2013年3月28日 星期四

Bill Brandt: A Camera Ravenous for Emotional Depth

  1. Bill Brandt - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Brandt - Cached
    Bill Brandt (born Hermann Wilhelm Brandt, 2 May 1904 – 20 December 1983), was a German-British photographer and photojournalist. Although born in ...
  2. Bill Brandt Archive

    billbrandtarchive.photoshelter.com/ - Cached
    My Account · Cart cart · Bill Brandt Archive · Search · Contact · Lightbox. Other Featured Galleries. Social England · Portraits [male] · Landscape · Nudes ...
  3. MoMA | Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light

    www.moma.org › VisitCalendarExhibitions - Cached
    Bill Brandt is a founding figure in photography's modernist traditions, and this exhibition represents a major critical reevaluation of his heralded career. Brandt's ...

帶着驚愕感看世界的攝影大師

Stan Honda/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
現代藝術博物館近日舉辦的英國攝影師比爾·布蘭特作品展「比爾·布蘭特:影與光」。

20世紀傑出的英國攝影師比爾·布蘭特(Bill Brandt)用照片構成一種藝術與人性的平衡,人們常常形容他的作品古怪、神秘、難以抗拒。最好的作品會誘使我們去凝神讀解,我們會揣度它們的形式和心 理狀態,我們會探究那些沉冥的黑色、簡約的白色,也不會放過暗藏於其中的敘事,我們會考慮它們和藝術史的關係,還有它們的紀錄現實主義。布蘭特自己在 1948年的一篇文章中提到,攝影的力量令他嘆服,它可以讓人用新的眼光看世界,帶着一種“驚愕感”去體會。
現代藝術博物館(MoMA)的“比爾·布蘭特:影與光”(Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light),又一次讓我們有機會領略千姿百態的布蘭特式驚愕和去熟悉化的奇異。在MoMA攝影策展人莎拉·赫爾曼森·梅斯特(Sarah Hermanson Meister)的敏銳策划下,展覽收入將近160幅首版沖印片和相關材料,包括從20世紀30年代中期開始刊載過布蘭特作品的圖片雜誌。整個展覽全面展 現了布蘭特的敏感,他對各種題材的廣泛涉獵,對沖印處理的極致關注——他認為那是攝影師的一項基礎技藝,還有即便在受託作品中也能保持創造性的能力。
追溯標題所透露的軌跡,展覽從他在20世紀30年代和“二戰”期間拍攝的英國人生活開始,這些照片時常是晦暗不明的——跟修拉的炭筆素描有相似之 處。而展覽的終點是20世紀50到60年代的超現實主義作品,是相對更明亮的女性裸體,身體、身體的局部在誇張的視角渲染下變得幾乎無法分辨,甚至已經抽 象,就像布朗庫西(Brancusi)或阿爾普(Arp)那些光滑的生物形態雕塑。
和幾位藝術地位相當的同輩人比起來,布蘭特(1904–1983)的成就不太好明確界定:沃克·埃文斯(Walker Evans, 1903–1975)最出名的是佃農和南方建築的斷壁殘垣,清晰的畫面展現出高絕的技藝。亨利·卡蒂埃-布列松(Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1908–2004)是手持萊卡的大師,用構圖優雅的“決定性瞬間”機敏地捕捉人間百態。
布蘭特對兩者都沒興趣。他的圖片有時候實在太暗了,要弄清拍了些什麼得費點功夫,而且它們都傾向於靜止(他多數時候用得是一台帶三腳架的祿萊)。他 的攝影作品並不僅限於呈現一種視覺風格,而是有一種氛圍,一種情感深度,處處提示着人的脆弱不堪,甚至在城市景觀和風景里都瀰漫著,在你觀賞照片時,這種 氛圍向不同方向擴展開去。
有些作品,比如他在倫敦拍攝的那些身着黑色裙子、圍着拘謹白色圍裙的女僕,看上去帶着鮮明的時代感,彷彿黑白電影,充滿社會衝突。還有一些照片不是 沒有評說的意圖,但卻是在時間裡風格化地搖擺着的。一幅女孩擦拭門檻的陰暗畫面,在許多方面都讓人想起19世紀攝影、夏爾丹(Chardin)和倫勃朗 (Rembrandt)。
布蘭特這個人本身也不乏晦暗之處。他希望成為一個紀錄祖國的英國攝影師,為此他不惜掩蓋自己被領養的身份。1983年去世時,多篇訃聞稱他生在英 國,但他其實出生於漢堡一個富有的德國銀行家和貨運商家族。他在少年時代罹患肺結核,父母被迫把他送到瑞士的療養院,強制性的休養讓他有時間去嘗試攝影。
1927年他去維也納,希望從精神分析的層面醫治他的疾病,結果卻在那裡做起了攝影師助理。他找到了自己的藝術,只不過還沒明確要去哪裡發展。
1929年他搬到巴黎,接下來的5年是關鍵性的,他會定期帶上相機,和朋友一起周遊歐洲(早期的一些嘗試,可以在他的旅伴蓮娜·巴爾韓斯基 [Lyena Barjansky]和艾娃·波羅斯[Eva Boros]保存的影集中看到;波羅斯後來成為他的妻子)。他曾給美國攝影師、畫家、超現實主義者曼·雷(Man Ray)當過一小段時間的助手,用心領會了他的感知力和無所顧忌的暗房技巧。布蘭特研習了尤金·阿傑(Eugène Atget)讚美巴黎的不朽之作,布拉薩伊(Brassaï)對他產生了很深的影響,一位評論家曾說,這位匈牙利裔攝影師在1933年發表的書《夜晚的巴 黎》(Paris by Night)在“描畫這一出深夜裡的人間喜劇時,無論技術還是紀實都表現出了前所未有的精確性。”
到了1934年,布蘭特搬到了英格蘭,在梅斯特看來,原因可能是巴黎有才華的攝影師實在太多。他很快就用兩本書給自己打出了名聲,一本是《家中的英 國人》(The English at Home, 1936),還有一本是向布拉薩伊致意的《倫敦一夜》(A Night in London, 1938)。
此次MoMA展分成了6部分,將布蘭特在題材上的多樣興趣很好地體現了出來。英國社會各截然不同的階層都有涉及:有嚴肅、獃滯的諾森布里亞礦工,有 身着制服的女傭,也有在梅菲爾公寓客廳里玩雙陸棋的倫敦富人。他在倫敦的街道和公園裡遊盪,在德軍空襲期間,還會去擁擠的地鐵站,躲避炸彈的人們在裡面臉 貼臉睡着,他有幾張最著名的照片就是在那裡拍的。倫敦大停電正好成全了他對陰暗的喜愛。他探尋英格蘭北部那些籠罩在狄更斯式陰鬱氣氛里的粗陋工業城鎮,比 如哈利法克斯和加羅;他去廣闊的田野,拍攝哈德良長城和巨石陣,還去到一片狂風凜冽的荒野,拍一座據說在艾米莉·勃朗特(Emily Brontë)的《呼嘯山莊》里曾經提及的廢棄農舍。
他為雕塑家、演員和文學名家拍肖像照,1960年還盯上了一些老一輩名藝術家的眼睛——有時拍左眼,有時拍右眼,其中包括讓·杜布菲(Jean Dubuffet)、露易絲·內維爾森(Louise Nevelson)、讓·阿爾普(Jean Arp)和阿爾伯托·賈孔梅蒂(Alberto Giacometti),其成果就是一系列無法分辨性別、種族甚至物種的器官大特寫,僅僅在周圍有一點粗糙、褶皺的皮膚。然後就是所謂的裸體系列,身為一 個已經確立顯赫聲名的超現實主義晚期重要人物,以這樣的風格結束創作生涯是有些意外的。
這些裸體作品被認為是布蘭特一生最偉大的成就,同時可能也是最神秘的。其中有一些,比如《倫敦貝爾格萊維亞》(Belgravia, London)——畫面底部森然出現兩條女人的腿,一隻腳搭在另一條腿的膝蓋上,小腿有一種劇烈的拉伸效果——可能基本上就是這個女人自己拍的(我們自然 很想知道:比爾在哪兒)。還有一些,尤其是在英格蘭和法國的卵石海灘上拍的那些,有種令人不安的古怪。耳朵和前臂顯得無比碩大。有一塊怪誕的肉體局部,看 上去像是一段被截取下來的肢臂,其實不過是一隻裸露的腳,只是彎曲的腳趾不在畫面內。
無論是展覽還是圖冊都體現了布蘭特在藝術上的一種專註。許多看起來在紀實的照片其實是擺拍。拍攝對象中相對富有的往往是家人或朋友;蒲拉特,就是他 經常拍的那位黑頭髮女僕,是在他叔叔家做事的。在做委託作品的時候,他一般會把最好的圖片留下來:1941年一期《圖片郵刊》(Picture Post)中刊載的羅伯特·格雷夫斯(Robert Graves)肖像是一個伏案工作的年輕人;同樣是這組拍攝,在布蘭特自己留下的一幅作品中,詩人顯得老成,他咬着一桿羽毛筆,眼神中略帶點憤怒與迷離。
MoMA攝影作品保管師李·安·達夫納(Lee Ann Daffner)編寫了一篇簡短而迷人的圖錄文章,配圖也十分精彩。文章深入研究了布蘭特為達到一定效果而採用的各種底片微調技巧:用刀片或錢幣加重線條 和紋理;用水墨或白水粉抹除瑕疵,加強光和暗影(例如杜布菲眼中的白色)。
布蘭特在暗房裡對底片進行了全面的修正,以至於每張沖印片多少都算是獨一無二的。令他的信徒們感到錯愕的是,布蘭特在20世紀60年代開始重新沖印 早期的圖片,把柔和滲透的灰色和黑色換成陰沉的黑色和白色,可能是裸體作品中的那種更銳利、明亮的效果使然。梅斯特本可以將這部分作品收入一些到展中,此 外還有20世紀70年代末的一些裸體作品代表,她形容後者有一種令人不安的、含蓄的暴力。
在圖錄文章的結尾,她提到自己還放棄了布蘭特的彩色風景照,以及他在生命最後幾年用現成物品三維組合的作品,她認為那是他在“滿足一點個人的好奇心。”她的最後總結略顯古板,稱布蘭特“和大多數偉大藝術家一樣,在某些時候,還是需要一個編輯的。”
這些被略過的部分,對梅斯特的這個美麗的展覽來說是種缺憾,它本身就像是一部布蘭特派的小說。它把布蘭特的藝術以最高的強度呈獻給我們——這也許是有必要的——但是對那些吸引着他的古怪地帶卻沒有太多提及。
“比爾·布蘭特:影與光”在現代藝術博物館展出,展覽截止至8月12日。(212) 708-9400,moma.org。
本文最初發表於2013年3月8日。
翻譯:經雷


A Camera Ravenous for Emotional Depth

Stan Honda/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
An installation view of “Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light,” a new exhibition featuring the work of the British photographer, at the Museum of Modern Art.

The pre-eminent British photographer of the 20th century, Bill Brandt, took pictures whose balance of art and humanity is frequently called strange, mysterious and irresistible. The best induce us to pore over them, exploring their psychology as much as their form, their implied narratives as much as their brooding blacks or parsimonious whites, their connections to the history of art as much as their documentary realism. Brandt himself wrote in 1948 that he admired photography’s power to make people see the world anew, to experience it with “a sense of wonder.”
“Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light” at the Museum of Modern Art is the latest chance to experience the several varieties of Brandtian wonder and defamiliarizing strangeness. Organized with sharp acumen by Sarah Hermanson Meister, a MoMA photography curator, it presents nearly 160 vintage prints and related material, including examples of the illustrated magazines that published Brandt’s work starting in the mid-1930s. All told the show provides a sweeping view of Brandt’s sensibility, his wide-ranging subject matter, his obsession with the printing process as an essential part of the photographer’s art and his ability to function creatively even when on assignment.
Following the trajectory suggested by its title, the show begins with the often penumbral images — not unlike Seurat’s charcoal drawings — of British life that he took in the 1930s and during World War II. It ends with his Surrealist, relatively light-bathed images of female nudes from the 1950s and ’60s, in which exaggerated viewpoints render bodies, and parts of bodies, nearly unrecognizable if not abstract, like smooth biomorphic sculptures worthy of Brancusi or Arp.
The achievements of Brandt (1904-83) are not as firmly fixed in the mind as those of his contemporaries and artistic equals: Walker Evans (1903-75) is known for the consummate lucidity of his images of sharecroppers and weathered Southern architecture. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), master of the hand-held Leica, captured people on the fly in elegantly composed “decisive moments.”
Brandt was interested in neither. His pictures can be so dark that it takes a while to know what’s what, and they tend toward stillness. (He worked for the most part with a Rolleiflex box camera on a tripod.) More than a visual style, his photographs have a kind of atmosphere, an emotional depth, a sense of human vulnerability that extends even to the city views and landscapes, and that expands in several directions as you study the pictures.
Some, like those of London parlormaids on duty in starchy white aprons over black dresses, seem quintessentially of the moment, made for black-and-white film and rife with social tension. Others, though hardly without such commentary, oscillate stylistically in time. A shadowy image of a girl scrubbing a doorsill variously brings to mind 19th-century photography, Chardin and Rembrandt.
Brandt was not beyond ambiguity himself. His desire to be seen as an English photographer recording his homeland led him to obscure the fact that it was an adopted one. When he died in 1983 more than one obituary said he was born in England, though he was actually born in Hamburg to a family of wealthy German bankers and shippers. He suffered from tuberculosis as a teenager, prompting his parents to send him to Swiss sanitariums where enforced rest enabled him to dabble in photography.
In 1927 he went to Vienna, seeking a psychoanalytic cure for his disease and ended up working as a photographer’s assistant. He had found his art, although it wasn’t yet clear where he would pursue it.
In 1929 he settled in Paris for five crucial years, making periodic trips through Europe with a camera and friends. (His early efforts can be viewed in photo albums kept by his companions, Lyena Barjansky and Eva Boros; Boros later became his wife.) He worked briefly as an assistant to the American photographer, painter and Surrealist Man Ray, taking to heart both his sensibility and his freewheeling darkroom techniques. Brandt familiarized himself with Eugène Atget’s monumental ode to Paris and was deeply influenced by Brassaï, the Hungarian-born photographer whose 1933 book, “Paris by Night,” as one critic put it, portrayed the “late-night human comedy with a technical and documentary precision unknown before his time.”
By 1934 Brandt was in England to stay, driven there perhaps, Ms. Meister suggests, because Paris was nearly overrun with talented photographers. He soon established himself with two books, “The English at Home” (1936) and, with a nod to Brassai “A Night in London” (1938).
Divided into six sections, the MoMA show gives an excellent account of the sheer variety of Brandt’s subject matter. He portrayed distinctly different levels of the British class system: from grave, besooted Northumbrian miners to those uniformed parlormaids to wealthy Londoners playing backgammon in a Mayfair drawing room. He roamed London’s streets and parks and, during the Blitz, the crowded underground stations where people sought shelter, sleeping cheek to jowl, and where he made some of his best-known images. The London blackout played to his love of darkness. He also explored the gritty industrial towns in the north of England, like Halifax and Jarrow, shrouded in Dickensian gloom, and he took to the open countryside to capture images of Hadrian’s Wall, Stonehenge and a ruined farmhouse on the edge of a windswept moor that is thought to have figured in Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights.”
He made portraits of sculptors, actors and literary notables, and in 1960 zeroed in on the eyes — sometimes the left, sometimes the right — of distinguished, rather ancient artists (among them Jean Dubuffet, Louise Nevelson, Jean Arp and Alberto Giacometti), resulting in extreme close-ups of organs of sight surrounded by leathery, sagging skin that are beyond gender, race and even species. And finally there are the so-called nudes, the surprise ending of an already illustrious career and potent latecomers to the history of Surrealism.
Considered his greatest achievement, these are perhaps the most mysterious of all Brandt’s work. In some, like “Belgravia, London” — in which a woman’s legs loom up from the bottom of the image, and a foot hooked over the other knee presents a drastically elongated calf — the picture might almost have been taken by the woman herself. (We certainly wonder: Where’s Bill?) Others, especially those taken on pebbly beaches in England and France, can seem disturbingly strange. Ears and forearms become colossal. A shockingly odd chunk of flesh resembles an amputated limb but is actually the sole of a bare foot whose bent toes are out of sight.
Both the show and catalog demonstrate the single-mindedness of Brandt’s artistry. Many of his seemingly documentary images were posed. His wealthier subjects were often family members or friends; Pratt, the dark-haired parlormaid he frequently photographed, worked for his uncle. When shooting on assignment he tended to retain the best images for himself: the portrait of Robert Graves that appeared in a 1941 issue of Picture Post shows a young man focused on his work; the one from the same session that Brandt held back shows the poet looking more mature, a quill pen clasped between his teeth and a slightly mad, oracular gleam in his eye.
A short, fascinating, well-illustrated catalog essay by Lee Ann Daffner, the Modern’s conservator of photography, delves into Brandt’s extensive fine-tuning of his negatives to achieve the effects he wanted: highlighting lines and textures with razor blades or pencils; removing imperfections and intensifying lights and darks with ink, wash or white gouache (as on the white of Dubuffet’s eye).
In the darkroom Brandt manipulated his negatives to such an extent that each print was more or less unique. And to the dismay of his admirers in the 1960s he began to reprint his early images, replacing their soft seeping grays and blacks with stark blacks and whites, perhaps as a result of the sharper, lighter effects of the nudes. Ms. Meister might have included a few examples of these, along with a few examples of his nudes from the late 1970s, which she characterizes as disturbing and implicitly violent.
At the end of her excellent catalog essay she notes that she has also omitted the color landscapes and the three-dimensional assemblages Brandt made from found objects near the end of his life that she describes as “a private curiosity.” She concludes with the slightly prim observation that “like most great artists, Brandt, upon occasion, needed an editor.”
Learning of these omissions slightly undermines her beautiful show, revealing it as something of a Brandtian fiction in itself. It gives us Brandt’s artistry at full- strength — which may have been needed — without quite revealing all the strange places to which it drove him.
“Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light” continues through Aug. 12 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org.

2013年3月16日 星期六

Forms and Functions




VISUALS

Forms and Functions


From “The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid.”
In 1847, Byrne used primary-color symbols to teach the principles of Euclidean geometry.


In 1847, Oliver Byrne, “surveyor of Her Majesty’s settlements in the Falkland Islands and author of numerous mathematical works,” wrote and designed an illustrated book so far ahead of its time that, with the exception of a few passé typographical details, it could have been published today. In fact, it has been published today, as a stunning boxed facsimile edition. Given its “less is more” layout and primary-color palette — red, blue, yellow, black — THE FIRST SIX BOOKS OF THE ELEMENTS OF EUCLID: In Which Coloured Diagrams and Symbols Are Used Instead of Letters for the Greater Ease of Learners (Taschen, $59.99) prefigures the art and design of 20th-century avant-garde movements. Yet although the illustration on the title page is the spitting image of a de Stijl and Bauhaus design, the mid-19th- century publishing date disqualifies it from being “modern” in the Museum of Modern Art sense of the word. Now, that’s obtuse.
From “The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid”
Emblems, from a 1920 manuscript on the history of England, in “Strange and Wonderful.”
From “Art of McSweeney’s”
The cover of McSweeney’s No. 3.
A Department of Homeland Security visa waiver from “The Form Book.”
A rendering of a British poster from World War II, in “Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World).”
Sure, the book may have one of those lengthy old-fashioned titles, but “The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid” is so rationalist, minimalist and aesthetically pure, every graphic designer, book lover and math nerd will be as awe-struck as I was. (It comes with a pamphlet containing an essay by Werner Oechslin, an architectural historian and theorist.) In the 1980s, the graphic-design historian Philip B. Meggs introduced me to the book through his illustrated series of articles in Print magazine called “Landmarks of Book Design.” Later, at a rare-book fair, when I saw an actual copy, with its vibrant color illustrations of geometric shapes, I decided I had to own an original. Of course, I would have had to mortgage the house, kids and dog to acquire it; so this facsimile not only satisfies my desire, it is more economical and functional in the bargain. I can actually page through the book without fear or guilt — and if it gets dog-eared, I can buy another.

Every high school student has suffered through Euclid’s fundamentals of geometry, which is why the pragmatic Byrne wrote: “The arts and sciences have become so extensive, that to facilitate their acquirement is of as much importance as to extend their boundaries. Illustration, if it does not shorten the time of study, will at least make it more agreeable.” Lo and behold, he was right. The color symbols — circles, squares, diamonds, etc. — effectively substitute for key words, rebus-style, making comprehension much simpler. By the time the complicated theorems and formulas appear, toward the end of the book, the reader is fluent in the visual language.
“This work,” Byrne continues, “has a greater aim than mere illustration; we do not introduce colors for the purpose of entertainment, or to amuse by certain combinations of tint and form, but to assist the mind in its researches after truth, to increase the facilities of instruction and to diffuse permanent knowledge.”

The time has long passed since I was forced to learn Euclidean geometry, but I believe this masterpiece of beautifully functional book design is so effective it could even help recalcitrant students today — perhaps as aniPhone app.

Byrne made complex information accessible, which is a job qualification for a graphic designer. One of the designer’s roles is to turn disorder into order, particularly when it comes to everyday documents like forms for banks, insurance companies, utilities, the census and so much more. When they are logically, rationally and, yes, handsomely designed, it could mean the difference between minutes and hours of labor. This is why THE FORM BOOK: Creating Forms for Printed and Online Use (Thames & Hudson, $65), by Borries Schwesinger, is so necessary. Not only is this an invaluable handbook for designers, it should open the eyes of anyone who produces forms.

But form users stand to benefit too, since they are probably unaware of the mundane details that go into making effective forms, details that, if ignored or rendered poorly, can lead to extreme frustration. For example, the book examines page numbering: “When a form consists of multiple pages, it is essential to number them.” Sounds obvious, but take a look at your forms and see how often page numbers are missing. And what about contact details? “They establish a practical connection with the provider, indicating who sent the form, where it should be returned.” And, naturally, typography is an overriding concern that is often ignored: “Good typography is a prerequisite for optimal legibility and demands a particular and considered approach to text. . . . Type can be austere or accessible, straight or rounded, emotive or exaggerated.”
Unless one has an obsessive- compulsive streak for filling out forms, this manual will probably seem arcane. However, one possible unintended consequence of “The Form Book,” which should concern everyone, is seeing in the numerous examples, from government agencies and private companies, just how much data — personal and otherwise — is regularly being collected from all of us. Not even good design will mitigate these privacy concerns.

There are no forms to be found in STRANGE AND WONDERFUL: An Informal Visual History of Manuscript Books and Albums (Sanctuary, $50), with an introduction by the art critic Jed Perl. But there are selections from a delightful handmade book called “Collezione di Rebus” (1820), with original watercolor drawings that replace words in sentences or phrases. This was produced 27 years before Oliver Byrne used the rebus concept in “The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid,” though there is no evidence to prove that this is where he got the idea. Doubtless not a single professional artist or designer was inspired by the journals and albums in this book, since each of them is the work of an amateur, although some were created by people who wanted to be published authors.
“Certain volumes are not so much finished products,” Perl writes, “as means to an end, for the authors surely hoped that what had at first been made by hand would eventually make its way through the printing press.” These specimens are organized according to genre (rather than date), from “Advertising” and “Album Amicorum” to “Walmart” and “Weaving.” None follow strict design conventions, and virtually all of them have some kind of undeniably quirky essence. “Weaving,” for instance, contains geometric patterns in red, blue and a hint of yellow, not unlike the illustrations in the Euclid book.

My favorite is the “Monograms” journal, which recalls Saul Steinberg’s fixation with official seals and monograms, yet without the satirical edge. These monograms were cut out from various sources and used as building blocks in other compositions. Likewise, the book under the heading “Emblems” reveals a fascination with the manipulation of letter forms that are similar to contemporary logos and trademarks. Some of the books are personalized how-to manuals, like the one for “Carpentry,” with detailed drawings of moldings and stairways. Others, like “Cat Story,” are maquettes for comic graphic novellas.

There is no real rhyme (though there is certainly a reason) for what the editor, Dan Wechsler, has included in “Strange and Wonderful.” But the combination of old and recent photography and drawing, some of it surreal and some of it quite real, triggers a stimulating visual, often contemplative experience. Indeed, these books are not unlike some blogs today — only it’s more fun to turn real pages.

For some bibliophiles, there is no greater pleasure than looking at smartly conceived and elegantly designed book covers and jackets. The next best thing just might be paging through PENGUIN 75: Designers, Authors, Commentary (the Good, the Bad . . .) (Penguin, paper, $25), edited by Paul Buckley, a noted creative director at Penguin.

This lushly illustrated book is a testament to the importance of design in Penguin’s publishing program. In 1946, the modernist typographer Jan Tschichold revamped its entire design scheme — though a lot has changed since then. The covers have become more conceptual and typographically variegated. Buckley also consistently uses young illustrators whose styles add contemporary luster to the books. And in recent years he’s recruited a group of graphic novelists, like Chris Ware (who wrote the foreword to this book), Jason Lambiek, Julie Doucet, Art Spiegel man and Daniel Clowes, among many ­others.

The book features 75 Penguin covers (in celebration of the publisher’s 75th anniversary), with the designers, illustrators and authors commenting on the process and result. The most interesting parts involve short “Rashomon”-type stories in which authors and designers tell their respective tales. But it is also nice to learn how authors feel when they see their babies — i.e., their books — wearing jackets and covers for the first time (most authors, mercifully, do not have a say in the art). I particularly liked the novelist Penelope Lively’s admission: “I am always wonderfully startled by the first sight of the jacket art for a forthcoming book — Oh! So that’s how they see it!”

Dave Eggers, who studied art and design in college, has created a distinct identity for his McSweeney’s publishing empire, based on new writing, ironic visual content and an expanding universe of artists and designers. In ART OF McSWEENEY’S (Chronicle, $45), by the editors of McSweeney’s, 11 years of alternative-publishing history are packed into 263 pages. And what comes through, as it does in “Penguin 75,” is an appreciation for good design and a preference for comics. McSweeney’s champions Chris Ware, Tony Millionaire, Art Spiegelman, Charles Burns and others. The entire McSweeney’s No. 13, covered with a foldout comics page by Ware, was devoted to old and new comics and was guest-edited by Ware as well.

Comics are not the sum total of McSweeney’s graphic personality, but they play a huge role in cementing the literary and visual personas in both McSweeney’s and its sister publication, The Believer. Since many literary journals avoid a strong visual presence — perhaps because it competes with the writing — it’s refreshing that Eggers has successfully combined the two mediums and their aesthetics. McSweeney’s has become a hothouse of 21st-century editorial graphics, and this book proves it.

When the history of 21st-century popular art is written, Maira Kalman will be included alongside McSweeney’s. They embody the zeitgeist in different yet similar ways. Both use art to entertain and inform, but not in a didactic or polemical way. Whereas popular art in the ’60s was acidly satirical, even angry (and for good reason), McSweeney’s artists and Kalman offer a more laid-back worldview. Wit and humor still abound, but so does a curious, comforting optimism, especially in Kalman’s impressionistic work.

Ingrid Schaffner’s MAIRA KALMAN: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) (Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania/DelMonico/Prestel, $34.95), the catalog from Kalman’s first major museum exhibition, for the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, is also the first analytical/historical monograph devoted to her. Until now, her art has mostly been seen in her children’s and adult books, as well as in various other publications, including The New York Times (where her illustrated blogs “And the Pursuit of Happiness” and “The Principles of Uncertainty” appeared). A catalog is always going to be a different experience.

Comparing this with Kalman’s original books would not be fair. Those were total entities, with narrative arcs. This is a document (midway through her career) that records her work in a collection of independent images, and therefore lacks some of the artist’s storytelling verve. The biographical chronology is useful, and the essays, by Schaffner and other scholars, are a good foundation for further study. But the book could use Kalman’s delightfully quirky ooh-la-la voice.

2013年3月13日 星期三

‘Henri Labrouste,’ at the Museum of Modern Art

Architecture Review

A Poetry Grounded in Gravity and Air

‘Henri Labrouste,’ at the Museum of Modern Art

Georges Fessy
Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light Domes hover atop a forest of thin iron columns in the reading room at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, a central focus of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. More Photos »
“Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light,” at the Museum of Modern Art, is elegant and astringent, like Labrouste’s work. The name may not ring a bell, but don’t let that stop you from seeing the show. It is gorgeous.
Multimedia

Michel Nguyen
A view of the reading room in Labrouste's Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris. More Photos »
Labrouste died in 1875, at 74, having left behind two of the great buildings of the 19th century, the Bibliothèque Ste.-Geneviève and the Bibliothèque Nationale, miracles of stone, iron and glass construction. I found it instructive to hear a historian, in a video accompanying the show, recall growing up like most French intellectuals during the 1950s and ’60s and lumping Labrouste in with all the other unfashionable detritus of 19th-century bourgeois culture. “Good” architectural taste skipped over the 1800s.
Fresh eyes were clearly required. Fortunately a generation of young Americans, among them the Harvard professor Neil Levine, who more than anyone else wrote Labrouste back into architectural history, had landed in Paris by the late ’60s. These Americans recognized Labrouste as a provocateur and poet with a pen and pencil whose influence reverberated across the centuries.
The exhibition’s arrival seems almost uncanny in the midst of the debate over the renovation of Carrère and Hastings’ New York Public Library building at 42nd Street, whose iron book stacks derive from Labrouste’s. Library officials have proposed removing those historic stacks, which support the main reading room, and replacing them with a circulating branch to be designed by Norman Foster. The stacks, they say, are too dilapidated and unsuited to be modernized.
But Labrouste’s even-older stacks at the Bibliothèque Nationale have recently been outfitted with modern climate controls and fireproofing and will be opened to the reading public. The exhibition’s last room greets visitors with a large photomural of that space — a pointed rebuke to those New York library officials who haven’t adequately justified their scheme and might now want to investigate more closely what Paris is doing.
The MoMA show is organized, with obvious love, by Barry Bergdoll, the museum’s chief curator of architecture, along with Corinne Bélier of the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine and Marc Le Coeur of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where the exhibition started. For Mr. Bergdoll, a scholar of 19th-century architecture, it renews the Modern’s commitment, dating back at least to its groundbreaking Beaux-Arts survey nearly 40 years ago, to explore the roots of Modernism.
There are wonderful touches. Mr. Bergdoll has commissioned drafting tables, fashioned after Labrouste’s furniture designs at Ste.-Geneviève, on which drawings are displayed. They’re ideal for studying works on paper. The architectural models constructed for the show could be a little more instructive, but’s hard to picture a finer selection of drawings. Those in the opening gallery, from Labrouste’s time in Italy, are a reminder of what great draftsmanship used to look like. It’s too bad that the architectural models made for the show aren’t equally impressive.
I’m sorry we don’t see more in the way of buildings aside from the libraries. Labrouste designed private residences in various traditional styles. The implication of their absence — that, forced to earn a living, he took on conventional commissions — would belie his reputation for intransigence. A sober and proud man, he bowed to nobody. “He had absolute integrity and devotion to his art,” is how Mr. Levine phrased it in a recent conversation. “He never did a thing he didn’t want to do.”
So what we get at MoMA is pretty much the Labrouste whom the critic Sigfried Giedion identified the better part of a century ago as a proto-modernist engineer-architect, a pioneer of iron construction. While that resonates Labrouste seems at least as interesting today for the complexity of his thinking. In our era of starchitects he makes an instructive case for his unwillingness to compromise, his dedication to function, his decorative originality and his unorthodox hybrid aesthetic, which married industry to classicism.
Dominique Perrault, the designer of France’s new, little-loved national library in eastern Paris, calls him a “conceptual” architect, “furiously contemporary.” With the Ste.-Geneviève library, he notes, Labrouste hewed to a strategy “of outside and inside, of roof, and of light” that redefined essential parts of a building. In the strict separation between the library’s severe stone facade and its airy, light-filled reading room, Mr. Perrault sees an “absolutely radical” mentality.
It’s a compelling thought. The gravity of Ste.-Geneviève’s exterior, as Mr. Levine has pointed out, comes from the minimalism of its design: unbroken ledges run the length of the long facade at the cornice and between the two floors, with simple stone garlands seemingly strung from the lower ledge over iron roundels, or knobs. Unadorned arched windows make the only breaks in the wall along the ground floor, save for the front door.
The facade’s upper story, predicting the architecture of the reading room that it encloses, presents a shallow arcade of arches containing a grid of plaques inscribed with the names of 810 writers. They are listed in rows beneath the large lunette windows, the reading room’s clerestories. Like those among the garlands below, the roundels in the spandrels between the windows are bolts and tie rods for the floor trusses and the vaults of the iron structure inside. Labrouste, in effect, makes the structural skeleton of the building its decorative motif, inside and out.
You could say the library facade acts as a billboard whose embellishments announce the building’s content and material construction: a “decorated shed,” as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown defined those sign-covered casinos along the strip in Las Vegas, which flipped the bird at conventional high taste.
At the same time Labrouste was reinventing civic space as a citizens’ palace where people could read and meet. He spent a dozen years, from 1838 to 1850, cooking up the language. In lieu of the frescoes and biblical scenes fashioned in stained glass or carved into statues and column capitals that dominated public architecture he used books and iron as decorative instruments.
Achille Hermant, a young French architect, spoke for many others when he found the results cold. “The character of a building is not measured only by the use for which it is intended,” he wrote. “Everything that is true is not necessarily beautiful.”
That is true. But the place is beautiful. Its long double bay — divided by a central row of slender iron columns that sprout from stone pillars, with bookshelves all around — feels austere and mysterious. The approach involves a procession, from the square outside through the downstairs vestibule, its ceiling painted sky blue, faux Pompeiian landscapes on the walls and a grid of square stone piers supporting iron arches that anticipate what’s above. Then comes the reading room, as exalted and democratic as the city’s then-new train stations, but reticent, hushed.
After Ste.-Geneviève, Labrouste labored for the last 21 years of his life on the Bibliothèque Nationale, its square reading room a light-bathed hive of nine domes hovering atop a forest of 33-foot-high thin iron columns. Where windows don’t pierce the upper walls, painted landscapes elaborate on the pastoral theme, with the iron vault of the book stacks, also skylighted, visible to readers through a tall glass wall and separated by a monumental archway.
Labrouste dedicated most of his working life, on a government wage, to works of public architecture. He transcended materials to arrive at functional buildings of an ethereal delicacy. Nothing was too small for his attention. After 12 years Ste.-Geneviève came in under budget. Labrouste told the minister in charge the news and won permission to switch out the cast-iron front door for a bronze one.
A perfectionist to the last.
Follow Michael Kimmelman on Twitter, @kimmelman.

“Henri Labrouste” is on view through June 24 at the Museum of Modern Art; moma.org.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

CDs Know That Ears Have Eyes

CDs Know That Ears Have Eyes

Images From ECM
A selection of covers for albums that were released this year by ECM.

MOST of us think we know where fine art roosts: museums, galleries, studios, maybe the stray subway car. But one of the more unexpected places to find striking, thought-provoking art, year in and year out, is on the album covers of ECM Records.
The covers of the more than 40 albums ECM released just this year, for example, make for an absorbing gallery of art photography, graphic design and abstract painting. ECM radiates a unified field theory of what an album can still be. As music more and more becomes just another cultural entree on the e-hive’s digital tasting menu, ECM, of Munich, is still fixed on making its albums a complete aesthetic experience.
On (those increasingly rare) store shelves they manifest intelligence, stillness — musical cheetahs stalking customers of jazz and classical discs. And in scrutinizing an ECM album it’s clear that a singular curatorial mind is at work, one that understands that art and music, like the best poetry, are (ideally) lyrical re-enactments of our lives.
That sensibility belongs to Manfred Eicher, who founded ECM in 1969 and has run it since. Besides producing the music, Mr. Eicher is also ECM’s de facto art director. As with the sound, his word is final when it comes to the visual. And when he talked covers in a telephone interview from Munich, the word “marketing” never fell from his lips.
“The cover is a metaphoric translation,” said Mr. Eicher, who refuses to be a mule to the literal. “Whatever it might mean, it’s a sign. It’s an envelope, the envelope of the given.” He added that he’s after “silence, poses, thoughtfulness, contemplativeness” — apt descriptions of the covers, all from 2012, cited here.
The process couldn’t be more human. Mr. Eicher marinates in the music, then (most often) shuttles between the album and his archive of images until he lights on the right one. It’s intuitive and improvisational (like much of what he has recorded), he says of his search for images that have the intonation and playfulness of the music, that aren’t obvious, but contrapuntal.
“It’s a very personal decision,” he said of settling on an album’s visual score. “I’m going for aesthetic connotation. And it doesn’t take more than a week. It’s like a recording mix. I want to get it done.”
The cover for “Year of the Snake” by the jazz trio Fly is a good example, as the artist Lourdes Delgado tells it, of Mr. Eicher as the alchemist who finds images that speak to the music — and vice versa. The four photographs that make up the cover come from her “Chants to Nature” series, and she admires how they were used.
“My photographs were made with one of the first photography techniques — the wet plate collodion — from the middle of the 19th century,” Ms. Delgado wrote in an e-mail. “Since one has to use silver nitrate to prepare the emulsion, the images become very physical, almost tactile, a feature that I needed to be able to express the materiality of nature. I can see this physicality mirrored in the sound” of Fly.
Mr. Eicher, who started as a musician and who is also a filmmaker, is more than ECM’s founder, producer and chief — he is its auteur. That realization is reinforced by a current exhibition, “ECM — A Cultural Archaeology,” at the Haus der Kunst museum in Munich. The exhibition includes cover art, a concert series, film screenings and photographs of musicians. In the exhibition catalog the show’s curator, Okwui Enwezor, wrote, “Eicher’s work with ECM touches on the fundamental connection between artistic disciplines in music, film, theater, graphic design, photography and contemporary art.”
It’s not unusual for ECM to get art-world attention. There have been gallery shows of ECM covers in Western Europe, and there are two thick books devoted to the label’s visual language, “Sleeves of Desire” and “Windfall Light,” both edited by Lars Müller.
Though rarely, the musician is sometimes directly involved in the visual mix. On Keith Jarrett’s “Sleeper,” a live recording made in Tokyo in 1979 but released this year, the red title type pops creepily from a black background, suggesting a poster, perhaps, for some long-forgotten horror movie. “The first impulse came from Keith,” Mr. Eicher said, referring to the red lettering, “and then we developed it.”
And the composer and sax player Tim Berne pitched both ends of a doubleheader when “Snakeoil,” his first ECM album as bandleader, also featured one of his photographs on the disc’s cover. “It sounds crazy,” Mr. Berne said, “but it was almost more exciting than making the record, because of Manfred’s exacting standards.”
Most ECM covers these days are moody and elemental photographs that tack toward the abstract: melancholy Bergmanesque cityscapes and landscapes swaddled in fog, waterscapes and skyscapes. They’re dreamscapes, really, all blur and chiaroscuro, layered onto albums with titles like “Canticle of the Sun,” “Canto Oscuro” and “Dream Logic.” It’s as if they loosely illustrate some neo-noir that only Mr. Eicher senses.
Hinting at an answer, if not an aesthetic, he said: “I really like the light in the north, and I’m a fan of Bergman. It reflects my atmospheric, poetic side.”
When it comes to the intersection of art and music, one of his favorite quotations comes from Gertrude Stein: “Think of your ears as eyes.” That helps clarify ECM’s artistic concerns, and applies especially to how the cover of Bach’s “Das Wohltemperierte Clavier” by András Schiff came about.
As Mr. Eicher explained: “Schiff sees music in color. The Bach cover was commissioned to go in the direction of color painting.”
The artist given this assignment was Jan Jedlicka, a Czech whose work has appeared on more than 50 ECM covers. The “Clavier” cover suggests multiple veins of musical ore, appropriate given that Mr. Jedlicka created the image using some of the more than 200 pigments he has made from the sands, stones and minerals of South Tuscany. “Found pigments,” he said, “just like in medieval times.”
Mr. Jedlicka added: “András suggested the colors he wanted, the color of the tonality. But the cover doesn’t have an illustrative relationship with the music.”
Then there’s the intimate give and take between painting and music on “Sunrise” by the Masabumi Kikuchi Trio. The painting was made in 2000 by Akiko Kitami, who was once married to Mr. Kikuchi. Though they are no longer together, her art has been “influenced by his life and his music,” she wrote in an e-mail. “It is included in mood and tone.”
One recent dawn as I listened to the floating abstractions of “Sunrise,” on which Mr. Kikuchi plays piano, I held the album cover up to the morning sun, let the brittle December light strike Ms. Kitami’s textured yellows and subtle blue-grays. As I looked and listened, the literal met the abstract to create a startling moment of stillness.
Mr. Eicher savors that silence, that stillness. Play an ECM album ... and often there’s five or six seconds of hush before the music begins. Amid the silence, he seems to say, is another place where we find art.


「把你的耳朵當作眼睛」

我們大都自以為知道美術作品該去哪裡找:博物館、畫廊、工作室,大概還有廢棄的地鐵車廂。然而有一處你可能沒想到的地方,已經年復一年地產出了許多動人而發人深省的藝術品,那就是ECM唱片公司的專輯封面。
以ECM今年發行的40多張專輯的封面為例,我們可以看到一組令人心曠神怡的藝術攝影、平面設計和抽象繪畫作品集。ECM提出了一種實際理論,告訴 我們音樂專輯仍然可以是什麼樣子。當音樂漸漸淪為喧鬧的e時代餐廳數碼品嘗菜單中的一道文化主菜時,來自慕尼黑的ECM還在固執地為專輯構造一套完整的美 學體驗。
它們在(越來越稀有的)唱片行的貨架上彰顯智慧與平靜——像一隻只音樂獵豹無聲地向爵士和古典音樂唱片購買者靠近。把一張ECM唱片里里外外端詳一 番,很明顯能看到它的背後有一個非凡的頭腦在謀劃,這個人深知音樂和藝術就像最好的詩歌一樣,是對我們生活的一次(完美的)熱情重現。
這種感覺的源頭,是1969年創辦ECM並掌管至今的曼菲德·埃希爾(Manfred Eicher)。除了製作音樂,埃希爾還是ECM實際上的藝術總監。視覺上的問題跟聲音一樣,他的話就是最終決定。當他在慕尼黑接受電話訪問談起封面時,從頭到尾就沒提過“營銷”這個詞。
埃希爾說:“封面是一種有喻意的轉譯。”他拒絕作一頭負責傳達本義的騾子。“不管叫什麼,反正這是一種示意。它是一隻信封,把已知包裹起來的信封。”他還說他追求的是“無聲、姿態、縝密、沉思”——本文提到的這些作於2012年的封面,都符合以上的描述。
而過程可以說是全憑人力。埃希爾會在音樂里浸泡許久,然後(一般都會)在專輯和手頭的圖片檔案之間來回比對,直到理想選擇驀然出現在眼前。這個過程是隨性而直覺的(一如他錄下的許多音樂),他想尋找的圖片要和音樂有一樣的音調和趣味,不過不能太淺白,應該是一種對位。
“這是個很個人化的抉擇,” 他這樣評價自己為專輯配畫的創作,“我求的是一種審美內涵。這個過程不會超過一周。跟做錄音縮混差不多。我是希望把事情給做成了。”
爵士三人團“飛翔”(Fly)的專輯《蛇年》(Year of the Snake)封面就是個很好的例子,藝術家洛烏黛斯·德爾加多(Lourdes Delgado)說埃希爾先生就像一個鍊金術士,能找到闡釋音樂的圖片——反之亦然。封面中的四張照片取自她的“自然聖詠”(Chants to Nature)系列,埃希爾對照片的運用令她心悅誠服。
“我的照片用的是最古早的一種攝影技術——濕片火棉膠法,19世紀中期就開始用了,”德爾加多在一封電子郵件中說,“由於是用硝酸銀備制感光劑,成像非常有實感,幾乎觸手可及,我需要用這個特性來表達自然的實質性。這種實感,我發現在飛翔樂團的聲音里有所反映。”
埃希爾是音樂家出身,還是位電影人,他不只是ECM的創始人、製作人和領導者——他一手導演了它。正在慕尼黑藝術之家博物館舉 辦的展覽“ECM——一次文化考古”(ECM—A Cultural Archaeology)加強了這種感受。展覽包括封面藝術、一個音樂會系列、電影放映和音樂家照片。在展覽手冊中,策展人奧庫依·恩維佐(Okwui Enwezor)寫道:“埃希爾在ECM的作為,觸及到了音樂、電影、戲劇、平面設計、攝影和當代藝術的創作準則之間的根本聯繫。
ECM受到藝術界的注目並不反常。在西歐曾有畫廊做過ECM封面展,對該廠牌的視覺語彙,已經有兩本大部頭專著:《慾望的封套》(Sleeves of Desire)和《風吹落的光》(Windfall Light),都是由拉斯·穆勒(Lars Müller)編輯。
音樂家有時會直接參与到這種視覺縮混中來,不過不多見。基思·傑瑞(Keith Jarrett)的《沉睡者》(Sleeper)是1979年在東京的現場錄音,但是直到今年才發行,紅色的標題字在黑色背景上顯得凶神惡煞,可能是要提 示這是某部被遺忘的恐怖片。“最初的念頭來自基思,”埃希爾在談起這個紅色標題時說,“接着由我們做了一些發揮。”
作曲家、薩克斯管演奏家蒂姆·伯恩(Tim Berne)在《蛇油》(Snakeoil)里承擔了雙重身份,這是他作為領隊的首張ECM唱片,同時封面又是他的攝影作品。伯恩說:“這聽起來很瘋狂,但是簡直比錄唱片還過癮,因為曼菲德的標準可是極苛刻的。”
近年的ECM封面大多是些沉鬱、基本的攝影作品,趨近於抽象:哀婉的伯格曼式都市和籠罩在霧霾里的風景,水景和天景。它們其實都是夢景,形狀模糊但 明暗分明,蒙覆在專輯上,印着“太陽的讚美歌”、“陰暗詩篇”和“夢邏輯”之類的標題。彷彿它們都是在若即若離地描繪某部只有埃希爾先生自己才看得到的新 黑色片(neo-noir)。
對此他間接地給出了一個答案,或者說一種美學,他說:“我喜歡北方的光線,我是伯格曼的追隨者。它反映了我對氛圍和詩意的追求。”
對於藝術和音樂的交集,他最欣賞格特魯德·斯泰因(Gertrude Stein)的一句話:“把你的耳朵當作眼睛。”ECM的藝術旨趣因此清晰了起來,這一點在安達什·席夫(András Schiff)的《巴赫平均律曲集》封面創作過程中尤其適用。
如埃希爾先生所說:“席夫能看到音樂的色彩。巴赫的封面是在他的授意下,選擇了彩色繪畫的方向。”
藝術家委託了捷克人揚·耶德列茨卡(Jan Jedlicka),其作品此前已經用在了50多幅ECM封面中。《曲集》封面上顯露出多條音樂礦脈的交織,有這種觀感是很自然的,因為耶德列茨卡在作品 中使用了200多種顏料,都是他自己用托斯卡納的砂、石和礦物製作的。“用現成顏料,”他說,“跟中世紀一樣。”
耶德列茨卡還說:“安達什建議使用一些他想要的顏色,調性的顏色。但是封面並沒有去作音樂的圖解。”
還有菊地雅章三人團的《日出》(Sunrise)中,繪畫與音樂你來我往地親密交流。畫是由菊地先生的前妻北見明子(Akiko Kitami)在2000年創作的。兩人已經分手,但她的藝術受到了“他的生命和他的音樂的影響,”她在一封郵件中說。“包含在情緒和基調里。”
不久前的一個黎明,我聽着由菊地演奏鋼琴的《日出》中漂浮着的抽象音符,將唱片封面放在清晨的太陽下,讓十二月的刺眼陽光打在北見女士那富有質感的黃色和細膩的藍灰色上。我看着、聽着,具實與抽象匯合在一起,營造出一派令人慨嘆的祥和。
這樣的無聲,這樣的祥和,是埃希爾在細品的。播放一張ECM專輯……音樂開始前往往會有五到六秒的寂靜。他似乎在說,這無聲是另一處可以找到藝術的地方。
本文最初發表於2012年12月30日。
翻譯:經雷

2013年3月12日 星期二

Spotlight: Architecture of Survival

Spotlight: Architecture of Survival

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Date Published:
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
The Projective Eye Gallery of the College of Arts + Architecture presents Favelas: Architecture of Survival, a series of photographs by Brazilian photographer Pedro Lobo. The exhibit will run from March 9 through May 30, 2013. An opening reception will be held in the gallery at our Center City building on March 22 from 6:00 - 8:00 PM.
Favelas: Architecture of Survival includes 48 large format photographs that document the favelas, or shanty towns, in Rio de Janeiro, the longest-lived squatter settlements in the world. Of approximately one billion squatters worldwide, one million live in Rio de Janeiro.
Lobo’s photographic landscapes document the organized chaos of hillsides overrun with homes. The photographs suggest a progression toward permanence, as people put down roots and build communities within these impromptu urban developments. These beautifully composed images do not shy away from the sprawl, or the hardships of the favelas, yet they are filled with optimism necessary for life in these marginalized urban neighborhoods. These images attempt to show the human dignity of the favela dwellers, in spite of all the difficulties faced by those who have no other choice but to live in these excluded communities.
These beautifully composed images do not shy away from the sprawl, or the hardships of the favelas, yet they are filled with optimism necessary for life in these marginalized urban neighborhoods.
Pedro Lobo is a Fulbright scholar who has studied at the International Center of Photography, NYC, and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Over the 1970s and 1980s, Lobo was a photographer and researcher at Brazil’s National Center for Cultural Reference and at the Monuments and Sites National Institute. He lives in Rio de Janeiro and Évora, Portugal. Lobo won first prize for the photographs in this exhibition in the TOPS IN International Photo Festival in Shenyang, China.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the gallery will host response work from our neighbors at Urban Ministry and students in the UNC Charlotte School of Architecture and its Master of Urban Design program in the Center City building’s front window. The opening reception on March 22 features Brazilian music and dance, a brief lecture by artist Pedro Lobo, and a panel discussion on issues of homelessness and transitional housing.

Favelas: Architecture of Survival was organized by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art of the School of the Arts at the College of Charleston, SC, and curated by Mark Long, Professor of Political Science at the College of Charleston.
Photo by Pedro Lobo.




favela[fa・ve・la]

  • 発音記号[fəvélə]
[名](特にブラジルの)スラム街.
[ポルトガル語]
fa・ve・la・do〔fveldou〕
[名]スラム街の住民.

Favela - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favela - Cached
A favela is the term for a shanty town in Brazil, most often within urban areas. In the late 18th century, the first settlements were called bairros africanos (African ...
slum
[名]1 ((しばしばthe 〜sで単数扱い))スラム街, 貧困地区.2 汚い部屋[家];((略式))いかがわしい所.━━[動](〜med, 〜・ming)(自)1 (特に好奇心で)スラム街をた...

2013年3月4日 星期一

Libeskind, Daniel Breaking Ground: An Immigrant's Journey from Poland to Ground Zero

 這個月為準備演講 讀了此書的末章可以說是精彩極了.

  約十年前我注意到 Daniel Libeskind 是Essex 大學的"學長":有意思的是他碩士畢業之後就到美國去任教.....



偉大的建築,一如偉大的文學作品,或者詩和音樂,都能說出靈魂深處的精彩故事。
第十一章 信念 還有許多精湛的見解,很值得參考與討論。譬如說"整塊區域構思為21世紀可持續經營的典範.....總體規劃納入了嚴格的設計方針,每棟建築,每個公共空間都得採用生態工法,以確保......
 Daniel Libeskind 破土:生活與建築的冒險Breaking Ground: Adventures in Life and Architecture  吳家恆 譯  北京:清華大學出版社 :2008 /光影交舞石頭記──建築師李伯斯金回憶錄台北:時報文化 出版社 2006年Libeskind, Daniel Breaking Ground: An Immigran...

然而  Daniel Libeskind 正如其他的大師般 其作品只不過是 世間的"渺滄海之一粟"。

33FACEBOOK給沈兄
自是辛苦不尋常. 可嘆微臣無力可回天。「信就是所望之事的實底,是未見之事的確據. Libeskind, Daniel Breaking Ground: An Immigrant's Journey from Poland to Ground Zero 結尾引希伯來書當時覺得它的翻譯有點怪
今天查一下:

11 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. (NIV)

信德是所希望之事的擔保,是未見之事的確證。(思高本)




 ----
以下是2008年的筆記
Columbia Encyclopedia: Libeskind, Daniel,
1946–, American architect, b. Łódź, Poland. He moved to the United States in 1959, becoming a citizen in 1965. He has held a number of teaching posts, notably at the Cranbrook Academy of Art (1978–85) and the universities of Pennsylvania and Toronto, and early in his career was known mainly as an academic and theorist. His first major building, the dramatic Jewish Museum Berlin (2001), has an angular titanium-on-zinc exterior, a floor plan reminiscent of the Magen David, and an empty, concrete-walled space (the Void) symbolic of the absence wrought by the Holocaust. His other designs include the Felix Nussbaum Museum, Osnabrück, Germany (1998); the Imperial War Museum, Manchester, England (2002); the Danish Jewish Museum, Copenhagen (2004); the Wohl Convention Center, Tel Aviv (2005); the Hyundai office tower, Seoul (2005); and the Denver Art Museum addition (2006). Libeskind became world famous in 2003 when he won the design competition for the master rebuilding plan for New York's World Trade Center site, but in the years since his role in the project has been severely curtailed. His books include Between Zero and Infinity (1981), Countersign (1992), and The Space of Encounter (2001).
Bibliography
See his memoir, Breaking Ground: An Immigrant's Journey from Poland to Ground Zero (2004).


奇怪 一時竟然沒找到台灣版本
光影交舞石頭記(PE0322)──建築師李伯斯金回憶錄
Breaking Ground: Adventures in Life and Architecture

作者:丹尼爾‧李伯斯金
Daniel Libeskind
譯者:吳家恆
出版社:時報文化
出版日期:2006年
「我要我的建築優雅而自然地老去。」
也許,我們從沒想過建築可以是一個敘述體,一個療癒空間,重建歷史論述。
李伯斯金的建築作品,回歸地方、文化、族群、個人的歷史,聆聽石頭的聲音,講述流動的時間故事。傾斜的地板、不成直角的牆 角、圓弧的屋頂、偎著罅隙透現的光、無盡反射折射的水晶體,沒有一個空間不讓人駐足反思──從刻滿世代傷痕與哀悼氣氛的猶太博物館,到垂垂老矣的維多利亞 與亞伯特博物館旁的螺旋體,拆解衝突本質的帝國戰爭博物館,重現畫家密閉幽室的努斯包姆美術館,乃至世貿重建案中呼應自由女神火炬的「自由塔」,將雙塔崩 塌時刻凝結的「光之楔」。
本書除了闡述建築師自己的創作理念,更穿插他對生命、家族、文化根源及對建築這個行業的省思。讀者被感性、詩意的文字綿密包裹之際,無意中或許會找到猶太博物館中那扇不存在的門。這不只是一本建築師的回憶錄。
作 者 簡 介
丹尼爾‧李伯斯金(Daniel Libeskind)
猶太裔波蘭人,一九四六年生於波蘭中部的羅茲,父母是大屠殺的倖存者。一九五七年舉家遷往以色列,一九五九年定居 紐約。從小音樂造詣頗高,善於演奏手風琴。後來立志成為建築師。建築作品遍佈世界各地,有柏林猶太博物館、歐斯納布呂克努斯包姆美術館、曼徹斯特帝國戰爭 博物館;正在進行的博物館興建案有丹佛美術館、多倫多皇家博物館、舊金山猶太博物館;在瑞士、義大利、德國、英格蘭、愛爾蘭都有文化及商業合作案。一九九 ○年創立李伯斯金工作室(Studio Daniel Libeskind),並擔任首席設計師。二○○三年二月獲選為紐約世貿中心重建案的總體規畫建築師。
譯 者 簡 介
吳家恆
政治大學法學士,英國愛丁堡大學音樂碩士,曾任職智庫文化、天下雜誌、康健雜誌、時報出版,現專事翻譯、撰稿、編輯,並在大學授課、主持廣播節目。(wu.chiaheng@gmail.com)
目 錄
推薦序 追求夢想的建築師/王澤
第一章 地基
第二章 地方感
第三章 光
第四章 建築
第五章 面容
第六章 心血
第七章 提案
第八章 看不見的力量
第九章 材料
第十章 勉強的結合
第十一章 信念
致謝詞

破土:生活與建築的冒險 北京:清華大學出版社 :2008
建筑师的骨气
伟大的建筑,一如伟大的文学作品,或者诗和音乐,都能说出灵魂深处的精彩故事。

也许,我们从没有想过建筑可以是一个叙述载体,一个疗愈空间。
李布斯金的建筑作品,回归地域、文化、族群、个人的历史,聆听石头的声音,讲述流动的时间故事。倾斜的地板、不成直角的墙角,圆弧的屋顶、由罅隙倾泻而下 的光、无尽反射的水晶体,没有一个空间不让人驻足反思——从刻满世代伤痕与哀悼气氛的柏林犹太博物馆,到维多利亚与阿尔伯特博物馆旁的螺旋体,拆解冲突本 质的帝国战争博物馆,重现画家密闭幽室的努斯鲍姆美术馆,乃至世界贸易中心重建项目中呼应自由女神火炬的“自由塔”,将双塔崩塌时刻凝结的“光之楔”。
本书除了阐述建筑师自己的创作理念,更穿插他对生命、家族、文化根源及对建筑这个行业的省思。这不只是一本建筑师的回忆录。


我在库珀联合学院(Cooper Union)上过迈耶和艾森曼的课,也算做过他们的属下。20世纪60年代末,理查德·迈耶是“纽约五人组”(The New York Five)的成员之一。这个由前卫建筑师组成的松散组织还包括查尔斯·格瓦思米、迈克尔·格雷夫斯(Michael Graves),还有跟我亦师亦友的约翰·海杜克(John Hejduk),他当过库珀联合学院建筑系的系主任;这个小组由艾森曼率领。我的第一份工作就是当迈耶的助手,那是1968年。如今理查德·迈耶最有名的作品大概是洛杉矶的格蒂美术馆(Getty
Center),当时他以极白、极具几何图形的新柯布西耶(neo-Corbusian)风格设计而闻名。


迈耶的办公室跟他的作品一样,光滑,有如机器,一片沉静。助手们坐在桌前,桌上摊开一本本大师的著作《建筑师理查德·迈耶》(Richard Meier: Architect),静静临摹着书上各种形状的曲线。经过一整天不动脑筋的机械动作之后,我心想,这不是我该做的事。那该怎么办?第二天,我称病不去。过了一天,我又打电话请假。再过一天也是。这样过了一个星期之后,迈耶打电话到我家。“你真的生病了吗?”他问道。

“理查德,”我说:“实不相瞒,这事我做不来。我心中的建筑不是这样的,这不是我想做的。”

有很多方式可描述艾森曼这个人——聪明、打破窠臼、创意泉涌——但是没人说过他有人情味。虽然我也曾是他班上的学生,但我到他创建的纽约建筑与都市研究学院(Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies)替他工作的第一天,完全出乎我的意料。当时我在英国,刚念完硕士,跟尼娜一起回纽约,一贫如洗。艾森曼不仅答应给我一份工作,也答应第一天就开一张支票给我,好让我们撑过去。但我去找他的时候,他给了我一把扫帚,要我把办公室扫一扫。才刚进门,就强要人低头。我来是要从事建筑的,不是扫地,所以我拒绝了。

“你到底要这张支票——还是不要?”他手里拿着支票问我。

“你自己留着吧。”我说完转身就走。之后10年,我们没再讲过半句话。

当时我还年轻,可能还不了解自己在这世界的位置。但我肯定,不用脑袋的临摹和扫地,绝不是我要的。-- 文摘自著名建筑师李布斯金《破土:生活与建筑的冒险》
【《破土:生活与建筑的冒险》/[美]丹尼尔·李布斯金 著 吴家恒 译/清华大学出版社/2008.1/46.00元】

 匡溪艺术学院在美国密歇根州一座与世隔绝的小山上,离最近的城市底特律开车也要一个小时。建筑系没有任何课程安排,学生从入学起搞一个题目(极少数人搞两至三个),搞完了就毕业,一般总要两三年。
  张永和 文
  张永和 美国麻省理工学院建筑系主任
  1982年初的一天,隆冬晴雪,我们一行人在匡溪艺术学院校园里到处寻找建筑系。遍寻不着,叫住一个学生问路,他指着我们前面不远的一行三人说 道:“跟他们走就到了建筑系,如果你们认为那是建筑系的话。”听得出来他话中有话。没时间多问,我们便尾随那三人进了一个半地下的工作室。等到在明亮的雪 地里缩得极小的瞳孔放大开了之后,才发现眼前满是艺术作品:炭笔画、丝网印刷版画、各种雕塑——木头的、陶瓷的……我正在琢磨这里到底是绘画系还是雕塑 系,旁边一个同来的朋友已恍然大悟地告诉我:“这儿就是建筑系!”
  这里静悄悄的;不像我们自己的工作室,摇滚乐总是放得震耳欲聋。天花板很低,使本来已挺拥挤的工作室,到处显得满满的。建筑系主任,也是这里唯 一的建筑学教授,对我们抱怨道:“地方实在太小,每年最多只能招收十五个学生。”他姓李布斯金,名丹尼尔,波兰人,三十来岁,个子不高,一张方脸,有棱有 角的。
  在工作室里遛了一圈,除了一个日本留学生搞的东西看得出是房子,其余的似乎都是绘画或雕塑,和建筑没什么联系。然而细看之下,就发现它们与一般 的绘画和雕塑不同。卡尔·朱的雕塑看上去更像一个大尺度结构的缩小模型,人们很容易想像自己(人形)处于这个雕塑之中的情形。也就是说这个雕塑暗示了一种 不是雕塑而是建筑的性质:可居性。泰国留学生塔拿普拉的《都市世界》也是异曲同工。雕塑家贾柯梅蒂对这些作品的影响是很明显的。我印象最深的是他的雕塑 《城市广场》:一块平板上几个人形向不同的方向走去;人形的动感创造了广场的空荡感觉。这里建筑好像是用作素材,被作者变形了、抽象了。
  我最喜欢的一个作品在一间没有窗子的小房间里,是两个年龄较大的学生的合作。我也不知为什么喜欢它:它显然象征着什么,我也琢磨不出来,人家讲给我听,我也没听懂。这件作品有种神秘的力量深深地感动着我。至于它的建筑性在哪里,恐怕只有天知道。
  一个穿着围裙、浑身是土的学生匆匆走了进来,手里捧着一件刚出炉的陶塑。他的眼睛和他的同学们一样,放出一种特殊的光芒,令人联想到修道士。其 实他们的生活和真的修道士也差不多。匡溪艺术学院在美国密歇根州一座与世隔绝的小山上,离最近的城市底特律开车也要一个小时。建筑系没有任何课程安排,学 生从入学起搞一个题目(极少数人搞两至三个),搞完了就毕业,一般总要两三年。多数学生一年365天全部在工作室里,难怪泡出了这种献身建筑(或艺术)的 目光。
  李布斯金教授的目光好像不及学生们来得清澈,却也明亮。他一听我是中国来的,就马上提到有一位中国建筑教授是匡溪的毕业生,并请我代他问候。我想大概是清华的吴良镛先生。
  看到李教授的学生们的作品,他自己的东西也可想而知。同一组题为《尽端空间》的作品,尽管标题各有千秋,看上去实是大同小异。作为纯绘画来讲, 他的画构图均衡严整,繁而不乱,组织得疏密有序,还颇有一种音乐感,画面上火柴棍似的简单建筑型体像交响乐队中的一件件乐器,在一定的结构里面组成既复杂 又和谐的整体。
  匡溪的师生们还试着在他们的作品中体现诗的意境,主要是通过象征的手法,似乎比较勉强,倒不如中国传统建筑中常把诗句直接写在墙柱牌匾上来得明了。我自己在写硕士论文时也曾模仿匡溪的方法用唐诗作题材画过几张,想试试中西合璧在这方面的可能性。
  匡溪搞的这套到底算不算建筑?我自己还没有找到一个很好的答案。到目前为止,美国建筑师学会仍不承认匡溪的建筑硕士学位,等于是消极地回答了这 一问题。但不知能否效法其他学科,把匡溪的东西算作“理论建筑”。实际上他们这伙学生大多数都有丰富的工作经验,有些还开过自己的事务所;他们回到学校来 读研究生(匡溪只有硕士学位),到底可以学点儿什么,也是个值得研究的课题。
  我和李布斯金教授见过五面,但现在回想起来,我只记住了李说的一句话,是1996年在北京那次。清华讲演后,我们一起吃晚饭。席间我谈起我的一 个理想:在中国办一所先锋的建筑学校。我以为李一定会认同。不想李说:就是办所建筑学校,不一定先锋。我当时没马上反应过来他的意思;来回琢磨,形成了这 样的理解:从事建筑,包括建筑实践和建筑教育,首先要有个认真严肃的态度,先锋不先锋并不重要。先锋是一个相对狭窄的思考方式。无论李讲的是否真是这么回 事,这句话后来对我工作影响很大。


(1946– )
Polish-born American architect. He studied with John Hejduk (see also New York Five) and enjoyed a varied career in architectural academe where, it has been said, he was essentially ‘isolated from the practicalities and resultant compromise inherent in building’. He designed the City Edge project, Berlin (1987), an influential proposal that ripped through established geometries of urban fabric, responding to the logic of the Berlin Wall by slicing up territory, so his approach is the antithesis of that of Léon Krier and others who have rediscovered the city and argued for the repair and restoration of traditional forms, spaces, volumes, and streets. In 1989 he won the competition to design the Jewish Museum, Berlin (opened 2001—its voids supposedly represent the silences left by the Holocaust, and its slash-like lines connect the addresses of some of Berlin's vanished Jews, though how this is intended to be read is a moot point), and he employed similar bleak geometries in the Felix Nussbaum Museum, Osnabrück, Germany (opened 1998—the in-teriors of which cause visitors to experience an alarming lack of orientation). He is associated with Deconstructivism, notably at the Imperial War Museum, Salford Quays, Manchester (2000–2—composed as a series of shard-like fragments). His master-plan for the replacement of Yamasaki's World Trade Center, NYC (2002–3—which will carry a burden of symbolism, interpretations of which may not be what are intended), and the Studio Weil, Port d'Andraxt, Mallorca (2001–3), demonstrate his handling of two projects differing hugely in scale. Contrary to popular ideas, he produced a conceptual design for the Ground Zero ‘Freedom’ tower: the final result (largely the creation of David M. Childs of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill) may be quite different. His first completed London building was the Graduate Centre, London Metropolitan University, Holloway Road ((2001–4—Libeskind claims it was inspired by the constellation of Orion), the jagged external form of which is an event on the street, rather than any attempt to draw together a disparate collection of unrelated elements. His extension to the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada (2002–5), is in a similar noisy style. Libeskind's manner of building has been seen as paradigmatic by some, but it does not co-exist serenely with established urban grain, and a certain unease has been expressed by others about the proliferation of Deconstructivist buildings.
Bibliography
  • Kalman (1994)
  • Jencks (2002)
  • Johnson & Wigley (1988)
  • Libeskind (1997, 2001)
  • A. Müller (ed.) (1990)
  • Salingaros et al. (2004)
  • The Times (13 Jan. 2004), T2, 16
The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)


出處http://www.feihong.info/daniellibeskind/
更多作品介紹:
Daniel Libeskind(丹尼尔·里伯斯金)作品-曼彻斯特帝国战争博物馆
其他

Daniel Libeskind(丹尼尔·里伯斯金)1946年出生于波兰一个纳粹大屠杀幸存者的犹太人家庭。他的双亲以及10名兄弟姐妹都经历过奥斯威辛集中营的迫 害,最后只有其父和一个姑妈熬过苦难,得以幸存。1959年,当时年仅13岁的利贝斯金德跟随家人迁往以色列,以后又乘船移民美国,来到纽约。利贝斯金德 在纽约读完中学后,进入大学先学习音乐,后来转到建筑系。毕业后,利贝斯金德以德国柏林为基地,组建了自己的建筑设计所。
他曾于北美、欧洲、日本、澳洲及南美各大学教书与演讲, 1986年他曾指导位于意大利米兰的私人公益建筑机构「Architecture Intermundium」, 曾任教于哈佛、耶鲁、伊利诺、南加大、德国汉堡学院等大学。
Daniel Libeskind的创作不仅是建筑, 亦被视为艺术, 其展览遍及欧洲、以色列、日本与美国, 轰动一时的纽约现代美术馆MOMA所展示的「解构主义建筑展」中, 他是其中重要的展览者之一。现居于柏林, 并积极的参与国际竞图。
Libeskind,满头银发,戴一副厚框眼镜。他的作品向来以反偶像崇拜风格见长,特别是他的博物馆设计备受青睐。他的主要设计有柏林的犹太 人博物馆、美国旧金山犹太人博物馆、英国曼彻斯特帝国战争博物馆、伦敦城市大学的研究生中心、瑞士的一家购物中心和以色列特拉维夫的展览中心等。 2001年,他成为第一位荣获“广岛艺术奖”的建筑师,以表扬其作品“对推动谅解与和平”的贡献。