Designing for art centres

Some of my favourite visual identities have a common thread — they’re done for art centres:

Jonathan Barnbrook for Mori Arts Center + Museum (Tokyo):
(Barnbrook also weaves political themes in his creative direction)

 

David Rager for New Museum (New York):

 

Kashiwa Sato for National Arts Centre (Tokyo):

 

And a little snippet from the latest collection at The Selby! :D

~ Christopher Simmonds, art director at Partner + Partner UK.

August mood board

 

 

it’s been a month of extremes…

fear and peace
faith and doubt
yes and no

…but i wouldn’t have it any other way. :) 

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– the last image is a painting by Francois Gerard. so tender and cold all at the same time no?

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– faith faith faith. “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” ~ heb 11:1.

Taken by Storm!

Pulse

One of the joys of buying a CD is enjoying the album cover and the art that accompanies it, and Storm Thorgerson has been a recent obsession. I started getting really interested in Storm’s work when a year ago, I bought my first Pink Floyd album, Pulse, and thought to myself, wow, just what is this piece of work trying to say? When something gets me worked up like that, I get all curious and I just have to — HAVE TO — find out!

Pink Floyd

Storm has directed most of the album art/posters/design for Pink Floyd, sealing the band’s identity as that of being otherworldly. On a post-exam spree, I had decided to (undeservingly) reward myself with Mind Over Matter, a hardcover compilation of Pink Floyd imagery by Storm. It’s a solid coffee-table book and a treasure trove at that for not only documenting the history of the band, but also tracing very detailedly on how its personality and creativity get absorbed into Storm’s art. He doesn’t call himself a photographer or designer or artist even as he is all three, rather he sees himself very much an image maker, that is to say, he has an idea and conveys it into an image, no matter the method. I love the way he emphasises on that because too often, we get so caught up with the technicalities of a certain genre that we fail to see the possibilities of going beyond it. The irony is that the lack of technology back then gave him the boldness to try out everything, anything.

Mind over Matter

Dark Side of the Moon

Storm has been designing, creating and art directing since the 60s till today, and when seeing the visual identity of Pink Floyd, you can pretty much chart the social changes happening through the times, as if these albums have become historical documents in themselves. An example is the album Dark Side of the Moon, which consists of a simple image of refracted light. During the time this album was being made, photography was becoming a huge, trendy thing, and Pink Floyd wanted to go against the grain of it, wanted something more graphical than photographical. At the same time, the band was starting to play a lot with stage lights for their live shows, the effect of which was to transcend audiences away from reality into another dimension. Thus the final artwork of a light prism on the cover of Dark Side — a product of the times (of increasing technology and how it enables us with multiple realities), of concepts and of Pink Floyd’s ambitious identity.

Syd Barrett then and after. He passed away in 2006.

The other beauty is the album art direction for Wish You Were Here. Most fans would know that the album is inevitably linked to Syd who had left the band due to his internal struggles and depression. But during a particular band practice, specifically for the song Shine On You Crazy Diamond (a direct dedication to Syd), the man strangely appeared in the room after not seeing the band in years. He just sat there stone-cold, no longer the crazy Syd they used to know, and Storm saw that as Syd being present, yet so absent.

The Diver for Wish You Were Here

The designer then began to play on that idea. He also realised that music-making in a band has got a lot to do with the concept of presence/absence — families would be physically present for them but they were emotionally absent, Pink Floyd were present together, but because they had differences (and ultimately split), they were emotionally absent during much of the process and merely went through the motion for the sake of togetherness. Stay together for the kids, one would say — only this time, the kid was the product of music — so is the parent present or absent? Storm ultimately came up with a few visual ideas, one of which was The Diver. He explains that in this work, there is a dive without a splash, an action without its trace — present, or absent?

Part of the Wish You Were Here visual process also included The Swimmer which wasn’t packaged in the eventual album, but is still incredibly note-worthy. In this piece of a man swimming into sand, it’s not about the absence of water, Storm says, but the absence of awareness (the swimmer hadn’t noticed that he left the sea!) and the absence of purpose (the man just keeps swimming on and on with blind intent, going nowhere). This was perhaps Storm’s interpretation of the Floyd’s emotional/mental health at that time, and to translate it into a stunning visual is simply amazing. It also turned out to be a cautionary tale to life.

The Swimmer

Created with little respect for technology, Storm’s work has been extremely edifying in that manner. Digital manipulation, duplication and shortcuts weren’t that advanced during the 1970s or 80s — unlike today — and Storm was making all these images through different methods of photography, cutting and pasting, and even taking heaps of effort to set up the stage. So for albums like A Momentary Lapse of Reason, Storm and team actually laid and put out all 700 beds on the beach! Which is why he is sometimes better known as a performance artist than a visual maker — there is nothing he would not try, and anything he puts his finger on has got to be larger than life. 

A Momentary Lapse of Reason

But technology was something Storm constantly struggled with — not because he couldn’t master it, rather, he would question — is it for better or for worse? How can technology be good if it reduces vinyl (where there was solid album art) to mere mp3s (where album art is completely rendered non-existent)? He adds in jest that mp3s put him out of money since he is an album artist, but he also emphasises that music is a whole experience that cannot be reduced to just listening — it has to be possessed, owned in an all-encompassing way, and compressing things into bytes no longer allows for that.

Light and video made things real and unreal for audiences — this constant theme of surreality permeates in the work of the band and thereafter in Storm’s art

Still, the fact that Pink Floyd was so experimental with music and light technology (most aptly represented in the album cover of Delicate Sound of Thunder — with the birds as metaphor for song and the bulbs as a direct translation for light) meant that technology turned out to be a double-edged sword for them. In the trajectory of the album art of the band, there is a visual sense of experimentation and progressiveness that is only possible through technology, but its rawness reveals a stubborn refusal or resistance to conform to the cleanliness, organisation and perfectionism of computer or technology-generated graphics. 

Delicate Sound of Thunder

I wish I could bring a Storm Thorgerson exhibit to Singapore one day — it’s running in Sydney now and you can catch glimpses of his other artworks here. He has also art-directed for Muse, Led Zeppelin, The Mars Volta, Audioslave and The Cranberries, amongst others.

One of my favourites -- Eye 2 Eye for The Scorpions

His creations usually document the story of the band — be it their energy, emotions, attitudes, processes, relationships or simply, their music. Which means to say he takes time off to comprehend the immaterial aspect or journey of these creators and then to materialise them through an idea or a concept — a much more authentic process of visual making that the speed of time (or rather, the compression of time) these days doesn’t quite allow for. For Storm, ideas area container for a story. Now, people expect a work of art or design so quickly with the justification that technology is supposed to churn out something perfect and good in a short time — we get ideas in a snap, but then where do these ideas come from? What more can a piece of work show us besides concepts? What is it trying to tell us other than being a mere representation? To appropriately borrow a title off Pink Floyd, would it just be another brick in the wall?

Understanding the work of Storm has also come in timely as I take a sabbatical from technology for a short trip to Europe. Am hoping there is enough time for a visit to the St Paul’s Gallery too, which specialises in album art — pretty amazing huh? There’re still other works I’d love to share in the near future, but also because everytime my mum visits this space, she says she learns nothing. “Just what are you saying in your blog?!” she asks in genuine frustration. Well then, I be testing her on Storm Thorgerson in a while. God speed!

"Naivete and enthusiasm are great bedfellows. I plunged into the cover for Saucerful without a second thought. I didn't know any better and what doubts I had were soon engulfed by waves of keenness. I was so keen, it was sickening." - Storm T.

What do you sing about?

Jimi Hendrix raised his Star Spangled Banner in Woodstock ‘69, U2 didn’t want no more Sunday Bloody Sunday and all John Lenon wanted to say was, let’s Give Peace a Chance. But it doesn’t take fame to speak out. Everywhere in the world, local musicians have been making music as protest, and Al Jazeera’s Music of Resistance documents these stories in a six-part series.

The production is nicely crafted and sharp, with producer Jason Breckenridge well-attuned to sound, executing pace with respect to varying rhythms in the featured music. There’s also a good sense of place. Besides the artists, locals are commonly interviewed and they rattle off statistics and other lurid details of their country’s current political situation, making it not only a documentary about music for change, but music for its people. Each time an episode is aired, it goes up online too in the spirit of sharing voices. 

In the midst of  finishing up my final year project and getting incredibly frustrated with it at times, catching nuggets of this keeps me alive. It’s a reminder that the world is so, so huge, each with his own battle to fight, and that there’s nothing worth better than putting up a good, tough one for the things that we want shaken, spoken and sung about.

ooh lala

Handmade by Denis Kamioka

a dandy list of videos landed in my inbox today and i haven’t watched it in its entirety, but i’ll like to point out a little one that’s pretty charming. Handmade is a short film by Brazilian director Denis Kamioka, and it shows how the most arcane thing in the world — feelings — can be visually sculpted. if you’ve read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud (or, made to read, heh) and loved his visual literary style, you’ll fall for Handmade as well. both of them are guardians of articulating ideas more than abstracting them. for e.g., Foer’s language is simple, child-like, but the  rhythm, cross-disciplining and eventually the imagery he conjures are so ultimately brilliant. it reminds me of how a child can sometimes tell a story way better than an adult precisely because his imagination is limited by vocabulary. the good in lack. how do you watch a film of words? word out a moving film? sing a song through pictures? or paint a picture through a song? 

Vincent Moon

The Take-Away Show: Arcade Fire

i first got to know about Vincent Moon from his projects with The National but never quite saw his work until recently, when i finally viewed some amazing clips from The Take-Away Shows. brainchild of the Parisian film-maker and armed with a sound engineer in tow, the project involves inviting a band to perform a song at the most natural of settings — on the streets, at a cafe, anywhere — with the film rolling to a most spontaneous rhythm, without any initial practice from the band or subsequent retakes from Moon. 

if the performance draws strange stares from people, it all becomes part of the film. a resistance to highly manufactured music videos, Moon’s project pays homage to independent music culture — free, experimental, organic, self-sufficient and cleverly attuned to technology, but ultimately producing what is at once a creed of intimacy and improvisation. his other works are often described as that, and he cites Michael Ackerman and Antoine D’Agata as heavy influences, both photographers who document intimacies with an aesthetic technique of blurriness that gives respect to motion and proximity, and most of all to their subjects. for these artists, extreme clarity and lucidity in images heighten certain perceptions in us that we eventually perceive to be real, but that may not always be the case, and so the photographers seek to destroy this hypothesization of reality. for Moon then, it is the overly-polished music videos on TV that insults reality and the musicians.

my favourites have got to be the Arcade Fire and The National take-aways, one, for reasons of bias-ness (both bands have become my favourites of all time), but also because the bands prove themselves to be authentic musicians who can play anywhere at anytime and still make good music (which the project pretty much proves for most of the performers).

the Arcade Fire take-away sees the group in the minutes riding up to a performance at a cafe and Win Butler suggests a take in an elevator. here, the most precious moments belong to the oft-neglected percussionists — one knocks against the metal of the elevator and another tears pages out of a magazine  rhythmically to produce beats — doesn’t take much to make some music. 

for The National, the band plays in an intimate setting among friends, and the small environment further draws Matt Berninger’s brooding vocals — this quality which affirms that his honest baritone is a versatile gift that works both in huge live performances and the former. if you watch “Start A War”, the little, banal part where Berninger lits a cigarette with the flick of a lighter lends the footage another glorious moment both aesthetically and aurally, and is rightfully observed by Moon’s quietly artful documentary style. that is also the essence of the project besides the bands — Moon’s eye is indispensable in producing the video. without his articulate insider view, the recording would be just that — a mere recording. but his knowledge in cinema brings the footage to the level of art that at times, supersedes the performers though never over-glorifying them into popstars. 

on another great note besides the discovery of Moon, is that news has it we’ve confirmed tickets to Stars (absolutely no pun intended about the elements of the universe). for some time i’ve been hanging on wondering whether it is fact or fiction, because Stars in Singapore sounds like a stretch. the rumours are officially nullified! now, that is one band i’ll definitely like to see on the take-away…

The night starts here

today the plan was to start on an essay, at least 50 words of it which is 1/30th of the chunk, but the constellations were failing me. ended up indulging on the internet which hardly disappoints, best find of the day being ABC3D, a typography bomb of a book by a certain genuis of the name Marion Bataille:

last evening, J, KL, aka the alphabets, and i shuffled to the museum for a talk by Malaysian photographer K. Azril Ismail — Pudu Jail’s Graffiti: Aesthetics Beyond the Walls of the Prison Cells. there was much to take home from his research process since that was the bulk of his presentation — he paid respect to history and philosophy, and used web 2.0 methods such as “tag clouds” to define and refine his pictures. in that, being a photographer was a convergence of all his other roles as archaeologist, technologist, academic and artist.

this was my favourite, by way of berandaseni

a particular theme of the Pudu Jail graffiti that was especially poignant was that of memories (others included: love, death, faith, time). it gave me the idea of how prisons disallow the making of new memories, since one is trapped in a cage of time, having no freedom to create new experiences to supercede old ones. it’s aching thinking of how a harsh building can hold so many people that are really fragile broken recorders, replaying their old memories so vividly each day again and again, just to keep themselves alive mentally. these imaginations are their only escape from the four walls and yet they suspend them in a mind ritual. i once fell in love with how Orhan Pamuk wrote about Nabokov’s work: “… (he) brings this simple, self-evident idea into being with a fine lyricism, showing how the past and the present can coexist in a single sentence.” as the prison visuals played out, i thought them exactly that — the past and present, all coexisting in a single cell, albeit a very flawed present.

on a brighter note, there was news from J that Stars are set to perform in Singapore next year, “take me to the riot!” he said. turns! out! true! facebook first had the scoop and us being cavemen, were probably the last to know. never too late though and i would want no other way to start 2009! i had such a great time dancing to Death Cab (J and RJ were pillars holding the roof of the Esplanade), and Stars shouldn’t be any less awesome.

take me take me to the riot!