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"objective" Tag


History repeats itself.


Wednesday, May 22, 2013

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

No objectiveness


Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Browsing through the library for the last time, I thought it was time for a different approach. So instead of searching, looking, considering for at least half an hour or maybe even longer, I just run into the library and get the first big book I see. Without even wondering if it is about art or design (well, ofcourse I know it is about art, but there is a story to tell you know), I borrow it. Once outside the library I see the book is about the work of Tadao Ando. My conclusion is that you can not be objective or random towards anything. The reason for this conclusion is that when I tried to borrow a random book from the library, I still get back with a book about a person whose work I really like. This book about this person. I knew it before, but through this project I am more certain about it, no one can ever be objective. That can turn out to be pretty good, but also pretty bad.

Illustrated chaos


Thursday, November 12, 2009

Image instead of font, relaxed instead of compulsive, everything except cats: these are the tags of the book I picked. No relation is a relation as well, and thus is this lack of relation the perfect link between the first and the second book. I found an objective way to link this post to my earlier post. This book pulled my attention in the same way it is linked to the other book: the big differences. Was the first book white, about fonts and having a sort of mysterious neurotic repeating cleanness, the second book is colorful, filled with images, hundreds of subjects and a bit of chaos. Browsing through the pages you see countless interesting illustrations, which make you want to take a closer look but also make you want to look further; are there more images like these, are there better images then these, could it become better then this? It makes you want to draw or make such images too: images from which you can see there was a lot of work in it or absolutely not much work. The amount of work is of no importance, the works are intriguing.

Rietveld Library code: ?


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