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Observatory

John Foster

A Nod to Surrealism

In the image-driven web world most of us frequent today—Tumblr, Flickr, and Pinterest, for example — we are bombarded with images that beg us to look twice. It’s relatively easy to create a yellow zebra with blue stripes, if that’s what suits your fancy. Masterful digital imaging can bring us whatever level of Surrealism you may desire — if you can imagine it, it can be done with pixel manipulation. For artists not working in digital media — those who cut, build, draw, paint, glue, bend, and make things in the more traditional manner — there is something of a “Surrealist” popularity at hand today.

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Alexandra Lange

Dream Weaver

When I wrote about the figure of the knitting architect in February, little did I know that a panoply of knitted, woven and recycled work would soon be on display in New York ... all under the rubric of art, but definitely spatial and challenging. El Anatsui's sinuous works at the Brooklyn Museum, Orly Genger's Red, Yellow and Blue in Madison Square park, and, most modest in scale, the first New York show in 50 years of the work of midcentury sculptor Ruth Asawa, who wove forests, anemones and orbs out of metal wire.

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Rick Poynor

The Conceptual Posters of Boris Bucan

What still seems surprising about the posters Boris Bućan designed in the late 1960s and early 1970s for the Student Center Gallery, the Zagreb Drama Theater, and other Croatian clients is how confidently reductive they are. If this is not quite anti-design, it is certainly design gripped by a powerful sense of restraint. I recall my first impression of the posters in a gallery. The images seemed sharply defined, cerebral and enigmatic.

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Rob Walker

Finding The Story

When Emily Spivack points to product descriptions on eBay, and reveals them to be funny, poignant, or otherwise surprisingly meaningful stories and narratives, she’s up to something effective, and affecting. What looked to the rest of us like mere detritus, the marketplace vernacular of a virtual nation trying to hustle a buck from used goods, gets transformed. Now these are tales of love, of memory, emotion, misadventure, family, fame.

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Alexandra Lange

Anxiety, Culture and Commerce

In recent years, it has become a slam to say, of design collections and exhibitions, that they looked like a shop. When I take my son to the MoMA design collection, he looks in their glass fronted cases and sees the same Massimo Vignelli for Heller plates we have in our glass fronted cabinets at home. Should the difference be obvious? Or is the ability to experience design as a consumer how we spark an interest in history? A series of panels I've organized at MAD examines these questions in the past, present and future.

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: Kit Hinrichs and Delphine Hirasuna

The Alphabet Card

The year 1913 marked the peak of the picture postcard craze. Even though the population in America was less than 100 million, nearly 970 million picture postcards were sold in the U.S. alone. At a time when most people did not own a camera and color commercial printing was in its infancy, the little picture postcards were a delight to view. Collecting and displaying picture postcards in scrapbooks became a popular pastime. Manufacturers encouraged this by issuing postcards in sets so that the public would want to own the whole series.

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Mark Lamster

The Tower that Beer Built

Somewhat unwittingly, I have embarked on a series of pieces on skyscrapers born of alcoholic beverage magnates. The Seagram Building was the product of the (bootleg) whiskey fortune amassed by Sam Bronfman. In Dallas, we have the Kirby (nee Busch) Building, now a residential apartment house but originally a spec office tower financed by the St. Louis beer barron Adolphus Busch. Like the Woolworth in Building in New York, it celebrates its centennial this year.

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Rob Walker

The Medium Is The Mail

Something surprising arrived in the mail not long ago: actual mail. Jill Stoll's "random acts of mail art" combines artistic ritual, creative reuse, and the postal service as unexpected connector. It's a distinctly analog project — with a digital twist. And it made my day.

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Rick Poynor

The Age of Wire and String Rebooted

The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus is a fiction of incomparable strangeness. What and where is the world that its stories describe with such dedicated observational precision? A new edition from the London literary publisher Granta has pulled off the improbable feat of making the book seem even stranger. Its visual interpretation by British artist and illustrator Catrin Morgan goes way beyond the norm for an illustrated book.

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Jessica Helfand

Our Shopping Lists, Our Selves

Lists are the practical roadmaps by which we quantify our obligations. They're scorecards for accomplishment, spreadsheets for success. At once truncated and annotated, they urge us to consider hierarchy and value, want and need. Lists embrace both duty (what we’re meant to do) and aspiration (what we yearn to do), thereby perpetuating the enduring illusion that maybe we’re actually making progress.

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John Thackara

Paranoid But Pretty

In his new show at the German Architecture Center (DAZ) Matthias Megyeri has developed a design language for the artefacts of protection and security in public space. Megyeri poses the question: does protection have to be inconsistent with harmony and beauty? His answer is a family of padlocks, chains, fences, and razor wire that he describes as ‘lovable objects’. Megyeri’s show prompted me to Google “design” and “homeland security” once again and question: "Are we safer?"

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Daniella Zalcman

New York + London: A Vision of Home

When I moved from New York City to London late last year, I decided to create a series of double exposures. The images are part New York, part London, and collectively represent my vision of home.

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John Foster

Enjoying TypeToy

This week's Accidental Mysteries highlights the blog TypeToy — an online collection of mid-century design and typography created by Aaron Eiland. According to Aaron, the name of the blog is derived from the playfulness he sees from much of the work of that era.

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Owen Edwards

The 99 Factor: A Man About Town & Country

I was recently reminiscing about a hero of mine and sometime mentor, Frank Zachary, one of the last of the great editors and art directors of what now seems the golden age of magazines, who turned ninety-nine not long ago. I worry that those of us who knew Frank, and were lucky enough to work for him, are getting older ourselves, and that his tremendous talent and eye for editorial photography is no longer known by many in the graphic design and magazine worlds.

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John Foster

The Inkblot and Popular Culture

Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922), who is still famous today for his psychoanalytic work using inkblots, was very familiar with a popular 19th century parlor game called Blotto. So much, in fact, that as a schoolboy, young Rorschach was nicknamed “Klecks,” (or, “inkblot”) by his friends — because of his fascination with the game. Players of the game would make up poems or stories based on what they saw from the folded paper inkblots they would create.

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