Our apologies for a couple of recent posts which have appeared in unfinished form and with spam links attached to them. Apparently spambots were taking advantage of our older, insecure version of Wordpress to hack our system, make draft posts live, and add invisible spam links to them. We’ve now upgraded Wordpress and hopefully can avoid further problems, though there may still be some kinks to work out in the coming days. Thanks to our readers who alerted us to these problems when they happened!
From August through October 2005, we worked on The Plain of Heaven, an art exhibition which took place in a derelict meatpacking building at 820 Washington Street at the end of the High Line in New York. At the time, the Dia Art Foundation had plans to buy the land from the city, demolish the building, and build a new museum there. Therefore, a large part of our design strategy focused on using the building as a surface for temporary stenciled graphics.
The exhibition catalog has french-folded pages which conceal a series of photographs that we took; these photographs serve as a tour through the abandoned building. However, since the catalog pages are unperforated, the reader has to destroy the book’s binding to view the photos properly. Therefore, the reader must make a decision to either destroy the book for the photos or else leave them hidden until the book falls apart on its own.
The building itself is still standing today: within months of the exhibition, the Dia’s plans for the site faltered. In November 2006, the Whitney Museum of American Art announced that it would take over the site to build a satellite location. However, as of yet, the building still exists, although it is closed to the public.
We’ve posted a PDF of the interior, concealed photographs from the catalog here. They show the strange remnants in 820 Washington Street and suggest the things that are left unseen throughout the city.
Adam Gopnik has a great article in this week’s New Yorker about magic, “Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life.” One of my favorite passages concerns master Jamy Ian Swiss’s critique of a young magician’s “torn and restored” bill trick — “tearing up a dollar bill and then making it whole again.”
“Why? Why would you tear it up slowly? Nobody tears a dollar bill up in the first place, but, if you’re going to tear up a dollar bill at all, you’d tear it up quickly, in a sudden fit, zip-zip-zip.” He demonstrated. “The only reason you would tear a dollar bill up slowly is if you were doing something else to it at the same time — if you were doing a goddamn magic trick. So right away we’re off in the magic land of ‘I have in my hand an ordinary deck of cards.’ But, O.K., let’s live with that. Why are you tearing it up? Are you doing it angrily? Gaily? Why are you asking me to watch you tear up a dollar bill? The method is not the trick. The method is never the trick. Once you’ve mastered the method, you’ve hardly begun the trick.”
Thanks to designer Ariel Lapidus for sending us this amazing story from LIFE magazine in 1964. She said it reminded her of our work (while also highlighting our need to find more opportunities for crop typography).
The exhibition we designed last Fall at the Center for Architecture New York, Berlin-New York Dialogues: Building in Context, is now traveling to the Deutsches Architektur Zentrum in Berlin. The show opens in a week, on 7 March 2008. For more information, check out the DAZ’s website. Here are some 3D sketches of how the exhibition will be reconfigured in Berlin. Please come join us if you’ll be in town next week!
“Vertigo: Collecting Sebald” is one of the few blogs I manage to read regularly these days. It is dedicated to late W.G. Sebald’s books in a wide-ranging manner. Three recent posts, which reprint an interview with Sebald by Jens Mühling from 2000 on the topic of creative writing, are a fascinating way to begin:
The Permanent Exile of W.G. Sebald, Part 1
The Permanent Exile of W.G. Sebald, Part 2
The Permanent Exile of W.G. Sebald, Part 3
We recently designed an exhibition at Stroom Den Haag, in the Netherlands, called “After Neurath: The Global Polis.” More information on the show can be found on the gallery’s website. For the exhibition handout, we wrote the following note on the exhibition design together with the show’s curator, Nader Vossoughian:
“The design of this exhibition was conceived expressly as a response to the work and ideas of Otto Neurath. We tried to address his belief that the museum of the future ‘might be copied everywhere without loss of value’ — that it could be mass produced for the benefit of society as a whole. Our position is that he was only partly correct.
On the one hand, we agree with Neurath’s emphasis on the power of comÂmunication and distribution to engage the public. As such, we have created a series of posters and a handout containing key exhibition texts and images that people can take home with them. Furthermore, the entire contents of the show will be projected nightly onto the gallery’s storefront window in order to make the exhibition accessible to people who work during the day.
On the other hand, we take issue with Neurath’s unqualified confidence in mass media and mass reproÂduction. In the show, there is an intentional juxtaposition of reproductions and originals. We insist on including original works, as they possess a presence and texture that transcends their pure communicative content.
Finally, this exhibition was conceived as a site-specific work for Stroom Den Haag. This focus on context is an explicit challenge to Neurath’s ideas about about exhibitions; we believe that this tension will help inspire dialogue. We hope you enjoy the exhibition and welcome your comments.
— Nader Vossoughian & Project Projects, theglobalpolis[at]gmail.com”
Here are some photographs from the installation process and finished exhibition:
Two magazines from last week
Detail of a great wood-carved infographic at the beach in Scheveningen, Holland
Last November, we designed an exhibition at the Center for Architecture in New York called Berlin-New York Dialogues: Building in Context. The exhibition investigates three neighborhoods in each city though complex sets of text, photographs, and data. Divided into several sections over multiple floors of the Center for Architecture, the exhibition communicates both experiential and analytical information about each neighborhood. In addition to our design work, we also curated a Film Room with looped films by four New York artists who made films that engaged with the Berlin cityscape and a Film Series with feature screenings throughout January 2008.
Below are some images of the exhibition. All photographs below, unless otherwise noted, are courtesy Noah Sheldon, who also took the large-scale commissioned photographs in the exhibition.
View of aerial photographs from outside
Ground floor staircase entrance with vinyl title (Photograph: Project Projects)
Staircase with running comparative statistics
Mezzanine level introduction wall and photo-murals of neighborhoods
Basement level with neighborhood context walls and free-standing featured projects (Top photo: Project Projects)
Film Room with projections on four walls