Iris van Herpen’s dress the ‘Pythagoras tree’ was one of the first things I saw when I entered the Handmade exhibition at the Boijmans. The question: why is this in a handmade exhibition? Came to mind first. Right after my fascination for 3D printing was back again. Followed by a long stare at the dress, how did she do this? Of course some jealousy comes along too, with a dress like this, wishing I would have the skill yet to create it.

Van Herpen’s work, often described as “wearable sculpture”, fuses fashion with art.’’ My goodness how many times did I read this sentence when searching the web for more information about Iris van Herpen. Fuses fashion with art? So fashion isn’t art and sculpture is? The reason for me to place it within Design and not Art its because it is functional. Of course there are many opinions about, if van Herpen’s work is made to function as a Garment or not. But you can not deny that if you wanted to you can wear everything she creates. The “Pythagoras Tree” dress was made in collaboration with architect Julia Koerner. She studied architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria. A lot of her designs are produced from organic structures and compounds. She has worked on a 3Dprinted dress with van Herpen before. For this dress a Technique was used, known as ‘Mammoth Stereo lithography’. It is a 3D printing process in which the garment is built slice by slice from bottom to top, in a vessel of polymer that hardens when struck by a laser beam.
The collection Hybrid Holism by van Herpen is inspired by a work of the architect Philip Beesley , named Hylozoic Soil (2007). His work is about architecture not just being a space for people to exist in, but the architecture itself becoming a living being. When seeing Beesley’s work in general I can make a clear connection between the two. It feels like van Herpen want’s to recreate the aesthetics  of the architecture into something wearable.

Philip Beesley- Hylozoic grounds

Iris van Herpen- Hybrid Holism

When we think of something being handmade, we mostly think of the past and the interaction between human and raw material. Nowadays the amount of handwork that is being made is becoming less and less .Also many different technique’s are being realized. Therefor you start questioning which technique’s are considered within the category Handmade. Van Herpen’s dresses are hard to define. They are definitely design because it is not only functional but they are clearly based on a concept as well. But she is not designing only, when trying to get the dress to function properly she is engaging herself in engineering. And many of the programs she work’s with to realize her garments are programs used more often by engineers then they are used by designers.

My fascination for 3D printing started a few years ago when I first heard about it. I knew it definitely was going to change everything from the moment it would be accessible for everyone. It would change our consumer society, and our view on authenticity. It may not have this impact quite yet, but it is coming soon. The way the development has quickly progressed is mind blowing. Lately a 3Dprinted gun has been making head lines in the USA and the The Netherlands too. A man from the USA managed to create a working gun and posted a YouTube video of it online. After this had been on the news everywhere, the HVA ( a university of Amsterdam) tried to reprint it, the did not manage to print it, because they were stopped. But it had made headlines in the Netherlands.

It always takes something shocking for people to realize how a certain technology has developed right under their noses. Another recent headline, was body parts being printed. A small boy Kaiba Gionfriddo, had a life threatening condition cured by having an artificial windpipe and an airway splint printed and inserted in his body. It is the first medical achievement concerning 3D printing. If they are able to print body parts already, I can’t imagine what they will be able to print in a few years. I might not ever have to give birth to child, I could just print one on my 3D printer.

Van Herpen makes use of both 3dprinting and handwork in one garment. This blurrs the line between hand or machine made. Why is it we value handmade things so much? Is it because of the society we live in, in which everything is mass produced? I think mass producing and machines are two words that obviously go together. Many handmade items are mass produced as well and are valued equally to the machine made products. So it’s all about authenticity. We human’s tend to like it when we own something no one else has. It makes us feel more important. This feeling is linked to the handmade products we value so highly from before the mass producing era. Van Herpen’s dress might not be handmade, but it is the only existing one so we value it the same as we value the handmade products at the exhibition. This made me think: I can change the value we give van Herpen’s dress, all i have to do is create a second one. Since the dress is 3D printed it should be possible to have an exact replica made. After a long but pointless search on the internet for the blueprint of the ‘Pythagoras tree’ dress, I came along an app called autodesk123D . The app is created to make 3D printing of existing objects easier, all you have to do is take 20-40 pictures of an object from different angles and it will create the 3D blueprint for you. Since I found out about this app too late it wasn’t possible for me to visit the Boymans again to take the pictures, and try out if it is possible to create an exact replica online. I guess i don’t have the skill to create a 3Ddress like van Herpen’s Pythagoras tree, but since I have 123Dapp I might have the skill to duplicate it.

If you are interested in 3D printing, and living in Amsterdam visit:

www.ground3d.nl/

 
The intimacy of Grayson Perry´s drawings and the DIY characteristic
of punk and queer movements

The first time I came across Grayson Perry´s work happened on the same week I had a discussion with my classmates regarding minorities and the quantity of women inside the art academies X how many of them do we actually see in contemporary art galleries and museums.
Not only for briefly getting to know his beautiful works, but I was mostly glad to hear he was a successful and Turner Prize winner artist who also happened to be a transvestite. He made it out there despite for his choice of appearance or behavior and above all: his body of work does speak about all of these matters in a very subjective and personal way.
I hadn´t thought or researched much more about Perry until I visited the Hand Made exhibition at the Boijmans van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam with the Foundation Year. For my surprise the centrepiece of the exhibition was The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, by Grayson Perry.

The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman is a tomb in the shape of a ship, which has been cast in iron, a floating reliquary that is forever earthbound. This, he says, is the tomb of the unknown craftsman, dedicated to the many thousands of artists over the centuries whose work survives but whose names will never be known. The political and whimsical aspects of the work promptly awakened my curiosity and interest in his art, so I decided to start researching about him.

Perry is mainly known for his ceramic pottery and tapestry, where he combines classical forms with his drawings and sketches. The drawings have a strongly autobiographical aspect, often depicting himself as Claire, his feminine alter-ego, and his teddy bear, Alan Measles, as a representation of the father figure, always providing comfort and affection. Many of his works picture sexually explicit content and for that reason they have been raising harsh criticism among art critics. But Perry habitually portrays the life of the working class as well as inciting discussions about minorities, sexuality, class and race. He has said, “I like the whole iconography of pottery. It hasn’t got any big pretensions to being great public works of art, and no matter how brash a statement I make, on a pot it will always have certain humility… For me the shape has to be classical invisible: then you’ve got a base that people can understand”.

Looking closely to the drawings on the pottery and trying to understand what they wish to communicate I could not help but think that their guerrilla-like motto and storytelling elements reminded me of the punk zines and the DIY (do it yourself) aesthetic of the punk and queer movements. In my mind, the way Perry uses the form of traditional vases as a free base and platform for the materialization of his thoughts immediately related to the intimacy and freedom of speech of the hand made booklets.
The hand made zines played a very important role in the punk movement in the late 1970s. Through the making of a zine one could express his own or a group´s principles and spread the word while being able to escape from the control of the publishing companies and media. In my opinion the exceptionally underground aspect of it is what provided the freedom necessary for the makers to loosen up from any possible apprehension regarding public judgment in order to feel welcome to express their most genuine political thoughts. I can recognize this very same bravery and freedom of speech in Perry´s drawings.

For Perry art should be able to communicate to the public and not only to the high-class art related intellectual minority. He also reflects on crafts as a form of art and in an interview to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, he mentions that craft and art are greatly linked and that is actually one great thing about it. Craft by definition is something that can be taught to someone else, you can teach someone how to throw a pot and they can become as good at it as you. Whereas art is very much linked to an individual vision and it´s not necessarily something that can be taught. One can be derivative and take up someone elses vision but he won´t ever become that person.
Perry calls himself an artist and craftsman and he makes use of crafts as a solid and clear base for his art, a base that becomes a tool for the expression and carriage of his message.
Not surprised I discovered Perry was involved in the Chelmsford punk scene in the late 1970s, he lived in squatted houses and at some point shared a house with the pop singer and transvestite Boy George, who became an inspiration for him. He is also the father of Flo, a 21 years old girl, and the husband of the author and psychotherapist Philippa Perry.

I find Design a difficult term. When I think of Design objects, I think of the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, which I, to my rather substantial displeasure, accidentally visited once during a school trip.
The building contained a few rooms filled with all sorts of glass Design objects, ranging from a little unpleasant to straight up horrible stuff. According to Wikipedia, the museum exhibits “more than 30,000 objects representing European and Asian decorative arts.” All I saw were contemporary glass lamps and mobiles and vases pretending to be all sorts of extremely valuable and expensive.
Having said all these mean things about Design, I myself completed an education in Graphic Design not that long ago. I have caught myself calling myself a Graphic Designer quite a few times.
Christien Meindertsma is also often called a Designer. In her bio a position on this matter is not being made, but in her CV the word Design appears very often. (It also says that in 2010 she was part of the show “Dutch Domestics – Design as Research” in the Museum fur Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt)

Christien is interested in raw materials. She explores these materials in thoughtful ways, making simple books and products that lay bare complex and otherwise hidden processes. If you’d like to hear her talking about her work you can follow this nice link.

I know Christien Meindertsma from her project PIG05049 (or actually from the TED talk she gave about it). For this project she spent three years researching the afterlife of the ordinary pig, and all the products that it ends up in after slaughter. All items are presented at their real scale in a book, a visual encyclopedia. Amongst some of the more unexpected products were: Ammunition, concrete, cigarettes, heart valves, brakes, chewing gum, porcelain and cosmetics.

Only recently I discovered one of her other projects, called One Sheep Sweater. It was on display in the cliché corner Eerlijk (Honest) at the Handmade show at Boijmans van Beuningen.
Christien started working on this project in 2003, when she was still studying at the Design Academy Eindhoven. In 2004, she made a collection of cardigans that were each made from the wool of one sheep.
After a few years of working with all sorts of wool and yarn manufacturers for her poofs and (Texel) ottomans, she picked up the One Sheep Sweater project again. Her goal was now to make them with a 3D knitting machine, to create an industrially made product, that would still tell a story of where it came from. She used Merino sheep from Holland and was part of the whole process from the shearing to the knitting.

I can very much relate to Christiens’ work most of the time. Though I don’t really have a particular interest in raw materials, I am very much concerned with the ways society deals with agriculture, whether it being for meat, wool, seeds, crops or other commodities. We are completely unaware of production processes and I find this very intriguing.

I think some of Christiens’ works I would call Design, for example the poofs and the ottomans and these Designy lamps that unfortunately remind me a bit of the glass Design objects that I mentioned earlier. However, the two main projects mentioned in this essay I consider to be art.
In my opinion Crafts, Design and Art are all the same things, namely words. The word Design reminds me of ugly glass objects, but that is really nobody’s fault, and it will hopefully not stay that way forever. The word Art is something I have more respect for, but I have also seen horrible stuff that was called that. With the word Crafts I mostly think of handwork, (which I use quite a lot in my own work, when I think about it now) but I also associate it with exceptional skill. And, as we all know, skills are awesome.

The words Art, Design and Crafts have different associations, but I think it’s extremely difficult to separate them from each other, if it is even possible to find out what they really mean. Some things that are considered Art can also easily be considered Craft, like some old Mannerism paintings, or more contemporary Hyperrealist paintings or sculptures. Some things that are considered Design may be considered Art. And some things that are considered Art, may by some people be considered Design.

Value is one of the main themes in Christien Meindertsma’s works. Trend forecasters tell us that, as a reaction to mass-consumerism, crafts will be valued more and more in the future. I’m hoping for this trend to develop in a large scale, for I think it has great potential to contribute to shifting our views and beliefs into less destructive and more beautiful ones.

Quick fashion, one trend after another. Passion for fashion becomes synonymous with renewing yourself and being up to date.

In today’s reality where we consume more than we need, where we meet and communicate through one screen or another and where machines can basically do everything, there are some necessities for experiencing the genuine and personal that cannot be simulated by any kind of machines.

Saskia van Drimmelen has been a fashion designer for two decades, graduating from the fashion Department of Arnhem Academy of Arts. For eight years she had her own brand and followed the fashion markets system with presenting two collections per year. Her collections were selling at leading boutiques such as Colette (Paris), Brown (London) and Van Ravenstein (Amsterdam). Her work was shown and bought by museums all over the world and Adidas asked her to design a sneaker. But along the way her interest and approach changed direction. Together with Margreet Sweerts, theater director, she begun to investigate ways to create more personal, unique, “slow” clothes and in 2007 they started Painted Series – a story in garment. A label with an embrace of handmade as opposed to mass production. They travelled to places where almost forgotten knowledge of craftwork still was practiced. To Bulgaria where women knew the tradition of making needlepoint and from the Assiniboine tribe in Northern America they learned about beadery. Collaborations started with different people involved to make the slowly ever-growing collection, like a bands repertoire. The collection is not bound to a season or trends.

The starting point for Saskia and Margreet were beautiful antique family garments from Bulgaria that had been inherited through generations and added to in each led. The pieces carried a story and a soul that inspired the duo to create garments with the same idea of letting designers and artisans traditional techniques contribute. As a result the collaboration creates a personal, unique, delicate piece of clothes that carries a story, tradition and a close relationship to its creators.

With the quote from Leonard Cohen “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” the Painted present their latest project Golden Joinery. Often when we repair broken things we do it with intention to hide it and make it as if new. An alternative “broken is better than new” aesthetic – that it actually can add value and the symbolic aspects – fascinates the fashion collective. With the passion for imperfect love they invite me for a workshop where clothes that are broken or stained can be repaired with a golden scar. The inspiration came from the Japanese tradition of repairing broken ceramics with golden paint, a technique called Kintsugi. The invitation is to bring a piece of clothes that you hold dearly and that is defect, to a workshop and repair it with the same idea as Kintsugi, with golden thread or patches of golden textile. The clothes breath new life by sharing the joy of making with the traditional techniques and an important aspect is the experience and the interaction. The participants are contributing to a new brand that slowly will arise.

 Gintsugi on a Seigan's Ido shape tea bowl [source]

In Painted’s studio • in the west of Amsterdam, four women came together with the originators of Golden Joinery and their brought broken beloved clothes wear. For a couple of hours we took a break from our duties and sat down to repair and to meet. I brought for myself a “new” but long looked for, perfectly worn out second hand leather jacket. The seams on the inside were completely trashed, the lining material was sticking out every time I put it on. I healed it with golden thread and the jacket slowly held together again. The golden thread gives me the feeling that it will hold forever. Knowing that, I will walk around with the golden thread on the inside, towards my body giving the feeling of a secret. If the jacket opens you might glimpse some shimmer and if you ever heard about Golden Joinery you will know the deal.

The people that come to the workshop are now a part of a new slowly arising brand. The logo, a small golden ellipse, that Saskia stitched on the left inside of my jacket is shining like a beetle and makes me a part of the ever-growing Golden Joinery. The event and the knowledge that more people have been joining the same thing –and you might spot the signs on the street–, makes it a bit special. My relationship to this jacket is now closer, like a friend that I supported. I haven’t known the friend for a long time but some you get close to quicker and some events can enhance this intimacy. This definitely did.

Apart from Amsterdam, Painted will give the workshop Golden Joinery to enrich garments in Maastricht, New York, Wrightwood, Ahmedabad, Eindhoven, Paris and Mallorca.

Dear Frank,

I’m terribly sorry to bother you again, but after reading a copy of the last letter that I’ve sent you I felt I had no choice. I realized that by only sending you pictures of the works from the Shift and Progression series, I was kind of disproving the point I tried to make. It started making sense, a bit too much sense if you ask me.

When you look at the objects from this series next to each other, of course you will see a gradual shift and progression, providing the thing with some sort of concept (although I wouldn’t call it a strong one). Also I realized that this title could be applied to nearly all of his work.Anyhow, I’m supplying you with some additional images of Smith’s work. Now from different periods of his career, so the ‘designer of shapes’ thing I told you about will be more clear.

I hope that now you can see my point a little clearer, and that I don’t change my mind again too soon.

Regards,
Giel

Dear Frank,

It seems to me that a short while ago we had a small misunderstanding about my feelings for the work Shift and Progression no.3 by Martin Smith. I’m writing you this letter, hoping to get things straight again, making you understand what it is that made my thoughts about the object shift, and made my initial liking for the object progress towards great annoyance.

At first I praised the work and to your question of why I liked it, I answered: “It’s the ungraspable nature of the thing, it seems to radiate from the inside through clever use of material and reflection, it almost seems a mystical object.” At the time of writing it was probably how I really felt, but at this present moment it’s nearly impossible for me to recapture that feeling.

A lot of my initial feeling probably had to do with the context I first encountered the work in. On the Hand Made exhibition it was one of the few objects that managed to attract my attention for a substantial period of time. It was mostly because I didn’t really get what I was looking at. Not many other objects managed to do that, a few examples: a cardboard owl, a ceramic owl, a table of which one of the legs is a frog made out of epoxy, I guess you get the picture. And don’t get me wrong, it is not that I was in no way attracted to any of the things in the exhibition, but the attraction was only visual. With this object I felt, there would be something more to it. But how wrong did I turn out to be.

After I started searching for Martin Smith on the internet, I soon hit a dead end. Apart from his personal website, and a mentioning of him as being a professor on the Royal College of Art in London, there was nothing to be found. His personal website showed a range of works, all ceramic. Browsing through all this, I soon felt I might’ve been wrong.

All his works definitely show his great skill in ceramic techniques, but never did I encounter a real surprise. He seems to work in series, every few years he changes the color of his clay, or adds another material to it, but that’s it. Series and series of basically the same type of object but slightly different. The first impression I had of Shift and Progression, that there had to be ‘something more’ to it than meets the eye, was definitely proved wrong. The website did offer me a quite brief description of his practice, namely: “an ongoing investigation of the formal language of the vessel and the way that it can both contain a space and define a place.”

What exactly was meant by this, I could only guess. Well I did get the formal part. Most certainly, when talking about form, he is exploring the possibilities of the materials he’s working with. But ‘contain space and defining a place’ really annoyed me. Any object can define a place. When placing a banana in a white room, it both contains space, and defines the room as the room with the banana in it. Put another object next to it, and both of them do the same. It didn’t seem to make much sense to me, just an attempt to put a fancy label on what he likes to do and is good at, working in clay.

Then, somewhat desperate I went to the library of the Stedelijk Museum. All they had was an 80 page book, which offered me a brief description of the mans life, and a lot of pictures of ceramic objects I had just seen on the internet. The only thing that I found out there, that seemed to be of any importance, was his interest in exact sciences, and the fact that he first studied to be a geography teacher. This, at least, could explain a bit about the impersonal and calculated works I had seen. But still made me wonder, what did it do in the museum, and why at an design exhibition?
It is possible to say that Smith is a designer of shapes, of course. These shapes, according to the book I found on him, are often the result of mathematic calculations. Also the chemical processes, for things as the glazing and ‘what happens when and at what temperature’ during baking, are approached in a very scientific manner. Even in his earlier period, where he made raku vases and bowls, he would calculate everything so precisely that the surprises that happen during baking, which are a important characteristic the technique, were reduced to a minimum. So the guy kind of struck me as a scientist, and even though the worlds of science and art aren’t that far apart, it’s just not the stuff that manages to interest me.

Then I decided to send the man an e-mail, hoping that he could explain me a bit more about his work, and light that once existing spark again. I asked him what he wanted to evoke with his viewers, what was meant by ‘containing space and defining place’, and whether he as well felt his work belonged in this Hand Made design-exhibition. But the man never cared to answer.

So in short, it was the cold approach and one-sidedness as I experienced throughout his entire body of work, really put me off. Even Shift and Progression now seemed devoid of any interesting aspect I found in it at first. All of the work seemed to me nothing more then just empty vessels, meant only to show off the technical skill of the artist.

Well, I hope this gave you a little more insight in my personal relation to the object and the gradual evolution it was subjected to.

Regards,
Giel

P.S.: I included a few pictures to prove my point. Also one of the  cardboardowl and of the epoxyfrog I told you about, just for fun!

In an essay from Freud published in 1919, called “The Uncanny”, he examines the phenomenon of the Uncanny. He describes it as a class of frightening things that lead us back to what is known and familiar. It is the return of the repressed events and memories that live within our minds. The uncanny is anything we have experienced in adulthood that reminds us of earlier psychic stages, of aspects of our unconscious or the experience of the human species.
According to contemporary artist Mike Kelly, “The Uncanny” can be felt when experiencing things like non art objects such as ancient Egyptian funerary objects, figures used for rituals, cults, and religious worship, anatomical models and wax figures, also contemporary hyper realistic sculptures. The scale of an object, The doubling of objects, and the “Almost Human” factor, can all produce that uncanny feeling. I am going to introduce to you now, 5 designers that possess these qualities in their work and designs.

First i would like to introduce Lidy Jacobs,
She takes the feeling of the Uncanny extremly seriouse in her work. She hand makes stuffed plush toys out of all sorts of different textures of fabric. And simply in its construction it reminds me of childhood and the imagination associated with dolls and toys. but the figures also present something terrifying, she adds elements of sexuality, that points back to adolescents and comments on  society and situations that arise between genders.

Her works really stood out to me in the exhibition “Hand Made” that i saw in Rotterdams, Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum. I saw brightly colored stuffed toys that somehow reminded me of my childhood but yet the figures were so outlandish that i could not place them with something recognizable in my mind.I connected with it but i was still lost as to what it was. This intrigued me.

Next i would like to look at Amsterdam based fashion designers, Viktor and Rolf. Graduates of the Design Academy in Arnhem, you can see here where the lines of art and fashion blur. There garments are known for being unbelievable unique .

As well as creating commercial garments and there haute couture collections, they also create life size and miniature porcelain dolls made in the exact likeness of the models that wore the original garments.

I find there application of the double in there doll making to be the definition of “uncanny”! You can see there collection here on their website

For a more structure based designer i chose Joep Van Leishout. Famous for his innvovative housing designs, his work borders on fine arts and design. He makes houses and sculptures in the likeness of our bodies (anotomically correct i might add) and blows them out of proportion.

The material he uses also gives a flesh texture even when the work is NOT related to the body, You can see his work around the Netherlands, At the Verbeeke Foundation and he also built some of the bathrooms in the Boymans van Beuningen museum.

Next i present furniture designer Maarten Baas. In his series called “Smoke” he has set fire to designs chairs we all know, from the high class French designs to the Reitveld chair. Again we see the use of the double here, an uncanny resemblance, although in the end it is something quite different.

 In his series “Clay” we see furniture that seems to be askew or off in some way. Almost like a child’s drawing manifested in reality. “Clay” speaks to me because of it imperfections, its hand made appearance. With its liquid appearance it looks as if it would melt right here. Thease days the mass production of furniture cause us to loose touch with the hand made journey that furniture goes through. Here it feels personal again.

Lastly i will introduce you to yet another Dutch designer named Zoro Feigl, an Amsterdammer who works with movement in sculpture. His witty constructions breed movement, and often are shocking with there seemingly flawless construction. In “poppy” its almost as if a flower is opening, as the seconds pass it then feels like were standing beneath a twirling woman’s skirt, then we are standing in a wind tunnel. Its in this process so many things are called to mind. With help of the image, the sound and the feeling of the wind produced by the device, it truly is an Art Experience. See for more of his work here on his website

on April 18th DesignResearch visited

“HAND MADE”

and researched the relation between craft and design

and how craft does relate to art and design….

to see all >click< for latest essay’s

by G_Group students

“Hand Made” is an exhibition organized

by museum Boymans van Beuningen,

taking crafts as its principal theme

more info

 /site Design.nl /site [Metropolis M [Dutch] /site Boymans van Beuningen

Choice, Cover, Sound. What can I find? Books, Visual, Design Why should I choose this one? Well. It wasn’t easy at all. But it was at the same time. operating 6 different words, which are never combining on the same title but can be easily associated with one single cover.
That was the idea. That was the choice. That was the start and finish point at the same time.
“Why not?” – that is the title for the third book I took from the library. The name that matches all of three chosen tags. If you start to Google it with "why not.." you will immediately have few options
Why not design,
Why not associates?
Why not" and "why not both".
You will also find website called WhyNot which propose "How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small" or
Why Not Eat Insects? Or
Why not build more Schools Without Walls?”
Why not take up knitting again?

Sex and intimacy after 60: Why not both?
Why not kill two birds with one stone and send IRS to Gitmo?
Dogs on trains? Well, why not?
Why not be a naive?
Why not to swipe your girlfriend's skincare?
SO when I was googling in the library by hand, touching, looking for something special, taking, putting back to the shelf, searching and exploring and when I saw the perfect book for that
I had no more doubts – that was the right one.
That is funny, you don’t care actually what you will read about. Just simple choice of a book, as a subject, as a thing, as a piece.
Ask “Why?”, think “Why Not”? And take it!

Rietveld Library cat.nr: ?

Does this mean you make the same mistakes twice?

Do we re-live our past but in a different atmosphere?

Can we see our future in the history of time?

It is surprising how the sum of the past and the future can result in the present. As well as in the last book I’ve chosen, I have the feeling that two different time spirits come together.

The layout and especially the letters used on the cover of this book are very old fashioned; the use of soft orange dyes in a round shaped fond combined with a black and white frame. A frame which reminds me of origami class where at least six women with the age of forty-five and higher are sweating over a piece of paper trying to construct a whooping crane. But the picture of the cover doesn’t correspond to my slightly ironical conclusion at all. It is a picture of two wooden beams with beautiful shapes on the end of each beam. The shapes are perfectly opposite so that they can fit together as two pieces of a very complicated puzzle. It looks very modern, like something they use in high tech vehicles or space ships.

At present, the title began to dawn on me. It said: ‘The art of Japanese Joinery’, made in 1977

After a small peek into the content of this book, it occurred to me that it was filled only with old Japanese ways to attach two or more pieces of wood together. Not in the prefab-style we attach stuff these days, but on the most exquisite, caring and futuristic way possible. I felt for a moment so angry at our IKEA society where everything has to be cheap so you can buy a new sofa every four years, not caring about old handicrafts and their gift to make the most refined details. Details of such beauty that you have to suppress the urge to dismantle your closet only to see how it has been made.
The tender approach of something so simple as to attach two pieces of wood together reminds me of the first book I had chosen, where Nabokov describes individual letters of the alphabet in the way he experienced them.

Affection, or at least attention, for stuff we work with everyday, like the feeling of a specific letter, a symbol or a construction, is very rare these days. We don’t seem to have time to notice these small ‘gifts’ in the rush of everyday life. So next time you go to the library, go with an open mind and grab the very fist book that draws your attention. You’ll be surprised what comes out.

Rietveld Library cat.nr: 694.1

continuing from ……[Here, here little foxie]

I walk up to the book that I found in the catalogue online and realize that the devil isn’t even orange. Which it was on Google. God damn it. I wrote a shitty text about an orange book that isn’t even orange, and thought I’d get away with it.

In the corner of my eye I see a big, fat, shiny book, almost bursting out from the self a couple of backs away. AMERICA! the back screams to me. Reminds me of my sweet friend Vera, who is absolutely and almost frantically in love with this country. Oh Vera, I sigh, America is just about burgers and cars, what can this book really offer me? I do as I usually do and pick the book ironically.

A jambalaya, the word for hot black dude my friend Irene uses shamelessly, cover the front. Gold tooth and all. It’s about portraits. In America.

I open the book and suddenly I understand why it was so important to actually go to the library and not just surf the catalogue for this assignment. In this glossy package I see dreamers, lovers, haters and the America Vera fell in love with. A sensitivity that needed this screaming shiny cover and assignment for me to see it. And it makes me think about Mike. My best friend’s ex from Miami whom I never hang out with anymore because that would be kinda weird.

He was exactly this book to me eight years ago when they first met. Tall, shiny, too big for the place he was put into, screaming around but with a magnetizing effect that immediately made everything around him dull.
 

 
I miss him. And I think I want to go to America, just to see the America that Andres Serrano gave me a glance of with this giant of a book. And Im not even sarcastic know. I really mean it.

Rietveld Library cat.nr: -serra- 3

In my third research I wanted to be more concentrated on the tag “paradox” because the last two researches where more based on the focus on the object chair and the humoristic association of the presentation of a chair in those books. Anyways this research now was more extended which made it also harder to find only one book fitting to the tag “paradox” but I stumbled over one book which is besides its outer appearance, the cover work, also a really interesting book about photography. “Mapping sitting” caught my eye first of all because of the title, the word mapping sitting doesn’t make not really much sense to me, not even with the subtitle “on Portraiture and Photography”, which all start to make sense when you see the front cover, together with the back  and the back cover of the book. Under the written words you can see old photography’s probably of a square in a big city where, when you take a closer look, the ghost shapes of humans are recognizable, those are overlapped over each over and seem to first build a big and hard to identify mass, on the second and closer look the mass is building a crowd. On the Third look you are also recognizing that the square is also a overlapped collage of photos of different squares which seems to be build one big picture of a square. The impression of just these photo collages on the cover, for me, means documentation, a documentation of another time (all the pictures are in black and white and obviously from the early last century), a collection of photos which have been put together in a book, one page laying over another. Therefore the word mapping start to make more sense; the photos are documented and collected as the information’s of geographical facts on a map, which is my first association of a map.  Still the word sitting stays mysterious for me, at least as the title on the cover without knowing the content, because you see actually mostly portrait photos of people sitting, inside the book, but on the cover design I cannot really find a connection to the word sitting. All in all I would probably say that this is the reason why I have chosen the book, the paradox or the not understanding of the title, which makes the book to something exciting.

Rietveld Library cat.nr: 761-bas-1

Hello, i´m very very very small. But worth to pick me out of the closet. There is mold in me, but I can´t do anything about it. I will fit in your pocket. I´m grey but not boring. I can tell you many things but not too much. But sometimes you shouldn´t tell too much because you can figure it out by yourself. I want to inspire you instead of telling you everything. Did you ever thought a person that you met and told everything about their self is interesting? Well that´s the same with us books. Encyclopedia´s are so snobby. They are know-it-all. You don´t want to be neighbors with an encyclopedia on a shelf, believe me. A chick flick is also a nightmare. I think I prefer also the older books. But the more specific ones. I had an amazing neighbor it was an old ancient roman. But it was in pain. The cover was almost hanging of the pages. The conversations were interesting but in the same time painful. Because I could hear the pain. I can only hope that I will get to that age. That I´m interesting enough to be in a library instead of being sold or thrown away. E-reader.. yes, that´s our enemy. It´s getting harder every day. We are in fear. That´s why we don´t want to look old and dirty. Because the chance you will be thrown away will be bigger. Some of us has been thrown away or sometimes never returned. It´s always exiting to be picked in the library. It can be amazing but also be horrible. Some people put boogers in us. Or fold our pages. One of our neighbors had a lunatic that put his dick on every page because he knew people would touch it. It was traumatizing.

Because I was thinking why I always chose small books, this time I a took a bigger book. But it was thin.. I don´t even look at big books. The cover was grey and it looked so boring. Boring in the way that no one will take that book. The books that get forgotten. I wonder sometimes what if books could only talk, what would they say. I think this one will be the strange one. The older book and I think he would have white hair. I´m thinking this because on the cover there are Greek pillars. A wise old white hairy man. Would some books just scream like in Harry Potter: PICK ME! Or hide because they are so old and a lot of people already read them. I think the new books would be the one that scream pick me and appreciate what is inside of me. The date on which someone rented my book was in 1994. I´m wondering why she or he would have taken that book. That is such a mystery about books in the library. Who took them and where did the books travel to? I think if you take a book on holiday, they will hate the beach. Because there will be sand in it and they will be wet. I think they would prefer old people. Who still really appreciate a book and cares about how you threat them. That don´t use Wikipedia but look their information up in an encyclopedia. I think if books could speak they would feel much lonelier than 20 years ago.

The first thing that I noticed about the book that it´s a very small. Always when I have to pick a book I take the smaller ones because I am less scared of it because I know that I can always carry it around. Also that I don´t have to read hours in it to understand everything. But actually it doesn´t make any sense because one phrase of a philosopher could keep me busy for days to understand. The cover is made of marble paper. My brother use to make it when we were kids. In the country house we used to be busy for days playing with colours and patrons. What is it that when you grow older you are more thinking about the past? Sometimes I´m thinking of what will happen to all the old books in 200 years. Will people throw them away? Or will it be something to collect and cool to read instead of an e-reader. Or whatever people read from in 200 years. There is an etiquette in the book. I wonder about the days that people were so proud of their book that they put an etiquette in every book. Like they were treasure. I think this book is treasure because it´s gives me the feeling that is a kind of journal. Orange and yellow are strange colours to combine for a cover. A choice I didn´t see often. Also I never made that colour combination with the marble paper. I never had a journal. Maybe this book makes me wanna have a journal. Because you lose your thoughts. But at the same time you shouldn’t live too much in the past. I also wonder how many times a person that has a journal actually reads it after.

‘Symbols are more meaningful than things themselves’
Jenny Holzer

The definition of the word ‘symbol’ in the Dutch etymological dictionary says the following: ‘that which represents something abstract of absent’. To me, this is a very clear notion that there is no actual difference between letters and symbols. Both are representations of images we gave a certain meaning to understand each other in daily life.

Imagine ancient times where we communicated with sounds, clangs and certain movements. The visual aspect of life wasn’t half as important as it is now. There is no need for physical attendance of ‘the other’ to communicate your message. We live in our own virtual and visual bubbles where we are surrounded by symbols of many kinds.

In the last hundred years technology took over the world, physical labour will not be necessary in more than 50 years. Symbols ,the collective noun of codes, letters, numbers and icon’s, have become our life-force. Everything in our daily life runs on notably abstract ‘doodles’.

What stroke me of seeing this publication was that it is a clear example of the evolution we’ve been through. Alpha being cave drawings and Omega the clear letters and numbers on the spine of this magazine. On the one hand it makes me proud being a part of this species but on the other hand it scares the shit out of me that it is only a matter of time that we become a symbol ourselves.

This book is not from the Rietveld Library but my own.
If you want to know about Trans-Humanism look at this video documentary [X]

The  three figures on the cover reminds me of a person that is structured in life.

A person that is good in maths and can calculate a drawing.

M.C. Escher for example.

I’m the total opposite.

I just passed my maths exam with a 6,5 out of 10 and a lot of effort.

Some people are capable to make an other dimension with just a pencil, ruler and their knowledge.

Precision it what it takes and a huge focus.

The music of Nujabes a Japenese hiphop producer reminds me in the way of producing a whole other world.
[audio:https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Nujabes-Aruarian-Dance.mp3|titles=Nujabes – Aruarian Dance]
His songs are for me a translation of certain feelings and atmospheres that we don’t even have a word for.

A lot of times people describe those moments as nostalgic.

But far away you know it’s something that you can’t describe.

Because there is no word existing for that feeling.

That’s why language always will have this barrier.

Rudolph Otto a German religious historian has a beautiful quote about the moment in history that people could provide their own food while none of the 3 monotheistic religions were there yet. The book which holds this quote is about the history of the three monotheistic religions.

quote: The symbolic stories, cave paintings and sculptures were a try out to express their amazement for the ubiquitous mystery and to connect it to their own lives. Nowadays poets, artists and musicians are driven by that same desire.
-'das heilige 1917'

For me that is the best explanation that I crossed awareness about what an artist is.

We try to translate fragments of the ubiquitous mystery that there is.

There will never be one work that will explain what the ubiquitous mystery is.

It can be the cliche question like why are we on this earth?

But for me the same mystery is that I can connect a song with a certain atmosphere for which there is not a word.

Such a translation of that atmosphere recognizable in a painting, sculpture or a song etc. is a mystery that doesn’t work for everyone.

So if you connect to and experience that certain feeling of recognition that is a fragment of that ubiquitous mystery.

Rietveld Library cat.nr: 004 Lau 1