Posts Tagged ‘avant-garde’
“This is the last avant-garde. Bold new forms. The power to shock.”*…
Avant Garde was a seminal, but somewhat obscure, magazine, launched in 1968, that broke taboos, rattled some nerves, and made more than a few enemies. The brainchild of Ralph Ginzburg, am adventurous publisher, it was the third major collaboration between Ginzburg and Herb Lubalin, the magazine’s widely-admired art director.
Avant Garde is the magazine that gave birth to a much maligned and equally lauded typeface of the same name. A typeface that reveled in the mutability of letterforms, exhibited brilliantly by its extensive set of ligatured characters. The magazine’s logo, which inspired the typeface, is a perfect encapsulation of what the magazine represented in 1968, the year the magazine launched: exciting, vibrant, edgy, with just the right amount of playfulness to move it out of the corporateness its geometric sans serif forms might otherwise imply. The magazine ran for 3 years, spanning 14 square-sized issues, and only folded due to Ralph Ginzburg losing his long-running legal battle with the US government over obscenity charges (partly stemming from Ralph’s and Herb’s first collaboration, Eros magazine)…
Now Alexander Tochilovsky and The Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography at the Cooper Union have digitized the entire run of Avant Garde and made it available on the web.
* Don DeLillo, White Noise
###
As we speculate on The Shock of the New, we might send masterfully-observed birthday greetings to Saul Erik Steinberg; he was born on this date in 1914. A cartoonist and illustrator (best known for his work for The New Yorker, most notably View of the World from 9th Avenue), he described himself as “a writer who draws.”
People who see a drawing in the New Yorker will think automatically that it’s funny because it is a cartoon. If they see it in a museum, they think it is artistic; and if they find it in a fortune cookie they think it is a prediction.
– Saul Steinberg
Now where did I leave that key?…
The legend in the map above has been removed. Try guessing what it signifies using only clues contained within the map—the relationships between color-coded regions, say.
(One clue to get you started: The map doesn’t analyze “gross national” anything.)
The answer is here.
Thanks to The Morning News.
###
As we we recall that context is everything, we might we might spare a thought for Jean Cocteau; he died on this date in 1963. An avatar of the avant-garde, Cocteau was a prolific poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker… and a passionate friend (and often more) to the likes of Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Yul Brynner, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María Félix, and Édith Piaf. He is probably best remembered for his novel Les Enfants Terribles, and his films Blood of a Poet, Les Parents Terribles, Beauty and the Beast, and Orpheus.
I see you…
Transparency Grenade by Julian Oliver captures network traffic and audio at the site then securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where information is mined.
Via NotCom.
As we “get over it,”* we might recall that it was on this date in 1913 that the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS) opened The Armory Show– the first exhibition of avant-garde art in the U.S. Among the 1200 works on display there were Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. But the work that captured the public’s imagination—and, in some cases, inspired their anger—was more current: the contemporary avant-garde, especially Cubism. Indeed, the paining that became synonymous with the succès de scandale of the Armory Show was Marcel DuChamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912).
In a “review” of the show in Outlook magazine, Theodore Roosevelt, then President of the United States, attempted to be evenhanded: “The exhibitors are quite right as to the need of showing to our people in this manner the art forces which of late have been at work in Europe, forces which cannot be ignored.” But then he went on, “This does not mean that I in the least accept the view that these men take of the European extremists whose pictures are here exhibited.”
DuChamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (source)
* from Wired, January 26, 1996:
The chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems said Monday that consumer privacy issues are a “red herring.”
“You have zero privacy anyway,” Scott McNealy told a group of reporters and analysts Monday night at an event to launch his company’s new Jini technology. “Get over it.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.