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What is minimal? … It was easier to define what minimalism is not. In term of graphic design, minimal does not mean black, empty, devoid, or evan quiet. It does not permit the gratuitous use of white spaces. It absoulutely is not a safety net for lack of contents.
In fact, minimal directly opposes all these things. Minimal graphic design, stripped of incidental references and pared down to its most essential elements, presents a purity intellectual or visual experience. As the extreme minimalist Ad Reinhardt said,”Art is art. Everything else is everithing else.”
Fishel,Catharine,Minimal graphics,the powerful new look of graphic design,2000,Rockport publishers,ISBN 3-927258-46-6
two minimal film
Film About A Woman Who… (1974)
Rainer’s work of this period also problematized the conception of the relationship between viewer and artwork that was at the core of the minimalist aesthetic.
Once again, this arose from the fact that the material of dance was the person. A minimalist painting or sculpture was thought to frankly address the viewer and the space of the gallery, to rely upon the viewer for its completion. To seek such a relationship between a live performer and an audience, however, was to risk opening up the dance to all of those things that Rainer had rallied against in her “NO manifesto,” since in dance, the performer/spectator relationship is a human one, in which emotion, empathy, and relations of power are present. Again, one of the basic tenets of minimalism posed a unique problem for live performance. In a way, Rainer can be said to have inverted a key principle of minimalist art by attempting to cut off any kind of human connection between her performers and the audience. For instance, Rainer often instructed her dancers to refuse eye contact with the audience, either by keeping their heads cocked away from the spectators or by looking over and beyond their heads. Ironically, then, Rainer’s performances seem to have initially aspired to the condition Michael Fried called “absorption,” a condition characterized by the work’s refusal to address the viewer, an almost metaphysical detachment of the work from the viewer’s time and space. Fried criticized the minimalist sculptors for their refusal to do this – for the ways their work acknowledged the viewer and depended on him or her for their completion. (Fried, 125-27) Rainer, concerned about the “seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer,” and troubled by the ramifications of the display of the dancers’ bodies for crowds of onlookers, resisted this dimension of minimalist art. In her analysis of her dance Trio A.
(From Erin Brannigan):
Made by Robert Nelson and William Allan
“In their starkly minimal film, The Awful Backlash, directors Robert Nelson and William Allan, focus solely on a pair of hands as they begin to unravel what appears to be a tangled fishing line. Any further evidence of the title’s confusing ‘awfulness’ other than the literal disentanglement of the line remains, however, tentative, left as it were, literally, at a loose end. The viewer knows nothing of the incident that led to this backlash or entanglement; nor of the directors’ initial motive for the title indeed not of any other attempt at blending an additional storyline beyond what is seen. There is, perhaps, one link with a reverse reaction a sense of gradual recovery taking place, as the thread unfolds from a position of multiplicity back to a singular line.” (Pamela Kember, Rethinking Refunctioning, ‘Awful Backlash’ catalogue, May 2000)
Erik Satie, a minimal composer
Alfred Éric Leslie Satie (Honfleur, 17 May 1866 – Paris, 1 July 1925) was a French composer and pianist. Starting with his first composition in 1884, he signed his name as Erik Satie. Satie was introduced as a “gymnopedist” in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the Gymnopédies. Later, he also referred to himself as a “phonometrograph” or “phonometrician” (meaning “someone who measures (and writes down) sounds”) preferring this designation to that of “musician,” after having been called “a clumsy but subtle technician” in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911. In addition to his body of music, Satie also left a remarkable set of writings, having contributed work for a range of publications, from the dadaist 391 to the American Vanity Fair. Although in later life he prided himself on always publishing his work under his own name, in the late nineteenth century he appears to have used pseudonyms such as Virginie Lebeau and François de Paule in some of his published writings. Satie was a colourful figure in the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde. He was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, repetitive music and the Theatre of the Absurd.
Minimal art: A type of abstract art, particularly sculpture, characterized by extreme simplicity of form and a deliberate lack of expressive content; it emerged as a trend in the late 1950s and flourished particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. (The term was evidently first used in print by the British philosopher Richard Wollheim in an article entitled ‘Minimal Art’ in Arts Magazine in January 1965, although the American writer Barbara Rose is sometimes credited with coining it; the term ‘Minimalism’ had been used by David Burliuk as early as 1929, but with a vaguer meaning, referring to ‘the minimum of operating means’ in John Graham’s paintings.) There are numerous precedents for the stark simplicity of Minimal art. In 1777, for example, the poet Goethe designed an Altar of Good Fortune for his garden in Weimar consisting of two utterly pure geometrical stone shapes-a sphere surmounting a cube; and in 1883 the journalist Alphonse Allais (1855-1905) created a burlesque version of minimalism when he exhibited in Paris a plain sheet of white paper with the title First Communion of Anaemic Young Girls in the Snow (he also produced all-black and all-red pictures with similar comic titles: Negroes Fighting in a Cave at Night and Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes by the Red Sea). Such byways aside, the roots of Minimal art can be traced to the stark geometric abstractions of Malevich and the ready-mades of Duchamp in the second decade of the century, and after this the idea of extreme reductivism occurred in various aspects of avant-garde art-certain sculptures of Brancusi, for example, the Spatialism of Lucio Fontana, and the monochromatic canvases of Yves Klein. As a movement, however, Minimal art developed mainly in the USA rather than Europe and its impersonality is seen as a reaction against the emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism. Leading sculptors of the movement include Carl Andre, Don Judd, and Tony Smith; leading painters (for whom the immediate precedents were Albers and Reinhardt) include Frank Stella (in his early work), and Hard-Edge abstractionists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland.
According to The Tate Gallery: An illustrated Companion (1979), ‘The theory of minimalism is that without the diverting presence of “composition”, and by the use of plain, often industrial materials arranged in geometrical or highly simplified configurations we may experience all the more strongly the pure qualities of colour, form, space and materials’. Minimal art has close links with *Conceptual art (Minimalist sculpture often has a strong element of theoretical demonstration about it, with the artist leaving the fabrication of the design to industrial specialists), and there are sometimes affinities with other contemporaneous movements such as Land art. There is even a kinship with *Pop art in a shared preference for slick, impersonal surfaces (some Minimal artists, however, have used ‘natural’ products such as logs rather than machine-finished products). Like Pop art, Minimal art proved a commercial success for many of its leading practitioners, and it generated a huge amount of critical commentary; sometimes it seemed that the less there was to see in a work, the more verbiage it attracted.
See also PRIMARY STRUCTURES.
Minimalism, chiefly American movement in the visual arts and music originating in New York City in the late 1960s and characterized by extreme simplicity of form and a literal, objective approach.
Minimal art, also called ABC art, is the culmination of reductionist tendencies in modern art that first surfaced in the 1913 composition by the Russian painter Kasimir Malevich of a black square on a white ground. The primary structures of the minimalist, sculptors Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Tony Smith, Anthony Caro, Sol LeWitt, JohnMcf’racken, Craig Kaufman, Robert Duran, and Robert Morris and the hard-edge painting of Jack’ Youngerman, ‘Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Al Held, and Gene Davis grew out of these artists’ dissatisfaction with Action painting, a branch of American Abstract Expressionism based on intuitive, spontaneous gesture that had dominated American avant-garde art through much of the 1950s. The minimalists, who believed that Action painting was too personal and’ insubstantial, adopted the point of view that a work of art should not refer to anything other than itself. For that reason they attempted to rid their works of any extra-visual association. Use of the hard edge, the simple form, and the linear rather than painterly approach was intended to emphasize two-dimensionality and to allow the viewer an immediate, purely visual response. They turned for inspiration to the impassive, quiet works of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, exponents of the colourfield branch of Abstract Expressionist painting.
Hard-edge painting is characterized by large, simplified, usually geometric forms on an overall flat surface; precise, razor-sharp contours; and broad areas of bright, unmodulated colour that have been stained into unprimed canvas. It differs from other types of geometric abstraction in that it rejects both lyrical and mathematical composition because, even in this simplified field, they are a means of personal expression for the artist. Minimal hardedge painting is the anonymous construction of a simple object.
Minimal sculpture is composed of extremely simple, monumental geometric forms made of fibreglass, plastic, sheet metal, or aluminum, either left raw or solidly painted with bright industrial colours. Like the painters, minimalist sculptors attempted to make their works totally objective, unexpressive, and non-referential.
Minimal art, along with the music of Erik Satie and the aesthetics of John Cage, was a distinct influence on minimalist music. Reacting against the complex, intellectually sophisticated style of modern music, several composers began to compose in a simple, literal style, thereby creating an extremely simple and accessible music. La Monte Young, for example, composed a number of electronic “continuous frequency environments,” in which he generated a few pitches and then electronically sustained them, sometimes for days or weeks. Young added very little to this texture and virtually eliminated variation as a developmental technique. Like Young, Morton Feldman tried to eliminate variation. His works explored innovative instrumental timbres through a slowly paced succession of unrelated, soft sounds. Another group of composers-Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Cornelius Cardew, and Frederic Rzewski-was influenced by the music’ of India, Bali, and West Africa. They used simple harmonic and melodic patterns in their highly repetitive music.
In both music and the visual arts, minimalism was an attempt to explore the essential elements of an art form. In minimalist visual arts, the personal, gestural elements were stripped away in order to reveal the objective, purely visual elements of painting and sculpture. In minimalist music, the traditional treatment of form and development was rejected in favour of explorations of timbre and rhythm-musical elements largely unfamiliar to Western listeners.
Despite Enron and Martha Stewart. scandal in the Catholic Church, and the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I would describe myself as a trusting sort. one who fundamentally still believes in the institutions that govern our public life. That trust was shaken to the very core by a report in the New York Times about the buttons that are mounted on poles at over 3.000 street corners in New York City. Despite the fact that they bear official-looking signs that read “To Cross Street/Push Button/Wait for Walk Signal/Dept. of Transportation,” it appears that at least 2.500 of them have not worked for the last fifteen years.
Like everyone else, I’ve trusted those instructions, pressed the buttons, and waited dutifully, fearing-and, indeed, this is the literal interpretation of the sign-that the light would not change, ever, unless one pushed the button. Now I learn that I have been the dupe of what Times reporter Michael Luo calls mechanical placebos, where “any benefit from them is only imagined.” My eyes newly opened. I wonder; can this possibly be an isolated case?
I have always wondered about those “Door Close· buttons on elevators I mean, the door always eventually closes, but it’s hard to tell if there’s really any causation involved. Like the crosswalk buttons, all of this buttons may function simply as therapy for the overanxious. And It’. Significant that even if they seldom work, they still work sometimes. Every behavioral scientist knows that if you reward the rats every time, they take it for granted; if you never reward them. they give up. the most effective approach is to reward them every once 10 a wht1e. This principal of intermittent reward is well understood by casino owners
I myself have deployed meaningless information to assuage my own anxiety. We bought our first house from a fairly paranoid owner who had outfitted the (modest) property with an elaborate security system. Its operation was well beyond the ken of my family and, after setting off various alarms at various hours of the early morning, we finally had the whole thing disabled. But we left up all those signs reading “This Home is Protected by the Neverrest Ultra Security system’”, reasoning that intruders would be as alarmed by the signs as by the (now disarmed) alarms.
In post 9/11 Manhattan, this exchange of meaningless information has become part of daily life. Visit any office building over four stories in height and you’re likely to run a gauntlet of inquisitors. The truly diligent ones subject visitors to x-ray examination and require tenant escorts. It’s an inconvenient procedure, but at least you can understand its efficacy. More often, you’re merely asked to sign a log and, sometimes. present your driver’s license. How this is supposed to deter cunning terrorists. who presumably can acquire cheap fake IDs as easily as anthrax or dirty bombs. I’ve never understood.
And of course, to move from the personal to the political. DO one is exploring the frontiers of information as placebo like our own Department of Homeland Security. What exactly ate we expected to make of Tom Rldges color-coded terrorism alert levels? When the level is raised. are we supposed to hide under the bed or go about our business? Are they trying to reduce anxiety or increase it? Do they mean anything at all? We do not know. and I am not sure they really know either. But one way or another they seem to be trying to press our buttons.
Bierut,Michael;2007,Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design,China,Princeton Architectural Press,ISBN:978-8-1-56898-699-9,Page 102-103
How to Become Famous
Fame, of course, is relative. Madonna and David Letterman are famous. Most normal people, on the other hand, have never heard of Milton Glaser or Paul Rand. In the context of this little guide, fame refers to something very specific:
a famous graphic designer is famous among other graphic designers. My mother, for instance, knows that I’m famous because my sister-in-law, who’s a dental hygienist, used to clean the teeth of a graphic designer in my home town back
in Ohio. Nothing could have astonished my sister-in-law more than when her patient asked her if she was related to me. Other than that, I can’t say for sure that being famous counts for anything.
I was asked once to prepare a presentation with the title “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Graphic Designers.” Rich I know nothing about. It was surprisingly easy to calculate fame, however. I took out the Membership Directory of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. I went through the list and ticked off anyone who had a name I even vaguely recognized from awards books or the lecture circuit. The result was 185 or so names. With further thought I even could have put them in order, from most to least famous.
That was in 1989. Now, there are even more famous graphic designers.
Yet,I sense that most people feel there really aren’t enough famous graphic designers. A lot of women designers don’t feel there are enough famous women designers, a lot of African-American designers don’t feel there are enough famous African-American designers, a lot of designers from Ohio don’t feel there are enough famous Buckeye designers, and so forth. And, of course, a lot of individual designers don’t feel that they themselves are sufficiently famous.
This is too bad, because I feel that becoming famous ISO. t really all that difficult. Most kinds of fame are based, to a certain extent, on individual merit. But there are a lot of trivial things involved as well. These have to do with things like speeches and competitions. You can only do so much with the talent you were born with. On the other hand, these trivial things are sometimes amusingly simple to manipulate. But remember, there’s no guarantee that being famous counts for anything.
How to Win Graphic Design Competitions
People who enter design competitions, particularly people who enter and lose design competitions, comfort themselves by imagining that something sinister goes on in the tomblike confines of the judges’ chambers.
When you judge a competition yourself, you learn that nothing could be farther from the truth. Behind the closed doors are table after table covered with pieces of graphic design. Like most things in life, only a few of these are really good. Each judge moves along the tables, looking at each piece just long enough to ascertain whether he or she likes it. It takes a long time and a lot of people to produce even a modest piece of graphic design. The judging process takes less than a second.
The predictability of this ritual, which has all the glamour and sinister aspects of digging a ditch, makes it easy to devise some simple rules that will increase your chances of winning.
1. Enter only the kind of pieces that win in design competitions. For the record, the kinds of things that win in design competitions are cool-looking projects that solve easily understandable problems. Things that are brilliant responses to intricate marketing briefs but that can’t be understood by another designer in less than a second will not win. Exception: if something is sufficiently cool-looking, it may not need to be understandable. In fact, being incomprehensible may be part of its allure. (Negotiating your way through the ever-shifting sands of ·cool-looking” is your problem.) Note: don’t be tempted by competitions that invite you to fill out long forms describing the problem, the client, the market situation, the strategy, and so forth. Very few of the judges read them.
2. Don’t enter things. that rely on complicated unfolding or unwrapping operations. The first few Judges won t bother opening it. The one that does won’t bother putting it back together. Also, don’t enter things that involve confetti or other supposedly festive materials spilling unexpectedly out of envelopes.
3. Try to enter so your thing is the biggest thing on the table. The pieces to be judged are almost always separated into categories so like is judged with like. Having your piece be one of the largest in its category gives it a tremendous advantage. For instance, your 17″ x 22″ season schedule poster for the local symphony orchestra that looks nice over your desk will look pathetic next to a gargantuan Ivan Chermayeff Masterpiece Theatre bus shelter poster. Enter it
as an “announcement” instead. It will compete-much more successfully, trust me-against things like wedding invitations.
4. Don’t enter slides unless you’re sure they’re going to be projected. See number 3, above. Nothing is smaller than a 350101 slide with a big old entry form hanging off it.
How to Give a Speech
Graphic designers are lucky in that when speaking before a group they can show slides almost the whole time. This obviates most of the advice on speechmaking you get in airport bookstores about eye contact and forceful gestures. The only thing left to remember is the reason that the audience is there: they want to see what you’re like. The rules:
1. When in doubt, show two trays of 80 slides each, first one, then the other.
Dissolve units break down. Side-by-side images get out of sequence. More than 160 slides make people’s butts hurt. Don’t worry, plenty can still go wrong.
2. Never describe the slide people are looking at. A slide presentation should follow the same dramatic rhythm of an Alfred Hitchcock movie: tension followed by release, tension followed by release. Describe the design problem you were asked to solve. Give the audience a moment to think what they would do. Ihen, show them what you did. Done properly, this acquires the cadence, and ultimately the effect, of telling a joke. It’s boring to be told what you’re looking at: you already know what you’re looking at. Instead, try to make the audience guess the next thing they’re going to see.
3. Never read your speech. It’s tempting, but it tends to make an audience dislike you. If you must, use really comprehensive notes instead.
4. If possible, avoid showing slides of annual report spreads Of slides created with presentation software. It’s very difficult to say anything funny Of Interesting about projected images of spreads from even well-designed annual reports. And presentation software slides-with all those gradated backgrounds and rules and bullets and Times Roman with crisp little drop shadows – Will make your audience afraid you’re going to bore them. At the very least. they will question your choice of typeface.
5. Choose the last slide of the first tray with special care. It should be really great Or really surprising or really funny. Why? To ensure a satisfied buzz in the audience during the endless amount of time it takes to change to the second tray. For that reason, never change trays in the middle of a thought: the sense of deflation In the audience is palpable when the second tray goes on and you’re still talking about that same old damn project.
How to Do Great Design Work
It should be obvious by now that great work, in this context, is work that gets published and wins design awards. Work that communicates effectively and solves marketing problems for actual clients will make you rich, not famous, and consequently is not discussed here.
1. Do lots of work. You only need to do about three really great pieces a year to become famous. Depending on how much talent you have, you may have
to design a lot of good things on the off chance that a few of them might turn out to be great Design anything you can get your hands on. Stationery makes
a nice gift; design some for every member of your family and all your friends, particularly those with funny names that permit visual puns. Brewing beer is complicated and messy, but it provides a pretext for designing beer labels. Avoid, however, designing clever wedding and birth announcements, which are sacred events that shouldn’t be cheapened with clever design concepts unless the design concept is really, really clever.
2. Do lots of posters. In America, posters are not as relevant a part of the cultural landscape: as they are in Europe, but they look good reproduced at a fraction of their original size on the pages of a design annual.
3. Do lots of freebies. It’s a cliche, but it’s easier to do great free work than great paying work. Be careful, however, about working for charitable causes or large cultural institutions that can be even more cumbersome and bureaucratic than corporate clients. Also, even in the shallow, craven context of this article, there is something particularly distasteful about trying to leverage a worthy cause like fighting HIV or breast cancer in your own personal quest for fame. 00 those projects for their own merits, not to win prizes. Instead, find a local theater group. This will permit you to solve easily understandable problems with posters.
4. Make your paying work as good as It can be. While a lot of famous designers make compromises to pay the bills, I don’t know any that actually do really bad work just for the money. It seems to be really bad for morale and consequently makes it harder to do great theater posters.
5. Have something cool-looking you can always do when you can’t come up with any other solutions. Every really famous designer I know has a visual strategy he or she can fall back on when all else fails. One makes lovely Matisselike torn paper collages, another makes a complicated three-dimensional model and takes a picture of it, and still another puts big black horizontal stripes on everything. This fallback position, if chosen carefully enough, will eventually become identified as your signature style, another hallmark of a famous designer. Reluctance to develop a surefire fallback position will only mean that you will waste a lot of time trying to invent exciting new solutions that probably don’t exist for problems that probably don’t deserve them.
6. When in doubt. make it big. If still in doubt, make it red. This rule of thumb, a slight but crucial improvement on “If it’s big and ugly, it isn’t big enough,” is embraced by a surprisingly wide range of contemporary famous graphic designers. It appears to be, like the typeface Garamond, one of the few things that everybody agrees on.
7. Finally, remember what my Mom always says. My mom says: “It’s nice to be important, but it’s important to be nice.” She’s not just the smartest woman in the world but the mother of a famous graphic designer. Trust her.
Bierut,Michael;2007,Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design,China,Princeton Architectural Press,ISBN:978-8-1-56898-699-9,Page 23-27
Siah Armajani,1985
“Art should be like a good game of baseball-non-monumental, democratic and humble. with no hits, no runs, and no errors at the bottom of the ninth, we know something historical is happening. Good art leaves no residue.”
When poverty comes…
When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out of the window. Although, at the first glance, we may consider the poverty as lacking of the food, goods or money but in my opinion, poverty means lacking of the knowledge. Old-fashion manners, War, terror, violence are based on lacking of the knowledge. Maybe by finding the common language of mankind be able to open new doors. According to an Indian proverb : Poverty makes thieves, like love makes poets.
