enlightenment and modernity, style and transparency, ornament and crime
instructions
design a poster as a means of exploring the contraries of modernity and Kinross's promodern "unconscious", or typographic reason and rococo excess, or – with the Adolf Loos and Hal Foster readings fresh in mind – ornament and crime. The poster shall incorporate at least once sentence from Loos's essay, and must elaborate on a theme relating to that essay and those of Foster, Kinross et al.
the poster works in at least two steps : initial impact (and thought), followed by afterthought.
readings
Robin Kinross. "Enlightenment Origins," Chapter 2 of Modern typography : an essay in critical history. 2nd ed. London : Hyphen Press, 2004
Robin Kinross. "Common Sense," in his essay Fellow readers : notes on multiplied language (1994)
Beatrice Warde. "The Crystal Goblet, or printing should be invisible." Address to the Society of Typographic Designers, formerly the British Typographers Guild, London, 1932. Reprinted in Looking Closer 3, Critical Writings on Graphic Design (1999)
Meggs, Chapter 9 "Graphic Design and the Industrial Revolution."
Alain Gruber, ed., The History of Decorative Arts : Classicism and the Baroque in Europe (1994)
Adolf Loos. "Ornament and Crime" (1908), in Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays (Riverside CA: Ariadne Press, 1998)
Hal Foster. "Design and Crime," in Design and Crime and other Diatribes. (Verso) First published in the London Review of Books, 2000
Alice Twemlow. "The Decriminalization of ornament. Spurned and marginalised for a century, decoration is enjoying a guilt-free renaissance." Eye 58 (Winter 2005) : 18-29
Adel Shakir
This simple solution prompts the question, if ornamentation is removed from objects of everyday use, where it is removed to? A possible answer is that it is removed to objects of symbolic or aesthetic "use" – that is to say, to Art. Abstraction relates to ornament as much as it does to analysis (=breaking apart) and coding of elements in a visual scene.
23 march 06