Art and Lies

Another catch-up blargh post: a book review, written for The Brooklyn Rail back in August. Today is a day of catch-up, sifting through the drifts of crumpled paper on my desk, re-stocking the refrigerator, enrolling in retirement plans, setting up savings accounts, paying bills, giving the web sites I still work on (including this one!) long-overdue attention.

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Steven Heller's Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State (Phaidon, 2008)
Few symbols grab and hold our attention like the swastika. The symbol has deep roots—it has been used by virtually every major civilization and dates back to at least 3000 BC. Even though the swastika is one of mankind’s oldest symbols, its grip on our imagination today is entirely due to its forceful association with the Nazi party.

In The Swastika: A Symbol Beyond Redemption?, Steven Heller wrote, “I find the swastika to be representative of how line, shape, mass, and color can be influential on popular perception when manipulated to serve an idea and promoted vociferously as a brand.” Heller writes the “Visuals” column for the New York Times Book Review where he also served as art director for almost three decades. He writes authoritatively and often on design in Print magazine and i.d. and has, in the last decade, increasingly turned his attention to the role of design in politics. In his latest book, Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State, Heller reconsiders the branding of the Nazi party, as well as the iconography and propaganda of the last century’s other major totalitarian governments: the Italian Fascists, the Russian Soviets, and the Chinese Communists.

The rest: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/07/express/art-and-lies.

Give 'Em Helvetica

For want of a fresh thought this evening, a link to a piece in Pop Matters that went up in August. A little meditation on typeface, ugliness, and individuality. By me.

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What do American Airlines, American Apparel, The Office, Target, and the Environmental Protection Agency have in common? The unassuming typeface Helvetica, which turned 50 last year. Designed by Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann in Switzerland (Helvetica means Swiss in Latin), the font became the predominant typeface for the rest of the 20th century, as Gary Hustwit’s 2007 documentary Helvetica thoroughly demonstrated.

The Museum of Modern Art also celebrated the font’s anniversary with a show, “50 Years of Helvetica”. Exhibiting the font alongside furniture and forks in the museum made the point that the typeface is a well-designed tool, like the objects nearby: a cluster of pill-shaped lamps, a lime-green helicopter. Yet because a typeface is a vehicle for language and, by extension, for thought, Helvetica begged for more scrutiny than the adjacent upholstered puzzle-chair, which merely offered a surface upon which to recline. As part of the exhibit, a dozen posters showcasing the font were hung, all from 1957 to 1967, all slowly turning an archival yellow, giving them a distant, reliquary feel. But even with the patina, it was hard not to feel the pull of the typeface. The steep slopes, generous curves, and balance of negative-to-positive space transmitted a steady calm, like so much blonde wood and brushed steel....

Read the rest here

Happenings in Hardwick

Peter Johnson of Pete's Greens.
Photo by Paul O. Boisvert for The New York Times.

The October 8, 2008 issue of the New York Times has an article about the agricultural renaissance happening in Hardwick, Vermont.

"Facing a Main Street dotted with vacant stores, residents of this hardscrabble community of 3,000 are reaching into its past to secure its future, betting on farming to make Hardwick the town that was saved by food.

With the fervor of Internet pioneers, young artisans and agricultural entrepreneurs are expanding aggressively, reaching out to investors and working together to create a collective strength never before seen in this seedbed of Yankee individualism."
(Read the entire Times article here.)

Many curiosity-piquing enterprises are mentioned: Jasper Hill Farm and the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese at the University of Vermont; Claire's restaurant, a community-supported local food restaurant (the concept owes something to the Farmer's Diner in Quechee VT); and the Center for an Agricultural Economy and the the Vermont Food Venture Center.

I was happy to see a few mentions of Pete's Greens. In '03, I talked to Peter Johnson for a small piece in Seven Days. (This was back before 'locavore' was in anyone's vocabulary, and the piece clunkily frames the movement in terms of 'organic, small-scale farming.')

I'm heading up to Vermont - to Hardwick, actually - this weekend, and will try to check out Claire's and Jasper Hill Farm if at all possible.

It should be a good weekend for rambling around outdoors - I hear that the trees are on fire.