Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: Art

  • Simplicity

    Don Norman has a good article over at his blog about simplicity in design, and how we are often ambivalent about it. Most people, including me, ask for good design to make things simple and effective to use, but when push comes to shove, we often buy things that have lots of bells and whistles because it looks more impressive.
     
    I’m not sure that I really fall into that group – I really do prefer to buy something that does the job with the minimum of fuss. For example, I still have an old-fashioned Nokia mobile phone – it can’t play music or take pictures and I have no intention of trading it in for a newer model. My hi-fi is an ancient Quad, with the absolute minimum of controls; no fancy graphic equalisers or other such nonsense. And we still have the simple toaster described by Norman – one knob to adjust the degree of toasting (which hasn’t moved in years), and a lever to lower the bread into the toaster. I mean, really, what more do you need?
     
    Update: Here’s an article about what Philips think about Simplicity. I’m not convinced, particularly when I read guff such as: "using creative chaos to affect lasting change". Pass the sick bucket, Alice. BTW, the comments on the story make interesting reading too. A MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) that has 2 hours as a data point? My advice to Philips would be to improve the quality of the product before marketing Simplicity.

  • Condom Couture

    While I generally loathe fashion and its followers, this has a point to it that I’ll make an exception for.
     
    (hat tip to Pandagon)

  • Peake and Dickens

    Giornale Nuovo has a marvellous entry celebrating the art of Mervyn Peake. It uses the illustrations that Peake did for a projected edition of Dicken’s Bleak House, which, alas, never came to be.

  • War Photographer

    Geoff Manaugh, over at BLDBLOG, has a long and interesting interview with the photographer Simon Norfolk. In a way, Norfolk is a war photopgrapher, but the conflicts that he photographs are etched in landscapes and architecture. Worth reading and looking at (and thinking about) his striking images.

  • The Periodic Table

    I’ve placed this under the category of Art, since it goes a step beyond mere Science.

  • Usability

    Good design is important for making things usable. Donald Norman has long been an advocate for good ergonomics. Now I see that Houtlust has examples of advertisements for something called World Usability Day 2006.
     
    I’d not heard of this event, or the organisation behind it, before now. Mind you, I can’t help but notice, with the raising of an ironical eyebrow, that one of the companies sponsoring World Usability Day is the German software company SAP. As someone who still bears the scars of battling with SAP software, which has quite possibly the most appallingly designed user interfaces in the known universe, I have to wonder why they are sponsoring World Usability Day. I’d like to think it was out of some sort of penance, but I fear that they actually believe that they are doing a good job in usability design.

  • No Utilitarian Value…

    …So says the maker of his self-assembling chair. The video’s rather fascinating, though…

  • The Power of Art

    BBC TV is broadcasting a series called The Power of Art at the moment. It’s been written, and is fronted by, the historian Simon Schama. There have been two episodes so far, the first on Caravaggio and the second on Bernini. I have found both to be riveting. Not because of the tiresome dramatised reconstructions, but because of the power of Schama’s words. I get quite irritated at watching hammy actors acting out something that Schama has just said; it’s a trend in today’s historical doumentaries that should have been drowned at birth. The series is at its best either with Schama speaking direct to camera, or showing the art, with Schama’s voiceover giving his view of the work.
     
    The series has had mixed reviews from the critics, and Schama replies in typical fashion with Bugger the Brickbats… Quite right, too. I’ll be there watching Schama deliver the rest of the series. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing his Rothko, since I’ve never thought much of that artist. I’m intrigued as to whether Schama can persuade me otherwise.

  • Homomonument In Madurodam

    Madurodam is a Dutch institution. It’s a recreation, in miniature, of architecture and landscapes found in The Netherlands. Scale models of famous buildings and landmarks can be found there.
     
    Yesterday, there was the ceremonial unveiling of the latest landmark to be added: a scaled-down reproduction of Amsterdam’s Homomonument. The unveiling was done by the Dutch Rapper, Lange Frans, Job Cohen, Amsterdam’s Mayor, Maurits van der Donk, the "Mayor" of Madurodam, and Frank van Dalen, the chair of the Dutch gay organisation, the COC.
     
    Good to see that that landmark has become a landmark in Madurodam. But what few visitors will probably realise is that a few hundred metres away from outside the entrance to Madurodam is The Hague’s own Homomonument…
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  • The Things We Do For Art

     
    (hat tip to Seed Magazine)

  • Good Art, Bad Art…

    Alright, I know that I’ve had a humour bypass over the subject of fashion. Put it down to bad experiences with fashionistas in the 1970s. But I really do not understand what anorexic females wearing fabric have to do with the meaning of life in any real sense. And now we have fashion that feels. A note: you have to skip forward about nine minutes into the video before you see anything that has evolved beyond paint-drying. From Boing-Boing’s panting review:

    Fashion designer Hussein Chalayan premiered his Spring/Summer 2007 collection this week, and it’s full of Swarovski-crystal-embellished animatronic couture. The clothes wriggle, unfold, collapse, and transform by themselves. The final act in Chalayan’s show, at left: this piece began as a dress, morphed into a hat, then rained down as a cloud of Swarovski crystal dust. Hot.

    Er, not. I am reminded of Boswell’s dog. And aurally quoting the soundtrack from Forbidden Planet was depressingly gauche. At least Boing-Boing didn’t plumb the depths of this review:

    This was fashion addressing the subject of fashion, a dissection of our contemporary habit of recycling "vintage," and an embrace of high technology, all at the same time. It wasn’t just the uncanny sight of the self-undressing clothes (tech-genius courtesy of the team who made the hippogriff in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) that provided the chills. That would have left it at the level of childlike entertainment. What really gave the show a disturbing sense of wake-up-to-reality was the soundtrack. Here, the changing shapes were connected to the sounds of the twentieth century—fragments of music, trench warfare, the ranting of Hitler, aerial bombing, jet engines, the beating of helicopter rotors.

    Oh, for fuck’s sake. Catch yourself on, Mary, as a good friend says to me when I spout crap. It’s a fashion show, it’s not reality as the vast majority of the world knows it. You silly, silly, woman.
     

  • The Slippery Slope

    Having come across the excellent web site Ballardian (see my last entry), I’ve been reading some of the entries on it. I came across this one, which attempts to discuss the Vogue Italia photo shoot by Steven Meisel that "posits supermodels as new-age terrorists". I freely confess that I find the photo shoot highly disturbing. Even more disturbing to me are the comments posted by LiveJournal users who find the photos "awesome" or "sexy". Mind you, Meisel is hardly the first to do something like this. I recall that one of the early issues of Rails – a free magazine given away by the Dutch railway company (it may even have been the first issue) – contained a fashion photo shoot that had crime scenes as its theme. Seeing "murder victims" modelling fashion struck me as being intrinsically wrong. Meisel’s effort arouses the same feelings of disgust in me.

  • Water Illusion

    If you’ve ever fancied walking on water, just like Jesus is reputed to have done, then get thee to Bridge, before it closes at the end of this month. Pruned has the details.

  • The Little Prince’s Planets

    These photographs might have been taken by The Little Prince.

  • The Blaschka Conference

    I’ve mentioned the amazing glass models of the father and son team of Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka before. Apparently, today is the start of the first-ever international conference devoted to their work. I’m glad to see that there is growing interest in the Blaschkas’ work. The models are heart-stoppingly beautiful.
     

  • Subversion

    Art meets politics. Brilliant.

  • Accidents Waiting To Happen

    I agree that these ads by the Red Cross in Canada are striking and thought-provoking. I just can’t help feeling, though, that one day they are going to cause an accident by themselves. Some poor schmuk is going to be at the top of the stairs and rush down, thinking about helping the "person" lying spreadeagled at the bottom. Halfway down, they will trip, fall headlong, and break their necks…

  • Wang Qingsong

    Extraordinary photographs. I’d like to see them full size, spread out on a gallery wall. Watch the video of the shooting of the Archeologist – it’s almost a work of art in its own right…

  • Science Or Art?

    Following in the footsteps of the quite simply wonderful Museum of Glass Flowers comes shuffling along the somehat more prosaic Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art. Models of the brain constructed out of, for example, knitting. Just one question: why?
     
    (hat tip to the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher society for the link) 

  • Bloemencorso

    Bloemencorso is Dutch for Flower Parade or Flower Pageant. A number of places in the Netherlands hold these annual parades. Understandable really, given that flowers are big business in the Netherlands. According to this, the flower auctions in the Netherlands handle 60-70 percent of the total world trade in flowers. 
     
    Anyway, a small town, Lichtenvoorde, is famous for its annual Bloemencorso, and as it lies within a 30 minute cycle ride from where we live, I cycled along last Sunday to take a look at the 77th Bloemencorso. The floats were spectacular, and are covered with hundreds of thousands of dahlia blossoms – all stuck on by hand. Here’s a few examples:
     

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    The King Kong moved and roared – the human Fay Wray screamed…

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    Many of the floats were powered solely by human power

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    What it must have been like in there, pushing the float on a hot day, with the sound system on the float blaring out next to your ears, I dread to think.

    The full set of photos I took are to be seen up on Flickr, here.