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NYC REPRESENT, STUSSY WORLD TOUR, 2nd STOP.....
October 31, 2006
Stussy has a world tour art stop in our Wooster St shop.
It will be up for a bit, come on thru............
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
October 29, 2006
The Bridge
11.4.07 and SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.
October 27, 2006
New York City here we come.
The 2nd color hits next week.
As well Mr. Glaser is a very smart man.
Ten Things I Have Learned by Milton Glaser
Part of AIGA Talk in London
November 22, 2001
1
YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE.
This is a curious rule and it took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required that you didn’t particularly like the people that you worked for or at least maintained an arms length relationship to them, which meant that I never had lunch with a client or saw them socially. Then some years ago I realised that the opposite was true. I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle.
2
IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB.
One night I was sitting in my car outside Columbia University where my wife Shirley was studying Anthropology. While I was waiting I was listening to the radio and heard an interviewer ask ‘Now that you have reached 75 have you any advice for our audience about how to prepare for your old age?’ An irritated voice said ‘Why is everyone asking me about old age these days?’ I recognised the voice as John Cage. I am sure that many of you know who he was – the composer and philosopher who influenced people like Jasper Johns and Merce Cunningham as well as the music world in general. I knew him slightly and admired his contribution to our times. ‘You know, I do know how to prepare for old age’ he said. ‘Never have a job, because if you have a job someday someone will take it away from you and then you will be unprepared for your old age. For me, it has always been the same every since the age of 12. I wake up in the morning and I try to figure out how am I going to put bread on the table today? It is the same at 75, I wake up every morning and I think how am I going to put bread on the table today? I am exceedingly well prepared for my old age’ he said.
3
SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.
This is a subtext of number one. There was in the sixties a man named Fritz Perls who was a gestalt therapist. Gestalt therapy derives from art history, it proposes you must understand the ‘whole’ before you can understand the details. What you have to look at is the entire culture, the entire family and community and so on. Perls proposed that in all relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing towards one another. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.
4
PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT.
Early in my career I wanted to be professional, that was my complete aspiration in my early life because professionals seemed to know everything - not to mention they got paid for it. Later I discovered after working for a while that professionalism itself was a limitation. After all, what professionalism means in most cases is diminishing risks. So if you want to get your car fixed you go to a mechanic who knows how to deal with transmission problems in the same way each time. I suppose if you needed brain surgery you wouldn’t want the doctor to fool around and invent a new way of connecting your nerve endings. Please do it in the way that has worked in the past.
Unfortunately in our field, in the so-called creative – I hate that word because it is misused so often. I also hate the fact that it is used as a noun. Can you imagine calling someone a creative? Anyhow, when you are doing something in a recurring way to diminish risk or doing it in the same way as you have done it before, it is clear why professionalism is not enough. After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal.
5
LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE.
Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the history of the world. If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and everything else. However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’
6
STYLE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED.
I think this idea first occurred to me when I was looking at a marvellous etching of a bull by Picasso. It was an illustration for a story by Balzac called The Hidden Masterpiece. I am sure that you all know it. It is a bull that is expressed in 12 different styles going from very naturalistic version of a bull to an absolutely reductive single line abstraction and everything else along the way. What is clear just from looking at this single print is that style is irrelevant. In every one of these cases, from extreme abstraction to acute naturalism they are extraordinary regardless of the style. It’s absurd to be loyal to a style. It does not deserve your loyalty. I must say that for old design professionals it is a problem because the field is driven by economic consideration more than anything else. Style change is usually linked to economic factors, as all of you know who have read Marx. Also fatigue occurs when people see too much of the same thing too often. So every ten years or so there is a stylistic shift and things are made to look different. Typefaces go in and out of style and the visual system shifts a little bit. If you are around for a long time as a designer, you have an essential problem of what to do. I mean, after all, you have developed a vocabulary, a form that is your own. It is one of the ways that you distinguish yourself from your peers, and establish your identity in the field. How you maintain your own belief system and preferences becomes a real balancing act. The question of whether you pursue change or whether you maintain your own distinct form becomes difficult. We have all seen the work of illustrious practitioners that suddenly look old-fashioned or, more precisely, belonging to another moment in time. And there are sad stories such as the one about Cassandre, arguably the greatest graphic designer of the twentieth century, who couldn’t make a living at the end of his life and committed suicide.
But the point is that anybody who is in this for the long haul has to decide how to respond to change in the zeitgeist. What is it that people now expect that they formerly didn’t want? And how to respond to that desire in a way that doesn’t change your sense of integrity and purpose.
7
HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN.
The brain is the most responsive organ of the body. Actually it is the organ that is most susceptible to change and regeneration of all the organs in the body. I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have. I was fascinated by a story in a newspaper a few years ago about the search for perfect pitch. A group of scientists decided that they were going to find out why certain people have perfect pitch. You know certain people hear a note precisely and are able to replicate it at exactly the right pitch. Some people have relevant pitch; perfect pitch is rare even among musicians. The scientists discovered – I don’t know how - that among people with perfect pitch the brain was different. Certain lobes of the brain had undergone some change or deformation that was always present with those who had perfect pitch. This was interesting enough in itself. But then they discovered something even more fascinating. If you took a bunch of kids and taught them to play the violin at the age of 4 or 5 after a couple of years some of them developed perfect pitch, and in all of those cases their brain structure had changed. Well what could that mean for the rest of us? We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain. I am convinced that if someone was to yell at me from across the street my brain could be affected and my life might changed. That is why your mother always said, ‘Don’t hang out with those bad kids.’ Mama was right. Thought changes our life and our behaviour. I also believe that drawing works in the same way. I am a great advocate of drawing, not in order to become an illustrator, but because I believe drawing changes the brain in the same way as the search to create the right note changes the brain of a violinist. Drawing also makes you attentive. It makes you pay attention to what you are looking at, which is not so easy.
8
DOUBT IS BETTER THAN CERTAINTY.
Everyone always talks about confidence in believing what you do. I remember once going to a class in yoga where the teacher said that, spirituality speaking, if you believed that you had achieved enlightenment you have merely arrived at your limitation. I think that is also true in a practical sense. Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you from being open to experience, which is why I find all firmly held ideological positions questionable. It makes me nervous when someone believes too deeply or too much. I think that being sceptical and questioning all deeply held beliefs is essential. Of course we must know the difference between scepticism and cynicism because cynicism is as much a restriction of one’s openness to the world as passionate belief is. They are sort of twins. And then in a very real way, solving any problem is more important than being right. There is a significant sense of self-righteousness in both the art and design world. Perhaps it begins at school. Art school often begins with the Ayn Rand model of the single personality resisting the ideas of the surrounding culture. The theory of the avant garde is that as an individual you can transform the world, which is true up to a point. One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty.
Schools encourage the idea of not compromising and defending your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usually all about the nature of compromise. You just have to know what to compromise. Blind pursuit of your own ends which excludes the possibility that others may be right does not allow for the fact that in design we are always dealing with a triad – the client, the audience and you.
Ideally, making everyone win through acts of accommodation is desirable. But self-righteousness is often the enemy. Self-righteousness and narcissism generally come out of some sort of childhood trauma, which we do not have to go into. It is a consistently difficult thing in human affairs. Some years ago I read a most remarkable thing about love, that also applies to the nature of co-existing with others. It was a quotation from Iris Murdoch in her obituary. It read ‘ Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.’ Isn’t that fantastic! The best insight on the subject of love that one can imagine.
9
ON AGING.
Last year someone gave me a charming book by Roger Rosenblatt called ‘Ageing Gracefully’ I got it on my birthday. I did not appreciate the title at the time but it contains a series of rules for ageing gracefully. The first rule is the best. Rule number one is that ‘it doesn’t matter.’ ‘It doesn’t matter that what you think. Follow this rule and it will add decades to your life. It does not matter if you are late or early, if you are here or there, if you said it or didn’t say it, if you are clever or if you were stupid. If you were having a bad hair day or a no hair day or if your boss looks at you cockeyed or your boyfriend or girlfriend looks at you cockeyed, if you are cockeyed. If you don’t get that promotion or prize or house or if you do – it doesn’t matter.’ Wisdom at last. Then I heard a marvellous joke that seemed related to rule number 10. A butcher was opening his market one morning and as he did a rabbit popped his head through the door. The butcher was surprised when the rabbit inquired ‘Got any cabbage?’ The butcher said ‘This is a meat market – we sell meat, not vegetables.’ The rabbit hopped off. The next day the butcher is opening the shop and sure enough the rabbit pops his head round and says ‘You got any cabbage?’ The butcher now irritated says ‘Listen you little rodent I told you yesterday we sell meat, we do not sell vegetables and the next time you come here I am going to grab you by the throat and nail those floppy ears to the floor.’ The rabbit disappeared hastily and nothing happened for a week. Then one morning the rabbit popped his head around the corner and said ‘Got any nails?’ The butcher said ‘No.’ The rabbit said ‘Ok. Got any cabbage?’
10
TELL THE TRUTH.
The rabbit joke is relevant because it occurred to me that looking for a cabbage in a butcher’s shop might be like looking for ethics in the design field. It may not be the most obvious place to find either. It’s interesting to observe that in the new AIGA’s code of ethics there is a significant amount of useful information about appropriate behaviour towards clients and other designers, but not a word about a designer’s relationship to the public. We expect a butcher to sell us eatable meat and that he doesn’t misrepresent his wares. I remember reading that during the Stalin years in Russia that everything labelled veal was actually chicken. I can’t imagine what everything labelled chicken was. We can accept certain kinds of misrepresentation, such as fudging about the amount of fat in his hamburger but once a butcher knowingly sells us spoiled meat we go elsewhere. As a designer, do we have less responsibility to our public than a butcher? Everyone interested in licensing our field might note that the reason licensing has been invented is to protect the public not designers or clients. ‘Do no harm’ is an admonition to doctors concerning their relationship to their patients, not to their fellow practitioners or the drug companies. If we were licensed, telling the truth might become more central to what we do.
Hot-N-Ready Metal Served Daily
October 26, 2006
Metal Head Pizza Dude
World Tour Documentary Screening #1
October 22, 2006
A few nights a go we screened our World Tour film at the Vista theater in Los Angels.
I waited until the film was finished so that night was the first time that I viewed the film.
I was not sure what to expect, however i was very surprised at the movement, grace and sincerity of the work.
You actually get to know some of these cultural creators in ways not usually scene.
It is a very interesting document to our culture.
After the screening was a Q&A with a few of the artists: Geoff McFetridge, Rob Abeyta and Brent Rollins.
The whole night was super cool, and the popcorn was free.
Next stop Nov 2 NYC......
Of our elaborate plans, the end...
October 15, 2006
Almost a year ago we started. It was a simple idea; ask a bunch of artists to do their version of a design. It was basically going to become a tee shirt project. Then it all went a bit crazy. Make a book, documentary, shoes and an art show. Why not? What could go wrong? Why can't we do a bunch of stuff we have never done we thought? Well we might of bit off more than we could chew, but it all worked out fine in the end. The tee shirts were awesome. The shoes were a great collaboration. The book/documentary will be done soon, more about that as it finishes.
And then the art show?
Last Xmas I got a copy of the book YOUNG, SLEEK and FULL of HELL:
Ten years of New York’s Alleged Gallery. I read it all day.
I miss that place (or was it an idea?).
This is an excerpt from the introduction of the book by Carlo McCormick:
It was a gallery . . . allegedly. In 1992, Ludlow Street in New York's Lower East Side was just gutter of low-rent tenements with a large demographic of artists, musicians, film-makers, designers, writers, and hoodlums. At the heart of it was Alleged Gallery--the most famous street-style gallery in America. A venue for art and artists always a few steps ahead of the object itself, this peripheral gallery launched--between 1992 and 2002--the international careers of countless emerging artists.
From the outset, the gallery was always something of a hypothetical. The disclaimer was inherent in the name: Alleged. With the first sandwich board signs announcing its arrival, there was no mistaking the iconoclastic agenda. This was pure Carney, an exhibition space as conceived for the art world as it might exist in less savory social margins. Between the art, music, words and pictures, sex, drugs, and drinking, it became a democratic, all-inclusive venue for young emerging artists, representing an attitude about unlimited and irreverent freedom.
Only one person could pull this one off, we needed Aaron Rose.
I have know Aaron for almost 15 years but never got to work with him.
I really liked his gallery and vision. It was time to let Aaron do what he does best. Make sense of a scattered vision and find a line or lines that can pull it all together or not?
This show is a sum of dislocated parts than need not adhere. The relasionship between subject and object and object and event needs no answer at this time. Maybe in the future this creative colaboration will all be more clear.
It was a seductive yet sublime event. Tons of stuff to look at and think about, while never being bogged down with filler and fluff. This show was a challenge to build but in the end it was well worth the wait.
This is the end, Beautiful friend
This is the end, My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
The End
The Doors
PS
It is not the end yet.......
ONE STEP BEYOND
October 14, 2006
ITS THE NEW 2 TONE RIG.
BLACK AND WHITE.
THIS BIKE WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY A HONEYEE COLAB.
FRAME HF, WHEELS AND PARTS MASH, THANKS.
PM
PS ITS FU%@$^#IN' FUN 2 RIDE............
CREATIVE ECONOMY
October 13, 2006
A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor,mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Ideas and Integrities (1963)
The World Tour: A Global Collaboration has been a fine example of an interesting yet elusive mixture.
Creativity and commerce.
A whole lot of super cool people came together and pulled this one out.
I would like to thank them all.
It has been great and the Art show, well lets say its a wonderful end.....
Or maybe a new beginning, lets see.
DESTRICTED
October 9, 2006
DESTRICTED [er], v,
1. To unlimit restriction
2. To bring objectivity by putting out of restriction.
3. To deconstruct within bounds, to unconfine.
Destricted is the first short film collection of its kind, bringing together sex and art in a series of short films created by some of the world’s most visual and provocative artists and directors.
Explicit in content they reveal the diverse attitudes by which we represent ourselves sexually. Formed in 2004, Destricted is a platform for all forms of uncensored artistic expression; manipulating and embracing the expression of sex through art.
The Destricted brand is the first in a continuing series. The seven films presented explore the fine line where art and pornography intersect. The films highlight controversial issues about the representation of sexuality in art; opening up for debate the question of whether art can be disguised as pornography or whether pornography can be disguised as art or something else altogether. The result is a collection of sexy, stimulating, challenging, provocative, strange and sometimes humorous scenarios that leave it up to the viewer / voyuer to decide.
Destricted will premiere at the Tate Modern, London in September 2006 before being released on DVD and digital platform viewing. The series has been overwhelmingly well-received at select theatrical screenings, which have become events and experiences in themselves, provoking much debate within the shared audience environment.
Each film maps its territory in dramatically different ways
Performance art legend Marina Abramovic delves into Balkan folklore to create an instructional series of mis-en-scenes that explore the crude, magical and mysterious rites of ethnic fertility and virility.
American fabulist Matthew Barney stages the erotics of sexual encounter as it takes place between 'green man' and the lubricated drive shaft of a customised deforestation vehicle destined for the Carnival de Bahia.
American artist and filmmaker Marco Brambilla ransacks porn-film archives to produce a witty, fast-moving montage of money-shots.
Larry Clark, cult anthropologist of American adolescence, directs a sensitive yet frank investigation into how, for the generation growing up in the 1980s pornography has shaped the way we think about sex and sexual fantasy. The result is a riveting documentary about desire and sexual inititiation.
Gaspar Noé, maker of 'Irreversible', the controversial art-house movie whose brutal depction of rape left audiences physically sick, now promises to turn you on with a cinematically erotic journey called 'We Fuck Alone'.
American iconographer Richard Prince appropriates a segment video that captures the generic gold-standard of 70s porn - big tits, big cock and cumshot - re-shooting it in the manner of the cowboys, girlfriends and outlaws that first made him famous.
British art star Sam Taylor-Wood directs a porn star in a droll elegy to masturbation and the great American outdoors.
A must have for the collection.......
World Tour: A Global Collaboration
October 4, 2006
