Spotted writer/critic Alice Rawsthorn in the audience at the Hella Jongerius talk at Frieze last Sunday.
Moderator Eugenia Bell – design editor at Frieze magazine – wasn’t exactly an exciting speaker. Bell’s problem seems to me that she rattles on as if she would be writing, including footnotes!
Rawsthorn came up with some questions after the talk that got Hella excited. She just manages to get more out of people and in all fairness, the fact that the two know each other probably helped.
Good or bad moderator, Hella was very inspiring herself. She just packed up her Rotterdam studio and moved to Berlin – minus the assistants – to be ‘a beginner’ again. Let’s keep an eye on the outcome!
But I digress … what I actually wanted to say is that if you fancy a bit of Alice Rawsthorn, here is a list of upcoming talks in London that she will be involved in.
27/10/2009 AA Future of Design – Conversation with the curator and critic, Shumon Basar, co-director of the Architectural Association’s Cultural Programme. Info here.
26/11/2009 Conversation with Konstantin Grcic in V&A. The upcoming Design Real exhibition in the Serpentine Gallery curated by Grcic can be found here.
08/12/2009 Talking Design – Conversation with Graphic Thought Facility in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Check for info on this site – not listed yet.
I will add these events to the calendar too.
Check her out, she is a great ambassador for design and has the coolest dress sense on top of it!
In this Autumn’s Tate Etc. magazine, Michael Diers wrote an interesting article ‘Can you believe it?’ on the practice of trompe l’oeil. One of the illustrations used in his essay is the artwork ‘Clearings’ by Thomas Demand, which was on display at the Venice Biennale in 2003.
On the 2nd of November, I am going to a talk in which Demand takes part - Architecture+Art: Crossover and Collaboration, organised by the Architecture Foundation - and was intrigued to find out more about his work.
See a photo of ‘Clearage’ below, what looks like a photo of foliage superimposed onto real, live foliage is in fact much more complex.
As Diers puts it in his article:
‘In Venice it was hard for the viewer to tell wether this was a decorative windbreak, an anonymous billboard or a work of art. In the end it was only the small label that indicated that it was a new work by Thomas Demand. Now the viewer felt obliged to go back and take a closer look, and suddenly all was revealed. The thousands upon thousands of leaves in the picture had in fact been made from paper, carefully positioned as foliage and only then photographed.’
Imagine, 30 people were working on this piece for three months and used 280,000 pieces of paper, flower wire and rolls of carpet to achieve the natural looking effect.
One assumes initially that photography is used for the faithfull depiction of reality and falls into the trap of visual illusion.
Master of deception!
Let’s see if he turns up ‘live’ at the lecture or if he sends his papier mache alter ego!
Watch this entertaining TED talk called ‘3 warp speed architecture’ by Bjarke Ingels of BIG on the future travels of Little Mermaid and much more.
Love or loathe the ‘big’ architecture, his ideas seem to make a lot of sense.
