The power of print

What started out as a bit of a shitty day, literally—I trod in dog shit on the way to Ipswich Station and got crapped on by a bird on the same walk—ended up being a great, but busy day. Firstly, I took 20 second year UCS Graphic Design students around a print works. Alphaprint in Colchester, once again, pulled out the stops and gave a fantastic tour of their fascilities. This is the second year on the trot that they've given this tour, and the students were fascinated and learnt a lot from seeing printing and finishing processes in action.


Students smell the ink on a 5 colour Mitsubishi.

Then I hot footed it across town to meet with my colleague, Russell Walker, who had arranged a talk by Abram Games' daughter, Naomi Games, of her father's work to final year graphics students. She told many a tale about his incredible life and strong willed nature, as well as discussing airbrushing (with an impromptu [dry] demo from Russell), and other techniques.


Naomi Games talking about her father.

The show is currently at The Minories Gallery in Colchester and well worth a visit, but be quick, it comes down on Monday 20 February.

More photos to follow on Flickr soon.

Links:

Alphaprint

Abram Games

The Minories

Post-postmodernism

Today I spent a very pleasant day at the V&A with first year UCS graphic design students looking around the Postmodernism exhibition. A little overwhelming at first, it is an intense visual overload that thrusts itself into your eyeballs. But despite this, there is much to like.

Divided into three main rooms, each split into different sections, you get a glimpse of where you are heading as you walk around. A hole in a wall, to lead the eye to what is around the corner; the sound of a video filtering into a neighbouring section; brightly coloured semi-transparent plastic strip curtains hiding corridors; and neon arrows directing you between rooms—regardless of the work on display, it is a well laid out show that visually, and aurally pulls you through it.

The students clearly responded well to an area dedicated purely to graphic design, which is rare outside of specialist galleries and the Design Museum. This was far braver than the V&A Modernism exhibition circa 2006 where graphic design was sidelined. All the expected works were there. Saville, Bubbles, Griemann, Brody, Scher etc. It was a little like walking through the postmodern chapter in a graphic design history book, but good to see in the flesh, none-the-less. I thought the graphic design section seemed the most sober and serious of the whole exhibition, as if the printed page that work appears on contained and controlled the work, unlike the frankly bizarre range of teapots and pop celebrity clothing on display.

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Postmodernism, outside of graphic design, but I thoroughly enjoyed the exhibition. It'll be interesting to hear what the students made of it when I'm next with them on Friday, especially as I don't usually teach Postmodernism until next semester, so they went only knowing what contexts I could deliver to them in a hastily put together 45 minute lecture, and what the exhibition text told them.

Postmodernism at the V&A

Next batch

Final year UCS Graphic Design students launch their website in the run up to the School of Arts & Humanities Degree Show 2011.

Link: Next Batch

Seeds, not with standing

Not standing on Ai WeiWei's Sunflower Seeds at Tate Modern today.

Tate stops visitors trampling on Sunflower Seeds

Tate Modern

Wim away

Wim Crouwel portrait at The Design Museum, photo via CR-Blog

Returning from the opening day of the Design Museum's Wim Crouwel retrospective, A Graphic Odyssey, I can whole heartedly agree with Creative Review blog that it is one of the best exhibitions that has been staged there. The first year graphic design students that a colleague and I took were amazed by the fact this work wasn't done with a computer. This led to many interesting conversations about how much of the terminology Photoshop uses for its tools comes from pre-digital processes and much guessing of how some of the imagery was produced. A similar reaction and conversations happened when I took second year students to see the Barney Bubbles exhibition at Chelsea Space last year.

Check out the CR-Blog post via the link below for a more detailed review of the show.

Wim Crouwel, A Graphic Odyssey, runs until 3 July. Go see.

Creative Review - The Wonder of Wim

The Design Museum

Weekend roundup

A quick round up of things seen on my weekend in Brighton last week. Briefer than I would wish, but time's pretty restricted at the moment.

First up is a statue of Max Miller just outside the Brighton Dome. I didn't really register the statue until Claire pointed out that it had a piece of knitted graffiti attached to it. Apparently this is quite trendy.



We saw the statue on leaving the ever excellent Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. I posted from our B and B last week about how much I enjoyed the Capturing Colour exhibition at the Museum, but haven't really had a chance to talk about the rest of the venue. There are some great exhibits of modernist furniture and paintings, as well as really well put together displays about Brighton's social history, of which it has plenty. There's too much to go into here, and needless to say photos will be up on Flickr over the coming week, but this quote on the wall near a section about cycling has to be posted, (excuse the poor image quality).



The other aspect of the museum I want to mention is the fashion section. What I like about this is the fact that much of it is about street fashion, and lots of the clothes are donated by locals, with back story.





On some items they even has responses from local school children. I wonder whether Tony Lord ever did use his belt to repel vampires?





On the return journey, we decided to take in the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, another modernist masterpiece.



Apart from the fact that it's always good to pop into this magnificent building, one of the things that drew us on this occasion was the Moving Portraits exhibition.



While I'd seen several of the pieces on display before, particularly Sam Taylor-Wood's David and the Gilbert and George Living Sculptures, what I wasn't expecting was to be bowled over by anything by Andy Warhol. His Screen Tests 64-66 gave an eerie sense of voyeurism as I looked at famous icons from the 60s who were all staring back at me, in complete silence. Wondering what was going through their minds is a natural reaction, steeped as many of them are with cultural significance, but I found them strangely powerful as well—the addition of motion seems to have given the traditional portrait not only life (obviously), but somehow made the subjects more tangible and ordinary, given that our relationship with these people is usually through the eyes of the media. I got the feeling I was being given a very personal and intimate audience with them. Particularly when, (spoiler alert) unexpectedly one of them, Susan Sontag I think, starts to cry. Very powerful stuff.

Other highlights included Margaret Tait's Portrait of Ga in which the unwrapping of a sticky sweet seems to suggest more about the personality conducting the action than seeing her going about her daily routines in the rest of the film. She wants the sweet, the simple pleasure, but is so very careful not to get her fingers sticky. I also enjoyed Candice Breitz' Factum Misericordia, where two identical twins are interviewed on camera, asked exactly the same questions and sat in exactly the same chair so that the only difference you could tell was in their narration, their individual take on their experiences as one of a twin, and how they felt they related to each other. The editing of the interviews, shown side by side, and the sound track running out of sync and switching screens added to the draw of trying to relate to these two people as individuals talking about their collective experience.

Highly recommended, and free.

Links:
Knitted graffiti

Brighton Museum and Art Gallery
De La Warr Pavilion

Bass for your face

Kemistry Gallery

Capturing colour

I visited the Capturing Colour: Film, Invention and Wonder exhibition at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery today. If you're planning a trip to the Sussex coast before 20 March, it is well worth a visit.

Tracing the history of colour in early photography and then into film, it takes you though all the technological advances from early monochrome tinting right through to capturing colour motion on mobile devices today. A fascinating story that, in equal measure, is a display of the technical, the scientific and the artistic.

It also has the potential to be one of an important double bill of motion/photographic exhibitions if you also take in the Moving Portraits show at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, an hour down the coast by car from Brighton. I'm hoping to visit that tomorrow.

Link:
Capturing Colour online.

More exhibitioning…

2011 promises to be a year of major exhibitions, well 3 at least:

The Design Museum
30 March - 3 July
Wim Crouwel: A Graphic Odessy

Time your trip wisely and take in the Brit Insurance Design Awards at the same time.

Tate Britain
14 June - 4 September
The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World

The V&A
24 September - 8 January 2012
Postmodernism: Style and Subversion

Ipswich Art School show at UCS

3 - 26 February

The Class Of…
An exhibition which celebrates the legacy of the Ipswich Art School through a mixed media show of past tutors. On at The Waterfront Gallery, University Campus Suffolk, Ipswich.

I wanted to go to Chelsea

I spent the day in London today visiting 'must see' exhibitions with UCS graphic design students. I ended up at Tate Britain checking out the Muybridge show which I found much more engaging than I thought I would, but the main attraction was Process: The Working Practices of Barney Bubbles.

For those that don't know, Barney Bubbles created many of the sleeves for punk and post-punk pop favourites such as The Damned, Generation X, Ian Dury and The Blockheads, Elvis Costello & the Attractions, Nick Lowe, and was Stiff Records' designer in residence. Before this he had a history of designing record sleeves for Glastonbury Festival and Hawkwind, as well as creating light shows for Pink Floyd, which is where his name was coined, as he mixed oil, water and ink and projected this to form psychedelic 'bubble' back drops for live shows.



It is only in the last few years that he has been getting much deserved recognition as he preferred anonymity to fame during his working lifetime, with much of his work going unsigned. 27 years after his death, with Paul Gorman's excellent 'Reasons To Be Cheerful' biography (2008), and this show, Barney Bubbles is finally being seen as a hugely important figure in the history of graphic design.



Paul Gorman was on site this morning and together with Donald Smith, Director of Exhibitions at Chelsea Space, kindly gave an introduction to Barney's working life and practices to students. The show was put together on the basis that most of the finished outcomes, (the products) were displayed along the entrance ramp, with the focus being squarely placed on Bubbles working methods. Sketches, Letraset and Rotring artwork, overlays of tracing paper with notes to printers and PMTs were all given pride of place. Students were amazed, enthralled and daunted in equal measures by the fact all the artwork was produced by hand - Barney committed suicide 2 weeks before the introduction of the Apple Mac in 1983.



The show unfortunately finishes this coming Saturday (23 Oct) but find below more images and links to Paul Gorman's blog, the Chelsea Space website, and unusually for Dublog, a link to Amazon for Reasons To Be Cheerful book; go buy it.

I look forward to the coming weeks where this exhibition will form much debate and discussion among students about process on display, ideas informing application, application informing ideas, and old school design methods.















Links:
Barney Bubbles blog
Chelsea Space
Chelsea Space 'Process' images
Reasons To Be Cheerful biography

Where's me jumper?

September has been super busy. After the wedding of some good friends of ours at the end of August, we've been to Brighton 3 times, taken in some art by the sea, been to a private view of some UCS graduate students (well done Luke, Nicki & Tom), grown a moustache for a stag do (me, not Claire), seen the reformed Pop Group in that there London, and given our bedroom over to Claire's daughter and grandson and so have been living out of our front room for the last week. Oh, and then there's the day jobs stretching into evenings & weekends as well, and getting side tracked writing the odd post here! All of which means I'm even more behind schedule with the McJunk book. I should never have made a brash deadline statement online about completing a personal project. What's frustrating is that it's 90% done - someone give me 4 days straight and I'll have it wrapped up. Never mind. Some sort of normality is due to return this week, whatever that is, and hopefully I should be able to plan in time to mop up the remaining 10%. Believe me, you'll be the first to know.

In the meantime, here are a few things that have caught my eye over the last month. Sorry, no tash shots, that's far too embarrassing, but feel free to check out my upper lip menagerie on the Dubdog Flickr photostream.

Art on the Prom, Felixstowe:



Poor Richard, or poor books?



Remixed ad. Reminds me of those plastic puzzles where you have to shift squares around to complete an image (I was always useless at them):



My Garden, Your Litter, the follow up to The Fall's Your Future, Our Clutter?



And finally, in my office this morning I was caught by my shadow as I was about to rush out of the house:



And now my favourite season of the year has arrived, can anyone tell me where I put my jumper?

Blowing Bubbles

A must see.

Links:
Barney Bubbles at the London Design Festival
Reasons To Be Cheerful

Fleet: Art In The Haven Ports. Landguard Fort

A weekend trip to Felixstowe saw Claire and I taking in Landguard Fort's part in Fleet: Art In The Haven Ports. Well worth a visit.






Gavin Turk's Les Bikes du Bois Rond.


Elizabeth Wright's Languard Fort Shoot.


Tod Hanson's Containerisation

Links:
Fleet: Art In The Haven Ports
Landgaurd Fort Shoot
Landguard Fort, Fleet

Go to!

NB Dubdog, 2010, after van Doesburg

Yesterday Claire and I went to the excellent Van Doesburg & The International Avant-Garde: Constructing A New World exhibition at Tate Modern. Highly recommended - so much graphic design that came after was highly influenced by this egocentric innovator and those he associated with. He was quick to exploit associations in order to get his vision across and he wasn't afraid to burn those that swayed from his singular mission; being gutted at his rejection by the Bauhaus as a tutor, he set up his own rival course in Weimer that dismissed Bauhaus teachings.

This exhibition is testament to the many visually exciting explorations that were happening at the time, both from the hands and mind of van Doesburg and from those of avant garde art movements. And you can clearly see the reverberations this had on those that followed:

David Carson work arguably couldn't have existed without van Doesburg's Dada type experiments,


Theo van Doesburg. Poster Dada Matinée. January 1923


David Carson



Alan Fletcher's collages owe many a debt to Kurt Schwitters,


Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild


Alan Fletcher



Stefan Sagmeisters work for Lou Reed could be said to be a direct reference to Raoul Hausmann's Postcard to I.K. Bonset,


Raoul Hausmann's Postcard to I.K. Bonset 1921


Stefan Sagmeister



and Müller-Brockmann's posters could have been composed from a De Stijl 'how to' manual, if such a thing existed.


Theo van Doesburg Arithmetic Composition 1929-30


Josef Müller-Brockmann


I particularly enjoyed the De Stijl Typography and Dada & Constructivism rooms, and specifically some of van Doesburg's ramblings written large on the gallery wall. This example almost reads like a CRASS lyric:

DADA, PICABIA writes, does not feel anything,
it is nothing, nothing nothing.
It is like your hope: nothing.
Like your idols: nothing.
Like your paradise: nothing.
Like your politicians: nothing.
Like your heroes: nothing.
Like your artists: nothing.
Like your religions: nothing.
Dada was not made, but came into being.
One cannot become a DADAIST, one can only be one.
(Van Doesbury 1923)

The exhibition on until May 16th 2010, Tate Modern. Go to!

Links:
Tate Modern
Avant-garde
David Carson
Alan Fletcher
Stefan Sagmeister
Josef Müller-Brockmann
Crass

Images 33 private view

AOI Images 33, The Best of British Illustration 2009. Private view at University Campus Suffolk, Ipswich 17.02.10.

The private view of Images 33, the AOI's Best of British Illustration 2009, was a great success this week, especially for a rainy winter Wednesday night. Students mucked in to run the bar, illustration author Mark Wigan gave a great speech and work was sold. The work on display is extremely diverse in content and style, from pen and ink to elaborate 3D collage and moving image. It's well worth a visit and is open until 26th March 2010 in the Waterfront Gallery at University Campus Suffolk, Ipswich.

Association of Illustrators
University Campus Suffolk

Images 33

The Association of Illustrators 'Images 33: The Best Of British Illustration 2009', will be on show at University Campus Suffolk, Ipswich from 18th February until 26th March 2010. Open daily at the Waterfront building, Neptune Quay, including weekends from 9am - 6pm.