Skip to Content Skip to Search Go to Top Navigation Go to Side Menu


"yorick" Tag


Iuvenis


Thursday, December 6, 2018

It drawn me to it. The cobalt blue colour emphasised the youthfulness of the imagery. The face was almost life sized, as if it wanted me to adore it and venerate the look in the eyes that told an enigmatic, coming to age story. A portrait of a working class, white, young man was gazing at me with his presumably blue eyes, covering almost the entire cover of the magazine. The image was beautifully screen printed with a raster. In a very strong looking font ‘’WERKER’’ was written above the flat cap of the lad. Immediately my mind started working – adolescent, masculine, boyish, Adonis. It was a very obvious attraction for me, as if the cover invited the spectator to get this aroused feeling of the sexualisation of a worker class lad.
As I’m browsing through the pages, the the layout comes across very nineties. It has a playful way of displaying titles, articles, text and images. But above all, it is a very smart moves that lies immediately the focus of the context of the magazine: young man. The structural slogans that are prominently coming back in the magazine, combined with the grainy images of young men and their body parts it gives the layout a feel of protest, anarchy but also youthfulness that keeps coming back as a theme. This combination is of the archiving layout and the strong images that are yet quite sexually intended are making everything stronger. It captures the underlying beauty of vital lads back in the day. It also reminds the spectator, by pulling the archiving trick, that now we can see them as more than just the middle class. It let my mind fantasize about these adolescent boys in a non embarrassing way. The mystery and subtle beauty, packed in something strong and masculine, let my eyes legitimize the scanning and the browsing at the photos. I wish I had a worker class boy by my side.

 

The 2


Thursday, November 29, 2018

Project on the city


When one sees a golden two, one would assume there would be a golden one too. In the space of the library, on a shelf filled with spines of books, I found the pair. One of the books had a golden ‘’1’’ on its spine, the spine on the right had a golden ‘’2’’. I immediately linked them as a pair, an unseparated duo that could be read apart, but had to be put next to each other in a space like this. The sizes were exactly the same, oddly enough. I would like to assume that a follow up book, is a bigger, greater, thicker,  larger, better book. But in this case it was not.
 When one sees a golden one, one would not assume there would be golden two too. One book can live by itself, but a second book would need a partner two life. A duo, a pair, contains a two. First I took apart the book with the 2. The 1 lived peaceful by itself on the shelf. But when I turned the tables and took away the 1 instead of the 2. The sight of just a book with a big golden ‘’2’’ written on, was an odd sight. No, not odd, it was peculiar. I kept staring at it and walking back and forth in the space, to figure out why it was such a

peculiar sight to see this book without its partner in crime. And suddenly it came to me. I could never imagine someone courageously putting a random number on the spine in such a fat font and such a big size. It almost covered one third of this spine. They did not ask for subtlety, it needed to be ‘’grande’’. That was an act of boldness, just putting it out there.

 

Monomaniac


Thursday, November 29, 2018

Hesitating to grab a book, I kept strolling through the library, my eyes scanning the shelves. In the back of my mind I knew that no matter what book I choose, it would be the most unappealing book in the library. That is my curse. The ability of picking out the worst looking book with the most tedious content between thousands of books, is something I was cursed with since I could read.  Eventually my eyes laid on the spine of a book that had a black plastic binding, protected by another layer of see through plastic. Odd, I thought whilst hoping this spine would not be as disappointing as always. I grabbed the book and I immediately grasped for air. Having a eye for good taste, my eyes were burning when they saw the dirty undefinable brown-greyish colour of the book. The layout of the cover had was as if someone wanted to have a minimalistic design but used a free preset example from a website. The title, in ariel -the designer should apologise himself-, had kilometres of blank space in between the words which suggests a failed attempt of making it look graphically interesting.
‘’Designing              and Building

a
Studio                  Glass Furnace’’
In the right corner an asymmetrical shape with seven corners. The librarian thought it was probably a shape with a function, because they put the sticker with the barcode inside of the shape. The back of the book is blank. It is for the best.

 

As soon as I browsed through the book, I immediately recognised the origin by its typeface. It was a thesis of a student at the Rietveld. One thing Rietveld students love, is courier new. It is alternative, it is cool, it is new wave. I felt bad for this student, that not only the outside of the book was boring but as so the inside and the outside… I thought.
Serious looking graphs and tables with numbers filled every second page, until they turned into dull series of real sepia photos, glued onto the pages, in which the was per step documented how to build a furnace. This part suited the whole book, but also gave it a sort of charm.
  Whilst I was about to close the book and finish my writing, I found two more analog photos hidden in the back of the book. One of them was the missing photo seventeen in the book. But the second one was an image of people walking down the canals in Amsterdam. From across the street a lady in red was looking right into the camera. She was my saviour of this book.
 


Log in
subscribe