Ever since Saul Bass designed his radical motion graphics for the films of Otto Preminger and Alfred Hitchcock in the 1950s and 60s, a small but vocal group of devoted fans, many of them designers, have followed this art form, often obsessively. The most flamboyant examples of the craft even generate enthusiasm among the general movie-going public (Star Wars and James Bond, come to mind), and every year or so, there is a film that stands out from the crowd largely because of its original title sequence alone. Currently, the film Watchmen is generating a buzz for its coupling of vintage superhero graphics and three dimensional motion type. Others from recent years hyping stylish title sequences include Juno and Panic Room. The best examples are without a doubt an art—essential to the action of the movie, while functioning equally as short, stand-alone films unto themselves. These bold, lavish productions in the skill of marrying original, catchy moving graphics with innovative type certainly garner respect and deserve admiration. But what of those film title sequences of the more subtle variety—those that employ type alone to usher us into the mood, plot, and action of the film? What is the role of pure type in the film title sequence, and does it too have a language, an art of its own?
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“All the world is a stage.” – William Shakespeare
“It is in the logic of things that the last actor should film his own death.” - Raoul Vaneigem
In the 1950’s, Italian painter Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio set out to parody mass production with his “industrial paintings,” paintings that came off a roll and sold by the meter. His concept was “to davalorize art by cranking it out in vast quantities” (Black). Yet, even in the 1950’s, the cunning of the market prevailed, and when he arbitrarily jacked up the price of his “glorified wallpaper,” demand increased (Black). This demonstrates an example of the idea of reification, a concept coined by situationist politico George Lukacs. Reification is the notion “where the relationships between things replaces the relationships between people. Commodities take on a mind of their own, turning humans into robots mechanically worshipping them” (Elliot).
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The following interview was conducted while I was a design student at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. One of our class assignments was to interview a favorite living designer. While many of my classmates chose superstar graphic designers such as David Carson, Stefan Sagmeister, and April Greiman, I instantly chose Naomi Yang of Exact Change. Perhaps more commonly known as a musician of Damon & Naomi and Galaxie 500 acclaim, Yang is actually both musician and designer. She is the graphic artist behind all the packaging for Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi, books published by Exact Change, as well as Web sites damonandnaomi.com and exactchange.com.
The interview was subsequently published in Yeti magazine, issue no. 3. Visit Yeti at this link.
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The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or more commonly referred to as the Large Glass (1913-23) is a conundrum, a discombobulating manifestation and amalgamation of modern sexual iconography laced with esoteric, mathematical, religious, literary, and even comical undertones. Duchamp himself, regarding his puzzling art, confessed the deliberate experimentation of the Large Glass, a project he admittedly began without solid preconceived direction or intention, a project which he worked on and off for ten years, and finally abandoned unfinished because of heightening boredom associated with the pursuit. Books have been written on the Large Glass alone, scholars desperately trying to unlock its hidden meanings and agendas, and thus creating more and more auras of mythical allure to be attached to the piece.
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Working well over a decade now, the thirty-something year old artist Matthew Barney has recently completed the final installment of his epic five film series The Cremaster Cycle. As a blockbuster show opens this spring 2003 at the Guggenheim in New York, the art world and art admiring public are forced to seriously consider the social and political manifestations of this monstrous endeavor in its entirety. Moving beyond all the current hype surrounding the young artist (a Yale graduate and once fashion model now married to the Icelandic singer Bjork) who is of the moment being touted as a modern day Duchamp, or even as Richard Flood of the Minneapolis Walker Art Center states, the “increasingly dominant artist of our era;” The Cremaster Cycle is in fact a stunning achievement if not solely for the grandiose scale and complex sets, striking in their elaborate detail and imagination (Spayde). If nothing else, the films are fascinating exercises in productionism, fuctioning as design extravaganza. The films encompass a vast design vocabulary, referencing styles from Art Deco to Baroque to contemporary eclecticism. In fact it is these allusions to both historical and contemporary design elements Barney employs as conduits for his narrative.
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I discovered Roger Ballen as I was flipping through the pages of the Winter 2003 issue of Aperture. I was immediately struck by the images for their shocking honesty and brutality. The figures, the people in the images are at once disturbing, fascinating, and endearing. More often than not, they are worn creatures who have lived harsh, stark lives of poverty. They have unusual physical features—one might say abnormalities, retardation. Their skin is rugged, often dirty, and their faces asymmetrical. I feel as if I’ve seen these images before. I’m reminded of the Walker Evans Appalachia photographs. I think at first, perhaps these photos were taken in rural Mississippi, or some Wyoming or Nebraska backwater. For some reason I am quite surprised when I learn the images are from South Africa. Perhaps I tend to glamorize foreign soil. In my head, the foreign poor are more cultured, more sophisticated than the average American. Poverty abroad doesn’t look like American poverty. Although education and reason tell me otherwise, the remnants of colonialism and exoticism still invade my consciousness. The piercing white poverty I see in these photographs is perhaps more in line with a Dorothy Allison novel for me. I’m not quite sure what that says about my character, my psyche, my Americanism. There is a surfacing of something akin to shame when I view this body of work. The directness here strikes a very private cord in my own life, digs at the interior of my existence.
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