NoRelevance.com

Ernst Haeckel and the Unity of Culture via the Public Domain Review

Art — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 19:58:03 +0000

Renegade Darwinist/zoologist and truly “mesmerizing” illustrator Ernst Haeckel may have caused quite a stir when he posited organic matter as originating from inorganic matter through spontaneous generation. However, he’s most surely better known for his incessant visual chronicling of our planet’s oddest lifeforms and their myriad variations of form and color. In his article on the Public Domain Review, Dr Mario A. Di Gregorio, professor of the History of Science at the University of L’Aquila and author of From Here to Eternity: Ernst Haeckel and Scientific Faith, offers insight into the origins of Haeckel’s theories and the mind-bending art that came from his obsessive depictions of the Kunstformen der Natur, or “the Art Forms of Nature,” which Haeckel published in 1904. You’ll stumble upon copies of this book in just about every format (Dover paperback with CD-ROM, for example, since its contents are in the public domain) in almost any new or used bookstore and should be a staple of your visual junk collection if there ever was one.

Also, keep your eye out for a documentary fill made in 2004 called Proteus, about the life and work of this strange and gifted man.

Letterheady – Vintage & Not-So-Vintage Letterhead Designs

Art — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 17:49:15 +0000

Click on over to Letterheady, a one-page scroller featuring letterhead designs for such notable figures as Nikola Tesla and Adolph Hitler to obscure companies like the Liverpool-based Robot Salesmen Ltd. They appear to be legit, with sources linking to other sites from which the examples were culled. Some seem to have been Photoshopped to give them an empty, unused state. Who cares. They’re fun to browse and fit right in here with my love of Visual Junk.

Bobo the Clown & Boy via These Americans

Art — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 20:59:54 +0000

The tagline for the These Americans website is “American Art, History and Culture Through Pictures” and, while this image of “Bobo the Clown and Boy (1951)” portrays the selflessness and compassion that embodies the American spirit, the website does tend to highlight some of the more colorful aspects of the Home of the Brave. Take, for example, their gruesome collection entitled “American Lynching” that contains photos featuring crowds of smiling white folks (including children) squeezing into frame around bare-chested black men tied, hung by their necks and often burned.

Just glance at the sub-menu navigation buttons and you’ll get an idea of just what types of art, history and culture pictures are in store: FSA, slavery, mug shots, lynching, Los Angeles, child labor, civil rights, studio, death, civil war, injury, racism, native american, prison, guns, war, great depression, exteriors. That’s quite a list of keywords for one website and yet it doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of tagged photos found here. In addition to what appear to be fortuitous thrift store/garage sale acquisitions (Polaroids & snapshots), you’ll find works by such accomplished photo-documentarians as Weegee, Dorthea Lange, Walker Evans, Bernice Abbott and Ben Shan, just to name a few.

Bap-Tizum

Art — Wed, 25 May 2011 14:41:02 +0000

The home page on Bap-Tizum.com contains two lines of text. The first of which reads: “Bap-Tizum.com is an archive of Black-American Christian spiritual music & sermons from the 1930s to the 1980s.” ‘Nuff said. Nothing about the drab, gray background or the poor quality Polaroid image that embellishes this page would clue you in to the fact that the site is a goldmine of forgotten audio recordings, ripped from the original vinyl records and organized by record speed: 33 (1/3), 45 and 78 RPM. Being a fan of old gospel music I’ve been loyally listening to Kevin Nutt’s Sinner’s Crossroads show on WFMU for years and I discovered this site from its contributions to the Free Music Archive.

But what pulled me into this site was its rather humbling collection of album cover and record label designs, which make up the entire user interface for listening to the audio tracks. Clicking on 45, for example, in the top navigation bar reveals an ever-expanding page displaying small-ish images of 45 label scans, each a link to their respective audio recording. I wish there were larger images available for us lovers of visual junk, but that’s just me wanting more of an already good thing. Spread the good word, Bap-Tizum.com is an inspired feast for the eyes and ears.

vinylclockwork – Handcrafted vinyl record clocks

Art — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:49:26 +0000

I just received my handmade vinyl record clock from vinylclockwork and love it! Mine was carved out of a Roger Williams LP on the classic and colorful Kapp Records label. I opted for the free-form version that I thought added to the uniqueness of the piece, though there is a ringed version with abbreviated (3, 6, 9, 12) numbering and a cool dot pattern fill. As a vinyl record collector I can assure you that no listenable albums were harmed in the making of these clocks. I applaud these folks and others who find a creative way to deal with the mountains of corny, cheesy, syrupy goo that our parents and grand parents listened to and that now collect dust by the crate-load.

Abandoned Yugoslavia Monuments

Art — Tue, 03 May 2011 18:36:19 +0000

I stumbled upon this blog post containing some remarkable photographs of cold war era monuments that seem right out of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie. My favorite is this one located on a hilltop in Podgarić, Croatia and also immortalized on this Yugoslavian postage stamp. From what I can dig up it appears to be a WWII memorial made of concrete and aluminum and was possibly erected in 1967. I remember seeing some similarly powerful Soviet-era monuments while travelling in Vietnam, but none as striking as these. What’s probably most eerie about them to me are the photographs themselves. The monuments certainly don’t seem contemporary, but instead rather futuristic and they appear more like relics of a lost civilization situated in uninhabited landscapes much like Inca and Mayan monuments must have looked to early bushwhackers. Days of Future Passed!

MoMA Collects Lustig (Alvin, that is) via The Daily Heller

Art — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 16:56:14 +0000

Steven Heller posted this piece on Elaine Lustig Cohen’s recent talk at MoMA’s Library and Museum Archives on the museum’s collection of works by her late husband, legendary graphic designer Alvin Lustig (previously lusted over on this website). Cohen is, of course, a superb graphic designer in her own right and probably too often overshadowed by Mr. Lustig’s high-profile body of work. My favorite piece of hers I discovered years after acquiring it. Huh? Picked up for a song in an NYC used book store, Jose Ortega y Gasset’s On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme sat on my bookshelf of design fetishes for years before I’d ever bothered to look up who’d designed the cover—even though her signature was plainly visible.

Western Swing on 78

Art — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 20:14:56 +0000

Got a yearnin’ or a hankerin’ to hear some scratchy 78rpm goodness? Then listen no further than Wester Swing on 78, a blog chock-full of freshly-ripped vinyl and acetate just waiting to turn your computer into a dusty ol’ Texas dance hall. Consisting of mostly ZIP archives of MP3 song collections, the blog entries contain historical information, publicity photos and playable sample songs of such iconic western swing artists like Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys as well as flour-pushers like the Hillbilly Boys and the Light Crust Doughboys. Click, download and two-step the afternoon away.

Select Font. Copy and Paste “RADIOHEAD.”

Art — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 19:30:08 +0000

I like Radiohead. I’ve always liked them. From the earnest songwriting of their youth to the rejection and gradual acceptance of their own fame to their continued exploration of what “music” is. I also appreciate the attention they have always paid to the visual component of their works having hired numerous designers, animators, illustrators, filmmakers and artists to create their albums’ packaging, videos, posters, websites, t-shirts and more. And that is precisely why I was a bit perplexed to see the masthead on the website for their new album, The King Of Limbs.

As an all-around lover of type my first reaction to seeing “distressed” typography is to check if the designer simply tapped-out the letters in a distressed font or if they set the type in a non-distressed font and then, after getting the kerning and such just right, added said distressing. Why this matters is hopefully obvious at first glance of the word RADIOHEAD. It’s bad enough when the same distressed character is repeated in close proximity, but when you have a pair of these characters, such as the “AD” in RADIOHEAD you might as well circle them with a red pen. This pitfall doesn’t just affect distressed typefaces. Any stylized type that is supposed to have a natural, unrefined look—scripts and handwriting fonts, for example—often suffer the same fate when just tapped-out.

I don’t know who the designer of this piece is nor do I mean them any disrespect. I’ve heard the spark of genius last just a nanosecond, but, honestly, here’s all of about ten minutes of work. And don’t get me started on the copy-and-pasted-and-horizontally-flipped tree artwork on either side. Many OpenType font families these days come with contextual ligatures and similar “awarenesses” that can automatically substitute alternates of the same character for creating variation and, if there ever was a case for using one, it’s right here. Even if the font doesn’t contain such features, how much work would it have been to set the nine letters in R-A-D-I-O-H-E-A-D and then apply a layer mask to distribute the distressing randomly across the whole word?

Any other band and I wouldn’t have noticed. But Radiohead have raised the bar for themselves with each successive release that to see such lackadaisical artwork is a bit of a knock against them as a band. For me at least. I know this might sound a bit harsh, like a pass/fail test. No, I’m not that disappointed with them. I still really like them and their music. Nevertheless, it feels like something important—the band’s visual identity—that appears more like a mock-up than a finished piece…and was missed by everyone.

200 Years on the Grid – via AIGA.org

Art — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 20:32:42 +0000

Love it or hate it, the “grid” has been a fact of life in Manhattan for 200 years. I spent 21 years of my life alternately bragging then complaining about this marvel of city planning that was once probably quite useful to those traversing the long, narrow island. Of course with any grid comes “grid-lock” and anyone who’s ever tried to cross Manhattan on four wheels has certainly experienced the fatal flaw in this boro’s design: human beings. Phil Patton’s article here provides a good historical overview along with the cultural impact the grid has had over the centuries. Interested in viewing more old drawings and maps? Check out Vincent Virga’s Historic Maps and Views of New York, an over-sized collection of historical drawings, engravings and renderings of NYC.