to make a noir someday.
MV: How long does it usually take you to shoot a video?
TW: It usually depends on what schedules the rest of the crew has, but if everyone is free, I'd say a typical music video would be three half-full days of shooting. The toughest part is that I shoot and direct at the same time, which has its own hurdles.
MV: How many people are in your shooting crew? Do you use art directors and production designers?
TW: I usually have one go-to man to help with location scouting and getting everyone secured. Otherwise, it is mainly just me. Not that I want it that way, but it's hard to get crew with limited budgets. The last music video for Youth Lagoon, which was the video for “Mute”, did actually have a very talented art director who helped me tremendously. I couldn’t have done it without her!
MV: What are you working on next, and is there a particular artist you would like to work with in the future?
TW: I don't have anything set for production yet, but I have a few in the works. Hmmm...dream artists to work with. I'm hoping to work with Timber Timbre at some point. They are probably my favorite current band. They are truly amazing. That's a tough one, though. Arcade Fire?
MV: What is the last album you listened to and film you saw?
TW: I've been listening to the new White Fence album a ton lately. The new William Tyler album is super good, too. I watched this Australian horror film a few nights ago called The Loved Ones. I really enjoyed it.
Like They Do In The Future: An Interview With Timothy Saccenti
Cheers! A new contributor we’d like to introduce conducted our latest interview. Matthew Vidalis is from Athens, Greece and currently resides in New York. He graduated the Rhode Island School of Design this year with a BFA in Illustration. He has worked with record labels and musicians creating album art and served as the event coordinator for RISD's music festival Take a Break. More recently, he has worked on short films and feature films, including on Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom.
Vidalis interviewed prolific music video director Timothy Saccenti, who has helmed videos by Battles, El-P, Depeche Mode, and Animal Collective.
Matthew Vidalis: How did you get started in the industry, and how did you end up working with so many great artists?
Timothy Saccenti: Without getting into a biography, it was a combination of luck, obsessiveness, and genuine love for the music that’s brought me to my current state. I was lucky enough to meet a group of creative people in New York City who were extremely passionate about music [mainly the burgeoning early electronic music of the mid 90s], art, and the philosophies that went with it. There was a certain understanding they gave me that has translated well to my photography and directing, which at the time was an interest in things like Kirlian electromagnetic photography and the like. As that paradigm shifted and the music has spread, and as it’s become a world wide movement rather than the small, esoteric fan base it initially had, I’ve been able to keep my aesthetics and ideals in place while having an actual career.
Luck is a huge factor in any success and I’ve been very lucky to have people support me and suggest me to these amazing artists I’ve worked with. But really, if you approach these subjects with genuine excitement about their music, that tends to be infectious. I’m personally surprised how far things have come, actually. But often, my relationship with the artists start with me working with them on a stills photo shoot, getting to know them and building trust, and then moving on to motion pieces. Doing still photography is very helpful in this way: trying out ideas and experiments without the risk and burden of an entire video and campaign weighing on it.
MV: When called to make a video, do the artists or their labels contact you? Do you ever reach out to artists you wanted to work with?
TS: This is a good point to make: that often the best works are true collaborations between you and the artist. The more layers between yourself and them, generally, the more room for error and miscommunication. I can look back at projects that didn’t succeed and see that that issue was nearly universal to them. Sometimes the artists reach out directly to me but each time is different. It was once such that only the labels would reach out, via video commissioners, and there was a set protocol. That seems to be quickly changing; some artists are getting funding from websites or television networks and bringing the projects directly to the director. So there are different routes being taken. But the cost of creating any video work is so high that most artists individually don’t have the budget to bring in the team to create a full-on music video. I try to keep my mind open as well to see if there’s some way to get something made, possibly tying it into an art show or a fashion magazine piece. There are so many outlets now that if you want to get something shown, there is a way. It might take a while to work it out, but now artists’ promotion cycles are more open as well. So basically, there are no rules. And yes, if there’s an artist I want to work with I’ll contact his or her label, manager, or them directly and start a conversation. There’s so much music now and so many great artists whom you can actually contact directly that it’s made that entire process much easier.
MV: What's your process when deciding on the content of your video? Are there lyrical or tonal queues you look for?
TS: I’m sure intuition plays a huge part, but usually I start with setting the rhythm and tone based on the visceral quality of the music. That’s a big part, getting the atmosphere and energy right. I'm sure like most directors and photographers you are always gathering visual and conceptual references. Being an art book and film obsessive pays off, so you start to gather those elements. It’s very abstract at that point. It might just be a set of shapes, an element like fire or water, or words. Sometimes you hear a song and think, “Oh, this sounds like someone being stalked by the ghost of your former lover” or “This sounds like a truck full of hexagons smashing into a lamp post.” That gets written down on note cards. I might put the track to some visuals I have I’ve been experimenting with myself and it’s basically an outline. From there, I would fill in the lines with colors, narratives, and symbols and send it to the band for their feedback. But usually, I start from scratch. I know many directors have files of old treatments they repurpose for bands, but I have a bit more of a hard time doing that. I fall in love with each track so I have a hard time repurposing older treatments.
MV: How involved are the artists themselves in the process? Do they have a vision for their videos? Or do they leave that up to you?
TS: I’m sure everyone is different, and I think part of your talent, as a director, has to be feeling out how much of “you” should be in a video and how much of the artist should be. I’ve done some videos, as in the “Heaven” video for Depeche Mode, where it was nearly self indulgent how much of it was purely my personal obsessions showing up on the screen, where as with the EL-P projects, he is in involved with the concepts from the first steps. It makes sense, as his hip-hop is very visual and has traditional story telling aspects and he needs to act in these films to be fully invested. I actually rarely write treatments where the artist needs to act, as he or she might be terrible and throw the entire piece off. So this is really an optimal situation with El-P.
MV: One of my favorite videos of yours is for Battles’ “Atlas”. Was the concept for that something you came up with? How did that come about?
TS: The “Atlas” video was part of a long campaign we had for the album. I had photographed the press shots and got along with the band. They had decided to call the album Mirrored; on my own, I had been working with two-way mirrors, so there was some luck and synchronicity there. We actually built a miniature mirror box and photographed the “Atlas” single artwork in it first, which I used to flesh out the idea. It was sort of a test for the album cover and video, which would be the band’s equipment in this large mirrored box. Dave Konopka, the bassist, is a great designer, so he and I collaborated on the look and feel of things. It was again an organic process. We had the luxury of time to work it out which is rare. They were very involved in the shoot production as far as the set, with Dave's brother production designing and the band themselves actually putting it together. My thought was that it was influenced by the loops and mathematical approach to their music, as well as their emphasis on performance. They actually are playing live; everything’s plugged in and during the edit, we made sure that each note in the track that was seen on screen was being played correctly. It was a complex production. I’ve been lucky to work on a few campaigns like this: creating the album art, portraits, and videos, and it’s always very rewarding. Much more so then jumping on a campaign in full swing with a band that is feeling a bit burnt on it and trying to bring some new magic to it.
MV: Do you have a favorite out of your own videos? If so, which one and why?
TS: Well, since I’ve basically become a director on set, [I hadn’t studied film and had barely been on a film set until I started directing] each one represents some technical, conceptual, or emotional hurdle that was either a success or a failure. I’ve tried to be careful about what projects I direct, and having a career as a photographer helps massively, as I’m not locked into needing to constantly direct. So in that sense, usually, my most recent project is my favorite. This Depeche Mode campaign we’ve been doing has been extremely rewarding. Working with a band at that level, with its rich visual history and creating as much content as we have, is a rare treat. So, at the moment, it’s the “Heaven” video. Looking to the past, it would be [Animal Collective’s] “Peacebone”, as the story is timeless, and the production was as fantastic and ridiculous as you could imagine.
MV: How long does it usually take you to complete a video? What’s the production process like?
TS: Start to finish it’s about 2 months. It’s fairly typical, I’d think: get song, sit in a dark smoking room blasting song, write ideas, trash ideas, write new ideas, write treatment, make revisions, story board, shoot, panic, shoot some more, edit, VFX, telecine, sleep. For boards, I work with a great conceptual artist named Dopepope, and I ask him to board out some of the more complex scenes, like scenes that need VFX. But often, I will change these as we shoot. Coming from a photography background, I end up improvising more on set for music videos a bit more than if I came from a motion graphics or computer art background. I’ve been on set literally thousands of days, so it’s where I feel most comfortable.
MV: What is your planning process for shooting? Do you storyboard beforehand or are you more process-driven?
TS: Basically, I take all my ideas, some lyrics, and references and generally put them on note cards as we go along, and then those get taped to the studio wall and organized into coherent patterns, often based on the wave form of the track so we can see where the ebbs and flows are. This is then made into a shooting template, which is helpful during the shoot, but not something that is followed precisely.
However, I think the most important part of the process is meeting with the people you will create with and then evolving ideas together. Coming from a stills background, it’s an amazing aspect of film. In photography, you are often the sole visual artist, playing the role of conceptualizer, art director, and lighting designer. So getting influence and inspiration from a team on a motion project is incredibly rewarding. Our team is individually obsessed with their craft and learning and trying new techniques, so we often use music videos as a way to experiment with them. For our video for MNDR’s “Cut Me Out”, Ivan Safrin, a digital artist I collaborate with often, had wanted to hack kinects for an installation piece. We worked out a way to make this happen and incorporated it into the video, something I could never have done on my own.
MV: Do you use an art director or a production designer for your shoots?
TS: Yes, I use an art director and/or production designer for our projects. It's important to have someone with the proper taste level in charge of those departments. However, that's always a tricky one.
MV: Do you usually work with the same crew, or does that vary between projects?
TS: I try to work with the same team as often as possible. It’s very important to have a shorthand dialogue and trust level, as the shoots themselves are stressful. We tend to have lots of technical elements, lasers, projections, and sets that can be tricky with the small crews we use—and I do try to keep the crew as small as possible for creative flexibility. Working with the same team helps with that. Everyone is at the top of his or her field, so why go elsewhere?
MV: What artists or individuals inspire you? Who has influenced your work?
TS: Friends, mainly: I have a rich, inspiring group of friends who are passionate about their work. They are fashion designers, set designers, 3D artists, and fine artists. It’s good to be influenced by sources outside your medium. Personally, I have a fascination with science, the dawn of consciousness, the nature of reality; things of that ilk inspire me conceptually. I keep picking back up The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. These books are interesting, as they inform the edit process: how does the mind process memory? Why is one edit or take visceral and the other flat? These are rooted deeply into the structure of the brain, and it’s fascinating to explore and/or manipulate that. See the PlayStation “Playfaces” campaign for an example of that, with the master editor Dayn Williams. My main hobby, though, is spending inordinate amounts of money on obscure films and art books. The Codex Seraphinianus, an encyclopedia of creatures from an imaginary world that informed the Depeche Mode project, has being doing the rounds lately. Doing these visual films recently, I’ve been obsessing over early video art again, running things through video synths. Piotr Kamler was a big influence on the last few projects we did. It’s always different. That’s the fun part, having an excuse to research the world and be exposed to things you would never think of. It’s definitely a good outlet for obsessive personality traits!
MV: What are you working on next?
TS: I’m excited to work with some new artists at the moment: a project for Hyperdub, one for Oneohtrix Point Never for Warp, and another fun video for Killer Mike and El-P. There’s a lot of great music coming out now. I think the challenge for everyone is keeping enough commercial work flowing to allow you to indulge yourself with your experimental exploration of the world and trying to bring your friends along with you.
