Ron Arad

Ripple chair for Moroso, 2005

Ron Arad est un designer israélien né le 24 avril 1951 à Tel-Aviv. Installé à Londres depuis 1973. London Design Medal en 2011.

Apollo 11 mission July 20, 1969NASA

NASA

This photograph of extraterrestrial landscapes was taken by astronauts and machines under the auspices of NASA during the Apollo missions in 1969–71. Unprecedentedly, these scientific images were exhibited at an art exhibition venue, New York's Light Gallery, in 1979. Critics at the time remarked upon the similarities between these images and contemporary conceptual practices depicting elements of the American landscape being shown by leading art institutions. Aside from their scientific significance, these images of craters, footsteps, and portraits of the astronauts serve as documentation of the extraordinary human feat of the first landing on the moon.

MoMA, Gallery label from From the Collection: 1960-69, March 26, 2016 - March 12, 2017

Dieter Roth

Literature Sausage (Literaturwurst)

1969, published 1961–70

Between 1961 and 1970 Roth created about fifty "literature sausages." To make each sausage Roth followed a traditional recipe, but with one crucial twist: where the recipe called for ground pork, veal, or beef, he substituted a ground-up book or magazine. Roth mixed the ground-up pages with fat, gelatin, water, and spices before stuffing them into sausage casings. The source materials include work by authors and periodicals that the artist either envied or despised; they run the gamut from lowbrow illustrated tabloids to well-regarded contemporary German novels to the works of Karl Marx and the influential nineteenth-century philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Roth turned literature into a metaphorical object for intellectual consumption and physical subsistence.

Gallery label from From the Collection: 1960-69, March 26, 2016 - March 12, 2017

Fauchon ramène sa fraise

Miam, un éclair garni d’un crémeux de fraise Gariguette, délicatement recouverte d’une fine couche de pâte d’amande à la purée de fraises. Le prix est à la hauteur (6€) mais c'est tellement joli.
http://www.fauchon.com/fr/macarons/eclairs.html

Le filet à provisions est de retour

Mis au rebut à la fin des années 60, avec l'arrivée des sacs plastique, le filet des courses fait son come back. Toujours 100% coton, non plus seulement écru mais décliné en plusieurs coloris, il surfe sur la mode vintage. Après le Conran Shop ou le MoMA de New York, on le trouve chez greenwee.com, bonendroit.com ou en boutique HEMA, souvent à moins de 5€. La société normande FILT en produit 120.000 exemplaires par an pour le monde entier. Vos courses n'auront de secret pour personne mais on s'en fiche, on n'a rien à cacher.

Bus, 1967, Mason Williams

Photo courtesy Y. H.

A 1968 NY Times review of Robert Rauschenberg's giant Autobiography edition by Hilton Kramer was titled "Art: Over 53 Feet of Wall Decoration." And the abstract mentioned simultaneous installations at the Whitney and MoMA, so I was interested to see what else Kramer hated. Turns out it wasn't a Rauschenberg or a Broadside Art project at all: it was Mason Williams' Bus.
Mason Williams' Bus is one of the most awesome photomural/artist book/oddball objects of the Los Angeles 1960s. I love it. It is a life-size photo of a Greyhound bus, folded up and put into a box. It was made in an edition of 200, but existed primarily as a joke, or a poster, or a decoration, and only rarely has it been perceived as an art object.
Which is hilarious--and hilariously wrong--because Williams is a childhood friend and longtime collaborator/co-conspirator with Ed Ruscha, whose deadpan artist books were busy not being recognized as art--or as proper books--at the same time.
This lack of critical appreciation may have something to do with Williams' primary occupation, which was TV writing and composition; he was the head writer for The Smothers Brothers and wrote "Classical Gas." Bus was an irreverent stunt, though he took it very seriously.
[For a rare, serious look at Bus, there's no place better than Design Observer, where Lorraine Wild wrote about it in 2008; Michael Asher had donated his copy of Bus to MOCA, and the museum had just installed it. Wild has Williams' making of story, the hilarity of which is only hinted at in the parodic text Williams included with each numbered edition:

Actual size photograph of an Actual bus.
10 ft. 3 1/2 in. x 36 ft. 2 in.)
Weighs 10 pounds, 7 ounces.
Conceived by Mason Williams.
Photograph by Max Yavno. Enlargement made from a 16x20 print of a 4x5 negative. Printed on billboard stock in 16 sections by silk screen process. Printed by The Benline Process Color Company of Deland, Florida and Pacific Display of Los Angeles, Califfornia. [sic] Hand collated, rolled and transported early in the morning by three people (two men and one woman) in one car over a period of several days. Each copy individually hand assembled by three people, using hands, feet, tape sissors [sic] and a Barlow knife. Assembled with 120 ft. (per copy) of Scotch Brand double-faced tape (No. 666).
Folded by hand and foot by three people.
Assembled and folded quietly on television sound stages on Saturday mornings in Los Angeles, Califfornia [sic]. Assembly time, nine man hours per copy.
Cover concept by Bob Willis. Designed from a box found under his bed by his wife. Cover constructed of corrugated fiberboard, 200 lb. test, #1 white. Printed and fabricated by Nehms Company of Los Angeles, California.
Published on the 24th of February, 1967 in a limited edition of 200 copies.

MoMA installed a copy of Bus in the lobby in Jan. 1968, and then invited graphic designers participating in the Museum's upcoming poster show to tag the bus with graffiti. Here's a photo of the result, as seen on the cover of Go Greyhound magazine.

Source ; greg.org: the making of
Photo : Bus (Copy signed by artists from the Word and Image exhibition, 1968), 1967–1968
 

Nous ne supportons plus la durée

Ecrites en 1935, soixante pages d'une incroyable actualité. Comme disait récemment  – pour s'excuser ? – un auteur interviewé sur son dernier essai : ça se lit vite.

Editions Allia, 2015, 3,10 €

Piece-a-Cake

Charlie Cho, Piece-a-Cake, 1993

Buffet (pour sortir les mots désuets du placard)

Federico Pepe & Patricia Urquiola, Credenza - Collezione Spazio Pontaccio

Josef Hoffmann

Josef Hoffmann War Glasses, 1914-16, Austrian Museum of Applied Arts

No comment

Umberto Eco : le nom de la prose

1932-2016

Gueule de bois

Des meubles en vrai bois, 100% français

Le ça, le moi, le surmoi ?

Matthieu Bourel

Mimmo Rotella, Le Villeglé italien

L'équipementier aux trois bandes

Le Point, avril 2016.

Letters to the Mayor

 

Letters to the Mayor: Buenos Aires, Galería Monoambiente, March 2016.

In 2014, Storefront for Art and Architecture initiated Letters to the Mayor, an ongoing program designed to highlight the sometimes overlooked relationship between architects and local political authorities, and to facilitate new conversations between them.

In Buenos Aires, Grupo Bondi (Eugenio Gómez Llambi, Iván López Prystajko) combined the architect’s and mayor’s workspace though a kind of overlay: a massive bureaucratic desk is covered with colorful pools of waxy pigment (à la Lydia Benglis’s poured latex rubber works of the 1960s), which drips down its sides and spatters onto the floor. It could be read as the residue of architects’ passionate strivings on behalf of the cities they love, sometimes resulting in nothing more than a lot of spilled ink, effort, and lifeblood. Alternately, it represents the architect’s revenge upon the bureaucrats who have blocked their best ideas from being realized: an orgy of violent color bleeds all over the desk, rendering it useless but finally beautiful, a monument to the frustrated creative process. A third element built into each iteration of Letters to the Mayor, in addition to the letters and desks, is an artistic wallpaper that reflects ideas and issues unique to each city.

Source : domus, avril 2016, http://www.domusweb.it

Arghhhh! (Le cri)

Jean, Le Point.

Le glow du portable le soir au fond des bars

Andy Friedman, Minutes in an underground  espresso bar, The New Yorker

01.04.16 :-) Dior