v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Anna Balecho

Interview with Balecho from Dazed Digital:

Dazed Digital: How do you achieve intimacy in your photographs?
Anna Balecho: It's not intentional, in the sense that I don't think about that while shooting, it happens. As much as I can, I only work with what I feel, even doing some kind of fashion editorial, I've done it like I would in my personal work.
 
DD: What's your favourite kind of light?
Anna Balecho: Natural. Not too sunny, and if I can be picky, not directly in my subjects of work. That said... I don't obsess over taking photos. Maybe because I've always used film, or maybe because that's just the way I relate to photography. If 'it’s' there, it’s there - I don't worry about the light.
 
DD: What's your opinion on the connection between memories and photographs?
Anna Balecho: In the end that's what photograph are, right? Memories of your dreams, of what you felt or what you wish you had. In a way we all try to create our memories. I’m not a nostalgic person, not even a bit, but I do have a thing about "stuff" that reminds me of the past...

Balecho's Website

Sunday afternoon in Chelsea

Vallejo Nocturno 2012- from the walkway. . .

Nu Esthetics

On the "new aesthetic", from Bruce Sterling:

The “New Aesthetic” is a native product of modern network culture. It’s from London, but it was born digital, on the Internet. The New Aesthetic is a “theory object” and a “shareable concept.”

The New Aesthetic is “collectively intelligent.” It’s diffuse, crowdsourcey, and made of many small pieces loosely joined. It is rhizomatic, as the people at Rhizome would likely tell you. It’s open-sourced, and triumph-of-amateurs. It’s like its logo, a bright cluster of balloons tied to some huge, dark and lethal weight.

There are some good aspects to this modern situation, and there are some not so good ones.

Art movements used to be Left Bank café tables where disaffected creatives quarreled about headlines in newspapers. “Theory objects” from the Internet are squamous, crabgrass-like entities, where people huddle around swollen, unstable databases. We know more or less how analog art movements once behaved. We don’t yet know much at all about collectively-intelligent theory-object “shareable concepts,” whether they’re worth anything or can deliver anything. Maybe they will brilliantly synergize. Maybe they will ignobly crash. Maybe they’ll have the mayfly lifespans of their hardware support. Maybe they will become things even harder to describe than they are now.

First, some “good” aspects of the New Aesthetic.

Above all, the New Aesthetic is telling the truth. There truly are many forms of imagery nowadays that are modern, and unique to this period. We’re surrounded by systems, devices and machineries generating heaps of raw graphic novelty. We built them, we programmed them, we set them loose for a variety of motives, but they do some unexpected and provocative things.

Bridle’s collection of this material is huge. The evidence is impossible to refute. Anybody with a spark of perception who looks through this thing:

http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/

must recognize that modern reality is on display there. What we think about that, or do about that, is another matter. That it exists is not in question.

Look at those images objectively. Scarcely one of the real things in there would have made any sense to anyone in 1982, or even in 1992. People of those times would not have known what they were seeing with those New Aesthetic images. It’s the news, and it’s the truth.

Next, the New Aesthetic is culturally agnostic. Most anybody with a net connection ought to be able to see the New Aesthetic transpiring in real time. It is British in origin (more specifically, it’s part and parcel of a region of London seething with creative atelier “tech houses”). However, it exists wherever there is satellite surveillance, locative mapping, smartphone photos, wifi coverage and Photoshop.

The New Aesthetic is comprehensible. It’s easier to perceive than, for instance, the “surrealism” of a fur-covered teacup. Your Mom could get it. It’s funny. It’s pop. It’s transgressive and punk. Parts of it are cute.

It’s also deep. If you want to get into arcane matters such as interaction design, computational aesthetics, covert surveillance, military tech, there’s a lot of room for that activity in the New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic carries a severe, involved air of Pynchonian erudition.

It’s contemporary. It’s temporal rather than atemporal. Atemporality is all about cerebral, postulated, time-refuting design-fictions. Atemporality is for Zenlike gray-eminence historian-futurist types. The New Aesthetic is very hands-on, immediate, grainy and evidence-based. Its core is a catalogue of visible glitches in the here-and-now, for the here and for the now.

It requires close attention. If you want to engage with the New Aesthetic, then you must become involved with some contemporary, fast-moving technical phenomena. The New Aesthetic is inherently modish because it is ferociously attached to modish, passing objects and services that have short shelf-lives. There is no steampunk New Aesthetic and no remote-future New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic has no hyphen-post, hyphen-neo or hyphen-retro. They don’t go there, because that’s not what they want.

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The new Inquiry

Circular Bookcase

The extraordinary case of the circular bookcase

speciesbarocus:

From: Ackermann Rudolph - The Repository of arts, literature, commerce, manufactures, fashions and politics (1809).

 

Idris Kahn

From PhotoSlaves:

dris Khan creates multi-layered photos, often of appropriated art and books, in a way that both augments the aura of the original and reveals the idiosyncratic trace of his own hand. Khan’s work explores the history of photography and literature, the beauty of repetition and the anxieties of authorship. “it’s obviously not about re-photographing the photographs to make exact copies, but to intervene and bring a spectrum of feelings – warmth, humour, anxiety – to what might otherwise be considered cool aloof image.  You can see the illusion of my hand in the layering.  It looks like a drawing.  It’s not systematic or uniform.  The opacity of every layer is a different fallible, human decision”. Idris Khan graduated with an MA in Fine Art from the Royal college of Art in 2003.

Since completing his studies at the Royal College of Art in London in 2004, the young British artist Idris Khan (born in 1978) has produced an intellectually lucid and visually impressive oeuvre in only a few years. Khan’s subjects show his passionate interest in culturally coded works and artefacts from the spheres of literature, art and music. Photography and video are his media of choice. In his photographs he digitally superimposes pictures, texts or scores he has acquired onto one another. He has applied this method to postcards of Turner paintings, photographs of industrial buildings by Bernd and Hilla Becher, notations from Wagners Parsifal, pages of the Koran and from a treatise by Sigmund Freud. Idris Khan’s composites turn texts, pictures and music into a vibrating turbulence and give them a new dimension of presence.

Working with appropriated imagery, Idris Khan’s photos are all-encompassing composites, consolidating iconic cultural symbols of similar type into single ‘super-images’. In this selection of his every… series, Khan aggregates the work of renowned artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, famous for their vast photographic collections of buildings and industrial sites. Exposed in translucent layers, anchored by the compositions’ continuous shapes, the Becher’s gasholders and gabled houses loose their commanding simplicity and rigid formalism, descending into fractured and gestural blurs merely suggestive of the originals. Through this process of layering, Khan creates a poetic malleability from the fixed codes of history. Compressing the timeline of repetition into indivisible subsuming moments, his photos offer a glimpse into the sublime.

Interview of designer/book cover artist Peter Menelsund

Interview by Christian Tobias from design/related:

CHRIS TOBIAS: Peter, tell me anything you want about your background, your training, and your first design job.

PM: The short answer is: I don’t have any design training (formal or otherwise), and the job I’m currently working in at Knopf is the first paying gig I ever had as a designer.

The longer story is: The arts always played a large role in my family—my father was an architect-turned-sculptor, and my sister was a painter. I always thought (and still suspect that) I was the one in the family who lacked visual aptitude—We’d go to museums together (incidentally, my mother works at the Metropolitan Museum) and I’d wonder what all the fuss was about. I think my dad considered me a lost cause in the visual-department as well, because he shackled me to the piano when I was five and I’ve been playing ever since. I went to Columbia U. and was a Philosophy major, though I spent most of my time playing the piano. After College, I got various useless graduate degrees in music from various conservatories, then performed, taught, and wrote classical music for a spell. When my first daughter was born, it became clear that a certain someone needed more income.... and after some soul-searching about what I enjoyed doing other than music (reading, making stuff), I taught myself Quark etc., volunteered to design some CD covers for a NY record label where I’d made some recordings, and six months after that, I showed up with a “book” at John Gall’s door, met Carol [Devine Carson] and Chip [Kidd] (ok, I had no idea who any of these people were, which helped A TON). The following week, I was working here; first at Vintage, eight months after that, Knopf hardcovers. Improbably, the entire process from music to design took less than a year. I count my lucky stars that John and Carol were up for a gamble.

And they hired you because...?

PM: I still have no idea. Someone must have been pumping narcotics into the water fountains at Random House the day I came in. I mean, I assume they thought that I had a passable eye…and I had read, or at the very least showed some familiarity with, a lot of the titles which they themselves were working on. I think one could say that those two traits, a decent sense of space and color, and a relatively high degree of literacy, are the most important to have in this profession. And the exciting thing there is: neither trait is particularly difficult to acquire. They definitely teach the first in design schools (how to look), though I’m not so sure about them covering the second (literacy). I’m constantly telling design classes to read more books that are not design-related. I have no idea if I’m getting through or not.

Anyway, I suppose it’s those things that got me hired, plus the drugs in the water. But Chip and Carol and John are the only ones who know for sure.

Did you ever come to the point where you said to yourself, “Hey, I’m working with some of the most celebrated legends in publishing—pinch me.?”

PM: Truthfully, from the moment they called me to tell me I had the job. I think, to my credit, not knowing anything about design, or the design community, I appreciated a good thing immediately. Still do.

The first book of yours that caught my eye was Mao. I have been hunting down your work ever since. Tell me about some of your recent covers including War and Peace. What kind of direction were you given? Is it liberating or intimidating to work on such a monumental classic?

PM: Well, In the case of War and Peace, I’d been waiting for a Pevear and Volokhonsky translation since the early nineties. I’d read their (translation of) The Brothers K. when it was first published by North Point Press, and realized pretty much immediately that everything I knew about Dostoevsky needed revision; and I felt the same way about Tolstoy when Viking published Anna Karenina. When I first got to Vintage I volunteered to repackage the Dostoevsky paperback list, and ended up talking to Richard Pevear on the phone. I remember that we each came to the conversation with a single demand that turned out to be the same: that we not portray the characters in any literal way. I’m inclined towards abstraction to begin with, so we were both happy in the end. And obviously, when W & P was launched, I jumped on it.

There was really no direction on W&P from editorial to go on—just basically “make it pretty.” I think that there’s only two roads for a designer to take with a classic like this— A totally modern re-imagining, like Paul Sahre’s History of Western Philosophy, David High’s Don Quixote, Gabrielle Bordwin’s Sorrows of Young Werther, Chip’s New Testament, these types of things. Or else one can take a classical route—a route which communicates some of the book’s prior design history. I clearly chose the latter. I tried to make the kind of cover that a Knopf designer of a much earlier generation might have made. It’s ironic, because it’s a jacket treatment that I think Constance Garnett (the previous translator of record, and the stylistic opposite of the current translating team) would have appreciated. In any case, everyone here seemed content, and the book’s gone on to do quite well.

And, as to whether the classics are intimidating or liberating to work on: other than the obvious pleasure one gets from reading good writing, the classics tend to come with dead authors, and that helps a designer tons—it’s one less person to object to your work, and thus one less hurdle to overcome. So I’d have to go with “liberating.”

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Kimono Times

Hiroko Takahashi

From PingMag, an interview with Hiroko Takahashi designer of the above kimonos:

How did you start making kimonos, which has now become your most representative work?

As a child, I wanted to become a fashion designer after I saw reports on Paris Fashion Week on TV, so I took a fashion design course at my high school and studied the basics there. After that, I studied traditional dyeing and weaving from the crafts course at Tokyo University of the Arts. But back then, I was immersed in dressmaking in my free hours outside college studies, and even went as far as setting up my own independent brand. It was in those days that I decided to challenge traditional kimono making for the first time, for my graduate presentation in the fourth year of my undergraduate course.

You’d always been making ordinary clothes until then, what made you suddenly turn your eyes to kimonos?

People usually spend a year or so for their graduate exhibition, but Western clothes to me were already so familiar and I found it difficult to perceive them as pieces of work. At the time, I was making clothes with my original fabrics, but Western clothes had limited space to show the patterns of the fabric, and they use many curved lines that make it difficult to connect to the patterns. On the other hand, a kimono can show a large chunk of patterns. Also, I was studying how to dye kimono fabric, so I thought I should challenge Japanese textiles. When I told that to my professor, he was really supportive because although there were many professors who had specialized knowledge on kimonos, students had little interest in it.

Pencils by Daniel Eatock

Pencils by Daniel Eatock

Deberny & Peignot

Divertissements Typographiques: Sample booklet for Deberny & Peignot edited, by Maximilien Vox, 1935