Design

Introverse Arrangements is centred on the work of German artist Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt who, despite only recently garnering attention for her work, is most known for a period of geometric and poetic typewriter drawings produced between the 1970s and 1990 while employed as an administrator for the German Democratic Republic.

It is the first title from Unbidden Tongues, a series edited by Isabelle Sully that focuses on previously produced yet relatively uncirculated work by cultural practitioners busy with questions surrounding civility and civic life—particularly so in relation to language.

Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking and Censorship is a two-part collection of poems by typesetter, activist and poet Karen Brodine. First published posthumously in 1990 as a reflection on her life
 as a typesetter, union organiser and lesbian, this series of ‘work poems’ chronicles labour struggles, both personal and collective, and draws on her experience growing up surrounded by socialist feminists immediately following the wrath of McCarthyism.

It is the second title from Unbidden Tongues, a series edited by Isabelle Sully that focuses on previously produced yet relatively uncirculated work by cultural practitioners busy with questions surrounding civility and civic life—particularly so in relation to language.

A verbal articulation of the authors' visionary theory of how the human body, architecture, and creativity define and sustain one another 

This revolutionary work by artist-architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins demonstrates the inter-connectedness of innovative architectural design, the poetic process, and philosophical inquiry. Together, they have created an experimental and widely admired body of work, museum installations, landscape and park commissions, home and office designs, avant-garde films, poetry collections, that challenges traditional notions about the built environment. This book promotes a deliberate use of architecture and design in dealing with the blight of the human condition; it recommends that people seek architectural and aesthetic solutions to the dilemma of mortality.  

In 1997 the Guggenheim Museum presented an Arakawa/Gins retrospective and published a comprehensive volume of their work titled Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die. Architectural Body continues the philosophical definition of that project and demands a fundamental rethinking of the terms "human" and "being." When organisms assume full responsibility for inventing themselves, where they live and how they live will merge. The artists believe that a thorough re-visioning of architecture will redefine life and its limitations and render death passe. The authors explain that "Another way to read reversible destiny... Is as an open challenge to our species to reinvent itself and to desist from foreclosing on any possibility."  

Audacious and liberating, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of 20th-century poetry, postmodern critical theory, conceptual art and architecture, contemporary avant-garde poetics, and to serious readers interested in architecture's influence on imaginative expression. 

For Lineto (https://lineto.com) the Specimen plays out through forms and formats in order to promote the foundry’s typefaces: books, posters, envelopes, pamphlets, letter transfers, print ads, and video clips as well as inflatable structures and bootlegs of logotypes. When Reala published LL Biff in 2000, the specimen employed graffiti culture and its modes of distribution, along with a combination of two references: “Medium is the message”*, “Style is the message”**. For Lineto the citation is a form that allows them to distribute their typographic catalogue while promoting diverse cultural fields: “Ignorance of your own culture is not considered cool!”***

* — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964
** — Tony Silver and Henri Chalfant, Style Wars, 1983
*** — Print ad for Lineto published in Dot Dot Dot #16, 2008 that cites The Residents, Duck Stab Poster, 1978

There are an increasing number of spaces in the field of Graphic Design where work can be promoted. Intermediary platforms between practitioners and the public can come in the form of specific tools (Instagram, for example) or even events that are organized for that purpose (festivals and exhibitions). The conference is one of these platforms. A true ephemeral editorial object, it is highly suited to the explanation and extension of the practices and methodologies of designers. It is, for certain designers, the opportunity to take stock of an approach, an inventory of finished forms, and for others, on the contrary, a pretext for the production of new, sometimes more performative, even experimental forms.

In 2008, English Graphic Designer James Goggin ran a two-day workshop with design students at the Hochschule Darmstadt in Germany. The object which resulted gradually took on the appearance of a photo album, a typeface specimen, and a color chart. On the cover, the phrase “Dear Lulu, Please try and print these line, color, pattern, format, texture and typography tests for us” is clearly addressed to the online print platform for which this book was proposed as a test.

Ten years later, the offer has become more diverse and the success of such online platforms is undeniable—indeed the phenomenon has spread well beyond the field of publishing. While some bemoan unfair competition for printers, others, professionals and amateurs, see in it a freedom to print and distribute relatively well finished objects at low cost.

The possibilities of these systems of production, are multiple but nonetheless limited, and this obviously raises the question of a possible standardization of forms and formats. However, when it comes to Print On Demand, it seems that the issue is not so much the materiality of an object (the choice of format, paper or a particular manufacture) but rather the actual existence of this object itself, outside of usual channels of production and distribution.

Photographs of works of art in an exhibition or studio setting, enlarged to the size of the wall, have become an essential and increasingly systematic element of contemporary museography. The institutional curator accompanied by his or her set designer, and the independent curator, both use them as much to recontextualize works as for their aesthetic qualities as documentary images that have become immersive and reflexive.

The obviously richer relationship that artists have with these unique images reveals in various ways what is currently at stake in the act of exhibiting.

To create a kind of retrospective of his work, in 2016 Johnathan Monk debuted a series of exhibitions entitled Exhibit Model*, which consisted of covering the walls of the exhibition space with archive photographs that documented his work in different contexts over the last 20 years. Marie J. Jean considers these staged exhibition views as a form of augmented reality: “This manner of considering the exhibition, in other words, of exhibiting the work along with the context of its appearance, reminds us that the work of art “is a place”, “establishes a place”, is “a has taken place**”.

However for Johnathan Monk, who often uses the work of other artists, isn’t it simply a way in which to appropriate his own work?”

Designed by Cornel Windlin (with Gregor Huber), the communications of the Zürich Schauspielhaus for the 2009/10 and 2010/11 seasons appeared just as the collaboration between the designers and the theater ended: with the Grand Prix of the Brno Biennial in 2010, where they won first prize in the international competition, with an exhibition in Chaumont the following year at the same time as the Swiss Federal Design Award, a brief appearance in specialist magazines and on specialist sites, and then nothing at all.

Once again, Cornel Windlin retreated into the shadows, leaving behind work which asserted itself through both its amplitude and completeness in the heavy silence which remained, and through the multifaceted mass of the media imagery that it reactivated. A series of seasonal posters, event posters, annual and monthly programs, booklets dedicated to each piece, invitations, flyers, graphic materials from the program for younger audiences… everything is here, set in a precisely tuned bold Unica77, digitized by the Lineto foundry with the original team of designers (along with Windlin), all coming together in that blindness inherent to times of eclipse, where the black disk chosen by Windlin as the identity of the Schauspielhaus stands out. Now, a decade later, the idea is to propose a meticulously organized reception, informed by Cornel Widlin and placed in a cavalier perspective by the analysis of Thierry Chancogne.

Design history as an independent discipline and field of study appears to be in trouble. Design historians complain about its diminishing influence within universities due to the ongoing instrumentalisation of higher education. The Eurocentric canon built upon values and methods adopted from art and architecture history has been contested by decolonial theories. And finally, it appears that the trust in the institution of ‘history’ itself and its meta-narratives has eroded.

A discipline that was once considered to provide reflection on what came before and guidance on what could come to be—under the auspice of a grand narrative of continuous progress—has been replaced by modest narratives, social anthropologies, and claims of the ‘end of history’.

In this article, I rummage through the ruins of design history and try to unpack what it was that we once considered design history and our design history canon, how we wrote about it and to what end. In particular, I focus on this one image: a portrait photograph of a well-known historical figure, the designer and typographer Jan Tschichold. How is it used? And what stories do we tell about it?

This publication offers a critical assessment of the complicity of design in creating, perpetuating, and reinforcing social, political, and environmental problems, both today and in the past. It proposes going against the grain by problematising Western notions of design to foster situated, decolonial, and queer-feminist modes of disciplinary self-critique, and looks at design through the intersections of gender, culture, ethnicity, and class. Applying robust scholarly insight with engaging and accessible modes of conveyance and storytelling, an urgent and expansive array of voices and views emerge from those engaged in struggles with, against, or around the field of design.

The white cubical house, the vernacular architecture in the Aegean Archipelago, knows no author. Its capacity to resist harsh climatic and topographic circumstances has been improved and adjusted through time and seems today close to perfection. The white-washed Cycladic House has become iconic to the image of Greece through the construction of national and tourism narratives. What happens when an architect steps into this process of anonymous transmission of skills? In 1966 music composer, architect, and engineer Iannis Xenakis articulated a response to this tradition and designed, from his base in Paris, a holiday house on the island of Amorgos while choosing to remain absent throughout the construction process.

CONTENTS

Constructing through Absence
by Hulya Ertas

Meteorites
by Mâkhi Xenakis

Summer Home for François-Bernard Mâche by Iannis Xenakis, 1966–74
by Sharon Kanach

Villa Mâche: a harsh hijack against the space of the sun
by David Bergé

Traveling to the Cyclades: Modernist Projections
by Dimitra Kondylatou

Iannis Xenakis, Selected Projects from Critical Index
by Sven Sterken

‘Tokyo Papers’ comprises a collection of 41 monoprints created by Dutch graphic designer and typographer Karel Martens between 2019 and 2020. In 2018, Martens received a package from artist-curator Pierre Leguillon that contained filled-in Japanese forms which he had found at a street market in Tokyo. Martens was intrigued by the collection of thin paper with a rectangular black-blue layer of carbon on the back. In 2019 he started to print on these back sides, but because the overprinting on the carbon layer caused unwanted damage, he switched to printing them on the front sides as well. “The closing image is related to Tokyo in a different way,” he explains.

Phylactère is born from a deep desire to transcribe performance, with authentic, subjective and spontaneous point of views; giving voice to amateurs, artists, designers and thinkers alike. Phylactère is published once a year. Each issue takes an onomatopoeia as its theme. Phylactère publishes transitional writings and in turn welcomes the discrepancies between a script, the performed action, to its translation; with an extreme and adventurous attention given to contexts, gestures, emotions and spaces put at stake during this transcription.

Phylactère is digging into post-performance, allowing those who weren’t present to get a reading of it and experience it from another perspective. This first issue has the theme of the French onomatopoeia Patati Patata: an inexhaustible and endless chatter, long or short discourse, gossip, word of mouth, whispers… Patati Patata or «Yada Yada Yada» in English, is a too much of speech, an endless story, an et cetera expressed out loud. Phylactère is a journal composed of multiple voices, initiated by Roxanne Maillet and Auriane Preud’homme, produced by RondPoint Projects and published by Immixtion Books.

Contributors : Alexandru Balgiu, Anna Tuccio, Anne Marchis Mouren, ArianE Sirota, Barbara Quintin & Liv Schulman, Barthélémy Cardonne, Camille Soulat, Dorota Gaweda & Egle Kulbokaite, etaïnn zwer, Ilke Gers, Josèfa Ntjam, Laure Vigna, Louise Siffert, Lou-Maria Le Brusq, Maria Barnas, Marouchka Payen, Martha Salimbeni, officeabc, Philippe Goguely, Sarah Korzec, Simili Gum, Sven Dehens et Uta Eisenreich.

Texts in English and French
Graphic Design : Auriane Preud'homme et Roxanne Maillet 

“May we want to reckon the time of the position ‘student’ not from the progressive aspect of amateur towards pro. Besides the fact that every step of life is an ongoing learning, there’s a clear physical(virtual) circumstance of school and an educational boundary for student, which makes student’s moment independent from any other vocations. Extra time of working on one subject with mistakenly expended deadlines, being experimental and anti-aesthetic by testing its performance, the growth on having own tone of (visual) voice while mumbling and simultaneously thinking the mumbling can be also a kind of voice. There are untamed beauties in this position.”

The inaugural issue of Rush Print focuses on the topic ‘BAD TYPE.’ A loose synonym of bad here is amatuer or ugly which is what contributors deliver as a student. The content ranges from interviews, workshops and anecdotes with 2020 participants of Grafisch Arnhem. The entire publication is typeset in student-made typefaces so the book also functions as a type specimen.

Rush Print is new magazine annually releasing out from the contributors of Grafisch Arnhem. Throughout spreads, it contains graphic design related subjects such as Types, Time, Talks, etc.

Dedicated to the incredible – and incredibly beautiful – publication Triple Jeopardy (1971–75, by the Third World Women’s Alliance), as well as the ideas in Sophie Lewis’s book Full Surrogacy Now! – Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019). Ms Heresies 3 is reprinting the book’s final chapter, the essay *Amniotechnics.*

Each spread weaves edited material from Triple Jeopardy with Sophie Lewis’s essay. These intuitive and meticulous compositions are the outcome of looking at Triple Jeopardy through the lens of collaborative graphic design. Reading, typesetting, collaging, painting, and ornamenting became a way of designing together while attempting an homage, a re-reading, and a cross-publication friendship.

The second issue of MsHeresies includes collages, paintings, and hommages to the work of sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, whose collaboration defied preconceived ideas of both text/image hierarchies, as well as rivalry at the cost of sisterhood. This visual essay is published alongside William Morris’s lecture Useful Work versus Useless Toil from 1884 which introduces the idea of the ornamental and its relationship to work and rest.

The ornamental can only come about under certain conditions: enough rest, agency, and variation of work. The ornamental is never an outcome or product of these conditions; but something intrinsically intertwined therein.

The flag bearing twelve yellow stars on a blue background has become Europe’s most recognisable symbol. Since its introduction by the Council of Europe in 1955, it has stood for the unification of Europe’s nation states. It was precisely this yellow circle of stars that prevailed over more than 150 flag ideas sent to the Council of Europe by a host of diverse private individuals. These colourful designs are being now published in Rejected for the first time. They document the continent’s zeitgeist at a decisive period in the development of European unity. Alongside the flag proposals, the trilingual book (English, German, French) features a written contribution by the German-French poet and writer Marie Rotkopf, who tackles the EU’s neoliberal political cynicism and Germany’s expansion of power with biting irony.

Défense d’Afficher est un recueil de graffitis politiques relevés en France tout au long de l’année l’année 2019, une période riche en contestations sociales. Une sélection restreinte, à fortiori non exhaustive, mais recouvrant un large panorama des luttes contemporaines qui nous concernent : contre le capitalisme, contre le racisme, contre le pillage du tiers-monde et pour l'accueil des réfugiés, contre le sexisme et les violences faites aux femmes, contre la destruction de la planète, contre cette société néo-libérale, contre la police et ses violences, contre les inégalités sociales, pour l’auto-défense et l’auto-organisation.

Sans oublier d’y faire apparaitre des sujets plus légers ou drôles. Le corps de l’ouvrage qui recueille les graffitis est imprimé sur six affiches jaunes fluo 50 × 70 cm pliées encartées, soutenu par une couverture muette au motif abstrait de peinture à la bombe. L’ensemble est recouvert d’une jaquette imprimée sur des affiches dos bleu accueillant le titre Défense d’Afficher, lui aussi relevé dans l’espace public. Ce fanzine à été produit suite à l’invitation « Impressions libres » d’Étapes et Exaprint.

Ce fanzine étant vendu à prix libre, il n’est pas possible de l’acheter en ligne. N’hésitez pas à nous contacter pour les modalitées de vente.

The first issue of the Cahiers du centre national du graphisme, around the relationship between graphic design and feminism.

Speaking about Chaumont and its festival, Vanna Pinter once wrote rather modestly, “The graphic design faith has remained in dependable legitimate hands, the hands that ensure the transfer of power.” To act outside of those transfers of power, from a co-opting of use, is to run the risk of a possible delegitimization. Acting on the fringe, adopting another vantage point, is therefore not without its risks—in terms of territorial thinking—but must be an absolute in a global context.

At the second iteration of the International Graphic Design Biennial in 2019, we tackled a number of themes, from invisiblization with Silvia Baum, Claudia Scheer and Lea Sievertsen [Not a Muse], and the postcolonial question with Jonathan Castro, to transformations of capital and the repercussion on the economy of a discipline with Tereza Ruller [The Rodina], and the notion of commitment with Teresa Sdralevich. In that context we found many more allies than fans of a “Bingo du Male Tears.”

Opening this first issue of our periodical and titling it “A Feminist Issue” around the figure of Anja Kaiser is about approaching graphic design from a feminist, collaborative and co-constructionist perspective. It is a perspective that a number of others have joined here, including Anna Jehle, Juliane Schickedanz, Fabrice Bourlez, and Loraine Furter. The title of this issue implies another, such as “An other Feminist Issue” coming after “Another Feminist Issue,” for there are many voices and they require us to lend them an ear while being attentive and precise. Le Signe Design [LSD], designed by officeabc, is the periodical of a platform for production, distribution, creative support, dialogue, and mediation between the artistic field of graphic design and the public, what the National Center for Graphic Design is all about. Le Signe Design is not so much a communications forum as a new way to enter a field of study. 

Texts by Anja Kaiser, Loraine Furter, Fabrice Bourlez, Anna Jehle, Juliane Schickedanz.

Decoding Dictatorial Statues, a project by Korean graphic design researcher Ted Hyunhak Yoon, is a collection of images and texts revolving around the different ways we can look at statues in public space. How can we decode statues and their visual languages, their object hood and materiality, their role as media icons and their voice in political debates?

Anticipating to current debates the book responds to urgent concerns about the representation of our heritage by not only asking us to examine what history to put on a pedestal, but to also consider the visual language of the statue itself. Decoding Dictatorial Statues therefore offers opportunity to level with the actual affairs the statues promote. In parallel to this deconstruction of the politics of a statue’s gestures the project discusses symbolic notion of culture and design by offering opportunity to another, and more cross-cultural understanding.

Ted Hyunhak Yoon(b.1987) is a graphic designer∙researcher based in Seoul(KR)∙Maastricht(NL). He graduated from MA Visual Communication, Royal College of Art in London, UK. From April 2017 onwards, he is a participant of a residency programme in Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Netherlands. 

Diagrams of Power: Visualizing, Mapping, and Performing Resistance, brings together the work of designers, artists, cartographers, geographers, researchers and activists who create diagrams to tell inconvenient stories that upset and resist the status quo.

Edited by Patricio Dávila. Words and works by Joshua Akers, Burak Arikan, Josh Begley, Joseph Beuys, Alexis Bhagat, Vincent Brown, Bureau d’Études, Teddy Cruz, Department of Unusual Certainties, Peter Hall, Alex Hill, W.E.B. DuBois, Patricio Dávila, Catherine D’Ignazio, Forensic Architecture, Fonna Forman, Terra Graziani, Iconoclasistas, Lucas LaRochelle, Eliana MacDonald, Julie Mehretu, Lize Mogel, Ogimaa Mikana, Margaret Pearce, Laura Poitras, Philippe Rekacewicz, Sheila Sampath, and Visualizing Impact. 

An essay on the forms or purposes of writing, books and libraries. Or as Quinn Latimer wrote: 'There is a relatively well-known workshop at Werkplaats Typografie, the school for design in Arnhem, Netherlands, called 'Best Books'. This past year the school asked the artist Sophie Nys to lead this course. In due time, Nys wrote König and asked if she might bring her students from the workshop to Cologne to discuss his work with books in the space of his own bookstore. She added that since he likely didn’t have enough chairs for all of her students, they would bring their own. König agreed. Then she asked her students to each pick their favorite book. They did so. Then she asked these students to design a chair inspired by that volume. An inspired idea. Strange—and useful. Thus 16 pieces of furniture suggested and elliptically inspired by specific books were built, a kind of living library of booklike creations, as another Walter might put it. The students went to see Herr König, stools in hand, their library entering his. I heard from Sophie in our email correspondence and singular Skype conversation that it was a wonderful visit. I even saw some pictures from that day. After the students returned to Arnhem, and for the final part of the project, they decided to make a publication. This is where I—and the text you are reading now—enter the picture, as they say.'

Real-Time Realist is a serial publication of J-LTF PRESS. This issue of Real-Time Realist explores Ecstasy, Joy, Serenity, and Love, The Yellow Wheel, with contributions from invited artists distilling the aforementioned emotions.

This first issue of Real-Time Realist explores amazement, distraction, surprise and awe (the blue sector of Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions) with contributions from invited artists distilling the aforementioned emotions. [publisher’s note.]

Real-Time Realist gathers contributions by graphic designers, writers, and artists, most of them living in the NL and former students of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie or the Werkplaats Typografie.

Contributors: Jungmyung Lee, Josse Pyl, Carson Lee, Charlie Clemoes, Laura Pappa, Lieven Lahaye, Will Pollard, Mathew Kneebone, Max Gershfield, Rudy Guedj.